Common Ground (52 page)

Arthur Garrity, too, was pained by the hard choices he had to make. Particularly difficult was the decision to increase busing. “Toward lessening widespread misunderstanding on the point, it may be stated that the court does not favor busing,” he wrote. “If there were a way to accomplish desegregation in Boston without transporting students to schools beyond walking distance, the court and all parties would much prefer that alternative.” But, as he saw it, there was no alternative. And there was no way to retain certain aspects of the Masters’ Plan without violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. The jurist in Arthur Garrity had prevailed over the pragmatist; John Marshall over Oliver Wendell Holmes; Thomas Aquinas over Jack Kennedy; the mind over the marrow bone.

A
lice had heard that sound before. A rhythmic slap, like the wings of a giant bird trapped in a closet. But what was it? The mad flapping echoed somewhere near the base of her skull, and try as she might, her sluggish brain couldn’t decipher it.

Abruptly she came awake. Outside her window, eerie blue lights played on the brick façade of the housing project. A siren wailed over the hill. And there was that sound again. Chock, chock, chock.

A garbage truck? An airplane? A helicopter?

That was it. But what was a goddamn helicopter doing in Charlestown at six o’clock in the morning?

Groping to the window, Alice could see a cluster of kids in the street, pointing up the hill toward the Monument. A police car blocked the roadway, its blue light pulsing. The sound was louder here, but still she couldn’t see anything. Stumbling into the parlor, Alice pulled back the curtains. Peering into the steel-gray sky, she saw not one but three helicopters circling the towering white shaft of the Bunker Hill Monument, hovering over the town.

It was Monday, September 8, 1975, the opening day of school, the start of Arthur Garrity’s Phase II plan for Boston, the first day of busing in Charlestown, a day Alice had been anticipating with apprehension bordering on hysteria. The day before, she had awakened with a neck so stiff that by midafternoon her son Danny had to take her to Massachusetts General Hospital, where an emergency room doctor could find no physical source for her ailment.

“Are you suffering from any particular nervous stress or strain?” he had asked.

“Not that I know of,” she replied.

“Oh, no,” Danny chimed in. “She’s only got seven kids and busing begins tomorrow.”

Ah, said the doctor, she was the fourth mother he’d had in there that weekend; like the others, Alice was probably suffering an anxiety attack. He gave her some muscle relaxants and encased her neck in a huge foam-rubber Thomas Collar, which eased the discomfort somewhat but made it impossible to sleep. Eventually, she’d taken it off, but the neck was throbbing and aching worse than ever.

Gazing out the parlor window now at the helicopters, she thought: It’s like we’re the Nazis and they’re the Americans, and they’re going to shoot us. It’s crazy!

She put the collar back on, twisted painfully into her bathrobe, and made herself a cup of coffee. By now the noise from the copters had wakened her children and they came clattering out of their bedrooms.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“Choppers, dummy! Whirlybirds!”

“It’s the Vietcong!”

“It’s the fuckin’ Marines!”

Alice tried to get the kids some breakfast, but everybody was too excited to eat. Pulling on their clothes, they piled out the door onto Walford Way, cut through the alleys of the project onto Bunker Hill Street, then up the steep hill toward Monument Square. Even before they reached the corner, they could hear the sound of trucks maneuvering on the narrow streets around the Monument, the thud of feet on the pavement, the sharp commands ringing in the autumn air. But they weren’t prepared for what they saw when they reached the square. Hundreds of police lined the sidewalks around the Monument: Boston police in regulation blue uniforms, with yellow rain gear tucked under their arms; Metropolitan District Commission police in light blue shirts and helmets; state police in breeches, boots, and broad-brimmed trooper hats; deputy U.S. marshals in gray business suits; and—most distinctive of all—the city’s Tactical Patrol Force in jumpsuits, leather jackets, riot helmets, and Plexiglas visors, pounding wooden batons into leather-gloved hands.

Danny hadn’t realized there were that many cops in all of Boston. And these guys meant business—they looked as if they were ready for combat in Vietnam.

Then Billy grabbed his arm and pointed toward the roof of Charlestown High School across the square. Danny could make out two policemen behind the rooftop balustrade, one with binoculars methodically scanning the street below, the other hefting a rifle with a prominent sniper scope.

Snipers on the rooftops! Helicopters! Riot police in combat gear! Hell, this wasn’t school desegregation—they were being invaded!

By then a blazing orange sun was inching over the crest of Breed’s Hill. For a moment, the McGoffs and their friends stood transfixed by the martial array drawn up before them, half admiring the military precision with which the police had seized the high ground, half seething at the edict they were there to enforce.

“Hell,” said Danny, quickly recovering his characteristic bravado. “They
can drop the damn atom bomb on the Monument if they want to. They’ll never get this town to cave in.”

Like most Townies, the McGoffs were resisting Garrity’s order as best they could. Alice had sworn she would never put her children on a bus to Roxbury, and even before her three youngest were assigned there, she’d enrolled them in Catholic schools in Malden and Everett, nearby working-class suburbs—Tommy at Immaculate Conception, the twins at St. Anthony’s.

Under Garrity’s plan—which designated certain age groups in each “geo-code” to be bused and others to remain in their neighborhood schools—Billy, Lisa, and Kevin were assigned to Charlestown High. Anti-busing leaders had called for a boycott of all Charlestown schools that first week to express the community’s determined opposition to the judge’s order, and many of the McGoffs’ classmates—under pressure from their parents—had already pledged not to go to school that morning. Alice had left the decision up to her kids. “I hope you won’t go,” she said. “It’ll show the judge we mean business. But I won’t stop you. You’re old enough to make up your own minds.”

