Galway Bay (42 page)

“You’ve sailed to France?” said Johnny Og.

He’d become a pet of the sailors, climbing in the ropes, helping with the sails. Máire had encouraged him: “The sea’s in your blood.”

“All over the world, lad.”

“We’re going to Chicago,” Paddy said to the young sailor.

“Chicago’s a thousand miles up the river. Very late in the season to travel that far north, missus,” he said to me.

“Cold up there already,” the older one said. “They say the wind never stops blowing in Chicago.”

“I could do with a cool breeze.”

“You’ll have to find a steamboat, a paddle wheeler, to take you up the river, and do it quick.”

Paddle wheeler? Steamboat?

“Look there,” he said, pointing over to a big white five-storied boat. “The
River Queen
,” he said. “It’ll take you to a port on the Illinois River where you transfer to a canal boat, but if the canal’s frozen already—”

“Don’t be rushing away from New Orleans,” the younger sailor said to Máire. All kinds of attractions.” He winked at her, and she smiled at him. “Coffee and a
beignet
, among others.”

“What’s beignet?” Máire asked.

“A kind of doughnut, ma’am.”

“What’s a doughnut?” I asked.

They helped us up onto the wharf. I tried to walk, but the planks of the pier rocked like the deck of the
Superior
. I couldn’t balance myself—my feet didn’t know where to put themselves.

Stephen squirmed in my arms. “Down. Down.” The sun brightened his red hair, but the heat didn’t seem to bother him. I set Stephen down. He took off, heading along the long wharf toward the dockyard. Bridget went after him. Then Johnny Og, Daniel, Paddy, and Jamesy started running. Paddy shouted, “Wait for us, Stephen!”

Máire balanced Gracie on her hip and turned to Thomas. “Your arm, sir,” she said, and put her hand on his wrist. They walked down the dock.

I stepped forward on my right foot, and the left one followed.

So, Michael, our children go before us except for this wee one inside me—our youngest, Michael Joseph Kelly, who will be born in Chicago. Amerikay.

Chapter 23

A
CRUSH OF SAILORS
and dockers, passengers and peddlers, swept us along the pier. I caught Stephen. Bridget grabbed my skirt. Máire had Gracie, but the boys had lost themselves in the crowd.

“There they are!” said Máire.

They had joined a circle of people watching two boys perform—one about ten years old, the other eight, maybe. The older one sang:

Gonna bend down, turn around,

Pick a bale of cotton

Gonna bend down, turn around,

Pick a bale of hay!

The younger boy made the song into a dance—bending down, taking something from the ground that he put into an imaginary pile.

Our boys wiggled their way to the front and began keeping time with the dancing boy, tapping their toes, then beating and brushing their bare feet on the wooden planks of the wharf.

“Look at our fellows,” Máire said to me. “Not a bother on them.”

The American boys had tight black curls and brown faces.

A man and woman passing stopped next to me. “Masters should not allow their slaves to caper around like this,” the woman said.

“Too many of these pickaninnies running around New Orleans,” the man replied, and they walked away, complaining to each other.

Slaves? These little boys?

“All right, move on now, this is a working pier! Get out of here, you monkeys! Come on, you black bastards.”

That accent—Irish.

A tall, thickset man, all muscle and might, pushed his way through the crowd and stood over the boys, swinging a club at them.

“For Jesus’ sake, man, you’ll break their heads open!” Máire shouted.

“What I’m intending to do, missus!”

The two boys tried to escape into the crowd, but the man caught the little dancer by the arm and dangled him in the air as the older one ran away. “No heathen shows on my wharf.” He dropped the boy to the ground, but still held him.

“Leave him alone!” I said in Irish.

“Who’s that speaking?” he asked.

“It’s me speaking! Mrs. Michael Kelly. A big fellow like you shouldn’t torture a little boy. Haven’t we enough of that in our own poor country without—”

“And what poor country would you be talking about, missus? My country is this one!” He stamped his foot on the wharf. “And my job is to keep these crews working.” He pointed his club back at the ships, where groups of dockers unloaded and loaded cargo, carrying sacks up and down the gangplanks. “Irishmen,” the man said. “Working, missus. Not loafing around like these children of Satan.”

“You sound like some old Protestant preacher,” I said to him. “Did you take the soup?”

That got him. He let go of the boy, who put his head down and ran.

“Who are you to call me a souper? I held on to my faith!” the man said.

