C H A P T E R 4
’Twas on a dreary Thursday morn’
As the buses rolled along.
They came up to our peaceful town
With orders from The Law:
Desegregate and integrate
Or you will pay the price
Of loss of pride, humility,
And even your children’s lives.
But Southie’s spirit was so strong,
They made us a barrack town.
They took their horses, dogs, and guns
and set them on the crowd.
The TPF, their sticks did crack
On the young and old alike.
But united still, our spirits high,
We’ll fight for freedom’s right.
—HELEN KING
MA’S TUNES ON THE ACCORDION STARTED TO BE ALL about the busing. She played them at rallies, sit-ins, and fundraisers for the struggle, all over Southie. The songs sounded like a lot of the Irish rebel songs we grew up with. They had the same tunes, but the words had changed: “So come on Southie, head on high / They’ll never take our pride.…” The Black and Tans, the murderous regiments who’d wreaked havoc on Ireland on behalf of the English Crown, became the TPF (Tactical Police Force), the special force that was turning our town into a police state. The Queen of England was gone from Ma’s songs too, her place taken by Judge Garrity, the federal judge who’d mandated busing, “the law of the land”: “Judge Garrity and traitors too / We’ve just begun to fight.” Garrity had an Irish name, which made it all the worse, as the Irish hated nothing more than a traitor. That’s why we hated Ted Kennedy; he’d sided with the busing too, and was seen as the biggest traitor of all, being from the most important Irish family in America.
The English themselves weren’t completely absent from our struggle, though. They ran the Boston Globe and were behind the whole thing. My friends and I started stealing stacks of the Globe left outside supermarkets in the early mornings. We could sell them for a dime to people on their way to work, who’d have been paying a quarter if it weren’t for us. That’s when I found out the Globe was the enemy. We tried to sell it in Southie, but too many people said they wouldn’t read that liberal piece of trash if it was free, that it was to blame for the busing, with all its attacks on South Boston. I heard a few people say it was a communist paper. “Not only are they communists, they’re the rich English, keeping up their hate for the Irish and Southie,” Coley told me. He showed me the names of the Globe’s owners and editors: “Winship, Taylor. All WASPs,” he said, “White Anglo Saxon Protestants, forever gettin’ back at the Irish for chasing them out of Boston.”
Boy, was I confused now that the English were involved. We’d always hated the English for what they did to the Irish. But what ever that was, listening to Ma’s Irish songs, I’d thought it was in the past and across a great big ocean. Now it was right here in Southie. I was glad to be doing my part anyway, stealing the Boston Globe and making a couple bucks on their loss. The rich English liberal communist bastards!
That September, Ma let us skip the first week of school. The whole neighborhood was boycotting school. City Councilor Louise Day Hicks and her bodyguard with the bullhorn, Jimmy Kelly, were telling people to keep their kids home. It was supposed to be just the high school kids boycotting, but we all wanted to show our loyalty to the neighborhood. I was meant to be starting the third grade at St. Augustine’s School. Ma had enrolled Kevin and Kathy in the sixth and seventh grades there as well. Frankie was going to Southie High, and Mary and Joe were being sent to mostly black Roxbury, so they really had something to boycott. But on the first day, Kevin and Kathy begged Ma not to send them. “C’mon Ma, please?” I piped in. It was still warm outside and we wanted to join the crowds that were just then lining the streets to watch the busloads of black kids come into Southie. The excitement built as police helicopters hovered just above our third-floor windows, police in riot gear stood guard on the rooftops of Old Colony, and the national news camped out on every corner. Ma said okay, and we ran up to Darius Court, along the busing route, where in simpler times we’d watched the neighborhood St. Paddy’s Day parade.
The whole neighborhood was out. Even the mothers from the stoop made it to Darius Court, nightgowns and all. Mrs. Coyne, up on the rooftop in her housedress, got arrested before the buses even started rolling through the neighborhood. Everyone knew she was a little soft, and I thought the excitement that day must have been a bit too much for her. She ran up to the roof and called the police “nigger lovers” and “traders,” and started dancing and singing James Brown songs. “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!” She nearly fell off the roof before one cop grabbed her from behind and restrained her. Everyone was laughing at that one: big fat Mrs. Coyne rolling around on the rooftop kicking and screaming, with a cop in full riot gear on top of her. Little disturbances like that broke out here and there, but most people were too intent on seeing the buses roll to do anything that might get them carted away.
I looked up the road and saw a squadron of police motorcycles speeding down Dorchester Street, right along the curb, as if they would run over anyone who wasn’t on the sidewalk. The buses were coming. Police sirens wailed as hundreds of cops on motorcycles aimed at the crowds of mothers and kids, to clear the way for the law of the land. “Bacon … I smell bacon!” a few people yelled, sniffing at the cops. I knew that meant the cops were pigs. As the motorcycles came closer I fought to get back onto the sidewalk, but it was too crowded. I ran further into the road to avoid one motorcycle, when two more came at me from the middle of the street. I had to run across to the other side of the road, where the crowd quickly cleared a space for me on the sidewalk. All the adults welcomed me, patting me on the shoulder. “Are you all right?” “Those pricks would even kill a kid.” “Pigs!” someone else shouted. I thought I’d lost Kevin and Kathy, but just then I saw them sitting on top of a mailbox up the street for a good view of the buses. They waved to me, laughing because they’d seen me almost get run over.
The road was cleared, and the buses rolled slowly. We saw a line of yellow buses like there was no end to them. I couldn’t see any black faces though, and I was looking for them. Some people around me started to cry when they finally got a glimpse of the buses through the crowd. One woman made the sign of the cross and a few others copied her. “I never thought I’d see the day come,” said an old woman next to me. She lived downstairs from us, but I had never seen her leave her apartment before. I’d always thought she was crippled or something, sitting there in her window every day, waiting for Bobby, the delivery man who came daily with a package from J.J.’s Liquors. She was trembling now, and so was everyone else. I could feel it myself. It was a feeling of loss, of being beaten down, of humiliation. In minutes, though, it had turned to anger, rage, and hate, just like in those Irish rebel songs I’d heard all my life. Like “The Ballad of James Connolly”: “God’s curse on you England / You cruel hearted monster / Your deeds they would shame all the devils in Hell.” Except we’d changed it to “God’s curse on you Garrity.”
