Others who sailed the Star had secrets of their own. One fellow traveller I last saw in South Dakota in 1866, to which state I had been sent by my editor-in-chief to write a series of articles on immigrants in the Midwest. My enquiries had taken me to a travelling Bandolero Show where a great many of the roustabouts were said to be Irish. I conducted a number of interesting interviews with cowboys from Connemara and other parts of Connaught. But just as I made to leave, something fascinating happened. My attention was drawn to a wrestling booth in the far corner of the field where, for the reasonable sum of half a dollar, the brave could pit their skills against ‘the greatest conqueror who ever lived’, one ‘Bam-Bam Bombay, the Sultan of the Strangle-hold’. His former butler (actually his elder brother) was now doing admirable duty as ringside second and barker.
They appeared mighty happy to see an old friend, and many a glass of moonshine was raised in South Dakota that night. Their names were George and Thomas Clarke and they were born in Liverpool, of a Galway scullery maid and a Portuguese sailor, the latter bequeathing them their dark complexions (and conspicuously little else). They had spent most of the 1840s criss-crossing the Atlantic in imperial disguise, performing small-time robberies and feats of minor card-sharping; until one day in Boston they were recognised by a hefty Irish policeman, which apperception necessitated a rather unimperial retreat into the slums. We shared a few reminiscences about our days on the Star, a voyage, apparently, less profitable than most. (It was the Maharajah and his servant who had roamed through First-Class, relieving us of what they regarded simply as their tribute. Moreover, they regarded it as a spiritual service. ‘Buddhism teaches a putting-away of material possessions,’ they remarked.) Apologies were sincerely offered and sincerely accepted. They rode me to the station, bade me farewell with many vigorous grapples and implored me to keep in touch on a more regular basis.
It was only on the train back home to New York that I noticed my watch was missing.
I didn’t begrudge it. They had insisted on paying for the booze. But eleven years later, in 1877, an envelope arrived from the wilderness town with the melancholy name of Desdemona, Texas. Inside was my watch, now inscribed with the memorable message: Fondest Greetings from Injun Country.
There was certainly a woman named Laura Merridith, for she and I were to marry a year after the death of her husband, and no kinder-hearted woman ever lived. Our marriage was not in fact happy but I never think of those times now. We divorced after eighteen months but never quite managed to separate. I still have the final papers somewhere in my files, devoid of the necessary signatures. For fifty-four years we were companions and comrades, each year a little better than the one before. Love came late; but it did come. It takes so long even to know what it means.
In later times, if friends asked for the secret of our closeness, she would remark that she still intended to sign those papers but was waiting for the children to die.
She was blinded in a streetcar accident in 1868, the same accident confining her to a wheelchair for the rest of her days. But it did little enough to prevent her doing what she wanted. All her life in America she worked for the advancement of the poor, and was a powerful champion of the suffragist and Negro causes especially. She was involved in a great number of important events, but I think her proudest achievement was to be among the women jailed for attempting to vote in the presidential election of 1872 (for Ulysses S. Grant). When the judge asked how it felt for a dowager Countess to be sharing a cell with the daughter of a slave, she said it was the deepest privilege she had known. She fought prejudice and bigotry wherever she saw it, most angrily whenever she saw it in herself; which others, including myself, never did. She died in 1903, on her eighty-seventh birthday, at the inaugural meeting of the American Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, an organisation she had helped to found. To have known her was the greatest honour of my life: to have loved her the only truly good thing I have ever done.
Our beautiful child was born prematurely, and only survived long enough to be baptised with the names of two brave women who stood in her background: Verity Mary Merridith Dixon. We learned soon thereafter that we could never make another child, a fact that was far from easy to bear. Neither were we able to foster or adopt. ‘Coloureds’ were not permitted such rights at that time, and though the colour of my body is the same as President Wilson’s, the colour of my soul is legally not. My father being quarter-Choctaw weighed heavily against us. When the papers came back from the Office of Minors, the place headed REASONS FOR UNSUITABILITY had been stamped with the single word ‘negritude’.
Her two remarkable sons are the joy of my days. They never talk about Ireland now. They tend to say they were born in America.
Robert married three times, Jonathan never. Long ago he confided that he prefers the companionship of men; and if he does, his living truthfully seems to have brought him happiness, and perhaps helped to make him one of the finest men I know. They bear my own name, those two aged fellows, a choice made by themselves in their early twenties; an election as unexpected as entirely undeserved. People even say they look like me, and in a certain light, indeed they do. Often we have been taken for three silent old brothers as we sit outside a café in a companionable huff at the world. (‘Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego,’ says the waiter – when he thinks we cannot hear him.) That gives me such pleasure that pleasure is not the word.
