"The Other Side of Prospect"

This is Nicholas Dawidoff's meticulous and comprehensive account of a murder and the ensuing injustice that fell onto a teenager. It's also an unsparing portrait of his beleagured community. It's pretty hard to get through but as a resident of the city where the events took place, reading it seems necessary, and the book deserves to be more widely read too. 

• in the new millennium New Haven became the United States city with the fastest growing ratio for inequality. Yet what set New Haven apart made it also representative: in a country riven by concentrated peaks and depths of wealth and poverty, Jed Kolko’s study found that New Haven residents’ age, education level, race, and ethnicity gave it the demographic distinction of being America’s most “normal” city.
• Those on each slope of the hill spoke of the community up and over as the other side. The word “other” communicated the distance and unfamiliarity of close neighbors, and plenty of people on the Newhallville side felt also that there was disregard, an assumption that their circumstances existed because they were different rather than differently treated.
• The grid of streets was reorganized by city planners during the 1990s to form a confusing sequence of one-way signs, some of them, including on Read Street, requiring abrupt block-to-block directional switches, done to frustrate car thieves and out-of-town drug purchasers.
• As recently as the 1960s, Newhall Street and Shelton Avenue pulsed with customers walking into the neighborhood’s hardware stores, record shops, bakeries, and workingmen’s taverns, but by the 2000s its 6,500 residents were well accustomed to having no grocery store, no bank, no laundry, no gas station, nowhere to get a money order.
• In Connecticut, Blacks were twenty-two times more likely than whites to be shot to death. <> The killings of Black men, most of them undereducated and from poor city neighborhoods, carried an intimacy. Since the early 1990s, Carmon guessed that he had personally known one hundred people murdered in New Haven.

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• In 1968, at historically Black South Carolina State University, three unarmed student demonstrators were killed and twenty-eight wounded, half shot in the back or the soles of their feet. The “Orangeburg Massacre” more than doubled the casualties at Kent State.
• Because how much was too much remained undefined, impulses toward self- and material improvement meant a perpetual discretion. Successful Black cotton farmers still kept their heads low as they drove their mule-pulled wooden wagons into town, asked white farmers for “furnish” loans they no longer needed,... “Lynchings have occurred,” wrote Ralph Ellison, “because Negroes painted their homes.”
• One common style of property fraud in the Deep South during the time was the “selling” of land to Black farmers at exorbitant rates during times of flourishing “boom” profits, so that when the economy reversed toward “bust,” the land was abruptly seized. Another scam was pretending to sell land, but then either providing “spurious titles”
• THE LOST LAND was the defining shadow across Pete Fields’s childhood.
• Yet no good time went unpunished. In the 1930s, General Motors had a policy of not selling Cadillacs to Blacks.
• (Migration food:) Susie packed fried chicken, pound cake, biscuits, and sweet-potato pie. Every Newhallville family could recall exactly what they ate, taste becoming a souvenir, carrying the lasting significance of the new-life moment.
• Even now, three generations later, on the narrow Newhallville streets are cars with Carolina license plates, and riding along I-95 through the Carolinas are more cars with Connecticut plates. African American funerals in South Carolina are often delayed, to give the people in Connecticut time to drive down.
• At the time of the American Revolution, Connecticut had 6,400 enslaved people, the most in New England. By 1800, when there were 951 enslaved people in the state, New Haven’s 220 Blacks included 60 enslaved people. The last enslaved person sold on the city’s Green, in 1825, was then immediately set free by one of New Haven’s many abolitionists.
• More Black people came to Connecticut than any other New England state. The Fieldses settled in Dixwell, by then considered New Haven’s traditional Black neighborhood, which was 62 percent “non-white” and home to historical congregations and prominent professionals.
• Others found succor from their upheaval in religion, in superstition, in liquor. The expectation of Glory Land and then the discovery of abundant bigotry in Northern life capsized some people.
• Another group, the Five Satins, began work on their songs as local high school boys, singing on the sidewalks, not for money but to impress young women. When Fred Parris, the group’s leader, began to perform something new he’d written, “In the Still of the Night,” he found, “that song, the girls, they’d be there, we could depend on that!”
