Every Word Matters: A Touch of the Irish

design by Vermont's Danforth Pewter

Writing historical fiction, like my three volumes (so far!) in the Winds of Freedom series, means paying attention to all the little words. It's not automatic to "speak" in the rhythms and vocabulary of another time, and there are days when I spend more hours checking language than I do pushing the plot forward. What did counterfeiters call each other? How did Canadians talk about the "money artists" living in their Eastern Townships? If you're adapting your best dress to a new style in 1854, what do you call the trimmings that you're stitching, if you're classroom educated or if you're happier helping with your father's horses?

All of those came into play as I wrote The Bitter and the Sweet, where Bible-studying Almyra Alexander needs to reach across class and social lines to admit she needs help from Susannah Hall in order to climb into a saddle. Riding a pony in Boston certainly didn't prepare her for carrying urgent messages while perched high above the ground on a full-size horse. (Don't get me started on how tall the horse was. Thank goodness for true experts like Amanda Gustin at the Vermont Historical Society, who can talk clearly and with authority about Vermont Morgan horses.)

As a poet as well as a novelist, I also want the words to sound fluid and interesting in the reader's "ear." One result of that is that I sometimes recognize my own writing in places I hadn't expected to see it -- a description of a local town that someone borrows from my own, posted online, or a review on the back of a book, mentioning the author's earlier work. 

Yes, that's a great gift of being a published author: If you choose to, and don't mind working without pay (we can discuss that more at some other time), you can get involved in reviewing other historical fiction. I treasure the chance to do that for the Historical Novels Review. It can be a great challenge to devour 400 pages, then work out a description to guide other readers -- condensing it to 300 words,  which is a bit less than a page. (The end of that sentence reached 359 words here, just to give you a better notion.)

One book I am reading for review this week is set in the 1850s, like my work, and by 10 pages into the story, I realized its author didn't care about language in the same way that I do. Probably the most shocking moment was when one of the characters, of Irish heritage, referred to Irish immigration to the United States as caused by "the potato famine." That raised two problems: First, Irish immigration began much earlier than that, and Irish Americans were well represented in our patriots of the American Revolution. Second, and what drives me to write about this today, is I knew that the Irish didn't say "the potato famine."

At least, I was pretty sure. But it's part of my way of writing and researching, that I needed to check. So I pulled out one of the vital books on my reference shelf: The Story of the Irish Race by Seumas MacManus. It came to my collection during the writing of Cold Midnight, a novel set in 1920 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, when many people working for the well-to-do came from Ireland. And I bet you might not ever have heard of Seumas MacManus, because he died in 1967, but here's how he's been described: "Seamus MacManus is considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition. He wrote down and interpreted traditional stories so that they would not be lost to future generations." (Wikipedia summary.)

Sure enough, his chapter LXX starts on page 602 (people did write longer books then), and is titled The Great Famine. It begins:

The Great Famine, usually known as the famine of '47, really began in '45, with the blighting and failure of the potato crop, the people's chief means of sustenance. 

You'll search long and hard for a copy of that book. But you can get a marvelously well-written modern (2015) exploration of America's relationship with that part of Irish history in Maureen O'Rourke Murphy's book Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine. Are you hooked on Vermont and its history? Asenath Nicholson was born Asenath Hatch in Chelsea, Vermont, on February 24, 1792.

Give yourself an adventure for this month of St. Patrick's Day: Look up a bit more about Asenath Nicholson. Let me know what you think, when you discover what she did. 

And I hope you noticed the phrase "the Great Irish Famine." Not the potato famine. See, you're already gaining an ear for the well-chosen words of  well-written historical fiction. Go ahead, tell someone else what you've discovered!

 

Irish Soda Bread, and Some Vermont Irish History

The best of St. Patrick's Day to you! And may your luck be cheerful and in all the right directions on this fine March day.

It's a day that I like to celebrate by making Irish soda bread, and this year, just for the fun of it, I tried out the whole-grain boxed mix provided by King Arthur Flour, one of our Vermont-focused businesses. Very tasty, and it didn't cut much into my work time this way!

It's a good moment to remember that being Irish once meant a great deal in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Just a few decades ago, the town's residents in response to the Census notched up 30% with Irish heritage. Significant in the area was the presence for decades of two Catholic churches: one "French" (mostly French Canadian, with Mass provided in both Latin and French), and "Irish" (Mass in Latin and English). The "Irish" church was St. Aloysius, pictured here; after the "French" church, Notre Dame des Victories, burned (yes, arson), the congregations merged and renamed the new church group St. John the Evangelist. Here's the building, from one of my late husband Dave Kanell's postcards.

The most recent available Census data, from the 2017 American Community Survey (the newer name for this batch of Census detail), showed 10.1% of Americans mentioning Irish heritage; 17.3% of Vermont residents; and 14.4% of those responding in Caledonia County (where another 14.4 percent mentioned French, 11.1% French Canadian -- should we add those together? -- and 18.2% English heritage; yes, Scottish comes in at 5.9%, and Italian at 5.5%). That's about one-seventh of the county with Irish heritage!

