All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  The day after the Haitian man was beaten, the news said that a white man driving through Roxbury had been stoned and beaten unconscious by about two hundred black teenagers roaming the streets, setting fires, and smashing things. They showed the pictures. It looked like Darius Court, except everyone was black. The news reports made it seem like the blacks were getting back at us. The white guy wasn’t from Southie, though. No way! No one from Southie would drive through Roxbury; most people I knew had never even been outside the neighborhood, and since busing no one wanted ever to leave again. When I was smaller we used to spend hours at the welfare office in Roxbury, with black and white mothers and kids. Never again!

  Nor were we welcome in too many places outside Southie now. But going downtown once in a while was the only way to get away from Mayor White’s “rule of three,” which made it illegal in Southie for more than two people to stand around on the corners. Kevin and his friends went downtown to scam, so I sometimes followed them. One time they showed me and Danny how to rob the parking meters for bags full of quarters, and we were chased home by a bunch of black kids who knew we were from Southie. We had to run all the way back to the Broadway Bridge, which blacks could never cross over unless they were in a yellow bus. Kevin swore at Danny for wearing his green jogging suit with a shamrock and SOUTHIE on the back. Kevin’s friend Okie showed us how he’d covered up the Southie dot on his wrist, the way he always did when he went into town, pulling his sleeves down past his hands.

  Ma wanted us to stay away from the troubles. But as much as we tried, it was all around us. You couldn’t help being in the middle of it unless you stayed home all the time. And there was nothing to do at home except set traps for the cockroaches. We were getting used to all the craziness from the busing; now on top of it all, it seemed as if the confusion was spilling into people’s homes. Teenagers in the neighborhood had started dropping out of school, especially once the police had gained a firm presence at Southie High. State troopers and the TPF were almost in a competition, it seemed, to flex their muscle on our streets. They did their drills in formation up and down Dorchester Street and around the high school. “Hup, two, three, four,” with their boots crashing on the road every day before and after school. People still lined the streets to protest, and Louise Day Hicks, Ray Flynn, and Jimmy Kelly kept the rallies going, but the younger people were losing all interest in school. It seemed that all at once, the girls who would’ve been juniors and seniors were pregnant. And teenagers spent a good part of their day figuring where they could hang out without being caught and arrested for drinking.

  Even though Kevin was in Catholic school, most of his friends were in public school and playing hooky to hang out or go into town to pull scams, like the one with the parking meters. He was doing poorly at St. Augustine’s, and the nuns didn’t like his sense of humor. He’d get everyone in class laughing by asking the teacher a question that had nothing to do with the long speech she had just given about the Assumption of Our Lady.

  One time Sister Veronica threw him out of class, and instead of waiting outside the door, he wandered the corridors pulling pranks on the other classrooms. He came to my third-grade class, knocked on the door, poked his head in, and asked the teacher if she had a spare pencil. Everyone knew my teacher was a pushover. She wasn’t a real nun—they called her a lay minister, and she could never control a class. Miss Shea gave him a pencil and he left. A minute later he knocked again while she was mid-sentence in a lesson, and asked her if she had a pencil sharpener. She sighed, and let him use the sharpener on the windowsill. The whole class was silent as he took his time sharpening away and blowing the sawdust off the tip of his new pencil. He finally left. A minute later, he knocked again, interrupting the lesson once more, and asked if Miss Shea had an eraser to go with the pencil. The whole class burst out laughing, and she chased him down the hall. But that was when Kevin did go to school. When Ma found out he was playing hooky, she got so mad, with all the money she was spending to send him to St. Augustine’s, that she wanted to give him a beating. He ran too fast for her, though, and slept in an abandoned car in Old Colony for a few nights, till Ma cooled off.