• From the first, New Haven was a template of American urban test runs and rough drafts, remarkably varied given its compact population, a city-scaled laboratory sufficiently receptive to the new that it achieved influential urban innovations such as early sewers and electrical lighting, the first commercial telephone exchange (and the very first telephone book),
• To fulfill a 1798 government order for 10,000 muskets, Whitney conceived a series of jigs and machine tools that workers could use for turning out parts with near-standardized assembly. The task required laborers from as far off as Massachusetts to work at Whitney’s riverside armory on the unsettled edge of New Haven. With nowhere convenient for his employees to live, Whitney constructed a row of white stone houses at the far northeast corner of what is now Prospect Hill.
• Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, New Haven became a city of more than one hundred thousand people and seven hundred factories, internationally renowned for building bicycles, fishhooks, eyeglasses, clocks, street-paving materials, and more birdcages and corsets than anywhere else.
• Winchester’s solution was to patent a tapered collar. By making the improved shirt, and in bulk by using sewing machines instead of seamstresses, Winchester accumulated significant capital, which he invested in a new business. Like Whitney, Winchester knew little about guns beyond sensing potential demand. With partners, Winchester bought concepts for repeating long-barrel firearms from a pair of designers, Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, who were turning their attention to handguns... On the edge of Newhallville, Winchester became the world’s biggest producer of guns and bullets, with thousands of employees and a terrible reputation among labor advocates.
• Twelve was the age the company’s sales division once identified as the threshold for children becoming “prospects.”... Later, there would be mordant irony in the outrage at the popularity of guns among Black teenage boys in segregated neighborhoods like Newhallville, as though the desire to hold a ratchet had come from some perverse quality unique to them.
• They returned North with ingredients and bottles of moonshine. Some families wanted their children born in the South, as if to establish a form of dual citizenship. It was not uncommon for these New Haven families to retain their membership in Southern churches.
• (70's Mayor) Lee had misread what made people like living in cities. Perplexing about him, a man from Newhallville, was how his best civic intentions went astray because he undervalued what presumably he knew best, the intimate experience of city life. Oak Street had the vitality of intermingled cultures;
• Yet when Susan and Peter later thought about why there had been almost relentless social activity, they recalled parents who seemed vulnerable. “Black people did a lot of things to cover up the feeling of the pain and stress and depression of feeling not good enough,” said Susan.
• Bill Fisher, a local Black realtor who worked mostly with Black clients, between 1972 and 1995 never sold a home in such New Haven suburbs as Orange, Woodbridge, and Milford. This created housing scarcity in neighborhoods like Newhallville, raising rents
• 1988, when his boyfriend brought him back to West Haven. Jeffrey was quiet, thin, weakened, and sad. He went up to his room and didn’t want to come out. The family knew what they were seeing. AIDS had become a second modern epidemic in New Haven,
• In 2006, it was off-the-chain bad.”... The detectives would begin digging out spent projectiles, and the homeowner might come out and tell them they were gathering evidence from the wrong shooting: “This one over here’s from last night.”
• She took her brother’s unspoken point, that people were more than the debts they carried.

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• Other days, he was exasperated by how Grace was placing herself under duress having more children. “When I think about the situation,” he said, “I think my mom’s lonely. Or she’s got something absent. She failed with us and wants to try over.” <> Grace and Bobby were only fifteen years apart,
• What he stumbled over were short words, the most basic vocabulary. It was as though he’d missed an early stage. She saw him as “a child,” who only during school felt the license to be a kid. <> Poverty suffused Bobby’s classrooms.
• The chugging coolers faded in and out of function, as did the security cameras. Collectively, what corner stores stocked wasn’t so far afield from the options at prison commissaries, though they also might have such telling items as animal traps, glassine envelopes, marijuana grinders, and the votive candles placed at sidewalk shrines honoring those who’d died there.
• “On the road” was searching for meaning in the America out there. “In the streets” implied finding the intensity of pure experience within the interior limits, unfiltered action, an immediacy that left no time for reflection.
• Hustlers were young people trying to make it happen on their own, were by nature bootstrappers, providers. Such was their resistance to relying on anybody, even a taxi driver, that kids in the game would trade drugs for the use of a customer’s car. The cars were referred to as “crack-head rentals.”
• Gun possession also brought self-possession. Getting guns, talking guns, stashing guns, there, too, was structure. Nas writing the inner life of gun-as-man in his song “I Gave You Power”
• “People don’t have much aim.” Stray bullets could not lose their own way, but the pinball type interaction of guns and kids and boredom and slights and revenge meant the wayward bullets were also not quite wayward. Neglected kids didn’t know how to shoot and shot anyway, and other people paid for their aimlessness.