Smash! A burst of flying glass and all that rage exploded. We’d all been waiting for it, and so had the police in riot gear. It felt like a gunshot, but it was a brick. It went right through a bus window. Then all hell broke loose. I saw a milk crate fly from the other side of the street right for my face. More bricks, sticks, and bottles smashed against the buses, as police pulled out their billy clubs and charged with their riot shields in a line formation through the crowds. Teenagers were chased into the project and beaten to the cement wherever they were caught.
I raced away about a block from the fray, to a spot where everyone was chanting “Here We Go Southie, Here We Go,” like a battle cry. That’s when I realized we were at war. I started chanting too, at first just moving my lips because I didn’t know if a kid’s voice would ruin the strong chant. But then I belted it out, just as a few other kids I didn’t know joined the chorus. The kids in the crowd all looked at each other as if we were family. This is great, I thought. I’d never had such an easy time as this, making friends in Southie. The buses kept passing by, speeding now, and all I could see in the windows were black hands with their middle fingers up at us, still no faces though.
The buses got through the crowd surrounded by the police motorcycles. I saw Frankie running up toward Southie High along with everyone else. “What are you doing out here!” he yelled. “Get your ass home!” He said there was another riot with the cops up at the high school, and off he ran with the others. Not far behind were Kevin and his friends. He shouted the same thing at me: “Get your ass home!” I just wanted to find Ma now and make sure she wasn’t beaten or arrested or anything, so I ran home. The project was empty—everyone had followed the buses up the St. Paddy’s parade route. Ma wasn’t home, but the TV was on, with live coverage of the riots at Southie High. Every channel I turned to showed the same thing. I kept flipping the dial, looking for my family, and catching glimpses of what seemed to be all the people I knew hurling stones or being beaten by the police, or both. This is big, I thought. It was scary and thrilling at the same time, and I remembered the day we’d moved into this neighborhood, when Ma said it looked just like Belfast, and that we were in the best place in the world. I kept changing the channels, looking for my family, and I didn’t know anymore whether I was scared or thrilled, or if there was any difference between the two anyhow.
The buses kept rolling, and the hate kept building. It was a losing battle, but we returned to Darius Court every day after school to see if the rage would explode again. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. But the bus route became a meeting place for the neighborhood. Some of my neighbors carried big signs with RESIST or NEVER or my favorite, HELL NO WE WON’T GO. There was always someone in the crowd keeping everyone laughing with wisecracks aimed at the stiff-looking state troopers who lined the bus route, facing the crowds to form a barrier. They never moved or showed any expression. We all wanted to get them to react to something. But we wanted a reaction somewhere between the stiff inhuman stance and the beatings. When my friends and I tried to get through to them by asking questions about their horses and could we pet them, they told us to screw. And it wasn’t long before some kids started trying to break the horses’ legs with hockey sticks when riots broke out. One day the staties got distracted by a burning effigy of Judge Garrity that came flying off a rooftop in the project. That’s when I saw Kevin make his way out of Darius Court to throw a rock at the buses. A trooper chased him, but Kevin was too fast. His photo did end up in the Boston Globe the next day, though, his scrawny shirtless body whipping a rock with all his might. It looked like the pictures we’d always seen of kids in war-torn countries throwing petrol bombs at some powerful enemy. But Kevin’s rock hit a yellow bus with black kids in it.
I threw a rock once. I had to. You were a pussy if you didn’t. I didn’t have a good aim, though, and it landed on the street before it even made it to the bus. I stared at my rock and was partly relieved. I didn’t really want it to smash a bus window. I only wanted the others to see me throwing it. On that day there were so many rocks flying that you didn’t know whose rock landed where, but everyone claimed the ones that did the most damage. Even though I missed, a cop came out of nowhere and treated me just like they treated the kids with good aim. He took me by the neck and threw me to the dirt. I sat there for a few minutes to make sure that everyone had seen that one. I was only eight, but I was part of it all, part of something bigger than I’d ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night.
Every day I felt the pride of rebellion. The helicopters above my bedroom window woke me each morning for school, and my friends and I would plan to pass by the TPF on the corners so we could walk around them and give them hateful looks. Ma and the nuns at St. Augustine’s told me it was wrong to hate the blacks for any of this. But I had to hate someone, and the police were always fracturing some poor neighbor’s skull or taking teenagers over to the beach at night to beat them senseless, so I hated them with all my might. SWAT teams had been called into the neighborhood. I’d always liked the television show “S.W.A.T.,” but they were the enemy now. We gave the SWAT sharpshooters standing guard over us on the rooftops the finger; then we’d run. Evenings we had to be off the streets early or else the cops would try to run us down with their motorbikes. No more hanging out on corners in Old Colony. A line of motorbikes straight across the street and sidewalks would appear out of nowhere and force everyone to disappear into hallways and tunnels. One time I had to jump into a bush because they were coming from both ends of the street. I was all cut up, and I really hated them then.
It felt good, the hate I had for the authorities. My whole family hated them, especially Frankie, Kathy, and Kevin, who got the most involved in the riots. I would’ve loved to throw Molotov cocktails myself, along with some of the adults, but I was only a kid and the cops would probably catch me and beat me at the beach. So I just fantasized about killing them all. They were the enemy, the giant oppressor, like Goliath. And the people of South Boston were like David. Except that David won in the end, and we knew we were going to lose this one. But that made us even more like the Irish, who were always fighting in the songs even if they had to lose and die a glorious death.
