Common Ground (92 page)

The old men hadn’t been badly hurt, but one of them was in tears, terribly upset at losing his social security money ($160), his only means of support.
After the police took a quick report on the incident, Colin brought the men back to his house and served them a couple of whiskeys to calm them down. As he sat there soothing the victims, he felt himself trembling with rage. He couldn’t forget the sight of those kids attacking helpless old men from behind. The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. He wanted to smash those kids in their ugly little faces. Finally he excused himself, got in his car, and, setting the Slugger on the seat beside him, drove around the South End for half an hour, searching for the attackers. He knew it was futile—surely by now they would have retreated to safety—but it made him feel better. At least he was doing something to protect his home, his family, and his neighborhood.

Some months later, as Colin left his house one morning, he became vaguely aware that something unusual was happening on West Newton Street. People were shouting. Somebody was running. A siren wailed. Suddenly he saw a black teenager running down the sidewalk toward him. A hundred yards behind came a police car in hot pursuit. Just then, the Puerto Rican mechanic jumped out and whacked the kid on the head with a bottle. The boy fell on his face, then got up and staggered down the street like a drunk. Colin and several passersby joined the chase, pursuing the boy for a block and a half until the police finally made the arrest.

As the West Newton Street contingent walked home together, Colin suddenly thought of the “hue and cry,” an early Anglo-Saxon practice he had studied in law school. The victim of a crime, or the principal witness, would set up a cry, then all the neighbors would pour from their houses and give chase. According to Harvard, it was the most primitive form of law enforcement. Primitive it surely was, but Colin now suspected that it might prove more effective than the belated—and frequently futile—police response. Even if no thief was ever apprehended, it would put prospective criminals on warning that here was a neighborhood which cared for its own, which wouldn’t sit by and watch innocent people being ripped off or assaulted.

One night later that winter, Joan asked Colin to go to the liquor store for a bottle of cooking sherry. Walking up the darkened sidewalk toward Columbus Avenue, he noticed a pair of black men coming toward him. When they were ten feet away, one jumped in front of him, the other moved to his side. Colin reacted quickly, darting between two cars and down the street toward the Tremont Street intersection. The pair followed him for a few steps, then turned and ran in the opposite direction.

Colin called the police, who, as usual, took a perfunctory report, then promised vaguely to “investigate.” But this time Colin refused to be brushed off. He’d gotten a good look at the youth who’d blocked his path. The kid had a shaved skull, like a black Yul Brynner—a head so frightening Colin was sure he’d recognize him again. He telephoned Gordon Doerfer, a Rutland Square neighbor and Municipal Court judge, with whom he’d often discussed crime and the inadequacy of police response. Doerfer called a lieutenant at District 4. Later that night, two detectives showed up at Colin’s house, bearing a notebook containing mug shots of every street criminal arrested in the South
End during the previous six months. For more than an hour, Colin pored over the celluloid pages, each of which held pictures of ten or twelve young men, photographed from the front, left, and right. There were hundreds of them and, except for a handful of Hispanics and a couple of whites, they were relentlessly black. He never found his Yul Brynner, but he saw more bleak and hopeless faces than he’d ever seen in one place before. The boys and young men who looked up from his dining-room table that night reflected such misery, such desperation, such malevolence that when Colin finally closed the book well past midnight he felt chilled to the bone. After the police had gone, he double-locked the door behind him, checking to make sure the Slugger was in its customary place. And when he went to bed he set a heavy shank of lead pipe on his night table.

T
he New England town meeting, America’s experiment in direct democracy, was also a celebration of community. At first it was merely the Puritan congregation reassembled to consider civil affairs, later the sturdy instrument by which the town charted its secular course. Farmers in muddy boots, blacksmiths fresh from the forge, teachers in chalk-smeared coats, carpenters, publicans, and ministers made their way to the meetinghouse on the hill, there to wrestle with the particulars of their common lives: repairs to the town bridge, grazing rights in the north field, a new road to the mill, raising the tax on rum, a fence to enclose stray animals. Debate was intense, petty rivalries and factionalism often intruded, but somehow a faith persisted that the meeting could resolve such differences, revealing the community’s inherent consensus. Deep into the twentieth century—long after that accord had been eroded by diversity—the town meeting remained the ritual by which Massachusetts towns renewed their sense of harmony.

