All Souls (27 page)

It was ten below outside, but the heat blasting from the radiators was enough to kill us all. I opened all the windows and sat on the couch looking out while Mrs. Mercer across the street made trip after trip to throw buckets of hot water onto her ice-covered front stoop. The hot water she was furiously throwing kept freezing over. Mrs. Mercer wouldn't give up, though; I counted her coming and going with the buckets of water fifteen times. Ma said she was on medication for her depression, and was probably just trying to keep herself busy. “She's a very unstable woman, and I think the pills are making her worse.”

Then Seamus, Stevie, and Tommy, along with a pack of about twenty other little kids came running up the tunnel, chasing a raccoon that must have taken a wrong turn. They ran after the animal with sticks and bats, and more kids came out of their apartments to join the fun. Then they chased it up to the roof across the street and cornered it at the ledge. Mrs. Mercer's twelve-year-old son, Donnell, stepped out of the pack, hushed up the war chants of the little kids, and crouched down, talking to the raccoon gently, as if he was trying to talk it out of suicide. “C'mon … here we go … that's it … we just want to help you.” Donnell inched closer and closer, one crouching step at a time. Then the raccoon jumped off the roof, landed on its feet, and in no time had the pack of kids chanting and chasing him again. The raccoon ran around an abandoned car before heading right toward Mrs. Mercer, who was carrying yet another bucket of hot water to the frozen steps. She dropped the bucket and sat terror-stricken with both feet up on the banister while the hunted animal did a slippery dance next to her on the ice-covered steps, before dashing into the project hallway and through Mrs. Mercer's open door. The little kids followed with their weapons raised for battle, and there was a short silence on the street as they disappeared into the building.

Then screams came from Mrs. Mercer's, and we saw the raccoon jump out of her bathroom window. Some kids climbed out of the first-floor window, while others jumped over the slippery front stoop. Mrs. Mercer's other son, K.J., came outside now with a wet head and a towel wrapped around him. The raccoon and the pack of kids had come through the bathroom while he was taking a shower. And off the whole crowd went down Patterson Way, laughing and chanting in Southie unity, chasing the raccoon out of Old Colony Project for good.

Jesus, this is the greatest place to grow up
, I thought, almost convincing myself again. I couldn't control the feelings of joy I got from scenes like that. I was jealous of the little kids, having the time of their lives. But Ma had started to worry about what would happen when the little kids became teenagers, and all that Southie stuff about sticking together would backfire. Seamus and Stevie were already thinking the gangsters were the greatest guys in the world. And all their friends envied them the times a big fancy car pulled up and Seamus and Stevie were handed a twenty-dollar bill, just for being Frank the Tank's little brothers. Tommy Cronin was one of the guys handing out the twenties. He knew Seamus and Stevie fought over everything, so he used to rip the bill in half and tell them they had to join forces and tape the bill back together, so they could spend it. A real lesson in sticking together. The only good thing I saw in those twenties the kids taped together with studied precision was that they kept them from stealing from Bell's Market. Stevie and his friend Tommy had been caught there already, and Ma had had to run down to Bell's to get Stevie after the owner had scared the two with threats about the cops and jail. But it wasn't the threats about cops and jail that made Stevie start to ignore dares to steal candy. He later told me he never stole again after seeing Ma break down and cry all the way home from Bell's Market, begging him and making him promise with his right hand across his heart never to do it again. He told me he'd never seen Ma cry before and never wanted to see her cry again.

Stevie and Seamus were worked up, telling us about the gun collection their friend's uncle had showed them. “That's for when the niggers come,” he'd told the kids. He'd said he'd been preparing for the race wars since he'd dropped out of Southie High during the busing. “And now they're moving them in.”

“There's gonna be a bloodbath,” one Southie leader announced on the six o'clock news, as reports came out that Southie was bracing for what was being called “forced housing.” The BHA and South Boston's own Mayor Flynn were planning to move minority families into the housing projects of white Southie and Charlestown. The NAACP had sued the BHA for bypassing minorities on the housing waiting list, when there were openings in Charlestown and Southie. Low-income people were usually able to pick their top choices of housing projects to move into. Most whites wouldn't dare go to black sections of the city, and many blacks would never think of coming to Southie, since the last black families had fled Old Colony and D Street during busing. But many new immigrants from Haiti or Latin America, who'd never heard of Southie and hadn't been in Boston for busing, simply needed an apartment, and had been passed over by BHA officials when an apartment was free in Old Colony.

