The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (7 page)

Jackie, Frances, Horace—everyone who loved Rob—feared the effect that Skeet's conviction would have on the boy's energy, his intel
ligence, and above all his spirit. After news came of the sentencing, and after they made their final visit to Essex County Jail before the transfer to Trenton State, Rob turned inward and ceased to ask questions, perhaps because the first question he'd asked about his father back in August 1987—“When is he coming home?”—had finally, irrefutably been answered. His family could only hope that he was pushing at his own pace through this uniquely protracted process of losing a father. They believed he was strong enough to do this on his own, and they hoped he wouldn't lose sight of the bigger picture; they hoped he wouldn't get mired in self-pity. Self-pity was hard to avoid in East Orange, and once it took hold of a person, it was harder to shed. Jackie knew that. Her rule for herself, in the event of loss or strain or bad luck, was to take a night to feel sorry for herself, typically with a strong drink next to her bed. The next morning, she flushed the sorrow out with her hangover.

In her son's case, she was confident that the new friends who surrounded him at Mt. Carmel, many of whom had lost fathers themselves and possessed the sympathy needed to relate one situation to another earnestly, would be sufficient to move her son forward.

She didn't know that Rob hadn't told his friends anything about his father. As far as any of them knew, the man had simply never been around, a typical enough story that Rob could wholly elude their attention and whatever support they might have given.

A
SIGNAL EVENT
in Newark history had occurred four years earlier, in 1986, when Sharpe James had been elected mayor. A former alderman, he'd campaigned on a platform of jobs, improved low-income housing, and attracting development money back to downtown Newark. Over the next twenty years, Mayor James would govern a generation of Newarkers. He presented himself as a different sort of politician, who had lived his whole life among residents, who wore jogging suits in public, and who knew and cared about the people on the individual level. At the time of his election, Newark proper was 52 percent African American,
and the African American community for the most part adored Sharpe James. Skeet Douglas, in the eight months between James's inauguration and his own arrest, was one of those people, and the mayor had been a fixture in Skeet's neighborhood conversational rounds.

At the time, more than one in three people in Newark lived below the poverty line. The violent crime rate was so consistently high that a 1996
Time
magazine article dubbed Newark the most dangerous city in America. The public high school graduation rate was below 60 percent, and in some outlying areas, such as East Orange, less than 10 percent of residents held a college degree. The city had lost 130,000 residents since the 1967 riots. The Ironbound District, once a busy, ethnically diverse commercial center northeast of the train station, was now a seedy stretch of shuttered storefronts inhabited by squatters. Some of the oldest companies in the city's downtown, such as Prudential Insurance, were trying to move; attracting workers had become too difficult. The city had gone so far as to construct enclosed “skyways” two stories above the ground, so that employees in the city center could walk from building to building without having to set foot on the street.

These larger socioeconomic problems persisted through Mayor James's first term, while he sorted through the complicated, land mine–laden pathways toward revitalization. His primary goals were to raze the project towers built by Mayor Addonizio's administration in the '50s and replace them with small-scale public housing and middle-income units, and to bring a performing arts center and sports arena downtown. But as he worked toward these and other aims (while also committing the first of more than fifty fraudulent acts that would lead to his own indictment years later, in 2007), he offered many of his residents a symbol. Here was a dignified black man of resonant conviction, born and bred here, who'd gone to college and worked his whole life and now, in his early fifties, had entered public service to
serve the public
. In fact, an acquaintance of Jackie's had asked Mayor James for a job during one of his rallies downtown, and a week later she was hired as a school crossing guard.

