The Bobby Bones Show - Award Winning Author Dennis Lehane discusses his new book “Small Mercies”

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Dennis Lehane has written amazing books over his illustrious career.His list of successful projects includes: Shutter Island, Mystic River, and Gone Baby Gone, all eventually turned into successful movies.In his new book “Small Mercies” he delves into the chaotic period in Boston in the summer of 74 when the school desegregation of its public schools turned into violence.Connect With Dennis LehaneWebsite: https://dennislehane.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Dennis.LehaneTwitter: https://twitter.com/dennis_lehane About the Show *****Thank you so much for listening to the TAKIN’ A WALK PODCAST SHOW hosted by Buzz Knight!  Listen to more honest conversations with a compelling mix of guests ranging from musicians, authors, and insiders with their own stories. Get inspired, get motivated, and gain insights from honest conversations every week that can help you with your own journey. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be part of this blessed family.Website: https://takinawalk.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebuzzknightLinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/buzzknightLinkfire: https://lnk.to/takinawalk Please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends and family!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple, Spotify, the podcast, Playground, and kindly share it with a friend and leave a review. Today we have a very special virtual guest, the best-selling novelist of so many great stories, Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island, his great novels turned into amazing movies. Dennis Lehane. His new book is called Small Mercies, and it's described as a jaw-dropping thriller, set in the days of the 1974 Boston School Segregation Crisis. We'll welcome Dennis Lehane next on Taking a Walk.

Well, Dennis, thanks for being on Taking a Walk, and congratulations on the release of the new book, Small Mercies. Oh, thanks a lot. Thank you. So take us back, you can, to what it was like, literally taking a walk through those Dorchester neighborhoods back in 1974, those big row houses and everything. What was that like? I mean, it was, for me, as a kid, it was wonderful right up until you started to see the graffiti. And then you'd start to see, I mean, imagine seeing KKK in Boston. That to me is,

is just burned into my memory. You'd see kill all the NWR. And where, you'd see N-Words stay out. It was a crazy, crazy time. This was, you know, Vietnam was winding down. Nixon had just resigned. I mean, it was a pretty historic summer, and that's the same summer they desegregated the, you know, the public schools. And Bill Russell, as a great leader for the Boston Celtics,

often talked about the difficulty of being an African-American during that period, too. correct? Yeah, yeah. It was, I think if you were, look, there were two very clear issues that were happening in Boston that summer. One was desegregation, which absolutely had to happen. It had been delayed for nine years. The Boston School Committee had blocked it for nine years. And it had to happen and it had to happen right then and it had to happen, you know, without question. And then there was the other issue, which was the method by which it was bussing. And it being with, I believe that if the suburbs had stuck with it and they pulled out at the 11th hour and left Garrity and the neighborhoods holding the bag, I believe that if it had been a countywide

desegregation of all schools, that it would have been a raging success. But because it was dropped into the poor neighborhoods, like South Ely, like. Dorchester like Charlestown. It gave them, A, one more reason to feel as if the powers that B were telling them what they were going to do, whether they wanted it or not. And B, it stoked

a racism that had that had been lying not dormant, but I think quiet. And until that moment. And then it just exploded. It just was like ripping the you know, ripping the band-aid off a scar. What was the

soundtrack musically during that period that you recall either listening on the radio or what was popular then. Oh, on the radio. Yeah, it's even in the book, you know, I was, Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me. I remember it was a big song that summer. I think there was things like, you know, the night day drove old Dixie Down, I think, was a big hit. It was like Tony Orlando and Dawn and stuff like that was big. Maybe seasons in the sun might have been around that time. I'm just, I mean, I'm just reaching back here. My mom would listen to W.H.D.H. Just Cain on W.H.D.H. Because they had this,

they had this every hour. They would give you a number. I'll never forget this. And they would give you this number. It would be like, say, 103.8.33. And it was the magic number. And you would call in. And if you could get through the busy signal, which you never could, you would, and you were the 10th caller, you would win that money. And they would give this away every hour, every hour on the hour. So my mother constantly had W.H.D.H. So whatever was the crappy pop songs of that time, I knew them all. And there were some bad ones, right? There were some really bad ones. There were some really bad ones. They're still stuck in my head. But it's an interesting backdrop to such a crazy period that the book focuses on with that,

