‘We Were Able to Say the Words We Weren’t Allowed to Say’.
Michael Patrick MacDonald was 8 years old in 1974 when South Boston—“Southie”—erupted in anti-busing riots. In his best-selling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, this year’s SPH Reads selection, MacDonald describes watching a Haitian man being dragged from his car and beaten. “The people at the forefront of attacking this man were some of our most degraded, poor people, who found someone ‘less’ than them,” MacDonald told an audience of more than 200 at a Diversity and Inclusion Seminar on October 17.
“That crystalized, for me, the entwined issues of race and class in America.”
MacDonald’s Southie had the highest concentration of white poverty in the country, and violence and addiction were rampant. He was of one of 11 siblings, “but four died,” he would write in his second book, Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion, which he also read from at the seminar: Patrick as an infant from pneumonia (“The hospitals didn’t have to take welfare babies back then.”); Davey from suicide; Frankie in an armored car heist; and Kevin hanged in prison—maybe suicide or maybe murder—after robbing a jewelry story. Kathy fell from a roof in a fight over drugs, MacDonald said, and continues to live with severe brain damage.
Still, MacDonald said, he grew up believing Southie was “the best place in the world.” Under Southie’s code of silence, no one talked about what was happening, focusing instead on how lucky they were to be part of a community—and to be white. MacDonald said his community held onto the idea that they were better, and better off, than black and Latino Bostonians. “The expression in Southie for ‘go to hell’ was ‘take a Dudley,’ take a Dudley bus,” he said, referring to the main station in the predominantly black neighborhood of Roxbury.
But MacDonald did “take a Dudley.” He grew up to be a community organizer, working in the predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. He led Boston’s gun buy-back program, and helped create a group for people to take on trauma. “I found my voice in community organizing,” he said, “in finding work where I could transform that pain and make it tolerable by making it useful in the world—and work with people who had similar pain. Together we were able to say the words that we hadn’t been allowed to say.”
His book takes its name from the All Souls Day vigil MacDonald began in Southie with a group of mothers from Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, who had come together after losing children to violence or overdose. Mothers from Charlestown (demographically “a mini-Southie,” MacDonald said) had also joined the group, making him hopeful that mothers from Southie would follow.
“Maybe we could break silences, and maybe we could also bridge some of those huge gulfs that emerged after the busing riots,” he said. When the mothers from Southie met the mothers from Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, “they were instantly sisters. They had something in common that you never want to have, but if you do have it, it’s family like you’ve never imagined.”
Seeing “how easy it was to bring people together with their pain” gave MacDonald hope, but it also “pissed [him] off.” These mothers had so much in common, he said, but they had been driven apart by forces beyond their control, much of it policy decisions such as busing.
“The desegregation order was important and long overdue, and it was the right thing,” he said, “but the remedy was a plan that would only apply to the poorest black neighborhood in Boston and the poorest white neighborhood in Boston.” He recalled Ruth Batson, a leading civil rights advocate in Boston who had fought for desegregation, arriving at Southie High, looking around, and saying, “‘This is not what we meant.’”
After the riots, MacDonald said, Southie was written off as a racist enclave and was ignored in future efforts to help Boston’s poorest communities—a microcosm, he said, for the nation’s difficulty addressing the 26 million white Americans living below the poverty line. “In the progressive world, it’s a shame that we erase that population,” he said. That doesn’t mean racial disparities should be ignored, he added, but “we shouldn’t talk about poverty at the expense of talking about racism, and we shouldn’t talk about race at the expense of talking about poverty.”
Much of his community work is now around trauma recovery, but when MacDonald was writing All Souls, he said he “knew nothing about what happens to the brains of people impacted by trauma.” He has since learned about how trauma functions, shedding light on his own experiences, including what he experienced when he found he couldn’t say the names of his brothers at the All Souls vigil: “shocked speechlessness, the shutting down of the part of the brain that’s responsible for speech, language, words, the story.” That speechlessness, he said, is another code of silence.
At the end of the seminar, an audience member asked why MacDonald continues to call Southie the best place in the world after everything he had experienced there.
“Community and connectedness,” he said. “I discovered that in South Boston. Then I found it in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, but I found it first in Southie.”