Smash! A burst of flying glass and all that rage exploded. We’d all been waiting for it, and so had the police in riot gear. It felt like a gunshot, but it was a brick. It went right through a bus window. Then all hell broke loose. I saw a milk crate fly from the other side of the street right for my face. More bricks, sticks, and bottles smashed against the buses, as police pulled out their billy clubs and charged with their riot shields in a line formation through the crowds. Teenagers were chased into the project and beaten to the cement wherever they were caught.
I raced away about a block from the fray, to a spot where everyone was chanting “Here We Go Southie, Here We Go,” like a battle cry. That’s when I realized we were at war. I started chanting too, at first just moving my lips because I didn’t know if a kid’s voice would ruin the strong chant. But then I belted it out, just as a few other kids I didn’t know joined the chorus. The kids in the crowd all looked at each other as if we were family. This is great, I thought. I’d never had such an easy time as this, making friends in Southie. The buses kept passing by, speeding now, and all I could see in the windows were black hands with their middle fingers up at us, still no faces though.
The buses got through the crowd surrounded by the police motorcycles. I saw Frankie running up toward Southie High along with everyone else. “What are you doing out here!” he yelled. “Get your ass home!” He said there was another riot with the cops up at the high school, and off he ran with the others. Not far behind were Kevin and his friends. He shouted the same thing at me: “Get your ass home!” I just wanted to find Ma now and make sure she wasn’t beaten or arrested or anything, so I ran home. The project was empty—everyone had followed the buses up the St. Paddy’s parade route. Ma wasn’t home, but the TV was on, with live coverage of the riots at Southie High. Every channel I turned to showed the same thing. I kept flipping the dial, looking for my family, and catching glimpses of what seemed to be all the people I knew hurling stones or being beaten by the police, or both. This is big, I thought. It was scary and thrilling at the same time, and I remembered the day we’d moved into this neighborhood, when Ma said it looked just like Belfast, and that we were in the best place in the world. I kept changing the channels, looking for my family, and I didn’t know anymore whether I was scared or thrilled, or if there was any difference between the two anyhow.
The buses kept rolling, and the hate kept building. It was a losing battle, but we returned to Darius Court every day after school to see if the rage would explode again. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. But the bus route became a meeting place for the neighborhood. Some of my neighbors carried big signs with RESIST or NEVER or my favorite, HELL NO WE WON’T GO. There was always someone in the crowd keeping everyone laughing with wisecracks aimed at the stiff-looking state troopers who lined the bus route, facing the crowds to form a barrier. They never moved or showed any expression. We all wanted to get them to react to something. But we wanted a reaction somewhere between the stiff inhuman stance and the beatings. When my friends and I tried to get through to them by asking questions about their horses and could we pet them, they told us to screw. And it wasn’t long before some kids started trying to break the horses’ legs with hockey sticks when riots broke out. One day the staties got distracted by a burning effigy of Judge Garrity that came flying off a rooftop in the project. That’s when I saw Kevin make his way out of Darius Court to throw a rock at the buses. A trooper chased him, but Kevin was too fast. His photo did end up in the Boston Globe the next day, though, his scrawny shirtless body whipping a rock with all his might. It looked like the pictures we’d always seen of kids in war-torn countries throwing petrol bombs at some powerful enemy. But Kevin’s rock hit a yellow bus with black kids in it.
I threw a rock once. I had to. You were a pussy if you didn’t. I didn’t have a good aim, though, and it landed on the street before it even made it to the bus. I stared at my rock and was partly relieved. I didn’t really want it to smash a bus window. I only wanted the others to see me throwing it. On that day there were so many rocks flying that you didn’t know whose rock landed where, but everyone claimed the ones that did the most damage. Even though I missed, a cop came out of nowhere and treated me just like they treated the kids with good aim. He took me by the neck and threw me to the dirt. I sat there for a few minutes to make sure that everyone had seen that one. I was only eight, but I was part of it all, part of something bigger than I’d ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night.
