Westport is a midsized town nestled on the east side of Clew Bay, about two-thirds of the way up the west coast of Ireland, in County Mayo. Clew Bay itself is squarish, and an archipelago of tiny islands clusters near its eastern side. The region is famous for two things: the mountain on which St. Patrick is said to have fasted, and the pirate queen Grace O’Malley, who often operated out of Clare Island in the mouth of the bay. St. Patrick’s mountain was earlier called Croagh Egli or Cruchain Aigle, the mountain of Eagles, but it is now Croagh Patrick, a rocky coastal hummock of 2510 feet. Patrick makes a good national saint for Ireland: born in England, or Scotland, or Wales, depending on whose version one takes up, he was kidnapped from a Roman or Romanized patrician family as a young man, discovered his faith while a slave in Ireland, and was granted miraculous foresight of the boat that would take him back out of Ireland, the first of many sea voyages Irish saints would take. So he was a multiple emigrant, or maybe just a migrant, and wandered western Europe for many years before taking up his missionary vocation in Ireland.
In Ireland itself he must have kept up his migratory ways, for sites all over the country are associated with him. He founded a missionary tradition that still continues, and he fasted on Croagh Egli/Patrick in imitation of Christ in the desert, Moses on the mountain, and various other moments of religious with drawal into the wilderness. A bishop, Tirichan by name, wrote around A.D. 670, “And Patrick went forth to the summit of the mountain, over Crochan Aigli, and he stayed there forty days and forty nights. And mighty birds were around him, so that he could not see the face of the sky or earth or sea.” Sometimes it’s said to be the mount from which he swept all Ireland’s reptiles into the sea. In recent centuries, the mountain has been the site of a devout pilgrimage during the last Sunday of July; I had seen photographs of middle-aged pilgrims going devoutly barefoot over the loose rocks and scree of the chilly heights.
I had been walking down my own street when my friend Dana and I first told each other about Grace O’Malley. We opened our mouths to speak at the same time and found we were talking about the same woman. I had just come across a brief mention of her in a general Irish history, but Dana had a more lavish offering: Alice O’Malley, a young lesbian descendant who told stories about her piratical ancestress Grace. And so on another expedition I strolled over to Alice’s apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in the old immigrant quarter of the city, among such streets as Hester Street, whose names I knew before I’d ever walked them. It was a cloudy Saturday morning, and the atmosphere of animosity New York’s bustling crowds induce was absent. The city was deserted. The ten o’clock streets belonged to grime, to odd smells, and to me.
Between what Dana had told me and what I’d picked up about Grace O’Malley, I’d expected Alice to be imposing, but a small, narrow woman with cropped strawberry blonde hair under a plaid cap came downstairs. She gave me the impression of having met more trouble than joy in her life, a serious, intense woman, but hardly fragile. We drifted over to Alphabet City and ordered our breakfast in an Irish music club that had lost its liquor license and begun serving food. As a couple of families set up a children’s birthday party in the middle of the room, Alice told me stories over our soggy eggs and damp potatoes.
The morning I set out, the mountain was covered not in birds but in fog, and my route pleased me: to reach the hermitess, I would have to circumnavigate the mountain, and so I would see all its visible lower faces and much of the scrubby and sparsely inhabited surrounding countryside. It was eleven miles clockwise from Westport to the Drummin junction where the road turns off for the hermitess’s home. I began to worry I might not make her visiting hours, and so a few miles later when a car passed I stuck out my thumb. The middleaged farmwoman who picked me up was ready with her kindness and her delight, pleased to hear I was visiting Sister Irene, with whom she was well acquainted and very fond. She was in raptures that I could speak English so clearly for an American, and perhaps because of my chameleon accent and my civil replies to her questions about how I liked her part of the world, she sounded me out about whether I’d like to be married off to a local farmer. Wives, apparently, were scarce here. She praised the life of a farmer’s wife, though she admitted it wasn’t easy, and dropped me off at the gate. The sign at the gate said:
4:30 am: vigil
12:30: dinner
2:30–5: visitors
5: prayer
8: retire
or something very close. I had plenty of time.
