Personal memories spring from the imagined and real connections among places, people, and things. This is where history and memoir diverge. Textbook history is arrived at by consensus, dulled at the edges. It is drawn from careful inspection of documents and limited by the records one can find. The grand sweep of history feels linear, even though it is messy and fraught with competing ideas and conflicting circles of influence. But for the memoirist, history and memory conflate to form a story we want to tell about ourselves, and that narrative arc changes as we grow older, as the world turns.
So how is one to bring together the fragments of inaccurate or incomplete history and faulty or incomplete memory? This is where the detective work begins. Finding information on my father’s family posed the greatest challenge. He had been a song and dance man with a promising career back in the thirties and forties. There are those who say that if you’ve seen a Jerry Lewis comedy, you can imagine my father’s career—my dad was a more nimble, and frankly more talented, version of Lewis. Since I never saw my father perform, I had to rely on movies and homemade films to see this.
As I went back into the census data to trace the lineage of my father, an African American man, I had to rely on the notes of faceless government bureaucrats with bad handwriting. Was my grandmother’s name Wilkes or Wilkinson or Wilson? It depended on whether I looked at my father’s birth certificate, my grandmother’s marriage certificate, or her birth certificate.
As I went further back, things got tougher. During the nineteenth century, black women were often referred to by first names only—so one is left to deduce from the person’s age and occupation and the names of her children whether the Caroline you’re looking at in Philadelphia in 1910 may be the same Caroline who owned two hundred acres of land in southern Virginia in 1890. And in antebellum records, even the names of the female slaves are lost. We were just breeders, after all.
Since I never met my grandparents, I had to search birth and death certificates to find their names: Rosalee Wilkes and Purcell Cross, although their names were spelled differently in different places. Was it “Rosilie” or “Rose Lee” or “Rosalee”? Was it “Percival” or “Purcell”? My grandmother was described as a domestic on her wedding license, and my father’s friends say she left Percy when her two children were young. After that she worked and lived in rich people’s homes, leaving her two children to raise themselves. At the end of her life, she ran a speakeasy.
My relatives remembered that she lived somewhere in North Philadelphia, but they couldn’t remember exactly where. Using estate and title records, I finally found the house my father had bought for her—a wide three-floor, four-bedroom row house with parquet floors that had been left to deteriorate. It took me three days of door knocking in the neighborhood where she had once lived to find the woman I was told had been her best friend. In our interview, I discovered that she and my grandmother had lived in a committed relationship, as partners, for almost twenty-five years. My grandmother, in other words, was a lesbian.
Within my extended family, I ran into the disconnect between the oral tradition and the written record. The oral tradition, as passed down from generation to generation, was that a servant girl named Jane had worked in the residence of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, and that a “prince from Madagascar,” walking by the house one day, had seen her, paid a price for her, married her, and been disowned from his Madagascar family forever.
Judge Taney was a powerful man. It should be easy to document this. However, his meticulously kept personal records make no mention of either a slave or a servant by the name of Jane. In fact, women were not named in those days—they were simply “females” with an age given. Judge Taney’s father had a female slave who matched the age Jane would have been, but she was given to Judge Taney’s brother, Robert, as part of the estate, and her presence is recorded there long after our Jane should have been married and bearing children.
Even on my mother’s side, the Anglo-European side that is better documented, I ran into problems. A cousin had told me that I was related to Miles Standish. My immediate reaction was, “But I don’t want to be related to Miles Standish.” It turned out I wasn’t. My mother’s ancestral tree, very well documented thanks to Mormon genealogical research, did indeed go back to colonial Boston. I was related to a ship’s captain named William Pearce (or Pierse, or Pierce) who plied the waters between London, Boston, and the Bahamas in a ship called the Lyon and who had made as many as thirty crossings during his career. Pearce also compiled the first almanac published in North America in 1639, for Harvard College. My mother’s plutocratic roots went deeper than anyone knew.
Pearce was a person with standing, a person with a documented life. But what about those unnamed huddled masses who were illiterate, whose stories are lost? I know their names—the one who fought in the Revolutionary War, received a shoulder injury and filed for disability; the one who joined the Mormons and survived the Mountain Meadows massacre—but I know nothing else. So I am forced to read the documented history, imagine their lives, and follow the trail of the ancestors with standing.
Captain William Pearce had a dark side—he kidnapped Indians from New England and sold them into slavery in Spain. He brought one of the first African slaves to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1639. She was a woman listed on the ship’s manifest only as “Angela.” For all I know, she was one of my father’s ancestors.
I found a rather eerie footnote in Captain Pearce’s life story: he had three wives during his lifetime. And the first, who came to Jamestown on a ship back in 1639 with that slave named Angela, was named June.
She died at Jamestown, and left no memoir to tell her tale.
So here I am, the descendent of a slave trader and a slave. Where does this leave my relationship to history in a country where you are either one of the conquerors or one of the oppressed? And how do I reconcile these internal and external versions of that history when the two can be so at odds? You could say I walk a tightrope between the two. But having researched the stories and histories of so many like me, so many others on my mother’s side who both supported and fought against slavery—and on my father’s side who used their relationship with whites to move forward, socially—it’s hard to claim that I am the only one like me. The more I learned about my story, the less peculiar it seemed.
