All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

Frankie’s growing success as a boxer is one of the few highlights of 1980 for Old Colony. The neighborhood kids admire him, and Kathy’s and Mary’s friends comment frequently on how handsome he is. Frankie, aware that the kids see him as a role model, stays away from crime and drugs. But when he fights, Whitey Bulger’s gangsters always work as his cornermen. 

Meanwhile, Kevin has gone deeper into the criminal world. Michael never knows exactly what Kevin is doing, but he has lots of money and is generous with it. Kevin gets arrested for stealing a car, but after he gets out of jail, he goes straight back to his life of crime. One day, Ma sees Seamus and Steven—who are six and seven years old, respectively—playing with a gun in the kitchen. She is furious with Kevin and demands that he remove all guns from the house. He leaves without agreeing. 

Whitey takes over a liquor store at the end of Patterson Way; the kids refer to this store as the Irish Mafia Store. It becomes the drug headquarters for Southie, and it is well known that “all the liquor stores and bars in town were buying their booze from Whitey’s hijacking operations” because “[n]o one was more powerful than Whitey, not the cops, not the politicians” (178). 

Frankie gets closer to Kevin in order to try and keep an eye on him. He tries to talk Kevin out of the criminal life, but more often winds up covering for him with the police when Kevin is in trouble. Kevin starts going with Frankie to a club called The Rat, where Frankie takes some work as a bouncer. Kevin uses the place to make new drug connections. Michael visits The Rat to see bands play. Michael hasn’t gone back to school since Kathy’s coma and cannot believe that he has become a high-school dropout. He begins to enjoy punk-rock music more than the soul and hip-hop that he previously loved. Punk expresses a defiance that no other type of music makes him feel. 

Kevin begins dating a rich girl named Laura who lives in an affluent neighborhood called Wayland. Laura’s father does not approve of Kevin, but she is already pregnant by the time he finds out about the relationship. They get married in secret; Kevin claims that Whitey Bulger was his best man. Kevin’s daughter, Katie, is born in the spring of 1984, and Kevin ends his life of crime in order to be a father. 

Frankie has the chance to become a professional boxer. He has saved all of his money, continued to work as a carpenter and a bouncer, takes Kathy to her physical therapy appointments, and is the brightest symbol of hope in Old Colony. He tells Ma that he wants to take the kids to Disney World. In the same conversation, he tells her that he recently had a disturbing dream in which he saw the family standing over another grave. 

Ma turns 50 on July 17, 1984. That night, she sees on the news that an armored car heist has left one person dead. The robber is still loose and unidentified. The next day, Mary visits and tells Ma that Frankie was killed the day before. He is 24 years old at the time of his death. At the wake, Michael refuses to believe that Frankie was killed during the robbery. He believes that it has to have been Kevin—at least until he sees Frankie’s body in the casket. Frankie’s body is wrapped in his Golden Gloves Championship boxing robe. 

At the funeral the next day, Ma reads a song that she wrote for Frankie. Michael remembers little about the day, other than the weight of the casket, which seems impossibly heavy. The next morning, Michael finds Ma at the window, tearing down the curtains to get a better look at Frankie’s apartment across the street. She repeats, many times, “He was such a beautiful kid” (189).

Kevin begins spending more time with Ma and gives her some answers about Frankie’s death. Kevin had been planning to participate in the robbery but “went straight” and left crime before its completion. However, he wasn’t able to find a way to get out of it, since he had committed to doing it. Frankie, believing that he could do the job simply and free Kevin from his part in the crime, stepped in and took Kevin’s place. Over the past few months, Frankie had begun doing cocaine, and his addiction was impairing his judgment and making him feel invincible. During the robbery, Frankie was shot in the upper back by a Wells Fargo driver while running to a getaway car. He would have survived if his partners had taken him to a hospital, but instead, they strangled him so that they wouldn’t have to take him to get medical care; this would have raised questions about the gunshot wound and Frankie’s involvement in the crime. 

Ma begins driving around in Frankie’s car, determined to go after the entire criminal ring. She asks Whitey Bulger if he had anything to do with the robbery, and he denies it. Two detectives invite Ma to speak with FBI agents, who ask her repeatedly if she knows a man named John Doherty. There is a rumor that Doherty is involved in the staging of all the bank robberies. Ma sneaks into his house with a pair of scissors and threatens to cut his throat, but he convinces her that he had no part in the robbery. MacDonald writes, “Everyone knew Ma was on a mission. That was why, when the gangsters finally came forward with the money for Frankie’s funeral expenses, they avoided dealing with her directly at all” (192). 

