As Rosemary points out in her most recent post, the violence
is pretty overwhelming – This is especially true in the 4th chapter
of the book. The chapter starts off right away explaining the boycotting of
Southie schools. The reason behind it is that black kids are now being allowed
to attend the schools and are coming in on busses, right through the streets of
Southie. I hope it’s pretty evident at this point that you know Southie is made
up of mostly Irish immigrants and their tolerance for any other nationality is
slim if not non-existent. It is expected
that everyone knows their place, just as native Southie kids do, and the shock
that someone would allow blacks into Southie schools is appalling at the time
to these folks. The racism was so bad that people even stopped reading the
Globe, calling it a “liberal piece of trash.”
The boycotting begins, and literally no one is going to
school. They are all waiting along the side of the road for the black kids to
ride by on the busses. This is where the
chapter gets intense. People are chanting “Here we go Southie, Here we go” like
it’s a football game. This little eight year old boy at the time is standing
there, chanting these words and the only reason he is doing it is because
everyone else is too. It’s unbelievable to actually read about a witness’s
story, and how easily this racism could have ceased to exist if only the adults
had set the right example. MacDonald proclaims “I belted it out, just as a few
other kids I didn’t know joined the chorus. The kids in the crowd all looked at
each other as if we were family. This is great, I thought. I’d never had such
an easy time as this, making friends in Southie” – These few sentences baffle
me. Instead of uniting about love, they are uniting over war. It is truly
disgusting but it makes the reader crave more.
People carried signs, yelled hateful things, threw rocks at
the busses, and riots broke out. The S.W.A.T. team was eventually was brought in and Southie
began to hate the police too. MacDonald almost got hit by a car at one point.
Kids were trying to break mounted policeman horses legs with hockey sticks. One
guy even held up a KKK sign. It eventually got to the point that the police
were beating kids. Teenagers were bold, being chased by officers and throwing
pebbles on their heads from rooftops. A Haitian man was beaten and a day after
that in retaliation, a white man was attacked by almost 200 black teenagers.
Both of them had been passing by and they paid for other peoples racism. People
were beaten in bars by police to send a message.
This chapter also involves MacDonald’s mom, who is one tough
broad. She knocks someone out while pregnant, and takes her boyfriend to court,
stating that he beat her. She is able to escape from a bar fight and feed her
family all in the same night. I don’t want MacDonald’s mom to go unnoticed as
she is a true testament to what a Southie mother was at the time.
The chapter closes with MacDonald’s older, mentally
unstable brother making what could be seen as a crazy statement but it rings
so clear and true after reviewing what has been read so far, “They don’t want you to know what the enemy looks like, so
you can end up killing each other, or yourself, in the frenzy. You become your
own worst enemy!”
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