by Jeff Hobbs
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.
In the meantime, Rob seemed to expand through adolescence in every manner. His bones elongated and thickened; muscles followed. Basic math and reading begat abstract problem-solving and reading-comprehension skills. Boy-girl crushes became full-fledged, impassioned romantic pursuits. And his perspective of adults and adult behaviors—no doubt accelerated by his interactions with his father—matured to the point where he fully considered himself one, though he had not yet completed middle school.
IN THE FALL of 1993, Jackie lost her job due to mandatory cuts at University Hospital. She’d been stretching their finances thin lately, trying to spoil her son a little. She’d bought him a used bike so that he could ride to his friends’ homes. She’d bought some new clothes to accommodate a recent growth spurt. She’d been trying to nourish him better with fresh produce instead of canned. Because of these efforts, she had no savings to carry her through a job search. After two weeks, her severance pay ran out, and unemployment insurance covered only the essentials. She had to take Rob out of Mt. Carmel and send him back to Oakdale.
“Okay,” he said casually. “It’s okay, Ma. We’ll do what we need to do.” He began leaving 100 percent of his work earnings on the counter for Jackie, which she found when returning home late each day after busing around the city applying for jobs.
Public school was much different in eighth grade than it had been in third grade, in terms not just of physical violence but also emotional stress. From his first day back, Rob had to put more energy into navigating his fellow classmates in order to avoid being jumped or robbed, and this left little reserves with which to maintain his grades, to glean at least some new knowledge from the limited amount being dispensed in those classrooms, some of them packed with more than forty kids at a time. Mt. Carmel was not a high-end private school, but it was far enough removed from Oakdale to make for a surreal contrast. The disparity wasn’t strictly financial, as Mt. Carmel ran on a smaller operating budget per student than the publicly funded school and had no subsidies for books or supplies. The difference lay in the attitudes of both students and teachers. When Rob told Jackie casually that kids were dealing drugs—and a lot of them—at Oakdale, she knew two things immediately: she had to get him back into Mt. Carmel and place him in a private high school next year.
A part of her had been thinking that he could go to Orange High, just like Jackie had, and easily make it into their gifted student program. But in the wake of these Oakdale revelations, she took the bus to Orange High between job interviews, in the middle of the school day. There, she stood on the sidewalk on South Orange Avenue and looked up the short rise to the building that she’d entered every day for four years in the mid-1960s. Aside from the food service supervisor program she’d attended after Skeet’s arrest, this had been the last place she’d gone to school. Jackie was forty-four years old; high school had been a quarter century ago. The place looked different now, and not simply because of the profane graffiti sprayed across its walls. It appeared to her that those hundreds of kids perched on the steps and leaning out of windows and milling around the yellowed lawn were training not for college or jobs but for their destiny as loiterers, hustlers, and single mothers. Jackie felt very old in that moment. But the natural question—what had happened to twenty-six years?—occurred to her only once, fleetingly, because its answer was obvious. Her son had happened. Many of her decisions had turned out poorly, many of her circumstances were more precarious now than they’d ever been, and most of her dreams had fragmented. But her son remained, and he was bright and he was strong and he loved her to world’s end. Jackie understood now, looking at her old high school, that she would never leave this place, Orange, like most of her siblings had. She was part of the asphalt fabric on which she stood. She also understood that, with a few more years of determination and sacrifice on her part, Rob would leave. He would do so in spectacular fashion. She could almost—almost—visualize it, through the massive outlay of effort that sat between this stark moment and that prescient one.
A few weeks later, Jackie found a job with a health care company that managed hundreds of nursing homes and posthospital rehabilitation centers around the country. She was placed in the food service department at the Summit Ridge Center, in West Orange. The job was a demotion from management back to kitchen work, but her employer pitched itself as a strong company in an expanding field with room to grow, and all these terms appealed to Jackie, who’d never had experience with a single one. She enjoyed riding the bus daily west toward the suburbs rather than east toward the city—to see her neighborhood open up and give way to fields and woods and ranch homes sprawling across half-acre plots along Route 501, to see where all those former neighbors she’d grown up with had moved during the ’70s while the Peace family had stayed put.