Every day I felt the pride of rebellion. The helicopters above my bedroom window woke me each morning for school, and my friends and I would plan to pass by the TPF on the corners so we could walk around them and give them hateful looks. Ma and the nuns at St. Augustine’s told me it was wrong to hate the blacks for any of this. But I had to hate someone, and the police were always fracturing some poor neighbor’s skull or taking teenagers over to the beach at night to beat them senseless, so I hated them with all my might. SWAT teams had been called into the neighborhood. I’d always liked the television show “S.W.A.T.,” but they were the enemy now. We gave the SWAT sharpshooters standing guard over us on the rooftops the finger; then we’d run. Evenings we had to be off the streets early or else the cops would try to run us down with their motorbikes. No more hanging out on corners in Old Colony. A line of motorbikes straight across the street and sidewalks would appear out of nowhere and force everyone to disappear into hallways and tunnels. One time I had to jump into a bush because they were coming from both ends of the street. I was all cut up, and I really hated them then.
It felt good, the hate I had for the authorities. My whole family hated them, especially Frankie, Kathy, and Kevin, who got the most involved in the riots. I would’ve loved to throw Molotov cocktails myself, along with some of the adults, but I was only a kid and the cops would probably catch me and beat me at the beach. So I just fantasized about killing them all. They were the enemy, the giant oppressor, like Goliath. And the people of South Boston were like David. Except that David won in the end, and we knew we were going to lose this one. But that made us even more like the Irish, who were always fighting in the songs even if they had to lose and die a glorious death.
One Friday in early October we took part in what Louise Day Hicks called National Boycott Day. Everyone boycotted school again. We’d all heard about the kids who’d gone to school during boycotts and who were threatened over the phone with getting their things cut off. Kevin told Ma we’d better not risk castration, and we got to stay home and watch the rally and march down Broadway. The rally was a good one. When the thousands of people sang the national anthem, with their right hands over their chests, I cried. It was as if we were singing about an America that we wanted but didn’t have, especially the part about the land of the free. Louise Day Hicks really squealed that part out from the bandstand microphone, and we all knew what she was getting at.
When the rally was over, the crowds marched to Judge Garrity’s home in the Boston suburb of Wellesley. We weren’t allowed to go because Ma thought people would surely be arrested. I wanted to go because I’d heard that where the Judge lived everyone was rich and white and I wanted to see what they looked like. But I couldn’t, so I just watched the march on its way down Broadway.
The signs at the marches were starting to change. Instead of RESTORE OUR ALIENATED RIGHTS and WELCOME TO MOSCOW AMERICA, more and more now I saw BUS THE NIGGERS BACK TO AFRICA, and one even said KKK. I was confused about that one. The people in my neighborhood were always going on about being Irish, with shamrocks painted on the brick walls and tattooed to their arms. And I had always heard stories from Grandpa about a time when the Ku Klux Klan burned Irish Catholics out of their homes in America. I thought someone should beat up the guy with the KKK sign, but no one seemed to mind that much. I told my friend Danny about the Ku Klux Klan burning out the Irish families, and that the guy with the KKK sign was in the wrong town. He laughed. He said he’d never
heard that one before. “Shut up,” he said. “They just hate the niggers. What, d’ya wanna be a nigger?” Jesus no, I thought to myself.
With National Boycott Day, everything got more scary. In the afternoon, after all the speeches, chants, and the tearful national anthem, crowds gathered at Darius Court once again to taunt the police and to throw rocks at the buses. The TPF chased one man into the Rabbit Inn tavern across the street, and a crowd of people at the bar protected him from the cops. Everyone knew the Rabbit Inn was no place to mess with. That’s where the Mullen gang hung out—the toughest bar in Southie. The next night, after dark, we were all called out of our apartments in Old Colony. The mothers on the stoop were yelling up to windows that the TPF was beating people at the Rabbit Inn to get back at them for the night before. Ma wasn’t home, so I ran to Darius Court with all of the neighbors, some of them carrying baseball bats, hockey sticks, and big rocks. When I got there, the dark streets were packed with mobs rushing the police. I saw Kevin running through a maze of people carrying a boulder with both hands. He was excited and told me that the TPF had beat the shit out of everyone at the Rabbit Inn, with their police badges covered. Just then I saw people covered in blood being taken from the bar into the converging ambulances.
