All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

“I stared at them for a good long time, wondering if they didn’t know how to use their wings, or if they just didn’t know they had them, until it was too late to save themselves.”

Michael’s view on the plight of the cockroaches foreshadows his eventually understanding of why most people never escape from Southie, or from poverty. 

“It’s funny, I thought, how the people who seem the meanest, the people we want nothing to do with, might be in the most pain.” 

Chickie has always scared Michael: she is confident and crazy. But when he learns that she tried to kill herself with pills, he sees that she was hurting in ways that he did not suspect. At a time when he feels like no one understands his own pain, it is a useful shift in his perspective.

“When the thousands of people sang the national anthem, with their right hands over their chest, I cried. It was as if we were singing about an America that we wanted but didn't have, especially the part about the land of the free.”

Michael does not believe that the people of Southie are free because the institutions he considers to be representative of America—the police, the government—do not seem to care what happens in Southie.