Rob heard this and other stories, and in his own ten-year-old way
came to worship James, who in 1990—while Rob began private school and Skeet began his lifetime prison sentence—easily won a second term in office. His face brightened when he or Horace or one of the nuns at Mt. Carmel spoke of the mayor. The Oranges were their own townships with their own city halls and did not fall under James's jurisdiction. But Newark cast a long shadow. To a boy like Rob, growing up on Chapman Street and never attending a school beyond walking distance, that cluster of earth-toned towers a mile and a half to the east, surrounded by a network of tall steel cantilever bridges spanning the Passaic River, represented a beacon, a diverse population center where commerce, education, and potential converged. And Sharpe James was the standard-bearer.

Jackie was surprised when her son suddenly began watching the news, just to hear what the mayor said. In fifth grade, he composed a biography of him. He asked her to take him to speeches downtown, which were held whenever Mayor James cleared a lot for a new office building or appropriated money to hire more police officers.

She didn't know what the term “surrogate father” meant exactly, but years later she would agree—“Mm-hmm, I suppose that's right”—when asked if Sharpe James might have been Rob's first.

W
ITH SCHOOL TUITION
effectively canceling out the pay raise Jackie had obtained, and with Skeet no longer contributing to the day-to-day, Rob saw how she struggled. There were, as ever, the constant night shifts. There were the ramen noodles and cans of beans and bags of rice in the cupboard. There were the increasing arguments at home about who was responsible for what share of annual property taxes, roughly $3,500 per year. There was Jackie's contracting social life and the beeline she made for her bedroom upon returning home from work, where she immediately fell asleep. There were the aunts and uncles and cousins he'd grown up with who, in steady succession, left New Jersey for better opportunities in Ohio, Florida, Atlanta, or elsewhere in northern New
Jersey (of Frances and Horace's nine children and five grandchildren, only Jackie and Rob remained on Chapman Street). There was the decade of age Jackie had on the mothers of almost all his friends, and in the latter half of that decade a doubling of the financial and emotional burden she carried. Though she hadn't wanted to marry Skeet, and though he hadn't left them intentionally, the aura of abandonment intractably clung to her.

Despite the attachment he felt to his father, Rob came to scorn abandonment above all things, and as he turned eleven and fifth grade began, he aggressively assumed the role of husband to his mother. She would find dinner plates covered with foil in the fridge when she got home late, leftovers of whatever Rob had cooked for himself that night. Sometimes she would wake up around midnight, after a few hours' sleep, and he would be in the rocking chair beside her bed, reading. He began working odd jobs on weekends for people he knew through his father—raking leaves, shoveling snow, painting—for a few dollars per gig. Always, he divided these earnings and left half on the counter for his mother. If he made $6.50 over a weekend of helping move furniture, and his employer gave him an extra fifteen cents for a candy bar on the way home, Rob factored the tip into his wages, rounded up one cent, and left $3.33 for Jackie. He became competitive with himself, trying to earn more each week than he had the last. He could always find people in Skeet's orbit to call on, always carve out additional hours with which to bring in money. He logged these earnings in a pocket-size notepad beside his bed, maintaining neat columns of what he'd made alongside what he wanted to make. Jackie let him do this not because she needed the money or didn't want him to spend it on himself, but because she saw the feeling of empowerment that taking care of her gave him.

Above all, whether at work or school or home with her, Rob strove to project confidence and strength while refusing to show weakness or insecurity. And Jackie wanted to stoke that quality, which she considered a greater embodiment of manhood than any football heroics or rap lyrics or fashion statements or even academic awards. Too, she didn't have the
heart to inform him that, however mature he may have felt, he was not yet the man of the house.

But still she saw the anger in him, a gradually thickening shade just behind the sometimes impenetrable veil of his eyes. She knew that any anger could be dangerous, and that this particular variety, seeded so deeply during Skeet's three years in jail awaiting trial—nearly a third of her son's life by the time it was finished—was especially destructive. But its source came from a time and place from which Jackie had already willfully moved on, and she didn't have the heart to revisit it. She could only hope that over time, Rob's feelings would fade, the way all of anger's counterpart emotions—hatred, sadness, love, joy—tended to do.

