Common Ground (86 page)

His younger brother wasn’t so fortunate. George had a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In July 1972, he was caught in a South
End riot triggered when police waded into a disturbance at the Puerto Rican Day celebration. Early that evening, he was standing with friends on Washington Street when a police car pulled to the curb. The rest of the crowd scattered, but the police arrested George, charging him with being a disorderly person and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon—for allegedly throwing a beer can at a policeman’s chest. George insisted he’d never thrown anything, the officer failed to show up in court, and the charges were dismissed.

Quieter and more studious than his older brother, George had come under the influence of an extraordinary teacher. Harriet Schwartz, a veteran of the Boston public schools, had escaped the corrosive cynicism that afflicted many of her colleagues. Appalled by the fruitless treadmill of Boston’s black schools, she was determined to find some way out for her most promising students. Every day after school, and all through one February vacation, she tutored six of them in math and English, helping to prepare them for private, suburban, or special city schools. In September 1970, George was admitted to West Roxbury’s predominantly white Robert Gould Shaw School, named after the white colonel who had led Massachusetts’ black regiment in the Civil War. From there he moved automatically into Roslindale High, another predominantly white school, where he compiled a satisfactory record in the college preparatory program.

But every day he came home from school to the raw realities of Methunion Manor, and soon he was hanging out with Richard’s crowd. Before long, he too was a street hustler—snatching purses, picking pockets, later graduating to car theft and mugging. The brothers rarely pulled off a job together—Richard considered George unreliable, less committed to the street life, more likely to make a mistake. So George paired off with another kid, operating much as Richard and his friend did, waiting until their victim was alone on a deserted street, moving in from front and rear, grabbing a wallet, a handbag, or jewelry, then fleeing back to the refuge of Methunion Manor. Like Richard, George never used a gun, but, after several of his marks put up a struggle, he began brandishing a knife to great effect.

He might have gone on from there to more serious crimes had he not been arrested in October 1973. He was running that day with the best known of the South End hustlers, a hood named Anthony Black, who was
de facto
leader of the Soul Center gang. Anthony’s father, Vernon, lived in Methunion Manor, where he ran a “trick pad,” an apartment to which prostitutes took their customers. At an early age, when Vernon was running a similar establishment on Durham Street, Anthony had learned to prey on his father’s customers. He’d watch as the prostitutes pulled up to the building in the customer’s car, wait until they’d gone inside, then break into the car and take anything he could find. Afraid of being mugged, the white hunters invariably stashed their wallets under a seat or in the glove compartment and Anthony would make off with a fistful of bills. From that he graduated to mugging and armed robbery. Though barely five feet four and only a hundred pounds, he was a tough,
cocky bantam, known to police as “the little Napoleon.” Already a legend up and down Columbus Avenue, he had earned a faithful following among the neighborhood kids.

On October 21, 1973, one of Anthony’s gang stole a pocketbook from a woman at the Midtown Motor Inn. In it they found the key to her car parked in the motel lot and they decided to take that too. As the oldest member along that day, George was delegated to drive. Rolling along Huntington Avenue near Copley Square, he failed to see a red light suspended high above the intersection and at once a police car pulled him over. George didn’t have a license, but he was doing a pretty good job of bluffing when one of the policemen glanced in the back seat and spotted Anthony Black. “Oh, Mr. Black,” he said. “We know Mr. Black quite well. Do you gentlemen mind stepping out here?” George was booked on auto theft. After the Reverend Bobby McClain testified on his behalf, the judge suspended sentence and gave him two years’ probation.

By then, Rachel’s third-oldest son, Freddie, was giving signs of becoming the family’s most dedicated hustler. At the age of fifteen, he was already spending a lot of time around the Paradise Lounge on Tremont Street. The South End’s most notorious bar, the Paradise was a hangout for drug pushers, gamblers, numbers runners, pimps, prostitutes, stickup men, enforcers, and fugitives of all sorts. Day and night, it was the place to get a fix, pick up a woman, make a bet, buy a weapon, fence some loot, exchange information on upcoming jobs, or get into a brawl. It was no place for a fifteen-year-old boy to be hanging out.

