Good From Bad

O, Father dear, I often hear you speak of Erin's Isle,

Her lofty scenes her valleys green, her mountains rude and wild

You said it is a lovely place wherein a prince might dwell,

Why have you then forsaken her, the reason to me tell?

My son, I loved our native land with energy and pride

Until a blight fell on my crops my and sheep and cattle died,

The rents and taxes were too high, I could not them redeem,

And that's the cruel reason why I left Old Skibbereen.

It's well I do remember on a bleak November's day,

The landlord and the sheriff came to drive us all away;

they set my house on fire with their cursed English spleen

And that's another reason why I left Old Skibbereen.

Your mother, too, God rest her soul, lay on the snowy ground,

She fainted in her anguish seein' the desolation round.

She never rose, but passed away from sleep to mortal dream,

And found a quiet grave, my boy, in dear old Skibbereen.

It's well I do remember the year of forty-eight,

When we arose with Erin's boys to fight against our fate;

I was hunted through the mountains as a traitor to the Queen,

And that's another reason that I left Old Skibbereen.

Oh father dear, the day will come when in answer to the call

Each Irishman with feelings stern will answer one and all,

I'll be the man to lead the van, beneath our flag of green,

And loud and high we'll raise the cry," Remember Skibbereen!"

-Irish Traditional

St. Patrick's Day, always observed on my mother's side. Her mother's people were Gallaghers, Brennans, and Campbells, hailing from Donegal and Mayo in the wild northwest of Ireland. My grandfather's name was Patrick Bowman, but not really--his birth father was a Brophy, a hard-drinking craftsman whose family came over from Cork during the Hunger (Skibbereen, the subject of the above ballad, was and is in Cork).

Grandma's people settled in Pennsylvania, north of Harrisburg in towns like McAdoo, and went to work in the mines. One of them, Alex Campbell, was a saloonkeeper who got himself hanged for supposedly participating in the Molly McGuires conspiracy to murder agents of the mine owners who practically enslaved the Irish they employed there. I've been to the very spot where he died, stood in front of the cell where he spent the last night of his life in what is now Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

Those first few generations had it very, very hard, to put it mildly. Often depicted as apes (see above), alcohol maddened animals who practiced a strange religion and weren't fit to participate in the American experiment, they had to overcome poverty and prejudice and the horror of leaving a country whose population still hasn't recovered to what it was before the British genocide.

But just look at us now. My mother's Pennsylvania cousins became successful businessmen and lawyers--one went back and held a mock retrial of Alex Campbell, trying to right an old injustice I suppose. One branch has been part of the L.A. Fire Department for over a hundred years now, with several rising to captain. We have surgeons and educators with doctorates and so, so many lawyers.

So today we remember what our people endured to establish our families here, and we celebrate that we've grasped the opportunities this country provided to rise into places our ancestors back in old Eire couldn't have imagined when this multigenerational hero's journey began.