All Souls (11 page)

Along with the craziness and the cockroaches, the summer of 1974 brought with it great anticipation for the fight of our lives. Motorcades and marches became arenas for our daily play. We still set dumpster fires, and a couple times we were able to light up a stolen car, stripped and abandoned in Old Colony, before the BHA finally removed it. But organized protests brought more thrills than anything we'd ever known. Most of the marches and rallies were peaceful, though the threat of violence filled the air. You could hear it in the throats of politicians like Ray Flynn and Dapper O'Neil, who led the cheering crowds. And you could see it in the watery swelled-up eyes of mothers, not sure whether they would cry or lash out. I knew these women were doing everything in their power to do neither, to hide their pain. But what mattered most was seeing how much they cared about us kids, and to tell the truth I wouldn't have minded if they'd brought out the Molotov cocktails from the beginning.

My whole family kept up with the wheres and whens of the motorcades and rallies. In Southie, news spread best through word of mouth—besides we didn't want the other side to sabotage our plans by knowing them ahead of time. Ma started to volunteer for Jimmy Kelly and his South Boston Information Center, which controlled much of the information in the neighborhood. Southie couldn't rely on what Jimmy Kelly called “the liberal media establishment,” and whatever that meant I knew I too wanted nothing to do with it. It was us against them, and my family was now part of the “us,” as the neighborhood closed off more and more to the outside world.

C H A P T E R   4

F I G H T   T H E   P O W E R

'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

M
A'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.