Scalpeen

Abstract

Scalpeen Richard Hague (bio) 1 There is a racial memory by which the past is continually accumulated and preserved. —Henri Bergson, A New Philosophy Even before my father bought a remote parcel of brushy-up land in Appalachian Ohio's Monroe County (which land and the people living around it has become a major source of writing for me over a half-century) there was one place among many that particularly ignited my vivid youngster's [End Page 29] imagination. Think of the enthusiasm of the boyish Mark Twain for a life on the Mississippi; I had something of the same enthusiasm, though more precisely a strange, sometimes overwhelming nostalgia, for some dimly-remembered but nevertheless emotionally powerful place and its concurrent life that, as a boy, I thought I could glimpse from my grandparents' front porch in Steubenville. 118 Logan Street stands three houses up from the river; about thirty giant steps could get me from the sidewalk there to the riverbank, and it was a journey I took often in my youth. But I remember equally as vividly sitting rapt in one of the metal lawn chairs on the gritty wooden porch my grandmother scrubbed almost every day, seeing maybe a half-mile away, as the crow flies, and three hundred feet atop the cliffs of West Virginia across from the paper mill, a lush green field sloping steeply downward, and from which I could not look away. In my imagination, I could feel the pitch of that far piece of land beneath me, feel the breezes that must have blown at that height. Oddly enough, I do not remember seeing Steubenville from that visionary point; and it is this detail which hints at the deeper remembering I suspect was going on during those long reveries. James Cavanaugh Hague, my grandfather, and Helen Madigan, my grandmother, were descendants of Irish immigrants to Steubenville, their ancestors' earliest arrivals, as far as we can tell, slightly predating the mass exodus during the Great Hunger of the late 1840s. Despite there being only the thinnest shreds of information regarding our families in Ireland, one story survived. My Uncle Jack showed me a handwritten letter that said his great-grandmother, (this would be my great-great grandmother) Margaret Cavanaugh, sailed over as an infant in the late 1830s. She was fed fresh goat's milk during the voyage, and the ladle from which it was [End Page 30] gathered and served had supposedly remained in the family long enough for him to have seen it as a boy. I don't know: I never saw such a thing, nor did any of Jack's five kids, my Hague cousins, though I do have great-grandfather Richard's shoe last and cobbler's hammer. But the point is that the field high atop the West Virginia cliff, unfenced, steepening downward toward the edge, I did see, as if again, fifty years later. In May of 2015, my wife and I stood at the edge of the Cliffs of Moher on Ireland's southwest coast, dizzied not only with the beauty and height and sheer drop of them, but, for me, by an overwhelming sensation of déjà vu. Surely, somewhere in my DNA, or in the collective unconscious, whatever you want to call it, I was at a familiar place. That high, green West Virginia field of my boyhood was here; the Cliffs of Moher were back there, across the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian mountains and the Ohio River a half-century before, in Steubenville. If this were the only such incident of such strong "racial memory," as a Jungian term names it, to strike me in my boyhood, I could write it off as just some sort of odd psychological phenomenon, the result of an over-active imagination working on nebulous speculations, perhaps even remnants of the fever-dreams during my boyhood bout with mononucleosis. But it isn't the only occurrence. 2 Life can only be understood backwards.... —Søren Kierkegaard When I was about ten, my father built a concrete block shed, very solid, in our tiny backyard. A great pile of excavated soil lay next to where he...