Common Ground (96 page)

Alice could see where the party’s leaders were headed. Only one man could stop them. She glanced expectantly at Tip on the front bench, but the Majority Leader looked impassively ahead. Indeed, a few minutes later, when Albert’s motion to table the resolution was put to a roll call, O’Neill voted “aye.”

That was too much for Powder Keg. Jumping to their feet, Alice, Pat Russell, and the others booed and shouted. Tip looked anxiously over his shoulder, fixing them for a moment with a peevish eye, then stoically turned his back. Uniformed guards rushed the demonstrators, commanding them to be silent. When one young man objected loudly, two guards dragged him into the corridor. Alice and the others were quietly escorted from the gallery.

Later they learned that the motion to table had been carried 172–96, effectively dooming the anti-busing amendment for the session.

From then on, Powder Keg made no secret of its hostility toward Tip. On December 16, twelve Townies staged an hour-long sit-in at the Congressman’s Boston office, refusing to leave until they read a list of demands on the phone to O’Neill in Washington. Throughout 1976, Powder Keg shadowed the Congressman wherever he went in the district, staging noisy protests in hotel ballrooms, American Legion posts, and church halls. Alice and Lisa took part in many of them, determined to wreak revenge for Tip’s betrayal. “Dump Tip!” they shouted, a startling message in a district long known as “O’Neill Country.” Not since his race in the fifties against Mike LoPresti had Tip faced more than token opposition in a primary. Now he had a serious challenger, a Belmont state representative named Edward F. Galotti. In most of the district, Galotti was a woeful underdog, but in Charlestown he drew fervent support from the anti-busing movement. So fierce was this opposition that O’Neill reluctantly heeded his advisers’ warnings against campaigning in Charlestown. For months he couldn’t even find a campaign manager in the Town. In the primary that September, the Majority Leader piled up substantial majorities elsewhere in the district, but lost Charlestown by an astonishing 3–2 margin. Even after easily winning reelection that November, O’Neill was reported to be stunned by the Townies’ defection.

For Alice, Tip’s betrayal was only the latest in a series of treacheries perpetrated by the very people who should have been her most zealous guardians—Irish-Americans like Arthur Garrity, Ted Kennedy, Kevin White, much of Boston’s Irish Catholic clergy. If she asked herself whom she really detested in all this, it wasn’t the blacks, who in many ways were as much victims as she was; it wasn’t the Yankees from the suburbs, who were just as out of touch with urban reality as she’d always known they were; it was the Irish Catholic
traitors, the people who should have known better but who had allowed wealth, comfort, power, or patronage to lure them from their basic allegiance to turf and tribe. Such betrayal seemed particularly shameful to a family like the Kirks, to whom loyalty and treason had been central issues for nearly three centuries.

The break with Tip severed a last, critical link with the Democratic Party. Alice no longer believed that the party of Honey Fitz and James Michael Curley, of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, cared very much about Charlestown. As time went on, Alice and her Powder Keg colleagues abandoned hope for prompt redress of their grievances. Their activism took on a ceremonial quality, rituals designed as much to express solidarity as to effect any substantial change in their environment. They displayed a nice feel for potent symbols—once they marched up Bunker Hill Street to hang Judge Garrity in effigy, led by two women dressed as the Statue of Liberty and the Blind Muse of Justice.

Most evocative of all was Powder Keg’s annual minstrel show. No immigrant group had produced so many minstrel stars as the Irish, and well into the twentieth century minstrel shows remained a fixture of Boston’s Irish neighborhoods. Although none had been presented in Charlestown in recent years, they remained part of its tribal memory, and not surprisingly, as Powder Keg searched for means of rallying the Town against hostile forces, the minstrel show, like the town meeting, seemed a natural candidate for revival.

Alice took up the idea enthusiastically, serving several years as the show’s co-chairman with her friend Barbara Gillette, and also taking prominent roles on stage. Beginning each October, the Townies rehearsed several times a week, put through their paces by a professional director and often laboring late into the night to get the numbers just right.