Billy and Lisa decided to go. A senior that year, Billy had already been elected co-captain of the football team; he would probably be co-captain in basketball as well, and he expected to be chosen senior class president as his brother Danny had been before him. Busing or not, it was going to be a good year and he was eager to get started.

Lisa felt even more strongly about it. As she told her mother that morning, “If we don’t go, we’re letting Garrity and all those police keep us out of our own school. I don’t care if they bring the whole Army in here, I’m going to school.”

A few minutes before eight, Lisa looked at her watch. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s time.”

Alice sat at the kitchen table, rubbing her aching neck with both hands. “Oh God,” she moaned. “I’m frightened for you kids. Please, stay out of trouble. If any fighting starts, just come home. And, Billy, for crying out loud, look out for your sister!”

Then the two of them set off along Bunker Hill Street. At Monument Street, where the Red Store and the Green Store manned the corner like old friends, they paused for a moment to gather their courage—buying some candy at the Red Store, exchanging greetings with the regulars around the counter—before starting up the hill. As they reached Monument Square, their path was barred by three policemen demanding identification. When they produced cards stating their names, grades, and school assignments, the cops waved them through.

Before them lay the grassy flanks of the Monument grounds, enclosed by a high wrought-iron fence and now by another wall of Metropolitan District Commission police, standing guard at ten-foot intervals. As the McGoffs turned right and headed toward the high school, whose gray granite façade dominated the northwest corner of Monument Square, they noticed for the first time a huge throng of press people massed behind the fence. There were
newspapermen scribbling in stenographer’s pads, photographers festooned with cameras, television cameramen with Minicams strapped to their shoulders, sound men with long black booms which they poked between the rungs of the fence, hoping to capture some murmur of approaching confrontation. The principal object of their attention was a group of about seventy-five Townies, most of them women, who had gathered on the corner of Concord Street as it emptied into the square, hard by the high school. Brandishing homemade placards with messages like “No forced busing!” and “Never!” the women were straining against another line of police thrown up across the intersection.

As the McGoffs reached the corner, they were halted again by a police sergeant who asked once more for their identity cards, then waved them through a cordon of police toward the school’s front door. Passing along the corridor of blue uniforms, Lisa was simultaneously excited and terrified. Never in her young life had she been the center of such a maelstrom of activity; never before had so many people seemed so passionately interested in what she was doing. Yet the very passion, the intensity, the sheer physical presence of so many armed men intimidated her, and she hurried toward the safety of the familiar school door, Billy close at her heels.

But as she stepped through the doorway into the gloomy marble lobby, the scene confronting her was anything but reassuring. Immediately in front of the door stood three large, rectangular metal detectors—like those she had seen at airports—through which her schoolmates were now filing one by one, closely scrutinized by teachers and school administrators. And suspended above the detectors was a cardboard sign, hand-lettered in bold, black characters:

Lisa stared at the sign in disbelief. This wasn’t the school she had left the June before—it wasn’t her school at all anymore. It was an alien place, ruled
by judges, bureaucrats, police, and criminals with knives, pipes, bottles, and clubs intent on doing her harm. With clenched teeth, she submitted to the metal detectors and a long, painstaking search of her handbag. Then, filled with anxiety, she climbed the marble steps toward her homeroom.

From the corner of Concord Street, Danny McGoff watched his sister and brother enter the school, almost wishing he was going with them. He’d had a hell of a good time up there and put together an impressive extracurricular record—president of the senior class, editor of the school paper, manager of the hockey team. He’d hoped to be the second member of his family—after his uncle Jim—to go to college, but he’d squandered so much of his energy on the hockey team and hanging out on the corner with his friends that his grades and board scores had been too low to get him in anywhere decent. The guidance counselors said he needed a year to “brush up” his English and math, so when the 520 Club—a group of teamsters up in Sullivan Square—offered him their annual scholarship, he grabbed it and selected Berwick Academy in Maine. For weeks now he’d been so busy getting his school gear together he hadn’t had much time to think about busing, but as he stood on the corner surveying the massive display of city, state, and federal power drawn up around his old school, he could feel the anger rising in him. He’d always thought the job of the police was to catch crooks, not to ram unpopular laws down people’s throats. Turning away in disgust, he jogged down the hill toward Bunker Hill Street, where a group of his pals had gathered outside the Green Store, restless and looking for action, hungry to vent their anger at the alien presence in their town. Many were already pulling on cans of Bud or bottles of Narragansett beer. And there were younger kids as well—among them his two youngest brothers, fourteen-year-old Kevin, who had stayed out of Charlestown High to see what was happening on the streets, and thirteen-year-old Tommy, whose classes at Immaculate Conception hadn’t yet begun.

An impish-looking sophomore named Jimmy Walsh had an idea. Together with a friend, he ran down the street to his family’s apartment in the Bunker Hill project, pulled an old pair of jeans and a sweatshirt from a closet, and stuffed them with wadded newspapers. Fashioning a head from a black plastic garbage bag, they hung a cardboard sign: “Nigger beware!” around its neck. Tying a rope around the effigy, they climbed to the project roof and flung it over the edge. “Look at the nigger!” Walsh shouted as the crowd below cheered.

On the first throw, the dummy caught in the limbs of a tree and dangled there for a few minutes. Soon the boys retrieved it and tossed it further out onto the street. The crowd in front of the Green Store broke and ran toward the dummy, kicking and stomping it in a frenzy of release. “Let’s burn it!” someone shouted. A match was produced. The dummy, doused with gasoline, erupted in flame. Prancing around the fiery “corpse,” the boys shouted, “Burn, nigger, burn!”