All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide contain extensive descriptions of racism, xenophobia, racist violence, mental health crises, addiction, suicidal ideation, suicide, murder, police corruption, and organized crime. The source text also makes use of racist slurs, which this guide obscures.

In the summer of 1994, Michael MacDonald returns to Southie. He visits the cemetery, remembering his neighbors, brothers, and friends, all of whom died as a result of violence and drugs. He recalls, “No outsiders could mess with us. So we had no reason to leave, and nothing to leave for” (2). 

He returns to Southie because of a call from Citizens at Safety, where he has been working on anti-violence campaigns since 1990. A reporter has been working on an article about the “white underclass.” The Lower End—the author’s neighborhood—had been shown in demographic studies to have one of the highest concentrations of poor white people in the country. Seventy-five percent of Lower End families have no fathers, and MacDonald states, “Liberals were usually the ones working on social problems, and they never seemed to be able to fit urban poor whites into their world view, which tended to see [Black people] as the persistent dependent and their own white selves as provider” (3).