07 April 2007
Woman's Work
Detail of the Woman's Memorial at Gettysburg
I stared in disbelief at the white stuff falling from the sky this morning. It cannot be real. I washed my car this week, and most of the salt has been washed off the pavement. It is corrosive stuff, and eats the vehicles alive.
I had been at one of those Washington dinners at the Willard downtown, and slept in a bit to enjoy the illusion of freedom that the weekend brings. Reading the e-mails out of sequence, I did not recognize the reference to chlorine gas in a note from a friend in Ramadi. She is working there to rebuild the infrastructure so that families can have a better life. I thought it was a historical reference to something, since the Bad Guys have conducted four or five attacks using tank-trucks filled with the nasty stuff.
It was not till I got to the paper that I realized a sixth chemical had been conducted right there, near the Forward Operating Base. The attacker made his bid on Good Friday for us and on the Muslim day of prayer, when the kids are out of school and the woman and running errands and visiting before the summons to prayer.
The tank-truck was filled with chorine, one of the more common deadly chemicals in that area since it is used to purify the water. Police managed to shoot up the cab as it approached a check-point. The truck swerved toward a residential area where the bomb detonated.
Chlorine is a choking agent, and it has no antidote. Depending on the concentration to which victims are exposed, the symptoms can range from a mild to fatal. This particular bomb destroyed a building containing six apartments, but local officials were pleased. The wind dispersed the gas cloud away from the women and children.
I'll admit it up front: I am guilty as most men in my view of the world. I take seriously the words of this-or-that-president, and the impact of General so-and-so, as if history pivoted solely upon them.
It does, to a degree, but the real story is far more intricate, and relies on the strength of the women to take it forward, since they bear not only their individual loads, but also the burden of the madness of the men.
I spoke with a woman I used to work with at Langley yesterday, same work and same pay. She said she had one of Those Dreams, where someone had broken into her house. She had a gun, and was prepared to kill the attacker, which reflects empowerment and a sense of self-worth. But in the dreamscape she also worried about where to shoot him. A torso or head-shot would create a bigger mess to clean up.
The cannonades and explosions of war are what took me back to the first Irish in the family to come to America, in the plague year of 1847. I concentrated on little Patrick, who with his silver tongue, later told of great exploits on the field of battle.
It is Honora McDonough I'd like you to meet this morning. She was Patrick's mother, and she had married Michael Griffin, Pat's dad, in Clifden, County Galway, somewhere around 1843.
There is no picture of her, so a description from the family records will have to do.
The family records say she was short; light complexioned, with a square face. You can see some of that in the later period picture of her son Patrick in his uniform of the 10th Tennessee Irish. Her husband Mike, by contrast, was the very personification of the Black Irish: dark-completion, with dark eyes and black curly hair.
They had four children in that most lovely of Counties. Patrick was the eldest and Barbara the second of four. She was to become the "little mother" to the two younger ones, Mary and William, for reasons involving a microbe that successfully attacked ground agricultural tubers. It was completely beyond her control.
In those days, there were five times more Irish in County Galway then there would be at the turn of the next century, too many for the land to support as the mysterious blight began to spread and the potatoes rotted in the ground. The misery began in earnest, and through the policy failures of men far away, became The Famine.
It rose to a peak in 1847. It was appalling. On one day alone in that awful year, one hundred and sixty corpses were picked from the Galway County roads. It continued, unabated, through the next year. In November of 1848, more than two hundred were reported to have died on a single day at the Clifden workhouse.
All that could flee did so. Honora and Michael looked at their children and despaired. Escape cost money, and they could not take them all. There was some hope, but it came with an awful price. Their family situation was a little better than most. Honora's mother Mary had a small hostel in Clifden, and a means to survive. But there was no work for Michael, and no room for all the young Griffin family.
It was life or death, and they chose the best that life could offer. Honora clutched her three little ones, and wept at the choice that life had offered up. She left her three youngest behind with her mother Mary, and the three oldest Griffins took passage on the sailing ship David, which took thirteen weeks to cross the Atlantic.