After a few weeks, Ma becomes discouraged. In September, Michael goes to Los Angeles for a month to stay with friends. While there, he calls his Aunt Leena and learns that Kevin is in the newspapers; he has been involved in a jewelry store heist in which the owner was shot and paralyzed. Kevin escaped after being shot in the leg. The police catch Kevin that night. When Michael gets home, the police are pressuring Ma to convince Kevin to help them indict the major players in the criminal ring. If Kevin talks, he will get a light sentence. 

Months later, Ma tells her sister, Leena, that she has had another dream; this time, it is Kevin who will die. At Christmas, Michael opens a card from Kevin, which was sent from the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Michael hadn’t known that Kevin was in an institution. The card is filled with religious language, which confuses Michael, as Kevin had never been spiritual. Michael learns that Kevin tried to hang himself in jail, unsuccessfully, and was consequently transferred to Bridgewater. In the card, Kevin talks hopefully about coming to terms with Frankie’s death and laments his own misspent life. In March, Kevin is found dead at Bridgewater, having hanged himself with a bed sheet. MacDonald writes, “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” (198).

After these deaths, MacDonald writes that the family “didn’t feel the same about our neighborhood now that the kids were dead, and Ma “wanted nothing more than to get the hell out” (199). However, her welfare check is only $250 a month. She begins attending hairdressing school and practices by giving haircuts at a shelter for unhoused people. She loves hearing the hard-luck stories and commiserating with the people there. She begins going to the wake of any child who dies of suicide or crime and attends 32 wakes that year. Ma convinces Michael to get his GED and pass his ACTs. He likes the progress and is surprised to feel his love of learning return. 

Ma continues to try to uncover the details of Frankie and Kevin’s deaths, but there is no new progress, and she does not trust the police. Michael stays out of the neighborhood as much as possible, staying with friends and attending concerts in nearby towns. While in New York, he has a dream about a kid who is begging him to stop the “terrible thing” that is about to happen in Southie, but Michael wakes without knowing what the terrible thing is. The kid in the dream is Johnnie Baldwin, a boy who died in a car crash four years earlier. When Michael returns to Boston, Ma tells him that Timmy Baldwin, Johnnie’s older brother, was murdered the same night he had the dream. 

Michael is summoned before a grand jury in connection with Timmy’s murder. The police call Michael and tell him that the phone in the MacDonald house was used to make a threatening call to a major witness in the case. Michael remembers that Packie Keenan had run in, grabbed their telephone, and made a call a few weeks earlier. Ma grabs the phone from Michael and tells the detective that she’s coming in his place. In front of the grand jury, it’s obvious that Ma only knows rumors from the street about Timmy’s murder; she can do little more than speak about Timmy’s high character. 

MacDonald writes that “[s]treet crime was becoming the main topic of news, along with reports about the poor getting poorer in American cities” (209). Because Whitey does not like the increased exposure, the shootings begin to slow down. He makes examples of a man who shoots someone in a bar, torturing him for three hours, knowing that the man will spread the message that guns and shootings are not allowed on the streets after he is released. 

Kathy moves back in with the family. She is often confused and talks to herself. One day, she wanders away and is missing for several months. Ma eventually finds her in a poor area nearby, three months pregnant. Ma takes custody of the baby after Kathy, consumed by her addiction, tries to sell the baby for $50. Ma names the infant Fatima Maria. 

Mayor Flynn initiates a program of “forced housing” in which minority families will be moved into the white projects of Southie and Charleston. Most of the minorities are Black immigrants from Haiti and have never even heard of Southie. While the neighbors begin stockpiling guns for what they are sure will be a major fight with their new Black neighbors, Ma is convinced that the family has to leave. When the moving trucks come at one in the morning, they are accompanied by a police escort. There are rallies and protests, but nothing on the level of the anti-busing summer. MacDonald writes, “When the minorities did move in, the little kids in the neighborhood played together fine” (216). No one bothers the new families who came from various Asian cultures. MacDonald registers the family’s surprise, saying, “There was no way we would’ve believed integration could work in Southie” (217). However, he notes that there is more peace than unrest. 

Ma decides to take the little kids and Kathy and move to a trailer park in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. She lets Michael and Joe keep the apartment. In August of 1990, 52 local businessmen are arrested in connection with a cocaine ring, but Whitey Bulger is not among them. A rumor that Whitey is an FBI informant begins to circulate. MacDonald notes: 

As much as I’d hated Whitey for what I’d seen happening to my neighborhood, it was nothing compared to the rage I felt when I realized that agents of the U.S. government had turned a blind eye while we were slaughtered […] The people of 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 (221-222).