All Souls

1798 Words4 Pages

All Souls by Michael Patrick McDonald is a non-fiction narrative of a family of eleven children raised by a mostly single mother under the dangers of criminality, family abuse, drugs, alcohol, violence, and guns in the projects of South Boston. The story began upon Michael McDonald’s visit to Southie at the age of 28 after four years of being able to transcend the boundaries of poverty and social injustice. This visit revived Michael’s memories of growing up in poverty, witnessing deaths and crimes; therefore, he began to narrate his life and the life of his family and friends.
Michael McDonald and his family were constantly subjected to oppression and discrimination due to their social status, skin color, and looks. They all moved several times trying to find an affordable and safer place where to live, but their quest was far beyond their reach and capabilities. The McDonalds were prisoners of their own social immobility which prevented them from prospering in life. Michael was less than a year old, when his mother, Helen McDonald, known as Ma moved with him and her other seven children to Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of working-class Irish families, escaping the insecurities and oppression of Columbia Point, a mostly black neighborhood. Then, they move to Old Colony after being forced to leave Jamaica Plain because Ma’s dad believed they were deteriorating the house too rapidly and it represented a loss on its book value. They all live in Old Colony for a very long time, experiencing some of the worst crimes and life experiences before the ones that survived Southie’s lifestyle could ever being able to get out.
According to sociologist, social mobility is the ability to “move from one place, economically, culturally, and pe...

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... boundaries of poverty. It would still take Ma a couple of years of hard work and dedication before getting out of Southie, but never as long as it took her in the nineteen hundreds. The truth is that single mother’s face far more challenges than marry couples with kids do, especially when combating dangers, crime, and poverty. According to the statistics released by The Urban Institute of Washington, “single-mother households become poor at a rate of 15.7 percent a year, compared with just 2.8 percent for married-parent households” (Ribar and Hamrick). However, it is proven by studies and statistics that the United States is slowly reducing its poverty rate by increasing the funding of services and institutions that help low income families; therefore, it is believable that in present years, Ma would be able to get out of Southie much faster than she did in 1990.

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