One Friday in early October we took part in what Louise Day Hicks called National Boycott Day. Everyone boycotted school again. We’d all heard about the kids who’d gone to school during boycotts and who were threatened over the phone with getting their things cut off. Kevin told Ma we’d better not risk castration, and we got to stay home and watch the rally and march down Broadway. The rally was a good one. When the thousands of people sang the national anthem, with their right hands over their chests, I cried. It was as if we were singing about an America that we wanted but didn’t have, especially the part about the land of the free. Louise Day Hicks really squealed that part out from the bandstand microphone, and we all knew what she was getting at.
When the rally was over, the crowds marched to Judge Garrity’s home in the Boston suburb of Wellesley. We weren’t allowed to go because Ma thought people would surely be arrested. I wanted to go because I’d heard that where the Judge lived everyone was rich and white and I wanted to see what they looked like. But I couldn’t, so I just watched the march on its way down Broadway.
The signs at the marches were starting to change. Instead of RESTORE OUR ALIENATED RIGHTS and WELCOME TO MOSCOW AMERICA, more and more now I saw BUS THE NIGGERS BACK TO AFRICA, and one even said KKK. I was confused about that one. The people in my neighborhood were always going on about being Irish, with shamrocks painted on the brick walls and tattooed to their arms. And I had always heard stories from Grandpa about a time when the Ku Klux Klan burned Irish Catholics out of their homes in America. I thought someone should beat up the guy with the KKK sign, but no one seemed to mind that much. I told my friend Danny about the Ku Klux Klan burning out the Irish families, and that the guy with the KKK sign was in the wrong town. He laughed. He said he’d never heard that one before. “Shut up,” he said. “They just hate the niggers. What, d’ya wanna be a nigger?” Jesus no, I thought to myself.
With National Boycott Day, everything got more scary. In the afternoon, after all the speeches, chants, and the tearful national anthem, crowds gathered at Darius Court once again to taunt the police and to throw rocks at the buses. The TPF chased one man into the Rabbit Inn tavern across the street, and a crowd of people at the bar protected him from the cops. Everyone knew the Rabbit Inn was no place to mess with. That’s where the Mullen gang hung out—the toughest bar in Southie. The next night, after dark, we were all called out of our apartments in Old Colony. The mothers on the stoop were yelling up to windows that the TPF was beating people at the Rabbit Inn to get back at them for the night before. Ma wasn’t home, so I ran to Darius Court with all of the neighbors, some of them carrying baseball bats, hockey sticks, and big rocks. When I got there, the dark streets were packed with mobs rushing the police. I saw Kevin running through a maze of people carrying a boulder with both hands. He was excited and told me that the TPF had beat the shit out of everyone at the Rabbit Inn, with their police badges covered. Just then I saw people covered in blood being taken from the bar into the converging ambulances.
The mothers in Old Colony showed their Southie loyalty that night. They went up against the entire police force that was filling the streets. I kept getting knocked around by bigger people running in all directions. Someone said the TPF had split open an eleven-year-old’s head. I pushed through the crowd to get a look at the kid, and was relieved to see through all the blood that he wasn’t Kevin. I wondered if I’d better get home, in case people started getting killed. As the sirens screeched, I saw the blue lights flashing onto the face of Mary Beth Duggan, a four-year-old from the project sitting on her big brother’s shoulders and smiling at all the excitement. I figured if she could stay out then so could I.
Someone propped up his stereo speakers in a project window, blasting a favorite at the time: “Fight the Power” by the Isley Brothers. We always did that in Old Colony, blare our speakers out of our windows for the whole neighborhood to hear. It was obvious this guy was doing it for good background music to the crashes and thumps of battle.
Everyone sang along to “Fight the Power.” The teenagers in Southie still listened only to black music. The sad Irish songs were for the older people, and I never heard anyone listening to rock and roll in Old Colony. One time an outsider walked through Old Colony wearing a dungaree vest with a big red tongue and THE ROLLING STONES printed on the back. He was from the suburbs and was visiting his cousins in Old Colony. He got a bottle thrown at his head and was called a pussy. Rock and roll was for rich suburban people with long hair and dirty clothes. Mary had a similar tongue painted on her bedroom wall, but that was for Rufus and Chaka Khan; it was okay to like them. Of course no one called it black music—we couldn’t see what color anyone was from the radio—but I knew the Isley Brothers were black because I’d seen them on “Soul Train.” But that didn’t bother anyone in the crowd; what mattered was that the Isley Brothers were singing about everything we were watching in our streets right now, the battle between us and the law: “And when I rolled with the punches I got knocked on the ground / By all this bullshit goin’ down.”
The mob started pushing and swaying toward the cop cars, blocking them from going down the street. Mrs. Coyne was out there again, and was the first to put a bat through a police windshield. Then everyone surrounded the cops and smashed all of their windows. I started to see things fly through the air: pipes, bricks, bats, and even a hubcap.
Just then I saw my mother pushing through the crowd, yelling at me to run home. “They’re beating kids!” she screamed. She kept getting knocked from side to side. She grabbed me by the collar and said she couldn’t find Kevin and Kathy; she had a crying voice on her. I didn’t want to go home without her, but she made me, while she went looking through the crowds, dodging everything flying through the air. Later on Ma dragged Kevin and Kathy home and gave into us for running up to Darius Court to join the riot. Frankie was still up there, Ma couldn’t find him, and we were mad that the three of us couldn’t do everything that the older kids could. Ma couldn’t yell at us for long; Kevin drowned her out by blasting the television news reports. And soon we were all glued to the set once again, watching for those we knew in the crowd getting dragged into paddy wagons at Darius Court.
On Monday Ma made me, Kevin, and Kathy go back to St. Augustine’s. There were no buses coming that day because the NAACP had taken the black students to some kind of meeting at the University of Massachusetts. The black leaders were asking for federal troops to be brought into South Boston, and wanted to see what the black teenagers thought about all that. We didn’t want the troops; it was bad enough with the state troopers, SWAT teams, and the TPF, who Ma called “the Gestapo.”