In the winter, when the leaves have fallen from the lime trees, I can see their mother’s tombstone from the window where I now sit and write. The beautiful daughter we lost is at rest there, too. I visit most days; sometimes daily now. I like to hear the truckles of the trams going past; and the hoots of the tugboats drifting in from the river – reminder that this noisy city is an ancient island; a prehistoric outcrop in a concrete disguise. Strange birds sing in the cemetery garden every morning. The old priest has told me their name many times but lately it never seems to stay in my head. Perhaps it does not matter. Anyway they sing.
Couples often stroll there in the spring afternoons, workers from the offices or students from the university. I sometimes see a child netting the astonishing butterflies that cluster in the nettles near the back of the chapel. He sells them in fruit-jars at his shoeshine station on 12th Street; this bright little mulatto boy who whistles southern gospel as he tiptoes between the gravestones chuckling to himself. Before long the birds will sing over me, too. My physicians have told me my time is very short. I like to think of the boy whistling gospel above me, and his sons whistling, when he grows to a man. But I know this will not happen. I will hear nothing, then. There is nothing to hope for and nothing to fear.
The above events all happened. They belong to fact.
As for the rest – the details, the emphases, certain devices of narration and structure, whole events which may never have occurred, or may have happened quite differently to how they are described – those belong to the imagination. For that no apology whatsoever is offered, though some will insist that one is needed.
Perhaps they are correct, by their own lights anyway. To take the events of reality and meld them into something else is a task not to be undertaken coldly or carelessly. On the question of whether such an endeavour is worthwhile or even moral, readers may wish to pronounce for themselves. Such questions must hover over any account of the past: whether the story may be understood without asking who is telling it; to which intended audience and to what precise end.
As for David Merridith’s murderer, his answer is this: on the wall of his study hangs the image of a monster which he cut from a newspaper seventy-five years ago, when he was young enough to believe that ends justify means. Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their names. He was a very weak man; and a rational man: a combination capable of realising the unspeakable. He believed he could not live without what he desired, and what he desired was owned by another. When he wept in the night, that was what he wept for. And still he weeps now, though
for different reasons. As to whether he would have desired beyond that terrible limit had the prize been free, he does not know. He called this deformity ‘love’ but part of it was hatred; another part was vanity and yet another fear: the same reasons why men have always done murder. His life was unimaginable without possessing the prize. Some call that patriotism; others call it love. But murder is murder no matter the translation.
He is an old man now with very little left to him. People are kind when they see him in the street. They know he once wrote something, but they do not know what. There was a time long ago when he garnered citations for his work, when he met with Presidents and eminent men. But the times did not last; and he was glad when they ended. He visits the tomb of his wife every morning. In the evenings he sits in his window and writes; and the portrait of a killer glares down from his wall. Sometimes it reminds him of Pius Mulvey; sometimes of Thomas David Merridith; but mostly of other untouchables he has known who lived to great ages and died in their beds.
Many on the Star had their secrets: their shames. Few have kept them hidden for quite so long.
The stare of the murderer intimates many things, but one thing mainly, which he sometimes forgets. That every image committed to paper contains the ghost of the author who fashioned it. Outside the frame, beyond the border, is often the space where the subject is standing. A shifting and elusive presence, certainly, but a palpable one for its camouflages. He is there, the killer, in the pictures he paints. But they also contain the untold histories, as every man who ever hated contained the blood of his innumerable fathers. Every woman. Every man.
All the way back to Cain.
G. Grantley Dixon.
New York City.
Easter Saturday, 1916.
1 It was Mr Newby and not the author who composed the arresting ‘standfirst’ texts which introduced the chapters of the original volume, with their hair-raising references to ‘SHOCKING DETAILS’, ‘WICKED DEEDS’, ‘HIDDEN SECRETS’ and so on. Having vexed the author utterly at the time of publication, they now seem rather innocent (though of course they are not). They are left unaltered here as a fond memorial to a friend who could sometimes be a little unscrupulous. – GGD
2 He dropped the final ‘e’ from his surname early in his political career, arguing that ‘it made me appear too English.’ See Meadows, J. Fifteen Rounds for Justice: The Story of My Life (New York, 1892). – GGD
SOURCES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BACKGROUND: Mary Daly, The Famine in Ireland (Dublin Historical Association, 1986); R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (Allen Lane, 1988); Joan Johnson, James and Mary Ellis: Background and Quaker Famine Relief in Letterfrack (Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, 2000); Helen Litton, The Irish Famine: An Illustrated History (Wolfhound, 1994); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford U.P., 1985); Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (Macmillan, 1989); Tim Robinson Connemara: Map and Gazetteer (Folding Landscapes, Roundstone, 1990); William V. Shannon, The American Irish (Univ. of Massachusetts, 1963); Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill, History of Clifden 1810–1860 and Patient Endurance: The Great Famine in Connemara (Connemara Girl Publications, 1997). Larger bibliographies are available in the above works and at the website of the University of Wales, www.swan.ac.uk/history. Other websites featuring primary source texts and illustrations include www.ucg.ie/depts/history/famine0.html and www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine.
EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE FAMINE: William Bennett, Six Weeks in Ireland (Gilpin, London, 1847)1; Distress in Ireland: Narrative of William Edward Forster’s Visit (Friends’ Historical Library, Morehampton Road, Dublin 4); The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith 1840–1850 (Oxford U.P., 1980); Alexander Somerville, Letters From Ireland During the Famine of 1847 (Irish Academic Press, 1994, K.D.M. Snell ed.); Asenath Nicholson, Lights and Shades of Ireland (1850)2.
SHIPBOARD EXPERIENCES: Details of individual voyages, some with passenger manifests, are at www.theshipslist.com. Many emigrant ballads are at ‘Irish Folksongs’, www.acronet.net/~robokopp/irish Thomas Gallagher’s Paddy’s Lament: Ireland 1846–1847 (Harvest, 1982) quotes the unmediated recollections of numerous emigrants, many from the collection at the Folklore Department, Univ. College Dublin. Further material is held at the Irish National Archives, Bishop Street, Dublin 8 (www.nationalarchives.ie). Voyage from Dublin to Quebec by James Wilson is at ‘Immigrants to Canada’, http://list.uwaterloo.ca/~marj/. Robert Whyte’s Journey of an Irish Coffin Ship, 1847 is at fortunecity.com/littleitaly/amalfi. A work of which questions have been asked as to provenance is Gerald Keegan’s Famine Diary (or Summer of Sorrow 1847), first published in 1895.
ILLUSTRATIONS: L. Perry Curtis’s Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1971) is a pioneering work on the subject, though some of its assumptions are questioned at www.people.virginia.edu/~dnp5c/Victorian/index.html, where a gallery of ‘simian’ Irish images is available. Steve Taylor’s website ‘Views of the Famine’ at www.vassar.edu/~sttaylor also features a collection of visual materials. I thank him for providing copies of certain illustrations and granting permission for their use. Artists, dates and original publications are listed if known. (HW: Harper’s Weekly. J: Judy magazine. ILN: Illustrated London News; JM is the News’s resident Irish artist, James Mahony. PT: Pictorial Times. PU: Punch magazine; JT is Punch’s principal cartoonist, John Tenniel.)
Title Page: ‘Scientific Racism’, HW. From www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish/unit. Prologue: ‘Emigrants Boarding a Ship at Waterloo Dock, Liverpool’, ILN, 6 Jul 1850, signed ‘Smyth S.’ Chapter I: ‘Poor House from Galway’, HW; by W.A. Rogers. From www.people.virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Famine. II: ‘The Pig and the Peer’, PU, 7 Aug 1880; JT. III: ‘Meal-Cart Under Military Escort’, PT, 30 Oct 1847. IV: ‘The Fenian Guy Fawkes’, PU, 28 Dec 1867; JT. V: ‘Below Decks — Feeding Time’. From http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/famine. VI: ‘The Scalp of Brian Connor, near Kilrush Union House’, ILN, 22 Dec 1849; JM. VII: ‘Keillines, near General Thompson’s Property’, ILN, Jan 1850; JM. X: ‘Searching for Potatoes in a Stubble Field’, ILN, 22 Dec 1849; JM. XI: ‘A Scalp at Caeuermore’, ILN, 29 Dec 1849; JM. XIII: ‘The Village of Tullig’, ILN, 22 Dec 1849; JM. XIV: ‘Bridget O’Donnel and Children’, ILN, 22 Dec 1849; JM. XV: ‘Boy and Girl at Cahera’, ILN, 20 Feb 1847; JM. XVI: ‘Funeral at Skibbereen’, ILN, 30 Jan 1847; ‘From a sketch by Mr H. Smith, Cork’; [the signature is ‘Smyth’]. XVII: ‘Cottage Interior’, PT, 7 Feb 1846. XVIII: Detail from ‘Three Irish Affections: Force, Folly and Fraud’, J, 8 Dec 1880. XIX: ‘Pentonville Yard’, from The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Prison Life by Henry Mayhew and John Binny, London, 1862. XXII: ‘A Farming Family Defending Their Home’, PT, 2 Jan 1847; and ‘The Ejectment’, ILN, 16 Dec 1848, signed ‘Landells’. XXIII: Cover of Harriet Staunton; or married and starved for money. Artist and date unknown. XXVI: ‘Miss Kennedy Distributing Clothes at Kilrush’, ILN, 22 Dec 1849; JM. XXVII: ‘Begging at Clonakilty’, ILN, 13 Feb 1847; JM. XXVIII: ‘Irish Armed Peasants Waiting