The North American continent begins small and intimate in the eastern seaboard and seems to gather scale as it moves west of the Mississippi, across the vastness of the prairies, over the high Rockies, the sublime expanse of the Great Basin, and the higher Sierra Nevada, but as it rolls close to its other edge, it begins to reduce its scale again, at least along the central California coast. With its intricacy of small, steep hills and rocky outcroppings, its dairylands and wildflowers, this my homeland reminds me of Ireland, at least during the two or three months of the green season. But its differences are profound too: the sky above was a high burning glass, not the sodden gray that keeps Ireland green, and the dry grass was crawling with reptiles. These reptiles lived in a world that was for most of the year dry, from the fresh gold dryness of late spring to the rain-leached iron gray of winter, and then for a few months at the end of the rainy season the whole thing turned a glorious green. A little farther up the road was the first house on Seventh Street, and one year the neglected grasses in its front yard grew so tall my younger brother and I trampled a maze in it. In places I could twist the grass overhead into arches, and then one day I almost stepped over the biggest bull snake I ever saw, almost black and infinitely smooth in the labyrinth of strawlike grass.
I never saw foxes or coyotes then, and I only heard rumors of mountain lions, but skunks and raccoons would wander down into the shrubbery of the subdivision. Sometimes early in the morning a deer or two would come trotting stately along the middle of the street as though on an inspection tour. There was a girl named Joy who lived near the top of Seventh Street alone with her father and a white horse in a field with a pomegranate tree, past the estate whose grapevines I also raided annually, along with sundry plum trees, prickly pears, and blackberry patches. It must have been the estate that planted the tall pines which flanked a stretch of the road and under whose low branches I built less a tree house than a field nest, of gathered grasses. I seemed always to be making little homes in the hills, finding hollowed trees in which to store treasures, rocky nooks to spend afternoons in, climbable trees. The best of all was at the top of the street, near where the pavement ended: a huge old-fashioned rosebush which had been running wild for decades until it was a mass the size of a large room; there was a low tunnel to its center, which was not a trunk but a cavernous hollow. Some nights I would lie in the still-warm grass of the hillside, my weight spread so evenly against the earth itself that gravity seemed hardly to hold me, and as I stared up at the stars the sky seemed a deep well I was hanging over and might fall into at any moment. The sensation of fearful vastness was my first introduction to the pleasures and terrors of the infinite.
Home, the site of all childhood’s revelations and sufferings, changes irrevocably, so that we are all in some sense refugees from a lost world. But you can’t ever leave home either; it takes root inside you and the very idea of self as an entity bounded by the borders of the skin is a fiction disguising the vast geographies contained under the skin that will never let you go. It is, if nothing else, the first ruler by which everything else will be measured, the place by which other places will be found hot or cold, bustling or serene, lush or stark. When I think back to my formation, it seems that landscape shaped me, made a home in the truer sense than the centerless house in the subdivision and an identity surer than the vague hints of familial and ethnic history that came my way. I am even literally made of the California landscape, of all the produce, water, wine I have been devouring since I was four.
What was passed along by my mother is of course a question whose answer approximates everything, from speech and language to her concern with social justice, which may itself be a legacy from her Irish republican forebears. She kept her emergency stash of money, in those days before electronic banking machines, in an old green copy of Liam Flaherty’s novel The Famine and named her last child David, not to please her Jewish in-laws but after her brother and father who were named after the Irish nationalist and poet Thomas Davis, because her grandfather was an ardent nationalist (according to family legend, he was a Sinn Feiner who left Ireland under an assumed name, a wanted man). There are cups of tea and minor markings of St. Patrick’s Day and a certain kind of sentimentality I can pin to Ireland, anxieties about error, justice, sex, and the body I can claim were Catholic, but little more. Which is not to say that profound things were not transmitted so much as I cannot name them or their difference from the larger culture. My mother and her brother are confidently and wholly Irish-American, educated in Catholic schools, baptized, catechized, and confirmed. Their interests, their sentiment, their claims all lie that way, toward this poor island they have visited several times each, sometimes to track down umpteenth cousins and see homesteads of ancestors whose names they never taught us, who are no longer the children of that now foreign country.