Mayor Flynn was now promising to integrate the projects on a first-come-first-served basis. To us it felt just like busing: because of past injustices by public officials, BHA applicants would now have no say in where they would live, unless they chose to move into a neighborhood where the majority of residents were of a race other than their own. In that case, they could move to the top of a waiting list of ten thousand families. And how could the new immigrants, who'd never heard of Southie and who desperately needed housing, pass that up?

The battle lines were drawn. Here we go again, I thought. Ma said, “That's it! I'm getting the fuck out. The blacks can have this place.” Then she wondered out loud why we were always fighting for the same piece-of-shit schools and cockroach-infested apartments. “Why don't they go after Newton with its beautiful lawns?” she screamed. “I'll join the NAACP, then we'll all get a piece of the pie.”

I laughed, imagining Newton seeing the likes of us tinkers coming through carrying everything we own in trash bags, and Ma with the accordion. But beyond that image, I was beginning to find out just how different Southie really was from suburbs like Newton. At school I'd learned that social scientists over the years had dubbed South Boston a “death zone,” along with Roxbury, our black counterpart for the failed busing experiment. I had never heard that one before, but I was glad to find out that I wasn't imagining what I'd seen in the streets. Families had been too ashamed to say their kids were dying of anything other than car accidents or freak heart attacks, but the truth was that we had some of the city's highest death rates for suicide, drugs, and alcohol, and through the early eighties had the city's fastest-growing homicide rate. I was relieved reading the statistics. I'd thought I might be going crazy whenever Southie people were appalled by my own death zone stories.

Police escorts surrounded the moving trucks that came through the project at one in the morning, sneaking the black families into the best place in the world while everyone slept. But the crowds were waiting; it was the end of summer and the neighborhood was always lively until early morning on hot summer nights. And everyone was ripping mad that the black families were being given free rent to be part of what some were calling another experiment on Southie. For some, this was sure to be the most excitement since busing. Something to come together around, another battle to fight, and to lose. Old Colony Task Force leaders and the politicians tried to organize rallies, bringing back the same old chants: “Here We Go Southie, Here We Go.” But the chants didn't sound as strong. There'd been drugs in the neighborhood back before the busing, but not nearly as much as we'd seen since then, with so many kids dropping out of school. The neighborhood was more fragmented now. We didn't have the fight in us that we had back in 1974. Ma wasn't the only one who wanted to get the hell out; others were feeling the same way now that the blacks were coming. But most people had nowhere to go.

The first black families had twenty-four-hour police protection at their doors. But much of the time the cops ended up sleeping in their cruisers because there wasn't any action. Ma said the city councilor was going around with his boys, changing the BHA's locks on vacant apartments and moving in homeless white families as squatters. Some people were starting to complain about the newcomer white families too, saying they were “white trash.”

Before long busing revival rallies took place in church basements, where residents talked about minorities hanging sheets out the windows to dry, and playing loud music all hours of the night. “For Chrissake, I don't know what country I'm in half the time, between the Haitians hanging their sheets, and the Spanish dancing on top of my head upstairs,” a scared older woman shouted from the back row. But we'd always hung sheets out windows, and played loud music. Our leaders played on the fears of elderly folks, stirring up anxieties about things Southie had seen for years before bringing out the big gun in their arsenal of threats: minorities would bring drugs and crime into South Boston.

When the minorities did move in, the little kids in the neighborhood played together fine. Most of the trouble came between teenagers, and in Old Colony we had the most teenagers of all the projects. There had always been fights in Old Colony, long before the first black family arrived. That's life in the projects. But now if a fight broke out between two neighbors with racial differences, the battle lines were drawn, names were called, and the fight was labeled a hate crime.

The Asian families mostly went unnoticed. “Thank God!” I heard one neighbor say when she saw two Asians jumping out of the moving truck backing toward our front stoop. Then she saw about twenty more climbing out of the truck. “For fuck's sake, how will they all fit in that tiny apartment?” Everyone said “the Orientals” were quiet people, though. No one seemed to mind them, despite the occasional dark discussions about people's missing cats and dogs.