We walked to school past Darius Court and up Dorchester Street. The streets were completely empty, still littered with all the things that had flown through the air on Saturday night. Fewer teenagers were finding a reason to go to school anymore, unless they wanted to get in fights. And on this Monday morning everyone had heard on the radio that the buses weren’t coming that day, so many in Old Colony stayed home. The silence on Dorchester Street was spooky. I was walking with my head down, looking at all the garbage in the street, when Kevin came up from behind and pushed me. I went flying and when I looked up I saw that I’d been headed straight for a bloody pig’s head on top of a post. I let out a yell that should have woken up the neighborhood. I looked up the street, and it looked like something from a horror movie. More signposts with pigs’ heads on top of them, some with apples in their mouths. Blood was on the street, scrawled into letters that said KILL THE PIGS or FUCK THE POLICE. We touched the pig’s head—we’d never seen real pigs before. I pushed an eyeball and it squished, and then it fell out of the socket onto my shoe. I yelled again. The whole thing seemed more violent than anything I’d seen yet. Whoever had decorated the street with pigs’ heads must have been pretty pissed off, I thought, killing some innocent pigs to send a message to the cops.
That afternoon, everyone gathered at Darius Court again, even though there were no buses. The pigs’ heads were gone, but you could still see FUCK THE POLICE on the street. The neighborhood was still upset about the TPF beating on women and children at the Rabbit Inn. They were all talking about it when we came upon the crowd. The crowds started chanting again: “Here we go Southie, Here we go!” A circle of teens started rocking a police car that had been left in the middle of the street while the cops chased some kid who’d thrown a boulder at them. They rocked the cruiser from side to side, and just when it rocked high enough they tipped it over on its head. The cops chased them too, but they got away through the maze of tunnels and hallways and ended up on a rooftop at Darius Court, where they threw fistfulls of pebbles onto the heads of their pursuers, who by that time had given up all the chasing and were now inspecting their upside-down cruiser.
I ran further up Dorchester Street when I heard the gunshot. There was a commotion at Jolly Donuts. A cop stood at the intersection with his gun pointed in the air, and he fired a second shot. He was trying to disperse a crowd that was dragging a black man from his car. The man ran from the crowd as people threw rocks at him. More and more angry people ganged up on the black man, who I could see was crying. He was trying to get away, but there was nowhere to go. He ran to a house just outside the project, and tried to climb over a railing. “Kill the nigger!” my neighbor shouted. That was Molly’s mother, running to join the commotion. Everyone made fun of Molly at school because they had seen her mother bleeding down the legs of her pants more than once. They said she was so poor she couldn’t afford a Kotex pad. But she wasn’t as bad off now as the black man, who was clenching his fingers onto the railing of the house before the boys dragged him onto the pavement and beat his skull with baseball bats and hockey sticks. The people living in the house were no help; they booted his fingers off their railing. A photographer flashed his camera at the man from all angles: hands reaching for an escape, baseball bat to the ribs, crying face to the pavement. I remember the man’s tears clearing paths in the blood on his face. That’s how close I was to him. Scores of police came to the corner at Jolly Donuts and brought out their tear gas and riot shields, and another riot broke out. Kathy and Kevin brought me home and I was sick: sick of the police, sick of busing, sick of being thrilled or scared, and sick of the hate.
The next day it was all over the news. Some pictures were from angles that I could’ve taken myself if I’d had a camera. Once again I was seeing a replay on the news of what I’d just seen in real life. I was sick of the news too. The newsman said that there were no suspects in the beating that almost killed the man, who was from Haiti and had been on his way through Southie to pick up his wife at a laundromat. I went back to the site where he was beaten. I don’t know why I was drawn there—maybe I had to feel the sadness, like at a funeral. I saw an aluminum baseball bat covered in blood and wondered why the cops hadn’t taken it in for evidence, fingerprints and all that. Whose side are they on, anyway? I thought. They certainly weren’t on our side, and now I knew they probably weren’t on the Haitian’s side either.
Ma was mad about the beating, and I was glad about that, because I didn’t like being the only one around who wanted to talk about it. No one else ever mentioned it again. It never happened. “He probably had no idea what he was driving into,” Ma said. She called him a scapegoat, and I knew exactly what that meant even though I’d never heard it before. I’d seen it. He was new to this country and probably didn’t even know about South Boston or Old Colony. He mustn’t have known that we all hated the communists, Judge Garrity, the rich liberals, the Globe, and the cops, who were all to blame for the pain in our lives, and he didn’t expect that he’d be the only one my neighbors could get their hands on … someone worse off than us, a nigger.
The day after the Haitian man was beaten, the news said that a white man driving through Roxbury had been stoned and beaten unconscious by about two hundred black teenagers roaming the streets, setting fires, and smashing things. They showed the pictures. It looked like Darius Court, except everyone was black. The news reports made it seem like the blacks were getting back at us. The white guy wasn’t from Southie, though. No way! No one from Southie would drive through Roxbury; most people I knew had never even been outside the neighborhood, and since busing no one wanted ever to leave again. When I was smaller we used to spend hours at the welfare office in Roxbury, with black and white mothers and kids. Never again!
Nor were we welcome in too many places outside Southie now. But going downtown once in a while was the only way to get away from Mayor White’s “rule of three,” which made it illegal in Southie for more than two people to stand around on the corners. Kevin and his friends went downtown to scam, so I sometimes followed them. One time they showed me and Danny how to rob the parking meters for bags full of quarters, and we were chased home by a bunch of black kids who knew we were from Southie. We had to run all the way back to the Broadway Bridge, which blacks could never cross over unless they were in a yellow bus. Kevin swore at Danny for wearing his green jogging suit with a shamrock and SOUTHIE on the back. Kevin’s friend Okie showed us how he’d covered up the Southie dot on his wrist, the way he always did when he went into town, pulling his sleeves down past his hands.
