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Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion Kindle Edition
In All Souls, Michael Patrick MacDonald told the story of the loss of four of his siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Irish South Boston. In Easter Rising, he tells the story of how he got out.
Desperate to avoid the “normal” life of Southie, Michael first reinvents himself in the burgeoning punk rock movement and the thrilling vortex of Johnny Rotten, Mission of Burma, and the Clash. At nineteen, he escapes further, to Paris and then London. Finally, out of money, he contacts his Irish immigrant grandfather—who offers a loan, but only if Michael will visit Ireland.
It is on this reluctant journey to his ancestral land that Michael will find a chance at reconciliation—with his heritage, his neighborhood, and his family—and, ultimately, a way forward.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateMarch 10, 2015
- File size5513 KB
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
At first our technique was basic. We’d wait at the top of the stairs of Andrew Station until we heard a train arriving, then dart down the stairs, hop over the turnstiles, and bolt for the train’s doors. By the time we were lined up at the four turnstiles, the train would be just making its final wshhhh sound, which Kevin said was the air releasing from the brake cylinder. We’d each lift off, hands on either side of the turnstile, and drive our legs over the bars feet first, landing as far out as we could. By the time we landed, the fare taker would be screaming and knocking on his scratched and blurry Plexiglas windows, mouthing what I imagined was You little fucks!” Right about then I knew we would hear the train doors open with a collective rumble. If we did it according to Kevin’s exact timing if we started running downstairs at just the right moment, when the train was first coming to a halt with a long screech of the brakes we’d usually make it inside just before we felt the suction of the doors closing behind us. No one ever chased after us in the early days, so we probably didn’t have to turn it into the heart-racing caper it always felt like. But it was great each time to feel the breeze of those clackety doors nearly catching my shirt. I’d take a deep breath in relief, and then in expectation.
If the train we hopped came from the suburbs, it would be one of the brand-new modern ones, carrying all whites. But if it had come from Dorchester it would be one of the old, rundown ones and filled with blacks. I would go off by myself to grab a seat and silently take in all the newness, black or white. But my brother Kevin seemed interested only in getting the fuck in, and getting the fuck out” back to Southie. To him we were on a mission, and he was all business. He’d make me stand up so that we were all sticking together. He’d keep us huddled around him while he told us what to do and what not to do around all these dangerous blacks and goofy- looking white people from the world that was not Southie. And he’d whack me in the head every time I snuck a glance at the people he was talking about. But after a few minutes our huddle would fall apart. As we tried to keep our feet firmly planted on the bumpy ride, I always seemed to have the worst balance, flailing backward and sideways with the train’s chaotic twists and turns. I didn’t mind, though, as long as I never hit the floor.
Riding the trains was my favorite thing to do even before the trips with Kevin. Ma always told us we should want to go places, like Dorchester or Jamaica Plain. For Chrissake, don’t you wanna see the world?” she said. On my eighth birthday she took me all the way to Park Street Station and put me on the Green Line to Jamaica Plain, where Nana would be waiting at the other end to take me out for a birthday dinner. The old trolley looked like it was the first one ever built, with bars over square windows that opened. Best of all, it had a driver’s booth at both ends I guessed that was so it didn’t have to turn around at the end of the line. That seemed like the greatest day in the world, being trusted to get on a Green Line trolley all by myself. I kept thinking that to drown out how nervous I was getting. I sat in the backward- facing driver’s seat and waved to Ma on the platform while I pretended to myself that I was the conductor. Ma disappeared from view, and I distracted myself by trying to think up an excuse for why I was driving backward. But before I could, all the excitement and the backward driving made me puke out the window into the blackness of the tunnel. I went to sit in a normal remaining seat, to pretend like nothing had happened. On the forty-five- minute-long journey, I let my fears get the best of me, though, and imagined that I would end up on this one-way trip forever and never see my family again. Worst of all, I was soon the only passenger remaining. When the train came to a final screeching halt, the driver shut off the engine and the lights and barked, Last stop! Arborway!” while packing up his things like he was going home. My heart was in my mouuuuuth until I saw Nana waving and running across the ghost town of a train yard. The sight of Nana was unmistakable, always in a loose navy blue polka-dot dress, shoes you saw at drugstores, and a flowered kerchief tied snugly under her chin. For Chrissake, you look like Mother Hubbard,” Ma would snap at her when Nana complained about Ma’s miniskirts and spike heels. For me though, Nana’s old-fashionedness was calming. And this day the sight of her was more comforting than ever. I hopped off the trolley stairs in one leap. Nana greeted me as she always did, not saying hello but spitting on a napkin that seemed like it had been in her purse forever and rubbing it into my cheeks until they hurt. Nana talked about rosy cheeks like they were the most important thing in the world for people to see. We’ll go for a wee supper now,” she said in that Donegal way that made everything sound like both an exclamation and a question. Well over my fears, I greeted her by saying that riding the subways was just about the greatest thing in the world and that I couldn’t wait to do it again.
Going home from fare-jumping trips with Kevin and his crew was easier than the trip out. We’d walk from Filene’s to South Station and press the red stop button hidden near the ground at the top of a wooden escalator so ancient- looking that Kevin convinced me it was from colonial days.” After we pressed the button, the escalator would stutter in its climbing motion and then come to a rolling stop. That’s when we’d run down the steep and treacherous steps into the station exit. Each wooden step was about one foot square, and I always wondered if people were skinnier in colonial times. At the bottom of the escalator was an unmanned gate that was often left wide open. But even if it was chained and padlocked, you could push out one fence post to make a gap, just enough to slip through. It usually took a bit of teamwork, but it was a cinch. Kevin was the scrawniest and could slip through without anyone’s help, so he’d go first and pull on the gate from the other side.