you know, that pop music and, you know, just that really tense. period. Yeah. Yeah. It was a, it was a very, it's a very strange thing to see people who wave at you and smile at you and are your, you know, which you know, I live right over the border with, with, with South Yale, Dorchester. It was the first neighborhood, um, south of South Boston. And to see these people who, you know, would help shovel your walk if you ask them to, you know, I mean, just, just, you know, good, solid people. And then simultaneously, those people are throwing rocks at buses with school children in them. And you can't get your head around that at nine.

It's hard enough to get your head around that at 20. And I don't know, it's a very strange thing to try and, I watch my kids go through this now. How do you reconcile not only the bad that's in good people, but the good that's in bad people? Like, how do you, how do you connect those? to, you know. I don't, I don't think, I think it's a lifelong process. And your inspirations as a writer really have always gone to themes of crime and corruption and intensity. So I have to think at nine years old, that's one of the things that happened that really shaped you around small mercies. Oh, without a doubt, without it out. Yeah, you just,

I think when I was writing this book, one of the things that was really surprising to me was, it's a dark book. I mean, it's a dark book. It drops the hammer and it just keeps going and it never stops. It's like it's a one way, you know, elevated drop to hell in a lot of ways. But writing it was a really pleasant experience. It was uplifting. It was, I think it was a, because I was purging a lot.

I was purging a lot of things that nine-year-old me had needed to purge. And so I started to feel this overwhelming sadness as I was writing the book. And I realized that I was really just trying to process my own sadness at that age because I just couldn't make sense of any of this. You know, and the vitriol, the level of vitriol. I mean, we're Bostonians, right? Buzz are you from here? I've lived here much of my life.

I'm originally from Connecticut, but I've been here since the early 90s. Got it. So I grew up in Boston. One of the things that is really common because it's such an immigrant-based culture is, you know, they have a common way of saying, oh, the Poles, oh, the Irish, oh, the Jews, oh, the Italians, right? You know, because it's very European in that way. And there's something kind of with a soft eye roll, and it's, and it's, there's almost a sweetness to it in a strange way, you know, that sweetness disappears when they say, oh, the blacks. completely disappears. And then they're not using the word black. And there was, I think I was shocked by that because at first when I was nine, I thought it was all part of the same stew.

But what busing did was say, no, you wouldn't be reacting in this way if they were busing in Italian kids from, you know, if it was a neighborhood's rights issue and they had decided to switch the population, say of South Boston High and Revere High, so that you're switching Italian-American kids with Irish American kids. Would there have been the same level of vitriol? Absolutely not. Would there have been a legitimate anger over, hey, you're forcing us to do something that we don't want to do? Yeah, sure, absolutely. But it wouldn't have reached this level of rage. That was particular to African Americans coming into our neighborhoods is how they look at it. Do you feel Boston is ever going to shake this? No. That's the real legacy of this.

is because I was nine, I'm sitting there and I'm going, what are we doing on the CBA? What is Walter Cronkite doing talking about my city? That's, it was national. You have to understand how big it was. It was leading the national news every night for weeks was the busing crisis. And they started having to bring in state troopers, you know, and they started to have to bring in the city cops to escort these buses up the hill. That was national news. And so everybody looked and we became a symbol of East Coast racism.

And that's, I don't think the city will ever shake it, maybe 100 years from now. But we're talking, you know, I'm writing about it 50, almost 50, full years after it happened. And it's, you know, it's right there, like very fresh in the rear rear rear rear. Could you go back in time and give your younger self writing advice maybe that you would sort of to consider? No, no. Because I got great writing advice, you know, very young, and 16, you know, and the first thing I ever taught was, you know, write what you know. What that means is, that doesn't mean if you come from a family as a dry cleaning business, that you write about a family from a dry cleaning, you know, you write about the dry cleaning business. It means right