 . . . Later Jack and Ralph had an argument and Jack went off into the forest. Jack and the hunters went hunting again. They invited Ralph and the others to the feast. During the feast, Simon ran out of the woods, and the hunters killed him. The next night Jack, Roger, and Maurice stole Piggy's glasses. Ralph, Piggy, and Sam 'n' Eric went to retrieve his glasses. This action resulted in Piggy's death. Ralph was now alone running from Jack and the savages. Jack set the whole island on fire which flushed Ralph out. Fortunately a military group saw the fire and were waiting at the beach. Ralph fell at the officer's feet and told him the story.

Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because the boys fought each other and the savages within themselves.

Voice: The story was written in the third person point of view because the author, William Golding, is narrating the story.

Tone: The tone of this story is the adventure, nothing happy or sad about it (with the exception of two deaths).

For the most part, Mt. Carmel's English teachers let students choose their own books from a predetermined list rather than assigning specific
titles to all students. Rob opted for the classics, relatively dense books with big themes often rooted in mortality: Jack London's
The Call of the Wild
(“Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because Buck had to prove to his owners as well as himself that he was a leader”), John Steinbeck's
The Pearl
(“Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because Kino fought many people and the emotions of shooting his son”), Mark Twain's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(“Conflict: Man vs. Man and Man vs. Himself, because Tom fought many people in the story and his own bad judgment”). He always made a cover for his book reports with crayon illustrations and large elaborate lettering (the above excerpt, written on
Lord of the Flies
in sixth grade, received an A along with a note scrawled diagonally by the teacher, “I would like you to share this with the class!”). He wrote succinct sentences, each leading quietly into the next, short on adverbs and adjectives, penned in cursive perfected under Skeet's watch. His teachers were accustomed to grading book reports composed of a few poorly punctuated and often illegible sentences, and Rob quickly found himself singled out, often prodded to read his work aloud to the class. His ability to consume and digest pages was iconoclastic at Mt. Carmel. As his teachers gradually learned through parent-teacher meetings with Jackie, he read these books and wrote these reports with minimal help from her, as on the nights she wasn't working he tried to finish his homework before she came home from the day shift so that the two could hang out.

His real passions were math and science, subjects in which hard conclusions were calculated from known variables by way of clear, logical processes that were largely absent from his life. The key component of middle school math was “showing the work,” mapping the pathway between questions and answers. His teachers graded the format and logic of the problem solving with the same weight as the solution itself. At first, Rob took issue with this and would repeatedly write only the answer. His fifth-grade math teacher was fairly convinced he was cheating on his homework by using a calculator, that he wasn't learning how to problem-solve (in fact, Rob wouldn't own a calculator until freshman year of college). She sent home a note to Jackie.

“I'm not cheating,” Rob told his mother adamantly.

“I know,” she replied. “Just do what she says and show your work.”

“It's just a waste,” he replied, as if the world were conspiring to get one over on him.

“A waste of what?”

“Paper, pencil lead . . .
my time
.”

Talking to Rob, like talking to his father, could be beyond frustrating when he had a firm opinion on a matter. “Just
do
it how they want it,” Jackie said, and then something occurred to her. “How do you get the right answers without writing anything down anyway?”

“I do it in my head,” he replied.

Jackie won, and Rob began to painstakingly write out every step of his problem sets, often making little notes in the left margins explaining what he did, as if the teacher grading might not be up to speed. As the math advanced from fifth grade to eighth grade, from long division to algebra and geometry, so did these sheets of calculations, often with extra loose-leaf paper stapled to the back. As in English, his work was often displayed on a bulletin board. Rob was not as proud of these accolades as his teachers thought he should be. He rarely cracked a smile. They were mystified by his nonchalance that bordered on apathy. Most kids his age, especially those from suboptimal circumstances, received a significant confidence boost from public praise. In contrast, Rob would turn away from his work on display, as if it were all he could do not to tear it down.