I was born in Columbia Point Housing Project, at 104 Monticello Ave., on the South Boston/Dorchester waterfront. Actually, I was born in a hospital across the city. But most children in Columbia Point who were born around the same time I was were delivered in their project apartments, since back in the sixties ambulances wouldn’t enter the development without a police escort. Many of these children were born before the ambulance arrived, long after it was called. And many of this generation had birth defects. I was lucky. I was two weeks late, and my mother had planned ahead and arranged through Catholic Charities for the other kids to be placed in foster homes during her stay in the hospital. As soon as they were placed, she called the police to pick her up. She was told she’d have to meet them a mile down the road, outside of Columbia Point. She didn’t mind, so off she went. And it’s a good thing she had the extra time to make arrangements, because when I was born I was almost thirteen pounds, and had given my mother twenty hours of labor.
I held the record for birth weights in Boston, and Ma always told everyone how the doctors and patients came from all parts of Beth Israel Hospital to see me in the nursery. She said I was twice the size of the other infants, and while they all cried, kicking their legs with eyes sealed closed, I was quiet with two big spooky eyes staring around the room and observing all who had come to observe me from behind the glass window.
I was my mother’s ninth child, with two sisters and six brothers before me, including Patrick. And we always did include Patrick in the count. The family had settled into Columbia Point three years before I was born. My mother was still married to Dave MacDonald, but he was nowhere to be seen. According to Grandpa, Ma’s father, the marriage of his oldest daughter had fulfilled everything he’d expected of it. On the day of her wedding, Grandpa woke Ma up, and told her to “get up for the market.” Soon into the marriage Dave MacDonald beat my mother, fractured her skull on two occasions, and broke her ribs on another. To this day, though, Ma will remind you of that one time she knocked out his teeth with one good kick.
Dave MacDonald was an entertainer like Ma. He played country-western music on the guitar in barrooms throughout Boston. They’d met each other in a Valentine’s Day minstrel show at the parish hall. Ma had entered the show and played her Irish accordion while her four younger sisters step danced. Ma always told us that when she first laid eyes on Dave MacDonald, playing Davy Crockett, she immediately remembered that she’d had a terrible dream about him, a nightmare about a bad marriage. Nonetheless, Ma married him at the age of nineteen, and before long they became a musical duo. But the good times were few. He was an alcoholic, and further along in their marriage he would disappear on his wife and kids. A “womanizer,” Ma called him. My older brothers and sisters don’t remember seeing him around much. Occasionally they’d hear him back in the house, and learned to expect the yelling and things breaking. Ma always said there was “no such thing” as divorcing your husband back then. You lived with whatever you had married, even if it was all turning to hell. When she went to Father Murphy about the cheating and abuse, he told her, “You’re a Catholic, make the best of it.”
For her, drinking too much was one thing, disappearing and going out with other women was another, and the beatings were bad. But not showing up for your own baby son’s funeral? When Ma confronted Dave MacDonald about being down at the local bar while his son’s tiny casket was carried through St. Thomas’s Church, he said that he’d seen too many buddies go down in Korea to give a shit about one baby dying. That was the official end of the marriage.
Ma had already started to take care of the kids on her own, with financial help from welfare. Ma says that at the time the welfare policy actually encouraged you not to have a man, as you could receive a stipend only if there was no man around. So even when Dave MacDonald had been at home sometimes, Ma started to tell welfare that he wasn’t there with them anymore. It was the truth really—he wasn’t “there” for his kids like a real father. The family was living with cheap rent in the project—sixty-five dollars a month. The project wasn’t a safe place, but it was all we could afford with the sixty-five dollars we got from welfare every two weeks. And with the boxes of surplus cheese, butter, and powdered milk Ma dragged home from the maintenance office, we could survive there.