The crowd dispersed. Only Máire and I and our children faced the giant man.

“I’m as good a Catholic as you or anybody else,” he said. “I put money on the plate at Saint Patrick’s every Sunday. Don’t speak about what you don’t understand, missus. No good comes from taking a soft hand with slaves, whatever age. That’s the way of this place. You’ll learn. And what about these strong, healthy boys of yours? They should be laboring, not standing, wasting their time watching foolishness.” He pushed his club against Johnny Og’s shoulder, then tapped Paddy and Thomas. “A few days working and you’ll forget about two little darkies. You’d see what it takes to make your way in this country.” He moved off, swinging his club at the dockers now. “Back to work!”

“Mam,” said Paddy, “what’s a bad man like that doing in Amerikay?”

“Just another fence to jump, Paddy,” I said.

“I wish Da were here. That fellow scares me,” Jamesy said.

I spread my fingers out and then gathered them into a fist. “What did your da teach you? Stand together and you won’t be frightened.”

Paddy and Jamesy made fists.

“C’mon, you lot,” said Máire.

Wagons lined the road near the dock, crowded with men—Irish from the look of them, but not from the
Superior
.

A fellow came up to us. “You got husbands looking for work, ladies?” Another Irishman, skinny, but swinging the same kind of club the other bullyboy had.

“We’re widows,” I said.

“Widows, is it? Maybe we could make arrangements. Lots of lonely men out in the camps. I could manage the both of you.”

“If your wagons are going in the direction of Chicago, we could come along, do your washing and cooking on the journey. Earn our way,” I said.

Máire grabbed my arm.

“We have children, but they don’t take up much room,” I said.

“Honora, come on.” Máire dragged me away from the wagon and pushed me, with the children, into a byway alongside the wharf. “For Jesus’ sake, Honora! Sometimes you’re too much of an ejit to be true! Cooking, washing, giving us a ride to Chicago? Catch yourself on! He wants us to be whores.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh!” she imitated me. “Manage us? Believe me, if I sink into degradation, I’m taking the full whack of the wages of sin and not giving any part of it to some dirty sliveen!”

“You don’t want to go where they’re going,” said a woman, brown-faced like the little boys, a red scarf tied around her head. “Some of those men’ll dig canals in swamps full of mosquitoes. They’ll get bit all over, catch the fever, and drop down dead. Some will lay rails for twelve, fifteen hours a day. Half of them’ll die, too. Masters not about to set slaves to such dangerous labors. Won’t risk valuable property. They work us to death, too, but over time and on their own plantations. Those Irish not worth nothin’ to nobody,” she said.

“Each one has a family at home,” I said.

“You Irish, too?” she asked.

“We are,” Máire said. “Who are you?”

“I’ve been following you since you helped my boys,” the woman said. “Lorenzo, Christophe,
venez vite.
”

The two musicians stepped out from a doorway.

“
Mes fils
,” the woman said. She pointed to the taller boy. “Lorenzo,” she said, then, “Christophe.”

They came over to us.

Jamesy reached out and touched the tight black curls on the littler boy’s head.

Paddy licked his finger and rubbed it on the cheek of the taller boy, then held it in front of his eyes.

Neither Lorenzo nor Christophe moved.

I grabbed Paddy’s hand. “I’m sorry, missus,” I said to the woman.

“Mam,” Paddy said, “I only wanted to see if the brown came off.”

“It don’t,” the woman said.

“Forgive my sons’ bad manners,” I said. “Everything’s so new and . . .”

She waved me silent. “Where are you headed?”

“Chicago,” I said.

“Chicago? A far way.”

“I’m hungry,” Jamesy said. “Are we going to eat in Amerikay, Mam?”

“Lorenzo! Christophe!
Les bananes!
”

The two little boys ducked away, then were back in a moment with a bunch of the curved yellow yokes we’d seen on the pier.

The woman broke one off from the bunch and handed it to Paddy, then gave one each to Johnny Og, Thomas, Daniel, Jamesy, and Bridget, while the smaller boy, Christophe, handed two each to Máire and me. “For the babies,” he said.

“Bananas,” said the woman.

We all nodded and smiled at her.

“Bananas. And what in the name of all that’s sweet and holy do we do with them?” asked Máire.

Paddy looked at Lorenzo and then put the end of the banana in his mouth and bit down. “Oh,” he said, and pulled it out, looking at the teeth marks.

Lorenzo and Christophe bent over with laughter, pointing at Paddy.