The mothers in Old Colony showed their Southie loyalty that night. They went up against the entire police force that was filling the streets. I kept getting knocked around by bigger people running in all directions. Someone said the TPF had split open an eleven-year-old’s head. I pushed through the crowd to get a look at the kid, and was relieved to see through all the blood that he wasn’t Kevin. I wondered if I’d better get home, in case people started getting killed. As the sirens screeched, I saw the blue lights flashing onto the face of Mary Beth Duggan, a four-year-old from the project sitting on her big brother’s shoulders and smiling at all the excitement. I figured if she could stay out then so could I.
Someone propped up his stereo speakers in a project window, blasting a favorite at the time: “Fight the Power” by the Isley Brothers. We always did that in Old Colony, blare our speakers out of our windows for the whole neighborhood to hear. It was obvious this guy was doing it for good background music to the crashes and thumps of battle.
Everyone sang along to “Fight the Power.” The teenagers in Southie still listened only to black music. The sad Irish songs were for the older people, and I never heard anyone listening to rock and roll in Old Colony. One time an outsider walked through Old Colony wearing a dungaree vest with a big red tongue and THE ROLLING STONES printed on the back. He was from the suburbs and was visiting his cousins in Old Colony. He got a bottle thrown at his head and was called a pussy. Rock and roll was for rich suburban people with long hair and dirty clothes. Mary had a similar tongue painted on her bedroom wall, but that was for Rufus and Chaka Khan; it was okay to like them. Of course no one called it black music—we couldn’t see what color anyone was from the radio—but I knew the Isley Brothers were black because I’d seen them on “Soul Train.” But that didn’t bother anyone in the crowd; what mattered was that the Isley Brothers were singing about everything we were watching in our streets right now, the battle between us and the law: “And when I rolled with the punches I got knocked on the ground / By all this bullshit goin’ down.”
The mob started pushing and swaying toward the cop cars, blocking them from going down the street. Mrs. Coyne was out there again, and was the first to put a bat through a police windshield. Then everyone surrounded the cops and smashed all of their windows. I started to see things fly through the air: pipes, bricks, bats, and even a hubcap.
Just then I saw my mother pushing through the crowd, yelling at me to run home. “They’re beating kids!” she screamed. She kept getting knocked from side to side. She grabbed me by the collar and said she couldn’t find Kevin and Kathy; she had a crying voice on her. I didn’t want to go home without her, but she made me, while she went looking through the crowds, dodging everything flying through the air. Later on Ma dragged Kevin and Kathy home and gave into us for running up to Darius Court to join the riot. Frankie was still up there, Ma couldn’t find him, and we were mad that the three of us couldn’t do everything that the older kids could. Ma couldn’t yell at us for long; Kevin drowned her out by blasting the television news reports. And soon we were all glued to the set once again, watching for those we knew in the crowd getting dragged into paddy wagons at Darius Court.
On Monday Ma made me, Kevin, and Kathy go back to St. Augustine’s. There were no buses coming that day because the NAACP had taken the black students to some kind of meeting at the University of Massachusetts. The black leaders were asking for federal troops to be brought into South Boston, and wanted to see what the black teenagers thought about all that. We didn’t want the troops; it was bad enough with the state troopers, SWAT teams, and the TPF, who Ma called “the Gestapo.”
We walked to school past Darius Court and up Dorchester Street. The streets were completely empty, still littered with all the things that had flown through the air on Saturday night. Fewer teenagers were finding a reason to go to school anymore, unless they wanted to get in fights. And on this Monday morning everyone had heard on the radio that the buses weren’t coming that day, so many in Old Colony stayed home. The silence on Dorchester Street was spooky. I was walking with my head down, looking at all the garbage in the street, when Kevin came up from behind and pushed me. I went flying and when I looked up I saw that I’d been headed straight for a bloody pig’s head on top of a post. I let out a yell that should have woken up the neighborhood. I looked up the street, and it looked like something from a horror movie. More signposts with pigs’ heads on top of them, some with apples in their mouths. Blood was on the street, scrawled into letters that said KILL THE PIGS or FUCK THE POLICE. We touched the pig’s head—we’d never seen real pigs before. I pushed an eyeball and it squished, and then it fell out of the socket onto my shoe. I yelled again. The whole thing seemed more violent than anything I’d seen yet. Whoever had decorated the street with pigs’ heads must have been pretty pissed off, I thought, killing some innocent pigs to send a message to the cops.
