Letters to America

by Tom Blair

  Since he was four or five Andrew had been helping Sunshine in the kitchen, peeling, stirring, washing. As bad went to worse than bad that first year of grief, Marse Edward sold his best field slaves, and Andrew was put out to help tend crops. Happy for us he was still living with us in the kitchen at night. Then one night he told me what the field slaves were saying. Said that Marse Edward was fixing to sell more slaves so he could keep Belle Normandie. I knew this couldn’t be true. Weren’t that many to sell. But Sunshine said Marse Edward wouldn’t sell Belle Normandie so he could keep us slaves, but for certain he would sell slaves and his right arm to keep the Big House.

  It was my learning with Miss Louisa that brought the worst grief. That’s not quite right, it’s not even right at all. It was that I didn’t listen to Treefrog, that’s what tore my heart with the worst grief a person could have. I forgot Treefrog’s warning that I shouldn’t tell others what I knew, ’cause they didn’t want to know that I knew anything that they didn’t. But I spoke up, one word just jumped from my mouth. It was at a dinner that Marse Edward and Miss Pauline had for some important people from Natchez. Marse Allan was there. If only he hadn’t’ve been there, but he was there.

  That night, the night of the special dinner, Sunshine stirred up the best smelling and tasting chicken and mushroom soup a body could imagine. Next was a roasted loin of beef marinated with ginger juice. It was sliced thin-thin and laid comfortable next to collard greens with a touch of lemon and new potatoes rubbed with salt and pepper. Lit bright with all thirty candles burning in the chandelier, the dining room was crowded with important men, food smells, and talk. Wearing my special-guests lace apron, I was dashing from person to person serving and pouring. I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t help it, I listened to the conversation.

  At first I didn’t understand a thing. Most about speculation and banks failing. Then some loud talk about politics. But then conversation I knew. Talk about the world, places in the world, and how the clipper ships were speeding bales of cotton between countries. Between puffs on their cigars the important men spoke of port cities, and I could see them on the map that I had studied with Miss McBride and Miss Louisa years before. Places I had just shown Andrew in the geography book in the Marse’s library. Then they spoke of some islands off the east coast of Africa that a clipper ship had foundered against. No one seemed to be sure of the name of the islands. Then Marse Allan spoke up and said Maldives. Lord knows why, but in a very low voice, ’cause I knew they weren’t the Maldives, I said Seychelles. Lord help me. I turned as quick as I could and fled to the hall with a tray of clanking plates. Behind me one of the men from Natchez called out laughing, “God damned, she’s right. Allan, why don’t you find out what else the slave can teach you?”

  I was so right about the Seychelles, but I was so wrong. It wasn’t just me that was punished, my family was punished. And Marse Edward was punished. ’Cause Marse Allan, as if he had a whip in his hand, took his way with us. Took his time before he cracked it. It was almost a year later. By then Marse Edward had sold or traded just about everything he had at Belle Normandie and still he owed money. His brother, not a brother but a cold-hearted man, wouldn’t lend him money. Told him he would give him the money for the banks if he sold him what he wanted. He wanted half Belle Normandie’s best-growing land and Sunshine. Marse Allan always had to have the best of everything, and everybody knew Sunshine was the best cook in the state.

  For a handful of days Marse Edward didn’t look at me straight on, never asked me to do anything for him. In time he had to tell me. It was a rainy morning that Marse Edward fetched me into his library and told me that he had sold Sunshine to his brother. Looked as though he was fit to be sick. As he spoke he stared down at the dark red carpet that was worn bare near the door and behind his desk. Told me that if Andrew and I wanted to go with Sunshine, we could. Said that his brother didn’t need no house slaves and we would both be put in the fields. He was quiet for a while, then looked me in the eye and said that since Andrew was too young to do a man’s work, Marse Allan’s overseer would for sure sell him straight away. Told me that if I wanted I could stay at Belle Normandie with Andrew and we could do the cooking. But then he told me something that made my bones shiver. Marse Edward said he knew for a fact that Marse Allan would never give Sunshine a pass to visit Belle Normandie. Neither would he ever let me visit Les Moines.

