Then he felt nothing. He was clear. All was well. It was quiet.
The boy lay there for minutes, for hours-he could not tell, because it was dark and he did not know what time it was and had only seen a watch once somewhere long ago. He had heard someone strange from time before, but that memory lay deep in the mysterious corners of his mind and he could not find it. He wondered how old he was, and decided that he was six because he was in school. Then he wondered how he had wondered it since he had no front, back, or middle. He suddenly realized that if he had lost track of time perhaps he had also lost being six as well. He opened his mouth and screamed…‘Help…I am six! Help!’
He heard a rumbling sound above him. A voice. A piece of the rubble was being pulled away. Then another. A sudden sliver of light burst through the rocks and the plaster dust as it billowed about him. A slab was lifted from across his head. Then a figure blocked out the sun…and the boy opened his eyes.
At first he thought it was the old man and he was frightened that the old man would be angry that he had not whistled that the Germans were coming…but then the old man had not left his soup. But it wasn’t the old man…staring down at him was a chocolate face, a huge chocolate giant…staring down at him from underneath a battered American helmet, its chin strap dangling lazily in the sun, bandoleers crisscrossing his massive chest, rifle slung horizontally across his back. The giant was straddling the rubble with massive boots, one knee touching the ground, the other leg stretched over the beam covering the boy’s chest. The giant’s skin was as black as the blackest night the boy had ever seen. His teeth were as white as the first snow. The boy had never seen anything like him.
The giant looked at the beam falling across the boy’s chest and he heard the boy whisper in Italian…‘Where is your tail?’ He placed his large hands around the beam, grunted heavily, but the beam would not budge. He tried again and the beam shifted slowly and the boy cried out. The sound of the boy’s voice seemed to scare the giant, and with one mighty heave he pulled at the huge beam again. Sweat and blood ran down his face in rivulets and into the corners of his mouth. He gritted his teeth, and from within his black face, the white teeth shone like tiny Christmas lights. He thrust his mighty head toward the ceiling and yelled at the top of his lungs…‘Lordy…’ the huge beam slowly lifted, high enough for him to reach in and pull the boy free.
Only then did the pain hit the boy, it hit him so hard he felt like he’d been jerked into a fire and flung into the jangled pits of hell. It washed over him with such force that he couldn’t contain it. He felt himself being lifted high, high, toward the sun…and he heard the giant soldier cry out and then the black man stuck his ear to the mouth of the white boy to see if he was breathing. The boy could not resist…chocolate…a giant chocolate face…the boy reached out with his tongue, and licked it…it was as sweet as anything he could imagine.
Historical Review
The forceful seaboard powers of Western Europe projected their values and manners across half the world. The Spaniards contemptuously swept away the Inca and the Aztec civilizations. The French established their lychees from Indo-China to the Caribbean. The Portuguese declared themselves rightful landlords of Brazil. The Dutch commanded an enormous empire in the eastern seas. Even the Danes acquired enclaves in India, and the British sailed out from their petty islands to rule nearly a quarter of the earth’s landmass and govern, uninvited, a quarter of all its inhabitants, English, French and Spanish became world languages. European systems of law, education, religion and technique were distributed among baffled indigenes in improbably environments. It became a military commonplace to find soldiers marching in turbans, coolie hats and flowing robes beneath a tricolor or a Union Jack.
Europe, that peninsula of Asia, dominated the world. More important still, it created new worlds of its own. The empire presently retreated as the twentieth century re-ordered matters, but the irreversible victory of Europe was this: that throughout North America and in the distant territories of Australia, sovereign settlements of Europeans were there to stay. Great new nations grew up in Europe’s image far away, and the balance of the world was permanently affected. Imagine a United States founded by Asians, say, or an Australia by Africans and you may realize how fateful have been the results of this particular continent’s imperial urges. When in the 1960’s the Common Market came into existence in Western Europe, people in New Zealand, on the other side of the globe, felt quite disgruntled to be excluded from it.
