All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  As an activist, I’d spent the past three years meeting some of the best people I could ever hope to meet in a lifetime. That was important after years of witnessing so much viciousness and dirty dealing. Like the activists and the mothers of Roxbury and Charlestown, Charles Stephenson helped restore my faith.

  At first I wasn’t so sure of Stephenson—I had little trust left in me. Although I was relieved Stephenson was from rural western Massachusetts, with no connection to the Boston Police Department, I worried that he wasn’t convinced by my ranting about police conspiracies in this case. He seemed to think that it was all a tragic mistake, the result of police incompetence and ineffective counsel.

  But Stephenson became increasingly distraught and traumatized the deeper he got into Steven’s case, witnessing blatant corruption firsthand. In order to convince the trial judge, June Gonsalves, that the trial she’d presided over was worthy of appellate review, Stephenson said he had to be exact in showing that Steven might have been exonerated had his lawyer done his job. We went before the judge a few times with arguments to get access to the firearm that killed Tommy, so that new ballistics experts could do test firings in the presence of the prosecutor. The judge wasn’t budging; no access until Stephenson made the right argument. Stephenson traveled two hours into Boston every time, and the skinny bespectacled man sometimes looked as if he’d keel over from the emotional stress. “I have two young kids, you know,” he told me. Stephenson’s compassion struck me, and I realized then that this was probably my first exposure to what it meant to be a real father, and how similar it was to the protectiveness I’d only ever seen from mothers.

  Finally Stephenson was granted access to the gun. On that day, he called me from a telephone booth, told me the good news, and went for lunch. When he came back to the clerk’s office he had a smile on his face and an order from the judge. “That gun’s not here, sir,” the clerk said, looking up from paperwork. “Says here it was sent to the Boston Police Ballistics Unit. To be destroyed,” she added. “This was issued about a half hour ago.” That’s when Stephenson found out what really had gone on in Steven’s case. He sped off to ballistics and saved the gun from destruction with his order from the judge. He later told me that he didn’t want to find out who’d issued the order, or to rock the boat, because by then all he wanted was to get through this case and clear Steven’s name. And that he did. The new test firings, combined with expert pediatric testimony about the absurdity of Tommy having an eighteen-inch arm, and evidence of questionable police tactics, made three judges unanimously agree to throw out the conviction. Charles Stephenson got nothing out of this case, in spite of what he gave to us. He said he knew Steven was innocent and he wanted nothing more than to undo an injustice—as much as he could. He couldn’t give Steven back his friend, but he certainly did help to restore Steven’s faith in people.

  And for me, discovering there were people like Stephenson—and Steven’s DYS psychiatrist—in the world, helped me finally to understand what justice meant.

  C H A P T E R 11

  V I G I L

  JAY AND CHRIS KING.” “ADAM ENOS.” “JOHN FITZPATRICK.” “James Boyden the Third.” “James Boyden the Fourth.” “Bobby Barrett.” “Herbie Stone.” Shamrocks bedecked the church altar, and rage came with the tears that fell from Irish eyes. I could have been in South Boston, but this was Charlestown. I fled out of the church. I couldn’t take any more. It was too close to home.

  When I’d read in the Globe about mothers in Charlestown speaking up in defiance of the Irish gangsters and the neighborhood code of silence, I knew I had to meet these people. “Please don’t send me another cold cut platter,” Sandy King pleaded with her neighbors in the article. What she wanted was answers about her two sons’ murders in front of silent witnesses, and for the good people of the town to start speaking up. Most people thought mothers like these wouldn’t live long, with their public attacks of the drug establishment. Instead, complaints came only from the real estate agents, who’d been making a killing as poor and working-class Charlestown disintegrated and property values boomed in a hot housing market. “You’re giving Charlestown a black eye,” said one real estate agent to Sandy King. I thought, looking at the fierce face of this mother in the articles, that he’d be lucky if she didn’t give him a black eye.