* * *
Alice told me her great-grandfather—her mother’s mother’s father—came over as a small child, late last century, one of a dozen or so children brought over by her great-great-grandparents, and it was her grandmother, the child of this infant emigrant, who would tell them O’Malley stories. O’Malley was her grandmother’s maiden name, and she had taken it up as an adult, in continuing identification with the heroic figure who loomed over her childhood. Being descended from this undomesticated heroine impressed her deeply, though other relatives—her grandmother’s brother, for example—disavowed the connection, and her mother tried to talk her out of it. She was six feet tall and had a beard, her mother would say. Is that what you want? Or, She killed her husbands. You like that? Both of us did, though Grace outlived both her husbands without recourse to murder.
Born in the 1530s, she lived until 1603, to the end of the independent Irish aristocracy, raided ships, had sons, lost fortunes, dealt with Queen Elizabeth as an equal, and left a legacy of legends, some of them true. Through intelligence and force of will, she had seized more power than women ordinarily possessed in her part of Europe, had a fleet of trading and raiding boats that went to Spain to exchange Ireland’s fish, hides, and fabrics for Spanish wine and salt and had forced boats on the way to Galway port to pay her tribute, and her adventures on land were lively too. It is a wonder she survived seventy years of wars, raids, conquests, captures, and shifts in political power. In 1838 a writer conducting an ordnance survey of County Mayo wrote, “She is now most vividly remembered by tradition, and people were living in the last generation who conversed with people that knew her personally. Charles Cormick of Erris, now 74 years and 6 weeks old, saw and conversed with elizabeth O’Donnell of Newtown with in the Mullet, who died about 65 years ago who had seen and intimately known a Mr. Walsh who remembered Grainne [one of the Irish versions of Grace O’Malley’s name]. Walsh died at the age of 107, and his father was the same age as Grainne.”
That Alice’s family had emigrated from Clare half a century or so later with the memory of Grace intact, and that it had survived down four American generations, impressed me as much as the earlier generations who remembered her at only third hand more than two centuries later. This child of an emigration as long ago and as many generations away as my own family’s was still steeped in identification with a country to which she’d never been, but then Alice had been raised as Irish and Catholic and eastern, all the things that had come out in my wash of outmarriage and westward migration. I was only what the Irish might once have been and are no longer, a wandering barbarian from the western fringes of the world.
I told her about Roger Casement and she told me about Grace O’Malley over our sodden breakfasts. Alice had been told that Grace cropped her hair when young and stowed away on one of her father’s boats bound on a long voyage, only revealing herself when it was too late to turn back. Legend has it that she became a sailor, and she did, in the historical record, remain a woman of the seas all her life, commander of fleets and nautical battles (in the story I had read, she gave birth to her second son on a ship and came aboveboard shortly afterwards to do battle). Another was that she took a liking to an aristocratic boy and kidnapped him, perhaps an evolution from a couple of more historically documented stories. In one of them, she rescued a young man from a boat shipwrecked near Clare Island and fell in love with him—but the MacMahons killed him while he was deerhunting, and she slew the responsible parties in revenge. In
the other, she was refused hospitality by the lord of Howth Castle, near Dublin, so she kidnapped the young heir, but surrendered him upon the promise that the table at Howth would always have an extra place set. It still does, as Alice’s aunt ascertained on a visit.
Grace O’Malley, or Grainaille, has become, with the legendary Queen Maeve, Countess Markievicz, and President Mary Robinson, one of the icons of strong women in Irish culture, and she is talismanic with many who aren’t O’Malleys. Although the earlier Celts had made a little more room for women than have most societies, by Grace’s time the room had narrowed, and Grace was exceptional. Her power was what she took, not what she received. There was a story about Grace and a hermit too, that her biographer, Anne Chambers, tells, a story that took place on an island in Clew Bay. “A chieftain of a neighboring clan, who had been defeated by Grace, took refuge in the church on the tiny island which was inhabited by a holy hermit. Grace, in her determination to prevent the chieftain’s escape, surrounded the church and waited to starve him out. The chieftain, however, with the aid of the hermit, dug a tunnel out to the steep cliff-face, considered impassable, but by the aid of a rope managed to lower himself down the sheer rock-face to a waiting boat . . . The hermit, breaking his vow of silence, came out later and informed the waiting Grace that her quarry had escaped and admonished her . . .”
