AT MY GRANDFATHER’S.
It may be doubted that I remember things that happened to me when I
was at my mother’s breast, or when I was three years old; but I have
no doubt on that matter. Prominent in my forehead is a scar. I got
that scar this way: The girl whose chief duty was to mind me had me on
her back one day. I was slipping off; she bounced herself, to raise
me up on her shoulders, and she threw me clear over her head, on the
street. My forehead came on a stone, and from the cut I got remains the
scar. I could to-day point out the spot where I got that toss--between
Billy O’Hea’s house and Beamish’s gate. I got it before I went to my
grandfather’s. I did not come back to town till I was seven years
old--the time I began my schooling.
Those four years I spent in a farmhouse photographed my memory with
all the pictures of Irish life, and fashioned my tongue to carry the
Irish language without any strain. Some say I have a “brogue.” I have.
I am proud I have, and I will never endeavor to have any other kind
of tongue. I gave a lecture in Detroit one night; coming out the main
doorway, there was a crowd, and behind me coming down the steps I heard
one lady say to another: “What a terrible brogue he has!”
Every allowance is made by English-speaking society for the man of
every other nationality on earth speaking broken English, except for
the Irishman. The Dutchman, the German, the Frenchman, the Russian,
the Italian, can speak broken English, and it won’t be said he speaks
it with a brogue, and is, consequently, illiterate; but the Irishman
who speaks it--a language as foreign to his nationality as it is to
the nationality of any of the others--is met immediately with ridicule
and contempt. But--’tis part of the price or penalty of slavery, and
until Irishmen have manhood to remove that slavery, the name of their
language or their land will not have a respected place among the
nations. We may bravely fight all the battles of all the peoples of
the earth, but while Ireland’s battle for Ireland’s freedom remains
unsuccessfully fought--while England continues to rule Ireland--all the
historical bravery of our race in every land, and in every age will not
save us from the slur of the unfriendly chronicler who writes that we
fight well as “mercenaries,” that we fight bravely the battles of every
land on earth, except the battle of our own land.
The Irish language was the language of the house at my grandfather’s
place. It was the language of the table, the language of the milking
barn, the language of the sowing and the reaping, the language of the
mowing, the “mihal” and the harvest-home. The English language may
be spoken when the landlord or English-speaking people came the way,
but the language natural to every one in the house was Irish, and in
the Irish language I commenced to grow. The household of Renascreena
consisted of my grandfather Cornelius O’Driscoll, my grandmother
Anna-ni-Laoghaire, my aunts, Nance, Johanna, Bridget, Anna; my uncles,
Denis, Conn and Michael. Michael was the youngest of the family. He
keeps the old homestead now (1896). Last year, when I was in Ireland,
he drove into Clonakilty to meet me, looking tall and straight. I
asked him his age. He said seventy-five. All the others--aunts and
uncles--are dead, except Aunt Bridget, who lives at No. 11 Callowhill,
Philadelphia, the wife of Patrick Murray. In the family, had been four
more daughters. Mary, married to John O’Brien; Margaret, married to
Jer. Sheehan, of Shanava; Kate, married to Martin O’Donovan-Ciuin, of
Sawroo, whose son is Martin O’Donovan of San Francisco; and Nellie,
the oldest of the children, married, at the age of fifteen, to Denis
O’Donovan Rossa, of Carrig-a-grianaan, whose son I am.
Yes, married at the age of fifteen my mother was, and born thirteen
years after she was married, was I. There isn’t much of a courtship
story, as far as I could hear. This is how I heard it: My father was
riding his horse home from the fair of Ross one evening. The girls at
the roadside well, there in the valley of the Renascreena road, stopped
his horse and challenged him for a “faireen.” He gave them a guinea; my
mother was the recipient of the gold piece. After that, came a proposal
of marriage. My mother’s people visited at the house of my father’s
people at Carrig-a-grianaan, one mile to the north, to know if the
place was a suitable one. All seemed right, and the marriage came off.