One day I discovered an even better way to get back home to Southie. Kevin was inside Papa Gino’s, pulling a scam he’d recently perfected. When the cashier called out a number, Kevin would wave a receipt from the trash, all excited-like, as if he’d won the lottery. His performance was so convincing or maybe just distracting that he’d walk away with a tray full of pizza and Cokes. Okie and Stubs would distract the waiting customers even further by asking if anyone knew where the bathroom was. I was outside on Tremont Street, playing lookout for what I didn’t know and daydreaming that Kevin would get a whole pizza pie. But Kevin cared more about scamming stuff for everyone else than for himself, and I knew he would give away his only slice if that’s all he got. While I was supposedly keeping watch, I spied groups of black people gathering nearby and then disappearing through an automatic door to a steel shaft sticking up from the sidewalk. As soon as one cluster of mothers, teenagers, and babies in strollers disappeared through the mystery door, more groups would gather around, press a button, and then loiter at a slight distance. They tried hard to look inconspicuous by rubbing their hands together or jumping up and down in one place as if they were cold, but I knew by their watchful eyes that they were just looking out, like I was supposed to be doing. The door opened, and again the busy sidewalk turned empty. I walked closer and saw through little steamy windows that everyone was squeezed like sardines onto an elevator and then whisked away to some place below Tremont Street. I pressed the button and waited for the elevator to come back up again so I could investigate.
What are you, a fuckin’ losah?” Kevin screamed down Tremont Street just as the doors opened and more people looked around before hopping on. He was running toward me with a single slice of pizza, yelling at me for always wandering off. You were supposed to keep watch!” he barked, grabbing me by the collar. Okie and Stubs were running behind him, pizzaless. They seemed like they thought they were being chased, and I told them to follow me. We squeezed into the elevator and pushed our way to the middle, surrounded by whole families of black people. Kevin punched me for staring up at them, even though there was nowhere else to look but up. In the end I would get high marks for finding a whole new and simpler method for getting a free ride home. The service elevator led from the street right into the subway system, beyond the conductor booths, and we all filed out nonchalantly. That day I earned the only slice of pizza Kevin was able to score.
In the days that followed I was so proud of my find I put the word out all over Old Colony Project about the new way to get home from downtown. That pissed Kevin off he said the more people knew, the sooner the MBTA would cop on and shut us out. For a time the elevator was the one place in Boston you’d see my neighbors from Southie squeezed into a small space with black people. A key was required for the elevator to work, but the keyhole was always turned sideways, in the on position, either because it was broken or because some transit worker was doing us all a favor.
Kevin and his friends didn’t care about leaving Southie except on scamming missions they never went just to wander. And I could never get my own friends to leave the project, so it wasn’t long before I was venturing alone to see the strange lands and strange people beyond Southie’s borders.
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Patrick MacDonald. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Product details
- ASIN : B00U58NSUG
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Illustrated edition (March 10, 2015)
- Publication date : March 10, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 5513 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 289 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,245,101 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,395 in Cultural & Regional Biographies (Kindle Store)
- #2,864 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #9,470 in Author Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony Housing Project in South Boston, a neighborhood that held the highest concentration of white poverty in the United States. After losing four of his eleven siblings and seeing his generation decimated by poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration, he learned to transform personal and community trauma, becoming an activist, organizer and writer. MacDonald has focused his community efforts on diverse, class-conscious coalition building to reduce violence and promote grassroots leadership from our most impacted communities and families. He co-founded Boston's first Gun Buyback programs and local support groups to promote the voices of adult and youth survivors of poverty, violence and the drug trade.
MacDonald is the author of the New York Times Bestselling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie and Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. These two books are frequent “First Year Experience” selections at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., for which he has given over 300 campus lectures. He has been awarded an American Book Award, A New England Literary Lights Award, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center.
MacDonald is working on his third book, The Echoes, which will use narrative non-fiction storytelling to reveal issues of generational trauma & painkilling in working class and poor communities. In addition, he has developed a community-based writing and healing curriculum, The Rest of the Story, which was piloted with the Crittenton Women’s Union in Boston to help women who are transitioning out of poverty find their voices on the page and in the world. This year he has taken transformational storytelling to Boston survivors of homicide victims at The Louis D Brown Peace Institute, some of whom are with us as special guests this evening.
MacDonald has been a contributor to The Boston Globe’s Op Ed page and a Senior Contributing Editor for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University for work on the 40th Anniversary of desegregation/Busing in Boston.
At Northeastern University’s Honors Department, he serves as Professor of the Practice, teaching his curricula: “Non-Fiction Writing & Social Justice Issues” and “The North of Ireland: Colonialism, Armed Resistance and the Ongoing Struggle for Peace with Justice." From May 8th - June 8th, he will lead a Northeastern University "Dialogue of Civilizations" classroom from Boston’s neighborhoods to post-conflict Derry & Belfast, in the North of Ireland. The name of the Dialog is “Redemption Songs: The Role of Our Lived Stories in Restorative and Transformative Justice.” As with all of his past activism, writing and teaching, the theme of the dialog will be the intersection of justice and healing.
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The story is interesting and very sad. It is also puzzling on two counts. First, Michael doesn't make clear exactly what drove him to complete his GED, a major change in time management and attitude adjustment. Second, the title, "Easter Rising" is scary. The title refers to the 1916 week-long Dublin battle that opened the modern "troubles" of the Irish independence movement. Why is this the title of the book? Metaphorically, who are the Irish, who are the English? I don't get it.