The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League

“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 […]. 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.”

Hobbs provides statistics to give readers vital insight into the socioeconomic context of Rob’s upbringing. His emphasis on East Orange’s extreme poverty and violent crime highlights the magnitude of Rob’s academic achievements, given his environment. The author presents Rob’s grandparents, Horace and Frances Peace, as clinging to their respectability and family values while the neighborhood deteriorates around them.

“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.”

This passage conveys not only Skeet’s sociable nature but also the sense of community that he enjoyed in East Orange. The reference to eating “six separate lunches” in one day captures the hospitable nature of the neighborhood’s residents despite ingrained poverty. While the area offers few opportunities for children like Rob to thrive, Skeet views this sense of community as adequate compensation.

“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 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’s desire to protect her son from the negative aspects of East Orange is highlighted in their trips to the park. Hobbs conveys how even the children’s play area is tainted by the area’s social problems. The wholesome image of Jackie and her son sitting on a picnic blanket is juxtaposed with references to “stupefied addicts,” “nails,” and “glass.” While Jackie’s maternal alertness succeeds in keeping Rob from harm as a toddler, she cannot protect him from the area’s undesirable influences as he grows older.

“Plumes of dark smoke that smelled of seasoned meat rose above the houses from backyard cookouts. Elderly women opened their front windows wide and sat there all day behind fans that blew across bowls of ice cubes. Cards, dice, checkers, jacks, jump rope, hopscotch, craps, dance-offs, stickball, handball, basketball—one could not turn a corner without encountering a game being played, often with the elderly cheering on the young, dispensing their peanut gallery wisdom gained from decades of playing the same games on the same blocks.”

This passage conveys both the positive and negative aspects of East Orange. The long sentence listing the games being played around every street captures the neighborhood’s lively energy. A sense of community and continuity is also emphasized in the way the elderly residents interact with the young as they play the games they once enjoyed. At the same time, Hobbs implies stasis in the description of the residents who “sat there all day” and the repetition of “the same games on the same blocks,” suggesting that the young people in the neighborhood are destined to repeat the patterns of the generations before them. This foreshadows Rob’s trajectory.

“In September 1990, just as his father’s murder trial began in the courthouse downtown, Rob entered the fourth grade in a private Catholic school. During the months to come, the remainder of Skeet’s life would be decided upon by a jury of his peers. In a certain way, Rob’s life would be, too.”

This passage emphasizes how Rob’s fate is inextricably linked to that of his father, although they appear to take opposing paths. Jackie pays for her son to be privately educated, hoping that it will provide the opportunities necessary for him to escape the neighborhood and a fate like his father’s. However, Hobbs’s use of foreshadowing indicates that others—“a jury of his peers,” referring to Rob’s friends the Burger Boyz—will ultimately decide his life path.

“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.”

Here, the memoir delves into the theme of Education as a Pathway to Opportunity and Isolation. Hobbs emphasizes the benefits of the boys’ private school education as they feel their futures expand in direct proportion to the growth of their knowledge. However, their burgeoning development separates them from their friends, whose stasis reflects the lack of prospects for most residents of the neighborhood.

“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.”

Rob’s conflicted identity is conveyed as Victor observes his friend’s navigation of different personas in the course of a day. Rob transforms, chameleon-like, from a model student at Mount Carmel’s to a streetwise kid in the neighborhood and the “man of the house” when he returns home. Hobbs’s reference to the “never-ending calibrations” this required hints at the exhausting emotional toll of these constant transformations.

“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’s observations on East Orange’s public high school emphasize her belief that its low funding leads to suboptimal outcomes for its students. Neither the students nor the administration seem to care about the quality of education at the school. This is emphasized by the building itself, which is covered in “profane graffiti,” and the “yellowed lawn,” which suggests neglect and indifference. Instead of focusing on college and careers, Jackie thinks that the students seem to be training to be “loiterers, hustlers, and single mothers,” showing that they do not have academic ambitions or hopes.

“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.”

The memoir captures how Rob’s intellectual curiosity and intelligence extend to his interactions with other people. The metaphor of the “cavernous brain” to describe Rob’s mind highlights his capacity for remembering and storing information. His knowledge of the intricacies of everyone’s lives in East Orange reflects his attributes of empathy and genuine interest in people. While admirable, Rob’s compulsion to “provide solutions” to the problems of others eventually contributes to his downfall.

“The house—specifically the basement—became the physical center of the boys’ lives, where any or all of them could be found at any given hour when they weren’t at school, and sometimes when they should have been. They were comfortable there, warm, fed, far from conflicts. On the foundation of this sudden, unexpected stability, the boys built a brotherhood, a family structure that was easy and permanent and good.”

