In 1993, just a few days before Christmas, 15-year-old Louis D. Brown was killed in a crossfire, while crossing Geneva Avenue near Fields Corner Station. A high school sophomore looking forward to college, he was on his way to youth meeting organized by Teens Against Gang Violence.
Almost thirty-one years later, in time for International Peace Day on September 21, the scene of violent crime and loss had been transformed by artwork. Coiled around a street pole on the avenue, close to the Red Line overpass, were multi-colored objects that looked like buildings with portals and peaked roofs. Designed by a lead artist who grew up in Dorchester, Ngoc-Tran Vu, the pole, signifying “Faith,”was one of the first seven markers along the “Peace Trail” recently developed by the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute.
The “Faith” pole contrasted with a surroundings marked by protective barriers and surveillance cameras, as well as the avenue’s history of gun violence. For Clementina Chéry, Brown’s mother and the institute’s founder, president and CEO, the “buildings” around the pole represented sanctuary, unlike a common marker of violence—a makeshift street memorial that she says, can re-traumatize if left untended.
“It took me about two years to really walk that area, because I didn’t want to be re-triggered and re-traumatized,” said Chéry. “I would really go around, to get to Fields Corner, to get to where I work, and I had to think differently. If I’m afraid of my community, if I’m always demonizing and living in fear in my community, why should I expect anybody else to come into my community?” That led to one of the goals of the Institute: to show that the world of survivors was more than just a cluster of violence.
“I really wanted to shift that narrative,” Chéry explained, “and moving, shifting from hot spots to one to creating a peace trail, to showing people for us to begin to take control of how do we see ourselves and how do we allow people to define us and to see us.”
Just three days after the Dorchester event to inaugurate the Peace Trail, another milestone for survivor initiatives was marked by a reading and discussion on the 25th anniversary of the publication of “All Souls,” the best-selling memoir by Michael Patrick MacDonald. Recently issued with a new afterword, the book tells the story of his family during the 1970s and 1980s, most of the time living in the Old Colony public housing development in South Boston.
The new edition also coincides with the 50th anniversary of Boston’s school desegregation order, with the family’s neighborhood steeped in the fierce violence over the start of busing. But the racial conflict would also overlap with disrupted education, mobster violence, a burgeoning trade in illegal drugs, and lives lost or impaired by substance use and mental illness. While the neighborhood outwardly celebrated success stories and tribal loyalties, MacDonald would look back on what was most familiar to his family, zooming in on the poverty and the “code of silence” nourished by fear.
The book details the loss of four siblings in MacDonald’s family, finally leading to his own work as a community organizer of fellow survivors. Though he credits the examples of Chéry and a survivors group organized by mothers in Charlestown, his book describes efforts to connect with survivors by his own mother, Helen MacDonald.
After the deaths of three grown-up sons, she does hair-dressing at a local homeless shelter and visits patients who are terminally ill with AIDS. She goes to 32 South Boston wakes in about a year, sharing holy water and rocks from the Our Lady of Fatima Shrine in Portugal that has been celebrated by Catholics and others for its powers of healing.
“She was kind of seeking out that remedy of turning tragedy to something you could use in the world as a gift for other people,” MacDonald reflected in a recent interview. “And it is an incredible remedy when people find that route of taking horrible things and making them feel useful and using them for other people and working in solidarity with other people and so forth. She was seeking that out in a place where that didn’t exist. And, in Southie there was no such thing as community organizer.”
Even earlier in the book, while MacDonald’s sister is hospitalized and lying in a coma, there’s a roll-call of neighborhood visitors turning up at her bedside who are later killed in acts of violence, leaving their trail of silent witnesses. MacDonald’s younger first-person narrator thought of them less as victims than “upbeat survivors,” at least before they succumbed.
“No one took the time to make all the connections,” he wrote. “Most of us were too busy picking up the broken pieces of our families. And those who hadn’t been hit yet protected themselves by seeing our young dead as somehow deserving their fate.”
