Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “Aunt Nonie,” he said. He was twenty-three years old. A man. A US Navy veteran but I’d been part of his life since he was a little boy. So he pulled the cap out of his pocket and put it on. Appropriate, I thought. The sailor returned. Wearing the navy blue peacoat, those bellbottom trousers, with a bit of a roll in his stride. He’d managed to make it into the last few months of the war serving on a destroyer.

  Now we heard voices, a chorus of shouts, high-pitched. We turned a corner into an open space filled with women.

  “The fish market,” John said. “These women are mostly from the Claddagh. They have the morning to sell the catch. Fierce competition among them. But cooperation too. They are Ireland’s secret weapon. Our women saved us.”

  As we moved closer I could see that the women were dressed in traditional clothing. Long red skirts, black shawls tied at the waist. Each one had a basket of fish in front of her and was calling out the qualities of their wares.

  “Herring, herring, herring,” the woman closest to us shouted. “King of the sea.” She was younger than the others with very black hair and those blue eyes I’d grown up with in Bridgeport. White skin. Her cheeks reddened by the wind. She waved us over to her. “You Yanks never tasted anything as fresh as Galway Bay herring. Restores your liver. Good medicine for you, young sailor.”

  “But we’re not Yanks,” I said to her. “At least not only Yanks. Our grandmother was one of you. Sold fish right here along with her mother and sister.”

  “And what was the name,” the woman asked.

  “Kelly,” Ed said. “We’re Kellys.”

  “Kelly? Half of Galway is called Kelly, but I don’t mind any fisher folk with that name. Kellys were farmers mostly.”

  “She was a Keeley,” I said. “Her father and grandmother came to Freeport from further west, Carna.” This was the information I’d gathered when I had come to Ireland twenty years before when Maura O’Connor had introduced me to an old woman who remembered my Granny Honora. She was probably long dead.

  “Keeleys. They were blow-ins,” she said.

  “No, no,” I said. “They lived in Barna a hundred years ago.”

  “A hundred years ago?” She laughed and snapped her fingers. “No longer than that. My family, the Kings, have fished these waters since beyond memory. I’m Katie King.”

  A group of women had gathered, watching us and listening. Now Katie spoke to them.

  “What’s she saying,” Joseph asked me. “Is that some other language?” Katie was speaking in Irish.

  “That’s our mother tongue, Joe,” I said. “Lost to us.”

  “I remember,” Ed said. “Something familiar in the rhythms. The throaty sounds. But I don’t recognize any words.”

  “Granny tried to teach us but we wouldn’t sit still long enough to learn,” I said.

  “Oh, I get it,” Joe said. “That’s Gaelic.”

  “Irish,” I said. “Our own brand of Gaelic.”

  Now Katie turned back to us. “There are stories of Keeley women alright,” she said. “One of them was, well, taken advantage of by the Scoundrel Pykes.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “That’s our family. My aunt Máire was a prisoner in the big house. Her sister Honora is our granny.”

  “So they did live,” Katie said. “We never knew what happened to our people after they left.” She pointed to a very old woman, though not the one I had met all those years ago. Small, a network of wrinkles on her face. “Bridie’s nearly ninety. Born just after the Great Starvation. She has knowledge from her mother. Those who died. Those who escaped, and those of us who endured here.”

  The old woman stepped closer to Katie and spoke to her in Irish. Katie nodded and said to us, “There are not many fishermen left in Barna. All driven out years ago. But here you are come back.”

  “Yes,” I said. “My granny Honora used to say we wouldn’t die and that annoyed them.”

  Katie laughed and translated the words for the other women, who nodded and smiled. Survivors, I thought. We are the survivors. I understood why John O’Connor had said that these women were Ireland’s secret weapon. Hundreds of thousands of them had been as determined as Granny Honora had been. Their children would live. And if they had to leave Ireland to save them, well they would always be Irish. Irish above all.

