All Souls: A family Story From Southie

   In 2000, when this book was getting rave reviews in the papers, I couldn’t believe any of it. First off, I’d never heard of Irish-Americans living in urban housing projects, so that was a bit of a shock. Secondly, I had a hard time believing that anybody could feel any affection for a horrible neighborhood. I wondered why the author’s community was full of single welfare mothers, when birth control was available. Why were they all on welfare, when Boston had jobs? Why would they choose to stay in a high-crime area? Had they never heard of white privilege? The reason I couldn’t believe the story is that I had only been to Boston once, and I’d never seen the Old Colony housing projects. When I asked my friends from Boston about it, they said they’d never seen it, but they knew it was there. This is precisely the issue explored in the book; South Boston’s public housing was not a secret, but if you didn’t live there, you didn’t go there. As for the residents, they distrusted everyone.

   The story begins in the early 1970’s, when the author was six years old and the youngest of eight children (more would follow later.) The family, headed by their matriarch Helen MacDonald, faced two major catastrophes at the time; inside the apartment, the oldest son had a mental breakdown, and out in the street, there were the anti-busing riots. The author attributes his brother’s mental deterioration to a horrible childhood; taking most of the father’s beatings, finding his baby brother dead in the crib, and though the author doesn’t say it, the mother’s behavior may have been part of the problem. Couple that with living in a hopeless neighborhood, where fighting is the norm, and it all adds up.

   As I mentioned in the beginning, I couldn’t believe any of it at first, which I attribute to my own ignorance. Though I’d been studying US history for years by the time I read this book, I knew nothing of the Boston Busing riots (it wasn’t covered in most college history books.) The problem with Boston is that the busing riots were a major issue in the history of civil rights, but they came at a time when the movement was splintering. The actual idea of exchanging poor black and white Boston students wasn’t even the work of Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, but white ivory-tower liberals like Ted Kennedy. It wasn’t fair on any level, especially since Ted Kennedy’s kids went to private school. All over South Boston you had the graffiti “bus Ted’s kids” while nothing good came out of desegregational school busing. The black schools in Roxbury and the white schools in Dorchester were still lousy. Did any of the liberals think that maybe the parents, regardless of their color, didn’t want this? Did they ask if the kids wanted this? It doesn’t seem as though the liberal establishment cared about the freedom of choice.

    MacDonald recounts his view of the busing riots, and his siblings’ own violent role. The protests had taken on an extreme racist tone, the likes of which you weren’t even seeing in the Deep South anymore. There is an earlier book of photos by Eugene Richards, titled Dorchester Days, with good clear photos of these events. White youth march with racist banners, smiling red-haired teens wear KKK placards, and who could forget the infamous photo “The Soiling of Old Glory” among the images of the events. One thing that the author of All Souls doesn’t mention, though he implies, is the neglect of education in the South Boston area. Reading this book, and seeing the photos by Eugene Richards, I have to wonder if any of these kids cared enough about their schooling to want to protest. How many of them would simply drop out regardless? How many of them ever put in a full day at school?

    Shortly after this book came out, I went to hear the author speak. He explained that in his opinion, South Boston could’ve been a very functional working-class community, if not for all the things that worked against it. The first problem was that the people in Southie didn’t trust the police, nor the media. Secondly, the politicians were a problem; the leftists used them as a racist scapegoat, and the right wing exploited their clannish anti-liberal mentality. The irony is that the conservatives, whom the residents usually voted for, were anti-welfare, but almost all the people in the projects were on welfare.  The next irony is that the right wing was tough on drug crime, but Southie had a huge drug problem. The mothers would say they were against free sex, but not one of the households had the father present, and despite the mothers being fervently Catholic, most of their kids were born out of wedlock. The clannish, anti-outsider mentality allowed criminals like Whitey Bulger to exploit the people; he extorted local businesses, scared outsiders from doing business in the neighborhood, and sold the drugs that were killing the kids.

    Over the years, Amazon reviews have been mixed. Some say the author’s neighborhood was the problem, other say that the family had problems long before they showed up. The mother, perpetually hooking up with bad men, comes off as incompetent, despite the author claiming otherwise. She marries an abusive man, has one child after another, fails to protect the children from him, then he leaves, and she shacks up with another irresponsible man, has two kids with him (one of whom dies in infancy) and then ten years later she does it again. MacDonald recounts an incident where they go to his grandmother’s funeral, and his grandfather yells at them to leave, not wanting bastard children in his home. Is the grandfather being horrible, or is he just fed up with his irresponsible daughter? The grandparents lived in a better part of the town, so I have to wonder if this story is an example of downward mobility?

