The Irish Immigrants:
Then came the pling pling pling plung , pling pling pling plung of the piano and this time Mattie's wailing violin was simply haunting. Little Maureen closed her eyes so she might better concentrate, and then, as she lifted her hands to the heavens, every ounce of her gave witness to life as she had seen it.
At five Maureen had sat by her grandmother's body because her starving kin were so weak from hunger they could not carry it out to bury it. ( From 1845 to 1855 one forth of all Irish fled to America . About one out of five who stayed behind starved to death.) At age six she had sailed with her desperate parents from the land they loved into this strange place where she had then watched their dream go sour.
Maureen did not know all of these numbers, but the facts were that the year she arrived in America , some 52,000 starving Irish had already overwhelmed the 400,000 people then living in the City of New York . She had watched her only older sister be torn from the Irish boy she loved, which seemed to make sister go wild when she reached this new land.
When Maureen was nine, her sister had disappeared off the streets of New York City . Maureen also watched as her father got ground down to less than a man by the Irish bosses who were the nastiest of men. He became their white nigger. When she was 11, Maureen was terrified as they slipped away in the middle of the night with Father, to flee his enormous debt to those same bosses. Father then tried life in the highlands, where he failed miserably.
And gave up. And turn to drink. And kept moving on. And got mean.
