Few authors write about South Boston like Dennis Lehane. His novels are thrillers with murder and mayhem, but also snapshots in time of the culture of ‘Southie’, with its intense ethnic divisions, racism, and close-knit ties. Now gentrifying, the area was white working-class Catholic Irish for many decades. The Kennedys often joined the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Whitey Bulger was the crime boss of the area.
Lehane’s latest novel, Small Mercies, is set at a particularly fraught moment of history. It is 1974. A court decision has mandated forced busing to integrate Boston schools, and a random half the children in all-white South Boston High will be bused to the black neighbourhood school of Roxbury High, and vice versa.
The people of Southie are enraged. Leaflets are being distributed house to house.
BOSTON’S UNDER SIEGE!
JOIN ALL CONCERNED PARENTS AND PROUD MEMBERS OF THE SOUTH BOSTON COMMUNITY FOR A MARCH TO END JUDICIAL DICTATORSHIP ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 30 AT CITY HALL PLAZA.
NO BUSING! NEVER!
RESIST!
BOYCOTT!
Mary Pat Fennessy is the tired mother of Jules, a fragile girl in high school. Mary Pat’s husband walked out on her some years ago, and her son Noel went to Vietnam and came back to die of a drug overdose, so it is just Mary Pat and Jules now. That evening, Jules goes out with some friends and never returns. At first Mary Pat assumes she has stayed over with friends, but as the next day wears on, she gets more and more worried.
Meanwhile, the newspaper reports that a twenty-year-old black man, Auggie Williamson, was found dead on the subway tracks at a nearby station; it is assumed he was hit by a subway car.
It doesn’t say anything about the dead black guy being a drug dealer, but it’s a pretty safe assumption, or otherwise why would he be there? Why come into their part of town? She doesn’t go into theirs.
In Southie, people stick together: it is community over all. There is also fear of the Mob, in the person of Marty Butler (modelled after the real-life Whitey Bulger) and his flunkies. But Mary Pat is not just any mother, though, she is ‘a tough Irish broad’, by her own description.
Most people would sooner pick a fight with a stray dog with a taste for flesh than fuck with a Southie chick who grew up in the PJs.
Dogged and determined to find what happened to her only child, she digs and digs, stirring up trouble from people who would rather some stones remain unturned.
Lehane does a wonderful job of setting the novel in its time and place. On both the black and white sides of Boston, there is poverty, drugs and racism. For all the supposed tight-knit community support in Southie, there are people like the drug dealer George Dunbar.
a handsome kid with his smooth demeanor and his heartless eyes who sold her son his own death in a little plastic baggie. He stares back at her with a gaze so flat and stripped of emotion it would look weird on a Ken doll.
The larger picture is not forgotten. The people of Southie, and the author, are incensed by the fact that
the judge who ordered all this lives in Wellesley, where his own law won’t apply.
At the protest at city hall, Mary Pat sees Senator Teddy Kennedy, generally beloved as an Irish Mick and the brother of Jack and Robert, but Teddy’s bonafides have been suspect of late on matters of race and busing. The crowd turns on him, asking him where his own kids go to school. This is a great scene: the Southie women no longer trust Mary Pat, they all feel the same about busing, and when the crowd spits at Kennedy, it is a powerful (and true) moment.
All very good so far, but Mary Pat’s increasingly violent quest gets somewhat unbelievable towards the latter half of the book. Still, most thrillers these days are pretty violent, and this is no worse than most. It’s the portrait of 1970s South Boston that makes it unusually good, and more than just a thriller.
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