All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  My own brothers and sisters bragged of their links to Whitey. Frankie came home from sparring at McDonough’s Gym with stories of Whitey studying the boxers from the sidelines. Most of the guys Whitey surrounded himself with were boxers. Kevin was always making like Whitey was his father, and that he would grow up to inherit the kingdom. He said Whitey always patted him on the head whenever Kevin would go out of his way to say hi to him. And Kathy bragged that her boyfriends and their mothers worked for Whitey, selling drugs from the privacy of their modern furnished project apartment, and paying him “rent,” in addition to what they paid the BHA. She said she’d be rich someday when her boyfriends got a little older and started making real loot, robbing bank trucks with “the boys,” as we called our revered gangsters. I never knew if any of these stories were true, but at the age of nine I was envious of all the teenagers with their connection to so much power. Visible or not, we all had a hero, a powerful champion, in the midst of all the troubles that enemy forces were heaving on us since the busing. Whitey was even more powerful than our elected politicians. They worked for him, that’s what Ma always said. I wanted to see the face of Whitey Bulger, so that I too could feel that power that everyone else bragged they were so connected to.

  No one had his eyes on Whitey more than Kevin. I’m sure he hardly ever saw him, but Kevin always had one up on the other kids in the neighborhood by knowing more about the workings of the Irish Mafia. The conversations on the corners of Southie were changing. From a distance I watched the teenagers who were still reenacting slow motion war stories, but instead of the blow-by-blow punches in the air, they’d started to draw invisible guns, imitating gangsters exchanging slow motion gunfire. And there was Kevin right in the middle of it, claiming to know more about Whitey than anyone.

  For a while I was following Kevin to the Boys Club, joining the swim team, playing ping-pong, shooting pool, and basketball. Kevin was winning first place in every league at the club. He left every awards banquet with his arms full of trophies, and a proud face, even prouder than years ago when he’d bring home the spoils from the Irish Field Day or the local bars. But by the time he’d turned twelve, he’d lost interest in the trophies, and instead of following him to the Boys Club I was once again following him around on his trail to make some money.

  During the fall of 1975, Kevin had gotten a job as a paperboy for the Herald American. He didn’t want to work for the Globe, because some guys in the neighborhood were hijacking Globe trucks and robbing them at gunpoint to protest busing. “I’m liable to get shot,” Kevin said; so he went to the Herald and carried on about how much he hated the Globe. The guys there got a kick out of that one, and hired him on the spot. That year was Phase Two of the plan to desegregate, when more Boston neighborhoods would be dragged into busing terror, so even more regiments of police stood guard over our streets to keep us from sparking a wider rebellion. But the streets were quiet when Kevin and I got up at the crack of dawn to deliver papers with our dog Sarge, and we felt pretty important to see all the troops looking so intimidating just for us.

  It was on these long early morning journeys that Kevin told me wild stories about the heroic Whitey Bulger and the Irish Mafia. I’d never heard of the Irish Mafia until recently; I’d always thought the Mafia was Italian. Kevin seemed to know all the details, though. He said that Whitey had been in Alcatraz for robbing banks, but that they’d let him go after he took LSD for the government in some kind of experiments about the drug; that Whitey was part of the Winter Hill gang in Somerville and had taken Southie over from the Mullen gang here. He talked about wild shoot-outs years ago in the very streets we were walking down on our paper route, between the Killeen gang and the Mullen gang, but said that everyone was united now, especially with the busing and all. I couldn’t follow his stories about gangs, and shoot-outs and takeovers, and whenever I got confused and asked a question about Whitey or the Mullen gang, or about LSD, Kevin told me to shut my mouth, that I was talking too loud. He told me I had an “Irish whisper.” I’d heard Ma say that about people who thought they were telling a secret but couldn’t keep their voices down. The Irish made fun of each other for not being able to keep secrets, and for talking too loud when they shouldn’t. “Especially with all the bad guys around these days,” Kevin added. Then he just went about his business delivering papers, waving hi to the customers, who called him a hard worker, and walking with his head down past the cops on horses and motorcycles lining the streets for the buses of black kids coming from Roxbury. Before I could ask him in another Irish whisper who the bad guys were, Kevin jerked his head sideways toward the cops. “Them are the bad guys,” he muttered under his breath. “Well, I already knew that one,” I belted out, “Anyone living in Southie with the Gestapo everywhere could have told you that.”

  One day when I didn’t go with Kevin on his paper route, he came home and shouted to Ma that he’d been robbed of all his collection money. He didn’t know what to tell the guys at the Herald who were expecting all the cash. Ma told Kevin just to tell the truth. But Kevin stopped going to work instead, and when his supervisor called him, he finally confessed to being robbed on his paper route “by some big guys that looked like weight lifters.… They put a knife to my throat.” He said he’d told the robbers that they had the wrong newspaper, that it was the Globe they wanted to rob, but that they’d told him to empty his pockets anyway. He told the supervisor he wouldn’t be coming back to work, that it was just too dangerous these days. Then he hung up the telephone. Later on he was laughing with Kathy in his bedroom at the very back of the apartment. She’d brought her friends up to the house to buy some pot from him. They didn’t know that I knew Kevin was selling pot, and when I walked in on them rolling a joint, they told me to screw. They weren’t letting me in on anything anymore, with my Irish whisper and all. I listened through the walls, though, and heard Kevin tell how he’d fooled the guys at the Herald into believing he’d been robbed, and that that was how he could afford to buy a half-pound of pot and some mescaline to start selling and make some real money. At the age of twelve, Kevin was now a player in the drug trade in South Boston. He said he’d have to keep it quiet, though, so he wouldn’t have to pay Whitey Bulger any of the money. He said that his “connection” paid up to Whitey, so he wasn’t really doing anything wrong.