The mad ex–San Franciscan Irishman in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, remarks that the Irish are as common as whale shit on the ocean floor, and in a country where nearly forty million people claim ties to the same island it is hard to say what distinguishing marks set the heirs of Irish immigration apart. Everyone in Ireland would demand my ancestry—or rather whether I was Irish, and if I said half, they would say, What’s the other half, then. Inevitably, they’d want to know in which religion I’d been reared and when I said neither, they’d goggle slightly and say in tones of gratified horror, You mean you’re nothing? Their surprise and my chagrin were signs of how far apart we were, I from the hybrid sprawl of California, they from the homogenous Republic of Ireland. It was clear to both of us here that to be of Irish extraction was not at all like being an inhabitant of this supersaturated little island, that a trickle of that mythological substance blood had little to do with being reared in a soggy green country with too much history and not enough industry. But they would often assert that I looked Irish, confirming something to their own satisfaction, though Eastern Europeans are always happy to trace in the same lineaments signs of their region. The two inheritances seem rather to cancel each other out, making me as much double as nothing, a compound that could never be divided back to its constituent elements, a Jew to Christians, a Christian to Jews, a European to Native Americans, and an American to Europeans. To truly go back where we came from, I would have to be dismembered and divided among many lands, and my heart, I was sure, should be buried in the California hills.
There are fashions in remembering and forgetting: the melting pot assimilationist ideal of much of this century celebrated jettisoning the past to reach more quickly a utopian future like a shimmering white city; while the recent reaction against this restless forward lurch has stressed roots, blood, ethnicity, difference, remembering, a past as dark as dirt. The place of the tangled present, and of place itself, seems never to have surfaced in these schemes built on hope or on history. And the conversation of ethnicity rarely speaks to the hybrids and mutations that go on in a new soil, and it was this new soil that seemed as much a parent to me as the people in the house below the hills in which I grew up. In the endless succession of intellectual fashions, bioregionalism—a philosophy of coming to belong to one’s locale by coming to know and respect its history and nature—seems to have fallen out of the conversation as multiculturalism made its entrance. So no chemistry proposing identity as a compound of ethnicity and geography has been made, nor any balance struck between roots and restlessness. Seventh Street I dream of still, one of only a few real places to take on any permanence in the territories I wander in my sleep. And Ireland for me was a place that looked like it, a road that extended from that first road.
Glengarriff was scattered along the main road, which dipped down toward the sea after shrugging off its few stores and pubs. In the Cafe de la Paix, I got tea and an egg sandwich and sat out front, watching the life of the town crawl by. Almost immediately a stout ruddyfaced man walked up to me, one of a long succession of garrulous middle-aged men who would buttonhole me and who seemed incapable of
talking to me for more than five minutes without touching on Irish history. These men—professional Irishmen a friend calls them—always intimated their detours through history were for my benefit, but they seemed to be for theirs: history was an itch they couldn’t help scratching. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville met one on a stagecoach, who spoke of what had happened locally since Cromwell “with a terrifying exactitude,” an exactitude that meant the wrongs were still felt and retribution was still due; and when the British Prime Minister Lloyd George met with eamon de Valera in 1921 to discuss a peace treaty, de Valera annoyed him by harping on Cromwell, who was ancient history to the former, but not to the latter. Perhaps history is too fine a word for it: history is a continuum of innumerable facts; mythology is the pattern of origins and reasons one picks out of them. The remembrances of professional Irishmen tend toward nationalist narratives in which their ancestors are victims and heroes, pure and simple.
