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by
Jeff Hobbs
Read between
August 22 - August 28, 2018
She’d always figured this repetition to be the source of his sternness, his absolute insistence on correct manners and etiquette. To him, life was lived successfully by getting the small things right every time.
As a girl, in church and school lessons, she was taught that Love was a boundless and ever-expanding entity. As she grew into her teens and found herself increasingly responsible for taking care of a generation of children she hadn’t herself conceived, she learned that there were limitations even to Love.
In her estimation, the union of marriage was what ultimately severed the union of family: the arguments over housing and money and time, the ribbing by unfettered friends, the inexorable waning of years and freedom.
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.
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.
Solitude, silence, stillness—these commodities were nearly impossible to find.
She knew that in the deeply layered world of drugs, the nexus of commerce was the person, not the place.
Jackie knew that friends and friendliness weren’t always directly related.
the fundamental struggle of Rob’s adolescence: being a fatherless boy in East Orange was hard, but being a nerd was harder.
This existence was fracturing, but it was the only way to integrate his ambition and intellect in a milieu in which neither had currency and in which both could get him hurt.
“Newark-proofing”
You stared down at the thick black line scrolling steadily beneath you, and all you heard was the rush of water past your ears, and a life that at times felt cosmically complicated was reduced to the simplest elements: oxygen, buoyancy, propulsion.
In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.
In troubled cases, the key was to locate a tangential entry point, something like a back door through which counseling could be administered without the boy feeling as though he needed extra help.
He owed it to his mother not to take anything more from her; this debt was unspoken, and unknown even to Jackie herself.
we were able to laugh over the fact that I was a white guy who ran sprints and he was a black guy who played water polo.
Rob, being both black and poor, was in the minority of the minority.
MB&B spanned everything from the most intricate proteins within the human body to the workings of the cosmos over billions of years (think Stephen Jay Gould and Stephen Hawking designing a college major together).
he began working in a lab at Yale Medical School headed by a famed molecular chemistry professor,
he quickly graduated to running his own low-level experiments, primarily in crystal diffraction.
On that night he made clear to his secret society that the fundamental conflict of his life was founded on precisely that belief: the white establishment would always keep the common black man down in order to cover their own asses.
Yale, to her, was a corridor between stations, not a place with a pulse.
he used Carl not out of loyalty or charity but as a beard to legitimize this image of himself, yet another Newark-proofing trick.
Curtis suddenly understood what the word “peace” meant to Rob Peace.
It was a choreographed parade of costumes, a chiaroscuro of color worthy of Kandinsky.
“The man’s like a dog. You can’t blame a dog for eating up a steak if you leave the steak on the floor.”
He chose instead to get down in the muck with his students, drill them with good study habits, embarrass them when they copped attitude, and utilize their pride as the primary motivator of their lives, as it had been his.
WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME.
during the winter of 2006, this was how Rob spent the bulk of his free time: alone in the basement making designer marijuana.
very few people in Rob’s life had cherished their brains more than Skeet, and that was precisely where the disease had fortified itself.
Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia.
Whatever future he saw for himself right now, however vividly he saw that future, its images lay beyond the reach of her bewildered eyes, even if those eyes were literally and figuratively shortsighted.
She didn’t bother bringing them up, inviting him to justify his actions with the mathematics of his family. She already knew how skilled he was at performing this equation.
He trafficked almost exclusively in the day-to-day: this shift at work, this flight, this city, this transaction, this chunk of money. No matter how skillfully he was able to string these moments together and stretch them into future years, he nevertheless struck her as inextricably lodged within the minute in which he was living.
(a mother walking around with her infant was generally probed for her flaws in the role, while a father seemed to be given undue accolades for showing even minor aptitude).
But Rob coveted money so that he could help other people materially and in doing so manipulate their perception of him.
fact-checking wasn’t a major tenet of gang behavior. Immediate action was.
the kind of yelling that indicated something important was at stake, yelling that negated the value of human life.
The majority of men figure that, when put in a situation where life hangs in the balance—both your own and that of those you care about—some dormant, primal instinct will activate, and you will be strong and decisive and precise and intelligent with every movement. In this moment, Curtis learned that such an instinct did not exist, or at least not in him.
I take solace in the fact that so many others thrived and found refuge in his shade while he was with us.
no matter how loosely or intimately intertwined we had been with the life of Rob Peace, our ineffectuality extended far enough to encompass the living and dying of others. So fucking smart, but so fucking dumb.
They still could not fully process the vacancy following Rob’s death, the space that was not occupied by his broad shoulders, the silence that was not punctured by his voice.