Curtis’s family home—34 Smith Street—is a recurring motif in the memoir. The house (particularly its basement) represents the qualities that the homes of the other Burger Boyz lack: stability, comfort, and, above all, safety. Hobbs highlights how the location provides the conditions the boys require to study and nurture their aspirations. The metaphor of the Burger Boyz building a “family structure” of “brotherhood” at this location conveys how the gathering place cements their friendship and loyalty.

“But in some long-dormant part of his consciousness, now stirred by his friend Rob, he saw it: a campus far from here with grassy quads and matching eaved buildings, with Tavarus himself walking through it carrying an armload of books. This image was grainy, but the resolution became sharper and more detailed with each hour spent in awe of Rob.”

Rob’s ability to inspire others to strive and achieve is illustrated in Tavarus’s dream of going to college. Hobbs uses the metaphor of a photograph slowly developing to convey Tavarus’s growing ability to see himself as a college student. The image is initially “grainy” due to the low expectations he has grown up with. However, Rob’s inspiring influence makes the picture clearer.

“Rob stood on the fringe, wearing baggy jeans, Timberland boots, and a “skully,” a tight, thin piece of black nylon fabric in the shape of a stingray, the wing tips of which he bound at the base of his cranium. He was smoking a cigarette, his back turned to us. The classmates who hadn’t met him yet clearly figured him to be a dining hall worker or part of the maintenance staff. He did nothing to dispel this notion.”

Hobbs explores the isolating aspect of education as he describes how Rob’s physical demeanor, clothes, and race set him apart from other Yale students. His white classmates immediately assume he is one of the dining hall workers or maintenance staff, signaling their implicit racial biases since they do not expect a Black student to be part of their cohort. Rob expects them to think this way and makes no effort “to dispel this notion,” indicating his frustration with their line of thinking but also his ingrained sense of pride in his own identity since he does not seek their approval or acceptance.

“I told him I’d grown up ‘near Philly,’ when in fact I had grown up in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on fifteen acres of rolling rural hills in Chester Country, thirty miles from the city. I consciously failed to mention that I’d attended private school beginning in prekindergarten, and that my parents, who had been married for almost thirty years, had invested their entire lives (not to mention their finances) into taking care of their four children—removing all uncertainty from our formative years.”

Hobbs confesses to his initial lack of honesty with Rob about his socioeconomic background. Consciousness of the social divide between them, he played down his privileged upbringing. The author’s list of his advantages, which include family stability, wealth, and comfort, emphasizes how his time with Rob makes him more conscious of The Impact of Environment and Upbringing on Personal Outcomes.

“Yesterday Rob had walked about the same distance from our room to Science Hill for biology class: past Sterling Memorial Library and its four million books, across the marble stones of Beinecke Plaza […,] beneath the forty-foot golden dome of Woolsey Hall […]. Today, he walked through the network of dealers who governed Vailsburg Park, along Central Avenue, a few blocks from where the Moore sisters had been killed, and then to Chapman Street. Along the way, he passed small houses, tall project towers, struggling businesses gating their doors, and poor people going wherever they were going, heads angled down.”

Hobbs contrasts Yale and Newark, the different worlds Rob moves between. The author conveys the grandeur of Yale’s landscape through the adjectives “marble” and “golden,” while he suggests unlimited resources in his reference to the library’s “four million books.” Meanwhile, adjectives such as “small,” “struggling,” and “poor” capture the scarcity and deprivation that characterizes Newark.

“Like the organic compounds Rob worked with in the lab, their friendship had evolved over time, experience, and an inexorable atomic pull. They called each other ‘brother,’ and in the context from which they came, a brother was someone who would die for you—not as a verbal phrasing meant to suggest a deep kinship but in actual fact should the need arise.”

Hobbs uses scientific similes to describe the powerful sense of brotherhood between the Burger Boyz. The author compares the friends to “organic compounds” that naturally bond together, suggesting that shared adversity forges the strongest relationships.

“What was unnerving about Newark, as […] the hospitals and colleges and greens of downtown gave way to graffiti, grit, and loiterers, was how cemented the poverty seemed to be. […] I did feel tense as it became apparent that I might be the only white person within three miles. And yet, with Rob at the wheel, waving to people in the street and attaching childhood stories to practically every corner, the neighborhood didn’t feel like a slum. Its streets were dirty, run-down, very poor, and very black, but they didn’t feel threatening, not sitting next to Rob.”

Recounting his first visit to Rob’s neighborhood, the author uses the alliteration of “graffiti” and “grit” to emphasize the impact of urban decay on Newark. His figurative description of the area’s poverty as “cemented” conveys how social deprivation has become ingrained and impossible for the residents to escape. Nevertheless, Rob’s presence allows Hobbs to understand that the district is imbued with his friend’s happy memories.

