by Brad Parks
Some of the scenes depicted were idyllic panoramas these children—with lives bounded by concrete, asphalt, and poverty—probably had never seen themselves. But they dreamed about them all the same. Their optimism fairly burst off the walls.
“They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” I heard a familiar voice say.
I turned around, and there was Sweet Thang, all bouncy blond hair and big blue eyes. I knew, from experience, that she was also probably wearing a dress, one that rather nicely displayed her commendable feminine aspects. But I had established a strict no-look policy when it came to anything below Sweet Thang’s chin.
“When I got here the walls were bare and I was like, ‘This will not do,’” she said. “So every time a kid in one of our programs made a drawing and I happened to be there, I asked if they wanted to bring it home or if I could keep it. Most of them were happy anyone even wanted their picture. After I had collected a bunch of them, I found a frame shop that was willing to mount them for us at cost and a donor who was willing to fund it. A year later, this is what you get.”
She smiled and so did I. I’d defy anyone, male or female, to spend more than ten minutes around Sweet Thang without falling in love with her, just a little.
“Anyhow,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Jawan Porter. Jawan, you can come out now, honey.”
From an office door just behind Sweet Thang, a little boy of perhaps six peeked out. He had perfect brown skin and a mop of an Afro atop his little head.
“Come on, Jawan,” Sweet Thang urged. “Jawan, this is Mr. Ross. Shake his hand just like I taught you.”
Jawan walked toward me and held out a waifish arm. I grabbed the small hand at the end of it.
“Don’t forget to look him in the eye,” Sweet Thang instructed.
Jawan and I exchanged meaningful eye contact and then I smiled at him. He smiled back, showing off two gummy gaps where his front teeth should have been.
“Ah, looks like someone has just gotten a visit from the Tooth Fairy,” I said, because it seemed like the thing you should say to a toothless six-year-old.
Then I caught that Sweet Thang was shooting me a cautionary glance, accompanied by a small head shake.
“Jawan lives in a residential home on Avon Avenue,” she said. “He’s got eleven brothers and sisters there.”
And that’s when I got it. Tooth Fairies didn’t necessarily visit group homes in Newark. Jawan probably had some vague conception of who the Tooth Fairy was. He did not necessarily have firsthand knowledge of her magic.
Sweet Thang quickly changed the subject. “You know something I learned about Jawan? He’s a really, really fast runner.”
Jawan’s smile stretched from the bottom of his face right up to the top. “Yeah, some of the big kids are faster. But I’m the fastest of the little kids.”
“Show Mr. Ross how fast you are, Jawan.”
He looked around nervously. He had probably been told—perhaps repeatedly—not to run inside. “It’s okay, Jawan,” Sweet Thang assured him. “You can run to the end of the hallway and back.”
Jawan tore off down the carpeted hall, reached the end, then launched himself back toward us. He stopped in the exact spot where he had started, then looked at me for approval.
“Wow,” I said. “How did you get to be so fast?”
“It’s because my shoes are so fast,” Jawan said, showing off his kicks, which appeared to be brand-new.
“Let me see one more time, Jawan,” I said. “I can’t believe how fast you were.”
Jawan repeated his mad dash to the end of the hallway and back. His chest was heaving just slightly when he was done.
“I can go even faster if I’m outside,” Jawan said. “I can go like a rocket.”
Jawan made rocket noises, to emphasize his point. As he did so, I pulled a camera out of my pocket. Most of our photo staff had been laid off, so for a story like this—where, frankly, the artwork wasn’t absolutely crucial—I was expected to snap a few pictures. There was no question a real photographer could do much more with the subject, but the paper could no longer afford real photographers for such simple jobs.
I snapped a few shots of Jawan posed like a Usain Bolt about to explode from the starting blocks. Then I took two more of Jawan showing off his gummy smile.
“Okay, Jawan, thank you. You can go back to Mrs. Rohne now,” Sweet Thang instructed. “Jawan is enrolled at Stephen Crane Academy. It’s a Montessori charter school that we run.”
She waited until Jawan had departed, then added, “Those shoes were purchased with proceeds from the Chariots for Children program. Everyone in Jawan’s group house got a new pair.”
I couldn’t have tamped down my smile if I wanted to, because I knew exactly what Sweet Thang was doing. She knew it, too. Having lured me into coming to do a story, she was now spoon-feeding me its contents.
“Jawan Porter with the fast shoes, huh?” I asked.
If I couldn’t turn that into a heartrending anecdotal lede, I might as well turn in my press card.
“Just trying to be helpful,” she said. “Let me show you the repair shop.”
* * *
She led me through a back exit to a paved area ringed by a series of brick buildings, all of them larger than the office we had just departed. This had obviously once been a manufacturing complex of some sort that the Greater Newark Children’s Council had taken over and rehabilitated. Newark had many such properties. Most of them had not been put to as good a purpose as this one.
Sweet Thang pointed out the buildings they used for their charter school, which appeared to have been relieved of their grime by a vigorous power-washing. She chattered about the school a bit. Like many charter schools, they were outperforming comparable public schools. I nodded politely through her presentation. At some point, she would probably try to strong-arm me into writing about them, too.
