The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (15 page)

His heart was set on Johns Hopkins. Jackie knew people in Baltimore, knew the city and its rhythms, knew that it wasn't too dissimilar from Newark. Its science program was top tier, and during visits Rob had appreciated that the boundaries between the university and surrounding lower-class neighborhoods were less clearly demarcated than they were at other urban schools like Penn and Yale. The student body, too, felt more diverse. Rob spoke often of “real people” with his friends, by which he meant people who struggled, like they all did. On the Ivy League campus visits, any sense of daily or long-term struggle had seemed airbrushed. At Johns Hopkins—and maybe he was only imagining this because of the Ivy League stigma absent in Baltimore—Rob believed the average student had worked harder and sacrificed more to be there.

The April postmark date for the Hopkins acceptance and room deposit arrived. Rob and Jackie had the signed documents—and the $500 deposit—sealed in a yellow manila envelope, ready for her to drop off after work.

A dreaded day among industrial food service workers was the random health standards inspection by state regulators, which happened at the Summit Ridge facility on April 10, 1998. A group of five inspectors wearing white smocks arrived and spent the full afternoon checking the kitchen, the ingredients, the workers. Jackie received a mark for wearing a hairnet that didn't meet the code in the density of its meshing. As punishment, her supervisor made her stay to oversee the full three-to-eleven shift, though she'd previously arranged for two half shifts. She'd borrowed her mother's car for the post office run that day, and after getting off work at eleven fifteen she headed straight for the I-280 to Jersey City, where there was a post office that stayed open until midnight. But it was Friday night, and she got caught in a snarl of Manhattan-bound tunnel traffic. She made it to the post office ten minutes late. Jackie knocked on doors and banged on windows. Finally, she scribbled, “Urgent, please postmark for April 10th!” on the front of the envelope addressed to Johns Hopkins, slipped it in the mailbox, and drove home hoping that one day wouldn't make a difference.

Hoping wasn't enough to get her son to his first college choice. A phone call the following Tuesday confirmed that the folder hadn't been postmarked in time, and Rob had automatically been placed at the end of the waiting list. As a small consolation, they assured her that the room deposit would be returned immediately.

Her son didn't hold it against her. They spent a meal bitching about her supervisor at work, and then they began assembling acceptance materials for Rob's second choice, Yale University.

Robert D. PEACE

Nickname: Shawn, FOD, Ropert, Wideback

Activities: Swimming (1,2,3,4); Water Polo (2,3,4); Math League (3);
Trail (1,2,3); Honor Code (4); Overnight (2,3,4); Senior Group Leader; Group Leader of DS (3); Lacrosse (1)

Favorites: Peace Family, CSP, Victor, DA BURGER BOYZ, real people, and knowledge

College/Future Plans: Attend College (unknown) and accomplish many things

The yearbooks had been published before Charles Cawley made his offer, but Rob appreciated the fact that Yale wasn't listed on his page. He was embarrassed enough by the way his mother had been telling everyone she knew where he was going to school. She'd even submitted the information to the community page of the East Orange paper, bought many copies, and posted the small blurb on the bulletin board at work as a subliminal
fuck you
to her supervisor.

“Ma, I'm gonna get curbed,” Rob said to her. She asked him what the term meant. He told her not to worry about the specifics, but to know that it wasn't something you wanted to have happen to you.

She said, “I've been quiet about my son for eighteen years. I can let people know you're going to college.”

“You don't have to advertise
Yale
, though,” he replied. “People are already talking shit.”

“Let them talk. And watch your mouth. Anyone busy talking about you isn't going to Yale I bet.”

But she saw how serious he was, and she stopped advertising to the extent that pride allowed her.

Her mother, Frances, was sick with the early stages of emphysema. At graduation that spring, known as “Walking,” Jackie sat in the back in case Frances needed to step away for a coughing fit. She listened to the valedictorian speak, less eloquently in her opinion than her son had spoken at the senior banquet. She watched her son walk in his broad-shouldered strut to receive his diploma.

Afterward, milling in the crowd, she began to see familiar faces flitting in and out of view: estranged siblings, old neighbors, Skeet's friends and relatives, boys Rob's age from the Orange High football team, people she hadn't spoken to or thought of in years. She needed a moment to
realize that they were all there for her son, and another moment to understand that Rob, unbeknownst to her, had maintained relations with all these people, people she'd been too busy or tired to keep in touch with herself. He'd listed “Peace Family” first among his favorite things in the yearbook, and he'd made sure everyone he'd ever considered a part of that family was there that day, everyone except his father.