  Kathy was getting more involved with boys and dating the toughest guys around, the ones with the criminal faces, as Ma said. She’d turned thirteen, and was thrilled no longer to be one of the “three little kids.” She hooked school sometimes, and went into town to shoplift with her friends. She hung out with Linda Coyne and Doreen Cassio. The three of them got arrested one day for climbing up the side of the State House. Kathy had a hammer and chisel in her hand and said they were trying to chip the gold from the dome on top of the building. She said they’d almost made it up to the dome when a state trooper yelled, “Freeze!” She said Doreen Cassio got her into that one. Doreen had started to stay at our house. She was running away from home, and told Ma that her father was digging a big hole in their yard to bury her alive in. She showed us all the bruises from the beatings he’d given her. Ma wanted to call the cops, but Doreen begged her not to. No one in Southie really trusted the cops anymore, so Ma just let her stay at our apartment on the couch. Kathy was always adding runaway girls to our family.

  Before he dropped out, Frankie was still enjoying the fights at Southie High. He had big fists and a hatred for blacks since he’d been beaten and stabbed on his way to Boston Tech in Roxbury. When he left Tech, he entered Southie High set on revenge. So whenever Ma heard the police sirens heading up to the high school, she put on the TV to get the news flashes that always came on when there was another riot. She watched, afraid she would see Frankie being arrested for starting another fight. But at least he was going to school, which was more than many of the other kids in Southie were doing. One day in December when I was home with the flu, the sirens kept passing by for a good half hour. Ma turned on the news and heard that a white South Boston teenager had been critically stabbed at the high school. They didn’t know his name. Ma had a crying voice and told me to go outside and find out; she knew there’d be more information out on the streets.

  There was hardly anyone outside, but those I did see were running up to the high school, carrying things to fight with. At the high school the streets were so crowded you couldn’t move. They were tipping over police cars once again. Just when I’d made it through the crowd, a woman pulled me back by the arm and I fell onto the pavement. She had saved me from being trampled by a police horse. The cops on horses were charging at people, the horses climbing on top of the rioting crowds with their two front legs. I remember looking at the horses and thinking that they didn’t look as if they wanted to be doing the stunts their masters were forcing on them, knocking people’s heads with their hooves. I found out it wasn’t Frankie who was stabbed, but a kid named Michael Faith.

  They’d made all the white kids leave the building. So now the black kids were in the high school trapped by the thousands of people that I was standing with. I wanted to get home to tell Ma the news, but now I was stuck. We were surrounded. The police had us trapped, while we all had the blacks trapped. If I left the safety of the crowd, I’d be run over by one of the horses or motorcycles that were surrounding us. And now came the staties, marching in all kinds of crazy formations. You couldn’t tell what direction they would turn next, and if you were ever in their way, forget it. The only way out was up, and now that was covered by a helicopter flying in circles above our heads. It kept coming at us to scare us off, then changing direction instead of killing us all. Nothing scared this crowd—the people just gave the helicopter the finger and screamed things into the choppy wind that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t get home for another two hours, when the riot had simmered down, but all the way home people were still worked up. Teenagers on the corners were doing what they always did at the end of a day of battle: drinking and retelling stories of fights, reenacting blow after blow in slow motion. Michael Faith was in critical condition.

  Ma said at this point what’s the use in going to school. It certainly w
asn’t worth the risk of getting killed. Frankie was ready to quit after being kicked out so many times for getting in fights. He’d knocked out one black kid at Southie High and was suspended for ten days. When he’d come back, he’d knocked out another black kid as soon as he walked through the high school doors, and got suspended for twenty days. After twenty days out of school, he’d had no idea what the teacher was going on about at the front of the class. Then yet another racial fight broke out in the classroom, and Frankie’d knocked out one more black kid. That’s when they suspended him for thirty days, and Frankie never went back. By the ninth grade he was a dropout, and Ma couldn’t afford to send any more kids to Catholic school. I was surprised that Frankie’d ended up a dropout; he was the one who’d always made me sit down after school to recite all of the times tables for him. I knew the times tables before the rest of my class had even started studying them. And besides that, he’d been admitted to Boston Tech in the seventh grade, which meant he was smart, because Tech was an exam school. But that was all before he was stabbed, and long before the buses started to roll.