Ma wanted us to stay away from the troubles. But as much as we tried, it was all around us. You couldn’t help being in the middle of it unless you stayed home all the time. And there was nothing to do at home except set traps for the cockroaches. We were getting used to all the craziness from the busing; now on top of it all, it seemed as if the confusion was spilling into people’s homes. Teenagers in the neighborhood had started dropping out of school, especially once the police had gained a firm presence at Southie High. State troopers and the TPF were almost in a competition, it seemed, to flex their muscle on our streets. They did their drills in formation up and down Dorchester Street and around the high school. “Hup, two, three, four,” with their boots crashing on the road every day before and after school. People still lined the streets to protest, and Louise Day Hicks, Ray Flynn, and Jimmy Kelly kept the rallies going, but the younger people were losing all interest in school. It seemed that all at once, the girls who would’ve been juniors and seniors were pregnant. And teenagers spent a good part of their day figuring where they could hang out without being caught and arrested for drinking.
Even though Kevin was in Catholic school, most of his friends were in public school and playing hooky to hang out or go into town to pull scams, like the one with the parking meters. He was doing poorly at St. Augustine’s, and the nuns didn’t like his sense of humor. He’d get everyone in class laughing by asking the teacher a question that had nothing to do with the long speech she had just given about the Assumption of Our Lady.
One time Sister Veronica threw him out of class, and instead of waiting outside the door, he wandered the corridors pulling pranks on the other classrooms. He came to my third-grade class, knocked on the door, poked his head in, and asked the teacher if she had a spare pencil. Everyone knew my teacher was a pushover. She wasn’t a real nun—they called her a lay minister, and she could never control a class. Miss Shea gave him a pencil and he left. A minute later he knocked again while she was mid-sentence in a lesson, and asked her if she had a pencil sharpener. She sighed, and let him use the sharpener on the windowsill. The whole class was silent as he took his time sharpening away and blowing the sawdust off the tip of his new pencil. He finally left. A minute later, he knocked again, interrupting the lesson once more, and asked if Miss Shea had an eraser to go with the pencil. The whole class burst out laughing, and she chased him down the hall. But that was when Kevin did go to school. When Ma found out he was playing hooky, she got so mad, with all the money she was spending to send him to St. Augustine’s, that she wanted to give him a beating. He ran too fast for her, though, and slept in an abandoned car in Old Colony for a few nights, till Ma cooled off.
Kathy was getting more involved with boys and dating the toughest guys around, the ones with the criminal faces, as Ma said. She’d turned thirteen, and was thrilled no longer to be one of the “three little kids.” She hooked school sometimes, and went into town to shoplift with her friends. She hung out with Linda Coyne and Doreen Cassio. The three of them got arrested one day for climbing up the side of the State House. Kathy had a hammer and chisel in her hand and said they were trying to chip the gold from the dome on top of the building. She said they’d almost made it up to the dome when a state trooper yelled, “Freeze!” She said Doreen Cassio got her into that one. Doreen had started to stay at our house. She was running away from home, and told Ma that her father was digging a big hole in their yard to bury her alive in. She showed us all the bruises from the beatings he’d given her. Ma wanted to call the cops, but Doreen begged her not to. No one in Southie really trusted the cops anymore, so Ma just let her stay at our apartment on the couch. Kathy was always adding runaway girls to our family.
Before he dropped out, Frankie was still enjoying the fights at Southie High. He had big fists and a hatred for blacks since he’d been beaten and stabbed on his way to Boston Tech in Roxbury. When he left Tech, he entered Southie High set on revenge. So whenever Ma heard the police sirens heading up to the high school, she put on the TV to get the news flashes that always came on when there was another riot. She watched, afraid she would see Frankie being arrested for starting another fight. But at least he was going to school, which was more than many of the other kids in Southie were doing. One day in December when I was home with the flu, the sirens kept passing by for a good half hour. Ma turned on the news and heard that a white South Boston teenager had been critically stabbed at the high school. They didn’t know his name. Ma had a crying voice and told me to go outside and find out; she knew there’d be more information out on the streets.
There was hardly anyone outside, but those I did see were running up to the high school, carrying things to fight with. At the high school the streets were so crowded you couldn’t move. They were tipping over police cars once again. Just when I’d made it through the crowd, a woman pulled me back by the arm and I fell onto the pavement. She had saved me from being trampled by a police horse. The cops on horses were charging at people, the horses climbing on top of the rioting crowds with their two front legs. I remember looking at the horses and thinking that they didn’t look as if they wanted to be doing the stunts their masters were forcing on them, knocking people’s heads with their hooves. I found out it wasn’t Frankie who was stabbed, but a kid named Michael Faith.
They’d made all the white kids leave the building. So now the black kids were in the high school trapped by the thousands of people that I was standing with. I wanted to get home to tell Ma the news, but now I was stuck. We were surrounded. The police had us trapped, while we all had the blacks trapped. If I left the safety of the crowd, I’d be run over by one of the horses or motorcycles that were surrounding us. And now came the staties, marching in all kinds of crazy formations. You couldn’t tell what direction they would turn next, and if you were ever in their way, forget it. The only way out was up, and now that was covered by a helicopter flying in circles above our heads. It kept coming at us to scare us off, then changing direction instead of killing us all. Nothing scared this crowd—the people just gave the helicopter the finger and screamed things into the choppy wind that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t get home for another two hours, when the riot had simmered down, but all the way home people were still worked up. Teenagers on the corners were doing what they always did at the end of a day of battle: drinking and retelling stories of fights, reenacting blow after blow in slow motion. Michael Faith was in critical condition.
