Memoir recalls growing up poor, white and Irish

------------------------- BOOK REVIEW

"All Souls: A Family Story from Southie" Michael Patrick MacDonald will read from "All Souls: A Family Story from Southie" at 7 p.m. next Thursday at the University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., Seattle. Information: 206-634-3400. -------------------------

The best stories can be the ones everyone has forgotten. "All Souls: A Family Story from Southie," by first-time writer and community activist Michael Patrick MacDonald, is a memoir of growing up poor, white and Irish in a housing project in South Boston called Old Colony.

History knows South Boston as the center of the anti-busing riots of 1974-75, when black kids were bused to "Southie" schools and Irish rage exploded into violent demonstrations. America watched and saw white racists out of control. Michael Patrick MacDonald, a boy of 8, saw a lot more. He saw a place under siege by police. "All Souls" is the story of his family and his neighborhood, especially what happened to its children in the years after the news cameras had come and gone.

A passionate speaker, even by long distance, MacDonald recently spoke from Denver about his reasons for writing "All Souls."

"For myself, I needed to tell the truth about my neighborhood as part of my own personal healing process," he said. "Beyond that, I want kids to live, and I know that the only way we can begin to promote living in our society is through truth-telling."

MacDonald cites some alarming South Boston statistics: "Two years ago, in a five-month period, 200 kids tried to commit suicide. Ten died."

MacDonald feels there is a stifled feeling among the young of South Boston, a need to be released from a place that seems to have no future. He notes that South Boston is now a new and trendy neighborhood, where new one-bedroom apartments are going for $160,000. He adds: "A whole new city is being built and the kids are not a part of this world."

Growing up, MacDonald didn't see his home, Old Colony, that way. Old Colony was "a world within a world," six or so blocks where things were always happening, and kids were left to find their own adventures. Of his childhood home, MacDonald says: "It was one big family."

One chapter in "All Souls," called "Ghetto Heaven," vividly recreates life in the projects, showing an Irish community with a strong sense of pride, humor and its own rules for living. Most people were on welfare, but nobody thought of themselves as poor: Poor, they believed, was a black thing.

MacDonald puts it even better: "When you're white, you're not ghetto."

MacDonald thinks that the idea of poverty as a black problem, a view so prevalent in Southie, is a racist construct also shared by mainstream white media. He points to how the media reports violent crime. "The first thing the media does when a murder has been committed is to point out how different the victim is from us. This is so we can feel safe. White, middle-class Americans see the victim and the perpetrator as the Other."

This sense of Them and Us is a recurrent theme of "All Souls." Whitey Burger, a local gangster, uses this kind of mentality to reinforce neighborhood loyalty after the anti-busing riots, while he gets rich off the accelerated drug trade. The costs to the neighborhood of playing by Whitey's rules were devastating. Crime, cocaine and violence would claim the lives of many Old Colony youth, including two of MacDonald's brothers, Francis and Kevin.

In his heartbreaking chapter "Stand-up Guy," MacDonald writes about Kevin and Francis' lives, and how they tragically ended in their early 20s. He admits that there is no real way to prepare yourself to write about family death.

"It is visiting hell," he says, "you have to go there alone." MacDonald says he had a number of good friends who helped him through that difficult part of the book.

"All Souls" is a painful story. Alcoholic, absent fathers, strung-out teenagers and crooked cops fill up many of its pages. The cumulative toll on the MacDonald family seems almost unbearable. Yet MacDonald underscores that "blame is not a part of my vocabulary anymore." He found that by going back over his early life, he discovered how good people can be.

He says he has been encouraged by the letters he receives from young people who applaud him for breaking the Southie code of silence and telling the real story of Old Colony. He also reveals that he has caught some flak from some members of Old Colony, mostly people who haven't read his book, but who worry that they are in it.

Speaking of one upset woman who wanted to know where she could find a copy, MacDonald's voice goes somber. "I told her it was all over, she could find it in most any bookstore in Boston. And here's the tragedy - she didn't know where a bookstore was."

A response like this might cause an activist to change careers, but MacDonald has plenty of fight left. He believes the candlelight vigil held for the dead children of South Boston, an event which opens and closes "All Souls," has been an important first step to healing the neighborhood.

And he still feels strongly about sustaining the village ideal. As he frames it:

"How do we balance a need for community, a sense of a place in the world, with being a part of the world at large?"

How's that for the first real question to answer in the 21st century?