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.