• New Haven’s policy, in 2006, of using only audio­tapes and not recording pre-interviews meant that recorded statements existed in the context of no context. As an experienced New Haven criminal defense lawyer explained, “Pre-interviews were to sanitize the [eventual] statement, and no notes were made.
• The handsome Willoughby now cut a large figure in a small city, a hardboiled solver of murders who built his flamboyant image with the beautiful lines of what he wore and what he drove.
• The Reid technique could be very effective if used by an honorable interrogator, but it overstated a city detective’s ability to decipher human guilt by scrutinizing behavior. Studies of law enforcement have found that only the Secret Service is significantly better than college students in reading guilt into personal expressions or mannerisms.
• Bobby was tired and terrified, a sparrow squeezed between the cat’s paws of police and the neighborhood people he feared too much even to mention by name. Bobby wanted what was happening to stop, wanted more than anything to go home. A culture of accumulated moments had built fantasy-inducing temperature in the room, the desire to control violence, the law asking a boy to save himself while making that impossible, him small beneath all those big piled-up moments. In response, a tempting illusion overtook Bobby. If he was cooperative, the terrifying experience would end and the better one promised by the police could begin. Cognitive dissonance prevailed, things later almost impossible to explain. “So,” Bobby said, “I gave them what they wanted. It felt crazy to say I killed a man I never saw in my life, never interacted with, a man I never crossed paths with.”
• Bobby didn’t know the details of the crime. So, he said, “I freestyled it.” But not quite. The process turned out to be collaborative, like scriptwriters in a writers’ room, two suited detectives and a kid in a T-shirt and shorts working up dialogue for what the detectives now told Bobby was a sidewalk altercation that had turned violent.
• Bobby would have had a much better chance of saving himself if he were cynical about the system. Kids deep in the game never talked. But Bobby believed. <> Once the detectives became convinced they had their man, they seemed to succumb to confirmation bias, interpreting anything about Bobby only in ways that supported his guilt.
• Richard Wright describes an emotional turning point when a falsely accused person has “the feeling that, though he had done nothing wrong, he was condemned, lost, inescapably guilty of some nameless deed.” It was a disconnected sense of shame, like that felt by some sexual-assault and abuse victims who blamed themselves,
• They’d spent so much time working up falsehoods about the murder, a clinical distance had been achieved from the chilling fact of its cruelty, and this latest retelling sounded rote.
• wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in 1932. “Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.” While Black Americans are just 13 percent of the country’s population, beginning in 1989, the National Registry of Exonerations found Blacks represented half of all exonerees. Innocent Black people are seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people.
• To experienced civil rights lawyers, one indication of a false confession is an evolving case narrative. If accumulating witness statements and confession transcripts keep realigning in parallel with the police’s uncovering of new evidence, it suggests police are feeding information...  Operating here were so many forces that could lead to a false confession, a mixture of shaky professional know-how, cocksure assumptions, vagueness instead of the nuance of pattern and the specificity of detail, all of it used to justify the decision not to pursue a likely suspect.
• James Baldwin once warned of when he wrote, “A black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was black, he was not black like you.”
• In adult court, if a defendant under eighteen wants to plead guilty, the court can appoint a guardian ad litem—a temporary legal guardian of the child’s best interests, who may testify that the child is making an informed decision. Now Hopkins asked to be appointed Bobby’s guardian ad litem so Bobby could accept Hopkins’s advice rather than his mother’s. “My mom said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” Bobby recalled. “He did it anyway.
• once more Bobby accepted guilt that wasn’t his. You had to be very broken to keep throwing your life away.
• Diane Polan.. came to New Haven in 1969 as a freshman in the first Yale class to admit women. Soon Polan was volunteering for the defense during the Black Panther murder trials, working on anti-poverty initiatives and Connecticut’s first rape crisis hotline, before attending Yale law school. She prepared for the bar with her good friend Thomas Ullmann, and then joined New Haven’s first feminist law firm.
• More likely, Spikes had never intended to meet Fields. Hoda’s theory had Spikes as “the bird dog” for the stickup kids he’d pointed Fields’s way. According to Hoda’s thinking, the dumpster was where they’d planned to divide the money. No charges were ever brought against Ella or her grandson in this case.
• He’d got involved by trying to help and obey the police and had lost his freedom. Now because he wouldn’t lie again for Clark, the prosecutor seemed to want to mutilate whatever self-respect Bobby had left. “I suddenly realized I had a platform,” Bobby would explain.