Mother Mary lived to be one hundred and eleven years, they say, and outlasted them all, though when she parted with Honora at the dock, they never saw one another again in this world. There was enough to be done. The cooking in those times took all day, carrying coal, when it was avilable, ash and soot, and the laundry to be boiled, and the ironing done with sweat and burning hand.
Honora's brother Patrick McDonough went off to America as part of the Diaspora. Fourteen years later, he wound up a sailor, in service to the Union, on an iron-clad on the Mississippi.
Landing at Baltimore, Honora followed Michael in a series of laboring jobs, swinging a hammer. The Irish in America were junction-people, living where the waters and the rails came together.
The Griffins fully intended to return to Ireland when the bad times were over, and Michael and Honora had sternly informed mother Mary that they did not want their daughters to wed while they were gone. The years passed with backbreaking labor for them all, little Patrick sprouting up as they followed the railroad from Alexandria in Virginia to the great confluence of river and rail at Nashville.
Little Barbara and her little sister Mary grew toward womanhood. Barbara took her responsibility seriously, but Mary was a winsome girl, and had a mind of her own.
Honora and Michael wanted to recover their children, and perhaps take over the hostel. But sunstroke felled Mike in his tracks as he worked on the railroad in Tennessee. He died at Cedar Hill, and is buried near there, leaving Honora and his young son alone in a new continent.
Honora abandoned the idea of returning to Ireland, and decided to send for her children. She married Thomas Griffin; no relation, and bore him two sons; Martin and Myles. Young Patrick began to hang around the Irish social clubs in Nashville, and became a follower of the Sons of Erin, a bold group of likely lads who like music and whiskey and supported the Democratic Party.
Barbara was fifteen in 1860, Mary had several beaus, and was a headstrong girl. Her parent's wishes, a world away but enforced by her Grandmother, were intolerable. She picked up and left. Perhaps she came to America, too, or somewhere else in the wide empire, but she was never seen again.
Barbara was determined to get her mother's blessing, came to America to find a husband.
She was a strong minded young woman. She said "farewell" to her grandmother and brother and crossed the Atlantic on her own. She came to Nashville in time to spend the war years there.
Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnson lost the city in the first year of the war. Nashville became a Union garrison for most of the conflict, even if her sons were fighting for the Confederacy elsewhere. It could have been worse. Barbara could have found herself besieged in Vicksburg, where the women and their children experienced great deprivation.
No one knows how or where, but in 1864, she hooked up with Yankee soldier James Foley, a strapping young blonde with a ruddy complexion who was on veteran's leave. He had concluded his first three-year enlistment in the Union Army, and re-enlisted grudgingly under great pressure from the Union army. He was flush with cash from his partial bonus, and he was instantly enamored with the dark-eyed girl with the Irish brogue like his own.
Barbara must have had a way with words the same way her brother Patrick did. He was off in Georgia by now, on what increasingly seemed like a doomed cause. She convinced James to desert the army, and not to return to the 72nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. The records say he went missing in Cincinnati, the town where he had signed up to go see the Elephant. He could easily have passed through occupied Nashville on his way.
Honora heard that her little son William died of the cholera back in Ireland the year after the war ended. He was only twenty. Her daughter Mary had disappeared forever. Of her two sons from the second marriage, Miles went to sea and was lost.
In the days of her age, she lived with her children Patrick and Barbara, by turns, after her second husband died. In her declining years, she loved to walk, though she was bent with arthritis and was compelled to use crutches. She passed away at the ripe age of 88, in a home for the aged and was buried by her brother Patrick's son, a McDonough, "who owned the funeral home from which she was buried."
Her mother remained in Clifden, where she saw many things in her one hundred and eleven years. She outlived Honora by a decade. The family that remained liked to say that the old woman was one of the few to experience the Famine, the First War and the Great Depression, working through them all and paying them equal mind.
In the process, she sent her babies off to the world, hoping that they might return some day, though they did not.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com