  I’d met the Charlestown mothers while Citizens for Safety was putting together a display at City Hall plaza, posting the faces of people who’d died from gun violence. Most of the victims in the posters were black, but I knew all too well that that wasn’t the whole story. I still couldn’t get myself to set foot in Southie, never mind talking about violence there. So I went to Charlestown. The mothers volunteered their kids’ pictures, at first reluctantly, having trouble trusting, being from a town like mine, always besieged by outsiders with their own agendas. The Charlestown mothers had already joined black mothers across the city in battles with legislators and judges and cops, and when they saw their kids’ faces in large posters alongside those of black children, their sisterhood across race felt even more natural. At the exhibit, black and white mothers took turns holding each other up, and sometimes picking each other up off the ground.

  The Charlestown women invited me to speak as a “survivor” at their vigil, and that’s how I ended up sitting on the church steps, unable to move after seeing all those shamrocks and trinkets, just like the ones I’d buried my own brothers with. But I knew these women like I knew my own mother. They’d kick my ass if I fled the vigil on them. I laughed to myself about that one, still trembling in front of the church. I had to go back inside, I had to speak to the crowd of faces that looked so much like those of my own neighbors, and when I left that place at the end of the day, I knew someday I’d have to move back home—to Southie.

  After the Charlestown vigil and my night of wandering through Old Colony among the ghosts of my life, the neighborhood’s pull on me was stronger than ever. And after giving a tour of Southie for U.S. News & World Report, I was certain about moving back. Steven’s case was behind us, and my recent experiences with people who gave yet wanted nothing in return helped redeem my life experiences with those who only take away.

  I got an apartment just outside the Old Colony Project, on Southie’s West Side. It was summer, and I’d been four years away. I drove past the little kids who ruled the small lanes with their street hockey and their loud cheers of solidarity as they threw water balloons at passing buses. After settling in, I took a walk up toward Broadway, past the curious stares of mothers on lawn chairs, wiping the sweat from their brows and doing anything but minding their own business. When I got to Broadway with its rows of double- and triple-parked cars, I was shocked to be once again in a place where traffic came to a grinding halt to let women with baby carriages cross the street. Tough-looking guys and girls held the door for each other at the corner stores, and I finally admitted to myself that there was no place in the world I’d rather be.

  Some things had changed. New people had been buying up and gutting out property in what was becoming the trendy Boston neighborhood of the nineties. Some neighborhood people in coffee shops talked about their property values going up, while others talked about becoming homeless with the new high rents. One day I decided to try one of the new espresso shops that had opened for the yuppies. I waited in line with the “outsiders,” resentful of their proud talk about “bringing the neighborhood up.” I cringed as they all pronounced the “r” in the sugar that went into their grande-double-shot-skinny-mochaccinos. Bobby Got-a-Quarter wandered in looking like he’d just woken up, head wobbling away, eyes fixed on the breasts of a newcomer. He didn’t mean anything by it; he just wanted a quarter. The preppie young woman moved nervously, trying not to look at Bobby. Bobby didn’t say anything. He’s been asking for quarters for so long he doesn’t have to ask anymore. You just give him a quarter; those are the rules. The newcomer didn’t know this—she probably just thought he was a slightly horny special needs man.
<
br />   The uneasiness was broken when a Southie guy stepped out of line and poured some coins into Bobby’s hand. “No quarters today, Bob, there’s five dimes—you can change ’em in for two quarters if ya want.” I felt proud then to be one of the people in line who was from the old Southie, with its loyalty and caring for poor souls like Bobby Got-a-Quarter. The Southie girl behind the counter shook two quarters out of her tip cup and slapped them both onto the counter, proud to abide by a neighborhood obligation to Bobby. “Here ya go, Bob, that’s for me and Sheila,” she said, pointing behind her to the other young girl making coffee. Bobby never said anything, not even thank you. He didn’t have to. This is Southie, and for better or worse some things are understood in the silence.

