“Some Argentines without means do it,

 People say in Boston even beans do it,

 Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”

• Cole Porter, “Let’s Do It”

“You Know Where I Stand.”

• Slogan of Louise Day Hicks’ 1967 mayoral campaign

When I was seven, I stood on my roof and saw my city burning.

My name’s Meredith Mulraney. My grandfather, Padraic Mulraney, came over to Boston from County Meath in 1925 without a penny to his name. He sold his hat and used the money to take the streetcar to City Hall, where he got a job driving Mayor Curley’s car. That’s how my dad tells it, anyway.

By 1968, the Boston Mulraneys weren’t driving cars for the mayor anymore. We weren’t in terrible shape, mind you; we were in about the same place as a thousand other working-class Southie Irish. Dad made enough at the Navy Yard to keep a roof over our head and shirts on our backs but not enough to send me or my big brother Patrick to the parish school. I thought about politics probably a little more than the average 8-year-old girl, but not politics that, as far as everyone in Southie was concerned, were playing out in the deep South and couldn’t matter less to our lives. I had a vague idea of who King was; I don’t think Ma and Dad hated him, but they thought he was on thin ice, especially when he started marching in the North for integrated housing.

“We don’t do shit like that here,” Dad said when they showed King in Chicago on the evening news, Ma slapping his shoulder and crossing herself at the swear. “They got all my sympathy down south, those bastards with the dogs and the hoses, they oughtta be the ones in jail, but he’s trying to turn a Southern thing into a white thing. He better watch his ass.”

That’s the other thing- I don’t think I knew a single black person at that age. I’d seen them, on the T and sometimes in the market, but never for long. I didn’t learn a black person’s name until I was 10; her name was Rachel and we met at Boys’ Club after school. I never thought this absence was weird, especially not in a city so easy to confuse for the entire world. They just weren’t around. When I got older, I learned a saying black people have: in the South, you can get as close as you want if you don’t get too big. In the North, you can get as big as you want if you don’t get too close.

Dad always had us watch the evening news with him and Ma; it was one of my favorite parts of the day. There were girls at school who, even that young, I could tell their parents were already teaching them it wasn’t important for girls to know what was going on. Each of them knew, on some level, that her job was to tread water for as long as it took for her to marry some boy from the block—hopefully one who didn’t hit her, and hopefully before he got her pregnant, but neither were requirements. Dad wasn’t some peace-and-love New Enlightened Man, not by a mile, but he never wanted that for me. The night of April 4, 1968, though, something was wrong. Dad sent me and Patrick to bed ahead of the news.

“Aren’t we going to watch the news?” Patrick said.

“I’m not asking again,” Dad said, pointing us up the stairs. He wasn’t angry; God knows I’d heard him angry. He sounded scared.

I tried to sleep but my head was full of questions and the sun hadn’t even fully gone down. After about an hour, I crawled to the landing and craned my neck to try to make out what Ma and Dad were saying. Dad was a fast talker, and I came in mid-sentence.

“…not excusing it at ALL, Bridget, Jesus. But what the hell did he THINK was gonna happen?”

“For Christ, Jim, I never said you were excusing it. I’m asking if you think your damn family is safe.”

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

“They’re burning down Washington, for God’s sake, Jim. The hell is so special about us?”

“They respect the mayor. He’s going to figure it out.”

“Jim, if someone shot the Pope, would you give a damn what the mayor said?”

The irritating thing about eavesdropping is the people you eavesdrop on don’t care about giving you a chance to catch up, and I could tell that was the case here. I crawled back to my bedroom and tiptoed out onto the fire escape. We were on the middle floor of a triple decker and getting to the roof scared me the first time I did it, but by this point it was easy enough. I stood on the roof and looked over my neighborhood and then over my city, thinking of them as different things for the first time in a while. I’d come up facing northeast, toward the bay, but something flickered in the corner of my eye and I turned around and faced south toward Roxbury. Something was burning down there. It was too far off to tell how big it was, but a fire you can see from your rooftop is a fire close to home.

I must have stood up there for a while; I never heard Dad coming up behind me. He knelt down next to me. “Is this your bed now?” he said. “I’ll admit the weather’s pretty nice but what if you had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Old Mrs. O’Meara on the third floor is gonna have a fit about her chimney.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be gross, Dad.”

“Hey, I’m not the one sharing a bed with the pigeons.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “You know what happened tonight, Meredith?”

I shook my head.

“Someone killed Martin Luther King. Down in Tennessee.”

“Do they have him? The guy who did it?”

“Not yet. But people are upset, and they’re getting angry. That’s what that fire you see is.”

“I… I heard you talking to Ma. Are they gonna burn anything here?”

“Nah, don’t you worry. It’s a lot better here than it was in other cities.”

“Why?”

He stood up. “Would you believe the mayor got James Brown to play a show here?”

“Dad!”
        “Honey, I’m being 100 percent serious right now. He wasn’t gonna do it but the mayor said everyone needed a lift so he did, and everyone’s getting up off of that thing instead of breaking windows.”

I laughed a little in spite of myself. “So we’re okay?”

“It looks like it.”

I stared at the distant blaze for a bit longer. “Was he a bad guy, Dad?”

“Who, King?”

“Yeah. I could never really tell from the way you talked about him.”