• There was a vibration of irony in the extractor of confessions not required to say anything himself, and armed with such talented support... Pattis made a specialty of defending the vilified, and Willoughby by 2008 was that. If Willoughby had taken the stand, Polan would have introduced his police internal affairs file, a cauldron bubbling and boiling with allegations of Willoughby’s fraudulent use of confidential informants and skimming the funds supposedly used to pay them.

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• As they spoke, Goody noticed other qualities in Major, how he vividly expressed his inner life by shifting between the use of street language and common English, like a song with a contrasting bridge. What Major conveyed was how intolerable he was finding his feelings.
• Major came up and said, “I was trying to sell a gun to this guy, and he tried to steal it from me. I grabbed it, and it went off in my hand.” Garraty was thinking “Jesus Christ!” As a police officer, Garraty had been “a priest cop,” someone people felt safe confiding in.
• By that summer, Major had foundered into personal entropy. There was some kind of overload, a violent inner velocity; Major’s life became a collapsing mine shaft, protections and supports falling away, dirt pouring down until nothing to see, no way to breathe, then a final snap and all became darkness.
• Some shooters favored contrasting light and dark layers of clothes so that, after firing their gun, they could strip the outer layer and throw off police pursuit by looking different. An abundance of clothing with elastic waistbands also helped to both secure and disguise a handgun. Then there were people who felt psychologically armored by wearing many layers.
• referred to the national legacy of Black mistreatment by Southern lawmen like Bill Wolfe in Wolfton as “legal estrangement.” She said, “There are good reasons for why people don’t talk to police. Will the police care about you enough to protect you?” That the estrangement had enabled murderers, and created more Black crime victims, was the painful paradox making members of families, like Pete Fields’s, Bobby’s, and Major’s who’d left the South to get away from such oppression, feel doubly let down by the country and its systems.
• You weren’t allowed to hang your clothes up to dry from a line, because this might impede a CO’s view of the room through the “Judas window” from outside the door,
• He tolerated whistlers, hummers, snorers, pranksters, masturbators, inaccurate toilet-bowl aimers, people who wouldn’t bathe.
• Prisons are incubators for new dances, people choreographing innovative ways to move in a narrow space. With time no object, they could spend hour after hour perfecting combinations and sequences before putting it all out there during rec, taking on challenges in impromptu dance slams,
• Some men kept extra-fit, exercising both because your routine was a way to have autonomy in a rule-bound life and also to be ready for the distant year when you’d reenter the world. “A lot of guys try to stay younger for later,” Bobby said. Mortality pressed on people.
• he was wrongfully convicted and sent to prison at age fifteen as one of the Central Park Five. Salaam said of his own mother that she “was in a worse prison than I was. Because she couldn’t protect me, that was itself a trauma.
• In the cold months, Granddad didn’t come either, and when spring arrived, he and Bobby followed an agreement not to criticize other family members. It was nearly backbreaking for Bobby to be forsaken in this way... The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” ran like a chyron under images he could only invent.
• It was wretched to think in isolation about people who, as far as Bobby knew, weren’t thinking about him. But he found it was worse to isolate himself from what had been good in his life. Within his cell, gradually, over two years, Bobby allowed himself to savor small memories, such as how, by calling one pretty cousin Halle Berry, he’d earned the wrath of the others who all wished to be similarly nicknamed.
• Hank blamed the neighborhood for Bobby, the way “the twenty-four-hour store, Division Street, all these sections competing with each other” were signs of an abandoned community where people who weren’t cared about grew careless.
• As Bobby worked it through in his cell, to have made the choice of standing with the popular neighborhood figures in front of the 2-4 implicated him: “I put my own self there. I chose to be out there.” That Bobby hadn’t killed or held up anybody made no difference. “You become literally what the environment is,” he decided... The reason why I say I’m more responsible than anybody is because I know better.” That one sixteen-year-old could never have changed the will of a crowd was irrelevant. The fault lay in the knowing better.
• That Bobby should reconcile himself to prison through personal responsibility could seem absurd. But it was not uncommon for rape victims, for example, to blame themselves as a reassertion of self over the power that had been taken away from them.