This redfaced man was traveling with his sister and niece, he explained, but they stayed under their own umbrella. Where was I from, he inquired, and when I said California, asked if it was San Francisco, and then, settling himself in, asked whether I knew the Abbey Tavern there. We paid our mutual respects to the Abbey Tavern, and then he knew all he needed to know about me, and began to tell me all I needed to know about everything else. His conversation roved over a vast terrain, anchored every so often by a statistic. He told me that though it’s only 300 miles from Mizen Head in the south to the far northeast of Northern Ireland, the country has more than 3000 miles of coastline; that in the Galway village he was born in, the policeman’s wife had 18 children and the tailor’s 24; that of the 8 in his own family, 5 are no longer in the Irish Republic, and he’d worked abroad himself for many years. He waved his hand at a cluster of adolescent girls bobbing by and said, They’ll all have to emigrate to find work—England, the States . . . and Germany now. I don’t know how my redfaced man worked in that he had 3000 books at home (one for every mile of Irish coastline, perhaps) or how many languages have died in this century—1000 (I guessed correctly which one had been brought back to life: Hebrew).
And then suddenly he was talking with mild personal grievance about the Penal Laws, put into effect at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He enumerated the laws restricting land ownership, the sporting of certain haircuts and garments, the practice of religion, almost all forms of education, and said that the Irish Catholics had been like animals, no, even animals are allowed to be themselves. And with a brief celebration of Daniel O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation, which came in 1829, he returned to his companions, who were quietly sipping their drinks. I’m surprised, in retrospect, he didn’t see fit to tell me about O’Sullivan Beare too, whose encounter with the English and the Irish weather (Ireland’s history is partly a history of unlucky weather) was more brutal than the French fleet’s in Bantry Bay. Defeated at Dunboy Castle along the northern side of Bantry Bay in January 1603, he fled from Glengarriff to the Curlew Mountains two hundred miles north with a thousand followers, including many women and children, on what became famous as his winter march across Ireland. Only thirty-five survived the weather and the enemies along the way, and their route was said to have been marked by the corpses of the rest of the party. O’Sullivan Beare himself was among the survivors, and he sought refuge in Spain. A few years later the Flight of the Earls brought further members of the old Celtic aristocracy into exile in Rome, and with that their reign was over.
I stayed that night in an old farmhouse partway up the mountain over which they fled, among rocks and woods from which rabbits shyly emerged to crop the grass at dusk. There was no one else there but a strapping American girl of about twenty on her first European journey and the proprietor, a sad, potbellied little man trying to make a living by taking tourists around in a boat by day and letting them stay by night in what had, in his father’s day, been a working farm on the steep slope. The girl seemed like a Henry James character, one of those freshfaced incarnations of American naivety and force, and she spoke of all the marvels she’d seen in an odd metallic voice that seemed to have something to do with the long scar around the base of her throat.
7
Wandering Rocks
A pirate sails around the world in the name of his Protestant queen, looking for gold, either the gold of enemy ships or the gold of exotic half-imagined lands. He finds it, sometimes, and loses it, sometimes, and ventures as far as the western side of South America in his boat made of English or Irish oak. Peru has already been raided, and the Incas robbed of much of their glittering wealth. During an expedition of 1586, considered a failure because he missed the gold-laden Spanish fleet by twelve hours, the pirate probably—the record is murky—brings back something more modest, in fact the most modest thing imaginable: a lumpy brownskinned tuberous root that had formed the staple of highland Peruvian diets for centuries.
On another long voyage seven years earlier, he stops on the west coast of North America, at a place whose rolling hills and oaks remind him of his own island home, because he names it New Albion and claims it for his queen, who will always remain oceans and continents away from this conceptual claim. The land already has many names, among them the Spanish name California, after a mythical island of women warriors, though neither the pirate Sir Francis Drake nor the Spanish know it’s not an island, and his name doesn’t stick. His warrior queen is already busy subjugating peoples nearer at hand, the Catholic Irish and the eastern tribes of this continent he’s landed on, and the strategies for both are much the same: plantations, settlers, massacres, and treaties made with men not in a position to make them and then enforced.
