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

by Jeff Hobbs

In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

The first time the one hundred members of the Pierson Class of ’02 congregated together, we were on the slate patio outside the dining hall. 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. In fact, he seemed to take pride in it. Like his mother on move-in day, he harbored little interest in interacting with the rest of us. Though I’d made an effort to be friendly enough, I kept my distance in those moments. An uncle had advised me not to get too chummy with my roommates early on, because it was easier to become better friends than to extricate yourself from someone you didn’t like. In a way that at the time felt natural but perhaps a bit too deliberate, I thought having a black roommate was fortunate. Though my high school was demographically the opposite of Rob’s—90 percent white—I was a national-caliber hurdler and had spent my summers traveling and rooming with mostly black runners at Junior Olympic meets. As a result of many long, cramped van rides, I had a familiarity with popular hip-hop artists of the day, I was conversant in certain strands of street lingo (“That’s tight!”), and I knew how to play spad...

MY OLDER BROTHER had spoken of it when he’d first left for Yale in 1992: how the black kids ate and hung out only with each other, how some kind of racism, or reverse racism, coursed through “their” social dynamic.

Rob seemed to have no idea where his father was or what he was doing on that morning. Arthur found it quite obvious that until Rob was able to place his father that day long ago, he’d have a hell of a time trying to place himself here, now.

“Look, anything you do, if it isn’t hard, it isn’t doing anything for you. So you’re better off not doing it. Use your time somewhere else.”

The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. 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.

He didn’t know anyone else who was better equipped to care for women. Rob had his mother and grandmother, of course, whom he doted on religiously even when they’d been fighting about his airline job. He checked in on Raquel Diaz and Daniella Pierce often and listened to their problems with attentive thought if not always with patience. Shannon Heggins, his junior high girlfriend who was now raising a daughter alone, relied on him to bring dinner to her apartment multiple times a week. He had cousins, neighbors, former classmates, so many others whom he took care of devoutly. The fact that Rob could spend so many of his waking hours—the majority, it sometimes seemed—tending to the women in his life, and yet he couldn’t get through one phone call with a serious girlfriend that didn’t bring him to profane heights of frustration, was bewildering.

And yet they also believed this repetitive playacting embodied a greater struggle inside him, one he refused to discuss. The fact was, he seemed positively determined to stave off anything resembling a functional personal relationship until he reached a place where he could take care of Jackie. And in the fall of 2008, with the housing market stalled and Rob’s savings drained once again, that place lay farther and farther away.

And yet, as they became more intimate, he gradually became more elusive. He’d say he was boarding a plane and then fail to show up. He wouldn’t return her calls, sometimes for weeks. By the winter of 2008, he was spending more time in Miami than ever but seeing less of her. The situation did not lead to the fierce confrontations to which Rob was accustomed, and which he at times seemed intent on baiting from her. Though “Aunt” Ina was twenty-nine years old, she was mature; her maturity was what had drawn him to her, the way her attitude transcended her age, and she could smoke weed and party but still seem to float above the life-stalling whimsy that marked most days. She and Rob had talked hypothetically about being together, how easy that would be. But they’d made no promises, and she refused to become possessive. Her concern for him trumped any ownership she was inclined to feel, and she had enough experience to know that voicing concern to a man like Rob invited nothing but anger in return.

Simply by virtue of geography she’d known men who had turned up savagely gutted in hotel rooms and Everglades swamps. She knew other men, some of them related to her by blood, serving long prison sentences. In a city like Miami, where that brand of easy money was always so tantalizingly close, the obstacles to living an honest life were hard to overcome.

But Rob, whom she loved, had a plan. He always had a plan—a plan for the day, a plan for the year, a plan for his life. He rendered these plans simply, using ground-level details, and he tied his decisions to them tightly. When he talked through the path he planned to take from this moment to graduate school, with the flailing real estate market in between, his plans almost—almost—made sense. But the risks he took for the profit he made, from a big-picture standpoint, seemed only obliquely related to those plans. And Ina gradually understood that Rob didn’t seem capable of seeing the big picture, the way he had when they’d first met. 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.

She was confused by all this talk of buying her a house. She’d lived at 181 Chapman Street for almost fifty years. She’d been poor for the same amount of time. That was the life she knew, and she was more or less content with it. She didn’t understand how her strong, bright boy could bring himself such discouragement trying to change what she had; she didn’t understand why he couldn’t hear her on the rare instances she’d tried to explain it to him.