St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys

St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys is a Newark institution whose importance in Rob Peace’s life lies in the way it joins educational opportunity to discipline, communal identity, and protection from the dangers surrounding many of its students. Rob enters a school built on the conviction that academic achievement alone is insufficient: before young men can fully use their intelligence and potential, they must be given structure, belonging, and practical means of avoiding fights, theft, drugs, abuse, and dropping out.

Origins and Reinvention

St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys was founded in 1868 by Benedictine monks. Over the following ninety-nine years, it expanded from a church and small schoolhouse into buildings occupying a full city block. During Newark’s postwar boom, its students were primarily the white sons of affluent white men who led the city’s corporate and manufacturing sectors. Edwin Leahy graduated from the school in 1964, left for divinity school, and intended to return as an English teacher.

The institution’s first historical transformation followed the 1967 riots, whose most intense violence occurred in the second police precinct immediately outside the school’s redbrick walls. The monks fortified themselves inside while Newark’s center suffered devastation in property, trust, and civic confidence. The racial tension that followed was intensified by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and by the Vietnam draft, which summoned many young, uneducated Black men from Newark and its surrounding communities. Teachers departed for wealthier monasteries, suburban families no longer wanted to send their sons into the city center, and in 1972 the school closed without any promise of reopening.

Leahy returned at twenty-four, young, inexperienced, ambitious, and unafraid. He judged that the closure reflected the monks’ depleted energy as much as any change in Newark’s social reality. He recruited young liberal divinity-school graduates and led an attempted reopening in 1973 as a smaller, religion-focused educational venture. That version intensified anger in the African American community, particularly when a young Black mother challenged the school’s decision to retain the name St. Benedict’s Prep when it had been a white institution but abandon “Prep” when the surrounding community had become Black.

In 1974, Leahy reopened St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys with a new mission: to serve young men from Newark’s urban districts and the communities immediately around the city. The transition was uneven, but the school soon achieved what many Newark residents had regarded as a progressive fantasy: the African American community took ownership of an institution once associated with affluent white families. Tuition covered only about half of the cost of educating each student, forcing Leahy to spend much of his time raising money. A loyal and wealthy alumni network sustained the school even after its student body had become almost unrecognizable to that earlier generation.

Setting and Institutional Culture

By the time Rob and Victor arrived in 1994, Leahy was raising $5 million each year from corporate and individual donors. The compact school on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard possessed a pool, an auditorium, a sports complex with a turf field and synthetic track, a science wing equipped for individual chemistry and physics experiments, a computer room with Apple IIc computers, and a library containing six thousand books. Its resources made it far more than a symbolic refuge; it was a functioning educational infrastructure placed in the middle of Newark.

Yet its deepest challenge remained psychological rather than material. Teachers still had to address the often crippling emotional trauma produced by the unstable or inadequate home lives of many students. The school’s stated work was to free cognition and potential, but the faculty understood that academic instruction could not proceed as if every boy arrived with equal emotional support. Its structure therefore sought to prevent trouble before trouble became destiny.

For the incoming class of 1994, that structure began with Summer Phase. One hundred and forty fourteen-year-old boys entered through automated double-locked doors controlled by a guard, passed beneath the school’s declaration, “WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME,” and gathered in the gymnasium known as the Hive, after the Gray Bee mascot. They came from forty towns and sixty middle schools, across economic backgrounds but with a strong representation from lower and lower-middle-class families. The gym’s bowed, splintered basketball court and mice in the walls made the setting austere rather than luxurious, but the deprivation was part of an environment designed to produce shared experience.

The boys were divided into eighteen color groups, with eight students randomly assigned to each group. Rob became maroon. They spent full days in classes, followed by sports and evening activities, and slept in sleeping bags on the gym floor. They ate, studied, and even brushed their teeth by color group. They had to learn every classmate’s first and last name, memorize five school songs, leave belongings exposed because locks were forbidden, and pass a test naming every student as well as every headmaster in the school’s 126-year history. Only afterward did they receive gym shirts and shorts in their assigned colors.

These practices had several connected purposes. Memorizing names and songs cultivated discipline and loyalty; random colors disrupted the formation of neighborhood cliques; academic work previewed the demands of the school year; unsecured possessions required trust; and sleeping together created a sense of family. Beneath all of those exercises was a more consequential aim: keeping the students out of trouble. The monks and faculty had learned that fights, theft, negative attitudes, emotional abuse, drug use, dealing, and dropping out could derail young men whose home lives supplied little guidance. Their preventive method was to occupy the boys’ time almost completely while binding them to school pride through repetition, surveillance, and collective responsibility.

Rob Peace’s Formation There

Rob was not conspicuous during most of Summer Phase, partly because Victor had been assigned to another color group. He distinguished himself when the summer reading assignments were distributed. While other boys reacted with disbelief to the combined size of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Light in August, and James Michener’s 888-page Chesapeake, Rob quietly opened Chesapeake and read for the hour before lights-out. He had already read the other two books for pleasure. A separate rumor identified him as the boy who knew every word of every Bone Thugs-n-Harmony song, a feat that made him the “Bone Thugs kid” of the freshman class.

St. Benedict’s also placed Rob between worlds. His neighborhood friends mocked the all-boys prep school for offering fencing, water polo, and chess instead of football, and Rob privately recognized that their ridicule had some force. Through a special application to the Orange Township school board, however, he and Victor obtained waivers to play football for Orange High while attending St. Benedict’s during the day. Rob practiced twice daily in the August heat, helped clear broken glass from the field, and played running back and linebacker on the junior-varsity squad. Friends who knew him as someone who drank, smoked, and relaxed around East Orange were surprised by the collision-heavy intensity he brought to football.

