The Dorchester I grew up in was working class traditional, the neighborhoods, more often than not, delineated by the Catholic churches they surrounded. The men were foremen, crew chiefs, probation officers, telephone repairmen, or, like my father, firemen. The women were housewives who sometimes had part-time jobs themselves, sometimes even had education degrees from state colleges. We were all Irish, Polish, or close enough to pass. We were all white. And when the federal desegregation of public schools began in 1974, most of the men worked overtime and most of the women went to full time and most of the kids went to private Catholic high schools.

This Dorchester has changed, of course. Divorce practically unheard of in my parents’ generation is commonplace in mine, and I know a lot fewer of my neighbors than I used to. But we still have access to the union jobs, we usually know a state rep who can get us into civil service. To some extent, we’re connected.

Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester is poor. The neighborhoods, more often than not, are delineated by the public parks and community centers they surround. The men are dockworkers and hospital orderlies, in some cases postal clerks, a few firemen. The women are the orderlies, the cashiers, the cleaning women, the department store clerks. They are nurses, too, and cops, and civil service clerks, but chances are, if they’ve reached that kind of pinnacle, they don’t live in Dorchester anymore. They’ve moved to Dedham or Framingham or Brockton.

In my Dorchester, you stay because of community and tradition, because you’ve built a comfortable, if somewhat poor, existence where little ever changes. A hamlet.

In Jenna Angeline’s Dorchester, you stay because you don’t have any choice.

Nowhere is it harder to try and explain the differences between these two Dorchesters White Dorchester and Black Dorchester than in White Dorchester. This is particularly true in my neighborhood, because we’re one of the boundary neighborhoods. The moment you pass through Edward Everett Square heading south, east, or west, you’re in Black Dorchester. So, people around here have a lot of trouble accepting the differences as anything other than black and white. A guy I grew up with once put it about as plainly as you’ll ever hear it: “Hey, Patrick,” he said, “enough of this bullshit. I grew up in Dorchester. I grew up poor. No one ever gave me nothing. My old man left when I was a kid just like a lotta the niggers in the ‘Bury. No one begged me to learn how to read or get a job or be something. Nobody gave me affirmative action to help me out either, that’s for damn sure. And I didn’t pick up an Uzi, join a gang, and start doing drivebys. So spare me this shit. They got no excuse.”

People from White Dorchester always call Black Dorchester “the ‘Bury.” Short for Roxbury, the section of Boston that begins where Black Dorchester ends, where they load dead young black kids into meat wagons on the average of eight a weekend sometimes. Black Dorchester gives up its young on a pretty regular basis too, and those in White Dorchester refuse to call it anything but the ‘Bury. Somebody just forgot to change it on the maps.