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

A Conversation with Jeff Hobbs, Author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

Why did you decide to write this book?

On a Wednesday night in May of 2011, while in the midst of brushing my teeth, I learned that my best friend from college had died violently, pointlessly. I did what anyone does upon losing someone dear: flew to the funeral, said a few words during the service, bowed my head during the burial, made toasts and drank to excess with old friends, mourned, tried to move on. Except that I couldn't move on; I returned home and found myself spending full workdays staring at the knotty wall planking in the garage where I work, mostly remembering good times had with Rob. I wrote a bunch of personal essays weaving together college memories with weak attempts at insight, as well as stabbing at the guilt of having allowed our friendship to grow distant over the decade since we'd graduated. I reached out to mutual friends, spent hours talking on the phone and in person, asking each other, of course, why? This was Robert Peace. Robert Peace was my roommate and best friend at Yale University during four vital years of life. Robert Peace had saved me from fistfights and towed me through heartbreak and made me laugh thousands of times. Robert Peace was a brilliant scientist, a loyal friend, a world traveler, a high school teacher and coach - and a Yale graduate to boot. He was the one who was always going to succeed and do so in spectacular fashion. He was definitively not the one who was going to be shot to death in a basement in the ghetto outside Newark, surrounded by marijuana. But that was how he left this world. In the end, there was not so much a specific decision moment of, "I am going to write a book about Rob," but rather a process of being caught in this wave of loss and curiosity - of needing to know more - which only gathered strength as weeks and months passed. To some degree, no matter the medium or intention, everyone writes about what conflicts them, and nothing has ever conflicted me more than the death of Rob Peace, and I believed that some catharsis could be wrought in telling his story - his true story - not just for myself but for all the many, many lives with which his intersected, most of which were the better for that intersection having occurred. Of course, I wouldn't presume to embark on such a sensitive undertaking without the support of his friends, family, and most importantly, his mother, Jackie Peace.

How did Rob's friends and family react to your intention to write his biography? Can you tell us a bit about the research process?

To say that Jackie Peace had given all of herself in order to nurture Rob's intelligence and curiosity in a neighborhood in which neither trait had much currency would be a vast understatement. When she lost him, she lost not only her only child, but all those decades of sacrifice - she lost her identity and her hope, and I can't imagine anyone who has invested more hope in another human being as she did in her son. I didn't know Jackie well at all when I first sat down in her living room to speak formally about the book. She told me that her lone consolation after his death was, "I think my son influenced a lot of people, I really do believe that." Feeling very small in proximity to this woman and her grief, I replied that, if she was willing, I wanted to write a book - a book about Rob's life, not his death. I told her that there was very little chance of it being published, but I was driven to work for the six months or so necessary to piece his story together, and that if this effort were in fact successful, perhaps he might continue to influence people in some way.

The research ended up taking more than a year, and the breadth of it speaks to the breadth of the life Rob led. I would one moment be speaking to the COO of a major bank, the next to a tarmac worker at Newark International Airport, the next to a Croatian fashion model from Pula, the next to a Yale professor, the next to a prison inmate in Trenton, the next to the mayor of Newark, the next to a drug dealer in the hood, and so on. These conversations were not always comfortable; they rarely were, being as most of them took place in neighborhoods in which I was not necessarily welcome and not always safe. I had a gun drawn on me once in a North Philadelphia drug den. A GPS mishap had me walking obliviously with my notebook, wearing a blue button down, through the heart of Newark's gangland on 18th Avenue. But all these barriers that existed - which were representative of all the barriers Rob had broken down in order to matriculate at Yale - tended to fall pretty fast, due to the clear commonality of caring about Rob and wanting to contribute to something positive in the wake of his ultimate fate.

Describe the neighborhood Rob grew up in, and the "barriers he broke down."

