The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (10 page)

“You'll get promoted soon,” Rob told her, “I know you will. And I can get a real job.”

She kept looking at the numbers he'd written in his lined composition book, where he kept track of his own wages.

“Ma,” he said with conviction beyond his years, “we'll do this. It's important. It'll be all good. You can bring home food from work. I'll eat whatever.”

“Yeah,” she said, “you'd eat horse meat if it was put in front of you with ketchup. And that's just about what I'm serving these days.”

She took his arm, about to give him a hastily prepared speech about focusing on work and taking advantage of this coming opportunity. But she said nothing. Rob didn't need to hear it; he already knew.

Rob (second row, third from right) and Victor Raymond (second row, sixth from left) with their seventh-grade class at Mt. Carmel. Jackie made many sacrifices to send her son to private school, which she could only
hope would prove to be worth it in the end.

Part I
I

Prep

Rob and Jackie celebrating Christmas during his junior year of high school.

Chapter 4

F
OR
R
OB
, the summer of 1994 lasted all of three weeks: three weeks of sweltering heat and football games and stoop hopping around East Orange, sometimes drunk and often high. Then, during the second week of July, the incoming freshman class of St. Benedict's showed up for “Summer Phase,” which in their collective minds was akin to summer camp but would prove to be something different entirely. One hundred and forty fourteen-year-old boys passed through the small vestibule on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, bookended by automated double-locked doors that were controlled by the guard in the adjacent glassed-in security station. They filed beneath the sign in the lobby that read in bold gray letters
WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME
, and down a hallway of classrooms to the gymnasium, known as “the Hive” in reference to the school mascot, the Gray Bee. Here, they lined up in rows with sleeping bags and duffels at their feet.

This group came from forty different towns and sixty middle schools in and around Newark. The boys represented all economic backgrounds but were weighted toward lower and lower middle class. They stood there and took each other in, some loose and cracking jokes among ­already-formed small groups, others stiff and nervous and alone. Even before Friar Edwin Leahy, their new headmaster, made his lofty speech about the trust and unity they would have to build in order to succeed here and in life, the incoming students intuited that the next four years were crucial, that there would be no do-overs or second chances. They
had all gone through the rigorous application process; they had chosen this school knowing all the challenges ahead of them; they were committed to becoming men here. Summer Phase officially began with the singing of the school song. After that weak and discordant effort, the group was divided into eighteen colors, with eight boys randomly assigned to each group. These colors would account for a large part of each student's identity over the next four years. Rob was tagged maroon, which at the very least trumped the pink to which he'd never grown accustomed.

Summer Phase entailed full academic days, followed by sports games and evening group activities, and then the gym lights clanked off over the boys as they whispered in their sleeping bags on the floor. The gym had been built in the 1940s and never renovated; the hardboard basketball court was bowed and splintered, and mice could be heard in the walls. The boys did everything in their color groups—classes, meals, even toothbrushing. In between structured activities, they were required to learn the first and last name of every other student in the class before week's end, as well as memorize the lyrics to five school songs, which were to be sung in the hallways between classes for the duration of freshman year. They had to leave all their belongings in the gym, fully exposed; no locks were permitted inside the school. At the end of the week, they took a test in which they wrote the name of each classmate, as well as the names and dates of every headmaster in the 126-year history of St. Benedict's. Only then did the students formally receive gym T-shirts and shorts in the colors they had been assigned.

The purpose of these various structures was obvious to the freshmen: memorizing names and songs fostered discipline and loyalty, the color assignments kept the boys from forming their own cliques, the schoolwork gave them a preview of what to expect come fall semester, the unsecured belongings built trust, the overnights implanted a feeling of shared experience—of family. And yet a greater aim loomed behind all this effort that would be apparent to the boys only years later, after they'd left St. Benedict's and begun navigating the challenges of adult
hood: trouble, and staying out of it.

Friar Edwin Leahy and the elderly Benedictine monks who ran this school knew that before they could teach math and history, before they could coach soccer and baseball, before they could take attendance or host parent nights—they had to preempt the problems to which this group of boys, most of them urban, many living with minimal family guidance, was prone. Through decades of experience, the faculty had learned the many forms these problems took. Fights, theft, and negative attitudes were the most common. Beyond those lay the more disruptive tendencies of emotional abuse inflicted on peers, dealing and using drugs, or dropping out of school entirely. The preventative measure the school deployed against these lurking obstacles was a combination of keeping the boys very, very busy while fortifying them with school pride: an inoculation, so to speak, administered primarily through force of repetition and a borderline invasive control over the most precious asset in their lives: their time.

Rob went through the Summer Phase largely unnoticed by anyone, including Victor, who had been assigned to a different color group. He stood out only once, near the end of the week when summer reading assignments were given:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain,
A Light in August
by William Faulkner, and
Chesapeake
by James Michener. While the other boys emitted disbelieving laughter at the sheer weight and thickness of the combined pages, Rob sat cross-legged on his bundle of blankets, opened the cover of
Chesapeake
(888 pages), and spent the hour before lights-out quietly reading. He'd already read the two other books on his own, for fun.

A rumor had also begun circulating that there was a boy in the class who knew the lyrics of every Bone Thugs-n-Harmony song, every single word to every single song. Because these songs were typically so fast-paced they sounded like a random spewage of consonants and vowels, learning one song, let alone all of them, was a feat that inspired awe in the freshman class. They began asking around: “Who's the Bone Thugs
kid?” He was Rob Peace.

S
T.
B
ENEDICT'
s Preparatory School for Boys was founded in 1868 by a group of Benedictine monks, and over the next ninety-nine years it expanded from a church and small schoolhouse to a group of structures spread over a full city block. During the postwar boom in Newark, the student body came to be composed primarily of the white sons of affluent white men in the area, the leaders of the city's corporate and manufacturing sectors. Headmaster Edwin Leahy graduated in 1964 and left for divinity school, planning to return to St. Benedict's afterward and teach English.