A social worker visiting Rachel in November 1973 reported that she had been “somewhat upset and depressed lately because her children are getting into all sorts of trouble.”

If the boys were in trouble with the law, the girls were in trouble with boys. All through those teenage years, Cassandra and Little Rachel energetically experimented with sex. On spring and summer evenings, they hung out with a crowd of neighborhood kids at the corner of Carleton and Holyoke streets—smoking pot, drinking beer, “foolin’ around.” Night after night, Big Rachel angrily hauled them home.

On Thanksgiving Day 1974, after dinner at the home of Rachel’s sister Alva, the family cleared the living room, put a stack of rhythm and blues on the stereo, and began to dance. As Big Rachel watched her daughters strut the floor, she noticed how heavy Little Rachel had grown. Suddenly she thought: That girl is pregnant, my thirteen-year-old daughter is pregnant! Rushing to Alva’s room, she flung herself on the bed, where Alva found her an hour later. The sisters summoned Little Rachel, who reluctantly confessed her condition.

Big Rachel had often discussed sex and its consequences with her daughters and had cautioned them against fooling around, but knowing they would do it anyway, she also had instructed them in contraception and urged them to pay regular visits to a gynecologist. If, despite all these precautions, they got pregnant anyway, they’d better be ready to care for their baby. All that winter,
a family debate raged over what to do with Little Rachel’s child. The girl insisted she was ready and willing to raise it. Her mother dismissed that notion with scorn. “You’re thirteen years old,” she told her daughter. “You’re a baby having a baby. And I can’t take care of it for you. I got enough on my hands. We got to do something.”

Little Rachel was already six months pregnant, too late for an abortion, so Big Rachel called the Boston Children’s Service Association to arrange for adoption. When Alva heard that she rushed down to Methunion Manor to confront her sister. “You’re giving away your own flesh and blood,” she said. “Nobody in our family has ever done that before. It’s a damn disgrace.”

Big Rachel wasn’t taking that. “You’re not my mother,” she said. “You’re not my father. You’re not my keeper. I don’t have to tell you nothing.”

Alva stormed out, but she was back a few weeks later. “Before you give that child away to strangers,” she demanded, “I want you to give it to me.” Rachel just stared at her. “You’re not even going to answer me?” asked Alva.

“You mind everybody’s business but your own,” Rachel shot back. “I got nothing to say to you.”

Little Rachel’s baby was born in April 1975. For three days, she nursed her infant; then, with her reluctant permission, it was put up for adoption. For years to come, Little Rachel grieved for her child and never quite forgave her mother. And the quarrel left a legacy of bitterness between Rachel and Alva—never again were the sisters more than coldly civil toward each other.

Rachel was heartsick over her children’s troubles. She’d done her best to make a good home for them, and God knew she loved them! They were all she had in life. They meant so much to her that maybe she loved them too much. But children couldn’t live on love alone. They needed discipline. They needed a man around the house to provide a firm hand, even a razor strap if necessary. Her brother Arnold had tried to be a surrogate father to her kids, but he lacked the authority a real father would have had, and some of them had angrily repudiated him. Bobby McClain had helped too with advice and guidance, but increasingly he was preoccupied with his own problems. As the years went by, Rachel realized she would have to be both mother and father to her kids.

She became a rigid disciplinarian, setting tight curfews for them, insisting that they perform chores around the house before they went out, demanding that they tell her where they’d been and whom they’d been with. But the more she cracked down, the more they seemed to resent her. Nearly every evening there was some kind of shouting match in the Twymon household, Rachel accusing her children of being lazy and irresponsible, they denouncing her for being meddlesome and domineering. “Get off my back,” George shouted at her one night. “Stop trying to run my life!” After his arrest for auto theft, George resolved to change his life, dropping out of the gang and setting his mind to school. But he and his mother remained temperamentally irreconcilable. Night after night they were at each other’s throat. During one particularly bitter spat, Rachel hit him behind the ear with her cane. As soon as he graduated
from Roslindale High, George left home, enrolling at Draughns Business College in Nashville, Tennessee.