Rob grew up in a neighborhood outside Newark, colloquially named Illtown. When he was born, in 1980, the previous two decades worth of white flight, the decline of the manufacturing sector and rise of federal project housing, the rapid flourishing of the drug trade and its violence - not to mention the riots of 1967 - had all but cemented the neighborhood as a place of permanent poverty. Crack and its violence were in full bloom outside his front door; hustlers governed the night and much of the day. I could give you many details about how specifically Rob grew up in this milieu, but I'll limit it to one: when he went to Burger King with his high school friends - they called themselves the Burger Boyz - he would grab two dozen ketchup packets from the bin and suck on them all afternoon, because he couldn't afford a burger. Suffice to say, he didn't have much. His father went to prison for life when he was seven years old, an incredible burden that he would carry quietly throughout his life. He was thus forced to become fundamentally an adult at an unfairly young age. But he had a home, owned by his family for over thirty years. He had the natural gift of a cavernous intellect, paired with the curiosity and drive to fill it to capacity with knowledge, even though knowledge could be very dangerous in his environment (for instance, if a group of street hustlers got to thinking that Rob thought he was better than them, that was a problem, one he worked tirelessly to avoid). He had a mother who loved him to world's end and had aspirations for which she was willing to sacrifice. He had loyal friends who challenged him and watched his back. He had impassioned teachers who recognized his potential and made the hard choices necessary to foster it. When he was admitted to Yale, that accomplishment was shared by so many - Rob Peace had made it out. What no one fully understood was that Rob didn't aspire to "make it out." He was deeply attached to the streets on which he'd become a man, and to the people who'd helped him do so. Yale University, and all the associations those words call to mind, was not enough to bring him to think any differently - to, in his view, forsake his roots.

How did his experience at Yale contrast to the coming of age you've just described?

He had an awful lot of experiences at Yale - most of them positive, a few of them negative - that I'm not sure the degree to which they can be reduced to an overall "experience." Paired randomly as roommates freshman year, Rob and I bonded first over the irony that I was a white guy from the country who ran sprints for the track team and he was a black guy from the hood who played water polo (initiation for which found him wearing a toga in the dining hall singing Madonna's "Express Yourself.") He majored in Molecular Biochemistry & Biophysics, which is about as easy as it sounds. He walked around hunched over, wearing a piece of nylon fabric over his cornrows called a "skully," and at a glance he did not look like a member of the student body; he looked like he worked in the dining hall or custodial, and he seemed to take some kind of pride in that, fostering his "otherness." There were subtle and not-so-subtle racial dynamics in play - inevitable in such a privileged and rarefied arena - but he never seemed bothered by this, except for one time, when he was working in the dining hall and a group of prep school kids left their trays on the table for him to clean up - again, not aware that he was a classmate - and he was so incensed that he put his fist through the wall. He smoked and sold weed - a lot of weed - but since he never seemed to spend any money, it was easy to assume that he was saving up for graduate school, or helping out his mother, or both - that if it was not exactly honorable, it was something he knew how to do, money that he needed, and because this was marijuana and we lived in a college dorm, it was safe. I remember going to one of his water polo games and being sort of hypnotized by the way he thrashed through the water, with power but not much grace, his teeth bared in a perpetual leering grin as he talked smack and threw elbows. His joy, which drifted upward into the stands, was total - and that was the Rob Peace whom I remember from college. And at the end of it all, when we watched him receive his Yale diploma onstage with that smile of his, a smile as big as all the outdoors, he seemed not only chosen but destined to fulfill all of his dreams, all the dreams others had placed on him.

What did you learn about Robert Peace that most surprised you? Troubled you?

You didn't have to know Rob well to understand that he inhabited two vastly different, fiercely insular worlds: the streets he'd come from and the classrooms his abilities allowed him to enter. That was his broad narrative, and again, he took pride in entering the latter without leaving the former behind, a pride that I don't believe was nourishing. But what I began to learn even before writing this book was that he didn't live in two worlds. He lived in ten, fifteen, more. He made communities for himself in Rio and Croatia. He spent much of his life, unbeknownst to anyone, working to free his father from prison - writing letters, studying in legal libraries, filing appeals. He mentored hundreds of kids as a high school teacher and coach. He all but carried his friends through the travails of life - academically, emotionally, financially. He lived firmly in the center of all these many spheres, shouldered the dependence of so many people, strived to carry all these various pressures with order and grace - and steadfastly refused help in any form along the way. And this broad word, "help," has a lot to do with the titular tragedy. He was surrounded by people who cared passionately about his well being, who would have done anything for him, and yet he saw seeking help, even the simplest kind of help such as permitting a friend to listen, as an expression of weakness, even a source of shame. That view was compounded with a pattern that emerged in which none of his friends at Yale felt comfortable or capable of offering advice because of the hard way he'd grown up in Newark, and none of his friends in Newark felt comfortable doing the same because this was the guy who'd graduated from Yale. He was heartbreakingly isolated, even in the midst of his closest friends. So Rob's life overall was nothing if not surprising and troubling - all that he achieved, all that he failed to achieve, the manner by which he was killed and all the hundreds of decisions, most of them innocuous in the happening, that brought him to that moment. But even in that context, I encountered so much positivity that I do hope courses through these pages - he faced so many challenges, many self-wrought, many induced by the relentless algorithms of poverty, and he never wilted, he never stopped caring about others and, as his mother told me, influencing others. That caring played a large part in some of the poor decisions he made, both drug-related and not. Though no one was in the basement when he was shot except the man in a ski mask who pulled the trigger (who remains uncaught over three years later), it is strongly believed that he was taking action to protect two of his best friends, one of whom had a wife and son, all of them upstairs in the house that awful night.