But a story is told about there being some angry words between my two
grandfathers after the marriage. My father’s father kept a bleachery
on his farm, and the day my mother’s father visited the place, the
storehouse of that bleachery was well packed with the “pieces” of
bleached linen, which were looked upon as belonging to the stock of the
house. But, when, after the marriage, the people who sent the pieces
in to be bleached took them away, Grandfather O’Driscoll charged that
everything was not represented fairly to him; he talked angrily, and
said he’d drown himself: “Baithfid me fein, baithfid me fein”--“I’ll
drown myself, I’ll drown myself.”
“Oh,” said the other grandfather, “bidheach ciall agat; ba ghaire do’n
fhairge Donal O’Donobhue ’na thusa, as nior bhathaig se e fein”--“Oh,
have sense; Daniel O’Donoghue was nearer to the sea than you, and he
didn’t drown himself.”
Daniel O’Donoghue was after giving his daughter in marriage to my
uncle, my father’s brother Conn, a short time before that.
There were always in my grandfather’s house at Renascreena a couple
of servant girls and a couple of servant boys; twenty cows had to
be milked, and horses and goats, pigs, poultry and sheep had to
be attended to. And what a bright picture remains in my memory in
connection with the milking time in the barn field back of the house!
The cows, munching their bundles of clover and looking as grave as
Solomons, the milking maids softly singing while stealing the milk from
them into their pails; the sweet smell of the new milk and the new
clover; the larks singing in the heavens overhead, as if keeping time
with the joyous voices on earth.
That was the time when everything in the world around me had a golden
hue. I was the pet of the house. And, how I’d bustle around on a Sunday
morning, giving orders to the boys to get the black horse with the
white face ready for mass! and when the horse was ready, how I’d run
through the bohreen into the main road to look at my granddaddie riding
out, the big buckle in the collar of his great coat shining like gold,
with my Nannie in her side-saddle behind him!
A small kitchen-garden orchard separated the house and outhouses from
the other family homesteads on that hillside slope. They were the
homesteads of my grandfather’s two brothers, Patrick and Denis. As
each of the three homesteads was well populated, the population of the
three of them made a little village, and when the neighboring boys came
around at night to see the girls, there was sport enough for a village.
There were fairies in Ireland then, and I grew up there, thinking that
fairy life was something that was inseparable from Irish life. Fairy
stories would be told that were to me and to those around me as much
realities of Irish life as are the stories that I now read in books
called “Realities of Irish Life.” I grew up a boy, believing that there
were “good people” in this world, and I grew up in manhood, or grow
down, believing there are bad people in it, too. When I was in Ireland
lately the population wasn’t half what it was when I was a boy. I asked
if the fairies had been exterminated, too, for there seemed to be none
of the life around that abounded in my time. Yes, English tyranny had
killed out the “good people,” as well as the living people.
The O’Driscolls did not own the townland of Renascreena themselves,
though the three families of them occupied nearly the whole of it.
The O’Driscolls did own it at one time, and other lands around it,
but the English came over to Ireland in strong numbers; they coveted
the lands of the Irish; they overran the country with fire and sword;
they beat the Irish; they killed many of them; they banished many of
them; and they allowed more of them to remain in the land, on the
condition that they would pay rent to the English, and acknowledge them
as their landlords. That is how the old Irish, on their own lands,
all over Ireland to-day are called tenants, and how the English in
Ireland are called landlords. The landlord of Renascreena in my day was
Thomas Hungerford, of Cahirmore. The landlord to-day is his son Harry
Hungerford, a quiet kind of a man, I understand. The father was a quiet
kind of a man, too. He was, in a small way, a tenant to my father. My
father had the marsh field on the seashore. Tom Hungerford rented from
him a corner of it, out of which to make a quay on which the boatmen
would land sand for his tenants. My father would give me a receipt for
a pound every gale-day to go up with it to Cahirmore. Giving me the
pound one day the big man said:
“If I was so strict with the tenants as to send for the rent to them
the day it fell due, what a cry would be raised against me.” I told
him the rent in this case wasn’t going to beggar him, and as he was
prospering on the estate, it wasn’t much matter to him paying it. He
smiled. He is gone; God be good to him; he was not, that I know of, one
of those evicting landlords that took pleasure in the extermination of
the people.
