Why do they hate us? Lehane’s latest novel helped me answer that.

Commentary

I integrated every school I attended until I went off to college. We were a strongly Catholic family. My father would go on to become a deacon in the church, and so it followed that the schools my parents chose were Catholic. I am Black. The friends I went to school with were all girls, and they were all white. But they were also Italian, Polish, Bohemian, Irish. And while it is true that their ancestors hadn’t come to America as slaves, they’d not been particularly welcomed either.

In the 1970s in our Midwestern city, subtle instances of anti-Catholic discrimination still existed. Nothing as horribly visceral as the Jim Crow laws in the South, but bigotry nonetheless. At school I felt different – but not that different. The ravages of desegregation – the violence, hatred, rock-throwing, destruction, name-calling – were something that, at that time, I believed belonged exclusively to the South. And by that, I didn’t mean South Boston.

But in 1974, U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled that, to achieve a de facto racial balance in Boston Public Schools, students from South Boston, which was predominantly Irish Catholic and white, would be bused into almost entirely Black Roxbury, and vice versa. The resulting violence was splashed on the news every night for a week – and then pe­­­­riodically for weeks – on CBS Evening News. What we saw rivaled anything coming out of Birmingham, Alabama. I can remember watching all this – police riding on horseback, women screaming, rocks flying through school bus windows as students were dropped off at South Boston High School – and thinking, why do these people, so like me in so many ways, hate us?

This question got buried under a mountain of questions about the way things are, but it resurfaced when I read Dennis Lehane’s newest novel, “Small Mercies” – a searing book if ever there were one. He uses the integration of Boston’s schools as the backdrop for an exploration of communities and their limits and of race.

Our guide through this morass is the singularly unlikely heroine Mary Pat Fennessy. She’s a tough lady. Her second marriage has fallen apart. She has lost her son, first to Vietnam and then, fatally, to heroin. She drinks too much. She cusses. She works at menial jobs.

The only things Mary Pat’s got going for her are her 17-year-old daughter, Jules, and what they think of as their community – the few-block stretch of impoverished South Boston, where they’ve lived all their lives. Mary Pat grew up in its projects. She knows its people, its nooks and crannies, and its customs. Without quite realizing it, she thinks of this knowledge, this sense of belonging, as her protection. It is her world until just before the schools are desegregated and Jules disappears – on the same hot summer night that the body of a young, murdered Black man is found on the tracks of a train station near her home.

Like her friends and neighbors, Mary Pat at first believes the man must have been a drug dealer. He has to have been. Why else would he be so far from his own home? It’s not that she hates all Black people. Certainly, she doesn’t think of herself as racist. She’s worked alongside “plenty of good, hardworking, upstanding Negroes” who want the same basic things she wants. She’s even told her children that if she hears them using the classic racist slur to describe Black people, “they better be sure they’re using it about those blacks who aren’t upstanding, don’t work hard, don’t stay married, and have babies just to keep the welfare checks rolling in.”

There’s definite irony here, since Mary Pat matches some of those descriptions.

But I myself grew up in a community that had its share of Black Mary Pats. Hardworking, God-fearing, exhausted women, struggling to keep it together, who would casually use racist slurs to refer to white people without thinking anything about it. They weren’t referring, of course, to the white people they worked alongside, but to the “others” – the ones they thought were so different from them. Many times they said this, just as Mary Pat did, because saying it was how you showed you belonged.     

But if Mary Pat wants to find her daughter, her idea of who belongs and who doesn’t has to become bigger, wider, broader, just as mine had to when I integrated all those schools. It happens to a lot of people as they move from the known into the unknown. Mary Pat has a lot to deal with as she searches out what happened to Jules, and part of what awaits is a racial reckoning. Her daughter is linked to the murdered Black man. Mary Pat’s own casual racism has had consequences she could not have imagined.     

It’s very vogue these days to talk about cultural appropriation. At the outer margins of this, it’s said that Black people should write only about Black characters, white people only about white characters, and so on. But I have no trouble identifying with the African Americans that Irish American Dennis Lehane wrote about. Maybe that’s because he writes about us with such humanity. There are no stereotypes, no long-suffering Negroes, but there are Afros “the size of a toddler,” a vivid Roxbury full of bright, strange, mixed-together colors, a lot of the same poverty that Mary Pat has seen back home in South Boston, and “men” who frighten her at first but, on second glance, turn out to be smiling 14-year-olds.

Mary Pat sees all this when she comes for the funeral of the murdered Black man, who is the son of someone she works with. Mary Pat has been friendly with his mother, but they are not friends. This woman, this family, owns their own home. The house is one of the first things Mary Pat notices: “A small Dutch Colonial on Itasca Street. It’s set up the way white homes Mary Pat aspires to live in are set up. Tidy. Well-kept lawn, recent touch-up on the trim.” But ... “You are others,” Mary Pat thinks before she can kill the thought. But she’s an “other” too, not at all welcome at this particular funeral in this particular neighborhood because of rumors about her and the murder.  

I am still struck by how much these two disparate realities have in common. Mary Pat Fennessy was a most unlikely teacher, but as she moved through South Boston and into Roxbury, she took me with her, and I am grateful to her for that. I’m still much more partial to one side of this story than the other. But I am thankful that Dennis Lehane gave me an opportunity to find at least a partial answer to my question, why do they hate us? Through Mary Pat, he allowed me to look inside a community that frightened me and see glimmers of humanity, even familiarity. Mary Pat taught me that the pull of belonging to the pack can make it hard to see all that we have in common with those outside of it.