Ma said at this point what’s the use in going to school. It certainly wasn’t worth the risk of getting killed. Frankie was ready to quit after being kicked out so many times for getting in fights. He’d knocked out one black kid at Southie High and was suspended for ten days. When he’d come back, he’d knocked out another black kid as soon as he walked through the high school doors, and got suspended for twenty days. After twenty days out of school, he’d had no idea what the teacher was going on about at the front of the class. Then yet another racial fight broke out in the classroom, and Frankie’d knocked out one more black kid. That’s when they suspended him for thirty days, and Frankie never went back. By the ninth grade he was a dropout, and Ma couldn’t afford to send any more kids to Catholic school. I was surprised that Frankie’d ended up a dropout; he was the one who’d always made me sit down after school to recite all of the times tables for him. I knew the times tables before the rest of my class had even started studying them. And besides that, he’d been admitted to Boston Tech in the seventh grade, which meant he was smart, because Tech was an exam school. But that was all before he was stabbed, and long before the buses started to roll.
Mary left school too. She’d recently walked by a black table in English High’s cafeteria—black kids sat with blacks, whites with whites—when one of the girls stood in front of her and accused her of trying to have hair like a black girl. Mary had naturally tight curly hair that spread out big and wide on its own. “You wanna look like one of us?!” the black girl said. Mary had already been jumped by a gang of black girls and had had enough. She said back, “What the fuck would I want looking like the ugly bitch that you are?” Then the whole cafeteria erupted into a food fight, which was becoming an everyday occurrence. Mary got jabbed deep with an Afro pick. She never went back to school after that, and Ma didn’t blame her—she just got after her to get enrolled in night school at Southie High. Mary started working full time at Jolly Donuts.
Around the same time, Johnnie was getting his cap and gown ready for graduation from Boston Latin School, and I wondered if this would be one of the few family high school graduations I’d ever see. It was.
“Get your coats on,” Ma said. “We’re gonna pay Coley a visit in the hospital.” She was talking to Johnnie, Joe, and Frank, since they could protect her while she gave Coley the beating she intended to. Coley was in the Carney Hospital in Dorchester. He’d had an operation on account of something happening to his pancreas from all the years of drinking. But that was the least of his problems; he’d put Ma in a rage, denying that he was Seamus’s father. He wasn’t Seamus yet, actually; we didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl that Ma had inside of her. Anyway, off they went to Coley’s bedside, Ma four months pregnant, protected by her three muscled bodyguards, determined never to let a man fuck her over again, no victims here.
I waited up, and when they got back I heard them retelling the story to each other, laughing their heads off. They’d been arrested but it was all worth it. “Did you see the son of a bitch shaking in his bed?” Ma laughed. She pulled the curtain around Coley’s bed and told his roommate to sit still. “We’re only gonna take care of this guy,” she said. With the curtain closed, Ma started ripping tubes and shutting off machines. She yanked the two tubes that were going up Coley’s nose to drain some kind of fluid out of him. Then she sucker punched him a few times. The boys just watched. She said the other guy in the room was scared shitless when he got a look at Coley, all beat up, pressing some button for the nurse, and screaming something in his Connemara Gaelic. When they ran down the back stairwell of the Carney, they were stopped by two doctors who couldn’t restrain them. That’s when security was called and they were brought in for questioning. The security guards sided with Ma when she told them about Coley denying his kid. “You shoulda kicked him in the balls too,” said one of them.
Ma filed a complaint, bringing Coley up on charges for punching her in the stomach. He never did punch her in the stomach. Ma could beat him in a fight even if he wasn’t in a hospital bed. She just wanted to file before he did. Besides, he’d done something far worse than punching her in the stomach—he’d abandoned his own kid that was inside her, a kid with no defenses, except for the wrath of Ma. I liked Coley and felt bad when I pictured him twisted up like a pretzel after Ma got through with him. And since I didn’t remember Mac, it was scary to see such fury—as I’d only known in the riots—creep into our home. But my thoughts turned to wondering if my own father had denied me. If he had, he’d deserve the same thing Coley got, maybe worse, I thought. He’d deserve the wrath of the TPF! To me there was nothing worse than a no-good bastard of a father. But I put those thoughts out of my head, reassuring myself that I had a good father, as Ma had told me. Sure enough, Coley did press charges: assault and battery. And Ma was scheduled to appear in court after the St. Paddy’s Day holiday.
St. Patrick’s Day 1975 brought more armed camps to our town. The authorities figured that with all the drinking, the Southie people would erupt into antibusing violence once more. There were so many TPF, state troopers, and army types on the sidelines of the parade that we kids could hardly see the step dancers or the posters with the faces of Irish martyrs from the 1916 rebellion. We heard the bagpipes, but whenever any of us climbed a mailbox or lamppost for a better view, some cop on a horse came at us with his club drawn. The whole thing’s ruined, I thought.
I found a staircase to stand on just as Southie started to let out roars for our saviors from the busing terror: City Councilor Louise Day Hicks, head to toe in the brightest green old lady clothes, followed by her right-hand man, Jimmy Kelly, a gangster from the Mullen gang, looking more like a politician since the busing started; Senator Billy Bulger, comical smirk and green tie, marching straight-shouldered and strong, and bouncing the shelaliegh he gripped, as if he were the conductor and we the orchestra; Representative Ray Flynn, out of breath because of all the jogging he was doing from handshake to handshake, zigzagging Broadway and pointing at each of us as if he knew us personally. He had one of those red faces that looked like it was melting, like the guys who sat on the wino wall on Broadway. Then there was Dapper, who marched down the street, fists clenched and a scowl on his face, as if he was looking for Judge Garrity himself to personally rip his throat out. The parade was turning into an antibusing rally, a political one. I only wanted to see more floats, with shamrocks and the guy dressed up like St. Patrick chasing the snakes out of Ireland.
