Elihu

Elihu is one of Yale’s senior secret societies, a highly selective organization whose initiation and private rituals place Rob Peace inside the most rarefied social world available to an undergraduate. Yet Elihu’s importance lies less in its prestige than in the contradiction it embodies: the society promises intimacy across class and racial difference, while Rob remains skeptical of Yale’s manufactured friendships and ultimately uses its protected setting to tell the story of his imprisoned father, Skeet Douglas, and the system Rob believes destroyed him.

Nature and Place at Yale

Elihu belongs to the network of Yale societies in which twelve seniors are selected by the class before them. Alongside Skull and Bones, Wolf’s Head, Scroll and Key, Mace and Chain, Book and Snake, and Berzelius, it occupies a campus culture in which membership functions as an exclusive honor and a public sign that a student has made an impression during the preceding three years. The oldest societies meet in heavily gated, windowless, sepulcher-like buildings scattered across campus; Elihu is named after Elihu Yale, the university’s founder, and is identified as Yale’s third-oldest secret society.

The society’s stated purpose is to create a setting where students who might otherwise remain acquaintances or strangers can open themselves to one another. Its meetings are designed to produce a more intimate version of the Yale experience, bringing people from different backgrounds together inside the cordoned-off world of the university. In practice, however, the organization also reproduces Yale’s exclusivity. Its members gain access to a private Federal-style house on the New Haven Green, complete with housekeeping and a year-round supply of expensive food and alcohol, while the organization’s rituals turn belonging into a scarce privilege distributed by an established hierarchy.

Rob’s Selection and Initiation

At the end of Rob’s junior year, cryptic messages began arriving from false Hotmail accounts, warning that he was being watched and that something was about to happen. Rob was not frightened by them. He understood the messages as evidence that he had been “tapped” for a secret society, and the prospect amused him more than it alarmed him. His selection was notable because he had repeatedly criticized Yale’s habit of manufacturing friendships and had insisted that he already possessed real friends rather than needing institutional substitutes.

Rob nevertheless proceeded with Elihu’s initiation. The choice may have reflected curiosity, an interest in the future contacts associated with membership, or an unacknowledged degree of identification with Yale. The initiation lasted three weeks in the spring. Seniors in masks and dark robes crossed campus in an almost theatrical display of deathlike imagery, while minor hazing rituals took place in chapels. Rob memorized verses about Elihu’s history on papyrus scrolls, performing the task with exaggerated detachment rather than the anxious humility displayed by some of his peers.

Tap Night extended the society’s initiation into a campus-wide night of drunken assignments and symbolic transgression. Students were directed to steal chairs from classroom buildings, climb monuments while singing in their underwear, and complete other disruptive tasks. Rob was ordered to lie in front of the library and challenge passing campus police officers to arm-wrestling matches. He refused. His refusal was rooted in his Newark experience: police had long watched him in his neighborhood, and he believed that police officers had helped frame his father and secure Skeet’s life imprisonment. Elihu could demand theatrical obedience, but it could not make Rob treat the police as harmless participants in a college ritual.

The final stage described in the initiation took place at the society’s house on the New Haven Green. There, Rob and the other eleven new members drank and received their pins after their hoods and masks were removed. During senior year they were expected to gather at the house every Thursday and Sunday night, spending several hours attempting to become fully open to people who would otherwise remain strangers. Membership also carried an immediate financial obligation: each new member owed the treasurer, Laurel Bachner, one hundred dollars. Rob’s check initially bounced, creating an awkward encounter across a sharp class boundary between Bachner, a wealthy white student from Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a Dalton School graduate, and Rob, who could not keep the same amount readily available in his bank account. Before she covered the debt herself, Rob supplied the money in cash and explained that the bank had changed his account number.

The Society and Its Contradictions

Elihu offered Rob access to a form of elite social capital that conflicted with the identity he had cultivated outside Yale. He was willing to drink the house’s free alcohol and smoke marijuana there, but he was reluctant to participate in the serious personal conversations that the society was supposed to encourage. The private house, its stocked provisions, its alumni support, and its network of members represented the material and professional benefits of membership. At the same time, Rob treated the organization’s promised intimacy as another institutional construction imposed on students who already had meaningful relationships elsewhere.

