All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

MacDonald’s earliest memory of his mother is of her crying after her baby had died. His name had been Patrick Michael, and she told Michael Patrick (the author), that he was going to take his brother’s place. She switched the names because “[t]he Irish always said it was bad luck to name a child after someone who had died” (16). The baby died at three weeks old. MacDonald reflects, “I could never really get mad at my mother the way most kids did at their parents. I could never blame her or judge her for anything in our lives. After I saw her cry for Patrick Michael, I only wanted to protect her” (16). 

Michael was born two weeks late and held the birth record for weight at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He was his mother’s ninth child. She was still married to Michael’s father, Dave MacDonald, but no one knew where Dave was. Early in their marriage, Dave had beaten her badly, twice. They were both musicians and met at a show where they were both playing. In addition to being abusive, Dave had an alcohol addiction and had affairs with other women, but Michael’s mother said the marriage did not officially end until he skipped the baby’s funeral. The family was already surviving on welfare, and Dave’s loss was mostly positive for them. 

Patrick died because he was turned away by a hospital on a night when he was having difficulty breathing. The hospital had filled its quota of “charity cases” (19) and said that Patrick’s issue was not an emergency. By the next day, Patrick was dead of pneumonia in his crib. 

The family hated living in Columbia Point Project, and matters only got worse after Patrick’s death. It was an area with a higher-than-average crime rate. All of Michael’s siblings had stories about being robbed and beaten in the streets, but the major tension arose from the fact that the MacDonalds were a white family living in a predominately Black neighborhood. 

Their mother often took the children shopping with her. She took pride in her looks, and she never wanted to be seen if she was not in high heels. Michael’s mother told him that one day the family was in a restaurant when a song came on the radio. It was a song by Dave MacDonald, their father, sung by an artist named Doug LaVelle. It was called “Two years for Non-support.” MacDonald says, “Ma jumped up and told everyone in Donut Chef that that that very song playing had been written by the kids’ father, a no-good bastard if there ever was one” (22). She added that she had gotten Dave put in jail for failing to pay child support when she was pregnant with their fifth child. After he got out—after only two months in jail—he came after her and beat her. Ma managed to kick a couple of his teeth out. She had him back in court before a judge the next day. MacDonald’s siblings are proud when the other customers in the restaurant cheer for her and ask to feel her muscles. 

Michael was a baby when the family finally left Colombia Point. Ma’s parents had offered to let her move into their triple-decker apartment in Jamaica Plain in 1967. There were only two bedrooms, but the kids had a yard to play in and the neighborhood was much safer. Ma usually slept on the couch while the children shared rooms. Michael slept on a mattress on the floor. 

When neighborhood kids came over to play, the house seemed joyously lawless. Meals were rarely eaten at the table and walking on the furniture was permitted since Ma—the adult—was rarely there. Most of the people in the neighborhood were Irish. Ma played the accordion in Irish pubs to make extra money, even though it would cancel her welfare if she were found out.

Each spring, the family went to Irish Field Day in the countryside. The games were put on to benefit African Missions and starving children. Michael’s brother, Kevin, was an entrepreneur by age seven. He learned how to run cons on most of the game tables at Field Day, and always came home with a hatful of money. 

The MacDonalds were the only family on Jamaica Street who were on welfare. Because they sometimes felt self-conscious about their lower economic status, they visited a nearby housing project to spend time with other welfare families. Soon, development in Jamaica Plain caused a demographic shift, and the MacDonalds found themselves in the white minority again. There were frequent fights, and the racial tension was obvious to the children. 

During the summer, the children slept on mattresses on the front porch because there was no air conditioning. The MacDonald household got a reputation for being a party house, since adults were rarely there, and the children became popular. 

Ma would occasionally get calls from social workers and welfare inspectors coming to check on the state of the house. The children would work together to hide their possessions so the welfare workers would not realize that the family had more money than Ma was reporting. The color TV was the only thing that was too big to hide, so they would throw curtains over it and pretend that it was a table, then serve lunch to the inspectors. 