  Mary left school too. She’d recently walked by a black table in English High’s cafeteria—black kids sat with blacks, whites with whites—when one of the girls stood in front of her and accused her of trying to have hair like a black girl. Mary had naturally tight curly hair that spread out big and wide on its own. “You wanna look like one of us?!” the black girl said. Mary had already been jumped by a gang of black girls and had had enough. She said back, “What the fuck would I want looking like the ugly bitch that you are?” Then the whole cafeteria erupted into a food fight, which was becoming an everyday occurrence. Mary got jabbed deep with an Afro pick. She never went back to school after that, and Ma didn’t blame her—she just got after her to get enrolled in night school at Southie High. Mary started working full time at Jolly Donuts.

  Around the same time, Johnnie was getting his cap and gown ready for graduation from Boston Latin School, and I wondered if this would be one of the few family high school graduations I’d ever see. It was.

  “Get your coats on,” Ma said. “We’re gonna pay Coley a visit in the hospital.” She was talking to Johnnie, Joe, and Frank, since they could protect her while she gave Coley the beating she intended to. Coley was in the Carney Hospital in Dorchester. He’d had an operation on account of something happening to his pancreas from all the years of drinking. But that was the least of his problems; he’d put Ma in a rage, denying that he was Seamus’s father. He wasn’t Seamus yet, actually; we didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl that Ma had inside of her. Anyway, off they went to Coley’s bedside, Ma four months pregnant, protected by her three muscled bodyguards, determined never to let a man fuck her over again, no victims here.

  I waited up, and when they got back I heard them retelling the story to each other, laughing their heads off. They’d been arrested but it was all worth it. “Did you see the son of a bitch shaking in his bed?” Ma laughed. She pulled the curtain around Coley’s bed and told his roommate to sit still. “We’re only gonna take care of this guy,” she said. With the curtain closed, Ma started ripping tubes and shutting off machines. She yanked the two tubes that were going up Coley’s nose to drain some kind of fluid out of him. Then she sucker punched him a few times. The boys just watched. She said the other guy in the room was scared shitless when he got a look at Coley, all beat up, pressing some button for the nurse, and screaming something in his Connemara Gaelic. When they ran down the back stairwell of the Carney, they were stopped by two doctors who couldn’t restrain them. That’s when security was called and they were brought in for questioning. The security guards sided with Ma when she told them about Coley denying his kid. “You shoulda kicked him in the balls too,” said one of them.

  Ma filed a complaint, bringing Coley up on charges for punching her in the stomach. He never did punch her in the stomach. Ma could beat him in a fight even if he wasn’t in a hospital bed. She just wanted to file before he did. Besides, he’d done something far worse than punching her in the stomach—he’d abandoned his own kid that was inside her, a kid with no defenses, except for the wrath of Ma. I liked Coley and felt bad when I pictured him twisted up like a pretzel after Ma got through with him. And since I didn’t remember Mac, it was scary to see such fury—as I’d only known in the riots—creep into our home. But my thoughts turned to wondering if my own father had denied me. If he had, he’d deserve the same thing Coley got, maybe worse, I thought. He’d deserve the wrath of the TPF! To me there was nothing worse than a no-good bastard of a father. But I put those thoughts out of my head, reassuring myself that I had a good father, as Ma had told me. Sure enough, Coley did press charges: assault and battery. And Ma was scheduled to appear in court after the St. Paddy’s Day holiday.

  St. Patrick’s Day 1975 brought more armed camps to our town. The authorities figured that with all the drinking, the Southie people would erupt into antibusing violence once more. There were so many TPF, state troopers, and army types on the sidelines of the parade that we kids could hardly see the step dancers or the posters with the faces of Irish martyrs from the 1916 rebellion. We heard the bagpipes, but whenever any of us climbed a mailbox or lamppost for a better view, some cop on a horse came at us with his club drawn. The whole thing’s ruined, I thought.

