Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  But the housing struggle cost Joan considerable anguish. She and Colin had settled in the South End so that their personal lives would echo their professional commitments to social justice; now their very presence was perceived as an assault on that ideal. She was reminded of an ecological principle: anytime you make one change in nature’s equilibrium, you risk causing another change quite different from what you intended. They’d been so sure of themselves, so confident that they could help the poor and disadvantaged by living in their midst. Now the very people they’d come into the city to help regarded them with suspicion, if not outright enmity.

  On more than one occasion, Joan tried to make human contact with those she was accused of exploiting. She had spearheaded the Bancroft’s effort to make minority parents feel part of the school community, only to find that few blacks were eager to sit down with white mothers. It was even more difficult to make such connections outside the school. When Colin and Joan moved onto West Newton Street in 1970, their block had been at least half black, but as the white influx accelerated, many minority families moved elsewhere. The blacks who remained generally kept to themselves. Somehow, despite the best will on both sides, no social intercourse developed. Joan and Colin could count on the fingers of two hands the times they had been in a black neighbor’s house or had entertained a black in theirs. The Divers and their white friends often reflected on the irony of their situation: they had moved to the South End because they valued racial and economic heterogeneity, but their lives remained disappointingly homogeneous.

  So when Colin and Joan stumbled into a relationship with one low-income South Ender, they had special reason to value her friendship. Half Irish, half Penobscot Indian, Nicky Nickerson had lived for a while with a black gambling man, who had fathered her only child, Andrea. For nearly fifteen years, Nicky and Andrea shuttled back and forth across the South End, moving from one cold-water flat to another, a step ahead of the wrecker’s ball and the gentrifier’s paintbrush. Nicky drew Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and other welfare grants, but, uncomfortable with her own dependency, she enlisted in every cause that came her way—demonstrating with the American Indian Movement, sitting in at the State House to demand welfare rights, squatting in slumlords’ apartments to seek better housing, picketing with the South End for South Enders Committee at the Victorian Champagne Ball, helping to publish the South End People’s News. In her formidable capacity to protest, she personified the grievance of the minority poor against those who had suddenly “discovered” the neighborhood they had known all their lives.

  By 1973, Nicky worked for a South End day-care center while living in a subsidized apartment on Columbus Avenue. Andrea, then fourteen, had begun babysitting for the Divers and other young professionals. One November evening on West Newton Street, Joan ran into Nicky, whom she knew only as Andrea’s mother. Anxiously, Nicky reported that Andrea had dropped out of her “experimental” school, seemed unmotivated and needed a more formal structure. Touched by her distress, Joan promised to do what she could. The only mid-year opening in the public schools was in South Boston, which hardly seemed the place for a half-black child. Eventually, Joan found Manter Hall, a private school in Cambridge. Manter cost $1,700, far beyond Nicky’s resources, so Joan raised the money from friends, neighbors, and several trust funds. Andrea entered Manter that February, compiling an impressive record of A’s and B’s.

  From that beginning grew a remarkable friendship. To a casual observer, Joan and Nicky would have seemed unlikely intimates. Then in her late forties, Nicky was nearly twice Joan’s age. A high school dropout who took college courses at night, she couldn’t match Joan’s educational credentials. While Nicky eked out a meager living, Joan enjoyed the solid comforts of the urban bourgeoisie. An avowed socialist, Nicky had little in common with Joan’s temperate liberalism. Yet those very contradictions, like poles of a battery, set up an electrical current, a spark which illuminated their relationship.

  In the evenings or on lazy weekend afternoons, Nicky would wander by and they’d sit for hours in Joan’s kitchen, sipping coffee and talking about children, neighbors, crime, politics, books, or movies. Sometimes Colin would join them and the conversation would turn to opera, a subject on which Nicky surprisingly knew more than he. Often she would tell stories—long, spellbinding sagas of double-dealing cops and corrupt landlords. For Joan and Colin those Were compelling moments, rare opportunities to penetrate the daunting barriers of race and class.

  For Nicky, they were curious encounters. It seemed strange to be sitting there in that gorgeous house, surrounded by all those beautiful things, talking with the very people she’d been protesting against all those years. They often disagreed on urban development, on gentrification, on the respective rights of tenants and homeowners, but there was something about the Divers which transcended politics, which made everything else okay. They were involved—in the fate of their city, in the condition of their neighborhood, in the lives of people around them. When her radical friends asked why she spent so much time with those “rich honkies,” she said, “I don’t care whether they march with us or not. Their hearts are with us. They care.”

  “If something bugs Colin and me,” Joan once told a friend, “we’re the kind of people who have to do something about it.” That, of course, was in the New England tradition. “If you know of any scandalous disorders in town,” Cotton Mather admonished his parishioners, “do all you can to suppress them and redress them.” Temperamentally, the Divers were Puritans, driven to right wrongs, to redress disorders. Practically, they had begun to shun the broader ideological issues, concentrating on concrete problems closer to home.

