I didn’t know this, of course, as a child. I just lived it and grew to understand it. Throughout much of the eighties and nineties, with the ascendancy of organized crime, so many families in my neighborhood lost children to violence and the drug trade. As a witness to such atrocities, I’d felt stifled, trapped between a poor white conservative neighborhood’s denial and the progressive world’s blanket characterization of my neighborhood as the last bastion of white supremacy and bigotry that must be broken. There was no regard for the levels of poverty and violent death in the town, no acknowledgment that we were already broken. I always felt my family’s and neighbors’ experiences had never been represented or acknowledged. Eventually, I realized that, for my own sake, I needed to take that first step of acknowledging what had happened to us in Southie. But first I had to find the voice to do so. In fact, I had not only to find a voice in a literary sense. I had to learn to speak.
Whenever I am asked that familiar writers’ question—“How did you find your voice?”—I have to answer that I’ve never viewed the process as one that only has to do with writing. It’s much bigger. It’s about making sense of the world and our experiences in it, as well as making use of those experiences for the sake of others. And for me that began with community-organizing work, long before I ever set out to write a book.
I grew up feeling a stunned speechlessness that trauma specialists have identified as a by-product of violence and terror.2 But even more stifling were the mythological narratives determined by powerful players both within and beyond Southie, whether gangsters or politicians, liberals or conservatives. After witnessing so much corruption and death, I tried to suck it up and move on, just like everyone else in the neighborhood. And the more I tried to move on, the more I fell back, suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress and eventual emotional collapse that manifested psychosomatically. I was convinced that I was sick, that there was something deathly wrong with me, killing me. I was right. But it wasn’t physical. It was all of the formative violence I’d witnessed but had been trained not to acknowledge.
I was fortunate to find my way to the center of activism in Boston, discovering a truth-telling movement of survivors of crime and violence in Boston’s African American and Latino neighborhoods. I’d been going to college at the University of Massachusetts, and I kept gravitating to history courses—Irish history, in particular, and the history of colonization in general. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, with the study of history I began to discover a context for understanding all that I came from, including Southie, a neighborhood that decked itself out in shamrocks and leprechauns often at the expense of understanding its real history, the history of a colonized people who have more in common with their black and brown enemies than they can bear to remember. In the study of history, I also found the context of class. Although Americans hardly ever acknowledge class, I could see it in the race riots I’d witnessed at the age of eight, or the constant young deaths in a ghetto neighborhood that would never call itself a ghetto.
While I found this context, though, I still had no place to put it, to make use of it. Then, while taking a criminal justice course (still gravitating, somewhat unconsciously, to the issues of my childhood), I had to do a field study through volunteer work at an agency. Most students in the class picked police, probation, or the district attorney’s offices, but I went with a citywide coalition working to reduce violence and crime in Boston by addressing “root causes.” Hearing this term used for the first time in relation to violence and crime, I began not only to understand the concept that I was so desperate for, but also to take action. This was the most important stage of empowerment in my life. It gave me my voice.
I started to meet people from the poor, black neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, many of whom had lived lives like mine. The only difference was that in black and Latino neighborhoods they were saying the words: poverty, oppression, corruption, drug trade, murder. We organized citywide gun buyback programs and gang intervention programs. At rallies, vigils, and press conferences, we told our stories as an instrument of peace. And for the first time in my life, I experienced the liberating power of telling the truth about the violence and deaths in my family.
However, there was one problem with our “citywide” movement. My neighbors were missing from the conversation. I had to take this truth telling home to Southie, though cautiously, since speaking about these things was still not safe. I organized a vigil on All Souls Day 1996, “to remember all those who died too young,” as the flyers innocuously stated. I thought no one would come, but the church was flooded with people who had been desperate to come out and simply say the names of their brothers, fathers, sons, daughters who had been murdered, who had overdosed, who had gone missing. And this was the beginning of a truth-telling movement in Southie, the first of many annual All Souls Day vigils.
I witnessed the transformation that takes place when individuals speak truth to power, beginning with just enough voice to utter the name of a family member who had died in a neighborhood that suppressed not only talk of the causes of death but, essentially, acknowledgment of our loved ones’ memories, their very existence, and our collective history. I watched survivors go from the simple naming of names at vigils to telling their stories to large groups of people. Witnessing the power of such a movement, both for the personal transformation of the one bearing witness as well as for the greater good of nonviolent activism, I wanted to go even deeper...by writing All Souls.