about what you know. It means that most universal things will have happened to you by your, by the time you're a certain age, you'll have had your heartbroken, you'll have lost your illusions, have understood both the taste of victory and the sting of defeat. You will know all of these things that are super important to every human being. That's what right, what you know means. It doesn't mean, you know, my dad was a foreman at Sears and Roboc. Right about Sears and Roboc. No, you know, it means right about your broken heart, right about your disillusionment,

right about your triumphs, right about your happy moments, whatever. you know, through the filter of characters, through the filter of other things. And I got that lesson very young. I also grew up clearly in a very interesting time. And if you grow up in a very interesting time, you're given a gift as a writer. In an interesting time, in an interesting place. I think, you know, people say how, you know, I get credit for both characters and dialogue. And I'm like, if you grew up in my neighborhood and listen to the way people spoke,

and looked at how just wonderfully nuts everybody was. You'd write good characters too. It's not all that hard. You know? So do you go back there ever? I go back a ton. But I haven't been back because of COVID. I used to go back every single year.

Every single year I take my daughters to Red Sox game. I'd see all my buddies. And then COVID hit and I haven't done it. But the last time I was there, something truly magical happen, which was I took my daughters and my wife, and we went by the house where I grew up. And it was being, it was literally, they were moving trucks on the street. And everybody was the people who had been living there since my dad sold it, were moving out because the house had sold. And I walked up with my daughters,

a little, little time and said, hey, how you doing? I grew up here. Can I take a look? And they They were like, sure. They didn't care. They were leaving. And I walked in and I took my daughters to every room in the house where I, and I can still remember they were running around from room to room and just saying, Daddy used to be play with Uncle Jerry here. Daddy used to, you know, it was fantastic. Wow. That was just the greatest gift.

Those people were so kind. And the guy said to me, oh, I got to ask you something. I wanted to know this for years. And he opened up this door and on the other side of the door was a wall. and he said, what's there? And I said, a staircase. And he was like, there's a staircase on the other side of that wall. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know why the guy threw up a wall.

I don't know why the owner threw up a wall. But yeah, there was a staircase right there. Amazing. It was magic. It was magic. That was the last time I was in Boston. In closing, Dennis, as we think of our divided country today, what lessons are in small mercies that apply now? We're all idiots.

we're all the same idiots. Stop acting like that your anger is special, that your unhappiness is special. Stop trying to wrap it into something, some sort of movement. And just accept that we're all the same idiotic species. And I don't care what color you are. I don't care what your ideology is. I don't care what your religion is. We're all the same idiots.

And I really feel like if you could get there, you know, it's one of my favorite lines. is from a movie I love called Bull Durham, you know, and he says, why are you so nervous? And he says, because my dad's in the stands. And Costner says, he's your dad. He's as full of shit as anyone. I love that. You know what I mean? That's just like, where's all just, we need to, I mean, when your ideology allows you to pick

up an AR-15, a machine gun, and go shoot a bunch of children in a mall, your ideology is bullshit. Like, it just, it needs to stop. It needs to stop to just, we need to stop with the rage and the hate. And I think that starts by just saying, you know, we're all the same. We're all the same. And we're not a couple of steps above the rest of the animals. Like, not by much, you know.

It just ease up, man. Live your life. Let people live their life. Let people enjoy their lives and protect their kids. That's it. And that's the only advice I got. And Bobby in the book, Small Mercy, She says something very similar along those lines.

You're amazing. Your work's amazing. I'm grateful that I had you on. And congratulations on small mercies. Thank you so much, Buzz. Taking a walk with Buzz Night is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast, Eating While Broke, is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future. This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre

as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up. There's an economic component to community striving. If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they failed. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant, I sit down with Tiffany the Budget, Budget, Nista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money. What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?

We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts. Too many of us were never, ever taught. If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more. Listen to money and wealth with John Hope Bryant from the Black Effect Network. on the I'd Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know

there's a lot to break down. Gorsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They hold and Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise. franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T, everybody's talking about. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. From IHeart Podcast, Saigon. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. They're pouring petrol all over here. Freedom for Vietnam! There's a fire coming to this country and it's going to burn out everything.

Listen to Saigon on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.