  The first to engage them was traffic. Most South End streets dead-ended at the railroad, discouraging motorists; but West Newton rode a bridge over the tracks, creating a natural thoroughfare from the South End into the Back Bay. Each weekday, the street outside the Divers’ home was clogged with some 4,000 cars, buses, and trucks, their engines shattering the calm, spewing noxious fumes, rattling windowpanes, cracking plaster, tormenting parents of small children.

  In November 1971, Joan launched a one-woman campaign to rid the street of heavy trucks and buses. Responding to her protest, the police agreed to enforce posted regulations barring trucks over two and a half tons. She was less successful in preventing empty buses from “deadheading” across West Newton Street to Copley Square. After a year of her letters and phone calls, the Transit Authority finally selected a more circuitous route through nonresidential streets, but some drivers stuck to their familiar path until Joan reported them. One ignored the directive altogether until she flagged him down, personally ordering him off her block.

  Meanwhile, as a member of the South End Committee on Transportation, Colin spent hours persuading city officials to establish an impenetrable maze of one-way streets to deflect commuters from the neighborhood. Most of West Newton Street had long been two-way; under the committee’s plan, the Divers’ block became one-way west, the adjacent block one-way east. The day the plan went into effect, Colin, Joan, and several neighbors manned the intersections at each end of the block, patiently explaining to irritated motorists why they couldn’t use their accustomed route.

  The street changes stirred unexpected discord in the neighborhood. Several popular merchants—a Lebanese greengrocer, a Chinese wine merchant, a black gas station owner—complained that their business had been severely eroded. An elderly woman who relied on taxis to get to work said she paid eighty cents more per day because the cab had to go around the block. Some residents claimed that crime had grown worse because there were fewer eyes on the street. These grievances, apparently legitimate, stirred misgivings in Colin. In his determination to reduce traffic, had he been imposing his own values on the South End rather than responding to its values? Were he and Joan trying to suburbanize the city rather than letting it urbanize them? With their reforming zeal, did they really belong in the city after all?

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nbsp; They couldn’t help themselves: no sooner did a problem emerge than they set about solving it. In 1970, a South End branch of the Boston Public Library had been erected just across a small service alley from the Divers’ house. The library and its adjacent playground were heavily patronized by neighborhood children, including Brad and Ned Diver, but motorists seeking a shortcut frequently sped through that alley, posing a grave danger to young children. For two years Joan waged relentless bureaucratic warfare against that traffic. After dozens of letters and countless phone calls to four separate departments, she finally persuaded the city to put “No Thru Way” and “Go Slow, Children” signs at either end of the alley.

  In the summer of 1974, a special problem developed in that alley. Prostitution had long been endemic to the South End. The first time Colin walked home from work at City Hall, he was solicited on West Newton Street; the Divers’ dinner guests were sometimes approached on their way to the house; the corner of West Newton and Shawmut Avenue was known for “nickel broads,” who sold their bodies for five dollars. Abruptly, in June 1974, the problem became more acute. As police cracked down on prostitutes in the Washington Street “Combat Zone,” many returned to traditional haunts in the South End. Because West Newton Street was heavily trafficked, the alley by the library was particularly convenient for solicitation. By June, three or four prostitutes could be found there every weekday afternoon. Construction workers in panel trucks and suburban businessmen in late-model sports cars cruised the alley, stopping to haggle over price, picking up the women of their choice.

  With her children in and out of the alley all day long, Joan was naturally upset. Moreover, since most of the prostitutes were white or light-skinned Hispanics, the men frequently made overtures to Joan and her neighbors. (South End social workers suggested that middle-class whites were at last distressed about the problem because they were now subjected to the indignities black women had suffered for years at the hands of white hunters.) Whatever the reason, Joan and her close friend Linda Trum spent late afternoons and early evenings on the Divers’ stoop, taking down the license numbers of cars in the alley, then forwarding them to the police for whatever action they cared to take (johns were rarely arrested in Boston, though some years before police had written such men at home, asking them to come into the station house for a “conference”).

  Since the same women were in the alley almost every afternoon, Joan and her friends got to know them by sight, sometimes even by name. There was a Puerto Rican named Maria who was very small, surprisingly blond, and often so strung out on dope she would stagger up to a customer’s car and collapse against it. There was a dark-haired woman who roamed the alley in blue jeans, a halter top, and frequently, bare feet. Still another wore miniskirts and a blue ribbon in her hair. Their pimp, a dumpy middle-aged black man, would sit on the library steps surveying his stable. Between customers, the prostitutes would go to the neighborhood grocery for pickles or popsicles, which they consumed in the library yard.

  Several of Joan’s neighbors confronted the women, demanding that they take their trade elsewhere. When Ellen Gordon told the dark-haired one, “I don’t want my children to see what you’re doing,” the prostitute broke into tears, explaining that she had three children of her own, her husband was in prison, and she needed the money to support her family. But when Ellen warned another woman to get off the block, the prostitute hauled off and punched her in the face.