  In the coming weeks, I started answering the door every five or ten minutes. People I had never seen before in my life were knocking and asking for Kevin. “Is Mini Mac there?” It seemed as if the most popular people in the neighborhood got the nicknames, like “Whitey” or “Skoochie.” Sometimes the knocks on the door started early in the morning, before any of us had even gotten up with the sound of helicopters and police motorcycles. Ma couldn’t believe how popular Kevin was. Kevin would step outside to the hallway for a few minutes, and I’d look through the peephole to see Kevin and some other teenager huddled in a corner. Then Kevin would come back inside, and I would be turning the channels of the TV, as if I was looking for something particular to watch, and minding my own business.

  Then adults started knocking, people in their twenties and thirties. Ma thought it was kind of weird, but would only comment on how retarded some of these people were, hanging out with little kids. “They need to get a life,” she said. Ma got sick of the knocks and told Kevin he’d better do something about it. That’s when we started to see less of Kevin. He started coming and going through his bedroom window. There was a tall oak tree that brushed up against the window, looking as if it would’ve grown right inside if it hadn’t taken an upward turn toward the roof. Kevin kept the upper half of his window open at all times and just climbed in and out from the roof. He could be in that back room all day long, and none of us would know it, except Kathy, who sometimes brought him clients so she could get a free joint for herself. Customers now just went up to the roof, lay face down near the edge, and poked their heads upside-down into Kevin’s window, saying pssst. My own room was next to Kevin’s, and one day M
arty McGrail lay down in the wrong spot and poked his head into my window by accident. I was taking a nap and woke up to an upside-down head psssting me, and scared Marty away when I yelled for Ma. After that I knew why we weren’t getting so many knocks at the door anymore.

  Phase Two of the busing brought Charlestown into the battle. And Charlestown was ready for nothing less than war. Back in the early days of busing, groups had formed with names like ROAR, or Restore Our Alienated Rights. The new group of mothers starting up in Charlestown was called Powder Keg, and their slogan was “Don’t Tread on Me.” We’d always heard Charlestown was a lot like Southie, with housing projects and people with shamrocks tattooed to their arms. They had an Irish Mafia too, but we always liked to think that our Whitey Bulger was smarter and more powerful. Whitey was so smart he’d convinced us that the addicts we were starting to see more and more weren’t really there. Whatever we were seeing, we figured it wasn’t half as bad as what the blacks over in Roxbury had. Or Charlestown, for that matter, where the gangsters and the politicians weren’t as organized as ours. Whitey kept a low profile during the riots in Southie, but everyone said he had something to do with the South Boston Marshalls, vigilantes who were supposedly passing out guns in Southie, getting everyone ready to protect the town. Kevin said that “the boys” in Charlestown were even crazier than ours, though, and that busing over there would make Southie look like Bethlehem on the first Christmas morning.

  During Phase One, Joe had gotten out of being sent to Roxbury by attending the trade school at Charlestown High. The trade school was separate from the regular high school, and attracted kids from all over the city. He said there were blacks in the trade school but that everyone got along because they weren’t being brought in on yellow buses yet. They chose to go there. But the peace ended in Charlestown when the buses rolled down the same streets where the Battle of Bunker Hill had been fought two hundred years earlier. The Charlestown kids started chanting the same chants we did in Southie: “Hell No, We Won’t Go!” Many of their teenagers got involved in boycotts and sit-ins, but many more ended up lining the streets to give the finger to the buses, to throw Molotov cocktails off project rooftops, and to stick hockey sticks into the spokes of speeding cop motorcycles. They said on the news that one Charlestown gang had filled glass bottles with acid and thrown them at the horses, burning their legs and sending cops crashing to the street. “They got balls over there!” That’s what Frankie said when he heard about that one.

  Joe had to start being careful hanging around with some of the black friends he’d made the year before. One afternoon he came home shaking. He said he was playing basketball in the high school gym with some black kids, when a group of townies challenged them to a game. The game started off innocently enough, but when Joe’s team from the trade school started winning, the townies started calling them niggers and jigaboos, and throwing punches instead of passes. The fight turned into a brawl, with Joe nearly knocking out one townie who’d called him a nigger lover and blindsided him. “That’s when the Gestapo came into the school and stopped all the fighting by cracking some heads with their batons,” Joe told us. The townies taunted Joe, saying they’d give him a beating after school, along with one of the black kids who’d also gotten the best of them in the fight.