On four consecutive evenings in March 1977, the Harvard-Kent School cafeteria was jammed for
Townies on Parade
. The curtain rose on a gaggle of scruffy washerwomen, four white and one in blackface. Alice played “Pearl,” who with “Sudsy,” “Soapy,” “Mopsy,” and “Mafalda” desultorily scrubbed the stage while casting aspersions on the “high-muck-a-mucks” whose messes they were cleaning. Then their ruminations were interrupted by a pair of Keystone Kops in baggy pants, who began whaling them over the head with rubber truncheons. When the scrubwomen shouted, “Police brutality!” the audience applauded lustily.

The musical numbers were suffused with a nostalgia for better days: a medley of Irish tunes by the “Singing Fitzpatricks”; a “Tribute to Al Jolson”; a sing-along of “Put Your Arms Around Me, Baby, Hold Me Tight,” with colored spotlights roving the audience while it swayed to and fro, arms linked.

When the songs were over, the spotlight picked up Alice McGoff, still dressed as Pearl the scrubwoman. “I love all that poetry and music,” she said, “I got class.” The audience roared derisively.

After intermission, the players returned in antebellum costumes for the “Show Boat Review,” a tale about a Mississippi river town struggling to repel
gamblers and hussies. The skit was studded with musical tributes to the Civil War era, among them Francis Fitzpatrick’s remarkable rendition of “Ol’ Man River.”

Though his face was blacked and his inflection owed something to Paul Robeson, he rendered the familiar song with the same feeling he had brought earlier to “Danny Boy,” seeming to remind his listeners that Charlestown, too, was a longshoreman’s community and that Irishmen, as well as blacks, knew what it was to suffer. When the last verse echoed through the hall, the audience surged to their feet, calling him back for three bows.

The show ended with the entire cast on stage, dressed in red, white, and blue. Alice McGoff and Barbara Gillette stood on the apron as Barbara explained, “It’s difficult to choose a last song. It has to represent the ideals of everybody who worked on the show. Don’t let anybody kid you, we’re united forever for liberty and justice for all.”

Then, as a giant American flag unfurled behind them, the cast stepped forward and sang a rousing, teary finale.

But the more vehemently the Town proclaimed its unity, the more patent was its fragmentation.

The anti-busing movement itself was hopelessly splintered, with Louise and Pixie, ROAR and United ROAR, Powder Keg and the Defense Fund sparring acrimoniously with each other. And that was only the beginning of Charlestown’s division. For busing had exacerbated the Town’s ancient hostilities, setting parish against parish, hill against valley, the housing project against all comers.

Powder Keg and the Defense Fund drew their leadership and their most enthusiastic supporters from the project (even such activists as Tom Johnson and Barbara Gillette, who didn’t live there, were closely identified with it by style and temperament). That was no coincidence. With their large families and crimped resources, the project dwellers were more directly affected by busing than other Townies. Too poor to pay parochial or private school tuitions, unable to escape to the suburbs, they were just as dependent on the public schools as their counterparts in the black community. The resentment which grew from this predicament detonated again and again in violent confrontations with the police.

Such disorders, in turn, simply confirmed the assessment the Town had long since made of the “project rats.” Always ready to dismiss them as coarse vulgarians, the comfortable homeowners of Breed’s and Bunker hills now concluded that they were vicious ruffians as well, hardly the sort of people with whom one wished to be associated. Moreover, property values were at last rising in the Town; the same young professionals who had flooded the South End were discovering the graceful old houses around Monument Square, and there was even talk of redeveloping the Navy Yard as a luxury apartment complex. Charlestown could only lose from further violence. At a secret meeting, some of the Town’s leading citizens told Captain MacDonald that the police should “crack a few heads” down on Bunker Hill Street to teach “those people” a lesson. The middle-class Townies on the hills had no more use for busing than the project dwellers; they had simply opted out of the struggle. With most of their children safely squirreled away in parochial schools, the residents of St. Mary’s and St. Francis de Sales’ parishes increasingly shunned the town meetings, rallies, marches, and demonstrations concentrated along Bunker Hill Street in tormented old St. Catherine’s Parish.

