The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is subtitled A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League and here begins the first of many juxtapositions. Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, is known as ‘Brick City’ due to the amount of brick high-rises that litter its landscape. Over time, this has taken on even worse associations to mean: a place where bricks of crack cocaine are bought and sold. For years, Newark has had problems with unemployment, crime and institutional corruption. The Ivy League on the other hand is the American equivalent of our Red Brick universities. One such university that belongs to this esteemed chain is Yale, of which Robert Peace attended. This then is a story of a boy who went from economical rags to educational riches, who exchanged life in Gomorrah for the ivory tower.

Newark.

I should mention that this social ascension is true; it is a story stranger than fiction. It is authored by Jeff Hobbs, Rob’s university roommate; an aspiring novelist at Yale, who never knew his greatest story slept next door. After Rob died, he set about interviewing friends and family to piece together this extraordinary life.

Robert Peace was a young man born in St Mary’s hospital, less than half a mile from his soon-to-be family home in Chapman Street. His father Skeet dealt in low-level drugs and high-level wisdom, making the boy both street-smart and book-smart. Jackie saw the academic potential in her son and was wary of his father’s influence. Consequently, she kept Skeet at arms length. Perhaps she was right to do so: Skeet was found guilty of murdering two women; a charge he vehemently denied. As a man with a history of non-violence and an alibi it seemed like he had a good hand; when his witness died before his trial the cards were stacked against him. He was put away for life.

Rob and his dad.

Untethered from his father and idol, Robert Peace was an astronaut lost in space. His mother knew that if she didn’t do something then his intelligence would be stomped on by the local school. So she scrimped, saved, trained and got promoted. She kept her nose to the grindstone to continue Rob’s private school education. This cost wouldn’t be astronomical for suburban couples ($400 dollars/£300 per month), but for a lady in low-paid work, who had a house to maintain, ailing parents to care for and regular prison visits to attend, it was a job to remain solvent.

For Jackie though it was all worth it. Her son prospered under the auspices of the school. His grades were sky high; his reputation with staff and peers equally so. Yet she still worried. Every day he walked home he had to cross the temptations that caught so many: the drugs; the machismo. Rob though assimilated with ease. He called it ‘Newark-proofing,’ the ability to change stance, gait and lexicon in order to dissolve and thrive in a tougher environment. Although he was the private school boy in a world of broken social housing, he didn’t experience much trouble – the reason? He never became ‘uppity.’ This word kept people in their place- for good or bad – in Newark. It stopped people from being condescending, kept them real to their neighbourhood; but stopped them from climbing out of their circumstances too; no one wanted to be a traitor to their people.

Rob continued to climb due to a combination of his mother’s sacrifice, his natural intelligence and the patronage of a benefactor. In many ways it is a story of Great Expectations where an impoverished boy is plucked out of poverty and sent to live as a gentleman. For Peace it wasn’t a convicted con of Dickens’ tome, but Charles Cawley, a philanthropist, who paid for Rob's transformation. Cawley, a former student of Rob's school, knew what a service the institution had done for him, and wanted to pay it back. On meeting Rob at a graduation evening, he was struck by the young man’s brilliance and charm. So mesmerised by the boy’s dazzling enterprise, Cawley offered to pay for him to go to Yale.  Finally, Jackie and Rob had achieved the American Dream. Together they had flown through the glass ceiling of colour, stopping only to land when they reached the manicured lawns of the Ivy League.

So how did Rob, who worked in a cancer and infection research unit whilst majoring in molecular biochemistry and biophysics, come to be killed aged thirty over dealing marijuana?

How did a boy who climbed out of the mire get sucked back in?

Read it; the answers aren’t simple.

Robert Peace was murdered in the basement of his friend's house.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is available to buy from all good bookshops.