I was always shocked to go to my cousins’ house in the suburbs, where they’d shut off any light that wasn’t being used and turn the heat way down at night. I was used to project heat and would freeze if I ever slept anywhere else. There’s no place like Old Colony, I thought. All the rules we were learning didn’t make any sense anywhere else. Not the rules about heat and light, not the rules about what to wear, not the rules about money. In the suburbs the kids were wearing cheap Wrangler corduroys and scruffy sneakers. Our designer clothes had to be spotless so that no one would call us “project rats” or accuse us of being on welfare. There’d been a few times when Ma had brought home sneakers that cost $1.49 at Kmart, thinking we’d wear them—but no way! Everyone in the neighborhood called the cheap sneakers “bobos.” We made Ma get the very best from Skoochie’s shopping bag of designer goods. She was always generous with whatever money she had. When we’d go to the store with our cousins, we’d ask Ma for a few dollars, whether in food stamps or real money. She’d give me a fiver sometimes. My cousins would each get about a quarter from their mother and father. And they’re the rich ones living in the suburbs with a father and all, I thought.
Even though Ma would give us whatever money we wanted, I started to get in on some of the scams local kids would come up with. It wasn’t big stuff. We didn’t get a lot of money; it was more for something to do. I’d go out to the main intersection outside the project, along with Kevin and my friend Danny, to hit up the commuters going back to the suburbs from their jobs in downtown. We took a tin can from the trash, covered the sides with white lined paper from a notebook, and wrote SOUTH BOSTON YOUTH HOCKEY on it. On the top of the can was a plastic lid with a slit cut into it for dropping money in. We’d approach the drivers, and I couldn’t believe how nearly all of them would give us money while they were stopped at the red light.
During rush hour, we’d make about ten bucks each. We started doing it every day, and the only time we were chased away was by one of the drivers who was a local from City Point, who said that he was a coach for South Boston Youth Hockey himself and had never seen us before in his life. Kevin told him we had to save up to buy the hockey sticks and pads and helmets before we could join, and he got out of his car and said he’d better not see us out there again. That’s when we changed our labels to OLD COLONY BASKETBALL. Kids in the project were more likely to play basketball anyway. It was cheap; all you needed was a ball and a hoop. No one at the intersection would know if we were really in a league or not, and certainly no one in Old Colony would care to investigate it. In Old Colony we stuck together.
It was on one of those days at the intersection in the spring of 1974 that we saw the headlights blinking and heard the honking and loudspeakers screaming something about the communists trying to take over South Boston. Everyone came running out of the project to line the streets. At first it was scary, like the end of the world was being announced. But then it seemed more like a parade. It was even along the same route as the St. Paddy’s Day parade. One neighbor said it was what they called a motorcade. The cars in the motorcade never seemed to stop coming. It went on for a good half hour. Irish flags waved out of car windows and one sign on a car read WELCOME TO MOSCOW AMERICA. Many more had RESIST or NEVER written on them. My favorite one was HELL NO SOUTHIE WON’T GO. That was a good one, I said. I started clapping with everyone else. But then I had to ask someone, “Where are we not going?” One of the mothers said, “They’re trying to send you to Roxbury with the niggers. To get a beatin’,” she added. Someone else told her not to say that word to the kids, that they were blacks, not niggers. “Well it’s no time to fight over that one,” someone else said. “It’s time now to stick together.” When I asked who was trying to send us, someone told me about Judge Garrity; that a bunch of rich people from the suburbs wanted to tell us where we had to send our kids to school; that they wanted us to mix with the blacks, but that their own kids wouldn’t have to mix with no one, because there were no blacks in the suburbs.