MacDonald writes, “Ma was drawn to men who would end up living off us, rather than providing for us” (35). Ma always dressed up and had constant attention from men, but these men did not help the family. Every time she started a relationship with a man, he would quit his job when he saw that the welfare checks came regularly and that Ma made enough on the side to keep the family going. 

When the narrative resumes, Michael is 5 years old; he is also the youngest child and spends the most time with Ma at home. He listens to her talk on the phone for hours with her sister, Nellie, and then sits while she tries to engage him in deeper discussions about God. One day, she tells him that he has a “different” father than the other children, which makes him different as well. Michael’s first impression is that he is glad that he is not related to Mac, the father of his siblings. He reflects, “I’m not sure what the word father meant to me” (37), but as the young Michael considers this new reality, his perspective changes, and he thinks, “I had a good father. I wondered how I might use my special new status in the world” (37). 

Michael brags to everyone in the neighborhood about his good father, but most people tell him to be quiet about it, and he states, “I knew something was wrong, then” (37). When someone tells him that he is technically a “bastard” (38), Michael quits bragging and begins to imagine that he has been created via immaculate conception, like Jesus. 

One day, Ma asks Michael to draw God. He draws the sun, moon, stars, trees, and some animals, arranging them all so that they resemble a face. His mother praises his drawing and says that Michael “must be some kind of genius” (38). Michael begins to believe that God might actually be his father. 

On Sundays, Ma sends the kids to church but never goes herself. She tells Michael that if she went, as a divorced woman, she would be judged by the church, and MacDonald admits: 

Naturally my mother’s beliefs shaped my own. Even as a kid I always felt torn between the Catholic Church and its rules for who’s in and who’s out with Jesus, and a deeper relationship with God that might be found elsewhere (39). 

One summer, the kids come home from summer camp to find a man named Bob King in their home. Ma married him while they were gone. Within months, Bob is drinking and stealing money from Ma. He leaves the family after she breaks a wine bottle over his head. 

When Michael is five, Ma is going to Suffolk University on financial aid. Michael goes with her and stays in the library during her classes. Michael’s memories of the time are mostly happy, until his brother, Davey, runs away. Davey is the oldest child and has endured the majority of their father’s abuse. Months after Davey leaves, Ma gets a call from the police; Davey has been arrested in California for breaking into a house. Ma sends him to stay in Ireland with her cousin, Danny Murphy. Davey works on Murphy’s farm for the summer. 

When he returns, Davey is “different, shaking and edgy” (43). After he beats Ma badly, he is sent to the Massachusetts Mental Institution for observation. Over the course of his three years there, he undergoes shock therapy. Michael goes with Ma to visit Davey every day. Ma makes friends with everyone, although many of the inmates seem uneasy around Michael. Ma tells him that it’s because children remind them of the things that happened in their own childhoods. 

During one visit, Davey begs Ma to take him home, but she isn’t allowed to. He jumps on her and has to be restrained by the guards. A doctor tells Ma that Davey has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The next time they visit Davey, he is locked up alone in a small room. Michael realizes that the mental institution is not a good place for Davey. He states, “For my family, freedom had become the rule above all others” (48).

In the summer of 1973, Michael’s grandfather sells the house on Jamaica Street, and the family moves. Ma approaches a man named Dapper O’Neil, a city counselor, in the Old Colony Housing Project in Southie. O’Neill gets her an apartment on Patterson Way after seeing that she has eight children and no money or home. The neighborhood community consists of white residents and is wary of what it considers to be outsiders. A boy named Danny tells Michael that he can plan to get in a few fights before becoming part of the neighborhood. Michael and Danny become friends, and Danny explains the rules of the neighborhood to Michael, using a racist slur to warn him of a line on Carson Beach that cannot be crossed because the community on the other side of this boundary consists entirely of Black people. Danny also speaks badly of the Black people who live in Columbia Point, unaware that Michael lived there and therefore knows that this is a gross exaggeration. 

