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

Author:Hobbs, Jeff [Hobbs, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

During Yale graduation weekend in 2002, Rob wore the African scarf that he’d been given during the “Black Graduation” ceremony one week earlier.

Part IV

Mr. Peace

Ty Cantey (second from left), Rob (third from left), and I (third from right) had a roommate reunion when they served as groomsmen at my wedding in Brooklyn, 2005. Later in the night, we three “Threw Dem Bows” on the dance floor.

Chapter 9

HE WAS AMAZED by what had been left behind. Expensive winter coats, racks filled with CDs, textbooks, halogen lamps, six-hundred-thread-count sheet sets that had never been unpackaged, gold and silver jewelry, stereos, Discmans, and even laptop computers: graduated seniors had simply departed without these things. And Rob—who was working the summer custodial job for the fourth straight year, cleaning up the campus between graduation in mid-May and the alumni reunions in early June—stayed to sweep it all up. He dealt with items of value first, stashing anything sellable in an industrial garbage bag that he set aside. Then came the work of hauling abandoned furniture down the stairs, sweeping up all the dust and grime and hair that had accumulated over the year, mopping and painting, reconstructing bunk beds that had been pulled apart in room after room. The various spaces he’d inhabited over the years were now empty, given a clean coat of white paint, awaiting next year. We’d all come to Yale aiming to leave a footprint; Rob knew from this work that none of us had, at least not in the dorm rooms.

He took a lot of cigarette breaks alongside the full-time maintenance employees, men he’d befriended over the years. They were generally derisive of the students, the way they felt entitled to just leave their shit for others to pick up. Dozens of fifty-gallon trash bags’ worth of said shit lay in a mountain in a corner of the quad, next to the master’s house. The final task was to transport them to a Dumpster on Park Street before the last debris of our time here was hauled away.

They did sell the valuables they’d collected. Like every year, the six-person custodial team combined what they’d found into one cache of contraband. First, they sold the textbooks back to the bookstore, which paid a fraction of the cover price no matter the condition—but still, it was cash. As for the rest, each member helped unload what he could. Some used the Internet. Others pounded the pavement in their neighborhoods. Afterward, trusting one another’s honesty, they divided the profits evenly. At the end of the three-week stint, Rob came away with almost $1,000. The figure paled in comparison to the money he had already saved. But still, he made enough to cover the summer’s rent in New Haven. He also gave himself a graduation present in the form of a second tattoo, this one on his left biceps, of an African woman with a tall headdress seen in profile. The image matched exactly Jackie’s lone body art, inked during her twenties, before Rob was a thought.

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