by Jeff Hobbs
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.
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 t
rying 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.
ROB AND JACKIE 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 wholesalers. 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 rese
mbling 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.