All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
by Michael Patrick MacDonald
Summary
Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie’s Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: “[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define.”
But the threats were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”
This is a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.
Excerpt
I was back in Southie, “the best place in the world,” as Ma used to say before the kids died. That’s what we call them now, “the kids.” Even when we want to say their names, we sometimes get confused about who’s dead and who’s 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 don’t go anymore. They’re not at the cemetery; I never could find them there. When I accepted the fact that I couldn’t 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 I’m not even sure if that’s 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. I’d 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. They’re right here, I thought, and it was an ec static feeling. I cried, and felt alive again myself. I passed by the outskirts of Old Colony, and it all came back to me—the kids were joined in my mind by so many others I’d last seen in caskets at Jackie O’Brien’s 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 we’d been taught didn’t 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 were to be Irish. We didn’t want to own the problems that took the lives of my brothers and of so many others like them: poverty, crime, drugs—those were black things that happened in the ghettos of Roxbury. Southie was Boston’s proud Irish neighborhood.
On this night in Southie, the kids were all here once again—I could feel them. The only problem was no one else in the neighborhood could.
Reprinted with permission of Becon Press. http://www.beacon.org
Reviews
”All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake.... The book leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details”—The New York Times
"A nicely balanced blend of pop science and personal essay, and just the thing for the family southpaw”—Kirkus Reviews
"An entertaining exploration and an intriguing look into new research in an ongoing debate”—Library Journal
Author's Biography
Michael Patrick MacDonald helped launch Boston’s successful gun-buyback program and is founder of the South Boston Vigil Group. He lives in South Boston, Massachusetts.