All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

Grandpa. All our relatives thought she was too wild, but Ma considered her a sister. We called her our aunt. Kevin knew she loved the drink and that she had no money, raising five kids on her own with no father. Besides, she’d be sure to keep us all laughing on the way home with a few drinks in her. Kevin made us watch the rest of the goods while he slipped under the table when no one was looking. He waited for a signal from Frankie and slipped back out again with a whole case of Irish whiskey. And didn’t Nellie go home legless that day from the drink, doing her wild imitations of our relatives and keeping us all in stitches the whole ride home! Kevin once again had provided for everyone, an eight-year-old genius of scams.
    Jamaica Street was my only experience living with families who had a father going off to work every day. We were probably the only family on welfare. Looking back I realize our Irish neighbors had some American middle-class pretensions that were at odds with the ways of my mother and us kids. And if we ever did anything considered lower class—like go to the corner store barefoot—in front of someone from Ireland, they might call us “fookin’ tinkers.” This was the worst you could be, according to Irish immigrants, especially once you’d already made it to the Promised Land.
    While we were happy not to be living in the project for once, my family still spent a lot of time visiting the one nearby and hanging out with the other families on welfare. It was a pretty equally mixed project racially, and as a result the tensions weren’t as bad as in Columbia Point. This all changed when the Jamaica Plain development shifted toward a black majority and poor whites started to flee. That’s when the fights broke out. That’s when the chanting started:
    Beep beep beep beep,
    Walkin’ down the street,
    Ten times a week.
    Ungawa ungawa,
    This is black power,
    White boy destroyed.
    I said it, I meant it,
    I really represent it.
    Takes a cool cool whitey from a cool cool town,
    It takes a cool cool whitey to knock me down.
    Don’t shake my apples, don’t shake my tree,
    I’m a J.P. nigga, don’t mess with me.
    The white kids started to say the same chant, switching “whitey” and “nigga.” But for a while, my older brothers and sisters hung out with mixed groups. Especially Mary, who by the mid-seventies had adopted a style that my grandfather criticized in a thick Irish brogue as an “African hairdo.” She was dressing too in platform shoes and doing the dances that only the black girls knew. She could do “the robot” like the dancers on “Soul Train.” Later, when Mary had two children “out of wedlock” in her late teens before finally marrying the father, my grandfather traced her alleged downfall back to the African hairdo.
    There was never much traffic, so we were able to take over Jamaica Street with games of tag, dodgeball, and red rover. All the kids from the other Irish families would join in. Then they’d disappear, called in to dinner. But we stayed outside because we could eat whenever we wanted to. They’d come out again after dinner, but a couple of hours later we were again on our own, as all the other kids on the street had strict curfews, usually before dark.
    The kids from the projects could stay out late too, so it was better to hang out with them. Sometimes we’d stay out really late telling ghost stories on the porch. Stories like the one about the hatchet lady, who carried a shopping bag full of little boys’ heads. As her bag was very heavy and she was very old, a polite youngster would offer to carry it for her. Before he got to her door with the heavy bag, he’d get curious and ask what was in it. The hatchet lady would let him look into the bag, and while he was bent over, she’d cut his head off with a hatchet, adding another head to her collection. I