All Souls (15 page)

One day when I didn't go with Kevin on his paper route, he came home and shouted to Ma that he'd been robbed of all his collection money. He didn't know what to tell the guys at the
Herald
who were expecting all the cash. Ma told Kevin just to tell the truth. But Kevin stopped going to work instead, and when his supervisor called him, he finally confessed to being robbed on his paper route “by some big guys that looked like weight lifters.… They put a knife to my throat.” He said he'd told the robbers that they had the wrong newspaper, that it was the
Globe
they wanted to rob, but that they'd told him to empty his pockets anyway. He told the supervisor he wouldn't be coming back to work, that it was just too dangerous these days. Then he hung up the telephone. Later on he was laughing with Kathy in his bedroom at the very back of the apartment. She'd brought her friends up to the house to buy some pot from him. They didn't know that I knew Kevin was selling pot, and when I walked in on them rolling a joint, they told me to screw. They weren't letting me in on anything anymore, with my Irish whisper and all. I listened through the walls, though, and heard Kevin tell how he'd fooled the guys at the
Herald
into believing he'd been robbed, and that that was how he could afford to buy a half-pound of pot and some mescaline to start selling and make some real money. At the age of twelve, Kevin was now a player in the drug trade in South Boston. He said he'd have to keep it quiet, though, so he wouldn't have to pay Whitey Bulger any of the money. He said that his “connection” paid up to Whitey, so he wasn't really doing anything wrong.

In the coming weeks, I started answering the door every five or ten minutes. People I had never seen before in my life were knocking and asking for Kevin. “Is Mini Mac there?” It seemed as if the most popular people in the neighborhood got the nicknames, like “Whitey” or “Skoochie.” Sometimes the knocks on the door started early in the morning, before any of us had even gotten up with the sound of helicopters and police motorcycles. Ma couldn't believe how popular Kevin was. Kevin would step outside to the hallway for a few minutes, and I'd look through the peephole to see Kevin and some other teenager huddled in a corner. Then Kevin would come back inside, and I would be turning the channels of the TV, as if I was looking for something particular to watch, and minding my own business.

Then adults started knocking, people in their twenties and thirties. Ma thought it was kind of weird, but would only comment on how retarded some of these people were, hanging out with little kids. “They need to get a life,” she said. Ma got sick of the knocks and told Kevin he'd better do something about it. That's when we started to see less of Kevin. He started coming and going through his bedroom window. There was a tall oak tree that brushed up against the window, looking as if it would've grown right inside if it hadn't taken an upward turn toward the roof. Kevin kept the upper half of his window open at all times and just climbed in and out from the roof. He could be in that back room all day long, and none of us would know it, except Kathy, who sometimes brought him clients so she could get a free joint for herself. Customers now just went up to the roof, lay face down near the edge, and poked their heads upside-down into Kevin's window, saying
pssst.
My own room was next to Kevin's, and one day Marty McGrail lay down in the wrong spot and poked his head into my window by accident. I was taking a nap and woke up to an upside-down head
pssst
ing me, and scared Marty away when I yelled for Ma. After that I knew why we weren't getting so many knocks at the door anymore.

Phase Two of the busing brought Charlestown into the battle. And Charlestown was ready for nothing less than war. Back in the early days of busing, groups had formed with names like ROAR, or Restore Our Alienated Rights. The new group of mothers starting up in Charlestown was called Powder Keg, and their slogan was “Don't Tread on Me.” We'd always heard Charlestown was a lot like Southie, with housing projects and people with shamrocks tattooed to their arms. They had an Irish Mafia too, but we always liked to think that our Whitey Bulger was smarter and more powerful. Whitey was so smart he'd convinced us that the addicts we were starting to see more and more weren't really there. Whatever we were seeing, we figured it wasn't half as bad as what the blacks over in Roxbury had. Or Charlestown, for that matter, where the gangsters and the politicians weren't as organized as ours. Whitey kept a low profile during the riots in Southie, but everyone said he had something to do with the South Boston Marshalls, vigilantes who were supposedly passing out guns in Southie, getting everyone ready to protect the town. Kevin said that “the boys” in Charlestown were even crazier than ours, though, and that busing over there would make Southie look like Bethlehem on the first Christmas morning.

During Phase One, Joe had gotten out of being sent to Roxbury by attending the trade school at Charlestown High. The trade school was separate from the regular high school, and attracted kids from all over the city. He said there were blacks in the trade school but that everyone got along because they weren't being brought in on yellow buses yet. They chose to go there. But the peace ended in Charlestown when the buses rolled down the same streets where the Battle of Bunker Hill had been fought two hundred years earlier. The Charlestown kids started chanting the same chants we did in Southie: “Hell No, We Won't Go!” Many of their teenagers got involved in boycotts and sit-ins, but many more ended up lining the streets to give the finger to the buses, to throw Molotov cocktails off project rooftops, and to stick hockey sticks into the spokes of speeding cop motorcycles. They said on the news that one Charlestown gang had filled glass bottles with acid and thrown them at the horses, burning their legs and sending cops crashing to the street. “They got balls over there!” That's what Frankie said when he heard about that one.

Joe had to start being careful hanging around with some of the black friends he'd made the year before. One afternoon he came home shaking. He said he was playing basketball in the high school gym with some black kids, when a group of townies challenged them to a game. The game started off innocently enough, but when Joe's team from the trade school started winning, the townies started calling them niggers and jigaboos, and throwing punches instead of passes. The fight turned into a brawl, with Joe nearly knocking out one townie who'd called him a nigger lover and blindsided him. “That's when the Gestapo came into the school and stopped all the fighting by cracking some heads with their batons,” Joe told us. The townies taunted Joe, saying they'd give him a beating after school, along with one of the black kids who'd also gotten the best of them in the fight.

