Read The Fence for Free Online Page A

toppled it. Another time he tried to make breakfast for his mother, Mattie, but didn’t have any idea how to do it. He presented her with a concoction of peanut butter mixed with milk and anything else he could find in the kitchen, leaving a huge mess for her to clean up. But it was hard for Mattie to stay upset with her son, and it was during one of the boy’s well-meaning messes that her girlfriend laughed, looked at him, and exclaimed, You just Smut!
    It stuck—a nickname born from soul and the latest mess he’d made. When spoken, young Robert heard only warmth, and he embraced his new name. “I guess I was like Dennis the Menace,” he said. “He didn’t mean no harm. He had a good heart. He was just always getting in trouble.” His mother would always still call him Robert while his father tended to call him Bob. But to everyone else in the projects he was Smut.
    Mattie and Robert Brown Jr. were living in the Franklin Hill housing project in Dorchester when Smut was born on June 26, 1971, although he was not their firstborn. Living in Georgia, near where Robert was from originally, the couple had a boy named Bobby in September 1965. He fell ill with pneumonia and died in the hospital three months later. Mattie was disconsolate. The couple tried again and had twin girls, and then a third daughter was born in 1968. Smut was born after the Browns moved to Boston. Mattie decided to name him Robert after the first Bobby she’d lost, and Smutgrew up a “mama’s boy.” He was the first to admit it. “Mama really took to me.”
    When the Browns moved into the Franklin Hill housing project it was nearly two decades old, a complex of nine three-story buildings built on the rocky terrain and ledges just south of the city’s sprawling Franklin Park. The red-brick buildings were clustered around concrete courtyards, asphalt parking lots, and patches of grass. The Browns’ unit at 11 Franklin Hill Avenue was located in the corner of one of the courtyards. The entry door, painted gray and made of heavy metal, led to a set of stairs. The Browns’ apartment was on the second floor, one of four off a windowless landing. The subsidized rent was $40 a month.
    From his top bunk, Smut could look out into the inner courtyard and see anyone approaching their entry. He saw lots of fist-fights. “Every day there was a fistfight,” he said, or so it seemed to a little kid. One time he was in the entry with one of his sisters when a man from the project began to bother her. The man would not let his sister go past him. She pushed, and they struggled. Smut was scared. When he was older he wondered if the man had been trying to rape her. Beyond a flagpole on the courtyard’s far side was a playground where Smut’s sisters took him when he was a toddler. The Dumpsters they passed made a lasting impression. “Rats flew out of them in the summer.”
    Smut daydreamed about growing up and becoming an astronaut, and, for a time, he was into what he later referred to as the “firefighter thing.” “Robert was a very active kid,” his mother said. “He used to jump in the air and do this flip, and scare me so bad.” Smut had lots of cousins and “cousins,” the kids of his parents’ friends. Families were always getting together. “Mama Janet” Jackson, for example, lived with her family on the other side of Franklin Park near Humboldt Avenue. Smut’s aunt would take a carload of kids over to play at Mama Janet’s, or Mama Janet would visit the project with her sons. The boys played hide and seek, tag, or football. Smut and Mama Janet’s oldest son, Dino, were the same age, while a younger son, Danny, was almost twoyears younger. Danny was a nickname; his given name was Lyle—Lyle Jackson.
     
    Smut’s father was a model of steady work. When the family first moved into the project, he worked as a packer in the shipping department of the Vanity Dress Company in downtown Boston. Laid off, he quickly went to work for a