It was while living in Columbia Point that Ma realized she and her kids were surviving without any help from her husband anyway, money or anything else. She was alone when she had to shove three of her kids into a bush to hide from a shoot-out between two speeding cars. She was alone when she had to confront a drunk mother about her teenage son trying to strangle my sister Mary to death when she was five. She was alone when her kids came home with stories of being chased down and beaten for being white in a mostly black neighborhood. And she was alone when she ran through the project banging on neighbors’ doors, frantically trying to breathe life back into the mouth of her baby, already dead in her arms.
Grandpa was the one Ma turned to when she did need a man, and she’d have to be desperate for help because the two of them didn’t get along. Grandpa always said, “Didn’t I tell you?” or else, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Ma and Grandpa had brought Patrick to the emergency room of Children’s Hospital the night before his death. Patrick was having trouble breathing and Ma thought he had a croup. Ma had no health insurance, and Medicaid was a year away. The hospital turned the baby away. Ma says that the hospital had filled its quota of what were called “charity cases,” and didn’t need to take any more that night. They said it wasn’t an emergency case. The next day Davey, the oldest in the family, found Patrick not moving in the crib, lying still and blue. The coroner said he’d died of pneumonia and should have been in a hospital. Ma later asked a lawyer about suing the hospital for neglect, but the lawyer said there was no case—the hospitals weren’t required to admit welfare babies with no insurance.
Ma says that when you lose a baby, it’s the worst feeling in the world because a baby depends on its mother for everything, and so ultimately it’s always the mother’s fault. I suppose that’s why she ran around with a dead baby in her arms—a baby that hadn’t been allowed into the hospital, in a housing project that ambulances wouldn’t come to. It was her baby, her fault, and she was going to do whatever she could do as a mother, which at that point wasn’t much.
My family hated Columbia Point Project, and hated living in our apartment even worse after Patrick’s death. In the mid-1960s it was one of the higher crime areas in the city, a neighborhood of tall yellow brick buildings with elevators that often didn’t work. Even when they were working, Ma says you’d take the stairs up seven flights to avoid being beaten and robbed on the elevator. And rats infested the hallways.
Davey always told me how he used his lunch box as a weapon to and from school, ready to smash anyone in the head who’d attack him or his younger brothers and sisters. Johnnie, the second oldest, tells me he’d be sent down to the Beehive corner store for milk and bread, only to be robbed repeatedly of the money Ma had given him for groceries. When Frankie was five, a gang of teenagers circled him and turned him upside down to shake all the coins bulging from his pockets for penny candy. Mary and Joe, the twins, used to pass one teenage girl in the courtyard who made them pull down their pants in order to get by. Drug dealings and shootings were becoming more common on hot summer evenings, so Ma started to call the kids into the house early in the afternoon.
Besides the usual fights and bullying in the project, the whole family remembers the tension of being part of a white minority in a mostly black development. Ma was always being called “that crazy white bitch” after going after some of the black mothers who’d watched their teenagers chase down and beat my brothers. While most of the project was made up of black families, Monticello Ave. was still about half white. The white teenagers organized gangs to protect their turf from the black gangs, and were admired by the white adults for their ability to “stand their ground,” as my mother said. Like us, most of th
ose white teens eventually moved to the all-white housing projects of South Boston. Many are now the parents of today’s teens “standing their ground” in the Southie projects, now undergoing integration through what locals are calling “forced housing,” after “forced busing.”
My older brothers and sisters looked forward to the weekends, when there were free buses out of Columbia Point, to Broadway, the main shopping street in white South Boston. The white families of Columbia Point would all go on excursions to the toy stores and supermarkets there. Many recall seeing my mother getting on the bus, with her long, red country-western hair, leopard coat, fishnet stockings, and eight kids wrapped around her. Everyone talked about her ability to look so good after having all those kids, and even though she had to be both mother and father. Ma wouldn’t be seen in public except in spike heels. To keep her figure, she went jogging around Columbus Park, down the road in Southie. She’d walk over to the park in her jeans and spike heels, carrying flat sneakers in a brown paper bag. It was only when she got to the park, where no one could see her, that she changed into the sneakers, putting the spike heels into a bag and throwing them behind some bushes. She might have had to be the man of the house but, as she always said, she wasn’t about to start looking like one. Ma liked the praise she got for her looks, and she would remind people, “Imagine, after having nine kids!”