The school officials thought they were helping Joe and the black kid by letting them go home early, before the buses came. But the Charlestown mobs were already lining the streets, and teenagers from the projects were milling around on corners. “I turned around and there were about a hundred townies chasing after us with baseball bats and hockey sticks,” Joe told us, with big eyes. He said he ran for his life. “Hey, MacDonald, wait up!” the black kid had yelled, trying to catch up. Joe said he just screamed back to him, “You're on your own,” and ran over the bridge out of Charlestown and into downtown Boston.

Joe still looked shaken after he told the story. After that day, he started making friends with some of the townies, and made sure that he joined in some of the boycotts and sit-ins happening over there. He still attended Charlestown High, even though he said it was getting harder and harder not to become “another dropout from Southie.” As Ma kept saying, it seemed as if Judge Garrity was using his power to make a whole generation of dropouts and jailbirds in our neighborhood.

“What a vicious son of a bitch,” Ma said, looking at the picture of a Southie neighbor from down the road on the front page of the
Herald.
He was aiming the pointed staff of an American flag and charging at a black lawyer in a suit. Ma said she'd just about had it. “Busing is a horror,” she said, “but this is no way to fight it. People like that are making us all look bad.” She said she was starting to think that some of the politicians in Southie were almost as bad as Judge Garrity himself. She thought they might be stirring things up in the drugged-out minds of people like the teenager in the
Herald.
“And the kids are the ones suffering,” she said. “Especially the ones who can't get into the parochial schools with the seats filling up and the tuitions being raised.” She said she felt like she was kicked in the stomach every time she heard Jimmy Kelly talking about niggers this and niggers that at the Information Center where she'd been volunteering. She said she couldn't get used to that word, no matter how much she hated the busing. Then there were the South Boston Marshalls, the militant group connected to the Information Center. We all wanted to stop the busing, but sometimes it was confusing. One day you'd be clapping and cheering the inspirational words of Louise Day Hicks and Senator Billy Bulger, and the next day you'd see the blood on the news, black and white people's blood. And here was a black man being beaten with an American flag on the national news. We sat on a legless couch in the Old Colony Project and watched the violent pictures of another bloody protest. Ma said she didn't know where to turn, what to belong to, and neither did I.

We all wanted to belong to something big, and the feeling of being part of the antibusing movement along with the rest of Southie had been the best feeling in the world. But it wasn't feeling so good anymore; we were losing—to the liberals and to the racists. Even Frankie had to find something besides the crowds at Darius Court to be part of. Boxing at McDonough's Gym made Frank a winner. He came home from bouts in a good mood. He said he felt pumped from all the winning. He was proud of his ability in the ring and bragged to us, showing Ma all his moves. Ma showed him some of her moves too. She always said that if she'd been a boy, she would've been a boxer. Coley agreed with her on that one. Frank was feeling good about himself. It got so he could knock out anyone he wanted to in the ring, black or white, when they fought in the statewide bouts.

Ma thanked God that Frank was hanging out at McDonough's Gym every day, away from the buses. The gym was behind the courthouse, and attracted boxers from all over Southie. Many kids went from the courts right into the gym to get away from the trouble in the streets. They were safe there, especially with all the gangsters who watched over them in the boxing ring, cheering the kids on, and sometimes becoming their trainers. Boxing was becoming Southie's prized sport, attracting some of the toughest kids in the neighborhood for bloody but regulated battles. It was better than fighting in the street, where you might get arrested by the bad guys. And it kept Frankie and other kids like him out of Old Colony Project for the day. Frankie said Whitey Bulger joked that someday Frank could be his bodyguard.

The whole country was celebrating America's two hundredth birthday, and the nuns at St. Augustine's kept trying to get us kids to draw American flags and eagles. I was the one in the class who could draw, so the other kids had me draw their pictures. Then they'd scrawl
STOP FORCED BUSING
with their crayons underneath the bald eagle. One kid even wrote
GEORGE WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT
underneath the American flag that I'd drawn for him. The Tall Ships were going to be pulling into the harbor right down the street from the Old Colony Project, and the Gestapo were watching over us heavily now, so that we didn't make another bloody scene for all of America to see that we weren't feeling free. But most people in the neighborhood were more excited that George Wallace was planning a trip to South Boston, to run for president and to promise to get the government off our backs.

In Southie all the talk now was about George Wallace, who would end forced busing for sure if he became president of the United States. The South Boston Information Center covered its trucks with his campaign signs, and yelled through their loudspeakers down Patterson Way that everyone should vote for Wallace. He was almost as popular in the neighborhood as Whitey Bulger. At first Ma said she wasn't too sure about Wallace, with all the news reports about him wanting to go back to the days of black people being second-class citizens, and some even said he talked about sending the blacks back to Africa. But eventually she changed her mind and went with Wallace when she realized he was the only one out there who was paying attention to Southie, the only one who'd work to end forced busing forever. The national news focused on us once again, covering Wallace's trip to Southie. And there was Ma one night on TV, with a George Wallace button pinned to her rabbit fur jacket. “Maybe then some of these kids in the streets could go back to school,” she said into the news cameras on Broadway.

All the adults were excited about George Wallace's visit. Some of the little kids got excited with the parents, like the boy whose sign I'd help make at St. Augustine's. Some of the older kids went to the fundraiser the local politicians held for Wallace on Broadway, but most of the teenagers couldn't be bothered. The Lithuanian Club was all decked out in the usual banners:
STOP FORCED BUSING
and
STICK TO YOUR GUNS SOUTHIE.
Ma brought her guitar and accordion up to the Lith Club and took the stage to do her own antibusing anthems, and she said she never saw Jimmy Kelly so excited as when he finally got to meet George Wallace.