I had a great time anyway, and whenever I saw Kevin, he had another green plastic bugle or ENGLAND GET OUT OF IRELAND button for me and Danny, stolen from one of the stands. He even gave Kathy a kelly green woolen scally cap, and she wore it tilted sideways, just like her little gangster boyfriends. Kevin also gave her his last STOP FORCED BUSING pin with a shamrock in the middle. When the adults disappeared into the bars that lined Broadway, gangs of kids roamed the streets looking for ways to get in on all the booze that was flowing or the fights that were breaking out with outsiders who’d come to Southie for the parade. I went with my cousin Paul, Nellie’s son, to wait for our mothers outside the Car Stop Cafe. Ma was playing the accordion there, and I knew she’d have all kinds of free food in her pocketbook when she came out. I’d have to share it with Paul, though, because Nellie would have none. She was just in there to drink, while Ma was scamming up some cash and food.
As we were waiting, paddy wagons sped right up to the door of the Car Stop. Cops got out with billy clubs. Then more police cars came wailing down the street, a whole line of them stretching two blocks. Then the TPF showed up, jumping out of a big police bus, with their helmets on and shields drawn. They all charged into the Car Stop, which was packed to begin with. I saw through the door that they were strutting slowly through the bar, banging their billy clubs on each table they passed until the whole place was filled with the organized rhythm of thumps. I was terrified and tried to get in, yelling, “Ma!” A cop pushed me out the door onto the pavement, and I could see through the window that someone had shut off all the lights. That’s when they started beating everyone senseless. Paul didn’t seem too worried—he knew Nellie would be all right somehow, like she always was when she got drunk. But Ma was pregnant, and I thought she’d be dead.
The door opened again and I saw one of the TPF beat into the skull of an old man who was on all fours under a table. I started crying and ran home to find my big brothers. Paul sat in front of the bar waiting for his mother, as if none of it fazed him at all. When I got home, there was Ma climbing the stairs, in her green maternity suit and spike heels. She was holding her head. She said the Gestapo had knocked her on the head but that she was fine. She’d slid out the back door of the bar, down a narrow corridor filled with cases of beer. She said she almost didn’t fit through, with her stomach and her accordion. She didn’t know what happened to Nellie. “They’re gonna kill people down there,” she said.
Ma turned her big leather pocketbook upside down and dumped all kinds of corned beef, Irish bread, and potatoes onto the kitchen table. It was all squished between wet napkins that had to be peeled off. She told us she’d been the cause of the riot at the Car Stop, with her accordion. She’d been playing her favorite reel “The Siege of Ennis,” when the owner announced that the bar was closed. He was trying to get rid of one troublemaker who was drunk and starting fights. The owner ordered Ma to stop the music. He said the party was over. Ma stopped, but then the troublemaker ordered her to keep playing. “He was this big fat truck driver,” she said, stretching her arms out to show us the width of him. She’d started playing again while he stood over her, clapping his hands to the reels. That’s when the owner called the police. “He probably figured one or two cops might come and get rid of the guy,” she said. She let out a big sigh and plopped herself onto the couch with her feet up. “Make me a cup of tea,” she said. “Jesus Christ, it’s good to be home.” I put on the kettle. I was glad she was home too, but I didn’t tell her that I’d been outside the bar scared that she’d be dead. “That’ll teach him not to call the cops in Southie. They destroyed the place.” Everyone knew that the cops were the enemy and that you shouldn’t call them unless you wanted the Gestapo, marching in with their boots and shields, looking for bones to break.
We didn’t see Nellie for a couple more days, not until Ma had to go to court for beating up Coley. When we got to the courthouse, there was Nellie in a lineup of people who were being charged with inciting a riot at the Car Stop Cafe on St. Paddy’s Day. She looked like a raccoon, with two black eyes and a big purple nose. And some of her partners in crime in the lineup looked worse than she did for the beatings they took from the cops. “What in the Christ happened to you?” Ma said, covering her mouth in shock at the sight of Nellie. Nellie said the TPF had beaten the shit out of her. The two of them were laughing hysterically. “Well, isn’t this a great bit of luck,” Ma whispered to her. “When you get done with the arraignment come upstairs to my courtroom—you’ll be my prize witness against Coley. I’m gonna say he gave you a beating too.”
Nellie loved to play the actress in any real-life drama. She fell right into the victim role. She walked into Ma’s courtroom with her head down. The room was packed with people waiting to go before the judge for “drunk and disorderly,” wife-beating, writing phony checks, and so on. Everyone stopped to look at Nellie, as she shuffled her feet through the court to sit next to Ma on the front bench. Ma had to keep her own head down to keep the judge from seeing her laugh. Coley looked back at Nellie, and he knew the two of them were up to something. He got so nervous, the piece of paper he held in his hand, some kind of note from a doctor, started to rattle. When Ma got to speak before the judge she said, “Your honor, he punched me in the stomach where you can’t see any damage that could’ve been done, but look at what he did to my cousin who’s just off the boat from Ireland looking for a better life.” She paused, then yelled, “Two black eyes!” She pointed to Nellie behind her, who now stood up from her seat, a proud witness. Nellie piped up in her Kerry accent, “And a broken nose!”
The clerk who knew Ma told Coley he’d better drop the charges, and he did. Ma agreed to drop her charges too, but that didn’t stop Judge Concannon from letting into Coley about the coward that he was, hitting a pregnant woman, and that he should know better, being an Irish immigrant himself, about how hard it is for someone like Nellie to get accustomed to a new land without the likes of him showing off his manhood in America. Later the whole family was in stitches at the table, with Nellie still playing her role. “That’ll teach the little man to hit me again!” she said. I think she was starting to convince herself that Coley really had beat her—that’s the actress Nellie was. And there was no mention of the TPF at all; we’d forgotten all about them.