The school’s academic and guidance systems later converted that discipline into visible opportunity. Counselors worked with students whose prospects varied sharply. Tavarus raised his grade-point average from 0.7 to 2.1, while Flowy understood that college would require scholarship money rather than the relatively small monthly Social Security resources that had helped make St. Benedict’s possible. Rob’s own grades, leadership honors, and combined SAT score of 1510 out of 1600 placed him in the ninety-ninth percentile nationally. His counselor urged him to consider top-tier colleges, and the school organized and paid for visits, including an Ivy League tour that Rob accepted partly because it allowed him to travel without cost.

Rob’s relationship with St. Benedict’s was not limited to receiving instruction. When a crisis created rumors that Leahy might retire, Rob, Curtis, Flowy, and Tavarus went to the headmaster’s office and promised that they would leave if he did. Rob spoke for the group, telling Leahy that they would not attend a school without him. Leahy had never intended to leave, but the sincerity of the boys’ appeal revealed Rob’s quiet leadership. Later that year, Leahy asked him to lead freshmen on the Appalachian Trail, a responsibility usually assigned to juniors.

The assignment tested leadership under conditions that classroom achievement could not. A sudden nighttime storm flooded the campsite, destroyed the group’s cheap tents, and isolated Rob’s twenty-four freshmen from the rest of the expedition. The boys were terrified by the lightning, wind, and runoff; the danger felt entirely different from the violence some had witnessed in Newark. Rob made them hold hands, abandoned everything except rain gear so they could move quickly, and led them down the exposed mountainside. At three in the morning, the group reached a rural house, where Rob respectfully asked to use the telephone and called a faculty coordinator in Newark. When the homeowner offered the boys shelter in a garage, Rob declined because, once the immediate danger had passed, he wanted the group to complete the experience on its own.

A School That Extends Beyond Graduation

St. Benedict’s remained present in Rob’s adult life as a network of people, expectations, and obligations. Charles Cawley’s unrestricted offer to cover Rob’s college expenses reached him through the school’s benefactor network. Rob initially believed the offer was too generous and considered refusing it, but Leahy told him that Cawley had chosen him when he had never made the same offer to another student in twenty-five years and that Rob had a responsibility to accept it and earn it. The school therefore functioned not only as an academic institution but also as an intermediary that converted trust, philanthropy, and achievement into access to higher education.

Rob later returned to St. Benedict’s as a teacher. The position offered continuity with the institution that had formed him, but it also exposed a tension between the school’s mission and his uncertain adulthood. In the summer of 2003, he had no job, no schoolwork, and suddenly no money; most graduate-school deadlines had passed while he was in Rio de Janeiro. Living again in Jackie Peace’s house, eating her food, and watching her leave for work each morning, he felt as though he had failed and been forced back to Chapman Street. Coaching and teaching at St. Benedict’s could serve as a bridge, but it was not yet a settled vocation.

That tension sharpened later when Rob worked at Continental Airlines. Jackie reminded him that a Yale graduate, scientist, and teacher had not gone to college merely to carry luggage, while Rob defended the airport job as a way to make ends meet and exchange mental strain for physical labor. The argument measured how far he had traveled from the school’s promise and how difficult it was to translate educational distinction into stable adult employment. After supervisors confronted him and he refused a post-accident drug test and the first appeal available under the airline union contract, Continental fired him. His path from St. Benedict’s to Yale, teaching, airport labor, and dismissal became difficult to explain on a résumé even though each step had made sense to him at the time.

The school’s ideal of disciplined mobility thus encountered the larger structures surrounding Rob. His high school record and Yale degree gave him educational capital, but they did not guarantee access to appropriate work, mortgage financing, or social recognition. In 2007, his Peace Realty plans were constrained when the housing bubble burst and subprime lending collapsed, leaving the company with only 122 Greenwood Avenue as a holding. Later, interviewers saw him as overeducated and underskilled, and advisers warned him that his detached manner could make employers angry. The gap between the person St. Benedict’s had helped him become and the positions available to him became one of the central pressures of his adult life.

Narrative Significance

St. Benedict's Preparatory School for Boys represents education as social mobility, but the book presents that mobility as a collective and fragile achievement rather than a simple escape from Newark. The school offers modern laboratories, athletic facilities, counselors, donors, and a powerful alumni network, yet its central technology is time: keeping vulnerable boys busy, connected, and accountable long enough for their abilities to emerge. Its motto makes individual injury communal, and its color groups, songs, exposed belongings, and shared nights turn discipline into belonging.

For Rob, the school is simultaneously sanctuary, proving ground, and source of obligation. It recognizes his intelligence when he reads an 888-page novel while classmates laugh, gives his leadership a public form during the Appalachian Trail crisis, and opens a route toward college through counselors and benefactors. It also establishes expectations that later make his adult detours more painful. His return to teaching, his arguments with Jackie about airport labor, and his difficulty presenting his résumé reveal not the disappearance of St. Benedict’s influence but its persistence as a standard against which his unsettled life is measured.

The institution’s history also mirrors Rob’s divided trajectory. It began as a school serving Newark’s affluent white elite, closed amid racial upheaval and urban collapse, and reopened by placing the city’s Black community at its center. Its survival depended on converting inherited alumni wealth into a new social mission. Rob likewise moves through systems that promise transformation—St. Benedict’s, Yale, scientific work, teaching, and real estate—while remaining tethered to the neighborhood, family responsibilities, and structural limits from which those institutions briefly seem to free him. St. Benedict’s is therefore not merely the place where Rob went to high school. It is the strongest institutional expression of the book’s belief that talent can be cultivated through community, and of its more unsettling recognition that even extraordinary cultivation cannot guarantee a safe or coherent future.