    Several of the MacDonald kids ended up dead, from illness, crime, or suicide. The oldest spends his teen years in mental hospitals, then jumps off the roof, and one of his sisters does the same thing while high on drugs and ends up brain damaged. Some of them do, however, get out of Southie and have normal lives; one becomes a nurse, one goes to Tuft’s University and joins the navy, and the author eventually gets a job, yet he stays in the neighborhood. His mother moves to Colorado in the early 1990’s and tries to have a normal life, but I can’t get over the way she neglects her kids. Why did she need to keep shacking up with irresponsible men? She goes to college, but she never tries to use her education to get anything better in life. In the part of the book that looked like a real window of hope, she’s befriended by an African-American librarian, who says to her “I got my high school diploma and got off welfare.” The author, a small child at this point, says that he was always trying to impress this woman, and I can see how that makes sense; the women in his neighborhood were all nasty and disgusting, some of them would walk around without wearing menstrual pads, others were always yelling expletives at their kids. This librarian was probably the only woman he knew who wasn’t a filthy skank.

    In some ways, this book shows us how the Civil Rights Movement went off the rails after Dr. King’s murder. It was Dr. King’s intention for children of both colors to attend the same schools, not for them to exchange schools! Somehow, I bet the people in Boston were crying out “why is it only Boston that has to do this, and not New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles?!?” The busing didn’t benefit anyone economically either, because it was basically two poor districts exchanging kids. The poor Blacks of Roxbury and the poor Whites in Dorchester could’ve united to effect change, but that wouldn’t happen, thanks to their attitudes, and the politicians too. At his book talk back in 2000, the author said that a better solution would’ve been to bus both colors to a school on neutral territory.

    Most of the antiquated and crumbling South Boston housing projects are gone now, replaced by mixed-income housing, more in line with Boston’s traditional architecture. The remaining projects are racially integrated, because the authorities got smart and stopped letting applicants be choosy about race. The author’s siblings are now scattered across the country, and the area he grew up in is heavily gentrified.

    The book could use a few additions, however. Some maps would be in order because the location of the Old Colony projects played a major part in how they ended up, along with some better photos of the area, and a timeline. It is one of the many books on poverty, but one of the few that are still in print and being widely read, along with Nickel and Dimed , and the recent Hillbilly Elegy. The difference between All Souls and Hillbilly Elegy is that MacDonald’s family were second or third generation Americans, while J.D. Vance’s family had been living in Kentucky for over a century. While the MacDonald family was downwardly mobile, Vance’s family had always been that way; the poverty was generational.

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

    Thomas Campanella, Cornell professor of urban planning, treats Brooklyn as a borough of missed opportunities. Jamaica Bay didn’t become a world-class seaport; Floyd Bennett Field is defunct; the canoe harbor at Marine Park never happened. Nevertheless, Brooklyn has a remarkable history when it comes to building, and much of it was built on dredged sand and reclaimed marshland. Unfortunately, Brooklyn was often treated as expendable.

    Expendability, in Campanella’s extensive history of Brooklyn, is best illustrated in the chapter titled The Island of Offal and Bones. The place in question is Barrier Island, a deforested stretch of salt march where the city processed dead animals. Boatloads of dead dogs, cats, and rats, ended up there, along with circus animals, and trolley horses when they were too old to be of use. The non-unionized beasts of burden were shipped there to be skinned for leather, butchered for dog food (or even sausage, perhaps) and de-boned for fertilizer and glue. Needless to say, the overpowering stench, along with the waste dumped into the stagnant waterways, did little to improve the area.

    The author devotes a full chapter to Brooklyn’s military contribution, long before the US entered the wars. Hundreds of pilots got their first lessons at Floyd Bennett Field, and it was a staging area for planes manufactured on the East Coast. Flying boats were staged in the area during WWII, in between sea patrols for German U-boats. However, both FBF and the Brooklyn Navy Yard illustrate another problem with the borough; both of them became obsolete after WWII, as the Navy Yard was too small, and the airfields were too short. Then the labor strikes crippled Brooklyn’s businesses, starting with the breweries, and it spread to other businesses as well. Industrialists packed their bags for states where unions were less favored by the government, or where land was cheaper. Then came urban renewal, which saw the American Safety Razor factory torn down and replaced by Metrotech. Goodbye factory, goodbye jobs.