In a broader, cultural sense, what would you hope readers take away from this story?

This is the story of one man's life, a relatively anonymous man who died because he sold drugs - and that stark fact can be and has been sufficient for any given person to dismiss his story as one of potential wasted in the service of thuggery. And if that's your reaction, you're perfectly entitled to it. But this book is about details, it's about empathy, it's about getting to know and understand a remarkable, flawed young man. Yes, his life touches on race and class in this country, yes it illuminates certain shortcomings of the educational system, yes it speaks to the fact that living a decent life in America can be tremendously difficult. These issues are quite subjective, and they are best served to remain that way; my intent is not to make statements but simply to tell what happened. For instance, Yale has a comprehensive infrastructure in place, geared primarily toward students whose upbringings haven't necessarily prepared them for college life - academic, emotional, social. There are guidance counselors and writing tutors and cultural advisors, all free and readily available. But it turns out that the kids most likely to take advantage of these resources are those who need it the least: the Exeter graduates, the future Rhodes Scholars, the affluent students who from the day they were born were primed to believe that adults existed almost exclusively to help them. I've mentioned the idea of seeking out help, and Rob's aversion to it as an admission of not belonging. But what do you do about that gap? Who's most culpable - the students falling behind or the administration unable to pull them forward? These are questions that haven't necessarily been asked before, as they lie under the shadow of broader and more bombastic debates. I don't know the answers, but I do feel like awareness is the first step. There are many dozen discoveries like this in the book -these seemingly small manifestations of wider socio-economic issues that are all but invisible. They shouldn't be invisible. People - and particularly young people - should be talking about them. And I have a feeling they will once they've seen them throughthe eyes of Rob Peace.

What have you discovered lately?

Through researching Rob's story, my biggest discovery has been nonfiction itself, some but not all of it related to this book. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is an incendiary journey through the United States penal system - wow, that gal is as smart as she is fearless, and she's able to make a grim study of prison policy exciting. I read Marina Keegan's The Opposite of Loneliness - which is interesting in that it is half fiction, have nonfiction. I approached this one with a bit of trepidation due to its unique and heartbreaking posthumous route to publication, and was blown away by the attention to detail, the deep earnestness that I have much nostalgia for from being twenty-two years old and striving, her ability to just write what she sees, with kindness and without self-consciousness. Her ability to redeem people with just a sentence or phrase is enviable. Susan Cain's Quiet is this joyful celebration of being an introvert in a culture governed by the "Extrovert Ideal," something I've always struggled with personally. She wrote it beautifully and the scope of her research is stunning - I think a must-read for introverts and extroverts alike. I like a good thriller - I recently burned through Hank Steinberg's Out of Range in just two days, it's a fun one, and written with care, sans the overwrought language and lazy similes that sometimes characterize the genre. It's been a while since I've really dug into a big literary fiction book, which is all I ever used to read (with all the pretentiousness that statement implies), but I'm halfway through Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See and it's such an experience, has rekindled that old, almost forgotten joy of sitting up in bed in the early a.m. with the reading light on and my wife and children and dog sound asleep, and simply inhabiting a story and siphoning its energy. A book takes you away like no other form of art, because it doesn't just happen to you like a movie or a song or a painting. You actively enter into it and participate in it, and, if it's great, give yourself up to it. Doerr's book has me. Read that one, just read it.