Small Mercies

She spends the next two hours attaching the signs to the sticks Brian Shea dropped off with the nails Timmy G provided. Someone clearly assumed Mary Pat owned a hammer, which she does. The nails are small and thin, the kind that make it hard to hold upright and not get your thumb in the way of the hammer, but she manages. For the first time that day, maybe the first time that week, she feels useful, she has purpose. She’s doing her small part to stand up against tyranny. Nothing else to call it. Nothing else fits. The people in power are telling her where she’s going to send her only living child to school. Even if that endangers her child’s education and even endangers her life.

Which is bullshit. And it isn’t about race. She’d be just as angry if they told her she has to send her kid across the city to Revere or the North End or someplace mostly white. The thought occurs to her that maybe she wouldn’t be as mad, maybe she’d just be really annoyed, but then she hammers another sign to another stick and thinks, Fuck that, I don’t see color. I see injustice. Just another case of the rich fucks in their suburban castles (in their all-white towns) telling the poor people stuck in the city how things are going to go. In that moment, Mary Pat feels a kinship with black people that surprises her. Aren’t they all victims of the same thing? Aren’t they all being told How It Is?

Well, no, because a lot of the coloreds want this. They’ve been fighting in the courts for it. And if you came from a shithole like Five Corners or the shoot-’em-up projects along Blue Hill Ave. or Geneva, of course you’d want to be in a nicer place. But Southie ain’t a nicer place, it’s just a whiter place. Southie High is just as big a mess as Roxbury High. Same exploding toilets, cracked heating pipes, water damage to the walls, mold, peeling paint, out-of-date textbooks with the pages falling out. She can’t blame the coloreds for wanting to escape their shithole, but trading it for her shithole makes no sense. And the judge who ordered all this lives in Wellesley, where his own law won’t apply. If the coloreds had sued to attend Wellesley High? Dover Middle? Weston K through eight? Mary Pat would march for them.

But then there’s the Other Voice asking, Would you? Really? How many names you know for black people, Mary Pat?

Fuck you.

How many? Be honest.

I know “colored” and I know “nigger.”

Get the fuck outta here. Tell the truth. And not just what you know, what you’ve used. What’s escaped your chapped fucking lips.

But those are just words, she pleads to some imagined judge. Poor people talking shit about poor people. Race don’t come into it. They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.

Once she finishes her work and all the signs are stacked along the wall on either side of the front door, she sits at the kitchen table with the window open and listens to the sounds of Commonwealth on a hot summer night and wishes her daughter were with her. They could’ve played hearts or watched TV.

Somewhere in the projects someone calls for Benny. A baby wakes up squawking. A single firecracker explodes. A few people walk below her window talking about someone named Mel and a trip to the Thom McAn in Medford. She can smell the ocean. And that single firecracker.

She was born here. Three buildings away in Hancock. Dukie grew up in Rutledge. (All the buildings in Commonwealth are named after signers of the Declaration of Independence: Jefferson, Franklin, Chase, Adams, Wolcott, where she lives now, a few others.) She knows every brick, every tree.

A young couple walks under a streetlight the yellow of bile, and the boy says he’s sick of it, just sick of it. The girl counters, “You can’t just quit. You gotta try.” He says, “That’s a shit deal.” She says, “That’s the only deal. You gotta try.”

Just before they’re out of earshot, Mary Pat is pretty sure she hears the boy say, “Well, okay.”