The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace Read online

  People looked down on her with pity and even with scorn for this fundamental, atypical decision. She could bear their opinions, some of which were silent, some not. She had a baby boy, and she never saw a trace of pity or scorn in his eyes.

  NEWARK AND THE Oranges were not the places Jackie had known as a child. During the 1970s—her twenties—she’d been vaguely aware of the things people talked about when they talked about Newark. There were the riots of July 1967, incited by the alleged brutality inflicted on a black cabdriver by white policemen: five days of burning, looting, sniper fire, and rage, at the end of which twenty-six people were dead, more than seven hundred were injured, fifteen hundred were arrested, and the texture of the city was forever changed. On one of those nights, Jackie and her girlfriends had ventured toward the city; they’d wanted to see for themselves what was going on, like a party they would regret missing (they’d been turned away by National Guardsmen at a checkpoint). There was also much talk about how the communities were no longer defined by the factories where people worked or the countries from which their grandparents had come seeking that work. Instead, they were increasingly defined by skin color: black, brown, or white. But very little of this talk had happened at her own dinner table, where Horace had presided from the contained space his soul inhabited. She’d seen teenagers throwing stones at squad cars and then fence hopping through the backyards of Chapman Street. She’d seen white-black fistfights break out in broad daylight on busy streets, and she’d stepped over the gore of teeth and bloody gum tissue left on the sidewalk in their wake. The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn’t need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure. Skeet aimed to succeed.

  After the riots came the phenomenon of white flight, which wasn’t discussed—not yet—but was observed when she rode the bus to her first job after high school, working in the mail room of Orange City Hall: FOR SALE signs, three and four to a block. In 1973, the western spur of the I-280 was completed, a freeway that channeled beneath the Oranges (just four blocks north of Chapman Street), connecting downtown Newark to suburban enclaves in Morris County and the Watch­ung Mountains. Transits that had previously taken more than an hour on surface thoroughfares like Central Avenue now took fifteen minutes. In the wake of the racial tensions that had erupted with the riots six years earlier—and that hadn’t ebbed much since—this highway provided a corridor by which people who felt threatened or simply uncomfortable near the city’s impoverished alignments could coast through them at sixty miles per hour.

  One thing her father did talk about, contemptuously, was the crooked real estate market, specifically realtors who profited off the civic unrest by convincing white homeowners that, once one black family moved onto the block, more would follow, and their home’s value would only decline if they remained. Jackie did in fact notice—more as a feeling than an empirical observation—that neighborhoods like Vailsburg, Irvington, and East Orange were becoming “blacker”: house by house, block by block, moving west from downtown Newark over the span of decades. In 1960, when Jackie’s family had moved from Elizabeth, the population of East Orange was 39 percent black and 53 percent white. In 1980, when Rob was born, the population was 89 percent black and 4 percent white, and the area was known colloquially as “Illtown.” But as a young woman existing in the day-to-day, Jackie didn’t concern herself too much with demographic shifts; she was simply happy to have a job when she could find it, to help pay for fun when she could have it.

  Her father, too, was happy to have a job still, because the city’s factories were concurrently shutting down in great swaths. All across America but particularly in port cities like Newark, St. Louis, and Chicago, improved transportation capacities caused manufacturing companies to gravitate toward cost-efficient real estate far from urban centers. Japan and China became major exporters of cheaper goods. American companies outsourced jobs to foreign labor. The service economy of the United States grew steadily while the industrial economy tapered and then, beginning in the late ’60s, steeply declined. For these reasons and many others, the factories closed, one by one, and the closures came with massive layoffs. Tanneries, glass, plastics, industrial machine parts—over six hundred factories in and around the city, which had made the port of Newark the busiest in the nation for decades, shut down between 1970 and 1980. With public housing already at capacity and unemployment rising steadily, the dangerous side of urban culture began to spill down and outward from the project towers into the spaces left vacant by the fleeing working class: across the wards in the north and west of Newark, and then still farther, into East Orange and, ultimately, past it.

  The Peace home lay just over the boundary separating Orange from the traditionally more dangerous East Orange. A half mile west sprawled the affluent neighborhoods like Tuxedo Park and the Seton Hall campus that still made Orange, on paper, a far more diverse and desirable place to live. Because of the technical remove of her address—because Orange was not generally associated with the slums to the east—Jackie couldn’t have imagined while growing up that the ethnic grocers on Central Avenue might one day be replaced by liquor stores and check-cashing centers, or that any of the houses on Chapman Street would be abandoned and boarded up, or that the crack of proximate gunfire could interrupt their dinner table talk. But the blight did come, inexorably overtaking Chapman Street, South Essex Avenue, and Lincoln Avenue before the suburbs west of Scotland Road formed the retaining wall that town lines drawn up in City Hall could not. This tide progressed slowly throughout the 1970s, and by the time it was complete, its effects had been sewn into the neighborhood’s fabric almost as a given. At any rate, Jackie’s physical life had always been based primarily in East Orange, where her friends lived, where she worked and shopped and felt comfortable, and where Skeet Douglas conducted his business. So, too, was Rob’s.

