Free All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald Page B

maybe all he needed was a cigarette, and he couldn’t even have one, and that not being able to smoke would make him worse.
    I’d come to hate Mass Mental. It didn’t seem right. I knew the inmates weren’t bad people; and whatever was wrong with them, it seemed as if they’d been put away so that the outside world wouldn’t have to deal with their pain. I knew Davey’d been through bad things, growing up with a father like Mac and finding his baby brother dead. And to me, it seemed he was being punished for having gone through bad things. Ma said that Davey felt things more than others—the bad things in the world—because he was so smart, and I thought she was right.
    Even at the age of six, I had to wonder what good it might do anyone to be at Mass Mental on a beautiful spring day, so cut off from anything that’s good about the world. I knew it wasn’t good for Davey, no matter what the psychiatrists said. For my family, freedom had become the rule above all others. But now I knew, having felt the locked-up pain of the people in Mass Mental, that for Davey, those days were gone.

C H A P T E R   3

    G H E T T O   H E A V E N
    I N THE SUMMER OF 1973, MY GRANDFATHER DECIDED to sell the house on Jamaica Street. He was having problems with us as tenants. Joe had car parts on the back porch, the cellar was looking like a teen clubhouse with mattresses and couches thrown about and glow-in-the-dark paint on the walls, and we were always using some pancake griddle invention of Joe’s that Grandpa said was a fire hazard. He took everything he didn’t like out to the backyard and stomped on it, making a statement obvious to all of us. We were out. Ma didn’t know what we’d do. We had no place to go that we could afford, and she was sure we’d end up once again in a place like Columbia Point.
    One day after a trip to the beach in South Boston, Ma walked through the Old Colony Housing Project in Southie and talked to some old friends who’d moved there from Columbia Point. She spotted an empty apartment at 8 Patterson Way and went right into the office of Dapper O’Neil, a local city counselor, who has since acquired a reputation in Boston as a bigot, often making public statements about blacks and whites staying separate. But he also has a strong record for constituent services, for doing anything he can for families in trouble, regardless of their race. Dapper saw that Ma was in an emergency situation with eight kids and no money and nowhere to live, and pulled a few strings for us to get the apartment at 8 Patterson Way.
    Ma was thrilled, as if she’d died and gone to heaven by getting a place in the all-white South Boston housing projects. She yelled up to all the neighbors on Jamaica Street that we’d struck a great bit of luck, six rooms for eighty dollars a month, heat, light, and gas included, and it’s all white—we wouldn’t have to go back to the black projects! I didn’t know why the white thing was so important. While I’d become familiar with the nightmarish stories from Columbia Point, my own experience had been that we got along much better with the black kids in Jamaica Plain, who seemed to have more in common with us than the other kids with Irish parents.
    We drove into Old Colony in one of Joe’s shitboxes, with a few mattresses tied to the top of the roof, and each of us carrying a garbage bag full of clothes and canned goods. We rolled slowly through the maze of red bricks, checking out the neighborhood, with its groups of young mothers sitting on the stoops, rocking their baby carriages back and forth. Kids splashed in wading pools on the hot summer day, while gangs of teenage boys huddled on street corners, shirtless and with rolled-up bellbottoms, no socks, and expensive sneakers. An occasional man would stroll down the street, more than one with a bottle in a brown paper bag. I knew what was in