To a woman like Alice McGoff—who had grown up with such people on Monument Avenue—their reserve was particularly distressing, and it was all the more painful because among those holding themselves aloof from the busing struggle were her own family. By the mid-seventies, most of Alice’s brothers and sisters had long since left Charlestown. Her sister Bernardine had moved to the suburbs as early as 1959, followed shortly by Donalda and Jim. When their father died in 1970, the other children had signed the Monument Avenue house over to the two youngest—Mary and Bobby—who lived there with their respective spouses through the early seventies. But neither couple had a child old enough for school, and neither became involved in Powder Keg. Sometimes they watched the marches and demonstrations on television and, spotting their sister in the ranks, they’d shout, “Atta girl, Alice!” They were with her—they really were; they just didn’t care to get involved themselves. After a few years, the Monument Avenue house got a little cramped for two growing families, so they put it up for sale. Late in 1975, Mary and her husband left for Melrose. In July 1976, Bobby and his wife moved to Hingham, leaving Alice the last of the six Kirks still in Charlestown.

Alice could face facts as well as the next person: she was the poor Kirk, the widow with seven kids, the project dweller with limited resources; there was no way in the world she could move to the suburbs even if she wanted to. But even if she came into a lot of money she didn’t think she’d ever leave Charlestown—she was rooted there, a Townie for life. And she couldn’t understand how her brothers and sisters could remain so utterly aloof from the struggle which threatened to destroy their birthplace. When the family gathered for a holiday dinner at one of their comfortable suburban houses, Alice would invariably launch into a passionate tirade on the busing issue until eventually someone would say, “For Chrissake, Alice, give it a rest. Let’s talk
about the price of honey or anything, but let’s enjoy the meal.” That would only stir Alice up again and sometimes the meal broke up in bitter debate over the old Kirk issues of loyalty and betrayal.

As the tight little band of Powder Keg activists felt increasingly abandoned, their weekly notice in the
Patriot
struck a plaintive note. Urging a big turnout for a “unity march,” it warned: “The only way to combat this foe is to unify for a common good. Remember the phrase ‘divide and conquer,’ for that is just what the bureaucratic dictators are striving to achieve in communities such as ours.”

And soon its tone grew more querulous. After only thirty-eight people showed up for one town meeting, the column declared, “We had an anti-busing meeting last Tuesday and, believe me, if the British had walked in they would have laughed us off the battlefield…. Where are our patriots? Lying on Bunker Hill? Is this what your great-grandfather fought and died for?”

Ultimately, in a telling piece of guerrilla theater, Powder Keg held a funeral for the Town. One drizzly afternoon, Alice, Lisa, Robin, and Bobby McGoff joined 150 other Townies, most of them from St. Catherine’s Parish, in a procession up Bunker Hill. Six pallbearers carried a casket containing likenesses of Arthur Garrity, a Catholic church, the Bunker Hill Monument, and Charlestown High School. Most of the mourners wore black, the women in veils, carrying white lilies and keening for the dead in that piercing wail traditional among the Irish. When they reached the Monument grounds, a high school bugler blew taps across the misty hillside. Pat Russell delivered a eulogy. Then they descended to that greasy stretch of black water dubbed Montego Bay, where the coffin was lowered into the sea. A death notice in the
Patriot
reported that the Town had died from a disease “perpetrated by Judge Garrity and Federal law.” Members of the family were said to include “generations of loyal and abiding Townies.”

T
he lobster shift was a lonely one for the guard manning the marble lobby of the Boston
Globe
. In the dismal hours between midnight and dawn few employees came in or out, the phone on the reception desk stopped ringing, the only sound was the thump and swish of the giant presses. John McAuliffe would fortify himself with Styrofoam cups of muddy coffee while he waited for the freshly printed paper to come up from the loading dock. When the first edition arrived on the morning of October 7, 1974, he turned to the sports section, pleased to see that the Patriots had butchered the Baltimore Colts, 42–3. But the ink on the page was still wet and a black smudge came off on his fingers. He was reaching for a towel when he heard the first shot.