Christopher

Christopher is the son of Tavarus and Darlene and the youngest member of the Burger Boyz, the long-standing group of friends whose lives remain entwined with Rob even as adulthood pulls them in different directions. Born while his parents were working and still managing to remain above the line of self-sufficiency, he is the first child born among the Burger Boyz. Rob becomes his godfather, and the child’s presence gradually turns the older men’s conversations toward responsibility, fatherhood, mobility, and the possibility of escaping the neighborhood without abandoning the people who made them.

Family and Place

Christopher is one year old when Tavarus and Darlene are living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Newark’s North Ward. The pregnancy had been accidental, and they had no plans to marry, but both were working and seemed happy. Their circumstances are precarious rather than wholly desperate: they are managing, but the demands of a child threaten to make movement and independence more difficult. For Flowy, who has deliberately avoided fatherhood because he believed childbirth and education were often mutually exclusive in the neighborhood where he grew up, Christopher’s situation becomes a visible example of how quickly a baby can become an anchor. The costs of raising a child, combined with the need for nearby family care, can make even a modest move away from Essex County seem impossible.

The child therefore enters the narrative not as an isolated domestic figure but as a test of the adults’ ideas about escape. Flowy dreams of settling somewhere with space, trees, and no gangs, yet recognizes that such places may offer few jobs suited to him. Tavarus and Darlene, meanwhile, are trying to create a stable household inside the same urban world that shaped their friends. Christopher’s existence makes the tension between leaving and staying concrete: the future is no longer an abstract ambition belonging only to educated young men such as Rob or Flowy, but a question of what kind of environment a child will inherit.

Rob’s Godson

Rob gives Christopher a full-size dirt bike for his second birthday in March 2008. Darlene unwraps the gift, and Tavarus laughs that it is too large for the little boy. Rob answers that Christopher will grow into it and emphasizes the hours required to put it together. The gift is excessive in scale but precise in meaning. Rob is not merely acknowledging a birthday; he is imagining the child as someone already moving toward a larger life, someone whose present limitations do not define his eventual capacity.

Rob’s relationship with Christopher is affectionate and supervisory. When Christopher is four, Rob picks him up from preschool each afternoon at one thirty and drives him back to 34 Smith Street while unemployed. Christopher rides illegally in the front seat, but Rob believes that position is safer because the car has no passenger-side airbag and only the front seats have diagonal chest straps. The detail reveals Rob’s mixture of improvisation and care: he is making a dangerous, imperfect arrangement within limited circumstances, while trying to calculate the least dangerous option available.

At home, Christopher is a sweet, quiet child who can entertain himself for hours. He enjoys being around the men who constantly enter and leave the house, but he understands when he is welcome to remain with them and when it is time to retreat upstairs. Rob says that his godson has a “good head,” yet worries that he is too soft. That concern is not simply about temperament. Rob has grown up in a world where toughness is treated as protection, and he fears that gentleness may leave Christopher exposed to people who are more forceful, less restrained, or more willing to use violence.

The Toy-Truck Lesson

Christopher’s vulnerability becomes visible through an ordinary preschool dispute. Another child takes control of a toy truck after overpowering him, and Christopher later asks Rob whether he should have hit the boy. He is ashamed not because he was bullied, but because he did not fight back. The question shows how early the neighborhood’s moral vocabulary can enter a child’s self-understanding: passivity feels like failure, while retaliation appears to promise dignity.

Rob tells him not to hit someone over a toy and asks what else he could have done. Christopher proposes telling the teacher. The exchange places Rob between two models of protection. He can reject violence, but he cannot simply pretend that institutional intervention resolves every conflict, because his own life has taught him how unreliable authority can be. The scene also exposes a contradiction in Rob’s caregiving. He wants Christopher to remain kind and safe, yet he worries that softness will not survive the world around him. His advice attempts to preserve the child’s innocence without leaving him defenseless.

When Rob asks Tavarus how it feels, as a father, to hear such stories, his face shows a curiosity that has recently been absent. Tavarus admits that a father wants to strangle the child who harms his son but cannot do so; instead, he remembers what childhood was like and feels grateful that Christopher does not face anything close to what they faced. Tavarus can imagine that Christopher might need to be harder, but he also recognizes that hardness does not truly get a person anywhere. Christopher thus prompts both men to reconsider the survival ethic that formed them. The boy’s softness is a risk, but it is also evidence that he has been spared some of the injuries they learned to call normal.

Survival and Loss

Christopher is present at 34 Smith Street during the home invasion that ends in Rob’s death. When the gunmen enter, he wakes groggy upstairs while Darlene remains with him. After the intruders flee, Tavarus confirms that both Darlene and Christopher are safe. Curtis, who has been trapped downstairs during the shooting, runs to summon neighbors and tells Tavarus to bring as many people as possible to the house. Rob is found facedown in the basement, already fatally wounded.

The men later reconstruct the event without ever knowing exactly whether the intruders intended to kill Rob. They believe that Rob may have confronted the smaller gunman after Curtis’s failed intervention, perhaps thinking that his recent martial-arts training gave him an advantage. They also understand that Rob’s shooting may have ended the attack quickly. If he had not been shot, the intruders might have killed Curtis, or killed both men, while Tavarus, Darlene, and Christopher remained vulnerable upstairs. The Burger Boyz tell themselves that Rob saved their lives. Christopher’s survival therefore becomes inseparable from Rob’s death: the child is not merely a witness to the aftermath but one of the people whose safety gives the killing its final, terrible meaning.

On the day of Rob’s funeral, Christopher rides the dirt bike Rob gave him around the driveway at 34 Smith Street. The bike is finally the perfect size. That small domestic image carries the weight of the relationship: a gift intended for a growing child has outlasted the man who chose it, and Christopher has reached the future Rob anticipated without Rob being present to see it. The house remains under the pressure of police activity and grief, but the child’s movement around the driveway marks time continuing through a place fixed by violence.

Memorial Presence

Christopher is included among the Burger Boyz in the account of Rob’s hometown friends, identified as the group’s youngest member. His membership is both literal and commemorative. He belongs to a generation after Tavarus, Curtis, Flowy, and Drew, yet he is bound to them through family, shared space, and Rob’s godfather role. In the backyard memorial, the men raise floating lanterns above the yard where they have gathered for almost two decades, while Christopher’s earlier presence in the house and his use of Rob’s gift remain part of the ritual’s emotional background.

The memorial’s language imagines Rob as enduring forever, but Christopher supplies the more concrete form of endurance. The child is the living future of the group, the person who will carry forward memories of a man whose life was divided among scholarship, family loyalty, teaching, drug dealing, and violence. His story does not resolve the dangers surrounding that inheritance. Instead, Christopher makes the book’s central contradiction visible: Rob repeatedly tries to protect younger people from the world that shaped him, yet his own attempts to provide protection draw him back into the risks of that world. Christopher survives, but the conditions that made his survival necessary remain part of the legacy he receives.