We started a book club
This is from the summer of 2023. I did not feel comfortable publishing it then. I think I should now since the subject of Denis Lehane’s book are clearly still poking us on the shoulder and reminding us we need to do better.
This must be a rite of middle aged passage; starting a a book club. My assignment for the first round was to read Dennis Lehane’s “Small Mercies”. Nothing to see here.
My task — as I have been voluntold is to create a list of discussion questions for the group. I did that part of the assignment.
Where to begin? Google “Busing Boston 1974”. That is where the story starts. What is the first image you see? I bet it looks awfully familiar and not just because its in most history books (still hopefully). It seems that image has been repeated more recently in 2021.
As I consider the busing-mediated desegregation event in our history; an event I have read and thought about since high school history and then later when completing my secondary teaching certificate; I now realize that the busing mandate was a completely unfit way to fix an issue that was brought about by an artificial sorting of our society imposed by banks and real estate practices that led to red-lining and institutional segregation. So instead of working to address the structural inequality brought about by red-lining, busing was used as a quick-fix rather than addressing the underlying larger issues. Its the tool that was available; but it did not provide the sustainable changes needed to alleviate the strife. That is the point of friction where the story is built; at the the point where worlds that were only separated by a few miles were kept separate by walls built on lies and mistrust.
Dennis Lehane has completely and vividly captured a place and time and moment in history — although it may be his last. Full disclosure: I am a bit of a homer for the guy, having read several of his books, devoured the movies and went silly when he made a small guest appearance on a the best TV show ever produced (which he also wrote for); ‘The Wire’ —( that’s him behind the counter). I have also met the author after a lecture he gave in my own fare city. I had just read his book, “The Given Day”. A book with such depth, scope, scale and detail that drew me in and still causes me to pause and think after reading it 11 years ago. From that book, I could feel the dust and grime from the streets of early 20th century Memphis and Boston. I asked Dennis how he had such command of the geography to describe a place so vividly. He responded he just looked at a few old maps and put himself in the place and time. Well whatever he did, I was there.
“Small Mercies” also transports — to South Boston 1974. The thing is, although the events took place a few years before I was born, and in a place I have only driven through; I know a similar place. Some of my own extended family grew up in an urban place that obliquely resembles ‘Southie’. It is where I first heard the racist slang that has so recently begun to make its way into more common mainstream usage. I am not completely naïve. The hateful sentiments and ideas are always right there; but the last few years the level of the intensity has noticeably increased.
Set against the backdrop of the busing and desegregation efforts of 1970’s Boston; the book is a look into a gritty, sweaty, desperate world or white working class provincialism. Hatred and grievance mixes with a mother’s desperate search for her only remaining child after an incident at a local train station involving the death of an African-American teenager; in the wrong place (South Boston) at the wrong time (anytime, but especially after sundown — I use this word consciously — click the link to know why). I think this book is about a person coming to terms with the structure of her life. Realizing too late that it was her that helped build the wall around her world; trapping her and her family in a dark, dead-end alley of despair. Like Jack trapped forever in the Overlook Hotel, she slowly learns her fate.
If there is one contrasting scene in the book that drives home how desperately trapped she truly is, she visits and confronts an ex-husband that somehow squeezed through a small opening and found escape just a few miles away working in the mail room of MIT. While the two areas of Boston are only 20 minutes apart, they might as well be separated by an ocean of thousands of miles. The conversation leads the ex-husband to confront her and his feelings:
“From the time I could walk, all I ever saw was hate and rage and people pounding booze so they wouldn’t feel it.” .p68
For me, this book is about the fortresses that people build around themselves to keep themselves locked in and the “other” locked out. What I learned visiting those places as a child, was that the world there was so limited and desperate. I still think about the street I used to visit and did not yet fully understand the unhappiness that was just under the surface. Alcoholic relatives that never really seemed happy. And in that world, people cling to anything that will help them feel a sense of belonging or community — the local bar or the warder’s club. Unfortunately that sense of community isolation is often mixed with resentment, fear and anger.
Mary Pat’s journey in “Small Mercies” takes you down a sad, dark and lonely road. But, you will find there are small mercies to be found in this story — they are there, but you need to look for them and hold onto them. These are the characters in the book that are working to find a way to “keep from drowning” in the darkness.
This book has an immediate resonance for a very long list of reasons. I hope it finds the right place in and sparks some thought about how we, as a people, relate to and live with one another.
~July 2023