No one expected the blacks and Hispanics to last long. These families often demanded transfers back to their neighborhoods once they found out Southie wasn't the clean-cut middle-class neighborhood our politicians had always publicized in the press. “Shit! Those little white motherfuckers are worse than the niggers in Orchard Park!” I heard one black woman on the train telling her friend who was being sent by the BHA to Southie. “I caught this one motherfucker trying to steal my air conditioner right out of my window. I pulled out the biggest blade I had in my kitchen and ran right outside to put it up against his dick. He put it back, but I said, ‘fuck this, I'm outta here.' ” She went on and on while her friend listened to every word, shaking her head.

There was no way we would've believed integration could work in Southie. Even Nellie, who'd lived with a black man and had a daughter by him, feared Southie opinion. She used to sneak our cousin Lisa in and out of Old Colony in blankets once she realized she wouldn't be able to pass her off as “half Italian.” But before long, Ma was inviting our Puerto Rican neighbors into the house to teach them Irish step dancing and to play a few tunes on the accordion. The mothers didn't understand English, so Ma started talking to them louder and stretching the words out. “Aaaaccoooordiiiian,” Ma yelled, bringing out the instrument to show what she was talking about. “Muuuusiic.” The women looked at Ma with worried faces, either because they didn't understand her or because they thought she was nutty. Then Ma brought out Maria, still sleepy from her nap, and pointed at her, yelling, “Cuuubaaaa!” thinking they might bond over Ma's little girl being Hispanic. But when Ma got the idea that a free haircut might break the ice, and brought out her pair of sharp scissors, they leaned back against the wall looking terrified.

There were also more promising signs that we all might get along. Sometimes black, white, and Hispanic mothers sat on the stoop together, watching out for each other's kids in wading pools on hot summer days. Stevie was excited and proud when he brought home the Alice Casey Award from the Perkins School, an award established after busing to reward kids like Stevie who got along with all races, and the only attempt by liberal leaders that I'd heard of to promote peace since busing.

But any peace that did exist started to crumble when the police dispatched its squads of the Community Disorders Unit. People started talking about the CDU, the cops who dealt with hate crimes, like it was the TPF all over again. All the talk around Old Colony was about how the CDU was targeting Old Colony white kids whenever a fight turned racial. Thirteen-year-olds were being lined up against the walls, frisked, arrested, and given juvenile records for racial assaults they sometimes were involved in, and sometimes weren't. To fit the description “a white youth with a Fightin' Irish baseball cap” was a liability. The resentments built up, the tensions flared, teenagers were criminalized, families were sometimes evicted. And before long no one even wanted to look at, never mind speak to, a neighbor of a different race, for fear of being accused of harassment.

Even Ma stopped her famous hospitality. “Where were my civil rights when my kids' lives were at stake when we first moved in?” she said. Then she laughed, “Jesus, to think, if Chickie had been black I'd probably have been in federal court.”

“A trailer park? The Rockies?” I couldn't believe Ma was packing her trash bags to flee Old Colony and move to a trailer park in the mountains of Colorado. “I'm heading for the hills,” she laughed. “You can keep the apartment. I had to lie about my welfare benefits being even less than they are and had the rent brought down to $150 a month. I'll send you some food stamps. Johnnie's getting out of the Seals and he'll be staying with you for awhile.” Ma said she wanted me to hold on to the apartment in case things didn't work out in the mountains. Seamus was thirteen, Stevie was twelve, and friends their age were being arrested for calling people “niggers” when they got in fights. And Ma was sick of going to wakes. One month in 1989 she was at the confirmation mass for Michael Dizzo, the ice cream man's nephew, and the next month she was seeing him off at Jackie O'Brien's after he and his uncle were shot to death. That was it for Ma. “This fuckin' place is like Sodom and Gomorrah, and if I ever look back may God turn me into a pillar of salt, like that guy's wife in the Bible.” Ma had been watching Pat Robertson on the TV and was starting to talk more and more about the end of the world and Armageddon. “There's gonna be a great chastisement, and haven't I had enough chastisement for one lifetime? It'll be safe in the mountains. Lot, that's his name, the guy in the Bible.” Ma was half joking and half serious with all her apocalyptic talk.