There's no place like Old Colony

By Michael Patrick MacDonald

The second grade was when I started to lie about where I lived. The kids at the [John Boyle] O'Reilly [School] per liblink were mostly from the housing projects, but we all said we lived in a house. The funny thing was that we all knew who was lying. Sometimes we'd accuse each other of being on welfare and eating ``wellie cheese.'' And we'd tell jokes about each other, about what someone couldn't afford, the ``you're so poor'' jokes. ``You're so poor you can't afford to wipe your [expletive]!'' Whatever that meant. Then there were the ``your mother's so poor'' jokes, which were always enough to start a brawl.

Ma used to give me a dollar food stamp to buy candy on the way home. I'd stop by the store extra early in the morning to buy something for a nickel so that I'd have the 95 cents to show on the way home, when I was with the other kids from school. I didn't want to pull out the food stamp in front of them, even though I'd seen their own mothers shopping with food stamps. Ma was generous with money and sometimes she'd give me two or three dollars in food stamps. But then I'd have to go to two or three stores to buy something for a nickel at each and collect the change. The stores were nice enough about letting kids buy candy or gum, which I don't think was actually allowed by the government. I didn't want to push it though, by changing three different food stamps in one visit to the same store. Kathy and Kevin would sell theirs on the street for a little less than they were worth, so they could buy some smokes, which was definitely not allowed with food stamps. And one time I brought food stamps to the movie theater on Broadway. I thought no one would see me with them when I tried to buy popcorn, but the popcorn lady got everyone in the lobby laughing as she told the story to whomever came by the counter. ``That's the best one yet,'' she howled. ``These people think they can use food stamps for anything they want!'' I had to hide from her the rest of the night. A few days later I saw her using food stamps herself at the supermarket, and she got a pack of cigarettes with them.

We all were on food stamps, but most of the jokes around the town were about black people on welfare. The same thing with living in the projects and eating wellie cheese -- those were black things. So was shoplifting and selling hot goods, although we justified that as long as we didn't steal from businesses within the neighborhood, or from other neighborhood folks.

The Boston Housing Authority came through the apartment on a regular basis, to make sure the house was kept up. The house was looking great since [my mother's boyfriend] Coley had moved in with us, building furniture and cleaning rugs. But whenever the inspectors were coming over with their pens and notebooks, Ma had to get rid of Coley for the day. Our apartment passed inspections, but the project itself wasn't looking too good. The ancient mailboxes in the hallway were falling apart. Everyone had to greet the mailman on welfare check day, so as not to risk having it stolen from a flimsy mailbox. The trash incinerators had the steel shutters broken off, with open flames coming out of the stack. You had to throw your trash from a distance in order to avoid being set on fire. The front doors to the buildings were hanging off their hinges. And when a hallway window broke, it would stay broken through the winter.

Long after the BHA inspectors were gone, when it got dark, the roaches would come out in droves. They didn't like the light, so if you ever got up in the middle of the night, you'd see them scatter all over the place as soon as you flicked the switch. They'd be covering the kitchen floor, carrying food and hovering around the slightest drop of liquid. They loved tonic, especially Sprite. I'd figured this out one morning after I'd left half a glass of Sprite out overnight and had woken up to find about 20 dead cockroaches floating around in the cup. That's when I realized that they had wings too, just like the huge water-bug roaches that came out in the summer. But they never used them until they started to drown in the Sprite. They all floated in the cup with their useless wings spread out. I stared at them for a good long time, wondering if they didn't know how to use their wings, or if they just didn't know they had them, until it was too late to save themselves.

We were keeping the house as clean as we could, and the roaches were still taking over. So at night I started to leave all the lights on so I wouldn't have to deal with them if I woke up to go to the bathroom. I also put glasses of Sprite in all the corners of the house, to kill as many as I could. I'd count them in the morning, and one night I got about a hundred. It became fun. We weren't the only ones with the problem. I started to notice that most of the other apartments in Old Colony were also lit up all night long. What did we care? We weren't paying electric bills -- that came with the rent. We weren't paying heat bills either, and the project didn't mind blasting the heat into our apartments nine months out of the year. Most people in Old Colony had to leave their windows open all winter long. You couldn't really control the levels on any of the radiators, and the heat would kill you if you ever closed the windows.

I was always shocked to go to my cousins' house in the suburbs, where they'd shut off any light that wasn't being used and turn the heat way down at night. I was used to project heat and would freeze if I ever slept anywhere else. There's no place like Old Colony, I thought. All the rules we were learning didn't make any sense anywhere else. Not the rules about heat and light, not the rules about what to wear, not the rules about money. In the suburbs the kids were wearing cheap Wrangler corduroys and scruffy sneakers. Our designer clothes had to be spotless so that no one would call us ``project rats'' or accuse us of being on welfare. There'd been a few times when Ma had brought home sneakers that cost $1.49 at K Mart, thinking we'd wear them -- but no way! Everyone in the neighborhood called the cheap sneakers ``bobos.'' We made Ma get the very best from Skoochie's shopping bag of designer goods. She was always generous with whatever money she had. When we'd go to the store with our cousins, we'd ask Ma for a few dollars, whether in food stamps or real money. She'd give me a fiver sometimes. My cousins would each get about a quarter from their mother and father. And they're the rich ones living in the suburbs with a father and all, I thought.