The buses were gone for the summer, and we were left with our frustrations and anger, with high school dropouts, alcoholism, and drugs galore. Ours was one of the worst buildings in Old Colony for trying to sleep on the humid nights. Not only were the lights on all night for the cockroaches, but the Duggans were always up late breaking things and beating each other. Moe Duggan, one of the few fathers I ever saw in Old Colony, came home drunk and beat on all six kids, while the mother screamed and tried to tear him off. She put up a pretty good fight most times, and he never seemed to beat her, just the kids. Then there was Molly next door. Her wall was against mine, and it was always banging with her head. She and her mother were always shrieking and chasing each other around the room, and I could never tell who was winning. They were both the same size, about four and a half feet, and everyone called them dwarfs. Al lived across the courtyard from us, and sat up all night drinking at his kitchen window. He’d invite the neighborhood teenagers up to join him, and they’d all get into a screaming fistfight by about four in the morning. He was always in his tank top, boxer shorts, and black socks pulled up to his knees. The mothers sat out on the front stoop until early morning, watching a TV that they’d carried outside. They’d talk about Al, looking up to his window occasionally, waiting for something to happen. On some mornings you’d see people who’d never gone to bed, chasing a good friend of theirs down the street with a baseball bat. “That’s what the booze will do to ya,” Ma said.
I knew there’d be trouble that hot day in August, when the neighbors all came out to get a good seat on the stoop. I heard the ladies on the stoop talking about how Chickie was pissed because Kevin had broken her window playing stickball. Chickie slammed the steel door to our building behind her. She was drinking. She swayed her skinny hips right past me down a couple of steps. She put her long fingers to the side of her mouth to send a message up to Ma: “Helen MacDonald’s a fuckin’ douchebaaaag!” she sang. I looked at her with big eyes, in shock. She didn’t even take notice of me. She walked further down the front steps, holding onto the railing. “Helen MacDonald’s a dickie puller!” she was singing, looking up to our window for a reaction. I ran up to the apartment. Ma was limping over to the parlor window, hands to her back, to help support her stomach. She was eight months pregnant and carrying huge. “What in the Christ!” she said to herself, looking down at Chickie, whose two eyes were magnified and distorted by the thick glasses on her tiny head. Chickie yelled some more swears up to the window. Just then Mary came around the corner into the front courtyard, and Ma told her to wait down there. When Ma got downstairs, one hand to the railing, the other to her back, she told Mary to cover her in case Chickie’s boyfriend jumped in. Chickie was going out with this guy, Jerry. He was like a real father to Chickie’s son, my friend Danny. He took Danny and me to see the Red Sox, the only time either one of us had ever been to Fenway Park. I knew he wouldn’t touch Ma—he was a nice guy who didn’t fit in with the scene under my window.
“Ma,” I yelled from the third floor. I didn’t want her to get in a fight. I knew Chickie was crazy. I was terrified of her. Ma marched over to Chickie. “Come over here,” Ma said with her finger. Chickie walked over to Ma, hands on hips, all attitude, getting closer to Ma’s face and saying more things about Ma and dicks. She called Ma a whore. Pow! Ma sucker punched Chickie, knocking her to the ground. Ma couldn’t bend over with her stomach and all, so she let Chickie get up and then grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the brick wall. Chickie’s thick glasses fell to the ground and Ma jumped up and down on them, then twisted and ground her wooden heel into the glass, crushing them to small bits. Ma walked slowly and triumphantly, holding her back, past the ladies on the stoop, who now cleared the way for her, never saying a word. That was that.
I was glad Ma was okay, with her being pregnant and all. I just didn’t know what to say to Danny. He was my best friend. Then I thought maybe he’d be glad that his mother got her ass kicked. I figured if anyone thought she’d deserved it, he would, even though he only said good things about her. I sat on the stoop with the ladies. They weren’t talking much around me, though. They were probably afraid they’d say the wrong thing, and I’d run up and tell Ma. Teens were now hanging out on the corners and reenacting Ma’s blows in slow motion. I knew they were talking about her because one motioned a round belly with his two hands. When Danny came out all he said was, “Wanna go to the store?” It was as if it never happened. Still, I could feel his embarrassment. But I never found out whether he was embarrassed because his mother had one of the filthiest mouths in Old Colony, or because she got her ass kicked by a pregnant lady.
“This is worse than Mass Mental,” Davey laughed. He said he’d be better off staying on the inside, at the hospital. Davey always talked about “the inside” and “the outside,” two separate worlds divided by the brick walls of Mass Mental. He’d seemed glad to be free until a stream of speeding police motorcycles almost ran him down while he was doing his bouncy walk across Patterson Way, in deep meditation. I’d cracked up at the window when I’d seen him forced out of his private world long enough to give them the finger. Then he’d bounced a little faster, looking back at them, as if they would’ve even noticed. They were probably off to some riot or something. Anyway, Davey was serious about it sucking on the outside. “Everyone’s nuts,” he said. Before deinstitutionalization, he’d only been out on the weekends, when there’d been plenty of drinking, but not so many people running across rooftops or hiding out in alleys, or squadrons of troopers appearing out of nowhere to march right over you, breaking into your concentration. Davey said he couldn’t think with all the “espionage” going on in Old Colony. “For Chrissake, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic and look where they dumped me, the KGB looking in our windows while I’m taking a shit!”
Davey started telling jokes that he’d made up. He was getting a kick out of Southie people. He couldn’t believe the craziness. “What’s the only parade bigger than St. Paddy’s Day in Southie?” he’d ask. “The lines going into J.J.’s Liquors on welfare check day!” It seemed he always arrived at his words of wisdom right after a long pacing session. One day after pacing the kitchen floor he asked me what Judge Garrity looked like. I didn’t know. “But he’s the enemy, everyone in Southie should know what he looks like—they should have WANTED posters up everywhere with his face on them.” I laughed. He took on this look he got when he was paranoid. “Hey, that’s pretty good!” he said. “They don’t want you to know what the enemy looks like, so you can end up killing each other, or yourself, in the frenzy. You become your own worst enemy!”