  So this was my grief time. Ripped apart was my heart. Sunshine was my sunshine. Andrew was both of our sunshines. Which would I choose? Which grief? Sunshine and I talked low so Andrew didn’t hear. I cried a lot, low so Sunshine wouldn’t hear. Sunshine figured that he could get Marse Allan to let him use Andrew in the kitchen. He was going to tell him that without Andrew’s help he couldn’t cook up the good meals. ’Course with me working in Marse Allan’s fields, there wouldn’t be no more education for Andrew. So the three of us staying together and going to Les Moines meant that Andrew wouldn’t be getting no more learning. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I knew that Marse Allan’s meanness would make him sell Andrew to hurt me. He wouldn’t let our boy stay with Sunshine and me, no matter what Sunshine told him.

  My insides were torn up and twisted like wrung washrags. No sleeping, no eating, no eating that stayed down. I even thought maybe we should run away, make for the North. Better that we be running together than living apart. Treefrog got me thinking right. Told me that running was hard enough for a young buck who could sleep under the brush during the day and in the darkest night walk straight and fast while stealing whatever he could to eat. Said no way a man and a woman with a boy could outrun the hounds and bounty hunters. ’Course he was right. So I asked Treefrog what I should do. He told me something that made no sense. Told me I should talk to Grannie Catfish. Said that she wouldn’t tell me what to do, but afterward I would know what to do.

  The sun had just set behind the sycamores when I walked down the curved dirt path to Grannie’s cabin, a cabin she shared with another grayhair. Grannie was on her rocker, the one Sunshine made her when Andrew came screaming into the world as her great-grandson. The cabin was pretty much dark, only soft light glowing from red and orange embers in the hearth, no lamps lit. In the far corner a mound on a cot. Only Grannie was awake. She was pushing against the packed dirt floor with her good foot, her shadow rocking across the wall.

  I sat on her cot and started to speak, started to tell her of my grief. She spoke two words: “I knows.” I was quiet. Grannie was quiet for a spell. Then she spoke, told me about Africa. Told me about men with beards and whips and guns. Men who came to her village and took all the young men and women. Told me about being chained together and walking through the jungle. The chain was as long as the line of slaves, every few feet a shackle around a person’s ankle. Men with whips kept the line moving. One of them carried an ax. If a slave fell and couldn’t be brought right, they didn’t take no time to unlock the shackle. One swing of the ax and the slave was left behind.

  After days of death they came to a boat in a wide river. Shackled together they were pushed down into its darkness. No water, no food, just a burning heat, screaming, and fear. After three days everyone taken above. Sun blinding after days in the darkness. When able to see, only ocean, no land. Buckets of water thrown on them to wash off the filth. Some young girls unlocked from their shackles and taken away by laughing men. Some women held babies to their breast, one of the men walked among them grabbing the babies and tossing them into the sea. Screams of a hurt worse than a body could stand, mothers struggling to join their babies, ankle and leg bones broken as steel shackles held them back. With broken bones they were no longer a slave of worth. A swing of the ax and they joined their babies.

  Then she told me of Binta. He was my mama’s brother. Never did I know that my mother had a brother. Binta was at the breast of my grannie and was tossed into the sea with the others. But my grannie did not struggle. Even though death would have been easiest for her, she didn’t struggle against the shackle
s. ’Cause she carried another. My mother was within her. For my mother’s sake the grief of losing Binta was carried by Grannie for weeks in the filth and vomit of the ship. A grief carried by Grannie without a word spoken till her words to me. A grief no slave, no person, no living thing should ever hold within.

  When Grannie finished talking she closed her eyes, but her rocking didn’t stop. So then I knew. I knew I could do no less. I needed to carry the grief of losing my Sunshine by staying at Belle Normandie for Andrew. This I did.

