All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

All Souls: A Family Story from Southie is a 1999 memoir by Michael MacDonald in which the author examines his experiences of growing up in the Old Colony neighborhood of South Boston, also known as Southie. The memoir contextualizes the MacDonald family’s personal tragedies amid the tumultuous historical events that took place in Boston during the 1970s, with a particular focus on the racist violence that occurred during the desegregation busing crisis. 

Michael Patrick MacDonald was raised amid the chaos of this crisis. Galvanized by the untimely deaths of four siblings and the omnipresent violence, corruption, and addiction issues in “Southie” at the time, MacDonald became a vocal anti-corruption activist. In addition to writing All Souls, he has become a senior contributing editor for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, and he continues to ally with South Boston families in the cause of social justice.

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide contain extensive descriptions of racism, xenophobia, racist violence, mental health crises, addiction, suicidal ideation, suicide, murder, police corruption, and organized crime. The source text also makes use of racist slurs, which this guide obscures.

Plot Summary

When the book begins, an adult Michael is returning to Southie in order to give a tour of the neighborhood to a reporter. The reporter is writing an article about social conditions among lower-class white people, which is the demographic in which Michael’s family found itself when he was a child. At the time of the book’s writing, Michael is working as an anti-violence activist who did not plan—and did not want—to return to Southie; the Introduction makes it clear that the majority of the book will be spent explaining why. 

After the Introduction, the timeline backtracks to when Michael is 7 years old. Young Michael’s mother, Helen Knight—known throughout as Ma—has just lost a baby son. The early chapters introduce the various members of the family and their neighbors and create a sense of Southie itself as a character in the story. The narrative focuses primarily upon Southie neighborhoods—particularly the Old Colony, Roxbury, and Charleston projects—which are filled with violence, crime, and death. In different ways, and to varying degrees, several of Michael’s siblings are sucked into the criminal underworld. 

Southie’s residents view their community as a rough-and-tumble but close-knit group that takes care of its own problems and does not need the help of the police to resolve its issues. In fact, the anti-police sentiment in Southie is so strong for most of the book that Michael cites a collective hatred of cops as one of the leading creators of new criminals among the Southie youths. 

After several chapters detailing his experiences of growing up in Southie amid the political turmoil of a racist anti-busing campaign, the narrative reveals the tragedies that begin befalling the MacDonald family in earnest. Michael’s brother, Davey, is diagnosed with schizophrenia and takes his own life by jumping off a building after leaving a mental institution. One of Michael’s older brothers, Frankie, is a Golden-Gloves boxer and the pride of the neighborhood, while his brother Kevin is a born grifter who delights in running scams and eventually begins working for the crew of Whitey Bulger, a notorious gangster who controls Southie’s criminal enterprises. Within eight months of each other, Kevin and Frankie both die; Kevin dies by suicide, and Frankie is killed after participating in a bank robbery, fulfilling a role that was meant for Kevin. 

Michael goes numb after the deaths of Kevin and Frankie and is determined not to feel anything again. However, he is unable to remain stoic when his 13-year-old brother, Stevie, is convicted of a murder that he did not commit, thanks largely to false evidence fabricated by the police. Rather than languishing in hopelessness and nihilism, Michael decides to pursue a life of activism against violence. He resolves to help ease the suffering of future Southie families in a way that he could never do with his own family. As the book ends, Michael is presiding over a vigil for the many dead youths of Southie, including his brothers, but he has seen a glimpse of hope and believes that he will be able to make peace with the tragedies that his family has endured.