    Not much is given to modern Brooklyn, now the great American yuppie zone. In a funny twist on the “lost industry” problem, there’s Bob Rosensweig’s vintage lightbulb company that’s now all the rage. Bar and restaurant patrons prefer the warm, intimate light to the sterile flicker of today’s energy saver bulbs. However, in an equally ironic twist, some folks like to eat in dirty old restaurants, lit by the old-school fluorescent bubs that give the place an ugly greenish glow. I would like to read more about how the artistic crowd reclaimed Brooklyn, though it was profiled in an earlier book titled The Last Bohemia. There could also be a chapter on how Brooklyn is portrayed in literature and film. Some book portray the positives of the community (like Chaim Potok’s novels) while others give you the sleazy side (like Hubert Selby Jr) or a combination of the good, bad, and bohemian (like Paul Auster). However, I am reminded of a 1994 graphic novel, Box Office Poison, that takes place in Brooklyn. The hero (or perhaps, loser) of the story, Sherman Davies, is a recent Hunter College graduate, working  in a dying old Mom & Pop bookstore, right before Barnes and Noble took over. He moves into a shared apartment in Carrol Gardens, and he sees how the neighborhood is very quiet and easygoing, and that’s how he wants it. While moving his books upstairs, he and his friends wonder “is Carrol Gardens going to be the new Seattle, or the new Des Moines?” Sherman responds with “the first flannel shirt I see, and I’m moving to Des Moines!” Not all young people want things to be “hip” or trendy.

   I applaud Campanella for his extensive research and unbiased writing. It’s a treasure trove of history and a bag of dirty laundry at the same time. Some of his sources came from the New York Times, others came from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Brooklyn hasn’t had much in the way of daily papers, ever since The City Sun closed in 1996, and I suspect that The City Sun might’ve been a trove of history in itself (if the defunct paper has been archived, which I don’t know.) Whether Brooklyn will become a great community, or an unwanted backwater, or a place with a huge rich-poor divide, this book will be an indicator.

  

Diversity Inc.

    In the preface, Pamela Newkirk debunks what she considers the myth of diversity and integration in the elite fields. She brings up two questions with regards to diversity; the first is how and why diversity is lagging, and secondly, why the White elites believe statistics, which the author claims are distorted and exaggerated.  In the first chapter she blames in on President Reagan cutting Federal money for job training, though I add that Reagan blames minority unemployment on minimum wage increases (as did economists like Milton Friedman.) Then she brings up an issue – museums having few Black curators – which I agree with wholeheartedly. I’ve been to museums all over the USA, and I saw lots of Black security guards, and but few in positions of management. The author makes this a race issue, but I would have to disagree, based on my experience and observation. If you look up any museum online, you will see that the curatorial staff have degrees in history, art history, and lots of unpaid internships in museums. It’s not a field for someone who has to work to earn money during the summer. Furthermore, a major art museum is going to prefer someone who went to a top college, not community college. Let’s face it, being a museum curator is an “ivory tower” kind of career.

    Newkirk writes that few Black Americans head a daily paper (probably true) or get an Oscar. But is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the only judge of talent? She doesn’t mention whether Black actors, writers, and directors get prizes at other festivals, like Sundance, Telluride, Tribeca, Cannes, Moscow, Berlin, Venice, etc. You also have to think in terms of geography; The Oscars are in LA, home of the Hollywood studios, while directors like Spike Lee take their cameras outdoors on the East Coast. He and other directors – Scorsese, Jarmusch, Alexander Paine – make their movies far away from LA, so it’s not surprising that they’re going to be closed out of the Hollywood cliques. The Oscars are essentially a child of the Hollywood system.

    Here are some things that I find missing from this book. First, I would like to know if job applicants are rejected from jobs on account of race. If an office has one Black employee, does that mean they have closed hiring practices, or does it mean that no Black men or women applied? Next, let’s take stock of how many Black school principals there are in major cities, then see how many of them head a racially integrated school. If the results are sparse, does that mean the White parents don’t want a Black American principal in their kids’ school? Then we can wonder why there are so many Black American correction officers in the NYCDOC, and few Whites. If more Whites entered, would there be an uproar over White people taking Black jobs? There are some trades, like construction, that are dominantly White, but is that because of racism, or because Poles and Albanians only hire their own? The same thing holds true for the jewelry industry, famously dominated by Hasidic Jews. Should we attribute the lack of Black gem cutters to racism, or because the Hasidic jewelers in NYC, Tel Aviv, and Antwerp, only train their own?

    Sorry Ms. Newkirk, but your book falls short. You failed to research enough fields to find out why Black Americans are underrepresented. If your research were more extensive, then you might have found instances of genuine racism, and your book might be the start of change in the USA.