for the Arrival of a Meal-Cart’, PT, 30 Oct 1847. XXIX: ‘The Day After the Ejectment’, ILN, 16 Dec 1848. XXX: ‘The British Lion and the Irish Monkey’, P, 8 April 1848. XXXI: Detail from ‘Two Forces’, PU, 29 Oct 1881; JT. XXXII: Detail from PU anthology, Vol. LXXXII, 1882; JT. XXXIII: Detail from ‘Anything for Peace and Quiet’, J, 13 Apr 1881. XXXV: ‘The Kind of Assisted Emigrant We Cannot Afford to Admit’ by F. Graetz, date unknown; possibly from HW. XXXVI: ‘The Bogus American’, J, 15 Jan 1868. XXXVII: ‘The Irish Frankenstein’, PU, 20 May 1882; JT, after similar work by J. Kenny Meadows in PU, 3 Mar 1843. Page 371: ‘Herd Boy of the Purple Mountain’, ILN, 1849. XXXVIII: Detail from ‘The Irish-American Skunk’, J, 3 Aug 1881. XXXIX: ‘Idiot and Mother’, ILN, 12 Aug 1846. Epilogue: ‘The Village of Moveen’, ILN, December 1849; JM.
QUOTATIONS: Many of Mulvey’s words for stealing are quoted in Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (Collins Harvill, 1987). The remarks of London traders (pp. 178
and 227) were recorded by Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor (1861) and quoted in Donald Thomas’s The Victorian Underworld (John Murray, 1988). That compelling work also describes the ‘solitary’ system in British prisons of the era and the 1836 escape of a Newgate prisoner who climbed over the cheval-de-frise; I borrowed the latter detail for the flight of Mulvey, so again I acknowledge Donald Thomas. The real-life letters extracted throughout the novel are quoted in Kerby Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles and Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America (Aurum, 1994, with Paul Wagner). I thank Professor Miller for his kind assistance in identifying the owners of some of the documents, and I thank the institutions and individuals below for granting permissions. Chapter II: From Patrick Dunny, 1856; Collection of Arnold Schrier, Emeritus Prof. of History, Univ. of Cincinnati. IV: From Mary Brown; Schrier Collection. V, VI and VIII: From Mrs Nolan (first name unknown); by permission of the Deputy Keeper of Records at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) T2054. XI and XIII: From James Richey; quoted from Miller; ownership of original document unknown. Possibly at PRONI T/2035/2345/2671 or D3561 (Richey Family Papers). XVII: From Daniel Guiney; Irish Nat. Archives (Famine Letters from the Quit Rent Office, Kingwilliamstown Estate). XXXIII: From Maurice Woulfe (or Wolfe), circa 1870; microfilm copy in Nat. Library of Ireland (mf p.3887); current ownership of original document unknown.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I thank my wife, Anne-Marie Casey, for so many kindnesses that I could not catalogue them without writing another book. For her patience, wisdom and endless charm, I am more grateful than the dedication of this novel could begin to convey. To Geoff Mulligan, my editor at Secker, I once again express my thanks for his insight and skill. To my literary agent, Carole Blake, I add my gratitude; as I do to Conrad Williams, my screenwriting agent, also at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency in London. I thank Caroline Michel, my publisher at Vintage, Hans Juergen Balmes at Fischer Verlag, Germany, Lolies van Grunsven at Nijgh and Ditmar, Holland, Jean Pierre Sicre at Editions Phebus, France, Luigi Brioschi at Guanda, Italy, and Drenka Willen, my publisher at Harcourt Books, New York. Special thanks are due to my father, Seán, whose jaunts with me into Connemara three decades ago were the joy of my childhood. Advice on certain Irish translations was given by Dr Angela Bourke, Dr Diarmuid Breathnach, Peadar Lamb and Niall Mac Fhionnlaoich. I offer each of them the sincere maith agat of an almost monolingual whose own garblings will be identifiable to careful speakers of Irish. The book was designed with great skill by Peter Ward.
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