All Souls

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: "[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define."

But the threats-poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world-were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be "the best place in the world."

We meet Ma, Michael's mini-skirted, accordian-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children—there are eventually eleven—through a combination of high spirits and inspired "getting over." And there are Michael's older siblings—Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero—whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride.

But too soon Southie becomes a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger, later revealed to be an FBI informant even as he ran the drug culture that Southie supposedly never had. It was a world primed for the escalation of class violence-and then, with deadly and sickening inevitability, of racial violence that swirled around forced busing. MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling "part of it all, part of something bigger than I'd ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night."

Within a few years-a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency-the neighborhood's collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family's tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that
doesn't allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist, first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he can't help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.

From Chapter 5: “Looking for Whitey”

Another one to make you a slave.’’ that’s what Nana said to Ma, looking at Seamus in the nursery at St. Margaret’s Hospital. Ma just laughed at her. She’d never gotten along with her mother—Ma said she was old-fashioned—and there was no sense in trying to relate now. Nana and Grandpa hadn’t even known Ma was pregnant until she went into labor. Ma kept it from them, knowing they’d judge her and her baby since she wasn’t married to Coley. She just wore big coats and held her big leather pocketbook in front of her stomach whenever she went to their house, among those lace curtain Irish neighbors in West Roxbury. Nana and Grandpa knew about me being illegitimate, but they never mentioned it, since most of their friends from Ireland thought that I’d come from Ma’s marriage to Mac—‘‘a bad marriage but a marriage before God nonetheless,’’ as Father Murphy said. I was close to Nana; she was my godmother and had been Patrick’s godmother too, so she took a special liking to me. I just had to brush off the bad things she said about Ma, and now I had to ignore her frowning gaze at Seamus. To make things more confusing for Nana and Grandpa’s Irish friends, Ma gave Seamus the last name King, from her short marriage to Bob King, whom they’d barely met. She had to put some name on the birth certificate; she knew welfare would never find Bob King, since he was probably homeless; and even though she’d gotten back together with Coley, we couldn’t be sure he’d stick around for too long. Ma was looking out for us again, making sure our welfare check wouldn’t be cut.

All I knew was that I was thrilled to come straight home from St. Augustine’s every day to see my little brother. I remember how clean and fresh he smelled even when he spit up on my shoulder. I was tired of all the battles, the rock throwing and the protests, and I was excited to be around something so new as Seamus. I just wanted to protect him, to keep him as fresh as the day he was born; and I became aware of how hard that might be when I started to take him out for a push around the front courtyard of Patterson Way, with all the buckled-up concrete catching the carriage wheels.

Ma liked me to take him outside every day after school. She always complained that the air in our apartment was bad for kids, with the smell of cockroach exterminator and the radiators going full blast even on a warm Indian summer afternoon. It seemed as if all the kids in the neighborhood had asthma. I’d walk Seamus in circles, around and around, on the beaten-up cement out front. The women on the stoop followed me with their eyes. I kept count so I could tell Ma how many times I’d pushed him around. ‘‘That’s twenty-nine times already!’’ I’d yell up to Ma. ‘‘Keep going,’’ she’d say from the window, ‘‘the air’s good for him.’’ I liked minding Seamus, but everyone wanted to come and look at him and smile in his face. Chickie was friendly to us now, and one time she came up to us, fixing Seamus’s blanket in a motherly way, and yelling up to Ma that all Ma’s kids looked like movie stars. Then she started talking baby talk. ‘‘Hiyaaa, hiyeee sweetie,’’ she sang, in the sweetest softest voice I’d ever heard coming out of her mouth. I started to see how babies did that to people, changed their voices and everything, no matter how mean or tough they seemed right before they’d laid eyes on the baby. Skoochie came by to show me the baby clothes she’d stolen downtown, taking them out of bags and sizing them up against Seamus, lying in his carriage. I sent her up to Ma, and she soon came back downstairs, folding up her empty bags. With Ma’s money in her hand, she called over to some teenagers I’d heard were selling pills. I just kept walking in circles, watching the action in the streets. Kids my age would ask if they could push the carriage, and when I let them they’d start running fast right off the curb toward the traffic—for some excitement, I guess. That kind of stuff made me frantic and nearly got me into a few fistfights, but everyone usually backed down from me, since the kids in the neighborhood were still afraid of my big brothers.

The worst thing about minding Seamus was when I’d hear a neighbor down the street calling someone a douchebag or a cunt. I couldn’t believe they’d say those words in front of a baby. Of course, they didn’t think they were doing it in front of a baby—they were down the street. I half realized that since Seamus was only a few weeks old anyway, it probably didn’t matter what he heard; and when they’d come up to the carriage the same people who’d just called someone a douchebag would start talking baby talk to him and tucking in his blanket. But I couldn’t help worrying for Seamus, with his fresh clean baby smell and brand-new terry cloth baby suits, in the middle of all this anger and confusion and drug dealing and fighting. I still loved our world of Old Colony, but I wasn’t always so sure about that now that I had a little brother to wheel around the broken-up courtyards.

After Seamus was born, the Boston Housing Authority broke down one of our walls for us, adding a second apartment. Only three families in Old Colony had a ‘‘breakthrough’’ apartment. Ma had pulled a few strings with the local politicians she’d met by volunteering for the South Boston Information Center and by playing the accordion at political fundraisers. We were the envy of the neighborhood now, with ten rooms in all, including two kitchens and two bathrooms. We had so much space that Ma had to start collecting furniture from the dumpster to fill up the house. I’d yell out the window to Ma, begging her to stop going through the dumpster, pulling out chairs. I didn’t want anyone to see her. My friends all bragged about their expensive living room sets stolen from the backs of trucks. But she’d just play it up, dragging some contraption behind her up three flights of stairs, ‘‘Look at this beautiful recliner!’’ It was really a lawn chair that one of the ladies on the stoop had left outside, expecting it to still be there when she got back. I was always afraid to let friends in the house, because they might find something that they’d thrown in the trash or just left outside.

We had it made now. Most of us had our own bedroom, and I had a feeling we would be in Old Colony forever. Ten fully furnished rooms with wall-to-wall green, blue, and orange shag rugs; free heat, light, and gas; Skoochie’s designer-label clothes for a quarter the price; all the excitement right out our front windows—‘‘Scenes better than anything on the TV,’’ Ma said—and the thrill of being on the inside of the exclusive world of Old Colony. We were privileged. And even though I was still a little worried for Seamus, I could convince myself, like everyone else, that we were in a superior kingdom.