• In his early years, Bobby encountered so many of his friends’ fathers, it hit him one day that prison was where the missing Newhallville fathers were. In the middle of conversations he would realize, “Okay, that’s your son? I went to school with your son!” Then he’d think, “That’s how you meet people these days.”... One son reunited with a father who’d been in prison for twenty years. Bobby watched them embracing, hugging, and crying, and considered it such a “tragic” way to follow your father’s example
• he agreed with Bobby that the relationship between Newhallville and the prison was so fluid that, in effect, the neighborhood prepared its young people for prison. And even in prison, Papachristos said, “these guys are still out in the neighborhood, still in network.
• People who attended school in Big Cheshire were given $7 every two weeks toward their commissary spending. That incentive was bestowed because American prisons are filled with undereducated people. At intake in Connecticut adult prisons, the average level of education was below ninth grade,
• He demonstrated how to exude confidence you didn’t feel, explained why it was important to speak well, abandon self-pity, and pull up your pants. All this Bosco supported with the findings of sociologists and statisticians, and with much cussing and weeping. To Bobby, for whom clean sinks, belted trousers, and sincerity were next to godliness, it was all beautiful, the conscious books come alive, except for Bosco’s actual godliness.
• Westberry took in how bewildered, uncared-for, and life-blasted Bobby seemed some days
• They were eager to test all the vocabulary they were absorbing, but employing a prized new word was perilous. “If you say a word and none of us knew exactly what it was,” Bobby said, “everybody would run to their cell and go grab their dictionary.”
• Westberry had been to restaurants in Hartford and remembered the menus. He described them for the others, slowly advancing down, describing how everything looked and tasted, from appetizers to dessert. “A lot of people did that,” Bobby said. “We called it eating in our heads. I ate a whole Sunday dinner that my mom cooked.
• PRISON DEPLETED. EVEN with the group’s companionship, Bobby couldn’t ever escape what he called the “hectic” of it. There was relentless interaction with other people living pressed right up against you, the rank odor, the whims of counts, searches, and lockdowns. It was like riding a bicycle over endless stones, Bobby’s whole body absorbing the vibrating stress of holding course.
• The bad feeling between Rosenthal and Clark reached a pitch when Rosenthal succeeded in arranging something unprecedented in state judicial history: making Clark himself a witness and grilling him for thirty-five contentious hours about his conduct. “I put Jim Clark on the stand for eight days,” Rosenthal exulted. “He couldn’t stand being a witness. I ask him one question, he yells at the prosecutor, ‘You should object to that!’ ”
• Rosenthal kept apple slices in the drawer, and ate them no matter how brown they got. At midnight, behind his desk, he set down a thin blue rubber mat, then placed on it a pillow and a yellow sheet. He slept there until three, whereupon he resumed work.
• The Bobby documents contained so many pages that no person could absorb them right away. That was also as Rosenthal preferred. Good appellate lawyers read their dense files the way some people did James Joyce novels, the understanding deepening with the increasing familiarity of rereadings, each pass yielding new insights, a plan of defense slowly taking shape.
• while his was a near-literary interest in people as characters. Pattis owned a used bookstore, wore a graying ponytail, and could be at turns brazen and then puckishly disarming: “I’m a lone wolf. I’m a shark,” he said of himself.
• Rosenthal could now be sure that Major possessed the gun that killed Fields shortly before the Fields murder and not long after it, which should have suggested to Willoughby, working on both cases, that Major was almost certainly the person who’d used it to kill Fields. That counted as newly discovered potentially exculpatory evidence, the classic marrow of a habeas petition.
• During the next week, Rosenthal wrote his letters to Kane, Boyle, and Esserman, the first installments of what soon became a one-way correspondence, single spaced missives that went on at novella length, with additional entreaty made via tabs and exhibits. Letters urging that a criminal conviction be reconsidered have a quality of madness, the beseeching of an unrequited heart, because it’s so difficult to convince someone who’s decided against you and moved on to relent, feel a different way, give you another chance. <> But Rosenthal was also doing the novelist’s work, making the object of his emotional concern the object of theirs, and his many pages affected readers.
• This was confirmation bias coupled with tunnel vision and at the end of the tunnel was catastrophe—and old poetry. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” Rosenthal recited. “That’s Walter Scott,” he said. <> Rosenthal posited a reason Quinn hadn’t pursued the forensic evidence linking Major and BlackJack to the case might be that by then he’d already locked himself in to Bobby by creating the $100 voucher.

