All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

“It’s funny, I thought, how the people who seem the meanest, the people we want nothing to do with, might be in the most pain.”

Chickie has always scared Michael because she is confident and intimidating. However, when he learns that she attempted to die by suicide with pills, he realizes that she was hurting in ways that he did not suspect. At a time when he feels like no one understands his own pain, this moment marks a profound shift in his perspective.

“When the thousands of people sang the national anthem, with their right hands over their chest, 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.”

Michael does not believe that the people of Southie are free because the institutions that he considers to be representative of America—the police, the government—do not behave as though they care about the many struggles and misfortunes of those who live in Southie. By juxtaposing his deep sense of grief with the overtly patriotic theme of the national anthem, MacDonald conveys the message that he and his family feel utterly disenfranchised by the very institutions that are supposedly meant to safeguard their lives and freedoms, developing the theme of The Widespread Impact of Abandonment.

“Standing at the altar, I at last felt I might be able to reconcile myself with all my memories of confusion, bloodshed, and betrayal.”

Through his activism, Michael has finally found a way to make something good and hopeful out of the many disasters that have befallen his family and community. In this moment, he finds a new sense of strength and determination as he resolves to forge a more positive meaning from the collective tragedies of his family’s experiences.

“As I sat in the long procession to the ceremony, I wondered why I was so happy at a funeral. Then I realized it was the first time I’d seen off someone who’d died natural from old age.”

Once again, MacDonald creates incongruous juxtapositions to invoke a deeply emotional tone and convey the profound impact of his life amid the violence of Southie. By finding an unexpected joy in celebrating his grandfather’s long life, Michael finds himself reflecting on the stories of those whose lives were cut too short.

“It was becoming another one of our Southie traditions. These groups of spiffed-up kids gathering to see their friends in a casket.”

Community rituals play an important role in Southie culture, but in this moment, Michael is struck by the macabre nature of some of these traditions. As this passage indicates, Michael realizes that it is perverse that the wakes of children have become so commonplace that the preparations for them have taken on a ritualized element. Even at this young age, he is learning to lament the ever-present violence that haunts his community.

“I didn’t know if I loved or hated this place.”

With this bleak assertion, Michael reveals the depths of his experiences growing up in Southie, evoking the theme of The Complexities of Close-Knit Communities. When he first returns to Southie as an adult, his ambivalent feelings imply that although he endured many tragedies amid these streets, he also experienced joys and meaningful moments that he cannot dismiss outright. Collectively, all of these experiences have combined to forge the person he has become. Ultimately, his admission that he truly does not know how he feels helps him to analyze his past and find meaning in his family’s suffering.

“I went to bed numb. I wasn’t going to feel this one. We’d buried Frankie only eight months earlier and I never wanted to feel again.”

MacDonald employs short, sharp statements to indicate the blunting of his own intense emotions. By relating such a deep tragedy in a voice lacking any feeling, he conveys his current inability to engage with his grief, and it is clear that because his emotions only cause him to suffer, he now refuses to feel anything at all.

“There’s no place like Old Colony, I thought. All the rules we were learning didn’t make sense anywhere else.”

Old Colony—and Southie in general—are so very insular that they tend to stand alone, apart from the rest of Boston. Encapsulated within this close-knit culture, Michael learns lessons that cannot be applied anywhere else, but he is unaware of this dynamic until he begins traveling to other cities to attend concerts. This same notion might also be applied to Ma, for although her new life in Colorado is safer, she soon becomes dissatisfied with living outside of Southie.

“I threw a rock once. I had to. You were a pussy if you didn’t. But I only wanted others to see my throwing it.”

This passage reflects the compulsion that the young Michael feels to conform to the social expectations of the Southie community, for although he has no real wish to engage in the violence incited by the busing crisis, he knows that maintaining a reputation for toughness is essential in Southie. Michael knows that he must at least feign the willingness to commit violence if he wishes to be respected by his peers.

“No one made us feel better about where we lived than Whitey Bulger.”

Throughout the book, it is clear that Bulger is a master propagandist who is willing to back up his words with violence. He becomes a symbol of pride and unity for Southie residents when he deliberately tells them lies about loyalty, community, and The Code of Silence in South Boston; these concepts make it easier for residents to believe that they must remain insulated from the world outside Southie and take care of each other.

“We all wanted to belong to something big, and the feeling of being part of the antibusing movement along with the rest of Southie was the best feeling in the world.”

Belonging to Southie and its causes allows Michael to feel a heady sense of community. Before he sees the neighborhood devolve into various violent mobs and cliques, he loves being part of the Southie community and deeply values the camaraderie that he experiences there.

