The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (8 page)

Rob had always been what most would describe as a nerd. With the loss of his father's persistent street influence, the nerd was permitted to flourish unbridled beginning at age seven. Like his father's, Rob's brain had a huge capacity to store facts. Unlike his father, however, Rob developed an outsize work ethic and attention span: he was able to open a book and read straight through until he finished it, or study the science texts until all the relevant facts were embedded. His mother encouraged this. His teachers marveled at it. The other boys in his orbit, at least those who were not his close friends, were less
impressed, which engendered the fundamental struggle of Rob's adolescence: being a fatherless boy in East Orange was hard, but being a nerd was harder.

The struggles of losing a father—emotional, social, financial—were helped by the fact that they were shared with so many of his peers and thus provided a common bond through individual hardship. Without necessarily trying to, Rob would draw these particular boys to him. Though they communicated in typical kidspeak over typical topics—football, girls, complaining about school—a genuine, mature tenderness manifested in their interactions that touched Jackie deeply. Most of Rob's friends were good boys in their hearts. They called her “Ms. Peace,” had fine manners, and didn't talk back. And they were always around, either on the street or on the porch or in the house. Her son, though now fatherless and in some ways motherless considering her hours, was hardly ever alone. She'd always wanted her son to have a sibling, and now, on weekends, she felt as though he had more than one. These relationships, the way the boys talked often of brighter futures, drew forth faint music from Jackie's heart, allowed her to feel that she was doing well in the parental intricacies she could control and doing her best in those she couldn't.

But being academically gifted presented a different struggle entirely, because unlike fatherlessness, Rob was isolated in it. His schoolwork—the unbroken succession of A's year after year, the solitary hours spent obtaining them—was an aspect of his life that could not be shared. He had his close friends to whom grades did not matter at all, but the rest of the kids at Mt. Carmel did not know what to make of this young, hard-looking upstart whom most of the nuns adored. So many of them treated him with suspicion, and their suspicion bred scorn. Private school could be even worse in this regard than Oakdale; because Mt. Carmel presented a more competitive environment, the academic structure could also breed more negativity. Periodically Jackie would come home at the end of the day to find her son sitting alone in the dark, sulking, and she knew something had happened that day, some cruel name
had been applied to him. These were some of the rare moments when he still permitted her to embrace him physically, and a part of her was grateful for the ridicule her son endured so quietly.

And then there were the various arenas he had to navigate outside school, on the street. Walking from Mt. Carmel to Chapman Avenue, Rob would pass the Center View Plaza apartment project on Center Street (which had neither a view nor a plaza, but always a steady stream of hustlers walking in and out), followed by four blocks of houses inhabited by people who'd known his father, and then Town Liquor and the teenagers hanging outside. Sometimes he might cut across Pierson Street to pass the burnt shell of his father's old house. But whichever route he took, loud music played, drug deals were transacted, threats were dealt. Some people would tell him how sorely his father was missed, while others would step in front of him and aggressively try to create conflict, something Rob learned to avoid by naming someone he knew in the projects, constructing a human bridge over the social gaps between them. This happened almost every day while Rob—wearing the pink shirt and purple tie—made his way home along with whoever was walking with him that day.

Starting in seventh grade, he was usually walking with Victor Raymond. Victor had grown up in Bridgeton, a working-class, ethnically split town in southern New Jersey. When he was eleven, his parents both passed away from illness within months of each other, and he lived with his seventeen-year-old brother, the aptly monikered “Big Steve,” who gave up a college football scholarship in order to work, pay the mortgage, and raise Victor. Then the state involved itself and declared that Steve, himself still a minor, could not be considered a legal guardian. So Victor moved north to live with his aunt in her apartment on Center Street adjacent to Orange Park, about a quarter mile from the Peace home. She sent him to Mt. Carmel, where Victor was taken with the quiet boy who sat in the back, somehow found a way to make the school uniform look thuggish, and scored 100 percent on every test. Rob took Victor under his wing, invited him to play in his football games, helped
him study, and provided an unvoiced assurance that, though Victor was reeling from the loss of his parents and the vastly different climate in Orange, everything would be okay.

