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florist and then, just before Smut was born in 1971, he got a job at Doherty, Blacker and Shepard driving a lumber delivery truck. “He worked there forever,” said Smut. Bobby Brown worked hard and was proud of his long service with the company. He had a photograph taken in late 1976 of his flatbed DBS truck parked in the company yard, loaded with lumber. The black-and-white picture of the truck—just a truck, no person in sight—was kept in a large envelope filled with photographs of birthdays, picnics, and other family moments.
    Unlike other kids Smut knew, his father was home, the head of the family. But Smut and his father were not close, and early on Smut got the idea his father did not like him. Smut felt his father was distant and hard on him. “He was there, but not there,” Smut said. “He was always yelling at me.” Smut would complain to his mother, saying his father didn’t love him. Why you sayin’ that? Mattie would ask. She tried to reassure her son, but she also knew he had reason to feel the way he did. “I think Bobby loved Robert,” she said, “but had a poor way of showing it.” Her husband was abusive. “Robert was afraid of his father.” The relationship only worsened as time went on.
    Bobby Brown did want more for his family. He began looking at houses, and by the late 1970s, he and Mattie found one a few miles south of the housing project in Mattapan. The seller of 231 West Selden Street was the federal government—the department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD—which had taken control of the home in 1977 and was selling it off as part of a national housing program. The price was $24,000. Under the program, if Bobby and Mattie Brown came up with $750 in cash, they could finance the balance. The couple seized the chance. Theytook out a thirty-year mortgage for $23,250, with monthly payments of $195.53.
    West Selden Street was long and wide. The top of the street, right off the busy and commercial Morton Street, had mostly two-family homes tightly packed on small lots. Farther south the street opened up—larger lots and more single-family homes. Behind the homes on the even side of the street were the wooded grounds of the Boston Sanatorium, which the city developed in the early 1900s to care for the poor suffering from tuberculosis. Bordering the sanatorium’s fifty-one acres gave this end of West Selden Street an almost suburban feel to it.
    Two thirty-one West Selden Street seemed like a three-story home, but that was because it was built into a rocky slope, meaning the basement was above-ground and at street level. The front door was up a flight of fourteen steps. There was a tiny yard on the right side, atop the ledge, in the shade of a half-dozen oak trees. The house itself, and the yard, were a mess. The Browns went to work. They installed yellow aluminum siding and cleaned up the yard. “I made it nice, so the kids could play there,” said Mattie. Her husband put up a picket fence around the yard and installed outdoor lighting.
    Leaving the project was a big deal. “I had my own backyard now,” said Smut, who was eight years old when they moved. Instead of the smell of urine, he said, “the air smelled clean.” Smut also noticed, “The roaches were gone.” Smut sometimes rode a city bus up Blue Hill Avenue to visit his friends from the project, but he also took to the woods of the nearby sanatorium, riding his bike on its paths with his new friends.
     
    Mattie tried to be there for her son. Having gone to work driving a city school bus, she parked the bus at home and used it to take Smut and his neighborhood friends on outings. In the summer, it might be a day trip for a swim at Hogan’s Pond in Milton, or to ride the roller coaster at Riverside Park in Springfield, Massachusetts. She’d take Smut and his friends on the bus to Providence to attend a concert.
    Smut was in the fifth grade riding the bus to elementary school one day when he saw a girl he could