  Junie

  Patrick

  Even though they represented more than eighty percent of Ireland’s populace, during the eighteenth century Irish Catholics were prohibited from purchasing or leasing land, from voting, from holding political office, from living in or within five miles of a corporate town, from obtaining an education, from entering a profession, and from doing many other things necessary for a person to succeed and prosper in society.

  Then the Potato Famine. A most cruel and desperate period of mass starvation for the Catholics of Ireland. A blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s. But its devastation on the poor peasants of Ireland was the worst; over fifty percent of the population was reliant on this cheap crop for their income … for their survival. More than one million Irish men, women, and children starved to death during the famine. Another million desperate souls fled Ireland seeking a better life, or better stated, a less cruel life.

  In 1843 a Royal Commission formed to investigate the Potato Famine reported that, “It would be impossible to adequately describe the privations which the Irish laborer and his family habitually and silently endure. In many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water, their cabins are seldom protection against the weather, a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury, and for nearly all a sickly pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.”

  It was this world that Patrick struggled to leave behind for the hopeful stories of the great open-armed America.

  DEFEATED WE WERE AT THE BATTLE OF THE BOYNE IN 1690, BUT we lived. Afterward the Protestants sat on us like a heavy rock, but we lived. It wasn’t the Protestants that got us Irish Catholics in the end, it was the potato. It snuck up on us, it pretended to be our friend, a good friend, then it turned on us. It killed a million of us.

  Starting with my grandfather’s father our tenant fields were planted with potatoes. An easy crop. Hoe the fields once, let God water them, pull four of each five potatoes from the ground for food, the ones left gave you five more back next season. Ugly to look at, bland to the taste, but all the things the body needed were there. A half pinch of salt in boiling water with the potatoes, dropped in a basket to drain, then stools pulled around and food for the family. One thumbnail left long to peel the skins, no need for knives or forks. Potato scraps fed to our landlord’s pig, the one we fattened for him. The head and feet were ours to keep at slaughtering time.

  Then the blight, the Great Hunger. I was nine or ten, maybe eleven. I know I was born within a year or two of 1838. And I know for certain I was the oldest son. Our potatoes had a black slime on them. Most rotted in the earth. Within a year everyone’s potatoes were born a weed. Thought we could make it through the year. We did make it. Everyone but grandmother made it. None of us ate much. There wasn’t much to eat. Grandmother ate nothing. Said she was anxious to see grandfather again. Father and I dug her grave where she could hear the creek bubbling.

  That first year we ate what wasn’t ours to eat. The landlord’s pig was picked to the bone by mid-summer. Father became a poacher; we woke to see a chicken. Then no chickens. By the winter of the first year of hunger there was hardly a dog to be seen. A brown collie’s hindquarter gave us soup for more days than I had fingers.

  It was the second year that killed most of us. By then we were nothing more than hollowed-out heads perched on a clump of rags with sticks for arms and legs. All the hares and birds were eaten or scared away. Each day Paul, little Meaghan, and I walked the fields looking for anything to eat. We searched the wintery fields in our bare feet. Long before our worn boots shredded, boiled, and eaten. Once we found a half-rotten crow. That night we thanked God for His gift.

  Starvation is ugly. Little Meaghan went first. Her blue eyes fallen to the back of her head, black gums and bleeding holes where teeth had been. After Meaghan mother died. It wasn’t the hunger that killed her, it was burying Meaghan. Then my younger brother Paul. For a few long days he never moved from his blanket. One morning he didn’t blink any more.

  Father died at the end of the year. I didn’t see him die, I heard about it. By then I was at the Work House. My last meal in our earthen-floored hut was a scrawny rat that father caught, skinned, and boiled. We sucked twig-like bones and gulped down the hot water broth. Hunched over with hunger in night’s blackness I found the rodent fur behind our hut and chewed it until there was nothing. Hunger makes all a feast.

