An Honor

It was an honor to write Galway Bay because through the process I met my great-great-grandmother, who kept her children alive in the most horrific circumstances and got them to America.  How did she do it?

Her family faced the Great Starvation in Ireland of 1845-1849.  One million died.  Yes, a natural calamity destroyed the potato, the people’s food, but it was the policies of the British government that allowed the famine to happen.

The more I learned, the more impossible it seemed that anyone from the devastated West of Ireland had survived.  But they did.  They escaped to America in one of the greatest rescues in human history.  The victims saved each other.  I was alive because of the courage of this woman, yet I had no notion of the story until I started to read Irish literature in the 1970s.  And even then, the famine was a kind of black hole - not spoken about. 

Certainly, growing up in Chicago, I had never realized that my ancestors had suffered.  I was Irish and delighted to be, but I didn’t connect that with the actual country of Ireland, nor did most Irish-Americans.  We’d created an identity and prospered but I don’t think we understood how much they had to leave behind - a language spoken for two thousand years, stories that informed their lives and shaped their consciousness and because of that surely had some influence on who we were - all gone or diminished.

I only started to touch the truth in conversations with my father’s cousin, a nun who lived to be a hundred and seven and who knew my great-great-grandmother Honora in the 1880s.  For twenty-five years I’ve been researching here and in Ireland and trying to imagine this young couple, Honora and Michael Kelly – married at eighteen and nineteen years old - with three little children when the blight struck.  I knew Honora had a sister and I know how sisters support each other.  I learned Michael Kelly was a piper, evicted from his land.  I saw that in spite of all the persecution, injustice and suffering, the Irish spirit was not broken.

“We wouldn’t die, and that annoyed them.”  Yes, the English had been trying to rid Ireland of the Irish for centuries, but inexplicably they held on, nourished by songs and stories and a faith much deeper than the institutional Church.  Only the Great Famine defeated them, and even then they escaped and triumphed - they built America, fought the civil war and survived.

Discovering the details of the Irish story brought me closer to every immigrant’s story, and all the strong women who have somehow survived and kept their children alive.

I’m grateful for this sense of connection.

-Mary Pat Kelly