Southie had for a long time held some of the city’s highest death rates from overdoses, but in the mid- to late 1990s, after Whitey Bulger went on the lam, the neighborhood saw an explosion of heroin overdoses and teen suicides by hanging. It was as if Whitey’s absence allowed people to feel again, and for some this meant an even greater need to suppress the pain. Community organizers developed a number of coalitions to deal with the root causes of the crisis. The national media descended on South Boston, this time exposing the poverty rates, drug deaths, and history of crime and silence. People were talking, saying words like “poverty,” “corruption,” “drug trade,” and “murder.” As an activist, I was often asked why so many young people were taking their lives. The answer could not be summed up in a sound bite. I knew that these young people had all experienced the life I had: one filled with violence and death, speechless terror, and a further stifling code of silence. And so I knew I had to use the voice I’d acquired in order to encourage others to find their own voices, to tell their own stories, and to make sense of their own histories so that they might move forward.
When I began writing All Souls in the late 1990s, the world was witnessing South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was something I knew we’d never have in Boston, whether about race and class issues around busing, or about the deaths from our drug trade, or about our drug lord’s immunity from prosecution given by agents of the FBI. Inspired by the commission’s title alone, I thought of my writing as engaging in my own personal truth and reconciliation commission, whether or not anyone would ever read it. I just had to tell it.
I first discovered my voice as a student, then used it as an activist and then as a writer. I know that this entire process—finding a context, discovering my voice, and acknowledging what happened—kept me from numbing myself with painkillers (prescribed or otherwise). I know it is why I am not an alcoholic, why I did not kill myself. Writing and activism are, for me, the opposite of suppression, addiction, and self-destruction. But one’s voice can be used in as many ways as there are callings in life. Finding one’s voice is just as important to a painter, comedian, lawyer, mother, neighbor. In all of these capacities, as with writing, our personal narratives empower us. Our histories and, in particular, our subjective telling of our histories collectively inspire a people’s history. What happened—the facts—are not even as important to empowerment and transformation as the telling of what we remember and h
ow we remember it. No history is objective, nor should it pretend to be. In the same way, there are as many stories of busing in Boston, or of life growing up in Southie, as there are individuals who experienced either.
• • •
When All Souls was published, I had lots of support from those who were part of South Boston’s burgeoning truth-telling movement, which was growing around the All Souls Day Vigil, and from the coalitions working to address the heroin and suicide epidemics. But much of the neighborhood was still denying the problems. And some—usually career politicians and criminals, both of whom benefited from our closed borders and collective self-deception—had a vested interest in maintaining things just as they always had been. Besides rumors of death threats and the grumblings of politicians, who had looked the other way while the gangsters of this neighborhood profited off our most vulnerable residents, there was a whole new enemy to truth: the real estate brokers and speculators who moved into the vacuum left by gangsters who had begun to either go on the lam or turn state’s evidence. A huge profit was to be made on the South Boston waterfront, and talk of gangsters or heroin epidemics was bad for business. So once again, the narratives were reformulated, and the town was presented as “hot” and “trendy,” the new SoHo of Boston, ridiculously named “SoBo” by real estate agents.
But there is room for all of the narratives. The only problem is that too many, particularly the poor and voiceless, are left out. At seven in the morning on the day All Souls was published, there was a frantic knock on my door. It was a neighbor who ordered me to come downstairs and explain what I’d said about “the rape.” I was groggy, trying to remember what rape I might have written about. Then she told me about the time her brother raped a young woman in our stairwell. I had written only about things that I’d witnessed or that affected my life growing up, and I had known nothing about the rape. I told her that if I had known, it might very well have been in the book, as I am sure it would have changed me. But the only mention of her family in All Souls was in relation to her two younger brothers being saved by my mother. They had been stabbed by their father and were running up the stairwell toward the roof, their father just a flight behind them, when my mother pulled them inside, locked the door on their father, and called 911. One of them collapsed on our floor and was resuscitated by EMTs. This incident, along with all of the chaos of the neighborhood, shaped who I am and of course was in my memoir.
She calmed down and acknowledged painfully that, yes, we “saw a lot of shit growing up in that place.” Then she wanted to see a copy of the book for herself, to make sure the rape wasn’t in it.
“I don’t have a copy,” I told her, as I had not yet been sent my complimentary box of books.
“Well, where can I get one?” she asked.
“I guess they’re at all the bookstores,” I said.
“Well, where’s a fucking bookstore?” she yelled at me.
The tragedy of that question brought it all home to me. It seemed unfair: I not only knew where every bookstore in Boston was but knew they were all selling my book. I had found my voice and was using it—but what good was that if others could not? How had I been so fortunate? Why me?