  The school officials thought they were helping Joe and the black kid by letting them go home early, before the buses came. But the Charlestown mobs were already lining the streets, and teenagers from the projects were milling around on corners. “I turned around and there were about a hundred townies chasing after us with baseball bats and hockey sticks,” Joe told us, with big eyes. He said he ran for his life. “Hey, MacDonald, wait up!” the black kid had yelled, trying to catch up. Joe said he just screamed back to him, “You’re on your own,” and ran over the bridge out of Charlestown and into downtown Boston.

  Joe still looked shaken after he told the story. After that day, he started making friends with some of the townies, and made sure that he joined in some of the boycotts and sit-ins happening over there. He still attended Charlestown High, even though he said it was getting harder and harder not to become “another dropout from Southie.” As Ma kept saying, it seemed as if Judge Garrity was using his power to make a whole generation of dropouts and jailbirds in our neighborhood.

  “What a vicious son of a bitch,” Ma said, looking at the picture of a Southie neighbor from down the road on the front page of the Herald. He was aiming the pointed staff of an American flag and charging at a black lawyer in a suit. Ma said she’d just about had it. “Busing is a horror,” she said, “but this is no way to fight it. People like that are making us all look bad.” She said she was starting to think that some of the politicians in Southie were almost as bad as Judge Garrity himself. She thought they might be stirring things up in the drugged-out minds of people like the teenager in the Herald. “And the kids are the ones suffering,” she said. “Especially the ones who can’t get into the parochial schools with the seats filling up and the tuitions being raised.” She said she felt like she was kicked in the stomach every time she heard Jimmy Kelly talking about niggers this and niggers that at the Information Center where she’d been volunteering. She said she couldn’t get used to that word, no matter how much she hated the busing. Then there were the South Boston Marshalls, the militant group connected to the Information Center. We all wanted to stop the busing, but sometimes it was confusing. One day you’d be clapping and cheering the inspirational words of Louise Day Hicks and Senator Billy Bulger, and the next day you’d see the blood on the news, black and white people’s blood. And here was a black man being beaten with an American flag on the national news. We sat on a legless couch in the Old Colony Project and watched the violent pictures of another bloody protest. Ma said she didn’t know where to turn, what to belong to, and neither did I.

  We all wanted to belong to something big, and the feeling of being part of the antibusing movement along with the rest of Southie had been the best feeling in the world. But it wasn’t feeling so good anymore; we were losing—to the liberals and to the racists. Even Frankie had to find something besides the crowds at Darius Court to be part of. Boxing at McDonough’s Gym made Frank a winner. He came home from bouts in a good mood. He said he felt pumped from all the winning. He was proud of his ability in the ring and bragged to us, showing Ma all his moves. Ma showed him some of her moves too. She always said that if she’d been a boy, she would’ve been a boxer. Coley agreed with her on that one. Frank was feeling good about himself. It got so he could knock out anyone he wanted to in the ring, black or white, when they fought in the statewide bouts.

  Ma thanked God that Frank was hanging out at McDonough’s Gym every day, away from the buses. The gym was behind the courthouse, and attracted boxers from all over Southie. Many kids went from the courts right into the gym to get away from the trouble in the streets. They were safe there, especially with all the gangsters who watched over them in the boxing ring, cheering the kids on, and sometimes becoming their trainers. Boxing was becoming Southie’s prized sport, attracting some of the toughest kids in the neighborhood for bloody but regulated battles. It was better than fighting in the street, where you might get arrested by the bad guys. And it kept Frankie and other kids like him out of Old Colony Project for the day. Frankie said Whitey Bulger joked that someday Frank could be his bodyguard.

  The whole country was celebrating America’s two hundredth birthday, and the nuns at St. Augustine’s kept trying to get us kids to draw American flags and eagles. I was the one in the class who could draw, so the other kids had me draw their pictures. Then they’d scrawl STOP FORCED BUSING with their crayons underneath the bald eagle. One kid even wrote GEORGE WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT underneath the American flag that I’d drawn for him. The Tall Ships were going to be pulling into the harbor right down the street from the Old Colony Project, and the Gestapo were watching over us heavily now, so that we didn’t make another bloody scene for all of America to se
e that we weren’t feeling free. But most people in the neighborhood were more excited that George Wallace was planning a trip to South Boston, to run for president and to promise to get the government off our backs.

  In Southie all the talk now was about George Wallace, who would end forced busing for sure if he became president of the United States. The South Boston Information Center covered its trucks with his campaign signs, and yelled through their loudspeakers down Patterson Way that everyone should vote for Wallace. He was almost as popular in the neighborhood as Whitey Bulger. At first Ma said she wasn’t too sure about Wallace, with all the news reports about him wanting to go back to the days of black people being second-class citizens, and some even said he talked about sending the blacks back to Africa. But eventually she changed her mind and went with Wallace when she realized he was the only one out there who was paying attention to Southie, the only one who’d work to end forced busing forever. The national news focused on us once again, covering Wallace’s trip to Southie. And there was Ma one night on TV, with a George Wallace button pinned to her rabbit fur jacket. “Maybe then some of these kids in the streets could go back to school,” she said into the news cameras on Broadway.