Even though Ma would give us whatever money we wanted, I started to get in on some of the scams local kids would come up with. It wasn't big stuff. We didn't get a lot of money; it was more for something to do. I'd go out to the main intersection outside the project, along with Kevin and my friend Danny, to hit up the commuters going back to the suburbs from their jobs in downtown. We took a tin can from the trash, covered the sides with white lined paper from a notebook, and wrote South Boston Youth Hockey on it. On the top of the can was a plastic lid with a slit cut into it for dropping money in. We'd approach the drivers and I couldn't believe how nearly all of them would give us money while they were stopped at the red light.

During rush hour, we'd make about 10 bucks each. We started doing it every day, and the only time we were chased away was by one of the drivers who was a local from City Point, who said that he was a coach for South Boston Youth Hockey himself and had never seen us before in his life. Kevin told him we had to save up to buy the hockey sticks and pads and helmets before we could join, and he got out of his car and said he'd better not see us out there again. That's when we changed our labels to Old Colony Basketball. Kids in the project were more likely to play basketball anyway. It was cheap; all you needed was a ball and a hoop. No one at the intersection would know if we were really in a league or not, and certainly no one in Old Colony would care to investigate it. In Old Colony we stuck together.

It was on one of those days at the intersection in the spring of 1974 that we saw the headlights blinking and heard the honking and loudspeakers screaming something about the communists trying to take over South Boston. Everyone came running out of the project to line the streets. At first it was scary, like the end of the world was being announced. But then it seemed more like a parade. It was even along the same route as the St. Patty's Day parade. One neighbor said it was what they called a motorcade. The cars in the motorcade never seemed to stop coming. It went on for a good half-hour. Irish flags waved out of car windows and one sign on a car read Welcome to Moscow America. Many more had Resist or Never written on them. My favorite one was Hell No Southie Won't Go. That was a good one, I said. I started clapping with everyone else. But then I had to ask someone, ``Where are we not going?'' One of the mothers said, ``They're trying to send you to Roxbury with the [expletive]. To get a beatin','' she added. Someone else told her not to say that word to the kids, that they were blacks . . . ``Well it's no time to fight over that one,'' someone else said. ``It's time now to stick together.'' When I asked who was trying to send us, someone told me about Judge Garrity; that a bunch of rich people from the suburbs wanted to tell us where we had to send our kids to school; that they wanted us to mix with the blacks, but that their own kids wouldn't have to mix with no one, because there were no blacks in the suburbs.

Everyone waved to Dapper O'Neil when he rode by in the motorcade. They loved him. But they got really excited when they saw Louise Day Hicks, their favorite committeewoman. I'd never heard of her before. She looked nice enough, though, like someone's grandmother, a tubby older woman with a flowery old-fashioned dress like Nana wore and a small church hat perched on top of her round Irish face. People said she was from Southie, but she didn't have a face that looked like she'd been through much. Her father was a judge and she lived in a big beachfront house in City Point, but she was OK with us. ``She's the only one sticking up for us,'' someone said. So I liked her too. Someone on a bullhorn started shouting about the rights of the people and about not letting the government force this and force that on us. I knew he was right, and I felt myself getting angry along with him. And I also knew that these adults were going to put up a fight for me. God, we couldn't have been living in a better neighborhood! Everyone's sticking together, I thought. Everyone's going to fight for us kids. We all cheered as the motorcade made its way toward City Point.

When the motorcade had passed, everyone lingered on street corners in the project talking about ``forced busing.'' It was going to begin in the fall, they said. They all seemed to know it was going to happen, but win or lose, everyone believed in going down fighting. I saw neighbors talking, people I knew had grudges against each other before. In the following days, I even saw people who were from different parts of Southie getting over their differences to talk about the busing. Mothers from City Point talking on Broadway to mothers from the projects. I couldn't believe it. The whole feeling in the neighborhood was changing. Before long, we kids could cross any turf line. We were united. Some said it was the communists who were making this happen. Still others said it was rich lawyers, judges, and politicians from the suburbs, and that it had nothing to do with the blacks, that they didn't want to come to Southie any more than we wanted to go to Roxbury. In the end it didn't really matter who we were united against, as long as we kept up our Southie loyalty.

Along with the craziness and the cockroaches, the summer of 1974 brought with it great anticipation for the fight of our lives. Motorcades and marches became arenas for our daily play. We still set dumpster fires, and a couple times we were able to light up a stolen car, stripped and abandoned in Old Colony, before the BHA finally removed it. But organized protests brought more thrills than anything we'd ever known. Most of the marches and rallies were peaceful, though the threat of violence filled the air. You could hear it in the throats of politicians like Ray Flynn and Dapper O'Neil, who led the cheering crowds. And you could see it in the watery swelled-up eyes of mothers, not sure whether they would cry or lash out. I knew these women were doing everything in their power to do neither, to hide their pain. But what mattered most was seeing how much they cared about us kids, and to tell the truth, I wouldn't have minded if they'd brought out the Molotov cocktails from the beginning.

Reprinted from "All Souls: A Family Story from Southie" by Michael Patrick MacDonald. Copyright 1999 by Michael Patrick MacDonald. By permission of Beacon Press, Boston.

This story ran on page B7 of the Boston Globe on 09/12/1999.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.