Small Mercies

South Boston is famous for its insularity and suspicion of outsiders, and because Small Mercies begins with the imminent implementation of the busing initiative as its social and political backdrop, the novel is deliberately crafted to reflect the profound anxiety of many residents over the imminent breach of the city’s invisible rules and boundaries. Some characters voice legitimate objections to busing, stating that those responsible for its implementation are hypocrites, and that sending children from one poor district to another is unlikely to enhance their education. They also counter that when students are suddenly forced to share spaces with those whom they have been trained to view as enemies, violence is likely to break out. Sooner or later, however, these more nuanced arguments give way to ugly racism and violent outbursts that reflect much more poorly on the people of South Boston than on the people they are trying to exclude. This dynamic is portrayed within the context of the novel as neighborhood rumor is quick to spin Auggie Williamson’s murder as the case of a drug dealer who simply got what was coming to him. Likewise, Mary Pat’s coworkers dismiss news reports revealing Auggie to be a hard-working student from a respectable family, for they derisively scoff, “Look how they try to make him look like a saint […] Keep talking about how he was a hard worker, his father’s a hard worker, blah blah blah. We’ll see” (85); such contemptuous attitudes reflect the widespread resistance that white residents of South Boston historically showed toward the Black citizens of the city during this time frame. Likewise at the anti-busing rallies, religious authorities drone on about “the inevitable destruction of their way of life” (135).

Surrounded by such systemic vitriol, it takes the terrible trauma of Jules’s death for Mary Pat to realize that the real threats lie within her own community, not beyond it, and that the ferocity of South Boston residents’ resistance to outsiders is mostly a distraction from this unpleasant truth. She already knew that “Noel didn’t discover heroin in Vietnam […] heroin discovered Noel in the projects of South Boston” (41). But in the case of Jules, a community that talks endlessly about looking out for one another instinctively closes ranks to protect a child molester and murderer. They are so desperate to protect the idea of their community against the perceived invasion of outsiders that they are willing to betray every single value that their community ostensibly stands for, betraying the very notion of community as a positive connection. In the end, the community is the source of its own corruption, not only by allowing racism and hatred to fester and explode into violence, but also by inducing a willful ignorance of the real dangers of organized white crime members who walk the streets freely.