Mission Flats

11

In the year and a half I lived in Boston as a graduate student, I never went to Mission Flats, not once. The neighborhood was mentioned often enough around BU. The savvier students, native Bostonians especially, referred to it in a smirky, knowing way, but always with fearful reverence. The name Mission Flats was shorthand for them. It meant all the things dreaded by city dwellers: a place where one would not want to get lost on a dark night, a place where stolen cars turned up abandoned, where stray bullets passed through kitchen windows, a place to score drugs (if you were so inclined). But for all the talk, few of them had actually seen it. I suppose every city has its isolated, run-down districts. Still, it was surprising how few Bostonians — white Bostonians especially — had ever been to Mission Flats. To them, it was as remote as the Gobi Desert. To be fair, there is no real reason to visit the Flats unless you live or work there. The neighborhood is small. There are no shops or sights. The only institution of any distinction is the New England Presbyterian Hospital, which found itself marooned in the Flats when the tide of wealth receded in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Even the picturesque features for which Mission Flats is named have been erased; there is no longer a mission or a flat there. The mission, where John Eliot preached Christianity to the Indians in the seventeenth century, vanished long ago. And the flats — a marshy, pestilential fen surrounding the Little Muddy River — had already been drained and filled by 1900. The district is adjacent to nowhere and on the way to nowhere, dangling beneath Franklin Park like a rotten pear. It exists in near-perfect isolation from the rest of the city, a sort of blighted Brigadoon. But it had taken up a spot in the ether of the imagination, especially among white suburbanites who knew nothing about Mission Flats except that they did not ever want to be there.

Kelly and I reached the eastern edge of the Flats shortly before noon. ‘You want to look around a little?’ he offered, and as I drove, he directed me down a broad avenue called Franklin Street. Here the sidewalk was lined with the same red-brick row houses that fill the Back Bay and the South End. Proceeding north, though, the street wall began to falter. Burned-out and abandoned buildings cropped up between the occupied ones. Here and there a tenement would simply have vanished, leaving a gap between the rough interior walls of the adjacent buildings. These vacant lots were strewn with stones and bricks. Eventually the row houses gave way to larger apartment buildings, then the desolate Grove Park housing project, then a commercial strip: auto-body shops, check-cashing services, convenience stores, tow lots.

‘The tour buses don’t get out here much,’ Kelly remarked dryly.

We turned off Franklin Street into a maze of side streets with tranquil names, Orchard Street, Amherst Street, Willow Street. The apartment buildings fell away and one-, two-, and three-family homes lined the sidewalks. Cracked driveways, sagging porches, peeled paint, even a few broken windows. The well-kept houses served only to highlight the decay of the surrounding ones. Yet for all that decay, on a sunny autumn day the neighborhood did not look especially threatening. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be cheery details: a milk crate nailed to a phone pole as a makeshift basketball hoop, flower boxes, little girls skipping rope. This was no underworld, just poor. I had seen poverty before. There is no shortage of dirt-poor swamp Yankees and Quebecois in Acadia County. I imagined people here felt the same sense of diffident yearning. Poor is poor.

We emerged from the winding side streets and Kelly announced, ‘This is Mission Ave.’

(Bostonians reflexively shorten the word avenue to ave. A New Yorker sees the abbreviation 5th Ave. and says ‘Fifth Avenue’; a Bostonian sees Massachusetts Avenue and says ‘Mass Ave.’ I don’t know why. In any event, in Boston the road is generally referred to as Mission Ave.)

The main artery through the Flats was a wasteland. Looking north, Mission Avenue was a corridor of empty lots strewn with rubble and garbage. Tenements stood here and there, listing like punch-drunk boxers. The pediments above each door had been stripped away along with any brass or metal trim, drainpipes, mail slots, street numbers — anything that could plausibly be carried off and sold. Someone had erected a chainlink fence around one of these buildings to define a sort of yard; scumbles of garbage were caught in it like fish in a drift net.

‘These row houses used to stretch for miles,’ Kelly said. ‘Used to be a nice place. Italians lived here, Irish, Jews. They all got out.’

We passed the Winthrop Village housing project, a cluster of concrete bunkers set in a landscaped park. A Boston Housing Authority Police cruiser sat idling near the entrance, and the cop, an enormous black guy with a badass goatee and wraparound shades, watched us drive past.

Kelly pointed to graffiti, the same insignia recurring over and over: two interlocking letters, MP, artlessly spray-painted in childish lettering. ‘Braxton’s crew,’ Kelly said. ‘Mission Posse.’ The Posse had tagged everything: MP on telephone poles, MP on sidewalks, they’d even painted over street signs with it.

