The face of commitment
Hard work pays off for Dorcena Forry
At first glance, Linda Dorcena Forry's electoral triumph this week might seem a function of demographic destiny in a changing Boston, a product of a growing minority population that vaulted a 31-year-old Haitian-American into the open legislative seat held for 26 years by a shrewd and ultimately very powerful white guy.
The new Boston politics, some call it.
But Dorcena Forry's victory in the seat once held by former House speaker Thomas M. Finneran is much more than that. The success of Dorcena Forry, the daughter of Haitian immigrants who worked multiple jobs to pay for their children's education, is a story about her own work ethic, her drive to succeed, and her marriage to a local newspaper editor, who happens to be white.
In a city that has never quite cleansed the stain of its racially troubled past, Dorcena Forry presents a compelling biography.
Raised in the Uphams Corner-Dudley Triangle section of Dorchester, Dorcena Forry as a teenager was a leader in neighborhood and school service organizations, a tutor, a drug and alcohol counselor. She attended Catholic grammar and high schools and was president of her class at Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School before entering Boston College.
Her parents, Andre and Annie Dorcena, ''worked hard and made sure their children stayed focused," Dorcena Forry said yesterday. ''The only thing they asked was that we do well in school." The family spoke both English and Haitian Creole at home.
At BC, Dorcena Forry was a leader in student government and involved in an HIV/AIDS awareness public health campaign. As a freshman attending a meeting of the BC chapter of the NAACP, she met Bill Forry, a sophomore and her future husband. Now managing editor of The Dorchester Reporter, a weekly newspaper, and The Mattapan Reporter, a monthly, Bill Forry was a classmate and close friend of her older brother, William Dorcena, at BC and before that at Boston College High School.
''Everyone loves Linda," said Ed Forry, her father-in-law, an Irish-American publisher and patriarch of a family that operates the Dorchester and Mattapan newspapers along with the monthly Boston Irish and Boston Haitian Reporter newspapers. ''You get consumed by her generous, happy, and friendly nature."
For nine years Dorcena Forry has been a top aide to Charlotte Golar Richie -- in the late 1990s when Richie was a state representative from Dorchester and since 1999 when Richie became director of neighborhood development for the City of Boston. Her protege's victory, Richie reflected Tuesday night, ''is the result of nine years of hard work."
The hard work continued in the campaign's final days as Dorcena Forry extended an exhausting regimen of knocking on doors across the Dorchester-Mattapan-Milton district and personally telephoning more than 2,000 voters who had previously indicated to campaign volunteers they might vote for her.
Her victory party at the Milton Hoosic Club was a cultural mosaic, an affirmation of her campaign's theme of ''a new partnership" and an approach to politics and public service that is unwaveringly positive and inclusive. During Finneran's reign, the racial makeup of the district changed dramatically: Even after the lines were redrawn and the district extended into mostly white Milton, only about three in 10 residents of voting age today are white.
The change was evident Tuesday night, when the celebrants cut across every racial and social class. Many had dealt with Dorcena Forry as a legislative aide, city official, or in neighborhood groups. The political activists present were, as one supporter termed them, a blend of ''young turks and grizzled veterans." There were teenagers and people in their 70s. Beefy white members of the carpenters' union mingled with gay activists, some in business suits and some in T-shirts. Sixtysomething white women shared a table with a pair of gray eminences from Boston's African-American community -- Ralph Cooper of the Veterans Benefits Clearinghouse in Roxbury and Paul Parks, a veteran of Kevin White's administration in the 1970s.
Of the five candidates on Tuesday, Dorcena Forry was the only one with a visible presence in both the mostly white and mostly black sections of the district. It was also true in the two precincts on the suburban side of the Neponset River. Helped by several white elected officials there, Dorcena Forry rolled up an astounding 62 percent of the Milton vote, compared with a 44.4-percent plurality in the 14 precincts of Boston.
As he savored his daughter-in-law's win, Ed Forry recalled when he and his wife and business partner, Mary Casey Forry, met Linda for the first time. She and her brother came to the family home in Dorchester Lower Mills for Sunday dinner.
''We were struck by Linda," he said. ''Afterward, my wife said: 'That's the woman my son's going to marry,' " Forry said, though it would be several years before she and their son began dating.
Addressing supporters Tuesday night, an emotional Linda Dorcena Forry recounted how Mary, suffering from pancreatic cancer, in a symbolic gesture had written in her daughter-in-law's name on last fall's state election ballot because she feared she would not live until the special election on Tuesday when her vote would matter. She died shortly before Christmas.
''My mother was a major fan of Linda's, and she felt immediately that we were soulmates," Bill Forry said. With their 15-month-old son, John Patrick, Bill and Linda live in a two-family house they bought a year after their marriage in 2000. The house on Richmond Street is five doors down from Forry's parents' home.
During the campaign, Linda's parents and other family members took care of the toddler. The two families, Ed Forry said, ''are bonded at the hip."
For motherhood and the five-month campaign, Dorcena Forry also had to suspend her post-graduate studies at Suffolk University, where she is enrolled in a master's degree program in public administration. ''I'll definitely get back and finish at some point," Forry said.
But first, she must make the transition from behind-the-scenes assistant to out-front politician.
''I am ready for it," she said. In Golar Richie, Forry said, she had a great teacher and role model.
She ran on a platform that combined bread-and-butter service issues -- funding for schools, affordable housing, and community health centers -- with progressive social positions, including support for same-sex marriage, an issue that was controversial in Boston's Haitian community.
''Linda always said she couldn't support putting something in the Constitution that would take a person's right away," her father-in-law said. ''She always says that 40 years ago in parts of this country, her own marriage would have been illegal." 