Then she steered me toward the repair shop. It was surrounded by old cars—most of them junkers—and still had its grime very much intact.
“Most of the Chariots for Children program is staffed by volunteers,” she said. “Over the last year, we’ve developed a network of mechanics who come in and work for us when they can. We get a whole crew of them on Saturdays and Sundays. They are just the nicest guys. When I first started there were only one or two of them and now there are more than a dozen. They say it’s because I make sandwiches for them, but they’re just being nice. My sandwiches aren’t that good.”
Somehow, I doubt it was the sandwiches they were coming for. Unless we were applying that word euphemistically, in which case I am sure the mechanics found Sweet Thang’s sandwiches very appealing.
She entered the building and I followed. It had a warehouselike feel to it, lit from above by an array of caged halogen bulbs that hung from the twenty-foot ceiling. From somewhere inside, a television kept a low chatter going.
There were two hydraulic lifts, a long workbench filled with tools, and a pegboard behind it with even more. On the floor I recognized several tanks that likely fueled acetylene torches, motors for powering speed wrenches, and other tools of the mechanic’s trade. Beyond the lifts there was an open area filled with various pieces that had once been inside the cars they served. The whole thing sort of looked like a chop shop.
“When a car gets donated, we make an initial assessment about whether we should try to fix it up for the auto wholesaler’s auction or whether we should just sell it for parts,” she continued. “This obviously isn’t my area of expertise, but there are some parts on a car where there’s a good secondary market. Like, catalytic converters or something. Actually, don’t write that down because I have no idea what I’m talking about. The point is, sometimes the car is worth more in pieces than it is whole. Our goal is to wring every dime out of each donation that we can. Oh, there’s Dave, come on.”
She led me toward a man whose most prominent feature was a white handlebar mustache that he had greased up to fine points on both ends. He was
bent over the open hood of a red Dodge Caravan, doing something with a wrench that was surely very wrenchly—auto repair not being my area of expertise, either.
“This is Dave Gilbert,” she said. “He is the director of the Chariots for Children program. It’s supposed to be a part-time position but he’s here, what, sixty hours a week? I swear, it’s like he lives here. He’s just a total sweetheart. Dave, this is Carter Ross, my friend from the Eagle-Examiner.”
Gilbert nodded at me. The mustache nodded with him. It really was an impressive piece of facial hair. Like a human version of a water buffalo’s horns.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
I reached out to shake, then he held up his right hand. It looked like something that could have belonged to a chimney sweep.
“Yeah, maybe we can just wave,” I suggested, and that seemed to suit him fine. He returned his attention to his work.
And then, for the first time, I focused on the car that was on the lift next to the Caravan. It was a white Cadillac CTS. And while I can’t say I was an expert, it looked to be about three years old.
Just like the one Buster Hays said had been carjacked in Newark the night before.
I tried to keep my tone of inquiry casual. “That’s a nice Caddy there,” I said. “When did that one come in?”
Gilbert pulled his head out back out from under the hood. He looked over at the car, then at me. I worked at making my face the very study of neutrality.
“Couple of days ago,” he said.
“Wow. Do people ordinarily donate cars that nice?”
“It happens,” he said. “Depending on your tax bracket, the write-off you can claim can be more valuable than the car.”
“Not my tax bracket,” I assured him.
“Mine, either.”
“I take it you’re fixing that one up for auction,” I said. “I bet the resale value on that thing is at least forty grand.”
Dave and his mustache just nodded again. I studied the car for a moment. The car had no license plates, so there went one easy way to tell if it was stolen. The VIN number was also out of my reach: the car was high enough on the lift that I wouldn’t be able to see it, much less be able to write down its seventeen letters and numbers without arousing suspicion. Then another idea occurred to me.
I turned to Sweet Thang and said, “Lauren, maybe I can interview the person who donated this car. It’s such a generous donation, they deserve to get some publicity for it. That would make a perfect addition to my story.”
Sweet Thang was just opening her mouth to reply when Dave cut her off. “No can do,” he said. “They wanted to keep it anonymous.”
Well, that was sure convenient.
I was trying not to get ahead of myself too much. Was I just getting delusional, seeing would-be carjacking rings everywhere I turned, whether it was Earl Karlinsky’s parking lot or Sweet Thang’s charity?
After all, a white Cadillac CTS was a reasonably common car. I’m sure General Motors produced several hundred thousand of them. It was not unreasonable to think that one could be carjacked while another was being donated.
Then again, what better front for an operation that resold stolen cars than a charity that benefited needy children? Maybe the reason this place looked like a chop shop was that it really was a chop shop. Gilbert could hide his illicit work among the legitimate stuff and no one would be the wiser. It was the last place the auto theft task force would ever look for hot merchandise.
Gilbert again returned to his work. Sweet Thang rambled some more about the program. I wrote down enough to be able to fake my way through the article I owed Brodie.
But when I got her back outside, my mind was still churning.
“Hey, this may seem like a weird question,” I said. “But are you sure Dave Gilbert is legit?”
She looked startled. “Well, yeah. I mean … yeah. Why?”