The Irish people learn through oral tradition what many people learn
from book history. Before I ever read a book, before I ever went to
school, I got into my mind facts of history which appeared incredible
to me. I got into my mind from the fireside stories of my youth that
the English soldiers in Clonakilty, convenient to where I was born,
used to kill the women, and take the young children, born and unborn,
on the points of their bayonets, and dash them against the walls, and
that the soldiers at Bandon Bridge used to tie men in couples with
their hands behind their backs, and fling them into the river.
Those very two atrocious acts are, I find, in Daniel O’Connell’s
“Memoirs of Ireland,” recorded this way:
“1641. At Bandon Bridge they tied eighty-eight Irishmen of the said
town back to back, and threw them off the bridge into the river, where
they were all drowned.--Coll. p. 5.”
“County Cork, 1642. At Cloghnakilty about 238 men, women and children
were murdered, of which number seventeen children were taken by the
legs by soldiers, who knocked out their brains against the walls. This
was done by Phorbis’s men and the garrison of Bandon Bridge.”
O’Connell’s Memoirs give accounts of similar atrocities in every
county of Ireland, and his accounts are taken from Englishmen writers
of Irish history. In the fireside history of my childhood home, I
learned that the English soldiers in Clonakilty took some of the
infants on the points of their bayonets and dashed them against the
walls.
At a flax-mihal, or some gathering of the kind at my grandfather’s, one
night that some of the neighboring girls were in, they and my aunts
were showing presents to each other--earrings, brooches, rings and
little things that way. One of them showed a brooch which looked like
gold, but which probably was brass, and wanted to make much of it.
“Nach e an volumus e!” said one of my aunts. “What a molamus it is.”
That was making little of it. Perhaps the boy who made a present of it
was “pulling a string” with the two girls. The word “volumus” is Latin,
but the Irish language softens it into “molamus,” and uses it as a name
for anything that is made much of, but is really worth very little. You
will see in Lingard’s history of Ireland how the two words came into
the Irish language. After the time of the Reformation, when England
formulated the policy and practice of expelling from Ireland all the
Irish who would not turn Sassenach, and all particularly who had been
plundered of their lands and possessions, she passed laws decreeing
that it was allowable for landlords and magistrates to give “permits”
to people to leave the country, and never come back. But, that the
person leaving, should get a pass or permit to travel to the nearest
seaport town to take shipping. And if a ship was not leaving port the
day of his arrival at the port, he, to give assurance of his desire to
leave the country, should wade into the sea up to his knees every day
till a ship was ready. There were printed forms of such permits; and
the first word in those forms, printed in very large letters, was the
Latin word “Volumus,” which meant: We wish, or we desire, or it is our
pleasure, that the bearer be allowed to leave Ireland forever. A royal
permit to exile yourself, to banish yourself from your native land
forever! Nach e an volumus e! What a molamus it is!
A political lesson was graven on my mind by the Irish magpies that had
their nests in the big skehory tree on the ditch opposite the kitchen
door. I had permission to go through the tree to pick the skehories,
but I was strictly ordered not to go near the magpies’ nest, or to
touch a twig or thorn belonging to it.
If the magpies’ nest was robbed; if their young ones were taken away
from them, they would kill every chicken and gosling that was to be
found around the farmyard. That is the way my grandfather’s magpies
would have their vengeance for having their homes and their families
destroyed; and it made every one in my grandfather’s house “keep the
peace” toward them. I have often thought of my grandfather’s magpies
in connection with the destruction of the houses and families of the
Irish people by the English landlords of Ireland. Those magpies seemed
to have more manly Irish spirit than the Irish people themselves. But
there is no use of talking this way of his childhood’s recollections.
