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.