“Rob’s role as a dealer was already more complicated than the next guy’s, because he was now a Yale graduate tagged with all the many stigmata that simple word carried in this neighborhood’s underworld. Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League.”

Hobbs uses paradoxical vocabulary to convey how Rob’s Ivy-League education alienates him from his community. The concept that Rob is “tagged” by his Yale degree like a “stigmata” illustrates the reversal of values in Newark as academic accolades—that are lauded in college and in wealthier environments—are viewed with distrust. The simile of a bird ostracized by its flock captures how Rob’s achievements become a source of isolation when he returns to his neighborhood.

“He didn’t stand out for being a nerd in a pink school uniform here, as he had in East Orange. He didn’t stand out for being black and wearing a skully, as he had at Yale. He didn’t have to keep track of bills exiting and entering his wallet (kept in the front right pocket), as he had always. He was just a man on vacation, cutting a broad, muscular silhouette against the southern horizon as he walked along the beach.”

Rio de Janeiro symbolizes Rob’s ideal lifestyle in the memoir. The repetition of “he didn’t” throughout this passage emphasizes the societal expectations and financial pressures he feels everywhere except in the Brazilian city. This description highlights Rob’s desire not only for acceptance but for anonymity as he enjoys being “just a man.”

“As a financial master, Mr. Cawley looked at the world in terms of investments, of risk and reward. In 1998, the ‘investment’ in Rob had struck him on paper as one of the lowest-risk and the highest-return; he saw no possible downside in giving this rare boy the slight push […] he needed to reach the pinnacle for which he was already headed. Almost a decade later, as Rob broke off contact to gaze down at the floor as if there was a pit between them, Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn’t lived on paper. He was not disappointed so much as confused, and he opted not to inquire further into what exactly had happened to Rob’s psyche between Yale graduation and now.”

In this awkward encounter, Charles Cawley, the wealthy banker who pays for Rob’s Yale education, reflects on Rob’s failure to reach the “pinnacle” of achievement he anticipated. The entire passage builds on an extended financial metaphor, with Rob described as an “investment” with “no possible downside.” However, Cawley’s statistical analysis failed to take into account the unquantifiable complexities of the human psyche.

“She was afraid for her headstrong son, because no matter how articulately Rob spun his circumstances, she knew what almost forty years of manual labor felt like (terrible) and what it earned you (very little). Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments—as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligation to his own talent.”

Hobbs conveys Jackie’s frustration as, despite the advantages of his education, her son resorts to the life of manual labor she wants to spare him. The ultimate futility of the sacrifices Jackie makes for Rob underlines the limitations of parental influence. The passage suggests that Rob’s pursuit of a life that is unrelated to his academic achievements is a rebellion against the burden of obligation he feels his “celebrated accomplishments” have created.

“He would stuff these parcels into his high-top Timberland boots, the same style as those he’d worn at Mt. Carmel and made illegal at St. Benedict’s, and plug them with wads of dirty socks.”

Rob’s conflicted symbolizes his conflicted identity in this memoir. The changing role that the Timberland boots play in Rob’s life capture his evolving but fractured identity. At Mt. Carmel Elementary School, he wears them to appear streetwise, diverting unwanted accusations of bookishness. As president at St. Benedict’s, he bans them, knowing them to be a distraction from serious academic focus. However, post-Yale, the boots become an aid to his drug smuggling, representing the downward trajectory of Rob’s life.

“The nightly scene reminded them of high school, when all five of them gathered at the table or in the basement to do the same thing, looking just as worn-out while doing it. Back then, they’d worked over Mrs. Gamble’s casseroles and cans of grape soda. Now, it was take-out barbeque and vodka.”

The basement at 34 Smith Street continues to be a hub for the Burger Boyz once they are adults. Although they gather there in the same way, their time is spent working on less productive projects, such as realty plans that fail and the marijuana venture that leads to Rob’s death. Hobbs underlines the Burger Boyz’s loss of direction as the wholesomeness of Mrs. Gamble’s casseroles and grape soda is replaced with fast food and alcohol.

“Rob Peace, more than anyone else I’ve known, didn’t need money to be happy. His needs and wants were basic: sustenance, companionship, sex, music, marijuana, little else. He was content with his unit on Greenwood, during the various stretches in which he lived there. He’d never replaced the leather jacket Zina had given him as a freshman in college eleven years earlier. He liked eating rice and beans […]. At his core, he was indifferent to the American concept of success: owning nice things, vacationing at resorts, being the boss of others.”

Hobbs argues that one of Rob’s central conflicts is his disinterest in the American Dream. While he went to Yale, he was not motivated by the status symbols an Ivy-League education is supposed to guarantee, such as power and expensive possessions. While he pursued wealth through drug dealing, his motivation was to provide for family and friends. Rob’s craving for a simple life explains his lack of purpose and ambition after graduating from Yale.