Everyone waved to Dapper O’Neil when he rode by in the motorcade. They loved him. But they got really excited when they saw Louise Day Hicks, their favorite committee woman. I’d never heard of her before. She looked nice enough, though, like someone’s grandmother, a tubby older woman with a flowery old-fashioned dress like Nana wore and a small church hat perched on top of her round Irish face. People said she was from Southie, but she didn’t have a face that looked like she’d been through much. Her father was a judge and she lived in a big beachfront house in City Point, but she was okay with us. “She’s the only one sticking up for us,” someone said. So I liked her too. Someone on a bullhorn started shouting about the rights of the people, and about not letting the government force this and force that on us. I knew he was right, and I felt myself getting angry along with him. And I also knew that these adults were going to put up a fight for me. God, we couldn’t have been living in a better neighborhood! Everyone’s sticking together, I thought. Everyone’s going to fight for us kids. We all cheered as the motorcade made its way toward City Point.
When the motorcade had passed, everyone lingered on street corners in the project talking about “forced busing.” It was going to begin in the fall, they said. They all seemed to know it was going to happen, but win or lose, everyone believed in going down fighting. I saw neighbors talking, people I knew had grudges against each other before. In the following days, I even saw people who were from different parts of Southie getting over their differences to talk about the busing. Mothers from City Point talking on Broadway to mothers from the projects. I couldn’t believe it. The whole feeling in the neighborhood was changing. Before long, we kids could cross any turf line. We were united. Some said it was the communists who were making this happen. Still others said it was rich lawyers, judges, and politicians from the suburbs, and that it had nothing to do with the blacks, that they didn’t want to come to Southie any more than we wanted to go to Roxbury. In the end it didn’t really matter who we were united against, as long as we kept up our Southie loyalty.
Some of the neighbors raged against “the niggers” more than ever before. But others were starting to talk about how this wasn’t about race. That it was about poor people being told that they have to do things that rich people don’t have to do. Our mothers couldn’t get over people thinking that we had something in our schools that blacks in Roxbury didn’t have. “Our kids have just as little,” they said. “Neither side has a pot to piss in and now they want us to fight over who can piss in what alley.” I couldn’t believe that there were people who were now willing to admit they were poor. I’d never heard that one before in Southie, especially not in the project. We weren’t poor; that was a black thing, being poor. But the ones who talked about us being poor were few and far between, and it wasn’t long before the talk became all “niggers this” and “niggers that.”
Toward the end of the school year, we could feel that our lives were about to change. Like most of the mothers in Old Colony and in South Boston, Ma was trying to get us out of the public schools so we wouldn’t have to be bused. The first year of busing, Phase One, would only include kids at the high school levels, matching up Roxbury with South Boston. Then the next year, Phase Two, would bring busing to the whole city. But parents were in a race to get their kids into Catholic schools before the seats filled up. The teachers at the John Boyle O’Reilly were talking to each other about how strange it was that the officials had picked the poorest all-black neighborhood and the poorest all-white neighborhood for “their social experiment.” Even the second graders at the O’Reilly talked about getting ready for the bloodbath. Ma got us into St. Augustine’s School down the road. The priests were letting people pay according to their incomes, and some of the poorer mothers would now have to work St. Augustine’s bingo nights for their cheap tuition. I’d been getting to like the O’Reilly School, but I was glad that I’d be able to stay in the neighborhood, away from the bloodbath.
One day t
hat June, we had to stay in our classroom a couple of hours extra. It was getting warm outside and we all wanted to go home and play and get ready for the motorcades, which had become a weekly protest in the neighborhood. But we weren’t allowed to leave. We saw the police and state troopers starting to assemble on the streets outside. The teachers told us that they were afraid there would be riots today and that we couldn’t go home until it was safe. Racial fights were breaking out around the city after a white woman had been covered in gasoline and set on fire in Roxbury. A police officer came to all of the homerooms to make it clear that we weren’t allowed to leave the school. I was scared and just wanted to be with my family. After a while they let us go, and when I got back to Old Colony, with the police cruisers still speeding up and down streets, all the talk in the neighborhood was about the coming race war.
