Summer Phase

Summer Phase is the demanding introductory program through which St. Benedict’s Preparatory School for Boys receives its incoming freshmen and begins remaking them as members of a common institution. For Rob Peace, it is more than a summer interruption between neighborhood life and formal high school: it is his first sustained encounter with a system that treats discipline, repetition, shared hardship, and school pride as defenses against the pressures surrounding urban boys. The program establishes the institutional habits that help carry him from East Orange into academic distinction, even as the story later shows that education cannot permanently dissolve the competing obligations and dangers of his home environment.

Structure and Setting

Summer Phase begins in July 1994, after Rob’s brief three-week summer of heat, football, stoop-hopping, drinking, and drug use in East Orange. One hundred and forty fourteen-year-old boys enter the school through the small vestibule on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, passing between automated double-locked doors controlled from a glassed-in security station. They file beneath the school’s declaration, “WHATEVER HURTS MY BROTHER HURTS ME,” and into the gymnasium, known as “the Hive” because the school mascot is the Gray Bee. Sleeping bags and duffel bags mark the boys’ places on the floor, turning the gym into both dormitory and training ground.

The incoming class comes from forty towns and sixty middle schools in and around Newark. Although the boys represent every economic background, the group leans toward lower and lower-middle-class families. Some arrive joking within established clusters; others are stiff, nervous, or isolated. Before Friar Edwin Leahy delivers his speech about trust and unity, the students already sense that the next four years will be decisive. They have passed a demanding admissions process and chosen St. Benedict’s knowing that the school will not offer easy reversals or second chances. The program therefore presents school as a deliberate commitment: the boys are not merely beginning classes but undertaking a collective project of becoming men.

The first formal act is the singing of the school song, an effort described as weak and discordant. The class is then divided into eighteen color groups of eight students each. Rob is assigned to maroon, a color he considers preferable to pink, which he had never become accustomed to. The color assignment is not a decorative detail. It becomes part of each student’s identity for the next four years and places the boys inside a structure designed to displace their existing neighborhood groupings with new, institutionally managed loyalties.

Discipline and Institutional Purpose

Summer Phase combines full academic days with sports, evening group activities, and overnight sleeping in the gym. The boys take classes, eat meals, and even brush their teeth in color groups. Between scheduled activities, they must learn the first and last name of every classmate before the week ends and memorize five school songs to be sung in the hallways throughout freshman year. Their belongings remain fully exposed in the gym because locks are forbidden. At the end of the week, they must write every classmate’s name and identify the names and dates of all the headmasters in the 126-year history of St. Benedict’s before receiving gym shirts and shorts in their assigned colors.

Each requirement converts an ordinary action into a test of membership. Memorizing names encourages attention to others; learning songs creates a shared verbal repertoire; color groups interrupt the formation of familiar cliques; unsecured property makes trust a practical obligation rather than an abstract virtue. The sleeping arrangements create a common experience that the students will carry into the school year. Even the exposed duffel bags and the prohibition on locks make the boys practice reliance on one another under conditions where privacy and individual control are deliberately reduced.

The deeper purpose of this structure is preventative. Friar Edwin Leahy and the Benedictine monks understand that many of the boys, especially those from urban neighborhoods and homes with limited family guidance, may encounter fights, theft, hostility, emotional abuse, drug dealing or drug use, and dropping out. Before the school can teach mathematics and history, coach soccer and baseball, or organize parent nights, it must obstruct the patterns that could defeat those activities. Its principal tool is to keep the boys extremely busy while surrounding them with school pride. Time becomes the institution’s most closely managed resource: by occupying it almost completely, St. Benedict’s attempts to reduce the opportunities for destructive behavior and to replace them with repeated forms of belonging.

Summer Phase thus operates as an organizational culture with its own hierarchy, rituals, bodily routines, language, and sanctions. The boys move through locked entrances, assigned groups, communal meals, academic tests, songs, and supervised nights. The program does not simply tell them to behave differently; it makes alternative behavior difficult by controlling where they are, what they must remember, whom they must know, and how they spend nearly every hour. Its educational method is therefore inseparable from social engineering, but the narrative presents that control as a hard-earned institutional response to the dangers the school has repeatedly witnessed.

Rob Peace’s Participation

Rob passes through Summer Phase largely unnoticed, including by Victor, who belongs to another color group. His most revealing moment comes during the distribution of summer reading. The class receives Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Faulkner’s A Light in August, and James Michener’s Chesapeake, a volume of 888 pages. While the other boys laugh incredulously at the weight of the combined assignments, Rob sits cross-legged on his blankets, opens Chesapeake, and reads quietly for the hour before lights-out. He has already read the other two books for pleasure.

The scene distinguishes Rob without making him perform distinction. He does not announce his preparation or seek praise; his exceptional reading appears as a private habit that happens to become visible. His academic ability is therefore established through action rather than reputation. At the same time, the reading scene places him inside the institution’s central bargain: the school supplies rigorous demands, and Rob responds with a capacity to absorb more than those around him expect.

The program also links achievement to physical endurance and practical responsibility. At the end of the first year, Rob leads a subgroup of eight students on the fifty-mile Appalachian Trail hike from High Point State Park to the Delaware Water Gap. During the walking phases he is quiet, but he becomes vocal when the group must establish camp and cook. Carrying a specified load over a specified distance gives him a sense of purpose and efficiency that many classmates lack. Summer Phase’s emphasis on schedules, group identity, and disciplined activity therefore continues beyond the opening week, joining intellectual performance to leadership and bodily competence.

Back in Newark, Rob spends that summer training four days a week at the public pool in Columbian Park with Julius “Flowy” Starkes and Tavarus Hester. They swim one hundred laps and throw a ball while shooting at a homemade net kept afloat by empty milk jugs. Afterward they return to Curtis Gamble’s house to eat, play video games, and complete schoolwork because St. Benedict’s maintains a Summer Phase to keep students engaged. The institutional program reaches into the neighborhood and reorganizes the boys’ free time without severing them from their friends. Rob’s education is consequently built from overlapping worlds rather than a clean departure from East Orange.

Continuity and Significance

Summer Phase becomes the first major institutional bridge in Rob’s trajectory. It places him among boys from many towns and economic circumstances, gives him a color-group identity, and teaches him to operate within an environment where time, trust, loyalty, and achievement are deliberately structured. Four years later, he receives St. Benedict’s highest honor, the Presidential Award, a culmination that makes the opening program look like the beginning of a successful educational ascent rather than a temporary summer exercise.

Yet the program’s success is never portrayed as simple escape. Rob remains attached to Curtis Gamble, Tavarus Hester, Drew Jemison, and Julius “Flowy” Starkes, and he carries those relationships into later settings. When he enters Yale, he places on his wall both a photograph of himself and Jackie Peace at graduation and a photograph of himself with those East Orange friends beside the smoky grill at 34 Smith Street. The second image, with the group making “East Side” hand gestures, looks to an outsider like a gang portrait. Summer Phase has added a powerful institutional identity, but it has not erased the neighborhood identity that existed before it.

The program’s importance lies in that unresolved coexistence. It gives Rob structure, academic confidence, social mobility, and a language of brotherhood. It also shows the limits of structure when the surrounding pressures remain active. The same life that includes St. Benedict’s discipline later includes Yale, scientific research, prison appeals for his father, unstable employment, and renewed involvement in the illegal drug economy. Summer Phase is therefore both an origin point for Rob’s achievement and an early demonstration of the book’s larger argument: education can create genuine capacities and openings, but those gains do not automatically cancel inherited loyalties, family burdens, or the environments to which a person remains answerable.