One of the few adults at Methunion Manor who maintained any rapport with the street gang was a white Catholic priest, Father Walter Waldron. A founding member of the Association of Boston Urban Priests, Waldron had remained in the inner city long after most of his colleagues had retreated to suburban parishes or left the priesthood altogether. Assigned to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, seat of Boston’s Archdiocese, he chose not to live in its spacious rectory but to take an apartment in Methunion Manor, where he could make a real connection with alienated blacks in his parish.

Waldron developed a special relationship with the project’s teenagers. Perhaps because he seemed less interested in judging them than in understanding how they perceived the world, many of them would visit him in his apartment to sip a soda, listen to records, and trade stories. And when they got in trouble, Waldron was always available with advice and assistance. He’d been before every judge in town urging clemency when he thought it was justified, or simply comforting young offenders and their families.

Detectives at the South End station house—most of them Irish Catholics—were angered by Father Waldron’s activities, accusing him of making their job harder, of “protecting the troublemakers,” of giving young criminals “sanctuary” in the bosom of the Church. “Those kids aren’t even Catholics,” they would grumble. “What’s a priest doing with them anyway?” A priest’s place, Waldron responded, was with the poor and dispossessed, no matter what their religion. In no way did he mean to underestimate the horror of crime, the hardship it worked on its victims, or the duty of police and courts to bring its perpetrators to justice. But, neither judge nor policeman, he was more interested in trying to understand what led these young people to commit such acts.

Most of them came from poor families, but Waldron doubted that profit was their principal motive. Easy money on the streets was certainly a lure, particularly when the potential rewards outweighed the risk of a long prison term. But only the real junkies—those with a voracious heroin habit—stole primarily for money.

An equally important motive, he concluded, was racial—and class—hostility. Some young blacks hated whites, convinced that they had enslaved, exploited, and misused black people so long that the gang was justified in taking whatever it could in return. Boston’s school crisis had aggravated those feelings, while gentrification had laid bare the chasm between the white middle class and the black working/welfare class. Such indignities prompted some young blacks to lash out at whites in violent street crimes. For others, it provided a rhetorical justification, a rationalization for crimes they would have committed anyway.

Then there was the excitement, the thrill of danger. The kids told him repeatedly how bored they were. Yes, there were basketball courts, a swimming pool, and baseball diamonds within walking distance of Methunion Manor, and for several years Union Methodist Church had been operating a
“drop-in” youth center offering black history courses, a theater group, leatherwork and sewing instruction. Nevertheless, the kids still felt there was nothing to do but hang out on the corner, drink beer, and get high on reefers. Crime lit up their bleak world.

Another significant factor, Waldron concluded, was pressure from their peers on the street. For ghetto kids, street hustles and violent crimes were a “rite of passage,” demonstrations that one was no longer a kid, that one was becoming a man. Risks must be run, rules broken, commandments violated. In short, the boy who aspired to black manhood had to be a “bad nigger” first. To shrink from that was to risk being labeled a momma’s boy, a coward. “You punked out on us, man,” the others would say. “We were ripping the cat off and you punked out on us. You’re finished on this corner.”

Their corner was the intersection of Braddock Park and Columbus Avenue. To the right, as one faced Columbus, was the Soul Center, rhythm and blues blaring from its doorway. On the left was Braddock Drugs, Hymie Krasnow’s place, where you could sometimes get a pint of liquor under the counter and always a Ring-Ding or Moon Pie from the well-stocked display case. The gang shuttled back and forth, generally spending midafternoon at the drugstore, moving over to the Soul Center in the evening. Both stores were strategically placed for the gang’s purposes, each commanding a wide field of vision across Columbus toward Rutland Square, Pembroke, West Brookline, and West Newton streets. Lounging on either doorstep, they could watch the young professionals coming home from work carrying their briefcases and evening papers, or returning from the Sunnyhurst grocery and Cheese Cask liquor store, their arms filled with shopping bags. As dusk fell over the South End, the gang waited on the corner, poised for lightning strikes into the heartland of the white gentry.