  People in donut shops and on corners seemed to be talking more openly about their problems. Gentrification had added to my neighbors’ sense that they were walking on a sinking landfill. Maybe that’s why I heard more honest stories of poverty and lack of opportunities for young people, even as one of the biggest development projects in the country was visible from the rooftops of the D Street Housing Project, where black and white teens were still distracted by race, still standing their ground, and still going nowhere. Southie’s waterfront, former home to manufacturing and shipping jobs, was set to become “the Seaport District,” with plans underway for billions of dollars in development, luxury condos, and jobs that these Boston Public School kids—graduates and dropouts alike—would not be educated for.

  Whitey had gone on the lam after the feds, whose collaboration with the gangster had been exposed, finally indicted him for racketeering, drug dealing, and murder. With Whitey out of the way, some people seemed to feel more comfortable talking about the drugs in Southie. But many talked about addiction and social decay as if they were new and wouldn’t be happening if Whitey were still around. Walking down Broadway, though, I saw Whitey’s legacy everywhere.

  “Hey, honey, you got some change for a girl down on her luck?” I looked over to where she was sitting on the wall, looking as if she were hanging on for dear life. “Debbie!” I said. “You’re Debbie Alinardo, right?” I almost didn’t recognize her. She’d aged since she’d hung around with Kathy, going to construction school after the two of them got out of a group home. “That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” she said, stumbling off the wall to approach me. She was drunk. “You don’t remember me,” I said. “I’m Kathy MacDonald’s brother, Mike.” “For fuck’s sake,” she said, “I thought you were some yuppie.” She took off her fishing hat with all the badges stuck to it, as if she were paying her respects. Then she looked at me and started to cry. “Kathy MacDonald, I love Kathy MacDonald!” she screamed to all the passersby on Broadway. She made the sign of the cross as if Kathy were dead. Then one of her buddies from the wall, an older guy about twice her age, came stumbling over to ask me for a cigarette. “Fuck off,” she said, belting him in the stomach with an upper cut. “That’s Kathy MacDonald’s brother. I fuckin’ love Kathy MacDonald!” she screamed at people all the way across the street. She grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me and asking, “How’s Helen? Helen MacDonald was the best-looking woman on Broadway!” The older guy next to her knew Ma too. “A good woman,” he said. “We never went hungry with her pocketbook full of toast.” His blurry eyes became clearer with a smile, as he shook his head, looking off into the distance, as if he could see the old days right in front of him. “A saint she was, and with all she went through, to still care about us.… Hey, can you help me out with a cigarette?” I gave him one. “Helen MacDonald was a knockout,” Debbie added, “the best set of tits on Broadway!”

  Debbie was a regular now up at the wall, hanging out with the older guys. She told me that all her friends were either dead or in jail. She’d found some new friends now, but she longed for the old days when her partying was just a normal part of growing up. Now she was thirty-five, looking almost as old as the other guys on the wall, and they were around sixty. She’d been a beautiful girl at one time, wearing the latest flash gear on the corners of Old Colony. Now she was wearing men’s clothes and a fishing hat with veterans’ medals and buttons with AA slogans, like one that said EASY DOES IT. I told her I had to go, but she wouldn’t let me. She kept hugging me and kissing me and crying over the old days. When she finally released me, she kept waving and screaming the names of my family. “Kathy MacDonald! Joe!” She even screamed the name of Joe’s customized van, where she’d slept more than once when she ran away from home: “The Blue Goose!” Then she clenched her fist and threw it up, like a symbol of power or unity, and screamed, “Patterson Way! Fuckin’ Patterson Way!”

  It felt right being back in Southie, but I started to get depressed. There was still so much sadness around. After a few weeks, I started to bump into other familiar faces, neighbors who’d lost their children, the hidden Southie. And all too often I heard through the grapevine of “shameful” deaths: suicides, overdoses from a new growing heroin epidemic, and occasional murders. But now I knew what I wanted to do. Rather than let it eat at me, or chase me away, as I’d once done, I brought home all the anger, resolve, and organizing I’d learned in Roxbury and Charlestown.