The first time Rob called Victor's apartment to hang out, his aunt answered the phone, heard the deep, drawn-out voice on the other end, and asked Victor, “What is a grown man doing calling and asking for you?” Victor told her that this was the kid he'd been talking about, the one with the best grades.

Rob and Victor were eleven, then twelve, then thirteen years old and feeling their minds expand exponentially each year. At the same time, they commuted daily through a slum populated by people they knew and liked but who never seemed to change at all. In order to make these transits safely, they had to be seen as fully a part of the streets and their residents. If they happened to be carrying any money, they would spread the bills around their bodies—tucked inside socks, back pockets, and underwear—leaving a few dollars in their wallets so that in the event they were mugged (which they were three times during middle school), they could hand over their wallets and plead their case: “This is all I have, take it.” They carried their book bags everywhere, slung over their shoulders, so that they seemed to be going to or from school and thus not threatening anyone's turf. Too, for Rob, this meant talking like the people talked, quoting the lyrics they quoted, playing football the way they played, and never letting them forget that he was Skeet Douglas's son. Not relevant in this arena were the Catholic principles of patience, pacifism, and conflict resolution taught at Mt. Carmel; nor was Rob's widening knowledge of American literature, human biology, European history, and algebra.

Victor watched Rob begin to develop and hone the system of neural switches—the subtle, never-ending calibrations of behavior and speech—that enabled him, at intervals throughout the day, to be an ideal student, the stand-in provider on Chapman Street, and just another mouthy kid parlaying on the corner of Hickory Street and Central Avenue. Further subsets existed within each of these roles, a complex
network of personalities, each independent of the others, that Rob had to assume. In school he listened attentively to the nuns and their Christ-centric lessons. He was a steady sounding board for the personal lives of Victor and the rest of his friends. Though he was not a leader by nature, he became one by the example he set, and he assumed this role dutifully; he spoke slowly, enunciated clearly, and the faculty often deployed him to resolve conflicts among the students. At home he was obedient to his rapidly aging grandparents, mindful of the chores Horace still assigned a generation after his own children had performed them. He was enthusiastic about rendering his day to Jackie when she had the energy to listen, and quiet when she did not. To the extent that he was allowed, he participated decisively in matters of time, property, and especially money. And on the streets outside, he knew everyone by name; he never lowered his head to scuttle past the hustlers, as most of his classmates did, but engaged with them as people. During football games he continued flipping ball carriers over his shoulder and not helping them up. He walked with his head raised and his chest puffed out, spoke fast and commandingly, and he took to being called by his middle name, ­DeShaun and later just “Shawn,” in much the same way that his father had opted for “Skeet” over their shared given name.

Each day, he was all of these people. But at any given moment, he walled off all but one. This existence was fracturing, but it was the only way to integrate his ambition and intellect in a milieu in which neither had currency and in which both could get him hurt.

He had a title for this all-encompassing process: he called it “Newark-­proofing” himself.

R
OB AND
J
ACKIE
kept visiting Skeet after he was transferred to Trenton State Prison in January 1991. Jackie would borrow her parents' car and endure an hour of monotony on the New Jersey Turnpike before taking the I-295 spur west into Trenton. The prison rose ominously from the surrounding neighborhood of short, narrow row houses and wholesal
ers. Whereas Essex County Jail was surrounded by chain-link fencing, Trenton State was wrapped by an unbroken brick-and-concrete wall that exuded permanence, like a coffin the size of a city block. This wall was twenty feet tall but rose to seven stories in some stretches, a fortress on the scale of the medieval structures Rob had been reading about in history books. Manned turrets resembling airport towers were spaced at fifty-yard intervals, dwarfing the steeple of the Church of God of Prophecy across the intersection at Cass and 2nd Streets. On the Cass Street end of the prison, which was the stretch Rob and Jackie drove along to reach the visitor parking lot, a colorful panoramic mural depicting a baseball game ran along the wall for its entirety of two hundred yards. Directly on the other side of this wall, attached to it, lived New Jersey's death row inmates.