In “All Souls,” MacDonald draws connections between the deaths of two brothers, as well as his sister’s impairment, to South Boston’s drug trade. Like Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill in their book “Black Mass,” he also connects the drugs with the gangster rule of James “Whitey” Bulger and his associates. But, for MacDonald and Chéry, assigning blame and eulogizing victims matter less than putting the focus on survivors and what happens in their future. The Peace Institute has used the focus to help survivors with anything from burial costs and trauma response to developing a peace curriculum for the Boston Public Schools and holding regular events, including the annual “Mother’s Day Walk for Peace.”
After his mother and other family members left the Old Colony Development in 1990, MacDonald moved to another part of the city. He returned to South Boston in the mid-1990s, only after he had started working in other neighborhoods as an anti-violence organizer with Citizens for Safety.
When he returned, MacDonald’s view of the neighborhood had also been altered by a story in US News & World Report that part of South Boston had the country’s highest concentration of whites in poverty. With the organizing work came contact with survivors’ initiative in Charlestown, as well as activists in Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan. MacDonald used that background in organizing the South Boston Vigil Group, with survivors making previously unspoken connections through a ceremony at Gate of Heaven Church, tactfully scheduled for Nov. 2 to coincide with All Souls’ Day, an annual Catholic commemoration of its faithful departed.
By 1997, the vigil group was part of the grass roots response to a rash of suicides in South Boston, with six deaths in less than seven months. The local epidemic had less in common with national figures for whites than with a national spike for Black males ages 15-19, whose suicide rate tripled between 1980 and 1994.
After “All Souls” was published in 1999, MacDonald said he was forced to cancel most of his events for promoting the book around Boston because of threats. After coming back to Boston, he continued to make connections between trauma recovery and writing, as a teacher at Northeastern University, and through a grassroots initiative, “The Rest of the Story.”
One participant in “The Rest of the Story” who was on hand for the inauguration of the Peace Trail was Carla Sheffield, a mother of five children and grandmother of eight. In August, 2012, her son, Burrell Ramsey-White, was fatally shot by a Boston Police officer following a traffic stop in the South End. District Attorney Dan Conley ruled in 2013 that the shooting was done in self-defense. In 2019, after a lawsuit filed by Sheffield, a federal jury ruled that police did not act inappropriately.
Even before the lawsuit was decided, Sheffield had begun to process her loss in other ways, trying to honor the memory of her son while helping teens and younger adults. In 2018, there was a “Family Fun Day” and basketball tournament at Titus Sparrow Park, close to the location of the traffic stop. In August of last year, at the same location, the tournament was combined with a bookbag give-away, and a similar event took place this year at Town Field in Dorchester.
When Sheffield arrived for the Peace Trail ceremony on September 21, survivors were sharing thoughts while gathered under a tent and a steady patter of raindrops.
“It always warms my heart because I know I’m with folks who are feeling the same thing,” Sheffield recalled the following day. “I’m feeling who’s gone through what I’ve gone through, so the Peace Institute is like a safe haven.”
After participants went inside the Institute’s headquarters near Fields Corner, Sheffield took her place at a table and crafted memory stones with names of family members. She wrote on the stones with a red-and-black markers, providing each with a red heart and a yellow ribbon.
“When I think about my loved ones, that’s how I get, like my creative thought process starts going in. I’m not an artist at all, but this is my way of keeping them, keeping their memory alive,” she explained.
Sheffield went on to list family members lost to violence or cancer. “But it’s all men,” she noted, “And I felt in the beginning when I was losing all the men in my life that I was being punished. But then all my children had boys. I have eight grandchildren and six of them are boys, so I feel like God needed them. They were here for a purpose. They served their purpose. And now I have these six kings that I have to guide and navigate and make sure they serve their purpose and not be pulling the wrong scenarios.”
Chéry extends the narrative even more widely. “That cycle continues,” she says. “And, if we’re not putting a space for us to tell the rest of the story–not the story of what happened, we’re not telling the story of how we are transforming our pain and anger into action and peace, or finding purpose to create sustainable spaces and healing within our community, because it’s generational. And so that is the rest of the story. And when Louis was killed, I didn’t focus on who killed Louis Brown.”
