Chapter 9

So in this chapter Ma is going crazy trying to do nice things and the right thing for everybody in Southie. Giving homeless people clothes, trying to get the bottom of crimes, she is just all over the place. She’s really trying to make a difference not only in her life, but in her two youngest sons lives Seamus and Stevie. MacDonald is trying to escape from Southie. He starts sleeping over other people houses that live out of town, he’s pretty much trying to be anywhere that doesn’t involve anything that has to do with Southie, and the coolest thing was that he wasn’t running away, he was really trying to make a name for himself. He started going to Umass Boston. It seemed that Southie itself was starting to turn around too. Police raids on drugs were happening more frequently, and people in the justice system were actually looking for answers instead of just trying to cover things up, or pretend they had answers that they didn’t.

This chapter pretty much leads up to the fact that Southie had been fooled the entire time by local gangster Whitey Bulger. Instead of keeping the streets safe like everyone thought he had been doing, he was running a ton of cocaine through the streets. Cocaine that killed lots of kids and lots of parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. The realization really hit Southie and everyone was pretty pissed off. It’s almost incredible that it took so long for police to really catch Whitey, and it makes the reader wonder what conspiracies were taking place.

It was evident to the reader what Whitey was doing, and it would be even if it wasn’t told from the author’s viewpoint just because we know what he’s done to this day. But the way that MacDonald writes about Whitey and how much everyone loved him and admired him is really an incredible thing, seeing how much damage this man happened to wreak upon Southie.