No town meeting had been held in Charlestown since 1874, when the Town was annexed by a burgeoning Boston. Yet, the more its fortunes declined, the more indignities it suffered at the hands of a careless world, the more the Town yearned for its lost identity. During the 1974 busing crisis—just a century after Charlestown surrendered its independence—Powder Keg laid claim to the town meeting tradition: every Tuesday evening at 7:30, it summoned all Charlestown citizens to the Harvard-Kent School. These “town meetings” rarely drew more than two hundred people, but in re-creating that time-honored rite, they invoked a simpler age when the New England village was sufficient unto itself, when the demands of community were proof against the call of equality.

Alice rarely missed a meeting. No matter how weary after a day at the telephone company, she grabbed a sandwich at home, then hurried down the street toward the little school. The neon lights of the auditorium beat down on
cold linoleum, the wooden chairs felt like stone as speakers inveighed long into the night, but, surrounded by friends and neighbors, armed with common purpose, Alice knew that her town would prevail against all adversity. And that solidarity stemmed not just from defiant oratory, but from a welter of communal activity—rallies, processions, prayer marches, motorcades, dances, bake sales, raffles. All through the autumn of 1974, the town meetings sought to forge Charlestown into a “fighting team.”

On the evening of January 21, 1975, Alice noticed that the tables which normally cluttered the stage had been pushed aside, replaced by a large white screen. “We have a treat for you tonight,” announced Powder Keg’s president, Pat Russell. “A film, called
Anarchy U.S.A
., which should help us all understand what’s happening to our city.”

When the lights went off, the screen lit up with an excited young black shouting, “They’re after the white man now, they’re going to do him in!”

A typewriter rapped out: “Anarchy—the breakdown of law and order, a chaotic reign of terror,” quickly followed by vivid images:

Blacks rioting and looting in Newark, Watts, Cleveland, and Chicago.

Leonard Patterson, a black educated in Moscow, warning that the Communists “use Negro people as cannon fodder in a violent and bloody revolution aimed at the establishment of an American Soviet dictatorship.”

White segregationist J. B. Stoner declaring, “We shall not mix up with a bunch of savages.”

Klansmen burning a cross while their robed leader pledged to “save the country from the onslaught of integration.”

A huge red map of the “World Communist Empire,” as Mao Zedong explained that the Chinese Communists were seeking “the same thing Lincoln fought for in the Civil War: the liberation of slaves.”

What the hell was this? Alice wondered. Chinese Communists? Burning crosses? When Fidel Castro came on the screen with his arm around a black revolutionary, she could stand it no longer. Stomping into the lobby, Alice found a half dozen others already there, arguing about the film:

“It’s Communist propaganda,” someone said.

“It’s the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Whatever it is,” Alice concluded, “it stinks.”

When the film ended, Pat Russell nervously took the stage, trying to calm the audience. “This isn’t quite what we expected,” she conceded. “They tell me we got this from a cop, a member of the John Birch Society. Maybe we should have looked at it first.”

For two decades the Birchers had been quarantined as hatemongering extremists, but now Boston’s busing turmoil seemed to offer them recruitment possibilities among the disaffected working class. From their headquarters in suburban Belmont they put out feelers to embattled white neighborhoods. A North End policeman supplied
Anarchy U.S.A
. to community groups throughout the city.

The film won few friends in Charlestown. Most of Powder Keg’s nineteen-member
executive committee—Alice among them—were horrified by its mix of alien ideology and homebred fanaticism. Seeking to mollify outraged Townies, the committee ordered a notice inserted in the “Powder Keg News” section of the Charlestown
Patriot
in which it apologized if the movie had “offended anyone in any way. We were under the impression it was an information movie on busing.”

Several committee members strenuously disagreed. To them, the film was an appropriate warning of the way things would be if racial integration was imposed on white neighborhoods. Among these dissenters was Marie Goodrich, the committee secretary, who inserted another notice in the
Patriot
asserting that the organization “owed no one an apology.” Marie was vigorously supported by her husband, Myron, and two other couples. During the next months, the split in Powder Keg’s ranks widened.