By the time I had traced the census back to the mid-nineteenth century, I found eighteen thousand souls in the United States with whom I could claim some kind of relationship. They are cousins four or five times removed. That moves my understanding of memoir and history beyond documentary, past the personal, into the archetypal. It’s impossible to feel like a lone soul surrounded by those kinds of numbers.
I recently reread Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past,” in which she distinguishes between “moments of nonbeing” and “moments of being.” Moments of nonbeing are what most of us experience in our day-to-day lives—we get out of bed, brush our teeth, eat breakfast, walk to the subway. It’s as if we live behind a veil of cotton wool or, to use a more culturally specific metaphor, as if we exist only behind the curtain of sound supplied by our iPods.
But then every so often, by serendipity or happenstance, something shifts. You have a conversation with a stranger whose story of hard luck and triumph speaks louder than any other. You walk out of your house and catch the scent of Jamaican jerk chicken being cooked the same moment you notice a band of smoke forming a black ribbon across a cerulean blue sky on a particularly bloody Tuesday one September. You enter a dingy room and your eyes meet those of the person you will marry, and you remember the exact tinge of yellow in the fading Christmas lights and the slight tilt of the ripped red and white linoleum floor as you walked to a barstool, with the smooth texture of the wooden chair polished by many hands, and how his palms were warm with sweat and cold from the bottle of beer he had been holding just before he extended his hand. In these moments, undo
cumented and unknowable to the historian, time slows and it seems you’ve joined the master current of the universe, as if your puny existence merged, in an instant, with human history that unites us all.
This is the role of memoir—a form more impressionistic and personal than autobiography, more introspective and less rigorous than historical narrative. The current surge of interest in this genre begins as an affirmation that the hegemonic “great man” theory of history ignores the stories of the bookie and the barbershop owners and those who shopped at the grocery stores in my Atlantic City neighborhood. It asserts that we all have our stories to tell and that those stories are as individual as wildflowers. I suspect, and I certainly believe, that by writing our own lives, we join the beauty of the field.
MICHAEL PATRICK MACDONALD
It’s All in the Past
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion
FROM Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion
The therapist watched me as I tried to answer her question, only her third in what seemed like small talk to get acquainted.
Shit, here we go again, I thought.
All my life I had struggled with the answer to the question “How many are in your family?” and it wasn’t getting any easier. My mother had lost the baby, Patrick, a year before I was born, but we always included him in the count, since we thought of him as a kind of guardian sibling. As a child, sometime I would say, “Eleven, but one died.” People would ask, shocked, “Eleven brothers and sisters?” I was proud to be from such a big family....
After Davey died I started saying, “Eleven, but two died.” But then people exclaimed, “Oh my God!” and wanted to know how the two had died. Once I saw how people recoiled at the mention of someone jumping off a roof, I usually didn’t feel like talking about it. I learned to say, “Nine,” relieved to have to deal only with an “Irish Catholics” comment. But I felt guilty about cutting Davey out of the count, even though I no longer cared about childish birth-rate contests. I started including both Davey and Patrick again.
But now, with Frankie and Kevin dead and only seven of us remaining alive, I had answered a few times, “Eleven, but four died,” only to see the person look horrified, not wanting to ask how. Then, to comfort them, I’d explain that it wasn’t that bad, that I only knew three of them, that Patrick was a baby who’d died before I was born. Which only made their faces contort more. I had to do some quick math in my head before answering at all, since Kathy was now permanently brain damaged and increasingly schizophrenic. She talked to herself all day and wrote childhood rhymes on any paper she could find, an existence that seemed somewhere between life and death. I felt more like I was one of six, not seven, survivors, and that brought me back to thinking, Who’s next? Then I’d want to call home to make sure everyone was okay or wonder whether the strange feeling in my throat was cancer.
I’d only paused for a few seconds before giving my “eleven, but four died” version, but the therapist looked confused. She straightened up in her chair to pursue the question further.
“How did they die?” she asked straightforwardly. I was glad she wasn’t asking with the wide eyes that usually accompanied the question. Anytime Ma had to answer the question, she said they were in a car accident. I guessed she wanted to keep it simple, rather than getting into suicide, jumps and falls from rooftops, bank robberies, and prison deaths....
Okay, here goes, I thought. Remember Patrick even though you never met him. And keep Kathy off the list of the dead.
• • •
It’s All in the Past
My friend’s seventy-year-old aunt lit into him on Broadway in South Boston after she heard his name was listed in the acknowledgments of my first memoir, All Souls.
“What did I do?” he pleaded as she crossed the street and came at him, her finger pointed.
“You’re in that goddamn book!” she screamed. “And that book is all lies!”
“Did you read it?” he asked her, surprised, since it had only just been published.
“No!” she bellowed. “And I’m not going to read it, either!”
My friend ran to the other side of a parked car, establishing a safe distance before asking, “Why not?” He expected he was dealing with Southie’s entrenched code of silence, a legacy of our neighborhood’s drug don, James “Whitey” Bulger, who had controlled the town through years of murder, bank robberies, and overdoses.