A boy approaches and tells Michael that he wants to fight him. He beats Michael up; the adults and other children watch until the police arrive. Michael’s brothers are annoyed that he lost a fight, so his brother, Frankie, schedules him for boxing lessons, promising that he’ll soon be able to get revenge on the boy, whose name is Brian Noonan. However, Michael and Brian become friends the day after the fight. 

One day, someone throws a bottle through the family’s front window. Michael’s brothers—shirtless, muscular, and carrying machetes—go downstairs to confront the five boys, who then run away, yelling the names of gangsters that the MacDonalds haven’t heard of yet. The next day, a neighbor tells them that a “known thug and murderer” (56) named Freddy Callahan will be coming to take revenge on them. Ma walks up and down the street with a loaded shotgun, showing everyone that she is unafraid. At sundown, Ma calls a taxi and sends Michael, Kevin, and Kathy—the three youngest MacDonald children—to their grandparents’ house. When the children come back the next day, Michael learns that Freddy circled their house a few times and then left. After that, everyone is friendly to the MacDonalds. MacDonald states, “Being the youngest in a family with a rep for being crazy, I’d never have to fight again in Old Colony, or in any of the areas immediately surrounding the project” (58). 

One afternoon, while Danny is giving Michael a tour of the neighborhoods, he tells him about the D Street Project and compares the lower-class white people who live there with lower-class Black people, using a racist slur. Danny tells Michael that the MacDonalds are in that category because they are lower-class Irish people. Michael cannot make sense of Danny’s explanation of Boston’s class hierarchy and decides not to worry about it. Many of the boys in the neighborhood tattoo themselves with a small dot on the wrist—the “Southie dot” (63). This identifies them as being loyal to Old Colony, but using this mark would get anyone with the tattoo in trouble outside of their neighborhood. 

Macdonald writes that “[t]here was always something to do in Old Colony, and it seemed a much bigger place than the six or so blocks it actually was” (64). The kids are always able to entertain themselves. They open the fire hydrants with a fireman’s wrench and splash in the water or light the dumpsters on fire and then watch the fire trucks arrive. The teenagers make their own fun as well, by smoking marijuana and selling drugs. No one ever told on them: “In Southie the worst thing you could be was a snitch” (67). 

The MacDonald family integrates fully into the neighborhood. Joe has mechanical ability and helps people with their cars. Kathy has a reputation as the toughest girl on the streets. Frankie boxes and lifts weights at the gym. Kevin pursues confidence games in the streets. More than the others, Kevin is drawn to the criminal side of the neighborhood. 

Ma has a boyfriend named Coley when Michael is in second grade. The kids all like him because he watches cartoons with them, is sober, never tells them what to do, and cooks for Ma. Michael doesn’t like knowing that the family is poor and on food stamps. At school, he says he lives in a house, rather than a project. He also begins to participate in a couple of scams to make extra money. Michael, Kevin, and Danny go to an intersection on Main Street and hold up a sign advertising the supposed “youth hockey” of South Boston, holding out a cup for donations to commuters stopped at red lights. 

In the spring of 1974, Michael is standing at an intersection when a motorcade approaches. One of the cars bears a sign stating that Southie “won’t go.” Someone tells Michael that Judge Garrity wants to send all of the poor Irish students away to go to school with Black children. Once the motorcade passes, Michael hears people talking about the “forced busing” (75) that will start in the fall, at the beginning of the next school year. This means that the poorest white students will be bused to a public school filled with the poorest Black students. Irish neighborhoods set aside all grievances and bond against what they see as their common enemy: the forced-busing initiative. 

In June, Michael and the other students are kept at school two hours late; the teachers say that there will be riots that afternoon because a white woman was covered in gasoline and set on fire in Roxbury, a Black neighborhood. More motorcades and marches happen every day for the remainder of the summer.