  During Rob’s early childhood, East Orange represented the second-highest concentration of African Americans living below the poverty line in America, behind East St. Louis. The violent crime rate of thirty-five hundred per one hundred thousand people was almost six times the national average of six hundred, and eight times that of adjacent South Orange, which stood at four hundred. The figure meant that any given person in East Orange had roughly a one-in-thirty chance of being violently robbed, assaulted, raped, or killed in any given year; an equivalent person in South Orange, half a mile away, had less than a one-in–two hundred chance of experiencing the same. Horace held his job, though, and the family remained in the house, as they always had, keeping it open to anyone in the family who needed shelter.

  Around this time, a resident of the North Ward coined what would become Newark’s informal nickname: “Brick City.” Depending on whom you asked, the moniker referred to the hardness and resiliency of its people, the bricks that paved many of the older streets downtown, or the easy availability of brick-shaped packages of crack cocaine.

  SKEET PLEADED WITH her to stop working, move in with him, let him support her even if she wouldn’t let him marry her.

  “I’m not moving to your house,” she told him.

  “Why not?”

  “You know exactly.”

  He looked at her as if she were the most cynical person on earth. “You think I’d ever put my son in danger? Or my woman?”

  The kitchen job at St. Mary’s was the first in which she earned an annual rather than an hourly wage. The wage still amounted to the national minimum of $3.10 an hour: a little more than $6,000 a year. The work itself was awful, mixing industrial quantities of low-grade animal products into stews ingestible by straw, portioning out endless lumps of Jell-O onto paper plates from huge vats of it, boiling vegetables to paste. Yet th
e pride lay in knowing that when she left work, work would still be there tomorrow, and that she’d receive a check on the first and fifteenth of each month. The hospital had a program through which, when the time was right, she could opt to attend night school for a management degree, qualifying her to supervise a kitchen. She’d worked in the cafeteria at Orange High School for credits, so a career in food service represented something like a linear trajectory, more than what many of her friends who ricocheted from job to job had. The money was important, but not as important as the ownership of her life apart from the other lives with which hers was entangled. Fundamental to that ownership was not becoming dependent on a man who dealt drugs, even if she loved that man. Jackie and Rob remained on Chapman Street.

  In that house, Rob read. Rather, Jackie read to him, but she felt as if he were reading along with her. With the opening of a book, a shift occurred in his eyes and he nestled an inch deeper into her lap while angling his chin upward, and he seemed to age a year or two. Not a reader herself, Jackie went to the local library for the first time and pulled the popular titles: the Berenstain Bears, Richard Scarry wordbooks, Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle. At a year, he began pointing his index finger at words as she spoke them. At two, he was memorizing simple sentences after he’d heard them once. Always he was entranced by the pictures, the successive turning of pages, the rhythm of his mother’s voice. With her job, housing situation, and relationship status, Jackie could sometimes feel as if she had no right to have borne a child. But during those hours, she was meant to be a mother.

  Skeet, once he caught wind of the reading obsession, was righteously opposed. In his estimation, a toddler who spent all his time sitting in his mother’s lap immersed in fairy tales wasn’t getting any better prepared for life. A child, especially a boy, needed to be out and about, around real people, growing skin. “He can do all that when he’s with you,” Jackie replied. “Me, I’m reading to him.” Skeet picked Rob up from day care on the days he wasn’t working. He tended to avoid spending time on Chapman Street, where he often clashed with Horace and Frances—despite or maybe because of his gregariousness, they were suspicious of him, and they also seemed to blame him for the no-marriage clause. Instead, he’d drive Rob around town to show off his son to various friends. These regular rounds were never drug related; he knew better than that. Skeet simply loved people—talking with them, eating with them, helping them fix things—and it wasn’t uncommon for him to eat six separate lunches over the course of an afternoon. He wanted to instill that sociability in his son; he believed that being curious about people was one of the few crucial life skills that could be fully nurtured in a place like East Orange.

  Jackie’s hypothesis regarding fathers and sons had proved correct: the boy had a powerful connection with his father, and Skeet was generous with his time and money. But what she hadn’t accounted for was the fact that, by the architecture of her design, the three of them were rarely together. Rob was at day care, or with her and her family, or with Skeet. And so the mannerisms he picked up from each of them appeared abruptly, often abrasively, to the other. The toddler’s mind had incredible suction, as his father’s did. When he spontaneously recited Go, Dog. Go! rhymes in Skeet’s car, his father came back to Jackie wondering loudly why his son’s head was being saturated by stories involving canines picnicking in tree canopies (dogs around here were often fierce creatures bred for their aggressiveness, not to be treated so lightly). When Jackie put Rob to bed with a book and heard him instead singing himself to sleep with Grandmaster Flash and the Fabulous Five lyrics, she winced. Skeet saw his three-year-old son being bullied on the playground, timid around older people, quiet when other boys were loud; Jackie saw the same son pushing another child at day-care drop-off and grabbing his toy truck.