The work starting out was worse than the hospital
, and the kitchen had a hierarchy—of which she started on the bottom rung—that was jolting, having come from a place where coworkers generally tried to have fun and help each other by sharing car rides, covering shifts, being interested in the lives around them. She had a hard time falling in with the big-corporation cost-consciousness that led to her cooking food for the patients that she would never let her own family eat. But she was able to transfer Rob back to Mt. Carmel.
Christmas that year was very thin. Jackie could manage no more than some homemade baked goods and stocking stuffers. Rob didn’t seem to mind; he told her that he considered the used bike, which she’d bought him last spring, to be like an early Christmas present, plus the encyclopedias (Jackie had gotten up to the G volume before losing her job). A few of her siblings came home for the holiday to sit in the living room with Horace and Frances. The house had been feeling too quiet lately, hollow in a way, and Jackie missed the chorus of arguments that used to resonate through the halls and stairways. She was worried that without anyone to engage him at home while she was working, Rob would reach farther and farther outward for stimulation, to people and locales where she had less control, if any at all.
That year, at age thirteen, Rob learned how to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana. Absent was any ceremonious “first time” that would later be fondly remembered as a rite of passage. These two crutches were a standard aspect of the stoop culture on and around Chapman Street, and the matter was as simple as Rob, goaded by the older boys with whom he played football, climbing three steps onto a neighbor’s porch, swigging from a bottle of beer, malt liquor, or E&J brandy, and then filling his lungs with a joint. And he liked it. The alcohol, since he had no tolerance for it, immediately brought forward a kind of blissful stupidity, a state in which words poured forth from his mouth free from analysis or reservation, and he must have found ease in laughing with others without weighing the relative meaning of what they had said. And then came the marijuana, with its immediate dilution of stress, and each of the five senses grew more receptive to minute pleasures in the air, in the sounds, in the faces. Under these influences his father’s trial and his mother’s dreams must have seemed suddenly very far away, and far less a part of him than they actually were. This state of mind was easy to enter, particularly with the advent of spring and warm weather when the whole neighborhood for a mile in every direction came out onto the stoops.
Rob couldn’t afford to buy alcohol or marijuana himself, but one of the benefits of remaining so well known in East Orange—and being Skeet’s boy—was that wherever he went, there were people, mostly men, who wanted to take care of him and who didn’t have much else to do. Rob would have to walk only a couple of blocks west along Central Avenue into East Orange, past Harrison Street and Evergreen Place. He’d make a left on Burnett Street, and in three blocks he would be on Chestnut Street, near the building where his father had lived, where the Moore sisters had been murdered by someone Rob believed in his heart was not his father. And here he would be summoned onto stoop after stoop, asked how he was, asked how his father was doing, and ultimately asked if he wanted a sip or a toke.
Victor Raymond accompanied him on a few of these excursions. At first Victor was impressed by the extent to which his best friend was a part of the neighborhood, treated as an adult by all these other adults who seemed so cool and wise. He drank and smoked a little himself. Sometimes there were girls around, and he and Rob would take turns trying to talk to them, practicing lines. Always, they heard music, about which Rob was increasingly passionate. He devoted much of his time to memorizing rap lyrics of groups like A Tribe Called Quest: breaking them down, analyzing them, internalizing the words as poetry.
