“There is a stone that whoever kisses, Oh! He never misses to grow eloquent ‘Tis he may clamber to a lady’s chamber or become a member of parliament”
Francis Sylvester Mahony
I don’t know what it is about us Irish but we’re about the only Caucasian folks who insist on clinging to the moniker Irish-Americans We “get it” when African-Americans and Hispanics want to be identified by their ethnic group. There is almost a racial longing in us to go back home to the old country at least to visit that probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone who isn’t Irish.
I think that’s why the minute I got off of the plane and started driving through the country side here in Wisconsin, I immediately fell in love with the country side. I’m told that southern Wisconsin is the one place in the USA that most resembles Ireland.
I’m 99.% pure Scots/Irish with the Scots being ruling class landed gentry who lived in Ireland making sure the rest of my shanty Irish relatives behaved themselves.The Scots can trace their family tree all the way back to the time of James the First. They’re right snobby about that shit, too but they still had to go home and muck out the manure in the milking barn the same as my shanty kin had to and they weren’t near as much fun. Stinkin’ Puritans, that was my Mama’s side of the family.
It was Daddy’s side of the family where the intermarrying between Catholics and Protestants took place. The Protestants looked down their noses at the Catholics and vice verse. I was raised by the Protestants but I thought the Catholics got the better deal in church. All that pomp and circumstance and ritual. It was all so mysterious. And the jewelry was cool. We fundamentalists were barely even allowed to wear necklaces with crosses. Plus their churches were prettier.
It was Daddy’s side of the family that had surely kissed the Blarney Stone as well. One of my Uncles actually went over to Ireland and kissed it during his travels in the Air Force. Another saw it but was too chicken to lean out that far that high to kiss it. Fear of heights is a family curse which I share with that Uncle and though he got ribbed about it a bit everyone understood.
They were all gifted story tellers beginning with my Grandaddy who kept us children enthralled with stories about fairies and elves. Grandma had papered the front Parlor with bucolic scenes that included thatched huts and barns and wagons pulling hay along rural lanes and Grandaddy would point and say “look quick did you see him there? Behind that red barn? I seen that little boy peeing again! Don’t tell yer Gran, she’ll be papering this parlor and taking away all my little people!” Well, we kids fell for that bit for years, believing Grandaddy had little people living in his walls and as we grew old enough to lose the gullibility, we just joined in the fun by duping our younger brothers and sisters and cousins.
Gran wrote wonderful letters to all of her sons in the service keeping them abreast of all the other children’s comings and goings and they all wrote wonderful letters home that were read aloud every Sunday at the dinner table. We divided our Sunday dinner hours between the Grandmothers’ homes and I remember letters being read aloud from both families.
Mother’s family had gone into foreign missionary work rather than the military and I had ann Aunt and Uncle living in Japan spreading the “Good News” and teaching English. Their eldest daughter was my age and as soon as we could write well enough (2nd grade), we were assigned to be each other’s pen pals. Since Linda was home schooled, I’m sure it was part of her curriculum. For me it was a way to indulge my budding love of tinkering with words.
Back to family genealogy. There was that Russian Jew the Protestants sneaked in a few generations back. You’ll never guess what his name was. Sinner. Honest. My Gran’s maiden name was Sinner. Ain’t that a hoot? But it’s OK, he was duly baptized (full immersion) as soon as the circuit riding preacher got around to their neck of the prairie and all was well. The waters of The Little Blue River washed away all that Jewish taint.
One of my Catholic ancestors on the other hand took a Native American bride (Lakota Sioux to be exact) so some of my family has this beautiful blue-black hair and deep brown eyes or maybe they might be startlingly blue (OK it’s rapidly going gray) with blue-green eyes and high cheekbones. My elders wouldn’t talk much about the Native American and Jewish blood in us because there was some shame attached to such indiscretions. Racism.
I was proud of it and wanted to take that information to show and tell when I found out about it but my Mama sure hushed that out of me in a hurry. What did I know? Jesus was a Jew; I thought being Jewish was a good thing and we must have been studying Native Americans (we called them Indians back then) in social studies that week. I thought all Indians were like Tonto on The Lone Ranger. A good thing.
Boy was I wrong. My good Christian Mama set me straight. She taught me all about miscegenation in half a heart beat although she wouldn’t even know the meaning of that word if she saw it written out to this day or still think there was a damn thing wrong with her beliefs then since she still believes the same damn thing today minus the back of the bus part.
Besides it was Daddy’s side of the family where all those indiscretions took place. Her side of the family would have never done such things. Translation: there was something not quite nice about my Gavin relative. The Fates and Hoyts had better breeding and I should be looking to them for role models no matter how boring they seemed to me at that juncture of my life.
If you’d like to know the nitty gritty details of what it was like growing up in Clay Center, Nebraska and being related to 3/4 of the dysfunctional families that made up the population and I knew all 584 of them by name and title which was Mr and Mrs or Miss if they weren’t a Doctor or retired military in which case special circumstances applied and they had titles like Sargeant or Lieutenant so and so.
And yes Sir and yes Ma’am. I still say yes sir and yes ma’am to everyone. Sometimes people think I’m making fun of them but by the time I got away from my parents home it had become so ingrained , I can’t answer a yes or no question from an adult without that sir or ma’am tacked onto the end.
My Grandaddy Gavin taught me about the persecution of the Irish by the English and told me that there were people in Clay Center who looked down on the Irish as second class citizens. One of them was my third grade teacher Mrs Witte. Her family and her husbands family were German. It was whispered that they were Nazi sympathizers during WWII. I wouldn’t be surprised but small towns are hot beds of cruel whispers.. She wasn’t liked at all but there was no one else to get to teach her class.
The W in her name was pronounced with a V sound if correctly pronounced she told us But no one ever could say it like it should be said so we prounounced it like it looks–Witty. She wasn’t.
Witty, that is. She was mean and awful to kids who were less than stellar students but she absolutely despised me. My mother said it was because I had already read nearly everything in her reading book plus all of the other books she had in her small library. My Grandfather was the school custodian and when the school decided to get new books for the grade school he brought the old ones to our house to be burnt in the wood burning stove my mother cooked on in the winter.
I went out to the woodshed and read all of them. No one really thought much about it except when I wasn’t bringing in fuel fast enough to suit them but as it turned out, they just got the new editions of the same book and very little was changed. They added a few new stories but Mrs Witte wasn’t teaching those. She was teaching what she had always taught forever and a day.
My Grandfather said it was because I was Irish and the woman hated the Irish. I have a distinct memory of her holding my chin in her hand and turning my face this way and that and commenting on the structure of my face, one day when she kept me in from recess, saying I had high cheekbones and that came from my Irish blood but I could have Indian blood too. Did I have Indian blood, she wanted to know? Tell the truth now. Well, I think that I knew that by then but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
Four years later she was tormenting my poor little developmentally challenged cousin who could barely string a complete sentence together but was the sweetest child in the world. I hated that old bitch for what she did to M. There were days when was browbeating him in the cafeteria that I wanted to snatch him up and run away with him. When someone said something to her once she retorted that “The little retard ought to be locked away! He’s impossible!” As you can see we didn’t exactly get the cream of the crop for teachers out in the boondocks of Nebraska.
So those experiences and what I had learned from Grandaddy about the Irish struggle for freedom from the English (he sent small sums of money to his relatives in Ireland to support Sinn Fein) I developed a real empathy for the Native Americans. Plus the whole civil Rights business and Martin Luther King Jr. was all over the news. My activist training was just beginning and so was my interest in the History of the Civil War and the 19th century in general.
B