The hermitess lived by a stream, in an indentation in one of those terrible pine plantations owned by the government, not far from the road. Her ducks, her goat, and its kid wandered around the grounds, and the whole place looked more like a bustling farm and less like a remote fastness than I’d expected. Two little boxlike houses, one red, one gray, sat on the slope above, and a cottage with a cross on it sat down below. More or less a hut in a clearing, but St. Anthony was never tempted in a landscape like this. The hermitess herself was theatrically good-looking, like Jean Seberg in Joan of Arc. She was young, small, had beautiful skin, and brown bangs sticking out from under her wimple of dark blue, a cassock of some heavy grayish stuff with a blue Celtic cross on it, and a turtleneck underneath, to match the thick socks inside her sandals—and the thick gold band of a bride of Christ on her ring finger. She was in the lower cottage, talking to a man about the heating. He was extremely tall, he was wearing a good suit, and, even after I joined them, he kept making forlorn attempts to get us to talk about the World Cup. It was scheduled to begin in a couple of weeks, and most of the country was heating up to a monomaniacal fever about Ireland’s chances in it, but the poor man had probably found the two people in Ireland least interested in football.
He did better talking with us about church history and heating. We toured the chapel, which was being built out of cinder blocks. We had tea, or at least we the guests did, for the funny little teapot only held two cups, and she passed around a huge tin box of cookies that must have been a gift. She seemed much more worldly than I expected, and for a recluse was quite alert to the politics of her church. She spoke with asperity about the lack of ecclesiastical support for the contemplative orders, in contrast to those which do good works in the world, and she intimated that contemplation and praying for the world rather than working in it were the real purpose of a religious vocation. There was a great rise, she said, of hermits in western Europe—there were a hundred in Britain and more than that in France, which is undergoing a real revival of the stricter orders—and in Ireland, seven hermits and hermitesses. Perhaps she seemed worldly because I wasn’t religious after her fashion and didn’t know how to speak to her of the unworldly things, and my interest in her choice of solitude, in the spiritually of solitude and immobility, seemed too intrusive after the talk of furnaces and football. But the tea and the image of hermits and hermitesses proliferating in the out-of-the-way places around Europe sustained me for the rest of my walk back, against the wind.
Alice marched with New York’s Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization every year, and when I spoke with her, she seemed to have gotten used to the idea of spending St. Patrick’s Day in jail. The ILGO was founded in a Japanese restaurant in 1990, and after its members “had lots of fun in the summer’s gay and lesbian parade,” as another member put it, they thought they’d try the city’s huge St. Patrick’s Day parade too. That’s when their trouble began. Cardinal O’Connor used their desire to participate as an occasion to inveigh a little more against homosexuality. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, the parade’s Catholic organizers, claimed that the parade was full and they would be put on the waiting list—but when the ILGO sued for their right to march, the Hibernians couldn’t produce any such list. A progressive Bronx division of the AOH invited the ILGO to march with their banner in that St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1991, the city’s 230th annual such commemoration. In a show of solidarity, the city’s African-American mayor, David Dinkins, marched with the two hundred gay and lesbian participants rather than at the head of the parade as New York’s mayors traditionally did. It was unclear whether the mayor or the people he was with elicited the forty blocks of boos.