Like other participants in “The Rest of the Story,” Sheffield has tried to process her experience and feelings through writing. “Even though I have it in my head and I haven’t put it down on paper, I feel like if I write it down somewhere that it’s not going to come out the way I want, so I’m holding tight,” she said. “When I sit down, it just flows.”
At a reading and discussion of “All Souls” on September 24 at the Civic Pavilion near City Hall Plaza, MacDonald emphasized how much the book owed, not just to his pool of memories, but to the perception of relations surfaced by the act of writing.
One example was the 1974 attack in South Boston on a Haitian immigrant, Andre Yvon Jean-Louis by a frenzied white mob armed with stones, baseball bats and hockey sticks. It was one month after the start of desegregation, and MacDonald, who was 8 years old, was close enough to see “tears clearing paths in the blood on his face.” The next day, after seeing news coverage of the attack, MacDonald went back to where it happened and noticed an aluminum baseball bat covered in blood.
“What you remember and how you remember it will tell you an awful lot about who you have become, I think,” he said in a remote interview. “And that’s one of the things I love about memoir, what you remember and how you remember it. The memory I have of the Haitian man who was dragged from the car and beaten — it was kind of a famous incident in Boston that was so crystal clear to me in my memory.
“And I wrote it exactly as I remember. I didn’t even know it was going to be in a book. And I remember crying and crying and crying when I wrote it and saying to myself, I never even thought this was going to be in the book, because this isn’t about me — but it is about me. Because that thing that I witnessed really shaped so much of my worldview around race and class.”
Even as an 8-year-old, MacDonald had noticed that one of the people urging on the attack was from a family ridiculed for its poverty by neighbors at Old Colony. A few years later, after his admission to Boston Latin School, he would notice that students from public housing were outnumbered on the daily bus ride by riders from more affluent areas such as City Point. With more time, MacDonald’s definition poverty migrates from a localized individual failing and cause for blame to something broader and more systemic.
“We have a lot of problems, just like people in Roxbury,” he observed. “All those problems are relegated, on the news, to Roxbury, but we have a lot of those problems. And we should be working in solidarity with other people who have these problems.”
Over the past 25 years, poverty metrics have changed in several Boston neighborhoods, with concerns about gentrification in several neighborhoods. By 2014, a newly built section of South Boston, the Seaport District, would be singled out by the Boston Planning and Development Agency as having the city’s lowest poverty rate.
As early as 2011, a report by The Boston Foundation’s Boston Indicators Project would show the city’s overall poverty rate flatlining between 1990 and 2009, thought with a widening racial gap. The white poverty rate had been cut almost by one half, whether because of smaller household sizes, low earners moving out, or high earners moving in.
Citing the city’s overall decline in poverty in 2022, Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) would conclude, “The reduction is not because more families are rising out of poverty — it is primarily because low-income families are leaving Boston in search of affordable housing.”In 2011, MacDonald was in California, working on a possible screen adaptation for “All Souls.”
He was working on a passage about his older brother Frankie being scouted for his boxing prowess by “Whitey” Bulger when news broke that the octogenarian fugitive mobster had just been arrested in Santa Monica, a couple of miles away.
Just as an 8-year-old boy had gone back to the scene of an atrocity more than 36 years earlier, MacDonald found himself driving to the epicenter of the story, only to be detoured when the car he was using—borrowed from a friend—gets into a collision. The mishap isn’t mentioned in the new afterword for “All Souls,” but MacDonald says it would be in his next book, as the beginning of another story.
“In the immediate aftermath of trauma,” he recalls, “your whole body numbs, and then it goes away, and that feels great. And then it goes away, and you’re stuck with just the disaster. And you need to get that numbing again. So, through story, I want to show that in this book and then get to the rest of the story, the work that I’m doing with survivors, and to incorporate their stories with their permission, of course.”
It’s a story also familiar to Chéry. “Healing is not a destination,” she says. “Healing is a journey.”
