Unemployed

Unemployment is not merely a lack of work in the story of Rob Peace; it is a force that reshapes families, neighborhoods, identities, and choices. It begins as a citywide consequence of deindustrialization, becomes a recurring pressure in Jackie Peace’s household, and later confronts Rob with the unsettling fact that academic distinction does not guarantee economic security. His periods without work repeatedly alter his relationship to education, masculinity, family obligation, legal employment, and the illegal economy.

Structural Origins

Unemployment first appears as part of the economic collapse surrounding Newark and East Orange. Between 1970 and 1980, more than six hundred factories in and around Newark closed, including tanneries, glass and plastics plants, and manufacturers of industrial machine parts. The factories had once helped make the Port of Newark the busiest in the nation, but improved transportation, cheaper foreign goods, and the movement of companies toward less expensive land pulled industrial employment away from the city. The closures brought massive layoffs just as public housing was already full and joblessness was rising.

The consequences did not remain confined to factory gates. As working-class residents fled and employment disappeared, the dangerous side of urban life spread outward from Newark’s project towers into vacant spaces across the northern and western wards, then into East Orange and beyond. The Peace home stood just across the boundary between Orange and East Orange, but Jackie Peace’s daily life was rooted largely in East Orange, where she worked, shopped, socialized, and knew the business conducted by Skeet Douglas. The neighborhood’s transformation from a working community into one marked by liquor stores, check-cashing centers, abandoned houses, and nearby gunfire made unemployment part of a broader erosion of economic and civic stability.

Jackie Peace and Household Precarity

In the fall of 1993, Jackie lost her job at University Hospital through mandatory cuts. The timing made the loss especially severe. She had been spending what money she had on Rob: a used bicycle, new clothes for his growth spurt, and fresher food in place of canned goods. Because those efforts had consumed her savings, her severance lasted only two weeks, while unemployment insurance covered necessities but could not sustain the household’s previous arrangements.

The immediate consequence was educational as well as financial. Jackie had to remove Rob from Mt. Carmel Elementary School and send him back to Oakdale, where eighth grade involved more physical danger, emotional strain, overcrowded classrooms, and the constant need to avoid being jumped or robbed. The contrast with Mt. Carmel showed that unemployment could alter not only what a family could buy but also the institutional environment in which a child developed. Rob responded by placing all of his work earnings on the counter for Jackie, a gesture that reversed the expected direction of support and revealed how early he had begun to understand himself as partly responsible for sustaining his mother.

Jackie found another job a few weeks later with a health-care company operating nursing homes and rehabilitation centers. She was placed in food service at the Summit Ridge Center in West Orange, a demotion from hospital management back to kitchen work. The new job took her by bus west toward suburbs, fields, woods, and ranch houses along Route 501, landscapes associated with former neighbors who had left while the Peace family remained. The work was harsher than her hospital position, and its corporate cost-consciousness required her to prepare food she would not have served her own family. Even so, the job allowed Rob to return to Mt. Carmel, demonstrating how employment, however diminished, could restore a measure of educational stability.

Rob Peace Between Achievement and Worklessness

Rob’s later unemployment carried a different contradiction. By high school, he had accumulated exceptional academic and leadership credentials. His combined SAT score was 1510 out of 1600, placing him in the ninety-ninth percentile nationally, and counselors encouraged him to consider top-tier colleges rather than limiting himself to Seton Hall University near his home. At Yale, however, he did not take the MCAT or articulate a conventional professional plan. He spoke instead about Rio de Janeiro and relied on the assumption shared by friends that he would eventually figure things out.

That apparent ease concealed money earned through marijuana sales at Yale. Rob had netted just over $100,000, given portions to Jackie Peace in installments that could be explained as dining-hall wages, spent roughly $10,000 on school supplies and travel, and reserved another $30,000 for his mother. The remaining “fifty large” was intended to finance his trip to Rio and support him afterward. Unemployment therefore did not initially mean complete destitution. It meant that legitimate employment had not yet replaced an illegal income stream, while the money earned outside the formal labor market temporarily allowed Rob to postpone decisions about graduate school and a career.

After returning from Rio in 2003, Rob had no job, no schoolwork, and suddenly no money. Most graduate-school deadlines had passed while he was abroad, and he was living in Jackie’s house again, eating her food and watching her leave for work each morning. His uncertainty was sharpened by his long-standing commitment to provide for his mother. Returning to Chapman Street made him feel like relatives who had tried to leave, failed, and been forced to come home. The promise of Yale had not translated smoothly into a next step, and unemployment made the distance between educational success and adult independence impossible to ignore.