  Like any two parents, they fought. These fights happened mostly on the Chapman Street front porch at night, sitting in the plastic chairs that were chained to the wooden railing, Skeet’s cigarette making loops of smoke as he waved his hands around. The neighborhood became desolate after dark, aside from a few clusters of young men passing periodically, smoking and murmuring. Some of them would offer nods of recognition to Skeet, a telepathy between men from which Jackie was glad to be excluded. Jackie’s and Skeet’s voices would echo off the cracked sidewalk. She didn’t care if these street thugs or neighbors or her family could hear, so long as Rob, asleep upstairs in their room, could not. They concentrated on the particulars, the minute details of books and music and diction and schools. Deeper in their hearts, they were debating what kind of man they wanted their son to be.

  “THE PROFESSOR’S RIGHT over there.” The day-care lady pointed to a set of building blocks, over which Rob, now three years old, crouched intently.

  “The Professor?” Jackie replied.

  “You didn’t know we called him that?”

  Jackie thought she—or, worse, her son—was being made fun of somehow and began searching for a cutting rejoinder while mentally mapping out the second-nearest day care.

  “It’s because he’s so smart and he knows everything.”

  Jackie looked up and saw that the woman was actually serious—that she called Rob Peace “Professor” in an earnest reference to his intellect.

  Professor, she thought to herself. My boy, the Professor.

  Humbly, she figured that the moniker came simply because Rob talked so much. He could make her own brain go lumpy with the constant stream of comments and questions. More than any other child she’d ever cared for, he asked, “Why?” And maybe she was projecting this, because he was her own, but she felt that he did so not out of reflex but out of a genuine desire to understand their world and the people who inhabited it.

  On weekends when it was warm, she’d take him to Orange Park by herself: a blanket, some canned pears and ham, a precious few lazy hours between the night shifts and backaches of the six-day workweek. For many years now, the park had been owned by the dealers, and more so as the progression of the 1980s brought crack to the neighborhood. Men—and sometimes women, sometimes boys—sat on picnic tables in groups of two, their feet planted on the benches beside malt liquor in brown bags. Their talk was generally cheerful, and they were unassuming enough until their patrons approached and a certain gravity fell over the ensuing transaction. The executive of this enterprise was named Day-Day. He was a smooth-faced man in his midthirties, Jackie’s age, and he was always on his feet traversing the diagonal footpaths. He never interacted with the dealers, but he was always watching. If you didn’t know him, he looked like a guy strolling in the park for exercise and peace of mind. But everyone knew him. Jackie figured he must walk fifteen miles a day within those few acres of city land. He knew Skeet and always paused by their blanket to comment on how Rob looked more like his father each day. On Sundays, he moved his salesmen to the south side of the park and gifted the north side, where the playground was, to parents and children.

  The playground equipment was splintered, held together loosely by rusty protruding nails. Bits of glass from crack pipes and vials were embedded in the dirt beneath the swing set. The park was a highly secure place for people to do drugs after dark, more secure even than homes and apartments. The police didn’t make regular patrols because they were too busy answering 911 calls. Policemen were more likely to enter a user’s building during the night, answering a domestic abuse call from down the hallway, than they were to make a pass through the Orange Park playground.

  Jackie and Rob would eat their snacks on the blanket (never on park benches, because stupefied addicts peed themselves on them), and she’d follow him closely over the jungle gym while her eyes searched always for nails or glass or older, rougher children who had no business on a toddler playground, anything that posed a threat to her boy.

  JACKIE ENTERED THE house to raised voices, one of them her four-year-old son’s. She walked into the kitchen where Rob and her younger sister Debbie stood on opposite sides of a po
ol of milk and an empty, upturned carton. He’d spilled it; Debbie was demanding that he clean it up and, once Jackie appeared, that she go buy more. Rob’s arms were crossed, his eyes wild. His logic for refusal was that someone had carelessly left the carton open and with the bottom hanging a third of the way over the shelf edge. That person should clean it up and buy more. That person was clearly Debbie, judging by her defensiveness. Jackie told her son, not gently, to clean the mess, and he did—huffing and muttering to himself with the fury of the wronged.

  “It’s just not right,” Debbie said, “that in a house with this many people, you’ve fixed it so you’re the only one he listens to.”

  Too many people were spread across too many years in the house on Chapman Street, and the result was friction. Jackie and most of her siblings were blunt and to the point, like their father. The house could be a chorus of minor discontentments and accusations that became further compacted when Horace took on tenants on the third floor. Because the neighborhood was increasingly unsafe, everyone stayed in the house most of the time, pent up with no energy outlets but to go at one another. Solitude, silence, stillness—these commodities were nearly impossible to find.