To become an activist, I had to learn that the personal is the political, so I brought my personal experience to bear on the bigger social issues I was advocating. But to become a memoirist, I had to learn that the political is personal, and so I brought it closer to home. I would not have been able to do either without first finding a voice. And that would not have happened—the voice and narrative would not have been shaped—without first discovering context and history. But the empowerment I had found through context and voice was replaced by the guilty knowledge that so many others cannot navigate the narratives and will never have a voice.
A year after the book’s publication, I received a call from a Boston juvenile detention facility. One of their teen inmates who was from Old Colony project had persuaded the entire population to read All Souls and even organized book discussion groups around it in their AA and NA meetings. They invited me to come speak. I knew when I arrived which kid was from Southie. He was the white one. The black and Latino kids had been shocked to hear that there were white people in projects, on welfare, and experiencing violence as they had. The context of class is as rarely talked about in black and Latino urban communities as anywhere else, yet it is everything. They were relieved to see that the brutality and crime they knew in neighborhoods of color was not something “in the blood.” A Latino teenager told me, a white man, “You told my story; you’ve lived my life.”
And some aspects of that life may be slow to change. After my visit, the Southie kid told me that, when he was first incarcerated, the black and Latino kids assumed he was “some rich white kid.” “This book saved my life,” he said. “They wouldn’t even let me speak in here, when they thought I was some white brat.” He held up a hardcover copy.
“That’s a hardcover,” I said. “It’s out in paperback now, a lot cheaper. You got it when it was twenty-four bucks?” I said, almost apologizing for the price.
“Nah,” he said. “There was a kid going around Southie with a box of them, stolen. Someone got me one for ten bucks, and sent it in.”
1 U.S. News and World Report, October 9, 1994.
2 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
ELAINE TYLER MAY
Confessions of a Memoir Thief
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
FROM Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
Chester Grey was satisfied with his marriage to Nora and rated it high. He claimed that he had sacrificed only “money and financial independence,” but gained “a happy home, complete with a loving wife and four children.” Nora Grey also reaped what she felt were adequate rewards for her efforts: “A nice home I can run the way I want to. A husband to be a lifetime companion and ‘protector.’ A fine group of children who keep life from being monotonous. The self-confidence that comes from the knowledge that my husband loves me more than anyone else in the world.” For all the world to see, they were a happy 1950s couple. But there was quite a bit the world did not see. At the end of the questionnaire where she could add “anything else” she wished to say, Nora wrote a story of extreme hardship and intense bitterness:
Much of our trouble has centered around my husband’s unwillingness to do work around the house, which he says is my sole responsibility....This was not too bad until I had the third baby within five years. My husband slept in a different room so as not to be disturbed by her night crying which she did for 5 months. I became so exhausted that I got very little sleep, even when she did, and I had to be up early with the other two little ones.
With the children’s care, housework, repairs, leaf raking, snow shoveling, some lawn mowing and making all our clothing (so we could save every penny we could toward a house) I became physically and nervously exhausted. My husband refused to get up with the children or let me stay in bed even one morning....He said, “You’re not human and don’t need sleep.”...With the present baby he is extremely different and has slept in her room and cared for her nights whenever I needed rest.
With all this misery, Nora wanted a psychiatrist to help her cope with her situation and make her feel better. But even her desire for professional assistance was out of reach: “I believe I had a nervous breakdown but I knew psychiatric help would be expensive and my husband said, ‘Your trouble is all in your head and you don’t have to feel this way if you don’t want to.’...For the above reasons we never had another baby until a year ago when I felt I could handle it. Now I feel that at 40 we are too old to take the responsibility of more.”
Chester’s responses to the que
stionnaire contained none of the evidence of the domestic strain and distress Nora described, but they revealed that his job was a major source of misery for him. In the question concerning emotional health, he noted, “Extreme depression anxiety and insomnia caused by job. Solved by changing job.” Nora, however, was unable to change her job. At the end of her questionnaire, she minimized her suffering and articulated her commitment to her marriage....In a remarkable series of superlative responses, Nora rated her marriage highly successful, “never” considered divorce, would “definitely” marry the same person again, “never” regretted her marriage, and considered it “decidedly more happy than the average.”
• • •
Confessions of a Memoir Thief
I am, by training and occupation, a historian. On the face of it, there is really no reason for me to steal memoirs. History and memoir are both interpretive arts. Both genres use carefully selected fragments of the past—memories, documents, events—to tell a story. In that sense, memoirists and historians mine similar sites and go through similar processes to construct their understandings of the past. Their work is refracted largely through each writer’s particular place in the present. Each practitioner, driven by individual passions, questions, and concerns, crafts a portrait of the past that blends historical memory, personal experience, and interpretive analysis. Both write creative nonfiction—although that term is usually applied to memoir and not to history.
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