In 1992 things didn’t go so smoothly. In 1993 the event was nearly canceled, Dinkins stayed away in protest, and more than two hundred gay and lesbian protesters were arrested for showing up anyway. In 1994 the veterans who organize Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade canceled it after a similar Irish queer group there won the right to participate, and a hundred gay and lesbian activists were arrested while protesting their exclusion. New York’s Ancient Order of Hibernians went to court and redefined their event as a religious procession rather than an ethnic parade, to give themselves a legal standing with which to exclude the ILGO or any other group they disagreed with. It was less an Irish than an Irish-American ruckus, the ILGO organizer Susan O’Brien told me in a voice with the soft remnants of an Irish lilt; the celebrations of the saint’s day in Dublin and Cork allow gays and lesbians to participate without fuss (and in Cork a lesbian and gay contingent that carried a “Hello, New York!” banner won the “best new entry” award). It was as though the New York and Boston parade organizers were trying to narrow down the definition of Irishness or seeing it in nostalgic soft focus, freed from the complexities and contradictions of Ireland as a real place. Their parades seemed to propose that participants must choose whether to be queer or Irish; to try to be boThat the same time meant spending St. Patrick’s Day in jail, a peculiar commemoration of a saint who had been a slave and a country whose principal heroes had been prisoners and exiles. Jail was, added O’Brien, not particularly unpleasant, what with all your friends there with you.
After the hermitess’s home, the landscape on either side of my road became more beautiful—rough country, scrubby and steep, with rivulets and streams. The winding road went up and over a low shoulder of Croagh Patrick, the shrouded mountain that had been on my right all day as I rotated clockwise round it, and when I reached the crest of that shoulder, I could see the bay. Sheep and cattle roamed free across the lonely road, there were minor waterfalls and few buildings until I came close to the bay again where, most of the way round my twenty- or twenty-five-mile route, I stuck out my thumb and got a ride into town from some French travelers.
St. Patrick was fasting on the mountain. Grace O’Malley was sailing the seas. Alice O’Malley was marching in a parade that was trying to walk backwards. Sister Irene was seeing to her goats or making tea. I was walking through their worlds. Grace was in the grave, though it’s not clear which one. Alice was spending St. Patrick’s Day in a New York jail cell. The hermitess was on the edge of a tree plantation praying for the rest of us.
16
Travellers
I couldn’t tell when my ride was supposed to come to an end. I had been keeping an eye on a young woman with heavy gold hoops in her ears I thought might be a Traveller, but she got off before we came to anything that looked like a prison, and so I asked the bus driver where Wheatfields Prison was. When he found out I was looking for the Clondalkin Traveller site at the walls of the prison his middle-aged face hitherto as bland as a
sofa cushion bunched up in fury. “Why are you interested in them?” he demanded, and I said noncommittal things. His rage increased and he said that they had killed the son of his friend “and the boy was just going on fifteen, he was a lovely lad. And they sat outside the courthouse laughing and drinking. Him as did it got only nine months but the boy’s gone forever. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the scum of the earth.” All of them, I asked, and he said yes. I asked him if he’d ever spoken to any of them, and he said he didn’t need to, and why was I going to? I’d been invited to visit, I said, and thought I’d see for myself. Not for nothing was I raised by a fair-housing activist, and I threw in a few platitudes about not judging a whole population by the actions of an individual.
Hate had entered my holiday, along with nomads. My travels up the west coast of Ireland had come to an end with a question about Travellers, a question only Dublin seemed capable of answering, and Dublin had answered it with a swarm of facts, a few encounters, and an invitation to visit a Traveller family. We had come to the end of the line on this bus route from downtown Dublin, and the bus driver insisted that I stand up and hold onto the pole next to his seat so he could give me a private tour of the suburban tragedy he was so bitter about. With an angry sweep of the arm he showed me the bare earth rectangle full of bare new blocks of houses where his friend lived. And as he turned around on his route on this muggy afternoon, he showed me the cemetery where the boy was buried and the camp where the killer—an inadvertent killer by means of drunk driving—lived; I wondered if the driver had done his time in Wheatfields Prison so that the whole story was all at the end of this bus line.
A Book of Migrations Page 22