“Well, first of all, brilliant and handsome though your father is, I don’t want you to make any decisions about who’s a bad guy based entirely on my say-so. But if you wanna know what I think, and honestly who wouldn’t, I think he had a lot of good ideas and a few bad ones. I think both the good ideas and the bad ones made a lot of people mad, so he was probably on borrowed time one way or the other.”

“What were the bad ones?”

He chuckled. “Should have known better to think I could pack you off to bed, kid. One of the things he wanted to do was make it illegal to say you wouldn’t sell a house to colored people.”

“What’s wrong with that?”
        “Well, what’s wrong with it is, once you start telling people who they can’t bring into the neighborhood, where do you stop? What if another guy said you couldn’t turn someone down just because they didn’t have a job?”

“Colored people don’t have jobs?”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Look, the point, Mer, is that I think he went too far on a lot of things. But he didn’t deserve to die for that, and the one thing he did, whether he was right or wrong, was stand up for what he thought was right. I think that’s something to be proud of.” He got to his feet. “And now, young Miss Mulraney, it really is time for bed.”

“You sure we’re okay?”

“I promise we’re okay, doll. This isn’t a Boston thing.”

Of course, that was before I met a boy.

When I was eight, I looked out my window and I saw my street burning.

        My name’s Tristan Stone. Our records don’t go back but so far, but my great-great-grandfather, Isaac Stone, was a free man from New York who joined up with Robert Gould Shaw’s 54th Massachusetts regiment, the first Negro unit in America. About half of them died in an attack on Fort Wagner, along with Colonel Shaw, but not Isaac. He came home after the war with a Medal of Honor—or a forthcoming one, anyway; he didn’t get it put in his hand until 1900. He got a job maintaining Boston’s streetlights and raised a family in East Roxbury.

The Stones did well, by the standards of both Boston and blackness. Black Boston was never Harlem but we had us our own little mini-renaissance around the same time, with black versions of the Brahmins on Beacon Hill. As we got smarter, we started opening our eyes to what was wrong in the city. Roxbury even had its own Dr. King and, like a lot of the toughest people in this city, she was a lady: Miss Melnea Cass, who’d been doing this for so long she cut her teeth registering Boston ladies after the 19th Amendment passed.

Hardly any of this touched me at the time, of course. My parents both marched with Miss Cass in 1963, when I was barely a baby, and I could always tell from pictures that doing that kind of thing together reminded them of just how in love they were. Then Mama died in ’66 and Pops stopped marching. It wasn’t that he didn’t care anymore; he cared a whole lot, and he made sure I did too. But so far as I could tell, he was reminded, in the space of one terrible day, how quickly you can lose what you love, and it became more important to him to safeguard what he still had than to demand anything new, whether he had the right to demand it or not. Since then he’d focused on raising me right and keeping the lights on in his diner.

The night they killed Dr. King, though, I saw that man in the photos with Mama flash back into his eyes. It was close to dark when the news came over the radio he kept on the counter, but some weird light seemed to wash over everything, like a lunar eclipse. We looked at each other for a second and then we heard shouting out on Centre Street. Pops jumped up and pulled the blinds. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“Go upstairs and lock the door,” he said. “Don’t unlock it unless you hear my voice and don’t get out of bed. Hear?”

I nodded and just looked up at him for a second. “Go, boy!” he said. I ran up the stairs and didn’t look back, but as soon as I was in my bedroom on the second floor, I peeked through the window. There was a car in the middle of Centre Street with a blonde white boy who looked 18 or 19 standing splayed against the door and a crowd of locals standing around him in a circle that was getting tighter by the second, like a boa constrictor. A black boy of about the same age was about to grab him when I saw Pops walk between them and hold up a hand. I could make out his voice through the glass, the voice he used all the time at the diner to let the patrons know he was there to listen and understand but on the other hand, maybe she just don’t want to see you anymore.

“It’s cool, brother,” Pops was saying to the black kid. “It’s cool.”

“The hell it is!” the boy yelled back, trying to go around Pops and lunge at the white boy.

“Listen,” Pops said, raising his voice a little. “You angry. Okay? We all angry. Angry times, son. These are angry times. But all you gonna do is make shit worse. Now, I you’re your mama, she comes in for her after-church coffee nearly every week, and I know for a damn fact Letitia Brooke didn’t raise no clowns, so you oughtta remember that. All right?”

I could only see the kid from the back but I saw his shoulders deflate and he hung back from the car as a police car rolled up. The cop got out and my muscles tensed up but he wasn’t moving too fast, and Pops and him looked to be just talking.

It could have been anywhere from five minutes to three hours later; I was lying in my bed and staring at a stain on the ceiling when I heard Pops’ voice in the doorway.

“You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“You been just lying in bed all that time and you’re still awake?” He walked into my bedroom and sat down at the foot of the bed. “I find that a little hard to believe.”

“Am I in trouble.”

“Naw.”

“Things get any worse?”

“Not tonight.”

“You think they might get worse later?”

Pops sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I love you more than anything or anyone, boy. You know that?”

“Yeah, Pops. I love you too.”

“I ain’t saying none of this to scare you. But this city’s got rage in its blood. We buried it tonight, thanks be to God. But rage never stays buried. It can live under the surface for years and years. And if that happens one day, I need you to be the man I’m teaching you to be. Don’t look for trouble, don’t pick no fights, but don’t let them bend your back either. Understand?”

“I think so.”

“Naw, you don’t. That’s okay. But you will, and when you do, you’ll remember.” He gave me a kiss on the forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Of course, that was before I met a girl.