Work, Illegal Markets, and Blocked Mobility

Rob briefly returned to marijuana dealing after Yale, but the work soon exposed the danger and instability that had been less visible on campus. In August 2003, a bulk supplier pulled a revolver on him during a failed negotiation after Rob threatened to walk away. Rob paid several hundred additional dollars, then began teaching at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School and left the drug business. The gun incident and the loss of his savings framed that summer: the illegal economy offered cash, but its anxiety and physical risk outweighed the return.

His later employment choices were also shaped by the tension between credentials and available work. At one point Rob joined Continental Airlines in an airport baggage position. Jackie Peace repeatedly pointed out that a Yale graduate, scientist, and teacher had taken one of the airport’s lowest-level jobs, a position that did not require even a high-school diploma. Rob answered that a teacher’s salary had not allowed him to make ends meet, while the airport job offered wages, benefits, and relief from mental strain. He understood the work as exchanging intellectual wear for physical wear and as a return to a simpler provider ethic: earning enough to support oneself without allowing other people’s expectations to define the value of a job.

The real-estate plan Rob hoped would provide a more independent future was undermined by the housing crisis. When the housing bubble burst in the fall of 2007, falling prices appeared at first to create an opportunity to buy distressed properties. Instead, the collapse of the subprime lending market removed the financing on which his strategy depended. Peace Realty remained limited to one property at 122 Greenwood Avenue, while Rob used his airline benefits increasingly for travel rather than business. The episode showed that even when prices became accessible, credit could remain closed to the person trying to enter the market.

Firing and the Aftermath

Rob’s most consequential period of unemployment began after an airport accident. Accidents triggered a standard protocol whose first step was a urine sample. Rob refused to provide one and also declined the first of three appeals available under the airline union’s contract. After supervisors reprimanded him on the tarmac and in administrative offices, Continental fired him. The dismissal ended the job that had offered him wages and benefits, but it also revived the instability Jackie had feared when he left teaching.

After the firing, Rob lived on rental income and unemployment checks of $412 a week. He was ashamed of the checks and of the dependency they represented, yet he deposited them, bought food for the house, attended to his grandmother, and maintained an uneasy truce with Jackie. His business planning with Tavarus paused, and he again needed work. Jackie privately hoped the firing might eventually help him, but she saw his darkened, increasingly unguarded expression and could offer no concrete solution.

Rob’s unemployment also distorted time and social behavior. He moved among friends and family during Thanksgiving, visiting Shannon Heggins, Lisa Wingo, Nathan, Victor’s aunt, Oswaldo Gutierrez’s family, Jackie’s home, Smith Street, and Rene’s after midnight, eating full meals and laughing as though nothing had changed. In bars such as Passion, Slick’s, and A.S.H., he drank heavily, stayed awake until three or four in the morning, and used alcohol and marijuana to occupy a period that outwardly resembled freedom but increasingly looked like paralysis. He applied for positions at pharmacies, real-estate firms, and a Merck plant in Rahway, yet received no offers.

The résumé presented to employers made the contradiction visible: laboratory research had led to high-school teaching, teaching to airport manual labor, and airport work to a controversial firing. Each step had made sense to Rob when he lived it, but condensed into bullet points, the sequence appeared discordant. He was overeducated and underskilled, and he struggled to show interest in interviews for jobs that did not engage the identity he wanted to project. At the Gaslight Brewery in South Orange, Nathan finally asked what he was doing. Rob answered that he had gone to Yale and knew what he was doing, but Nathan reminded him that Yale had been ten years earlier. The exchange crystallized unemployment’s deepest injury: it turned a celebrated past achievement into an inadequate answer to the demands of the present.

Narrative Significance

The book treats unemployment as a recurring break in the expected promise of social mobility. For Jackie, worklessness follows industrial decline and forces sacrifices that immediately affect Rob’s schooling. For Rob, it arrives after Yale, scientific training, teaching, drug dealing, travel, real-estate planning, and airport labor, revealing that his problem is not simply a lack of ability. His credentials exceed the opportunities he can accept, while the jobs available to him fail to reconcile income, dignity, family responsibility, and his distrust of institutional expectations.

This gap helps explain why legitimate work never becomes a stable identity for Rob. Education opens St. Benedict’s Preparatory School and Yale University, but neither institution supplies a durable bridge into adulthood. Illegal drug income temporarily solves financial problems; teaching offers social purpose but inadequate pay; airport labor offers money and benefits but appears to deny the meaning of his education; real estate promises autonomy but is blocked by the collapse of credit. Unemployment is therefore both a material condition and an identity crisis, a recurring point at which Rob’s achievements, obligations, and available choices fail to align.