Free The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs Page B

purple-and-pink plaid tie.
    Two evident types of children walked through the neighborhood each afternoon. The kids who went to school walked in cheery clusters, many wearing simple bicolored uniforms and carrying backpacks. They walked slowly to and from the bus stop, savoring one another’s company, none eager to part ways and return home to whatever awaited them there.
    The other kids walked in much smaller groups, usually two but never more than three. During the summer they wore wife-beater undershirts, and during the winter they wore baggy coats that they shouldn’t have been able to afford. Whether these children actually sold drugs or simply wanted to project an association with people who did, Jackie felt sorry for them—sorry for the fact that ten and twenty years down the road, assuming they were not incarcerated or dead, they would be doing exactly the same thing they were doing now. These kids, mostly boys, mostly fatherless she presumed, would pass by the schoolkids, leering. The schoolkids, whose safety came from numbers, would quiet for a moment and walk on. Jackie saw this dynamic almost every day on the corners on either end of Chapman Street, but only as she edged farther into her forties did she begin to see the power in it: half the generation already lost, the other half just trying to get home each day.
    Just after Skeet’s conviction, Jackie splurged on a gift for her son: the A volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She bought it from a door-to-door salesman, with a spontaneity rare for her, and she began saving extra so that every few months she could furnish another volume.
    Her faith in her son’s promise began with his intense interest in books, a passion that could not be taught, not where they lived and not with Jackie’s work schedule. These books were gateways, not just in abstractions of the mind but to real-world opportunity. They led him to as many school academic squads as he could fit into his schedule and subsequent competitions in the tristate region. Unlike Oakdale, the Mt. Carmel teams were actually capable of winning. Rob began bringing home ribbons, certificates, and small plastic trophies. He placed them all in a cardboard box beneath his bed. He joined a traveling church choir at St. Mary’s. Rob never said much about these extracurriculars, aside from asking for rides to and from places and small amounts of money for travel fees. “Industrious,” the nuns at Mt. Carmel called him. “Focused . . . advanced . . .”
    Jackie, Frances, Horace—everyone who loved Rob—feared the effect that Skeet’s conviction would have on the boy’s energy, his intelligence, and above all his spirit. After news came of the sentencing, and after they made their final visit to Essex County Jail before the transfer to Trenton State, Rob turned inward and ceased to ask questions, perhaps because the first question he’d asked about his father back in August 1987—“When is he coming home?”—had finally, irrefutably been answered. His family could only hope that he was pushing at his own pace through this uniquely protracted process of losing a father. They believed he was strong enough to do this on his own, and they hoped he wouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture; they hoped he wouldn’t get mired in self-pity. Self-pity was hard to avoid in East Orange, and once it took hold of a person, it was harder to shed. Jackie knew that. Her rule for herself, in the event of loss or strain or bad luck, was to take a night to feel sorry for herself, typically with a strong drink next to her bed. The next morning, she flushed the sorrow out with her hangover.
    In her son’s case, she was confident that the new friends who surrounded him at Mt. Carmel, many of whom had lost fathers themselves and possessed the sympathy needed to relate one situation to another earnestly, would be sufficient to move her