All Souls: A Family Story From Southie

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.

Michael is now the only one in the 10-room apartment. After Johnnie gets out of the Seals, he takes the apartment. He is welcomed back to Southie and begins spending time with Frankie’s old circle. Michael avoids Southie whenever possible, and he and Johnnie rarely see each other. 

The younger children do not enjoy Colorado. Ma pretends to, but Michael suspects that she doesn’t like it, either. Seamus and Stevie tell Michael that there is no excitement there. Ma sends the two of them on a two-week visit to Southie to see Michael. A few days into the visit, Stevie’s best friend, Tommy Viens, finds one of Johnnie’s guns. Tommy dies of a gunshot wound to the head, which is ruled as a potential suicide. Detective O’Leary takes Stevie to the station for questioning, since he was in the apartment when Tommy died. When Michael and Johnnie get to the station, O’Leary is questioning Stevie and accusing him of the murder. Michael furiously thinks that he would kill O’Leary if he could, reflecting, “Steven was just another easy target. His arrest would bring weeks of splashy Boston Herald headlines and a feather in the cap of the detective” (230). Stevie is formally charged with murder and spends the night in jail. The next morning, Michael and Seamus visit him and ask about the night Tommy was shot. 

Stevie says that Tommy had been prank-calling sex lines on the phone. A police officer called and said that if Tommy didn’t stop, he was coming over to arrest them. Tommy bragged to Stevie that he would just get one of Johnnie’s guns and shoot the officer when he arrived. Stevie and Tommy watched half an hour of a game show on TV, then Tommy grew agitated and walked into another room of the apartment. Stevie then heard the gunshot and found Tommy on the ground, a gunshot wound in his head. He swears that Tommy would never die by suicide but has no idea where the bullet came from. 

Soon, Stevie is arraigned in court for murder in the first degree. Bail is set at $250,000—or $25,000 in cash if the family’s assets cannot cover the $250,000. In Stevie’s cell, afterward, Stevie is crying. He has been visited by Tommy’s father, Mr. Viens, who thinks that Stevie committed the murder. Mary, Joe, Johnny, and Michael pool their savings for the bail money. Michael takes Mary back to the house. Mary notices that there are brains on the floor from Tommy’s shooting. “I swore I’d never come back to Southie again” (236), says Michael.

Michael spends the summer in a rented cottage on Cape Cod with Seamus and Stevie. Ma comes to visit for a few weeks. They go into Boston occasionally for meetings with Stevie’s lawyer, Ed Fallon. One afternoon, Fallon shows them a 911 transcript of Stevie’s 911 call. It includes two lines that show Stevie saying he shot Tommy in the head. Michael begins to doubt Stevie’s account and wonders if he blacked out after shooting his friend. However, two weeks later, they acquire the actual recording of the call, and nowhere in the recording does Stevie say that he shot Tommy. The transcript has been forged. Michael is overcome with guilt over doubting Stevie, and he is furious at the police, saying, “The world’s nothing but pain. It’ll never get better. It’s completely useless. Stevie’s going to be found guilty of something he didn’t do, and how much more suffering and death will that lead to?” (239). Michael considers suicide but decides to continue living and fighting for justice. 

Stevie has two trials. During the first, the charge is reduced to involuntary manslaughter. If Stevie takes the plea, he will only serve a small amount of time in jail. However, he maintains that he is not guilty of any shooting. Preparations for the second trial—this time, for involuntary manslaughter—begin. 

Grandpa dies in the spring of 1991. MacDonald believes that Grandpa’s funeral was the best he’d ever been to because “[i]t was the first time [he had] seen off someone who died naturally, of old age” (243). 

Michael begins spending all of his time in the library at Suffolk University Law School, reading books on forensic pathology. The prosecution insists that Tommy’s arms were not long enough to shoot himself with a gun as large as the .357 Magnum, the model involved in his death. The defense argues that there was no gunshot residue of any kind on Stevie’s hands, and Michael begins finding material that could be used to discredit the State’s case. 

During the jury trial, Stevie never deviates from his story of his innocence, but the jury finds him guilty. The judge determines that Stevie will be sent to the Department of Youth Services, who will decide how long to keep him. They could potentially keep him until his 18th birthday, which is five years away. Michael, anxious to work as an activist, contacts an organization called Citizens for Safety, admitting, “I was looking for a revolution to put all my rage into” (246). He begins working with Kathie Mainzer, a white woman with a middle-class background, and with Muadi DiBinga, who lives in Roxbury. The three of them begin gathering groups to make formal complaints against police who unjustly detain and demean Black youths. 

During a gun buyback program, they began working with the Boston Police Department. The police have publicly committed themselves to a new era of “community policing,” and Michael pushes the program as a way in which the police can hold themselves accountable. Thousands of guns are turned in. The police take all the credit, but Michael doesn’t care. 

Officials at Stevie’s detention center decide that he has been rehabilitated and send him to Ma in Colorado. Stevie comes out determined to prove his own innocence. Two years later, an appellate court overturns his conviction, citing unethical police tactics and abuses of power. An appellate lawyer named Charles Stephenson had taken the case pro bono. Over the two years of working on Stevie’s case, Stephenson becomes something of a father figure to Michael. He works tirelessly without expecting compensation because he is outraged by Stevie’s case and the blatant corruption. MacDonald admits, “Discovering there were people like Stephenson helped me to finally understand what justice meant” (253).