  On the evening of June 17, Joan was leaving for the grocery store when another neighbor, Carol Feldman, ran over and grabbed her by the arm. Pointing toward a station wagon parked in the alley, she whispered, “There’s a girl in that car giving a guy a blow job!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” Joan exclaimed. When Carol shook her head, Joan went back inside and called the police.

  The police arrested the prostitute and took the driver’s name and address, but when Joan told Carol that both parties would be charged with committing an unnatural act in a public place, Carol refused to be the prosecution’s witness. As a psychologist, she didn’t believe fellatio was an unnatural act and feared that if she supported such a heresy she might be drummed out of the profession.

  Moreover, she was then a Ph.D. candidate at Boston College, studying with Professor William Ryan, author of Blaming the Victim, an argument against the tendency to blame poverty, disease, and racial inequality on the victims themselves rather than on the victimizing forces in American society. To Carol, the John—who turned out to be a married man from working-class Somerville—was more victim than victimizer. A rich man could keep a mistress in a luxury apartment, but this poor guy had to do it in an alley and now faced up to twenty years in prison. She wanted no part in such a sentence. Carol couldn’t work up much indignation about the prostitute either. Most streetwalkers were poor unfortunate women—classic victims.

  Her refusal to testify became a cause célèbre in the South End that summer, exacerbating the community’s ideological divisions. Joan Diver simply couldn’t believe it. “You brought it to my attention!” she reminded Carol. “You were sufficiently outraged then. Your children play in that same alley. You’ve got some rights!”

  Others felt even more strongly. Ellen Gordon angrily lectured Carol on the phone. The Arenellas stopped speaking to her altogether. But Rutland Square’s radical/liberal community rallied behind her. When it seemed for a while as if Carol might be subpoenaed to testify, Jane Bowers offered to form a Carol Feldman Defense Fund.

  When the case came to trial, Joan and Colin attended. Joan couldn’t do much because she hadn’t witnessed the sexual act, but she hoped to make enough fuss so that the case would attract notoriety, forcing police to remove prostitutes from residential neighborhoods. Without a prosecuting witness, the case quietly died. But eventually, the South End station house got the message. Late that summer, it sent plainclothesmen onto West Newton Street, arresting the prostitutes for soliciting an officer. By September, the women had moved their base of operations to Symphony Hall.

  The street outside the Divers’ door hadn’t always been so disturbing. During their first years in the South End, when Joan was at home more, she spent hours at the window watching the street life unroll before her like an endlessly satisfying movie. After the monotony of Watertown and Brighton, the variety of West Newton Street fascinated and invigorated her; there was always something doing out there, something absurd, uncommon, and intriguing.

  There was a neighborhood drunk named Freddy, a shambling black man who wandered the street all day long. Often he would appear with a broom, comically purporting to sweep the sidewalk and invariably trailed by small children who delighted in his antics. Joan had planted a small flower bed in their front yard, and it was routinely raided by passersby. When the doorbell rang one morning, there stood Freddy. “Please, ma’am,” he said, “may I have one of your flowers?” Joan couldn’t refuse him.

  One Sunday, glancing out the window, Joan saw a taxi pull up across the street. A man got out, walked over to Dan Shannon’s house, and urinated in his doorway. A Puerto Rican mechanic working on his car nearby grabbed a wrench and went after the man, bellowing, “Get out of here, you stinking pervert!” With that, a woman leapt from the taxi, wrenched a drainpipe off the Shannons’ house, and advanced menacingly on the mechanic. She was about to hit him when two friends rushed to his assistance, sending the taxi and its occupants careering up the street.

  When night fell, the street could be more forbidding. Once Joan was awakened by scraping noises from the house next door. Rushing to the window, she saw a man dragging a dishwasher into the street. Just then, Joan’s neighbor Linda Trum yelled out her window, “That’s not your dishwasher!” “It’s not your dishwasher either, lady,” the man responded. “I didn’t get it from your apartment.” With which he calmly resumed his task, interrupted only when an enraged Mike Trum burst from his doorway, driving the still-protesting burglar up the alley.

  Anything that wasn’t nailed down might di
sappear in the night. The Divers parked their blue Dodge Dart on the street in front of their house. On several occasions, vandals took the windshield wipers and hubcaps, adding random dents in the process. And one morning the car itself was gone. Several days later, the police found it, largely intact, in a black neighborhood.

  Twice in those early years, the Divers’ house was hit by burglars. While Joan was off taking a tennis lesson someone jimmied the street door and stole their stereo, TV set, camera, and electric typewriter. And one evening, while Colin was in the shower, Joan heard a noise in the front hall. Rushing to the head of the stairs, she saw two young black men rummaging through her purse on the vestibule table.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “We’re looking for Mr. Jones,” said one, a stock answer in such situations.