MacDonald Michael Patrick - All souls: a family story from Southie

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All Souls

A guileless and powerful memoir of precarious life and early death in Bostons Irish ghetto MacDonald gives new life to this old American story of poor-white pride and prejudice. He also has a knack for quickly grabbing and holding a readers attention.

R . Z . S HEPPARD , Time

Harrowing.

S USAN O RLEAN , The New Yorker

Peppered with hard-won humor the story of a man who understands poverty because he has known it and is blessed with an ability to bear witness in plainspoken prose.

B RIAN B RAIKER , Newsweek

An incendiary, moving book that startles on every page remarkable.

K IRKUS R EVIEWS , starred review

All Souls is a memoir filled with desperation and despair, but there is also hope in it MacDonalds discovery of his vocation in neighborhood activism is a refreshing change from most memoirs, which so often are largely concerned with describing an ascent to celebrityhood.

J ULIAN M OYNAHAN , The New York Review of Books

Michael Patrick MacDonald takes us on a heartbreaking tour of his South Boston family.

F RANK M C C OURT , author of Angelas Ashes , in Irish America Magazine

All Souls hits with the power of a driven fist that crashes through the cynics intellectual defenses and leaves one speechless.

S UNDAY B USINESS P OST (U.K. and Ireland)

A brilliantly original memoir of white-working-class life MacDonald spins stories with a wondrous mix of wild humor and brooding darkness. Though his prose is luminous, he has a purposefulness that goes well beyond that of a raconteur.

D AVID L . K IRP , The American Prospect

A tough book about a tough place.

J EFF B AKER , The Oregonian

After reading this harrowing memoir of a Catholic boyhood in a South Boston housing project, poverty will never be a mere category to you again. It will wear the face of a family that loses children to drugs and crime, and that face will be white. Michael Patrick MacDonald has a gift for narrative, an eye for social detail, and a voice of earned authenticity.

J ACK B EATTY , author of The Rascal King

A genuinely good read, a book that defines a multigenerational struggle out of an urban abyss.

M ICHAEL S AUNDERS , Boston Globe

All Souls is a rowdy, sometimes raucous venture into the MacDonald familys inner vault. It will leave you weeping and laughing uproariously at the weave of tragic and comic events in this unconventional family. A must-read for the uplift of spirit, and for the courage shared by this grand writer.

M ALACHY M C C OURT , author of A Monk Swimming

[MacDonald] has spent his adult life on a personal crusade to break through [the Southie code of silence], to reach families in pain and, through them, to tell the truth.

D ELIA O H ARA , Chicago Sun-Times

A must read All Souls is poised to become one of the most significant Irish American books of the era.

I RISH E DITION

The gritty saga of the South Boston MacDonalds should be read by anybody looking for a gripping and full account of poverty in urban America.

S ETH G ITELL , Weekly Standard

Michael Patrick MacDonald rips the cover off the myth that poverty and violence happens predominantly in the Black community. His story of growing up poor and white in South Boston reminds me of my own, growing up poor and black in the South Bronx. This is an honest, piercing taleonce you read it, you will never look at our country the same way.

G EOFFREY C ANADA , author of Fist Stick Knife Gun

ALL SOULS

All Souls

A F A M I L Y S T O R Y F R O M S O U T H I E

Michael Patrick MacDonald

B E A C O N P R E S S

Boston

Beacon Press

25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

1999 by Michael Patrick MacDonald

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Some names have been changed to disguise or protect some identities.

Text design by Charles Nix

Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacDonald, Michael Patrick.

All souls: a family story from Southie / Michael Patrick MacDonald.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8070-7213-4 (pbk.)

1. MacDonald, Michael PatrickChildhood and youth. 2. Irish AmericansMassachusettsBoston Biography. 3. MacDonald family. 4. Irish American familiesMassachusettsBoston Biography. 5. South Boston (Boston, Mass.) Biography.6. Boston (Mass.) Biography. 7. South Boston (Boston, Mass.)Social life and customs. 8. South Boston (Boston, Mass.)Social conditions. I. Title.

F73.68. S M 33 1999

974.4'6104'092dc21

[ B ] 99-30692

F O R T H E K I D S , A N D M A

Facing page (clockwise from top left) : Ma with Davey (standing) , Mary, Joe (on lap) , and Johnnie; Frank the Tank; Michael on Daveys shoulders, Joe, Kevin, Johnnie, Kathy, Frankie, and Mary; Kevin; Joe (left) and Davey; Kevin and Sarge

C O N T E N T S

C H A P T E R 1

I WAS BACK IN SOUTHIE, THE BEST PLACE IN THE world, as Ma used to say before the kids died. Thats what we call them now, the kids. Even when we want to say their names, we sometimes get confused about whos dead and whos alive in my family. After so many deaths, Ma just started to call my four brothers the kids when we talked about going to see them at the cemetery. But I dont go anymore. Theyre not at the cemetery; I never could find them there. When I accepted the fact that I couldnt feel them at the graves, I figured it must be because they were in heaven, or the spirit world, or whatever you want to call it. The only things I kept from the funerals were the mass cards that said, Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep. I am the stars that shine through the night, and so on. I figured that was the best way to look at it. There are seven of us kids still alive, and sometimes Im not even sure if thats true.

I came back to Southie in the summer of 1994, after everyone in my family had either died or moved to the mountains of Colorado. Id moved to downtown Boston after Ma left in 1990, and was pulled one night to wander through Southie. I walked from Columbia Point Project, where I was born, to the Old Colony Project where I grew up, in the Lower End, as we called it. On that August night, after four years of staying away, I walked the streets of my old neighborhood, and finally found the kids. In my memory of that night I can see them clear as day. Theyre right here , I thought, and it was an ecstatic feeling. I cried, and felt alive again myself. I passed by the outskirts of Old Colony, and it all came back to methe kids were joined in my mind by so many others Id last seen in caskets at Jackie OBriens Funeral Parlor. They were all here now, all of my neighbors and friends who had died young from violence, drugs, and from the other deadly things wed been taught didnt happen in Southie.

We thought we were in the best place in the world in this neighborhood, in the all-Irish housing projects where everyone claimed to be Irish even if his name was Spinnoli. We were proud to be from here, as proud as we were to be Irish. We didnt want to own the problems that took the lives of my brothers and of so many others like them: poverty, crime, drugsthose were black things that happened in the ghettos of Roxbury. Southie was Bostons proud Irish neighborhood.