  I looked at Ed. Did he understand that these women were heroes, as our grandmother had been? Joseph was looking down at the ground, pointing something out to Ed. No shoes. Many of the women had no shoes. Nobody in Chicago was so poor as to go barefoot. Weren’t there always shoes in the mayor’s Christmas boxes? I hoped that Katie hadn’t seen that exchange between father and son. Why embarrass her? But she lifted her foot up and was wriggling her toes.

  “If you grow up in your bare feet you’ll never get pneumonia in the snow,” she said. John O’Connor laughed.

  “See,” he said to us, “the poor English never really understood what they were up against.”

  * * *

  “And was your grandmother really that poor?” Joseph asked me as we drove along the coast road toward Barna. He’s picturing his mother in her ermine coat, I thought. Their fancy Lake Shore Drive apartment. The house in Eagle River. All of this from a barefoot fishmonger?

  “It was much worse then,” I said. “Our whole family almost starved to death. Our grandfather did die and so did a million more.”

  “Was that the Potato Famine?” Joe asked.

  “Not a famine,” I said. “Plenty of food in the country. But our people were like the sharecroppers in the US. The landlords owned everything. The people turned over their crops to pay outrageous rents on land that had belonged to them.”

  Joseph was looking out at the wide waters of the bay, touched by a winter sun that kept shining.

  “Our people had no control over their lives then,” Ed said. “They couldn’t vote. Couldn’t elect anyone to speak for them. They only had the potato which sustained them until the blight destroyed the crop.”

  “Dead bodies all along this road,” John said. “People desperate to get to Galway City to beg for help but they were turned away. They just collapsed and died where they fell.”

  “And the government didn’t…,” Joseph said.

  “It wasn’t their government,” Ed said. I turned to Joseph.

  “Think of how your father helped the people of Chicago during the Depression. Remember, he was working for them. Maybe politics isn’t such a dirty business after all,” I said to Ed. “This area could have used a few powerful aldermen.”

  We arrived at Barna. John parked next to a pub and led us down to the shore.

  “Here, right here, Ed,” I said. “Granny was born here at this spot.”

  “But there are no houses here,” Ed said.

  “There were,” John O’Connor said. “Thirty cottages. A fishing village called Freeport—in Irish, An Chélbh.”

  We were standing on a jumble of rocks, some as big as boulders, others only round pebbles, but all packed together on the shore of Galway Bay.

  “But there’s nothing here,” Ed said again.

  “The landlord who owned their cottages sent in soldiers at midnight to drive the thirty families out and set fire to their homes,” John said. “They didn’t worry about the people inside. Thatch goes up very quickly. Some didn’t escape, too sick and weakened by starvation to flee the flames.”

  “Horrible,” Joseph said.

  “Pyke the landlord didn’t see the Irish as human beings,” John said. “He wanted the land to build a seaside resort.”

  Ed turned and looked at the empty space. I could see that he was imagining the scene. Cottages jammed together in this small area all burning in the darkness. The terror, the confusion. Women carrying their children as Granny had held Ed’s own father, Stephen, only a year old. My father, Patrick, seven, had tried to help his mother.

  “And many of those who survived the fire died soon afterwards,” said John. “No food, no shelter. No one had anything.”


  “And yet here we are,” Ed said.

  “She saved us, Ed,” I said. “Granny, Aunt Máire and their children escaped in our great-grandfather Keeley’s boat. They sailed out onto the dark waters of Galway Bay, with your father in her arms, pregnant with our uncle Michael. Eight children between them, escaping. We didn’t die.”

  And Ed understood. He reached over and took my hand, and then put his arm around Joseph. “So many lives depended on her courage,” Ed said. “All the Kellys.”

  “And millions more. All of us Irish-Americans are descendant from someone who got out against all the odds,” I said.

  John O’Connor had been standing a little apart. Ed and Joseph and I were wrapped in a cloak of emotion, like in the old Irish tales. We had somehow been transported back in time so that the young Honora, as well as the baby who would become Ed’s father, Stephen, along with my father, Patrick, Uncle James, Aunt Bridget, all of them were somehow here. Aunt Máire’s children. Johnny Óg who would die in the Civil War, the son of her young fisherman husband who had drowned. Her other two boys born of the landlord, as was my aunt Grace. All of them now married with families. Hundreds of us down through the generations. Overwhelming really.