  I found a staircase to stand on just as Southie started to let out roars for our saviors from the busing terror: City Councilor Louise Day Hicks, head to toe in the brightest green old lady clothes, followed by her right-hand man, Jimmy Kelly, a gangster from the Mullen gang, looking more like a politician since the busing started; Senator Billy Bulger, comical smirk and green tie, marching straight-shouldered and strong, and bouncing the shelaliegh he gripped, as if he were the conductor and we the orchestra; Representative Ray Flynn, out of breath because of all the jogging he was doing from handshake to handshake, zigzagging Broadway and pointing at each of us as if he knew us personally. He had one of those red faces that looked like it was melting, like the guys who sat on the wino wall on Broadway. Then there was Dapper, who marched down the street, fists clenched and a scowl on his face, as if he was looking for Judge Garrity himself to personally rip his throat out. The parade was turning into an antibusing rally, a political one. I only wanted to see more floats, with shamrocks and the guy dressed up like St. Patrick chasing the snakes out of Ireland.

  I had a great time anyway, and whenever I saw Kevin, he had another green plastic bugle or ENGLAND GET OUT OF IRELAND button for me and Danny, stolen from one of the stands. He even gave Kathy a kelly green woolen scally cap, and she wore it tilted sideways, just like her little gangster boyfriends. Kevin also gave her his last STOP FORCED BUSING pin with a shamrock in the middle. When the adults disappeared into the bars that lined Broadway, gangs of kids roamed the streets looking for ways to get in on all the booze that was flowing or the fights that were breaking out with outsiders who’d come to Southie for the parade. I went with my cousin Paul, Nellie’s son, to wait for our mothers outside the Car Stop Cafe. Ma was playing the accordion there, and I knew she’d have all kinds of free food in her pocketbook when she came out. I’d have to share it with Paul, though, because Nellie would have none. She was just in there to drink, while Ma was scamming up some cash and food.

  As we were waiting, paddy wagons sped right up to the door of the Car Stop. Cops got out with billy clubs. Then more police cars came wailing down the street, a whole line of them stretching two blocks. Then the TPF showed up, jumping out of a big police bus, with their helmets on and shields drawn. They all charged into the Car Stop, which was packed to begin with. I saw through the door that they were strutting slowly through the bar, banging their billy clubs on each table they passed until the whole place was filled with the organized rhythm of thumps. I was terrified and tried to get in, yelling, “Ma!” A cop pushed me out the door onto the pavement, and I could see through the window that someone had shut off all the lights. That’s when they started bea
ting everyone senseless. Paul didn’t seem too worried—he knew Nellie would be all right somehow, like she always was when she got drunk. But Ma was pregnant, and I thought she’d be dead.

  The door opened again and I saw one of the TPF beat into the skull of an old man who was on all fours under a table. I started crying and ran home to find my big brothers. Paul sat in front of the bar waiting for his mother, as if none of it fazed him at all. When I got home, there was Ma climbing the stairs, in her green maternity suit and spike heels. She was holding her head. She said the Gestapo had knocked her on the head but that she was fine. She’d slid out the back door of the bar, down a narrow corridor filled with cases of beer. She said she almost didn’t fit through, with her stomach and her accordion. She didn’t know what happened to Nellie. “They’re gonna kill people down there,” she said.

  Ma turned her big leather pocketbook upside down and dumped all kinds of corned beef, Irish bread, and potatoes onto the kitchen table. It was all squished between wet napkins that had to be peeled off. She told us she’d been the cause of the riot at the Car Stop, with her accordion. She’d been playing her favorite reel “The Siege of Ennis,” when the owner announced that the bar was closed. He was trying to get rid of one troublemaker who was drunk and starting fights. The owner ordered Ma to stop the music. He said the party was over. Ma stopped, but then the troublemaker ordered her to keep playing. “He was this big fat truck driver,” she said, stretching her arms out to show us the width of him. She’d started playing again while he stood over her, clapping his hands to the reels. That’s when the owner called the police. “He probably figured one or two cops might come and get rid of the guy,” she said. She let out a big sigh and plopped herself onto the couch with her feet up. “Make me a cup of tea,” she said. “Jesus Christ, it’s good to be home.” I put on the kettle. I was glad she was home too, but I didn’t tell her that I’d been outside the bar scared that she’d be dead. “That’ll teach him not to call the cops in Southie. They destroyed the place.” Everyone knew that the cops were the enemy and that you shouldn’t call them unless you wanted the Gestapo, marching in with their boots and shields, looking for bones to break.