The disaffection spread to Moe Gillen’s Education Committee, on which Alice McGoff and other Powder Keggers had sought to mitigate Arthur Garrity’s order. But two of them—a retired Air Force sergeant named Frank Van Gorder and his wife, Peggy—feared they were being inexorably drawn into collaboration with Garrity’s court. On August 20, three weeks before the buses were due to roll, Frank submitted a stinging letter of resignation, countersigned by his wife. “I will not aid, sympathize or compromise with this committee for the smooth and successful implementation of Forced Busing,” he wrote. “I will not in good conscience allow myself or this committee to dupe my friends and neighbors or the citizens of Charlestown. To them I can offer only one word of hope—RESIST!”

These intramural squabbles were echoes of a distant battle then beginning to divide the city’s anti-busing movement.

When Elvira “Pixie” Palladino announced her candidacy for Boston’s School Committee in 1975, the forty-three-year-old mother of two was little known outside her native East Boston. Part of a fiercely loyal Italian clan, she had gradually built a neighborhood fiefdom, becoming president of the East Boston Home and School Association, heading ROAR’s East Boston branch (the One If by Land, Two If by Sea Civic Association), and representing East Boston on ROAR’s executive board.

Pixie was often likened to Louise Day Hicks, but the two women were temperamentally at odds. The daughter of a powerful Irish judge, Louise had been raised a little lady. Born to an Italian shoemaker, the bottom of the heap in Depression Boston, Pixie confronted her world with gritty pugnacity. While Louise, a devout Catholic, deeply respected the clergy, Pixie tempered her devotion with a caustic anticlericalism. When Monsignor Mimie Pitaro, then a state legislator, opposed repeal of the Racial Imbalance Act, Pixie intercepted him outside the chamber and gave him “the Italian kiss of death”—three fingers taken to the lips, then quickly moved toward the target. Louise had mastered the art of indirection; Pixie rarely hesitated to say what was on her mind, often in explicit street language, which earned her the nickname “Garbage Mouth.” Once, after denouncing a cop on the street, she boasted to
reporters, “That’s the worst Italian curse there is.” (Roughly translated, it went, “May you vomit up your blood.”)

She could be just as candid about her social views. In 1973, she told the
East Boston Community News
, “I don’t believe in integration. God made people of different colors and once we lose our identity, we have nothing.” Though she later denied making those remarks, her position on racial matters was certainly less equivocal than Louise’s. Buoyed by her election to the School Committee in November 1975, Pixie became the spokesperson for those in the anti-busing movement who accused Louise of pulling her punches.

That view gained currency in the winter of 1975–76. Those who knew her well reported that Louise was deeply upset at the violence in her native South Boston, particularly at her own inability to restrain the extremists. A friend in the City Council frequently found her trembling on the verge of tears. But the grumbling that was now spreading through ROAR’s rank and file focused on her relationship with Kevin White. A decade earlier, the two had seemed to be permanent antagonists, yet after White beat her for a second time in 1971, there were rumors of an accommodation. City Hall regulars noted that after Louise was elected to the City Council in 1973, she frequently threw her support behind the Mayor. Others pointed to the inordinate number of city jobs which had gone to Louise’s supporters. After White won reelection in November 1975, some ROAR members openly wondered which side Louise Day Hicks was on.

Alice had heard the rumors, but for a long time she simply dismissed them. Louise was the mother of them all, the first public figure to challenge the liberal orthodoxy, for years the only one willing to risk black vituperation and media vilification. Alice had consistently supported her for the School Committee and the City Council—though not for mayor, a post for which she thought Kevin White better qualified. She simply couldn’t believe that Louise would sell them out. But something happened that winter of 1975 to change her mind. Under Louise’s auspices, ROAR had long held its weekly meetings and other functions at City Hall. In December, members were invited to a Christmas party there, then quietly advised to bring blankets, sleeping bags, and thermoses full of coffee. For once the party was over, ROAR was going to seize the building, holding it for the rest of the weekend to dramatize their grievances against the city administration.