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• Fear and resentment of those released from prison meant rules and circumstances canting so heavily toward protecting society, the fear accomplished what it sought to guard against. In Connecticut, a felony record exposed a person to 625 so-called collateral consequences upon prison release, restrictions on housing, student loans, and forms of employment like being a barber, electrician, or plumber—professions it might have made sense to license in prison,
• Lack of sleep had faded the color from Bobby’s eyes, and there was a dull, burnt-tissue-paper pallor to his skin, as though prison had slow-cooked him with the oven timer set to 78,576 hours. American men age two years for every year spent in prison.
• But others didn’t know that prison had conditioned you; they thought you’d lost your hearing, and so they began speaking louder. The amount of salt in prison cooking meant it was usual to complete a prison term with higher blood pressure.
• People who left prison were calibrated to the age they’d been when they entered prison. Those, like Bobby, who’d gone to prison in their teens, usually still wanted to dress in youthful fashions
• Besides the problem of cash flow, it didn’t help that while Bobby was in prison, someone had “stolen” Bobby’s Social Security number and ruined his credit rating. His credit history, his employment history, his rent-paying history: there was no helpful history.
• Holding himself accountable allowed him to make meaning out of a horrible experience that otherwise made no sense. It also permitted him to see those he’d grown up around, like Major, with more sympathy than he extended to himself. “Dudes on the streets,” Bobby said, “I think you gotta understand them, how they got out there, what’s happened to them.”
• But gossip meant something more ominous to Bobby. “I spend a lot of time thinking about this,” he said. “A lot of time.” Gossip was rumors. Gossip was danger. Gossip had put Bobby into the prison slipstream... Gossip was the world ambushing him.
• On too many days Bobby was “miserable.” It was the inconsolable realization that in his life there was too little to care about in the way he wanted to care. “My driver’s license don’t mean anything,” he said. He still yearned for “that spark” of fulfilling work, but “I have no clue what to do,” he said sadly. And then he began to speak a threnody that brooded beyond himself to the laments of generations. “They talk about they let me free,” he said. “I don’t feel free. I don’t know this world.
• And something in Shay now seemed to relax, and she became more sympathetic to Bobby than she’d been when she felt let down by him as his girlfriend. He, too, was kinder with her. They encouraged each other, were solicitous and caring in the way of old, dear friends who’d been through a lot together.
• There were men and women who left prison and flourished afterward, received Ivy League degrees, built profitable businesses. These were the quasars of reentry, spectacular, luminous, celestial exceptions that helped create the myth any young person could go to prison, separate from family, from school, from training, employment, and community, then depart prison with only the person they were to recommend them and make their fortune in America.
• For typical young people entering prison from poor city neighborhoods, they’d been scratched and torn by life on the outside, and then inside they accumulated more lacerating experiences. Prison took away a person’s prime. It kept you young even as you aged, a perpetual first act.
• Bobby brooded about his family. He loved them “to death,” but “I conditioned myself to not care about them for so long that it’s become a natural feeling and second nature to me.” It frustrated Bobby that he could not simply forgive and move past. He didn’t want to hate. And when his telephone rang and his mother needed his help, off he went. Two days later he was making fun of himself for how he whiplashed between emotions.
• The financing company was so skilled at valuing cases, the woman had told Rosenthal that only 8 percent of the cases USClaims invested in went bad. Since she’d explained a large hedge fund was backing them he said now, “they have money. Nothing but money.” If the percentages went with Bobby, he would be awarded a judgment and USClaims would end up with some of it. For the first six months, Bobby’s obligation was 16 percent interest on what he was advanced. Then the number would grow by 16 percent every six months, to a maximum of a 100 percent interest debt, again contingent upon Bobby being successfully compensated.
• “I was on the highway last night, thinking what a beautiful highway,” he said. “The beautiful signs. The intellect it takes to make a world. And I wondered why the people that created that world are not from my world. Our environment would be beautiful if we had the same kind of education.”
• “‘We saw them run up on the guy.’ Everybody knows who did it, but we talk about it and still don’t say his name. That’s a legacy of its own that’s not going anywhere.” <> IN ALL THIS was the way life grinds you, with little indignities after big.
• I feel like when I tell people that I’m stressing, then people add onto my stress by telling me they’re also stressed, and it’s like filling up a balloon with a bunch of adversities and stress and it’s just going to explode eventually.” It was as though he’d held everything inside until he was released from prison, and now, two years later, he couldn’t personally release, leaving him to manage what he held in or else rupture. The rest Bobby wanted was a rest from being Bobby. Others worried he was indulging his suffering... Reuben Miller, the Chicago professor who did volunteer prison work, had a term, “learning to languish,” for what happened to people in the months and years after prison.