The personality of Europe is kaleidoscope, molded by different national origins, rooted in thousands of regional customs and references, embodied in desperate cultures and sealed by the effects of countless wars. Yet there is some abstraction, more than mere geography, which does bind this extraordinary gallimaufry into a whole. Even Europe’s most blazing nationalist would probably admit to its existence, and recognize the power of the European identity.
Gibbon defined it as a ‘system of arts, and laws and manners’, but I think it some more metaphysical arrangement. Perhaps it is partly the bond of shared experiences. To one degree or another every European people shares a history. We have mostly fought the same wars, on one side or the other. We have endured similar political or ideological processes, common depressions and catastrophes have oppressed us, and common tyrants have bullied us. The wind makes people in Ireland shiver as they shiver on the Polish plains, and when the Chernobyl reactor melted down, it polluted both the vineyards of Bulgaria and the sheep-farms of Wales.
But more probably Europe’s identity is a matter of theory. The continent is built upon an immense foundation of very old theories, and one in particular used to be synonymous with Europeanizes. The spark of Christianity came from the east, of course, but it was Europe that fanned it into flame, and here the Christian faith was formalized, institutionalized, and popularized, it is true that even within the faith the Europeans continued to quarrel-the Reformation which split the continent in the sixteenth century reverberates still on Europe’s western fringe, where the Catholics and Protestants of Ireland are locked in apparently insoluble conflict. Nevertheless, the notion of Christianity has surely been the greatest of all the factors that have distinguished Europe from its neighbor continents. The first pan-European armies were the armies of the Christian Crusades, and as often as not the European imperialists sailed out to conquer the world as missionaries of Christ. Europe is the world headquarters of Christianity still, and until recent years it could truly have been called a Christian continent. Only its Jewish communities, the Muslims of its eastern marches and immigrants from elsewhere would have declared themselves anything else. To a visitor from Mars it might feel like one still. It would be impossible to visit any modern city in Europe and take a picture, half of those would contain the tower of a steeple of a Christian temple, and often the pattern of a city is built around its presence, just as the pattern of European history has so often been dictated by its passions.
Only in our century have the godless creeds of the Nazis and communists tried unsuccessfully to mold the continent in other spiritual kinds, and it is still some distillation of the Christian principle that gives these countries a degree of moral cohesion. That the majority of Europeans are now probably pagans or agnostics has not yet weakened the heritage, or turned its noble monuments into museums. If Europe’s cathedrals are no longer declarations of the continent’s creed, they still symbolize its identity.
During the past half-century Europe sometimes seems to have lost its dynamism, divided as it has been by its ideologies, and generally playing a passive rather than active role in the world. It has fallen into what used to be called, in the days of the old Empires, Spheres of Influence-American in the west, Soviet in the east, Japanese and Arab money has become indispensable, too, and in some parts of the continent millions of immigrants from elsewhere have changed the style of life.
Nevertheless, one cannot take a journey across the continent, whether on land or in the air, without sensing t
he colossal latent power of it. Its 500 million inhabitants have survived all challenges and miseries to remain perhaps the most variously gifted and productive of all the world’s people. The achievements of its past are stacked up, so to s Strange, like a reactor, and the energy of all its prodigies seems to irradiate it. Sophocles, Einstein, Tolstoy, Mozart, Palladio, Pasteur, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo-the list is like a roster of human achievement itself. To think that one small continent (to parody the Irishman Oliver Goldsmith) could do so much!
Yet to be a European has not always been a source of pride. Americans and Australians have often thought it an effete or decadent condition. Activists of the Third World have thought it distinctly unwholesome. During the past couple centuries, at least, Europe had given the rest of humankind as much tragedy as blessing, and nobody could boast of the continent’s general behavior in our own times-it could perhaps be said that of all man’s inhumanities to man, the cruelties of Europe in the 1940’swere the worst. Of course the Americans might beg to differ, as would the Irish and the Australians as well as the Africans…each having their own moments of torment at the hands of the Europeans.