‘Pull in here, Ben Truman.’ Kelly was pointing at a little market called Mal’s. ‘I want to use the phone.’

Kelly disappeared into the store, and after flipping through the radio stations for a minute, I decided to get out of the car, take in the sunshine and the view. There was not much to look at. The oatmeal shade of the sidewalk nearly matched Mal’s storefront. Even the signs in the window had been bleached by the sun. I stood on the sidewalk, crossing and uncrossing my arms, leaning and unleaning against a parking meter.

People stared. A kid hanging in a doorway, sagging against the doorjamb like an empty set of clothes. An overweight woman in Adidas shower sandals. Were they staring? What were they staring at? Mine was the only white face on the street — was that enough to draw attention?

The kid draped in the doorway roused himself to approach me. His face was the color of caramel, almost as fair as my own. He wore new-out-of-the-box white sneakers and a loose hockey-style shirt that hung off his bony shoulders.

A second kid joined him. A huge, plump kid I had not noticed before.

There was a cretinous quality about him. He had narrow eyes incised into a bloated, doughy face.

‘What are you waiting for?’ the first kid said.

‘Just waiting on a friend. He’s inside.’

The kid studied me, as if my answer were suspicious.

‘This is a nice car,’ the slit-eyed guy said.

The first kid was still staring at me. ‘You got any money?’

‘No.’

‘We need some money to go to the store.’

‘Sorry’

‘You lost?’

‘No. I told you, my friend is in the store.’

‘All we need is like a dollar,’ said Slit Eyes.

‘I told you-’

‘Come on, a dollar?’

I gave them a one-dollar bill.

‘Thought you didn’t have any money’

‘I didn’t say that. I said I wasn’t giving you any’

‘Only now you did. You gave us some.’

‘So?’

‘So, a dollar? That’s like, why don’t you just give us a fuckin’ penny?’ The skinny kid watched me for a reaction. ‘Come on, you got a whole walletful. I just seen it. We need it to go to the store.’

‘No. Sorry’

‘We need to get something to eat.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Slit Eyes, ‘something to eat.’

‘I’m not giving you any more.’

‘Why not? I told you, we need it.’

I shook my head. Maybe it was time to announce that I was a cop. But these were just kids, it was under control. Besides, I was not a cop here. I was outside my jurisdiction, I had no police powers. Just another tourist. ‘I gave you a buck, fellas. That’s all you’re gonna get.’

Slit Eyes edged beside me. ‘But I just seen your wallet.’ He was taller and heavier than me. His eyelids squeezed tight as clams.

‘Come on,’ the first kid wheedled, ‘just help us out.’

He stepped toward me, not aggressively — or maybe it was aggressively, I’m still not sure. I raised my hand to hold him away. My five fingertips pressed lightly on his breastbone.

‘Hey, don’t touch me!’ the skinny kid said softly. ‘You don’t want to get physical.’

‘I’m not getting phys-’

Slit Eyes cut me off: ‘Hey, yo, don’t go getting physical. There’s no need.’

‘Look, you asked for a buck, I gave it to you.’

‘Yeah,’ the skinny kid said, ‘but now you went and started getting physical. What’s up with that?’

‘I didn’t get physical.’

‘Have I disrespected you?’

‘No.’

‘No, we’re just talking here. I just asked you for some help. How come you’re all mad?’

‘I’m not mad.’ I pulled my hand back down. ‘I’m asking you nicely now, respectfully: Step back.’

‘It’s a public sidewalk. You think you can tell me where to go just ’cause I asked you for help? It’s like that? I got to step back because you gave me a whole dollar?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You thought it. I can see.’

‘I didn’t think anything.’

‘Yes, you did.’ The skinny kid reached out and tapped my front pants pocket with his knuckles, apparently to feel my wallet.

I brushed his hand away, gently. ‘Don’t touch me.’

‘Hey! I told you, you don’t have to push. I’m just talking to you.’

Kelly emerged from the little market. He glanced at the three of us, then said, in a peremptory way, ‘Come on, Ben, we don’t have time to fool around. I want to see my daughter.’ He brushed between us and climbed into the passenger seat. ‘Well? Let’s go.’

I stepped around the two kids without a word, and they offered not a word to me.

‘It’s like another country,’ I said in the car, but Kelly did not respond, and saying it did not dispel my uneasiness.