Plenty of heart and plenty of hope

The emotional core of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie comes from its very first sentence which emphatically defines Southie as "the best place in the world." (MacDonald 1) This is Michael Patrick MacDonald's mother's (or Ma's) proclamation, but it is Michael who espouses it, to the bitter end (and beyond, but that's another subject). It is Michael who feels, already as an 8-year-old, that "It was good to be part of the neighborhood." (68) He feels this way on an evening that does not sound especially "good" at all: "One night as I sat in the window watching and waiting for something to explode, I saw a giant cockroach appear out of the corner of my eye." (67, italics mine) This neighborhood sounds frightening and disgusting. And yet, the 8-year-old Michael thinks, above all: "This was great... My whole family and a good portion of the neighborhood were sticking together to gang up on the giant cockroach." (67)

Nor is this crazy episode that combines "tension building" and "sticking together" isolated or atypical in the Old Colony projects in South Boston where Michael grew up. The tension certainly builds fast in the protests against forced busing in Boston in 1974, and so does unity of the very different parts of Southie. And again, it is this unity that (the child) Michael perceives: "God, we couldn't have been living in a better neighborhood! Everyone's sticking together, I thought." (75-76)

This rather rosy perception does not last. Peaceful motorcades are quickly followed by racial fights and horrific riots, until Michael comes to feel "sick of the police, sick of busing, sick of being thrilled or scared, and sick of the hate." (91) It's about this time that Michael's older brother Davey remarks that Southie is "worse than Mass Mental" (105), the (no longer extant) psychiatric hospital where Davey had been committed. Even Ma starts to think that maybe Southie isn't the best place in the world, after all. During yet another incomprehensibly violent protest over forced busing, Ma says that "she didn't know where to turn, what to belong to...." (118) All of the above represents one shift in their attitude about Southie, one turning point--among many. This is not a work of fiction with a neatly defined dramatic arc. This is messy reality (and how).

Just as Michael initially believes that Southie is the best place in the world, so he initially believes that the outlaw Whitey Bulger is some sort of benevolent ruler, "...the king of Southie, but not like the bad English kings who oppressed and killed the poor people of Ireland... He had definite rules that we all learned to live by, not because we had to, but because we wanted to." (110) While Michael's feelings about Southie shift back and forth many times before he decides unequivocally that it is a "death trap" (205), Michael's feelings about Whitey Bulger are not equivocal in this way at all. After the murder of his older brother Frankie--and, before that, the suspicious death of his older brother Davey--Michael sees clearly that Whitey is part of the "Irish Mafia" and he forbids his much younger brothers, Seamus and Stevie, to go to neighborhood stores connected to Whitey and the "bad guys." (199) More than that, it turns out that Whitey was an informant for the FBI: a traitor as well as a killer, not some benevolent father figure. There is no ambivalence about Michael MacDonald's condemnation of Whitey Bulger.

In the end, there is ambivalence about Michael MacDonald's attitude to Southie. Although he decides that Southie is a "death trap"--although he swears that he'd "never come back to Southie again" (236)--he does, after four years away, move back near the Old Colony Project where he grew up. He comes to see, and focus on, what is worthy and valuable about Southie: from "its loyalty and caring for poor souls like Bobby-Got-A-Quarter" (257) to "[their] solidarity with the mothers who'd been victimized and silenced by violence and the drug trade." (259) Indeed, he feels that this kind of solidarity reflects "the real Southie, the good Southie." (259)

And Michael MacDonald leaves us with an image of "the good Southie": a vigil at the Gate of Heaven Church, where, he writes--

[Hundreds of Southie residents] stood in line in defiance of the strong winds and pouring rain, and walked past the bagpipers playing "Amazing Grace." They were children, teenage friends of kids who'd committed suicide, mothers whose kids had been murdered...older men and women with canes.... A few black and Latino women got out of taxis they'd taken through the storm, braving the town they'd always been warned not to enter, and being embraced by women like Kathy Havlin and Theresa Dooley. (262)

Amen to that.