Why do they hate us? Lehane’s latest novel helped me answer that.

I integrated every school I attended until I went off to college. We were a strongly Catholic family. My father would go on to become a deacon in the church, and so it followed that the schools my parents chose were Catholic. I am Black. The friends I went to school with were all girls, and they were all white. But they were also Italian, Polish, Bohemian, Irish. And while it is true that their ancestors hadn’t come to America as slaves, they’d not been particularly welcomed either.

In the 1970s in our Midwestern city, subtle instances of anti-Catholic discrimination still existed. Nothing as horribly visceral as the Jim Crow laws in the South, but bigotry nonetheless. At school different. The ravages of desegregation – the violence, hatred, rock-throwing, destruction, name-calling – were something that, at that time, I believed belonged exclusively to the South. And by that, I didn’t mean South Boston.