“I lived in that housing project for thirty years,” she shrieked, “and we never had cockroaches!”
The denial was so deep in our neighborhood that we didn’t even want to acknowledge the bugs. Never mind that Southie had the highest concentration of white poverty in America.1 Never mind that the town was controlled by Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger, finally exposed in 1999 as a protected FBI informant. Never mind that local politicians looked the other way as gangsters flooded our neighborhood with angel dust, cocaine, and crack, leaving a trail of dead young people.
Even today—a decade after Whitey Bulger went on the lam, tipped off by his FBI handlers about impending indictments—Southie has the city’s highest rate of overdose from heroin and other painkillers.
Never mind that. Forget about it. It’s all in the past. These are the mantras we grew up with in Southie.
Or even worse: “It never happened.”
I had a book contract when I wrote All Souls, but I didn’t think I was writing a story anyone would read, beyond a few loyal friends. I was therefore able to write freely about my experiences growing up in a world where the truth had always been suppressed. I was the ninth of eleven children. Four of us were lost to the effects of poverty. A baby, Patrick, died of pneumonia after being denied admission to the hospital in 1964, before Medicaid, when hospitals weren’t required to admit welfare babies with no insurance. In 1979, when I was thirteen, I saw my brother Davey, ten years older, lying in the street in front of our apartment after he jumped off a project rooftop. (Among its many off-the-charts statistics, Southie has long held the city’s highest suicide rate.) When I was eighteen, my brother Frank, a New England Golden Gloves boxing champion, was killed while robbing a Wells Fargo armored bank truck. And eight months later my brother Kevin was found hanging in prison under suspicious circumstances.
And there were other tragedies. My sister Kathy went off another project rooftop after a fight over pills when I was fourteen; she lay in a coma for four months and is now partially paralyzed with serious brain damage. A year later, my mother received a minor wound from a stray bullet as I stood next to her while she washed dishes. In 1991, my thirteen-year-old younger brother Steven was convicted of manslaughter when his best friend died while playing with a gun; two years later a state appeals court unanimously overturned his unjust conviction.
It took me a while to see it, but South Boston, often described as insular, was psychologically as well as geographically so. The neighborhood sits on a peninsula. Downtown Boston is only accessible by two bridges. If Southie’s borders weren’t enough fortification from the outside world, the Old Colony project where my family lived was an even more closed world, a subculture within a subculture. While South Boston’s politicians often presented the myth of the hardscrabble yet blue-collar neighborhood (“blue collar” being the more acceptable euphemism for “poor,” often used by white ethnic groups who seem to have a hard time saying the p word), the three census tracts in the neighborhood’s Lower End held the nation’s highest concentration of white poverty. Seventy-five percent of the households in its three housing projects and the low-rent housing around them were families headed by single women. In my housing project, all white and mostly Irish American, 85 percent of residents collected welfare.
In the larger world, though, my neighborhood wasn’t known for these statistics. I grew up dur
ing its time of greatest notoriety: the 1970s, when South Boston’s violent resistance to court-ordered school desegregation flashed across the nation’s TV screens. My neighbors appeared, furiously chanting HELL NO WE WON’T GO and throwing rocks at black children who were bused into the neighborhood. Some Southie residents carried out hideous violence, often instigated by politicians who benefited from the neighborhood’s insularity and sense of vulnerability to the “social planning” of the big, bad world out there. And for many years to come, the conversation about school desegregation in Boston would focus solely on race—in particular, Southie’s racism. Class, not to mention class manipulation by the more powerful, has rarely been discussed.
During the busing riots, the walls between Southie and the bigger world were fortified. Southie became a trap for so many of its young because it met the interests of both our own bigoted right-wing demagogues within Southie and the equally bigoted upper-middle-class white liberals beyond our borders, whose class interests were never threatened by their support for forced busing among the poor. (Phase One of the plan involved only Boston’s poorest white and poorest black neighborhoods: South Boston and Roxbury.) Of course violence broke out. Judge Arthur Garrity, who ordered Phase One, and the police in riot gear, who lined our streets on the first day of school, could not possibly have expected anything else.
The year the judge ordered forced busing, 1974, was also the year that Whitey Bulger, known to law enforcement and to the community as a drug dealer and murderer, sealed an agreement with agents in the FBI that gave him carte blanche to control Irish South Boston in exchange for becoming an informant on, among other things, the Italian Mafia across town (bigger fish to the FBI than a less serious-sounding Irish Mafia). Busing may have been the best thing that ever happened to Whitey Bulger. South Boston’s young people—especially those in the Lower End’s housing projects who could not afford to escape to the Catholic schools—dropped out. The dropouts became lucrative drug customers as well as recruits seeking income via the gangster underworld, with its organized bank heists, truck hijackings, and black-market distribution of goods and services. Poverty + forced busing + drop-outs + a government-protected drug don + a neighborhood code of silence. It all equaled violence and death. Perhaps the conspiracy was not planned among all the power players involved, but it served their interests, not those of my neighbors or of anyone in Roxbury.
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