The potato perhaps brought back by Sir Francis Drake to northern Europe becomes a staple everywhere, spreading first through Europe and then even into Asia and becoming so much a part of local fare few remember whence it came. No one becomes so dependent on it so quickly or so completely as the Irish and, as the potato economy enables them to become more populous and more impoverished, they begin to cultivate a single strain called the lumper, large, unappealing, prolific, and easy to grow. A monoculture is a dangerous thing, but because of the instability of a war-torn place, a crop that grows under the ground, requires little cultivation, and can be stored as subterraneanly as it grows is irresistible. The single strain succumbs all over the island to a single blight, rotting overnight in the fields in 1845 and 1846 and on and on for a decade, and the Irish Catholics who have lived on lumpers and died of politics leave off their ferocious adherence to the local and become a race of emigrants, emigrating particularly to North America, to the English-speaking country that has shrugged off the mantle of English empire, to the United States.
Both of these colonies, first Ireland then America, become refuges for the Scots, who cluster most thickly in Ulster and the American South. In Ireland they never become Irish, and as the centuries pass they think of themselves more and more as British (though the Scots were Celts, and originally from Ireland), until Ireland’s time of liberation draws near and they become the Unionists who succeed not in halting the revolution but in making it incomplete. A quarter of Ireland remains part of the British Empire, a last squalid little corner of what was once so far-reaching an imperium, and in this corner the liberation struggle deteriorates into a routine of revenges. But the Scots Irish in America are another story; many of them go to the southeast and become the most settled white people in the nation, the ones with traditions, a relationship to the land, a collective memory—with all those elements that constitute local culture. They make their whiskey out of corn and their houses out of wood, but they sing the same haunting ballads, ballads which are, as Bob Dylan once said, “about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels.” Even in the ballads written in this new country, even late in this century, the romantic, violent, topographically specific, and fatalistic strains of Celtic legend gleam, and the dialectic of homesickness and restlessness fuel
s thousands of miles of song.
This country where they become free is the same one where Africans become slaves. In their homelands, they were West Africans and West Europeans whose identities were determined by culture, heritage, region, but in this mixed new country, skin itself has currency as meaning, and they become blacks and whites. The whites who were at the bottom of the social ladder in Europe now have someone lower than them, and a lot of them seem to like it that way; they live for centuries in highly structured suspicion and interconnection. The ballads and rhythms of their musics mix with least inhibition, and in the twentieth century new indigenous musics evolve, out of the red dirt, the strong African and maybe Native American beats and rhythms, the Celtic melancholy, into the hillbilly music cleaned up as country and western, and into blues and rhythm and blues. They all dovetail as rock and roll, a medium that spreads less like imperialism than like the potato and becomes a local crop all over the world, particularly the English-speaking world, a local crop that expresses the insurrection of the young against tradition and authority, of the margin against the center, and that sometimes becomes an institution itself too, like U2 in Ireland. The melancholy and the exuberance of slaves and outsiders have come, or come back, to Ireland, and by the time I wander across its expanse not only rock and blues but country and jazz bands are playing, along with traditional Irish bands, in all the small towns I reach, and it is possible to eat fish and chips and hear live blues in the poky town of Bantry on the west coast of Ireland.
Bantry, where in 1796 Wolfe Tone’s rebellion failed. Had it succeeded, Timothy Murphy might not have jumped ship in northern California around 1828, not far from where Drake landed in 1579, and if the Famine hadn’t happened perhaps my mother’s four grandparents would have stayed home in Ireland too. To imagine Timothy Murphy as a personality bracketed by those two countries, it’s important to remember what they were then: Ireland had ninety more years to go as part of England, and California had a decade and a half before it ceased to be Mexico and became the United States. The former was densely inhabited by its poor Gaelic-speaking indigenous population, lorded over by the immigrant English; the latter was in some ways similar, though its indigenous population is estimated never to have exceeded about a third of a million, a population broken up into about a hundred languages and cultures as befit the wildly varied terrain of California, desert, mountain, forest, grassland (California is five times as big as Ireland). The Irish, like the original Californians, had been too fragmented, despite their cultural homogeneity, to rally together against invasions on any grand scale, and so they became a conquered people.
A Book of Migrations Page 11