Time heals, yet still the sum of this and that remains the same. We are learning slowly that it is states, not people that really commit patriotic atrocities;(as Lincoln finally discovered with the assistance of his General U.S. Grant in the great Civil War) and as the eventful twentieth century comes to a close. Europe seems at least half-reconciled to itself. The nations of the west, so long enemies, are slowly coalescing. The nations of the east, so long estranged, are beginning to see themselves once more as part of the European whole. Perhaps it will all go sour again, the Balkans will relapse into discord, the old enemies across the Rhine will again come to blows, the British will turn their backs on the continent and look to the sea once more. But at least we see in Europe today, the hopes of a peaceful continental community-a prospect nobody has been able to discern for a couple of thousand years.
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I must return to the history of Ireland and its centuries of enslavement to Britain to put a face on the other side of England, and give some definition to the reader intent on trying to understand that the plight of Ireland was no different from that suffered by the negro in America, except, the negro wasn’t permitted to fight for his freedom until the very end of the Great Civil War.
Just as the Americas were being founded, after the War of the Tudors and the Flight of the Earls, Catholics still held two-thirds of the land in Ireland. Then came the Ulster Rising of 1641, which began as an attempt by the dispossessed of Ulster to recover their lost lands, and spread to the whole island, growing into an uprising of all Catholics to preserve their religion and defend their property and constitutional rights under the Protestant Monarch. It was followed by eleven years of upheaval complicated by the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles, I at Whitehall in 1649, Oliver Cromwell, military commander of the Commonwealth of England, with little better to do, sailed across to Ireland with 3,000 troops to annihilate the remaining opposition, whether Catholic or Royalist.
Cromwell reached Dublin in the middle of August; but since the city had already opted for his side, his stay in the capital was brief. Cromwell thought better of spending his time, in the face of mounting critics back home…fed by exaggerated Protestant reports of Catholic atrocities on the poor Protestants, he hurried on to Drogheda, Wexford and other cities, in which he saw to the killing of thousands of Catholics and Royalists, in deference to what Cromwell believed unwaveringly to be the will of God. Perhaps those same Protestants who fed him with overzealous and faulty reports of Irish Catholic atrocities filled him with premonitions as well as to his place in the hierarchy of the Church of England to which Oliver Cromwell would accede under Henry the VIII.
Thousands of Catholics were sent to the West Indies, as slaves by Cromwell… drastically reducing the Catholic population. Then he heaped insult on injury…The Cromwellian Act of Settlement of 1652 dispossessed the remaining Catholic landlords in Leinster, Munster, and Ulster, and outlined plans to transplant them and their tenants to Connaught, the fourth and most barren of the Irish provinces, a composite of mountain, rock and bog. “To Hell or Connaught” was the puritan slogan for the dispatch of papists, for whom either prospect must have seemed equally bleak. Many of Cromwell’s own men received their arrears pay in the form of confiscated Catholic land.
More than any other single act, Cromwell’s settlement sowed the seeds of 18thCentury Protestant dominance. Catholic hopes in 1685 were heightened by the accession of Catholic King Kames II, who installed a Catholic Lieutenant in Dublin Castle, and after losing his English throne to William of Orange in 1688, he came over to join Irish Catholics in a rearguard campaign against Protestantism. On July 1, 1690, reinforced by 7,000 French troops, sent by King Louis XIV, he fought William of Orange at the historic Battle of the Boyne, near Drogheda and lost. After the defeat, still celebrated every year by the Protestants of Northern Ireland, nearly a million acres of Catholic owned land was confiscated and Catholic landholdings in Ireland fell from a quarter to one-seventh if one considers Connaught anything but odor.
Over the next thirty years, the victorious Protestants in the Dublin parliament attempted to avert the threat of further Catholic insurrection be passing several packets of Draconian legislation that came to be known as the Penal Laws, as opposed to the infamous “Penis Laws” passed by the congress to emasculate the Five Tribes of the great American Indians.