That afternoon, everyone gathered at Darius Court again, even though there were no buses. The pigs’ heads were gone, but you could still see FUCK THE POLICE on the street. The neighborhood was still upset about the TPF beating on women and children at the Rabbit Inn. They were all talking about it when we came upon the crowd. The crowds started chanting again: “Here we go Southie, Here we go!” A circle of teens started rocking a police car that had been left in the middle of the street while the cops chased some kid who’d thrown a boulder at them. They rocked the cruiser from side to side, and just when it rocked high enough they tipped it over on its head. The cops chased them too, but they got away through the maze of tunnels and hallways and ended up on a rooftop at Darius Court, where they threw fistfulls of pebbles onto the heads of their pursuers, who by that time had given up all the chasing and were now inspecting their upside-down cruiser.
I ran further up Dorchester Street when I heard the gunshot. There was a commotion at Jolly Donuts. A cop stood at the intersection with his gun pointed in the air, and he fired a second shot. He was trying to disperse a crowd that was dragging a black man from his car. The man ran from the crowd as people threw rocks at him. More and more angry people ganged up on the black man, who I could see was crying. He was trying to get away, but there was nowhere to go. He ran to a house just outside the project, and tried to climb over a railing. “Kill the nigger!” my neighbor shouted. That was Molly’s mother, running to join the commotion. Everyone made fun of Molly at school because they had seen her mother bleeding down the legs of her pants more than once. They said she was so poor she couldn’t afford a Kotex pad. But she wasn’t as bad off now as the black man, who was clenching his fingers onto the railing of the house before the boys dragged him onto the pavement and beat his skull with baseball bats and hockey sticks. The people living in the hous
e were no help; they booted his fingers off their railing. A photographer flashed his camera at the man from all angles: hands reaching for an escape, baseball bat to the ribs, crying face to the pavement. I remember the man’s tears clearing paths in the blood on his face. That’s how close I was to him. Scores of police came to the corner at Jolly Donuts and brought out their tear gas and riot shields, and another riot broke out. Kathy and Kevin brought me home and I was sick: sick of the police, sick of busing, sick of being thrilled or scared, and sick of the hate.
The next day it was all over the news. Some pictures were from angles that I could’ve taken myself if I’d had a camera. Once again I was seeing a replay on the news of what I’d just seen in real life. I was sick of the news too. The newsman said that there were no suspects in the beating that almost killed the man, who was from Haiti and had been on his way through Southie to pick up his wife at a laundromat. I went back to the site where he was beaten. I don’t know why I was drawn there—maybe I had to feel the sadness, like at a funeral. I saw an aluminum baseball bat covered in blood and wondered why the cops hadn’t taken it in for evidence, fingerprints and all that. Whose side are they on, anyway? I thought. They certainly weren’t on our side, and now I knew they probably weren’t on the Haitian’s side either.
Ma was mad about the beating, and I was glad about that, because I didn’t like being the only one around who wanted to talk about it. No one else ever mentioned it again. It never happened. “He probably had no idea what he was driving into,” Ma said. She called him a scapegoat, and I knew exactly what that meant even though I’d never heard it before. I’d seen it. He was new to this country and probably didn’t even know about South Boston or Old Colony. He mustn’t have known that we all hated the communists, Judge Garrity, the rich liberals, the Globe, and the cops, who were all to blame for the pain in our lives, and he didn’t expect that he’d be the only one my neighbors could get their hands on … someone worse off than us, a nigger.
All Souls Page 10