  Now John O’Connor spoke. “Against the odds certainly. Hard for us to imagine how difficult it was for the people to escape. Starvation brings a kind of passivity. Some families just lay down together in front of the hearth, barricaded the door against the packs of wild dogs that fed on corpses, and waited to die. Those who did survive usually had someone who’d gone over before and sent back money for the fare.”

  “For us it was our great-uncle Patrick, our grandfather’s brother,” Ed said. “Nora and I knew him as an old man. Full of stories about his work on the I & M Canal and the years he spent trapping furs up north with the Ojibwe. He sent the money.”

  “Don’t forget Aunt Máire stole the landlord’s jewels,” I said.

  This got Joseph’s attention. “Stole?”

  “And proud of it. She told me the Scoundrel Pykes owed her that and much more,” I said.

  John O’Connor nodded. “Even when people had money in their hands for the fare, the landlord could still stop them. He would send soldiers onto the ships confiscating money, claiming he was owed it for rent or as a reimbursement for handing out some sacks of Indian corn.”

  “But that’s disgusting,” Joseph said. “How could anyone defend against that?”

  “The people were clever. They wouldn’t assemble until a ship was in port. A piper alerted them. You’ve heard the song ‘Danny Boy,’ ‘the pipes, the pipes are calling’? That describes how a piper signaled them to sneak down to the ship.

  “Some walked hundreds of miles. Whole families, children and old people staggering along, somehow made it to Cork or Dublin and piled onto ships that provided little food and brackish water. Others got to Liverpool. All had rough crossings.”

  “The coffin ships,” I said. He nodded.

  “The Atlantic Ocean is a graveyard,” John said. “It’s said one-fourth of those passengers perished. One ship sunk a few miles off the coast. Relatives waving farewell saw their loved ones drown.”

  “Our granny’s two brothers died. One had got as far as Canada. French families took their children in. There’s a story about our two French cousins arriving with Uncle Patrick. I wish I’d listened more closely,” I said.

  “Every family in Bridgeport who came from Ireland left behind death and despair,” Ed said.

  I turned to John O’Connor. “Ed left school at twelve,” I said. “Had all kinds of jobs. More or less taught himself how to be an engineer and built Chicago into the city it is now. Saved it from bankruptcy. FDR himself depended on him and so does President Truman.”

  I’d never been struck so forcefully by the sheer unlikeliness of Ed’s rise. Of all our successes. Joseph Kennedy had never spoken about how his family had escaped. But surely they hadn’t had an easy passage either. Thirty million Irish Americans and most of us without a real notion of what our ancestors suffered or the kind of determination it took to make the journey. Ed began speaking but he sounded as if he were talking to himself.

  “Half the Irish workers on the I & M Canal died,” he said. “Froze to death in below zero temperatures sleeping in unheated tents. Dead bodies discovered in the morning. Others were crushed when inferior equipment failed. Similar statistics for those building the railroads. Did you know, Mr. O’Connor, the Irish were used on projects considered too dangerous to give to slaves? After all slaves had value. We didn’t.”

  We. I’d never heard Ed talk about the defeats, the losses the Irish had suffered. He always spoke of our victories. All those men at the Irish Fellowship Club were proud of how they’d earned their fortunes. Patting each other on the back. And yet each one of them had come from some place like this.

  The light was leaving the sky over the bay. The sunset turned the clouds a kind of purple-red. Long stripes on the horizon.

  “Tír na nÓg,” John O’Connor said. “In Irish mythology the land of the ever-young was just beyond the horizon in the west. Amerikay.”

  “Amerikay,” I said.

  Ed smiled. “I can hear Granny pronouncing America that way. She once told me she was afraid that this Amerikay would swallow us up and we would forget that we were Irish.”

  He looked over at Joseph who was skimming flat stones across the water. Three, four, five skips, not listening to us.

  “For Joseph, being Irish is Notre Dame winning football games, the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the Christmas party at the Irish Fellowship Club,” Ed said.