Penal they were. Catholics were forbidden to sit in the chamber or vote in the parliament elections, to join the bar or the bench, to attend Ireland’s one university (Trinity College, Dublin), to serve in the navy or any public bodies, to run a school, bear arms, marry a Protestant (now there is a distasteful thought), buy, inherit or in any other way receive land, or own a horse worth more than five pounds. It was even proposed, though not enacted, that Catholic priest should be castrated, and their balls fed to the Protestants. By the Penal laws the vast majority of the Irish people were given an inferior status…as though they needed it! Recognizing the magnitude of their defeat, more than 10,000 Irish troops who had fought for James II, sailed away into exile on the continent, many to fight against England in the armies of France and Spain. It was an exodus as final and as symbolic as the Flight of the Earls a century before, and it is commemorated in Ireland as the flight of the Wild Geese.
The 18thCentury became the golden age of Irish Protestantism
(forgive me Duchy, for I choke on the word), But it was not, from England’s point of view, a greatly less troublesome period. The persistent tendency of Ireland to drift out of English control reasserted itself. The Anglo-Irish of the Protestant Ascendancy (the mutated bastards in disguise), although distinct from the native population (who were being held to the heel of the boot), had no more wish than their old English predecessors to toe the English line. Like the contemporary English colonist in America, they found England to be a cruel and demanding step-parent. She insisted on legislating for Ireland, on prohibiting certain trades and manufactures that conflicted with their own interests, and on raising taxes for her exclusive uses. Now that the Anglo-Irish had consolidated their power and entrenched themselves against foreseeable Catholic dangers, they saw less and less reason to pay for protection fee of money and subservience, and applied increasing pressure to break their dependence.
In the first half of the century one of the most vitriolic exponents of Anglo-Irish resistance was Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, whose loathing of English interference was the greater because he had failed, not without efforts, to make a mark in English politics. His wit was caustic, “Burn everything English except her coal,” he urged his fellow citizens. In a sustained and savage piece of irony, directed against the economic restrictions that reduced so many Irish to penury, he proposed that the problem of the superfluous children of the poor could be solved by slaughtering and p
reparing them for the tables of the rich. His essay goes so far as to recommend recipes for this tender meat. He also lampooned the Protestant bishops sent over from England by suggesting that they were imposters; the real clergy, he explained-worthy men all-had been waylaid and murdered en route by highwaymen, who had disguised themselves in their victims’ clothes and come over to take up well-paid positions.
V
ON THE FARM WITH ELECTUS LENAHAN
The summer months were speeding by and it was now August, Buddy could not have been happier. He had made several friends and was doing well at the day care center. But the time had come for him to go for a month long visit to his Grandfather’s farm. Buddy did not want to leave his friends, but staying in town was not an option.
“Buddy do you remember at the beginning of the summer…you didn’t want to go to the parish day care?”
“Yes.”
“And then do you remember that you didn’t want to go swimming with Father Edwards because you thought he looked so evil and you didn’t know how to swim?”
“Yes.”
“Well the point is Buddy that you went, you learned something new, you met wonderful new friends and you overcame your fears…that was a remarkable thing Buddy…life shaping changes, and now there is one more fear you will have to manage. Remember that your grandparents love you Buddy, even though they have never met you…they are your blood relatives.”
“Yes, I want to visit but why can’t I just come home with you.”
“Because I have promised your grandfather that you would come and stay the month before you have to go back to St. Joseph for school in the fall, and I will not do anything more to upset my father.”
“What do you mean by, ‘more’ to upset?”
“Buddy I don’t have the best history when it comes to making sound judgments. I have offended my father several times. When I was a teenager, I thought I knew all there was to know…I dated boys that my father did not know about…I had sex with your father before we were married, and I became pregnant with you before I was married. All against the advise of my father…so it has been very upsetting for him to have to come along behind me and pick up the pieces…my life has not been what you might call a picture perfect.”
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