Daire Nua: The New Oak Grove Elizabeth Creely There is a kind of acquired memory that gets formed from family artifacts—objects acquired accidentally or gained by inheritance—and from the small stories they contain. Things like a picture of a woman with a ridiculous hat. A gold ring that could never fit on any present-day finger, with an inscription attesting to eternal love. A rusty horse bridle with a large silver “C” engraved on it that hung in my grandfather’s garage for years. (It now hangs on a wall in my apartment.) Most family artifacts come with a story, or with the hint of a story: I’ve always looked at the bridle and wondered what the name of the horse was that it was used to control. These stories can feel like memory, embodied, experienced. They can feel like something you lived. False memory may shape you, just as surely as the geography of the place you live in shapes you. But only if there is a story. What if there isn’t one? Stories can be hard to come by if one country was left for another because of disaster: war, for example, or in the case of my family, famine. If no one had stories of “home” to tell, or brought anything with them—and who had that luxury, amidst the stress and panic of something not quite deportation, but, well, very like deportation? If the people who left Ireland lived through a fear so intense that the conscious mind was ordered to face forward, it’s likely that their living story was set aside and left behind, as something wholly unsuitable for the future. Why bring disaster with you? In that sad and common case, the descendants of the emigrant will usually follow the example set for them: to never look back and never make any inquiry of what life was like, back then in those catastrophic and eventful times. They gathered their families together and ran. This is the unspoken rule of the immigrant: don’t look back while walking in uncertain terrain. And, while moving forward, don’t engage in unreality. The immigrant Civil War soldier in the nineteenth-century song may wish he were in “dear old Dublin.” But he knows that Dublin could not provide for him, could not accommodate his existence. He had to leave. What he remembers and longs for is not real. [End Page 9] I know much more about the Creelys than anyone else in my family, although I don’t know much. I have casually researched the family name in Ireland (more than the actual family), using the usual lunch-hour search on Ancestry.com, an astonishingly easy and pleasingly quick method. Cobbled together from the research a cousin undertook twenty years ago, these researches have resulted in an incomplete profile of a family set in motion from Armagh to San Francisco by the combined forces of colonialism, disaster, and personal ambition. But that’s it: just big picture, impersonal stuff. Statistics, instead of story. No documentation. No letters, no photos. Just impenetrable silence, so typical of refugees. My great-great-great-grandfather, Patrick Creely, arrived in San Francisco in 1851, near the height of famine-induced immigration in America. To be something other than a man in flight would make him a statistical anomaly. If he had been that rare Irish Catholic who came to America in the mid-eighteenth century, untroubled and confident, I don’t believe he would have kept his mouth shut so tightly. Patrick did not talk. He passed on his silence intact and it became the inheritance. I imagine when he lived, one would have needed a crowbar to pry open his mouth . . . and even then, what might have emerged would have been a shadow, a void in which the enlightening words swirled around like dry leaves. The Creelys became “real,” traceable through a paper trail of wills, death notices, directory advertisements, in California starting in 1875. Their residences and businesses—a blacksmith shop on Folsom Street, a house on Shotwell—are listed in San Francisco city directories. There is a picture of Edward Creely’s veterinary hospital...
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May 26, 2013
Alexey I Shcheglov + 2
Open Access