POETRY CONNECTS ARDBOE IN IRELAND AND PAWTUCKET

TRANS ATLANTIC BARDIC ECHOES AND KINDRED POETIC SPIRITS: FROM THE OLD CROSS AT ARDBOE TO THE ANN & HOPE MILL VILLAGE

“What's bred in the bone will out” Irish saying

Today I propose to combine Irish folk literary history and working class history memoir in Rhode Island in the early 20h century.

In the summer of 1973 I took my mother and her brother Joe Coleman, who was a Christian Brother with the religious name Brother Cajetan Cyril, to search for any relatives that might remain where the parents of Margaret and Joe had left them when their parents, Jane Conlon and Joe Coleman, immigrated from Lough Neagh to Rhode Island in 1904 .

The fact that I had completed a PhD and that I had a teaching job inspired me to undertake this pilgrimage with little prospect of making any successful connections. It was my gift to my mother and my Uncle Joe,

My grandmother had died in 1942 before I was born. Until that time my mother had been the person who copied out letters from her illiterate mother and mailed them to an address in County Tyrone. By the time my mother agreed to join me to the trip she had not heard from her cousins or whoever was left in Ireland since her own mother's death. So the silence stretched for 30 years between them.

My mother was very skeptical of the claims and memories that my grand mother and grand father had repeated—they were mostly in the form of comic stories and place names. Margaret had the Irish healthy face-saving derision about any boasts her family members made. Reminding me constantly that we were shanty Irish and proud of it, she discounted any “lace curtain” pretensions. She only had an incomplete memory of the address –someplace near Cookstown-- and she did not recall the names of the people that she wrote to –someone named Mary Ann. .

We also did not understand the full significance of the fact that the people we were connected to were from places with nicknames like “Tyrone in the bushes” or “in the moss”. We were from Ireland but that place was now another country since County Tyrone was one of the six counties that was set aside at partition and re-named Northern Ireland. Because of my own writing and research, I did understand the history of the region but had no sense of the role our family and friends had played and continued to play in that history.

I hope at some time to fill in the details of the week we spent in the Cookstown area and the family and cultural connections we discovered from the Battery to the Old Cross to the Lough Neagh fisherman's association to the Ardboe Martyrs. Today I am  offering the broad outlines.

Most remarkably during that visit we were gifted with a sheaf of handwritten manuscripts ascribed to a local poet who signed himself John Coleman Mullinahoe and who was the Uncle of my mother's deceased father Joe Coleman and whose poems had been read aloud to my mother and her siblings by her father who received them in occasional clippings from the Cookstown newspaper the Mid Ulster Mail. 

This entry  marks the beginnings of my investigation into those poems and the deep unbroken line of poetic inspiration and bardic sept clan responsibilities that flow through the veins of the Colemans from their titular saint-- Saint Colman --- to my mother, Margaret Coleman writing on the banks of the Blackstone River hundreds—yea, thousands -- of years after her ancestors wrote on the  banks of Lough Neagh..

I will come back to this topic in future entries when I discover more of the facts of that Bardic tradition and its modern expression.

Why a bucket?

When did Pawtucket become THE BUCKET in local slang?

Frankly, I don't know but I do recall the first time I heard my native city invoked by that nickname. Of all places--it happened in Ardboe, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. 

 It was part of a refrain repeated for the benefit of me and my mother in 1973 when we made our first trip together to try to find our close relatives that had stayed behind in the old country. When we found my mother's first cousin and told him what city we were from in the US he suddenly recited: "bad cess to the day that I came to Pawtucket To work for John Campbell Hauling stones in a bucket."

He knew Pawtucket and the US first hand--he was one of the few Irish emigrants who made it to New York and didn't like it (he told us that he had been a conductor in NYC and crashed the trolley) He somehow managed to save the money to come back home. He told us that he missed the Old Cross at Ardboe and the beauties of Lough Neagh and the eel fishing that was their livelihood.

 And so he came back when he was 25 and fifty years later we walked into a pub and asked if there were any Colemans living nearby and were brought to Johnny Devlin whose mother was Mary Ann Coleman and the sister to my mother's father Joe Coleman--so we had a reunion of first cousins.