When I visit my New York City grandsons, I like to step across to their neighborhood's amazing Irish Hunger Memorial. Here are two photos of the structure, taken by Wally Gobetz and shared on flickr (thank you!); there's a description of the memorial added below, and if you don't have time to read it all, just keep this in mind: It's built from an actual stone cottage from Ireland, like the ones people lived in at the time of the potato famine there. I imagine the mud and stone and starvation made these homes feel terribly, frighteningly cold.

In fact, we have some great descriptions of exactly that, from Asenath Hatch Nicholson, a woman originally from Chelsea, Vermont, who left what comfort she'd found in New York City to go and see the starvation conditions for herself back in 1844. See my earlier discussion of her work here.

Now, before I go spread some good Vermont-branded butter on my next chunk of Irish soda bread, one more important history item: The first to use "baking soda" in bread recipes were not the Irish, but Native Americans, says noted food writer Gillie Houston -- see her explanation here -- and the recipe drifted to Ireland, as that region adopted agriculture and recipes for locally grown "soft" wheat.

You just never know what you'll come across, when you start digging into history. Or baking!

***
[memorial explanation originally published at https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/irish-hunger-memorial]

A winding path is lined with blackthorn, foxglove, and ling heather, marked with 32 rocks each engraved with the name of an Irish county. The quarter-acre of Ireland on the edge of Manhattan is a memorial to the over one million Irish who died during the Great Famine of the 1840s, as well as those who continue to suffer from hunger.

Designed by artist Brian Tolle, the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park incorporates a Famine-era stone cottage brought over from County Mayo, Ireland, and reconstructed as the heart of the monument. Visitors can enter directly from the street up a path through the suspended field, or through a tunnel lined with granite and words behind glass remembering worldwide hunger crises, while a ghostly recording plays voices recounting famine.
Room has been left for more words to mark new hunger crises. From the top of the field at 25 feet in the air, there is a view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the first stop for many of the over two million Irish immigrants to the United States.

Learning the 1800s: Sunday Mail Delivery

As I write THIS ARDENT FLAME, set in northern Vermont in 1852, I spend a lot of time in research -- but not just exploring this pre-Civil War decade of ferment. In order to understand the thinking and discussions of the time, I often backtrack to the War of Independence and the strong-minded individuals who voiced their dreams for this new nation, built from a set of very different colonies and then growing by annexation of territory (and almost always while ignoring the history and rights of Indigenous peoples).

This week I'm reading Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine, by Maureen O'Rourke Murphy. One reason to read the book is as background for how the characters in THIS ARDENT FLAME deal with the Irish immigrants arriving in Vermont at the time. Another is that Asenath Nicholson, an activist of the first half of the 1800s, was born and raised in Chelsea, Vermont, not far from the Northeast Kingdom. (I've spent many hours there as the mom of an actor in a Jay Craven/Howard Frank Mosher film. Where the Rivers Flow North.)

Every detail in the book takes me digging for more details elsewhere, and this morning I "dug into" Sunday mail delivery. I was surprised to learn that it was routine in our nation's first century: It was considered essential for commerce! Moreover, the 1820s/1830s movement to end Sunday mail delivery came out of a small group with religious passions and especially religious bias -- against those Irish and other Catholic immigrants, who often used their "day of rest" to feast, gather, and rejoice, rather than to endure the silent solemnity of a Puritan-style Sabbath.

The post office with its mandatory Sunday opening (required by law to be open at least one hour each Sunday) became a social location. Not only did men gather there to pick up their letters and commercial orders, but they also often sat down to socialize, drink, and play cards. This horrified those who took their Sunday worship more seriously. Interestingly, these horrified individuals were often the same ones pursuing the Abolition of slavery, out of the same Christian beliefs!

Thus, Arthur Tappan, an ardent abolitionist of both New York City and New Haven, CT, would raise as much anger by his "Sunday mail laws" campaign as by his campaign to end slavery, and his brother Lewis, campaigning the same way, had his house broken into in 1834 by an angry mob.

Only 7% of the nation claimed strong religious ties at the time, and most opposed shutting down the post office on Sundays. The invention of the telegraph in the 1840s would ease the commercial necessity of Sunday mails. But the legislation to close the post office on Sundays would not be passed until 1912, and part of the opposition to it lay in favoring one religion over another, counter to the definitive statement of the Constitution that insisted the new nation not pick and choose. (Arguments included the belief that Sunday closing of the postal service would then lead to Saturday closing on behalf of the Jewish Sabbath, to be fair!)

What eventually tipped the nation to passing the closure laws was a combination of two pressures: postal workers wanting a day off like everyone else, and trading the closure for the new service of Parcel Post: being able to handle packages routinely.

That's a lot to think about, in the context of this week's political talk about Amazon, postal rates, and Sunday deliveries that have now resumed!