Along with the craziness and the cockroaches, the summer of 1974 brought with it great anticipation for the fight of our lives. Motorcades and marches became arenas for our daily play. We still set dumpster fires, and a couple times we were able to light up a stolen car, stripped and abandoned in Old Colony, before the BHA finally removed it. But organized protests brought more thrills than anything we’d ever known. Most of the marches and rallies were peaceful, though the threat of violence filled the air. You could hear it in the throats of politicians like Ray Flynn and Dapper O’Neil, who led the cheering crowds. And you could see it in the watery swelled-up eyes of mothers, not sure whether they would cry or lash out. I knew these women were doing everything in their power to do neither, to hide their pain. But what mattered most was seeing how much they cared about us kids, and to tell the truth I wouldn’t have minded if they’d brought out the Molotov cocktails from the beginning.
My whole family kept up with the wheres and whens of the motorcades and rallies. In Southie, news spread best through word of mouth—besides we didn’t want the other side to sabotage our plans by knowing them ahead of time. Ma started to volunteer for Jimmy Kelly and his South Boston Information Center, which controlled much of the information in the neighborhood. Southie couldn’t rely on what Jimmy Kelly called “the liberal media establishment,” and whatever that meant I knew I too wanted nothing to do with it. It was us against them, and my family was now part of the “us,” as the neighborhood closed off more and more to the outside world.
C H A P T E R 4
F I G H T T H E P O W E R
’Twas on a dreary Thursday morn’
As the buses rolled along.
They came up to our peaceful town
With orders from The Law:
Desegregate and integrate
Or you will pay the price
Of loss of pride, humility,
And even your children’s lives.
But Southie’s spirit was so strong,
They made us a barrack town.
They took their horses, dogs, and guns
and set them on the crowd.
The TPF, their sticks did crack
On the young and old alike.
But united still, our spirits high,
We’ll fight for freedom’s right.
—HELEN KING
MA’S TUNES ON THE ACCORDION STARTED TO BE ALL about the busing. She played them at rallies, sit-ins, and fundraisers for the struggle, all over Southie. The songs sounded like a lot of the Irish rebel songs we grew up with. They had the same tunes, but the words had changed: “So come on Southie, head on high / They’ll never take our pride.…” The Black and Tans, the murderous regiments who’d wreaked havoc on Ireland on behalf of the English Crown, became the TPF (Tactical Police Force), the special force that was turning our town into a police state. The Queen of England was gone from Ma’s songs too, her place taken by Judge Garrity, the federal judge who’d mandated busing, “the law of the land”: “Judge Garrity and traitors too / We’ve just begun to fight.” Garrity had an Irish name, which made it all the worse, as the Irish hated nothing more than a traitor. That’s why we hated Ted Kennedy; he’d sided with the busing too, and was seen as the biggest traitor of all, being from the most important Irish family in America.
The English themselves weren’t completely absent from our struggle, though. They ran the Boston Globe and were behind the whole thing. My friends and I started stealing stacks of the Globe left outside supermarkets in the early mornings. We could sell them for a dime to people on their way to work, who’d have been paying a quarter if it weren’t for us. That’s when I found out the Globe was the enemy. We tried to sell it in Southie, but too many people said they wouldn’t read that liberal piece of trash if it was free, that it was to blame for the busing, with all its attacks on South Boston. I heard a few people say it was a communist paper. “Not only are they communists, they’re the rich English, keeping up their hate for the Irish and Southie,” Coley told me. He showed me the names of the Globe’s owners and editors: “Winship, Taylor. All WASPs,” he said, “White Anglo Saxon Protestants, forever gettin’ back at the Irish for chasing them out of Boston.”
Boy, was I confused now that the English were involved. We’d always hated the English for what they did to the Irish. But what ever that was, listening to Ma’s Irish songs, I’d thought it was in the past and across a great big ocean. Now it was right here in Southie. I was glad to be doing my part anyway, stealing the Boston Globe and making a couple bucks on their loss. The rich English liberal communist bastards!
