Book Talk Uncovers Newhallville’s Voices

What makes a neighborhood unique? What makes a neighborhood ​“iconic”? What makes a neighborhood, well, a neighborhood?

After eight years of research and 500 interviews for his landmark new book about a Newhallville murder, author Nicholas Dawidoff found the answers to those questions in the many individual voices that — taken together — add up to something rich and profound.

Dawidoff circled back to that insight time and again Wednesday evening during a public reading from his newly published book The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City that was held in a basement meeting space at the New Haven Free Public Library at 133 Elm St.

Before a packed room of 50 attendees, Dawidoff — a Pulitzer Prize-finalist author and New Yorker contributor who grew up in New Haven– read excerpts from his deep-dive exploration of the 2006 murder of Pete Fields and the wrongful conviction of 16-year-old Bobby Johnson.

He also fielded questions from both audience members and the event’s co-host, nationally celebrated local poet and criminal justice reformer Reginald Dwayne Betts.

Despite its often violent and upsetting subject matter, this book is filled with a ​“generosity of spirit,” Betts said. It’s ​“a testament to what it means to remember home, what it means to love community fiercely” even as people work through some of the biggest challenges one can face in life.

What did you need to learn to feel ready to tell this story? he asked Dawidoff.

On the one hand, the author replied, this book is of a piece with others he’s published about topics ranging from a baseball player-spy to the rich and mystifying worlds of professional football and country music: ​“All my books are in one way or another about outsiders who come up on the American periphery and, through force of personality and talent and persistence and signal American institutions .. enter the mainstream, and influence it.”

For this story in particular, Dawidoff continued, to understand the stories of the man killed, the man arrested, and the man who likely pulled the trigger, he quickly found that he needed to understand as much as he could about the Newhallville neighborhood.

And to understand Newhallville’s history, its landmarks, its demographic and industrial evolutions and its taking in of wave after wave of migrants from Europe and the American South over the past century and a half, he had to listen to its residents’ voices. 

“I didn’t want to write a true crime book or anything like that,” Dawidoff said. ​“I wanted to write a book that yielded the kind of complexity with which cities engage.” One of the most significant themes of the book is the ​“great human temptation to generalize and simplify. With people, if you don’t know people as individuals, it doesn’t work.”

And so he talked, and he listened. 

He listened to Babz Rawls-Ivy tell stories about the pickup truck driven by a farmer from South Carolina or Virginia or Georgia that would drive through Newhallville offering a bed full of greens.

He listened to neighbors ​“describing the smell of pineapple upside down cake” and how everyone on the block knew who was the best cook just based on one whiff.

He listened to stories of ​“the interconnectedness of Newhallville and South Carolina,” and learned why more South Carolina license plates are visible in this one compact New England neighborhood than in just about anywhere else outside of the Palmetto State.

He listened to old-timers talk about playing cards at the Mudhole as they unspooled story after story about their past lives down South, their Winchester Arms work in Newhallville, and their present and future lives in the suburbs.

He thanked Mike Jefferson and Tracey Meares and Holly Wasilewski and Stacey Spell and, of course, Bobby, for answering every question he asked over the years and greeting his writer’s curiosity with honesty and reflection.

“Everybody talks about things differently and, if you listen carefully … certainly for me, listening to people talk specifically about their childhood and their neighborhoods” is what makes for a compelling book, he said. 

“The main character in this book is really an iconic American neighborhood, and for me, it’s those many, many voices that make up a neighborhood, and it’s thrilling for me to hear people talk about where they came from.”

What do you hope readers — especially white readers from outside New Haven who may not believe the stories he relays in this book — take away from reading The Other Side of Prospect? asked Elm City Lit Fest founder and Newhallville native IfeMichelle Gardin.

Dawidoff recalled getting to know the city as a kid by biking around from neighborhood to neighborhood to participate in youth baseball leagues. He remembered standing in Bowen Field and marveling at the ​“paradise” of Yale and wondering how this city can contain such wealth and such hardship all in such a compressed location. He remembered telling himself time and again when interviewing people about violence in Newhallville for this book that, if these stories shook him, imagine how it must be to actually live through such challenges.

“Here is a problem that has persisted,” Dawidoff said. With this book, he told himself, ​“I should just be part of a chorus. I should be one person among many people who are speaking up about something that on some basic level offended me. I had to do it as well as I could.”

Dawidoff then read an excerpt from the early pages of The Other Side of Prospect in which one such neighborhood-defining voice — as well as that of the author’s own — takes center stage:

Bobby’s just-around reputation spoke to one of his abilities, which was fitting in wherever he went, to his instinct for being there. ​“I feel I was the type of kid who adapted,” he said. ​“That came natural to me and I did it.” Seated on outside couches, playing basketball at the park, chilling at house parties, he listened to others with attentive interest while maintaining nonchalant scrutiny of what went on. Bobby’s conversation was efficient to the point of being epigrammatic, and yet when he described his block, it came alive, like a watercolor: ​“Crazy foot traffic. People on porches. Jumping out of cars. Walk around.” Not yet fully grown at five-foot-six, with an induction buzzcut for summertime that emphasized protruding ears, dark skin, a trusting pre-adolescence in his eyes, Bobby was skilled at being watchful without seeming watchful, an alert, accurate close observer who saw blurry life with clarity, and remembered what he saw. ​“I pay attention to everything,” he said, thinking back on his boyhood self. ​“I knew who was who. I knew everything. It’s not hard. You notice my eyes are always moving. Taking everything in. That’s different about me.”

Nicholas Dawidoff will discuss The Other Side of Prospect with civil rights attorney Michael Jefferson and librarian Diane Brown at the Stetson Branch on Dixwell Avenue on Oct. 26 starting at 6 p.m. Click on the videos below to watch recent interviews he’s done with Babz Rawls-Ivy on WNHH FM’s ​“LoveBabz LoveTalk” and with Paul Bass on WNHH’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”