“
Garçons!”
the woman said, and that one word stopped the hilarity. “Lorenzo,” she said.

“
Pardón
, Mama.” Lorenzo took the banana and pulled away the yellow skin, revealing a curve of white.

Paddy and the other boys peeled theirs, then held the spearlike fruit in front of them.

“Now,” the woman said. “Eat.”

Paddy took a slow bite and chewed. Johnny Og, Jamesy, Thomas, and Daniel did the same. Then the woman peeled Bridget’s and she bit the top. Soon they all were burying their teeth in the bananas and laughing.

“Good, Mam,” Jamesy said.

Máire and I peeled our bananas. She looked at the curve in her hand, then at me, and started giggling.

The woman caught the look and smiled.

“Don’t say
anything
, Máire,” I said as I took a bite of the softest, sweetest prattie ever grown.

“Banana!” I said, and laughed.

“Banana!” said Paddy.

“Banana!” said Jamesy.

“Banana!” said Johnny Og, and then:

“Banana!” said Bridget.

Máire fed a bit to Gracie.

“Different,” I said. “But I like it. Bananas.”

With that, Stephen reached over and grabbed a piece of my banana and shoved the whole of it into his mouth.

We all laughed.

“Thank you so much,” I said to the woman. “We’ve eaten mostly porridge for six weeks. I’m Honora Kelly.”

“I’m M’am Jacques.”

“I’m Máire Leahy,” Máire said.

Banana.

I could see that during our short time in New Orleans, we would meet more different kinds of people, eat a wider variety of food, and see a greater range of trees, plants, flowers, and buildings than would have come our way during a lifetime in Galway. Dizzying. Exhilarating.

Oh, Michael, is this the wider world you sought when you went adventuring?

“This place beats Tír na nOg,” Máire said to me as M’am Jacques led us through streets of three-storied yellow and pink and blue houses.

“Le Vieux Carré,” she told us. “The French Quarter.”

M’am Jacques took us to the place she lived—a convent, would you believe—where a woman called Sister Henriette Delille and two other nuns cared for sick, abandoned slaves and gave religious instruction to slave children. Against the law to teach slaves any other subjects, forbidden for them to learn to read and write, she said, though the nuns were allowed to maintain a school for free children of color.

She herself was a “free woman of color” and had begun her own order, the Sisters of the Holy Family, when the white convents had refused her admission. She explained all this to Máire and me while she fed our children their first meal in Amerikay.

“Only biscuits and milk, I’m afraid,” Sister Henriette said.

Only? The children could barely eat for grinning while they chewed those warm biscuits covered with butter and strawberry jam. My four had never tasted such food nor had they drank milk since the before times. Thomas nodded to Máire as he gobbled up biscuit after biscuit, the little lord giving his approval.

“Delicious,” Máire said, sipping her coffee, something not even the Scoundrel Pykes drank.

That night, Máire and I sat with Sister Henriette and M’am Jacques on the porch of their small wooden house.

“No porches in Ireland,” I said.

“Or swings, either,” Máire said as we rocked back and forth, holding Gracie and Stephen while the other children slept inside. “A lovely scent, that,” she said.

“Night-blooming jasmine,” Sister told her.

“Nice to be warm,” Máire said.

We’d both been surprised when M’am Jacques told us that Sister Henriette owned her. “She inherited me and my sons when her own sister died.” M’am Jacques went on about the Delille family. “All the girls are beautiful,” she said, “speaking three and four languages, playing piano, painting pictures. Wasn’t their granddaddy a French nobleman and their grandmother the daughter of an African chief?”

Then Sister Henriette said to M’am Jacques, “Hush now,” and told us she’d gladly free M’am Jacques, but if she did, M’am Jacques would have to leave New Orleans. Recently freed slaves weren’t allowed to live in the city. “Slavery’s our country’s great sin,” she said. “I pray every day America will repent and make amends.”

“Best you go to the Irish church, Saint Patrick’s, for Sunday Mass tomorrow,” Sister Henriette said, though she supposed we could go to the French church, St. Louis’s Cathedral, or the Spanish one. She explained that she and the sisters and M’am Jacques attended St. Augustine’s, a colored church, and while that congregation would welcome us, our being there could cause trouble with the white authorities. I said that St. Patrick’s would suit us. The Dohertys from the
Superior
would surely be there, and Charlie’s brother could help us buy our tickets for Chicago.