 So that was my Bucket experience. It seems that the popular use of the term started more in the 80s and what some of us see as an affectionate nickname is often taken and intended as a derogatory term by others.

 I have often thought of Pawtucket as a small important city. So much greatness like the mighty Blackstone has passed through here--the first foundry built by Joseph Jenks in the 1600s. The Slater Mill that launched the industrial development of the colonies in the 1700s.
 The first strike of textile workers soon after that showed the courage and sense of labor justice in Pawtucket. The Pawtucket boys who joined the GAR in the 1860s to fight for the end of slavery. See their graves in the Mineral Spring Avenue Cemetery and Oak Grove on Central Avenue. 

Remember the the waves of immigrants that came here during and after the famine in Ireland of the 1850s. The incredible fact that Pawtucket at the Old Saint Mary's actually holds a Fenian grave--a sacred symbol and promise of Ireland's nationhood. I was amazed when I learned this from Professor Al McAloon, and he told me as we stood in the old grave yard that he had witnessed as a school boy the burial of James Wilson, the Fenian rescued from imprisonment in Australia by the CATALPA who lived out his life in Central Falls and Pawtucket.

 Patrick Pearse in his famous oration at the grave of Fenian O'Donovan Rossa inspires his listeners with the significance of this Grave to the history of Ireland: "Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace"

So it is a city with a great history,and it still may be called a bucket--but there is no disgrace in that--when you need a bucket, there is no substitute. So polish that bucket, patch that Bucket, raise that Bucket high. It's part of the paradox of Pawtucket-- a place we may love to laugh at but still a place to love and where we live with dignity and pride.

Pawtucket at its Best

Maybe because I am a grandmother trying to help  and advise and  comfort a teenage grand daughter  who lives far away and I rarely see,  I find that I am thinking a lot about my grandmothers. Jane Conlon and Ida Mowry-- neither of whom I ever met.

Around 1906 when Jane Conlon first came from Ardboe, County Tyrone, Ireland to Cumberland to live in the Ann& Hope Mill Village, she worked in the Ann& Hope Mill as did so many of the new Irish immigrants. One of the experienced workers, from a local Yankee farming family also worked in the mill, helped her and instructed her in her new job and her new life. That teacher was Ida Mowry-- and I sometimes think of the two young women forming a friendship across the divides of origin, and religion and ethnicity. I am grateful for that meeting for reasons that they could not know: for they would share more in the unfolding of time. They would share grand-daughters: me and my sisters, when Jane’s daughter Margaret married Ida’s son Norman. I did not meet either of my grandmothers; for Ida Mowry Jenckes died in the terrible flu epidemic of 1919 and Jane Conlon Coleman died in 1942, but I celebrate those two women and their friendship.

They show  Pawtucket at its best.

Let me leave you with that image of what is possible in Pawtucket. More than  100 years ago in 1906 an experienced and kind American worker turned to a younger and frightened Irish immigrant girl –as they used to say–just off the boat. That woman from the old RI family that had founded Pawtucket befriended and helped the Irish girl, a girl raised on the Banks of Lough Neagh in County Tyrone, whose daily routine, until she left, was lived to the rhythms of fishing and nets and boats and eels, a girl that was frightened by the screeching mill whistle. That girl stood now for the first time in a noisy textile mill with rows of deafening whirling machines, and Ida Mowry reached out to her the hand of friendship and helped her to understand her new world . And 100 years later their grand daughter celebrates them today.

In these troubled and troubling times, where there loom so many causes to despair, I draw hope from that history: the hope that perhaps, this very day in some work place in Pawtucket or the Blackstone Valley a worker turns with compassion and friendship to a scared immigrant and guides her to a new and better life. Who knows--perhaps a century from now in 2106, their grandchild will bless them for it.

DIVERSITY  IS STRENGTH

Pawtucket has always been the gateway to a new life; this small, important city on the banks of the Blackstone where people come to find places to work and play. When we welcome newcomers and make room for their children and grand children to grow in body, mind and soul, when we safeguard and improve places of work and play, we are building a rich, creative life of work and play– a vision of human possibility much too large to be written on the back of a dollar bill.