“How many people are we expecting?” Mary Pat asks the group.
Carol says, “Maybe fifteen hundred?”
They reach the curb. As they exit the bus, the bus driver hands everyone another tea bag.
They open the back door and each grabs a sign. Mary Pat’s says End Judicial Dictatorship. The woman next to her lifts one that reads Boston Under Siege. Mary Pat finds herself wishing she’d grabbed that one — it’s a better acronym.
They climb the stairs leading from the back of the building to the plaza. The clouds are gone. The sun, bright and blistering, immediately bores into the back of Mary Pat’s neck. The crowd moving up the stairs — so thick that Mary Pat and her bus companions seem but specks in the larger throng around them — is already sweating, several faces pink with heat. There are a lot of flags — American flags, Irish flags, sheets tied to poles with neighborhood names: Southie, mostly, but also Dorchester, Hyde Park, Charlestown, and East Boston. Halfway up the stairs, the crowd starts shouting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Mary Pat has to admit it feels good as the words leave her mouth, particularly at the end, when the crowd kicks it up several notches and shout-spits the final words: “liberty and justice for ALL!”
She’s starting to suspect there’re more than fifteen hundred of them, and when they reach the top of the stairs and spill into the plaza, she’s overwhelmed to realize there are thousands of them. She can’t see to the end of them. They have to be nine thousand strong, maybe ten.
Carol leads the group to a fountain where they add their tea bags to hundreds more, the tea staining the water a rusty brown. Mary Pat once again wonders if anyone will get it. She imagines an old flatfoot standing over the fountain later, saying, “Ah, now, don’t these morons know that tea tastes better when the water’s properly boiled?”
Along the far edge of the crowd — most of them safely across the street at 3 Center Plaza — she notes the counterprotesters. Hippies, mostly, white and scraggly and living on their trust funds; a few blacks with confrontational Afros and dashikis; and finally, a cluster of men and women who look like Mary Pat and the people she knows — working-class Irish, Polish, and Italian. There’s not too many of them, but they’re there, holding signs that say things like end segregation now (not much of an acronym there either) and education is a civil right. Among the group, Mary Pat is shocked to see a few older folks she recognizes — Mrs. Walsh from Old Colony; old Tyrone Folan from Baxter Street; the entire Crowley family from M Street.
Before she can identify anyone else, they’re in the sea, buffeted along by some unseeable North Star that leads them to a spot maybe ten feet short of the stage. Here there are no counterprotesters. Who would dare? They’re packed in hundreds deep — not just Southie, white Dorchester, Hyde Park, Charlestown, and East Boston but the whole fucking city — Revere, Everett, Malden, Chelsea, Roslindale — except for (obviously) Mattapan and Roxbury and the sections of Dorchester that are fully black now. In what’s come to be called Phase 1, the city will be desegregating fifty-nine of the two hundred schools in the public school system, starting in less than two weeks. Within two years, all two hundred schools will be affected. And that explains the crowd — this will be a problem for all of them eventually.
The first three speakers are members of the Boston School Committee, those who fought hardest, for almost a decade, to keep the schools the way they should be. The first speaker, Shirley Brackin from St. William Parish in Dorchester, reiterates what all the people there already know — that none of those in charge of desegregating the schools in a manner as fucked up as busing actually live in the neighborhoods they’ve decreed must change; that not one of those people sends their kids to public schools; that not one of those people — the white ones, anyway — live in integrated neighborhoods (because there pretty much are no integrated neighborhoods in Boston). The next speaker, Geraldine Guffy of St. Augustine Parish in Southie, rips at the inevitable destruction of their way of life: Theirs is a village life within a city, where neighbors know neighbors because they all grew up together, went to the same schools, played in the same playgrounds and sports leagues, knew one another’s parents and grandparents so well, why, if one of those kids got out of line, those other parents and grandparents were free to step in and discipline — with a smack to the head or the backside or just a stern tongue-lashing — as if that kid were their own. “They say this will change the neighborhood in a good way,” Geraldine Guffy says, and then has to wait for the roar of boos to die down, “that in some sugar-sweet fairy-tale land, our kids and the colored kids will become friends. But our kids and the colored kids are going to return home every day to their friends and their families in their neighborhoods. They’re not going to become friends, just schoolmates. And our traditions, our way of life, our feelings of safety and security? We won’t be able to buy those back. You can’t buy back something when it’s already gone. And all those things will be gone the moment you see that very first bus roll down the street toward our high school.”
The crowd erupts in a mixture of euphoria and threat. Mary Pat looks back over her shoulder and can’t fully grasp the size of it. She’s in the center of the plaza, yet the crowd is so immense she can’t see any of the streets that surround them.
She can feel their power and their outrage and their sadness, and she’s surprised to suddenly feel it with them. For the first time since she opened that bag of money and understood what it signified, she feels something. She thought that after losing her daughter, she had nothing, and she mostly does, but she needn’t forget that she still has her way of life. She still has her neighborhood and all the people in it. She still has community. And what these social engineers and limousine liberals are doing is taking a wrecking ball to that. To her way of life. To the only life she’s ever known and the only thing she has left to defend in this world.
By the time the third speaker, Mike Dowd of Most Precious Blood Parish in Hyde Park, takes the stage, he can get out only a sentence or two before he’s drowned out by the roars of the crowd. He waits them out, goes another two sentences, and they roar again. Mary Pat and the half-dozen SWAB Sisters are right there with them, screaming themselves hoarse.
“God made us,” Mike Dowd bellows. “God made us women and God made us men and God doesn’t make mistakes, right?”
The crowd is a little less sure how to answer, but they mostly cry out, “Right!”
Mike Dowd leans into the mic. “And God made us white and black and brown and Oriental. And was that a mistake?”
Again, a bit of hesitation, as if the crowd’s confused because no one told them there’d be a quiz, but eventually, a roar of “No!” roils up into the sky.
Mike Dowd shouts, “Exactly! No. God did not make a mistake. He chose to make us white and black and brown and Oriental and even red Indian. Those were the colors he wanted. If He wanted us to mix, then He would have mixed us. Made us half yellow, half blue. Purple and white.” Chuckles of approval roll through the crowd. “He didn’t make us mixed. Because He doesn’t want us to mix.”
Well, isn’t it the truth? Mary Pat thinks. Isn’t that just the bottom line? We have our way of life, the coloreds have theirs. The Hispanics, theirs. The Orientals have Chinatown, for God’s sake, and you don’t see anyone trying to force them to disband and disperse across the city. No, they know their place. And as long as they keep knowing it, they will be left in peace to manage their own affairs. And that’s all we want.