The contradiction became especially visible at the society’s retreat, held at the New York Governor’s Mansion in Albany because a senior Elihu member was the governor’s daughter. Oswaldo Gutierrez, recently discharged from a psychiatric ward and trying to catch up with his classes, warned Rob not to bring large amounts of marijuana, drink excessively, or otherwise become intoxicated. Oswaldo believed that Rob was representing people like them and that reckless behavior would reinforce stereotypes about Black students and outsiders at Yale. Rob ignored the warning. After sitting in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair on display in the mansion’s museum area, he became intoxicated and ended the Saturday night passed out on a pool table with an empty bottle of the governor’s whiskey in his hand.

The episode completes the irony of his initiation. Elihu was perhaps the most exclusive part of Yale, but its rituals did not erase the behaviors, loyalties, and conflicts Rob brought with him from Newark. The society could confer a pin, a private house, and access to wealthy alumni networks; it could not produce a stable reconciliation between Rob’s Yale identity and the social world that continued to define his sense of loyalty and danger.

Rob’s Elihu Biography

The most consequential use of Elihu came when Rob delivered his society biography. Members expected a relatively brief account focused mainly on his mother, Jackie Peace, perhaps accompanied by remarks about racism at Yale or another controversial subject. Instead, he spoke for four hours about the part of his life they had not previously heard: his father.

Seated at the head of a long oak table without notes or photographs, Rob described Jackie’s strategy of raising him, the nights spent doing homework, and the days he spent wandering through the neighborhood. He connected his family history to the Pierson Street fire, the Chestnut Street apartment, and the wide circle of men maintained by Skeet. He recounted the murder trial, prison visits, the successful appeal and its reversal, and the letters he continued sending each month to appellate judges. Elihu’s intended exercise in mutual disclosure became, instead, a sustained account of imprisonment, family loyalty, and racialized injustice.

Rob also reconstructed the events of August 8, 1987, presenting the murders of Charlene Moore and Estella Moore from the perspective of an apparently omniscient observer. He focused on the Taurus Spesco .38-caliber revolver that Skeet owned because, in Rob’s understanding, a person involved in street life had to carry a weapon. Rob’s theory was that the real murderer had entered Skeet’s apartment in 2E, stolen the revolver, used it to kill the Moore sisters in apartment 2D, and returned it to 2E. He further argued that police illegally removed the gun and planted it on Skeet so the case could be closed quickly rather than properly investigated.

By telling this story inside Elihu, Rob shifted the society’s discussion away from abstract class conflict and toward the central conflict of his own life. The private room designed to make Yale students vulnerable to one another became the setting in which Rob declared that the white establishment would keep ordinary Black people down in order to protect itself. Elihu therefore serves as both audience and emblem: it is an elite institution that grants Rob a platform, but the story he brings before it exposes the racial and class structure that makes his membership feel conditional rather than liberating.

Narrative Significance

Elihu marks a temporary passage into elite belonging without resolving Rob’s divided identities. Its rituals echo the discipline of St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, where students learned names, songs, schedules, and group loyalty through repetition, enforced busyness, and control of time. At Elihu, Rob again memorizes institutional history and submits to a prescribed community, but the setting is transformed from a school gymnasium into a private house supported by wealthy alumni and furnished with luxury. The parallel reveals how organizations manufacture solidarity across very different social levels.

The society also clarifies Rob’s pattern of selective participation. He accepts the advantages of institutions while resisting their claims over his identity. He memorizes Elihu’s verses but refuses the police challenge; he attends the retreat but disregards Oswaldo’s warning; he enjoys the private house while withholding the emotional openness expected of him; and when he finally speaks fully, he does not offer the biography his peers anticipate. He gives them Skeet’s case, Jackie’s labor, the prison visits, and his conviction that the legal system was designed against people like his father.

Elihu’s significance is consequently double. It is a gateway to privilege, a site of friendship-making, and a source of social connection, but it is also a chamber in which Rob’s unassimilated past becomes impossible for the audience to ignore. The society can include him ceremonially, yet the four-hour biography demonstrates that inclusion does not dissolve the Newark–Yale divide. Instead, Elihu becomes the place where Rob makes that divide visible to the people who had previously known him only as a Yale student.