“I think it’s his spirit that is sick. And the spirit is just too much of a mystery for them to figure out.”

Before Davey’s diagnosis of schizophrenia, Michael intuits that there is something wrong with Davey. Even without the full knowledge of his brother’s diagnosis, he instinctively understands that Davey’s brain is ill, not his body. These oblique descriptions also indicate the limited understanding that society had about mental health conditions during this time frame.

“Even the times I’d come close to the violence, I still felt comforted by the popular line that Southie was the one place ‘Where everyone looks out for each other.’”

This passage emphasizes the importance of the standard Southie view of loyalty and the necessity for members of the neighborhood to watch out for each other’s safety. However, the narrative also indicates the ironic contrast between this dynamic and the onslaught of violence that Michael witnesses in his community.

“We’d never see Davey on this earth again, and right then there was no way of understanding the meaning of that.”

The bleak tone of this passage reveals the young Michael’s first attempts to process the harsh realities of death and collective grief. After Davey’s suicide, Michael feels offended as he watches people going about their day and doing normal things. The death of a family member makes everything seem meaningless to him.

“Frankie had as many admiring eyes on him now as any of the gangsters did, and he didn’t have to hijack trucks or sell poison in the streets to get that respect.”

Frankie shows Michael that respect can be earned by generosity, ethical behavior, and a loyalty to family that is different than the code of silence enforced by the gangsters. He takes his status as a role model seriously, and these positive attributes make Frankie’s death all the more tragic in comparison.

“We didn’t feel the same about our neighborhood now that the kids were dead. Ma wanted to get the hell out.”

Although faced with a barrage of personal tragedies and the deaths of several of her children, Ma had never entertained the idea of leaving Southie—not until the deaths of Kevin and Frankie. After their deaths, Michael begins to see the neighborhood as she does, and they both feel the need to escape from Southie’s influence.

“For many kids my age, hate for the cops was a good enough reason to be an outlaw.”

This matter-of-fact statement reveals the common attitude that young people in Southie held toward authority figures such as police officers. MacDonald’s account emphasizes that police corruption and abuse of power are drivers in Southie’s continual development of criminal elements. If Southie citizens believe that the police are inherently against them, they become easier to recruit for criminal enterprises.

“Jesus, this is the greatest place to grow up.”

Michael has this thought while watching a group of children chasing a stray raccoon. Even in the midst of his pain, he is reminded that there are things he loves about Southie. After this moment, however, he remembers the wakes and the collective grief that his family suffered, and he sadly acknowledges that not everyone in Southie gets the chance to grow up.

“When the minorities did move in, the little kids played together fine.”

In this passage, MacDonald directly addresses one of the paradoxes of the racist violence that he witnessed in Southie as an adolescent, for he acknowledges that on a practical level, young children have no interest in perpetuating racist stereotypes. When Black people and people of various Asian heritages move into the neighborhood, Michael does not initially believe that this integration will be successful. However, he observes that small children remain unaware of their differences in skin color, and the narrative implies that they have not yet been taught the prejudices that have taken root in most Southie adults.

“The people of South Boston have been had, I thought. But not simply by a local gangster. He had a little help—from one of the most powerful agencies in American government.”

Michael’s commitment to justice and a life of activism is spurred on by the deaths of those around him in Southie and his growing awareness of how corrupt the government and law enforcement agencies have been in their use and protection of Whitey Bulger. By making this bold statement, MacDonald takes his activism to a new level and strives to hold all contributing parties to the past violence to account.

“The world’s nothing but pain. It’ll never get better. It’s completely useless.”

While waiting for Stevie’s verdict, Michael contemplates suicide, and the sheer hopelessness of his mindset is conveyed in these bleak-toned passages. In this moment, he no longer believes that anything good can result from a life in Southie, and it is not until he uses activism as an outlet for his rage that he finally finds a way to put his past experiences in a more constructive light.

“I decided then, that if I ever made it out of this storm, I’d have to spend my life fighting—not only for Stevie, but for everything else that had happened over the years, for the dignity of my family, and for other families like mine.”

In the aftermath of Stevie’s trial, Michael decides to fight against corruption and injustice rather than abandoning his own faith. He realizes that Stevie’s conviction is a symbol of everything that has ever been wrong with Southie, and he gains a new sense of resolve to speak out and effect positive change for his community.

“It was one thing to feel forsaken by the criminal justice system. It was another to feel forsaken by God.”

When Michael finds that Stevie has left the rose that Mary Scott gave to him, he knows that Stevie—as a 13-year-old who has been found guilty of a murder he did not commit—has lost his faith in God. This moment conveys what occurs when every single social entity fails to protect an innocent boy like Stevie from injustice and harm.