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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and substance use.

“Robert DeShaun Peace, the baby in question, lay sleepy-eyed and pawing in Jackie’s arms. He was a day and a half old, eight pounds, ten ounces. When he’d first been weighed, the number had sounded husky to her. Now, outside the hospital for the first time, he felt nearly weightless.”

This passage illustrates the novelistic quality of Hobbs’s memoir. The description of Rob as “sleepy-eyed and pawing” demonstrates how the author uses imaginative details to vividly depict the facts of Rob’s life. Jackie’s reflection that her son feels “weightless” outside the hospital highlights her protective instincts toward her son.

“During Rob’s early childhood, East Orange represented the second-highest concentration of African Americans living below the poverty line in America, behind East St. Louis. The violent crime rate of thirty-five hundred per one hundred thousand people was almost six times the national average of six hundred, and eight times that of adjacent South Orange […]. Horace held his job, though, and the family remained in the house, as they always had, keeping it open to anyone in the family who needed shelter.”

Hobbs provides statistics to give readers vital insight into the socioeconomic context of Rob’s upbringing. His emphasis on East Orange’s extreme poverty and violent crime highlights the magnitude of Rob’s academic achievements, given his environment. The author presents Rob’s grandparents, Horace and Frances Peace, as clinging to their respectability and family values while the neighborhood deteriorates around them.

“Skeet simply loved people—talking with them, eating with them, helping them fix things—and it wasn’t uncommon for him to eat six separate lunches over the course of an afternoon. 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.”

This passage conveys not only Skeet’s sociable nature but also the sense of community that he enjoyed in East Orange. The reference to eating “six separate lunches” in one day captures the hospitable nature of the neighborhood’s residents despite ingrained poverty. While the area offers few opportunities for children like Rob to thrive, Skeet views this sense of community as adequate compensation.