But Victor quickly and alarmingly noticed that for his friend, these walks were more than time-wasting little adventures, boys doing things they shouldn’t be doing and hoping not to get in trouble later. And these people whom Rob kept introducing him to with pride—dozens of people—were not so cool, not so wise. These were grown men and women who sat on their front porches all day in various states of inebriation listening to music. Rob threw himself into these gatherings with an intensity not evident in anyone else, which Victor struggled to confront directly. Rob knew who was having car trouble, who was looking for a job, who was behind on rent. He knew everything about everyone, it seemed to Victor, and was able to store each separate personal story in that cavernous brain of his. Like a math or science problem, Rob was always trying to get inside these people, figure them out, learn their problems, provide solutions.
Most disturbing to Victor was the almost professional means by which Rob hid these vices from his mother and grandparents: saline drops for the eyes, spearmint gum for the breath, aerosol deodorant for the clothes, and a preternatural ability to carry himself with as much controlled composure high as he did sober.
Victor much preferred the Caribbean Festival in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, to which he and Rob took the train together every year to walk with the brightly dressed crowds down wide, blockaded avenues far from those they lived on, drinking mango juice and eating jerk chicken off skewers and meeting smiley strangers with melodic island accents. That was his favorite day of the year, and that was the Rob Peace he liked best.
THE PRIVATE HIGH schools were all well known: Seton Hall Prep, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Essex Catholic, and St. Benedict’s Prep. Simply put, these schools sent students to college, and—more important in most cases—they were affordable. Each accepted one hundred to two hundred freshmen a year, roughly six hundred placements for the ten thousand or so teenagers of greater Newark seeking the opportunity. Each had tours, interviews, and entrance exams. About half the students at Mt. Carmel applied, guided through the process by the nuns. Some of these children had never written a personal essay before and were stymied by questions like, “In two hundred words or less, describe yourself.”
Victor was already committed to attending St. Benedict’s, the only all-boys school. He’d geared much of his last two years around applying: writing letters to the faculty there, going to soccer and baseball games, attending community open houses. Rob and Jackie toured each of the schools, and she could tell immediately that he gravitated toward St. Benedict’s, too—her last choice, due mainly to geography. Seton Hall and Immaculate had relatively expansive campuses in suburban West Orange and Wayne, respectively, whereas St. Benedict’s was a compact building in central Newark, on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, in the exact opposite direction of her new job. Traffic would be terrible during both rush hours, and the neighborhood immediately surrounding the school was sketchy at best, with adjacent basketball courts and fast-food restaurants tailor-made for hustlers. The school was two blocks from the courthouse in which Rob’s father had been convicted of murder.
But she empowered her son to choose, and she figured he based his decision on staying close with Victor and on the matter of diversity. St. Benedict’s was the least diverse of the four schools: the student body was 89 percent black and Hispanic. The school had a much more generous financial aid program than the others due to its strong and successful alumni network. The tuition was $8,700 per year against an overhead cost of $16,000 per student, along with further financial aid available based on need.
Rob was wait-listed at first. No one understood why but figured it had to do with the financial statements, which Rob had undertaken himself—maybe he’d left them incomplete, maybe he’d fudged a little. Victor, who had been accepted with a B average at Mt. Carmel, told his aunt. The next day she went to the school personally, sat down in the headmaster’s office, and said she would raise a stunning amount of hell if they didn’t accept Robert Peace. Jackie received the acceptance letter the following week—which left her anxiously waiting to learn what aid they would offer. That envelope came in the late spring, after a long day of work during which she’d been yelled at constantly by her boss, an irritable white man who supervised the kitchen at Summit Ridge. St. Benedi
ct’s offered Rob a tuition of $4,000 per year: a $500 down payment followed by monthly installments of $388 if she opted to pay only during the nine-month school year, or $291 if she wanted to pay continuously year-round.
The decision was a hard one and involved a lot of math that Rob helped her sort through. She’d been paying $200 for Mt. Carmel, but with her recent pay cut that tuition was already gouging the food budget. The extra $90 per month and additional three months of payments would begin encroaching on utilities and other basic costs. She’d have to ask her parents to pay the full property taxes this year, and probably for the next four if she wasn’t promoted.
“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.