After a day of shopping on Broadway, Ma would sit for a cup of coffee at the Donut Chef and talk to everyone in the room. She was a great talker, and whether you were on a stool right next to her or on the far end of the room, you were part of her audience. While Ma did her storytelling, the kids stood lined up against the wall in descending order, each one hugging a bundle of groceries, watching for the free bus to take them back to Columbia Point. On one snowy day, as my brothers and sisters waited and watched for the free bus, the jukebox began to play the country-western hit that Dave MacDonald had written, sung by Doug LaVelle. Ma jumped up and told everyone in the Donut Chef that that very song playing had been written by the kids’ father, a no-good bastard if there ever was one. The song was titled “Two Years for Non-Support.”
Ma loved the chorus because she could knock twice on the coffee counter, like a judge banging her gavel. “And I gotta go-oh-oh / Because I owe. / Order in the court (knock knock) / Two years for nonsupport.” She told everyone in the shop how the song was about her getting her husband locked up. That years ago the kids’ father had been sentenced to two years for nonsupport after being brought to court by her, pregnant with their fifth child. She pointed to Frankie in the lineup. He was four now, and was watching Kathy and Kevin, the three-year-old and two-year-old, to keep them in the line. Ma told how Dave MacDonald ended up getting out after two months, broke down the door at Monticello Ave., and tried to strangle her. That’s when she kicked him in the mouth and knocked out a couple of his teeth. The next day she had him right back before the judge. Ma says he looked worse from the fight than she did. And when he was allowed to speak before the court he said, “Your honor, she may be a little woman, but she’s as strong as any man.”
My mother cherished those words and got everyone at the Donut Chef laughing while she made a few of them feel her biceps and showed her leg muscles. My brothers and sisters laughed too. We were on Ma’s side when it came to stories about the no-good bastard. We always felt a rush of pride with Ma’s favorite line, “I was always a fighter.” Grandpa had told her that when she was born she’d had to be brought into the world with forceps, and out she came with two black eyes, clenching the two fists in front of her. She bragged that her life was a battle from the start, and she was proud to show that she could take anything. “Feel that muscle,” she’d tell the guys at the Donut Chef.
The free bus came to take them all back to Columbia Point before dark, when it was dangerous to walk even a few blocks. All the other white families from Columbia Point were glad to see Ma and the kids climb onto the bus. They knew she’d be telling stories from one end of the bus to the other, keeping everyone laughing. As the bus approached Columbia Point though, things turned somber, and Ma says that’s when the white families would start telling their stories of being attacked and of being scared to be in a black project. If only we could get into Old Colony Project in Southie, they’d say. Many were counting their days on the waiting lists for the white projects. Ma says that a few on the bus would call the blacks that word that we were never allowed to say in our home. Others on the free bus just said they would feel more comfortable around their own, where the kids wouldn’t be threatened and attacked for being different.
Before long, we were one of the last white families holding out in Columbia Point. The white neighbors on the free bus were getting few. Many of them had fled to the Southie projects. And my family was beginning to stick out like a sore thumb on those scary walks back to our apartment at nightfall.
At the time, waterfront areas in Boston were still reserved for the ghettos because of the pollution and rodents. But Monticello Ave. is gone now. The streets have been changed around. Today, waterfront properties are some of the most sought-after areas in Boston, and are being developed for people with money. What was once Columbia Point is now a development primarily made up of white urban professionals. The buildings have been renovated, the rats are gone, and the stigma of the past has been erased with a new name—Harbor Point. But one-third of the neighborhood is still occupied by poor black families paying rent according to their income. And a few of the poorer black families say they’re feeling they might eventually be squeezed out by the single white tenants who live such separate lives and don’t want to pay high rents to live near poor people with kids and the problems that come with all that.