If walking into Essex County the first time had felt to Jackie and Rob like a passage into purgatory, then the entryway to Trenton State was hell. A hundred Essex County Jails could fit into Trenton State. Through barred windows in the visitor hallways inside, they could glimpse the first inmate buildings across a concrete courtyard, six stories high and a hundred yards long and perforated by rows of tall, narrow window slits. They wondered how many six-by-eight cells could fit into that building, and how many more similar buildings there were, and which ­building—which cell—was now inhabited by Skeet. Fully contained from the surrounding neighborhood, which looked not unlike East Orange, the grounds had their own order, with buildings fanning out from a central security hub. The men who lived there followed a specific schedule, designed in accordance with rehabilitation guidelines of the time. Trenton State felt like a warped college campus, and it seemed that a person could not achieve a greater state of anonymity, of meaninglessness, than to become one of the nineteen hundred inmates. The visitors moved along slowly in a line to the point where Jackie stopped and let Rob see his father alone, as she would from now on, knowing that the long trip wouldn't be worthwhile to her son if his conversations with his father were monitored. She would sit in the waiting area and try not
to think about the smell, which even here in the far fringe of the facility was a mixture of sweat, garbage, food of far lesser grade than what she worked with at the hospital, blood, feces, rot, guilt, resignation—a smell akin to the monotonous inevitability of death.

On the long drives back to Newark, often as dusk and then night fell, she'd talk to Rob about the week of school coming up, what Victor was doing tomorrow, and what was going on with the girl Rob had a crush on—everything but the man Rob had just seen. Rob would humor her, only rarely mentioning the various legal appeals that Skeet had slowly begun moving forward. Her son deeply, firmly believed that his father had been falsely accused by witnesses, set up by police, positioned to fail by the system, and wrongfully convicted by the jury. This Jackie knew and regretted, because she saw nothing more hopeless that her son could waste his ample mind worrying about than his father's past or future. The past had happened; the future was literally locked in place. Neither could inform the present in any meaningful way. Her son, still such a boy complete with a boy's terrible optimism, was not yet capable of understanding this kind of permanence, as Jackie did. Like many other aspects of their reality, she figured that her son would be best served by learning about this on his own, in good time.

But still she dutifully took him to Trenton State, and these visits very much marked the passage of time during Rob's middle school years. The transit, the arduous entry process, the waiting room, the interstate rest stop fast-food counters all added up to a singularly endless day for her—usually her only day off of the week. But to the boy, the actual time spent with Skeet must have seemed much too short. Each time Jackie parked on Chapman Street and entered the house afterward, she would feel relieved; no sooner could she experience that relief than Rob would ask when they could go back.

“Soon,” she would tell him as she went to work making dinner. “Maybe in a couple weeks.”

A few days would pass, and Rob would start talking about heading down to Trenton this coming Sunday, after church. Sometimes she would be able to put the next visit off for two weeks, three, but never
more than four. Rob was persistent in almost everything he did, and visiting his father more than the rest. For all the toll they took on her, the prison visits seemed to energize her son. Maybe this energy came from the way Skeet kept him up to date on his legal processes and enabled Rob to feel like an adult participant in contrast to the way he'd been largely removed from the actual trial. Or maybe he just liked to lay eyes on the man and be heartened by the fact that prison, during these first years, was not enough to break Skeet Douglas. If not surprised, exactly, Jackie was herself struck by how
himself
Skeet remained after his conviction. The trial had burdened and frustrated him to the point where communication had been hard; Skeet had simply come to exist on a lower wavelength than she. The verdict, while not the one any of them desired, seemed to have released all that pressure and given him a return to his true form. When she did go in to see him now, maybe every third visit or so, he grinned and talked vibrantly about new friends inside while asking questions about old friends outside. He was clearly hopeful about his sentence eventually being overturned. She didn't know to whom he was talking—she was no longer privy to his legal undertakings, as Rob increasingly was—but Skeet took with him to Trenton State a hopefulness that was not contagious to Jackie as it clearly was to their son.