I’ll stop. If childhood has pleasure in plenty, I had it in this house
of my grandfather, from the age of three to the age of seven.
I am publishing a newspaper called The _United Irishman_. In it, I
printed the two preceding chapters.
Ex-Congressman John Quinn, whom I have spoken of in them, sends me the
following letter:
DEAR ROSSA--I read with delight in the last issue of your truly
patriotic journal what to me is the most interesting of all
stories; namely, “Rossa’s Recollections.”
The traveling along with you, as it were, carries me back to
the early morning of my life in that dear land beyond the sea,
and I feel that I hear over again the tales as told by a fond
mother to her listening, her wondering children, of saintly
Ross Carbery, and the wild, the grand country from there to
Bantry Bay.
Yes, I have heard her tell of the miracles which were performed
at the tomb of Father John Power, and, I feel that if ever the
afflicted were healed of their infirmities on any part of this
earth, they were, at the grave of that saintly priest.
I was not born in that county, for “under the blue sky of
Tipperary” my eyes first saw the light of day, but, as you say,
my mother was born in Ross Carbery; and where is the son who
does not love the spot where his mother was born? I do, with a
fondness akin to veneration.
Oh, what memories you will call up in those recollections of
yours! How the hearts of the sons and daughters of Ireland will
throb as they feel themselves carried back in spirit to the
abbeys, the raths and, alas! the ruins, around which in infancy
their young feet wandered. For to no people on earth are the
loved scenes of childhood half so dear as they are to the sons
and daughters of our Green Isle.
It is very interesting to me to have brought to my mind once
more the dear old names from whence I’ve sprung. And, you ask,
“Would John Quinn care to know that the Kanes, the Shanahans,
the Coxes, of Rochester; the O’Regans, of South Brooklyn, and
the children of the exiles, are cousins of his and mine?” Why,
Rossa; I certainly would be more than delighted to know of
them, and to meet any of them; the more so, as leaving Ireland
with my parents immediately after the “Rebellion” of ’48, I
never had much of an opportunity of meeting any of them, or
knowing of their whereabouts. No matter where they are, or what
their lot might be, they would be to me as dear as kindred
could be.
When first I learned that the same blood, through the Shanahan
line, flowed through your veins and mine, I seemed to draw you
the more closely to me.
I had long admired you for your devotion to motherland. I have
in other days wept as I read of your sufferings in British
dungeons; when, with hands tied behind your back, you were
compelled, for days at a time, to lap up the miserable food
given you. I did not know that we were united by ties of
kinship then, but I felt bound to you by the strongest ties of
country and of home, for I recognized in you a son of the Gael
who, no matter what your sufferings might be, had vowed to
keep the old flag flying; to keep the torch blazing brightly to
the world, proclaiming that all the power of perfidious England
could not quench the fires of faith and Fatherland in Ireland.
Yes, you proclaimed, not only from the hilltops and the valleys
of our native land, but also from the cells of an English jail,
that Ireland was not dead, but would yet live to place her heel
on the neck of England.
For this, every Irishman should admire, should honor you. Your
paper and your “Recollections” should be in the hands of every
true Irishman. The reading of such stories will keep alive the
faith of our fathers, faith in the sacred cause; yes, and make
hearts feel young again as they read of those grand old hills
and valleys of holy Ireland.
And those noble, those prominent figures, the sons and
daughters of other days, who played their various parts in the
great drama of Irish life and patriotism--we shall read of
them, and though of many, very many, we must feel that in this
world we shall never meet again, yet we know that in leaving,
they have but gone a short time before us to enjoy in heaven
that reward, which hearts so good and pure as theirs were,
shall surely receive.
Wishing you success in your “Recollections,” your _United
Irishman_, and all your undertakings. I am,
Sincerely yours,
JOHN QUINN.