“Because a white Cadillac CTS just like the one he had up on his lift was carjacked in Newark last night. Do you guys run criminal background checks on your employees?”
“Uh, I have no idea,” she said. “I’m sure we’re required to do them on the people who work with kids. I don’t know about the people who work with cars.”
“Do you know his full name, by any chance?”
She knew this meant I was going to run his name through a variety of databases to uncover any possible wrongdoing in his past. To be honest, I do this quite frequently: with people I’ve just met on the job; with my female friends’ new boyfriends, particularly when they seem too good to be true; with sources who might not yet have been fully vetted. That they don’t turn out to be criminals 98 percent of the time doesn’t stop me from checking. Because that 2 percent sure does make things interesting.
“Carter, he’s a sweet man who dedicates his life to helping the children of Newark. He’s not a felon.”
“Well, then there’s nothing wrong with me looking into his background a little. If he’s clean, it’s no harm done. If he’s not, then we’ll talk again. I’m not sure I can do the Chariots for Children story without at least checking.”
She twisted her face a little, her best attempt at a scowl—not that she could really carry one off. Then she said, “His middle initial is ‘I.’ He told me once that it stands for Isaac.”
“Date of birth?” I asked.
“I have no clue and I’m not looking it up for you,” she said. “I’m sure Dave is not a criminal.”
I wasn’t. For as much as I liked Sweet Thang, her assurances in this instance meant little. It was one of the things that had made her ill-suited to newspaper work: she assumed everyone was as pure of heart as she was.
And they weren’t. They just weren’t.
CHAPTER 22
When I returned to my car, I e-mailed Kira O’Brien, one of our librarians and a fleeting romantic interest during my prepregnancy life. Kira and I had our fun, but her idea of a major life commitment was agreeing to attend a party more than a week ahead of time. When I learned I was going to become a father, I informed her of my retirement from dating and my intention to seek a more permanent solution with Tina. She had happily moved on to less complicated options.
We had since returned to an amicable professional relationship, with no hard feelings on either side, which meant I could prevail on her to investigate my hunch about David Isaac Gilbert. I was reasonably certain there would only be one person with that name in New Jersey, but just in case I told her to look for a date of birth that made him roughly sixty years old. It’s too bad Kira couldn’t do a public records search on handlebar mustaches.
Once that was done, I decided—since I was already in the neighborhood—to make a quick detour to Tujuka Okeke’s house. As I made the short drive, I thought of the critically important work of Dr. Duckworth.
One of the big buzzwords in educational circles over the past few years is the word “grit.” Teachers and researchers are figuring out that the students who go on to become successful aren’t necessarily the ones with the highest IQs or the ones from the wealthiest families—smart kids and rich kids underachieve all the time. The real can’t-miss high performers? They’re the ones who are willing to keep bashing their head against a problem until they solve it, the ones who refuse to be cowed by repeated failure. That’s grit.
The pied piper of the modern grit movement is a University of Pennsylvania researcher named Angela Lee Duckworth. She and her team have gone to a diverse array of challenging environments, from the U.S. Military Academy, to an inner-city Chicago public school, to corporate America. In each of these very different settings they asked: Which cadets would make it through the grueling first year? Which students would beat the odds and graduate? Which salespeople would post the best numbers?
The team tracked the population over time, looking at their success or failure, and seeing if it correlated to an array of traits: intelligence, social skills, family income, race, and so on. But the trait that kept coming back as being the most
significant predictor of success was not any of those things. It was grit. It was the people who set a long-term goal for themselves, then had the passion, perseverance, and work ethic to see it through.
I first learned of this research when Tina forced me to watch Dr. Duckworth’s TED Talk—Tina’s chief concern being whether or not she was nurturing a gritty enough fetus. But what immediately struck me is that most reporters would be able to independently confirm Dr. Duckworth’s results after just a few months’ hard time in the newsroom.
The best way to crack a source was often just to keep after them and make them realize, in the most polite and respectful way possible, that you weren’t going away. As long as you didn’t cross the line into pissing them off—and made them realize the necessity of your persistence—most of them eventually caved.
I hoped Tujuka Okeke would be one of those. In addition to wanting to talk with her about her ex-husband generally, I still had the specific question about why her insurance company might have been withholding payment. I hadn’t necessarily been in the market for a story about the evils of the big, bad insurance company making life difficult for the poor widow, but I also wasn’t going to turn one down if it gifted itself to me.
And so, once again, I parked next to her home, walked up her short driveway, and knocked on her front door.
When nothing happened, I knocked again. The Toyota was in the driveway, just as it had been the day before, leading me to surmise she was home.
After a minute or so of staring at her front door, it finally opened. Tujuka Okeke appeared.
“Mrs. Okeke, I’m sorry to bother you again, but I—”
“I work the night shift at University Hospital,” she said testily. “I have to sleep during the day. Please leave.”
And, in short order, I was again staring at her door. A lesser reporter might have viewed this as failure and defeat. A gritty reporter did not. This was one more necessary step toward establishing a working relationship with Tujuka Okeke. In a strange way, I knew it was progress.