  In London the British Parliament argued for free trade, they said there was no need to send food to the starving Irish. Export the extra British crops for coins. Rather more coins than more Irish. The English Protestants hated us Catholics, but when other countries heard about starving Irish children the English claimed to care. Michael said that only after she killed a million of us did the cold-hearted Queen pretend feelings. I don’t know why she decided, but it saved my life. I was sent to a Work House for the starving poor. Father with his last breath saved his last child. On a cold morning he stood slumped in front of our hobble and pleaded with a stone-faced man in a cart leading a group of walking skeletons. Pleaded for me to go with them.

  I feared the Work House. Stories were the British slaughtered Irish women and sold their meat to the French. Irish men were worked till they dropped and their bodies fed to pigs. It took us a three-day trek to the Granard Work House. On the second day each of us given a single hard turnip. Other than water from creeks we didn’t see any food or drink. But we saw death and misery. Not a mile passed without some poor soul laid dead flat on the ground or propped against a tree. Some in whispers begging for food. Most were still. Many were black with death, feeding worms and flies. The worst was a long-dead woman, her child sucking on her flat breast.

  The Work House was the finest building I had ever seen. Brick walls with glass windows and a wood-burning stove. A stone wall surrounded three buildings, one for men, one for women, and one for children without their mothers. If thirteen or less you were a child. I was a child because I didn’t know for sure how old I was.

  The first day we were handed stiff, worn clothes and a pair of tattered shoes. I was told to wash in a large wooden tub. Were they cleaning me before I was slaughtered for my meat? I was given a bed in a dark room with twenty or more Irish children. Never before had seen a bed. Before the sun set I was given more food than I had seen in a year. Everyone but me got a bowl of porridge. I got half a bowl. They told me my stomach couldn’t hold a whole bowl. After a few days I got what everybody else got. With each bowl of porridge I thought of Meaghan and Paul. With happiness we could have lived on a single bowl. I thought the porridge was the only food we’d get each day. But in the morning we were handed a slice of hard black bread.

  Each building had a warden. A short bony woman was the warden at the children’s ward. Malley was her name. Never spoke much, and a stained gray dress was what she wore each day. Malley carried a stick. Only once I got smacked. Told by Malley that the men’s warden was Protestant mean. A big fellow he was, smelled like nothing I knew. Later Michael told me it was the smell of ale.

  From six to six each day we worked. I didn’t know what clock time was, my family worked the land in the light. The happy luck was that Work House children didn’t do the hard chores. Men did the sweat-hard work, cut and laid stones for roads and walls. Me and the other children ground corn, scrubbed floors, sawed and hauled firewood, and kept the grounds swept clean. For sure Malley would scream and rant if she saw a single leaf sleeping on a path.

 
It was a shamrock certainty that I was the tallest in the ward of children. And it was a two-shamrock certainty that I was the dumbest. I didn’t know any letters or numbers. We got most of Sunday off if we went to a Protestant service. Even on Sunday we couldn’t go outside the stone wall that closed in the Work House. When Malley figured out I couldn’t read or write I was made to go to a class on Sunday with little children. Never learned my numbers at the Work House, but I did learn my letters and some words.

  Late at night, in the blackness of the ward with the wind pounding the shutters, I would think of my family. I wondered if they remembered me. I wondered if they missed me. I thought that I should be in heaven with them. I thought all the goodness must be in heaven because there wasn’t any in Ireland.

  Was in the children’s ward for most of a year when I turned fourteen. One summer morning Malley told me I was fourteen ’cause they needed more men cutting and laying stone. The men’s ward looked just like the children’s ward but it was different ’cause of the men. Cursing and fighting all the time. A lot of fights with eyes gouged and ears bitten almost clean off. I didn’t talk to anyone, kept my eyes down.

  Then I met Michael, a fellow who only stopped talking to chew. He was sixteen, so he was for sure older than me. For more than a year he had been in the Work House. Right off he told me that he had a sister in a convent and a brother in America. After his parents had starved Michael was sent to his uncle’s farm at Dingle Bay. For a hurting long time they lived off winkles and barnacles and seaweed. When there was no more to eat his uncle laid down and died, so’s Michael walked fifty miles to the Work House.