  With the help of the Charlestown mothers, we started a group for families of people who’d “died too young.” At first the Southie mothers who showed up wouldn’t talk about how they’d lost their children, except to say that it was an accident or an illness. But over time, it became clear that most had lost someone to drugs, violence, or suicide. And after hearing from the Charlestown mothers with their keen sense of justice, they were brought to tears, rage, and acknowledgment. More and more families started to come to our weekly meetings. A few had indeed lost loved ones to freak accidents and illnesses, and it was great to see them stay, not afraid to stand in solidarity with the mothers who’d been victimized and silenced by violence and the drug trade. “Blood is blood,” as one woman said.

  At those meetings, I learned even more how much I loved the real Southie, the good Southie. It all came home to me when one mother, explaining how her son who’d died of AIDS hadn’t been allowed a funeral at a local church, and how she’d had to take him to a gay church, brought the lone father in our group close to tears. A tough guy, he’d come because his daughter had been murdered, and he was moved by what he’d heard to talk openly about his deep respect for all life, a rule his daughter had lived by. He held back his tears for the mother’s loss as well as his own, demanding a letter-writing campaign to the priests. That’s the real Southie, I thought.

  The group started planning a vigil like the one in Charlestown. The first thing we did was put together a list of names of those we’d remembered dying young. We ended up with a list of 250, most of them victims of the drug trade, crime, or suicide. We published it in the South Boston Tribune, alongside the usual articles by the South Boston Information Center, about how our biggest problem was black people bringing drugs into the neighborhood, and the featured City Point weddings, bazaars, and cake sales. We announced that the vigil would be on November 2, All Souls’ Day; and with the criticism we expected for a vigil for the likes of drug users, murder victims, bank robbers, and suicides, we were glad we hadn’t picked All Saints’ Day. But Southie’s response was positive, and in the end even mothers who’d lost their children in infancy added their children’s names, and stood with the rest of us.

  In the summer of 1996, Citizens for Safety was getting ready to organize its fourth annual gun buyback program. One day I was walking by the courthouse on Broadway, reading about Brian Havlin, a neighbor who’d been ambushed in the Old Harbor Project and shot nine times after an argument. As I passed the courthouse, I saw a redheaded woman pacing. I knew that face. She looked like Ma after losing Frankie, with anger and sadness welling up in tears that refused to fall while her daughters stood by her. “Are you Mrs. Havlin?” I asked.

  Kathy Havlin started coming to our South Boston Vigil Group meetings along with her three daughters. She was angry about the
hypocrisy of our politicians, who’d only sent her their sympathies once they found out how well thought of Brian was and that his murderer was a junkie no one liked anyway. She also vented her fury at the priest who’d come to her project apartment, discovered she was a single mother, and looked around the room asking, “Do you work or anything?” She was working on bringing the murderer to justice and wanted to shut down the bar where the fight had started. She also wanted to do something about guns on the street. Before long she was meeting me at the end of her long work day, showing up on Geneva Ave. in the heart of black Dorchester, to hand out gun buyback fliers with Tina Chery, who’d lost her son Louis to gunfire on that street. Kathy walked up to tough-looking black teens hanging out on corners and pleaded with them to spread the word about the buyback.

  By 1996, our buyback program was led by survivors from every neighborhood in Boston. Terri Titcomb, whose son Albie had recently been shot in Charlestown over a fifty-dollar drug debt, led the press conference, her back and shoulders buttressed by outstretched hands of all colors. She asked parents to turn in guns, teenagers to turn in guns, and legislators to make stricter laws on the gun industry.

  That buyback, we took in fewer guns, and the Boston Police Department didn’t see any reason to continue the project. With their growing emphasis on “zero tolerance” policing and suppression tactics, the cops weren’t impressed by our multiracial mumbo jumbo. But as we’d found year after year, the tougher guns were coming in with each successive buyback. I had the buyback hotline in my apartment in Southie, so I knew where the guns were coming from, and they weren’t coming from little old widows, as the cops liked to say. I got directly involved in a number of turn-ins, one from a former gang member, another from a thirteen-year-old girl hiding a gun for her boyfriend until he got out of DYS, and one from a murder victim’s mother, who’d been hell-bent on revenge until she’d become one of the program’s spokespersons.