The summer of 1998 was the last hurrah, and Rob and his friends treated it as such. Flowy, whose scholarship aspirations had been quickly doused along with any hope of affording college (he did not even apply), took a few weeks off before a coach at St. Benedict's helped him secure summer work as a lifeguard for the Department of Parks & Recreation. Everyone else was going to college: Victor to Daniel Webster College; Tavarus to the University of Georgia–­Clarkson; Drew to Johnson C. Smith, a small university in North Carolina; Curtis to Morehouse. They took the bus downtown for nostalgic lunches at the Burger King by school. Rob got a tattoo, a sphinx on his right biceps. Victor had drawn the picture during a Fourth of July cookout, and Rob was sufficiently taken by the image to have it inked permanently on his skin. They barbequed in Curtis's backyard and, when his mother wasn't home, they drank a lot and smoked more. They talked about a future in which each of them would congregate here again, in the homes and blocks they knew, with four out of five of them holding college degrees. They would get jobs and then get better jobs. They would save money and buy property and then make profits to buy better property. They would sleep with many women until each found the woman who suited him, and then they would marry and have families and be true to those families. They would teach their sons to swim and send them to St. Benedict's, where Friar Leahy would lecture them about manhood at convocation each morning and Coach Ridley would run them through six-thousand-yard swims at practice each afternoon (ten thousand yards during holiday double sessions). They would be businessmen, landlords, leaders. They would take care of their parents and each other. They harbored little doubt that this future, this collective trajectory, would be earned and actualized. They felt that in light of all the struggles they'd endured, nothing ahead of
them would feel very hard at all. Only time lay between now and then.

In August, as Rob was getting ready for one more Appalachian Trail hike with the underclassmen, Jackie gave him a piece of mail, with a Wilmington, Delaware, return address.

The letter began, “Dear Robert, looks like we're going to be roommates . . . ,” and briefly described a guy who was going to run hurdles on the Yale track team and major in English. He professed to be relatively clean, quiet, and excited about college (except for the quiet part, these were lies). In the letter, he suggested that they talk on the phone before leaving for New Haven, so that they might suss out who was bringing what to furnish the room. The letter was from me.

A week or so later, I came home from my summer job at a preschool for mentally challenged kids, where I helped with sports like kickball and floor hockey. I was turning around for track practice in preparation for the Junior Olympic Championships in Seattle that year when my mom, in the kitchen, shouted that one of my roommates, Robert, had called. She was cooking dinner for six, meat-starch-vegetables, as she'd done most every evening of my life. Above the kitchen table, more than a dozen photos of me and my siblings playing sports were arranged in a sprawling shrine. My little brother was watching
The Simpsons
on TV in the next room.

Later that evening, I called Rob back. Jackie answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Jeff, is Robert there?”

“Jeff who?” Her voice was curt, I felt, and bordering on suspicious.

“Jeff . . . Hobbs.”

“How do you know Shawn?”

“I . . . think we're going to be roommates.” She remained silent, as if needing more information to complete the explanation. “At . . . Yale?”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You're the one that sent that letter?”

“Yes, Mrs. Peace.”

“Let me get Shawn.”

While I waited, I heard adult voices in the background, three or four, arguing about something. Then Rob muttered at whoever was there to
keep it down before he picked up the phone. “Hello?” That he was black was basically the first thing I learned about Rob Peace, evident in the first syllable of the first word he spoke. His voice was deep, as if created by a stone friction far down in a subterranean larynx. His speech had a viscous cadence, heavy on
o
's and lacking in hard
r
's, and he had a particular way of not responding to sentences—of embedding long silences into our conversation—that left me slightly uneasy.

The Orange, New Jersey, address meant little to me. My older sister's college roommate was from a nearby town, and she came from a wealthy Italian family; as far as I knew, all of northern New Jersey was affluent, siphoning fortunes out of Manhattan. I learned over the course of our conversation that Rob had gone to a prep school, he “played a little water polo,” and his favorite pastime was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Nothing he said shaded him as anything other than well-off and overeducated: a typical rarefied Yale applicant. And yet there was something serious behind his voice, contemplative and world-wise. I told him that my older siblings—my brother a Yale graduate two years earlier, my sister going into her senior year at Yale—had advised organizing beforehand who would bring what to the room to prevent overlap. Rob told me he had a TV and side table; I said I could bring a stereo and a few lamps. Neither of us seemed interested in prolonging the conversation; an inherent awkwardness existed in talking to someone whose face you'd never seen and with whom you would be living in tight quarters
for the next nine months. “Later,” he finally said and hung up.

A few weeks later, Rob spent a day making rounds to his friends' homes. He spent another day visiting his father in Essex County Jail, where Skeet was still waiting for the postconviction relief hearings to begin (the first hearing wouldn't take place for another eleven months). Then Rob loaded up his grandparents' car—TV, one large canvas duffel bag of clothes, backpack full of books, one side table—while his mother sat on the porch keeping watch, as it was foolish to leave a packed vehicle unattended for even a moment. Rob embraced Frances and Horace. Then Jackie drove him the ninety miles to Yale.

After more than two hours they rounded a bend in the interstate, and New Haven, similar in scope and appearance to Newark, coalesced into view. They joined the slow stream of cars, packed with the material existences of more than a thousand other freshmen like Rob, and then stop-started along Temple Street, between the centuries-old alternately Gothic and Georgian buildings in which he would now live alongside the hundreds of already-arrived students now jaywalking around their car in flip-flops. They rode mostly in silence, both exhilarated by what this new commute signified and frightened of the pending moment, not far away now, in which they would have to say goodbye.

Before graduation in 1998, Rob won the St. Benedict's Presidential Award, the school's highest honor. Teachers such as Abbot Melvin (left) and Friar Leahy (background) were beyond proud of how far the student had come in four years, and how far he was set to go from there.

Part III

Class of Oh-Deuce