• Losing light was, he said, “For me a way to learn responsibility. I’m used to my mind drifting off. That’s how we were in there.” Over and over, year following year, he achieved the same revelations, the redundancy of revelations itself eventually a revelation. <> Bobby’s life was short on stirring events, and those occurrences that did happen were often interior.

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• Violence interrupters and better policing policies helped New Haven follow the American trend with sharp statistical reductions in rates of shooting in the pre-COVID years. The Connecticut violent-crime analyst Ivan Kuzyk said part of the explanation was open-air drug markets had mostly given way to more discreet cell-phone dealing: “hit men and robbers like Major don’t have the flow of cash that sustained the gun culture.”
• Bobby hadn’t known Major well, but he had compassion for him. Terrible events happened, intertwining children in a form of violent empathy. It was as though Major had become Bobby’s secret sharer, Bobby sensing in his neighbor “so much pain... Bobby’s conclusion was “at the end of the day he felt adult despair too early.”
• In 1933, a residential college named for the slavery champion, South Carolina politician John Calhoun, opened replete with stained-glass windows depicting enslaved people working in the cotton fields and shackled at Calhoun’s feet.
• Only in 2017, the year after Corey Menafee, a Black dishwasher, smashed the Calhoun College “slave window” with a broomstick, saying it was “degrading” to work under, leading to national opprobrium, did the university deem Calhoun’s legacy in fundamental conflict with the university mission and rename it Grace Hopper College.
• In postindustrial New Haven, the city often lacked the resources to meet its basic costs. New Haven’s 2020 municipal budget was under $600 million. Yale’s operating budget was more than $4 billion, sometimes at surplus.
• In 1854, Herman Melville had written in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” of how the American poor “suffer more in mind than the poor of any other people in the world” because of “the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grindstone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty.”
• It wasn’t until 1988 that Yale College tenured an African American woman, art historian Sylvia Ardyn Boone.
• When Bobby saw a city bus with an advertisement on its side that offered $365 OR MORE TO THOSE WHO EXPERIENCE DEPRESSION he was quick to note, “That’s a Yale study. They want to use us like guinea pigs. I am not their guinea pig.” His reaction spoke to a long American history of appropriation and exploitation. People in Newhallville were quick to mention the Tuskegee syphilis study.
• Evaluating Elicker’s predicament, Raymond saw an understaffed manager limited by an insufficient budget, “trying to do it all, looking at data, not sleeping. He was so alone.” Meanwhile, Yale was converting its gym into a temporary hospital with world-class testing and care. When Elicker asked if city emergency first responders could sleep in dormitories, Yale refused. After this became public, Yale belatedly offered rooms,
• Many other individuals, from city employees to Yale epidemiologists, performed critical individual roles, with the result that New Haven early on accomplished one of the fastest “crush curve” COVID case declines among American cities. When CNN interviewed Elicker, Raymond and the students were all watching the broadcast
• Most of the people he knew hadn’t much, and while it was clear to him he couldn’t try to save everybody without soon sinking himself, he saw that, if allowed, others would pluck him of money until “I’m naked with no clothes.” But if Bobby saved only himself, he was not himself.
• People from Newhallville said BlackJack had “done so much dirt” he could never leave all the harm behind. For him, moving around Newhallville was going to be such a high-resolution existence it would be as though he’d acquired a watermark unmistakable for all to see. And the danger would not only be from those who already had it in for him, but also the next nervy young person for whom BlackJack could be the source of a spotlessly bad reputation.
• For mothers, like Quay, each new day was grief that surged, ebbed, and surged back, an ocean of grief that salted every morning with the fresh sting of an experience impossible to get used to.
• When Stacy Spell thought about the violence, the retired detective from Newhallville said he was like Bobby: it was impossible for him to walk his old neighborhood without experiencing it as a city topography of loss and death. Spell knew all the fatal Newhallville doorways, vestibules, and driveways, and they had become memorials in his memory.
• Nobody, certainly not Bobby, wanted to be defined by injustice, by oppression, by being exploited, by martyrdom. Shay and Bobby both liked to talk about the need to “finesse the world,” which was a way of describing operating from a position of experience. Innocence was such an admired virtue, the pure and unblemished, but like everything else, innocence had its dark side. It could get you into so much trouble.