Then the 1967 riots happened, the thickest of the violence in the second police precinct, right outside the school's redbrick walls. While the live-in monks fortified themselves within, the city center was decimated, not just in terms of property but also in attitudes and in trust. The racial tension left in the aftermath of the riots was compounded by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—who later gave name to the very street St. Benedict's was built on—in April 1968, followed by Robert Kennedy's in June, and the expansion of American involvement in Vietnam, which manifested itself in a draft that summoned by force of law many hundreds of young, uneducated black men from their homes in and around Newark. A racial awakening occurred in these homes, in the town halls, and in the streets of downtown. The St. Benedict's faculty—most of them elderly, pacifist white men who wore dark red robes and grew thick white beards beneath their spectacles—was not equipped to adjust to the tension, nor were the school's traditional students prepared to commute from their suburban homes into the city center, the crucible of unrest. More than a dozen teachers left for cushier positions at wealthier monasteries. In 1972, the school found itself unable to reach a sustainable attendance. The doors closed with no promise of reopening, even as a church. This was the state of the school when Friar Leahy came back.

He was twenty-four years old, skinny and pale and relatively green. He was also fearless, ambitious, and direct. He saw that the school closure had more to do with the energy, or lack thereof, of the monks than with any new social reality that had taken hold of the city. So he recruited a group of young, fresh, liberal divinity school graduates, and he led the movement to reopen the school in 1973, not as St. Benedict's Prep but as a smaller, religion-focused educational venture. This effort actually exacerbated rather than alleviated the anger within the African American community. At a town hall meeting that spring, Friar Leahy fielded a question from a young black mother in the crowd. She said, “How come you can call the school St. Benedict's
Prep
when it's all of you around, but now that it's all of us around you don't call it
Prep
anymore?” Her remark seemed to exemplify all the social issues in the country that seemed impossibly complicated. In 1974, Friar Leahy reopened the St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys with a new mission to serve young men from the urban districts within and immediately surrounding the city. The transition didn't occur overnight, nor did it always occur smoothly. And yet, quicker than any of the monks expected, and in the middle of one of the most tumultuous decades in Newark's history, something happened that many residents in the city, both white and black, had previously dismissed as a progressive fantasy: the African American community of Newark took ownership of the school.

Nurturing this change was not easy. From a business standpoint—with tuition covering just half of the per-student overhead—nobody could make sense of the budget, and Friar Leahy spent two-thirds of his time on the phone or in meetings, beggar's hat in hand, tasked with raising $1 million a year just to cover operating costs. But the school grew, thanks to an alumni network predating the school's reinvention that remained extremely loyal (and extremely wealthy) even though the student body was suddenly unrecognizable to them.

By the time Rob and Victor arrived in 1994, Friar Leahy was raising $5 million per year from a reliable network of corporate and individual
donors. The school had a pool, an auditorium, a sports complex with a turf field and synthetic track, a science wing with sufficient chemistry and physics equipment for each student to run his own individual experiments, a computer room with a row of Apple IIc's, and a library with six thousand books.

But even though the school had modernized and flourished, the biggest challenge these teachers faced each fall was still the same challenge that had existed in 1973, two decades before Rob ever walked onto the grounds: how to minister to the often crippling emotional trauma caused by the suboptimal home lives of so many students, and in doing so, free their cognition—and their potential—in full.

R
OB'S FRIENDS FROM
the neighborhood—the ones he played ball, drank, and smoked with—cracked themselves up in the weeks leading up to the fall term: his school had fencing, water polo, and chess teams—but no football. They wondered loudly how a badass like Rob Peace could have chosen an all-boys prep school like that over a real school like Orange High. They made Jesus jokes. They made pussy jokes. They made gay jokes. Rob had no grounds to fight them over it, because in his eyes these friends were more or less right to laugh. Matriculation at St. Benedict's posed problems.

Through a special application process with the Orange Township school board, Rob and Victor acquired waivers to play on Orange High's football team in the fall while attending St. Benedict's during the day. They went to two-a-days in the August heat; the players spent the first practice on hands and knees in full pads picking glass from broken bottles out of the field. Rob played running back and linebacker in the JV squad's first scrimmage the week before the school year started. Some of his upperclassman teammates had been playing with him in the street games for five years, so he didn't have to prove himself the way many freshmen did. Other teammates knew him as a guy who liked to chill and get stoned around East Orange, and they were amazed at his
intensity, his desire for collision.

For the first three weeks of school, he would catch the bus downtown at six, get to school by seven, go through the school day, catch another bus to Orange High at three, be on the field by four, practice until six, catch another bus home, and read until he fell asleep. The schedule left him with little energy to socialize at school, where most of the boys were still in the process of checking one another out, projecting confidence while feeling insecure in their new surroundings. Between classes, freshmen were required to walk with their right shoulders touching the wall at all times while singing the school songs in a predetermined order. The upperclassmen maintained discipline in this regard, and they were quick to call out any freshman they saw breaking rank with a smack on the back of the head. The students stayed with their colors throughout the day, from convocation in the morning to classes to meals to gym. Each of the eighteen colors had its own president and vice president in the senior class, tasked with addressing any behavioral or academic problems that arose within the group. Entering the school, the freshmen could roll their eyes at this manufactured brotherhood and its hierarchy reminiscent of British imperialism. But day by day, the system had a way of drawing them in. An individual young man could easily get lost among five hundred other young men in the school; among twenty-five wearing his same color and obligated to look out for him, he couldn't.