I don’t actually remember anything about our days in Columbia Point; I was only a baby when we finally fled. But those stories from my family, repeated like legend, have always been with me. Ma liked to say there was “no time for feeling sorry for yourself,” but I knew the blows she received must have hurt. Her fractured skull and broken ribs and the everyday threats made her want more for us than to be living in an unsafe project. I knew that even if he was in heaven praying for us, Ma would have given anything to have Patrick back with us. And I knew she never wanted her kids to be called “charity cases” again.
Ma had only one way out of Columbia Point—to take her parents’ offer and move us into their triple-decker in Jamaica Plain, which she did in 1967, less than a year after I was born. The apartment was on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood of working-class Irish families. We’d now have a yard for the first time, much more room, and freedom in more ways than one. My brothers and sisters could go outside whenever they wanted without getting jumped. Plus, it was just us and Ma now. Dave MacDonald was gone from our lives, and this was the greatest freedom of all.
There were only two bedrooms. The six boys slept in one, the two girls in the other, and Ma slept on the couch. We plopped our mattresses onto the hardwood floors and made ourselves at home. The floor of the boys’ room was mostly covered by mattresses. The remaining space was reserved for piles of clothes, clean but never folded. We slept side by side, with some lying across the bottoms of the mattresses; usually Kevin preferred this spot. He could fit there best, being the skinny runt we all called him. I always thought it strange at friends’ houses to see a high bed, perfectly made, with layers of sheets and blankets for different purposes: one sheet to hug the mattress, another to put over you, a light blanket coming out over the top of a matching quilt. It all seemed like such a big deal to make out of sleeping. I decided my mattress on the floor, covered with a tangled pile of blankets, was better than all that fuss. I felt bad for my mother, though, who had to sleep on the couch and was lucky if she got a blanket at all. Usually she’d cover herself in our winter coats. She said she liked them better than blankets. Even after some religious people came around with loads of army blankets for us, she’d still call out from her bed, asking me to get her a couple of coats to put over he
r. “Those blankets are scratchy old things I wouldn’t give to a dog,” she’d complain. The couches Ma slept on were also close to the floor, with their legs ripped off the bottoms. Once one leg broke, the rest of them had to go. In later years, we started to take the legs off our couches immediately after buying them from the Salvation Army. Why wait for the day when one of the wooden legs would crack and throw the couch lopsided while everyone was squeezed together watching Saturday morning cartoons or “Soul Train”?
Neighborhood kids were thrilled at the amount of freedom in our home. Most of them had couches covered in plastic, and had to eat at the dinner table and answer their parents’ questions about school and play. We could walk on top of mattresses and couches with our shoes on. Even jump up and down on them, and have pillow fights. We could take curtain rods down from the windows and have sword fights and scream “on guard.” We could eat food whenever we wanted and wherever we wanted. We never once sat down at a fixed time at the dinner table. There was no dinner table. Besides, there were just too many of us. Ma would make a big pot of something—usually an invention, mixing the last three days of leftovers into one big mush—and you’d slop some in a bowl, and find a corner of the house where no one would bother you.
Most of the families on Jamaica Street were Irish American, and some parents were actually from Ireland. My mother and her sisters spent a good part of their childhood years on this street, so we were familiar with many families who had been there for a couple of generations. The Sullivans and the Walshes lived across the street, the Rowans next door, Dick and Bridy Burns down the road, and Mrs. Carrol to the left of us. They were all part of a tight-knit Irish community that spanned Boston. The Irish in Boston all feared each other’s gossip, and Ma always said that certain news of her would be “all over Ireland.” As a kid I imagined that she meant this literally, and couldn’t believe that a whole country would care about things like the length of Ma’s miniskirts, which seemed to be a preoccupation of my grandparents and the other God-fearing Irish parents in the neighborhood.
All Souls Page 3