That September, Ma let us skip the first week of school. The whole neighborhood was boycotting school. City Councilor Louise Day Hicks and her bodyguard with the bullhorn, Jimmy Kelly, were telling people to keep their kids home. It was supposed to be just the high school kids boycotting, but we all wanted to show our loyalty to the neighborhood. I was meant to be starting the third grade at St. Augustine’s School. Ma had enrolled Kevin and Kathy in the sixth and seventh grades there as well. Frankie was going to Southie High, and Mary and Joe were being sent to mostly black Roxbury, so they really had something to boycott. But on the first day, Kevin and Kathy begged Ma not to send them. “C’mon Ma, please?” I piped in. It was still warm outside and we wanted to join the crowds that were just then lining the streets to watch the busloads of black kids come into Southie. The excitement built as police helicopters hovered just above our third-floor windows, police in riot gear stood guard on the rooftops of Old Colony, and the national news camped out on every corner. Ma said okay, and we ran up to Darius Court, along the busing route, where in simpler times we’d watched the neighborhood St. Paddy’s Day parade.
The whole neighborhood was out. Even the mothers from the stoop made it to Darius Court, nightgowns and all. Mrs. Coyne, up on the rooftop in her housedress, got arrested before the buses even started rolling through the neighborhood. Everyone knew she was a little soft, and I thought the excitement that day must have been a bit too much for her. She ran up to the roof and called the police “nigger lovers” and “traders,” and started dancing and singing James Brown songs. “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!” She nearly fell off the roof before one cop grabbed her from behind and restrained her. Everyone was laughing at that one: big fat Mrs. Coyne rolling around on the rooftop kicking and screaming, with a cop in full riot gear on top of her. Little disturbances like that broke out here and there, but most people were too intent on seeing the buses roll to do anything that might get them carted away.
I looked up the road and saw a squadron of police motorcycles speeding down Dorchester Street, right along the curb, as if they would run over anyone who wasn’t on the sidewalk. The buses were coming. Police sirens wailed as hundreds of cops on motorcycles aimed at the crowds of mothers and kids, to clear the way for the law of the land. “Bacon … I smell bacon!” a few people yelled, sniffing at the cops. I knew that meant the cops were pigs. As the motorcycles came closer I fought to get back onto the sidewalk, but it was too crowded. I ran further into the road to avoid one motorcycle, when two more came at me from the middle of the street. I ha
d to run across to the other side of the road, where the crowd quickly cleared a space for me on the sidewalk. All the adults welcomed me, patting me on the shoulder. “Are you all right?” “Those pricks would even kill a kid.” “Pigs!” someone else shouted. I thought I’d lost Kevin and Kathy, but just then I saw them sitting on top of a mailbox up the street for a good view of the buses. They waved to me, laughing because they’d seen me almost get run over.
The road was cleared, and the buses rolled slowly. We saw a line of yellow buses like there was no end to them. I couldn’t see any black faces though, and I was looking for them. Some people around me started to cry when they finally got a glimpse of the buses through the crowd. One woman made the sign of the cross and a few others copied her. “I never thought I’d see the day come,” said an old woman next to me. She lived downstairs from us, but I had never seen her leave her apartment before. I’d always thought she was crippled or something, sitting there in her window every day, waiting for Bobby, the delivery man who came daily with a package from J.J.’s Liquors. She was trembling now, and so was everyone else. I could feel it myself. It was a feeling of loss, of being beaten down, of humiliation. In minutes, though, it had turned to anger, rage, and hate, just like in those Irish rebel songs I’d heard all my life. Like “The Ballad of James Connolly”: “God’s curse on you England / You cruel hearted monster / Your deeds they would shame all the devils in Hell.” Except we’d changed it to “God’s curse on you Garrity.”
All Souls Page 9