  “He’s young,” I said. “I was his age when the old women would gather in front of the fire at 2705 Hillock—Hickory Street then—full of stories about auld Ireland, I didn’t pay much attention. I was modern. I was American. Not tied to some ancient place that seemed to only exist in sad songs.”

  John O’Connor had been listening and now he said, “Yet we are not a tragic people. We did survive the Great Starvation. Even it couldn’t destroy the fun we make for each other. I think I’d better take you to a session. Get Paddy John the fiddler to come to the Lodge along with Larry Martin the sean nós singer, and round up some dancers.”

  We entered Connemara after full dark had fallen. John stopped. “To me this is the most Irish part of the country.” Not that we could see anything. The car’s headlights illuminated only a few feet of the road ahead of us. “You can’t see them now but we’re surrounded by mountains. The Twelve Pins,” he said. “They were once taller than the Alps. So ancient they’ve been rubbed down to the core. And lakes. Dozens of lakes.”

  Joseph sat in the front seat trying to see beyond into the darkness. He rolled down the window. We could smell the sea.

  “When they escaped the fire at Barna, our own fathers landed just west of here, Ed,” I said. “Can you imagine how terrified those little boys were? Their home aflame, soldiers shouting and threatening, then the journey in their grandfather’s boat. And finally safety at the Keeley place at Ard near Carna.”

  “And is that where we’re going now?” Ed asked.

  “Not tonight,” John O’Connor said. “I’ll take you there in the morning. My wife is a Carna woman and she’ll show you the Keeley home place. Though none of that family is left there. There are other Keeleys in Kilternan a few miles away. Your in-laws, Nora, I believe.”

  “I didn’t know you were married, Aunt Nonie,” Joseph said.

  “A long time ago, Joseph. And that’s a tale for another time.”

  Ed leaned close to me in the back seat. “But you never really married that fellow did you, Nonie? I mean not properly.”

  “Please, Ed. Not now.”

  John turned off the coast road. “There’s the Lodge,” he said. Still miles away. But the only light in that whole dark landscape came from the Lodge windows. A kind of beacon in the blackness.

  Maura O’Connor had dinner waiting for us. Thick potato soup and whol
e-meal wheaten bread. Still hot, so the butter melted right in. A taste uniquely Irish with a sweetness that comes from new grass and soft rain.

  “So,” Maura said to me. So. As if we’d met only days ago, not more than twenty years. “So. Tell me all your news.”

  “Nice place,” Ed said, looking around what had been the front parlor when the Lodge belonged to the Berridges. Not a titled family like the Marquess of Sligo, who claimed most of the land north of here. Just wealthy English people who wanted to fish famous Lough Inagh. Maura explained to Ed that she and John had taken care of the property for the family who only came one month a year.

  “The Berridges left during the Civil War,” Maura said. “Let us buy it on good terms.”

  “They couldn’t sell it to anybody else. And they knew that many another big house had been burned to the ground,” John told him.

  “Still, it was kind of them,” Maura said. “We’ve just paid off the last of the mortgage. We had planned to open it as a hotel for Irish Americans such as yourselves. But then with the war…” She shrugged.

  “People will be traveling soon enough,” Ed said. “The US will start booming. Lots of money to be made and a place like this…” Ed laughed. “Something satisfying about lounging around the big house. Getting some of our own back.”

  John put turf on the fire. The five of us very comfortable in the Berridges’ overstuffed armchairs as we stretched out in the warmth.

  “All of Connemara belonged to the Keeleys once,” I said to Joseph. “Our granny’s family.”

  “And was that before the war?” he asked. The O’Connors laughed.

  “Quite a few centuries before,” John said. “When was it, Nora? About 1300 when the O’Flahertys took over?”

  “About that. And they held it for about four hundred years until—”

  “Let me guess. The English. It’s hard to believe that all those people who were so nice to us in London are really our enemies,” Joseph said.

  “Please God, they’ll be our paying guests,” Maura said. “Ireland still has a great draw for English people. And our hotel will be open to all. But tonight is just for family. Come along.”