Reading the Famine: Books About Ireland’s Great Hunger: 1845–1852
The title of the book, Kathleen, was spelled out in blue letters along the spine.
I was fourteen years old and in Waldenbooks at the Kings Plaza Mall, just blocks away from the Flatlands branch of the Brooklyn Public Library from which I was a fugitive, hounded by late notices with their fines, climbing dime over dime. The books were never lost. I just had trouble surrendering them.
There were several similar books in the same row as Kathleen. They were, I’d learn, Young Adult romance novels. Each story took a resourceful young woman and put her in the middle of a historical event where she met two handsome men and had to choose between them. Elizabeth is caught up in the Salem Witch Trials. Amanda travels the Oregon trail. Caroline joins the California Gold Rush. Nicole survives the sinking of the Titanic.
Already a writer, my name anywhere on a book felt like a wink from the future. Before I even slipped Kathleen by Candice Ransom off the shelf, I knew I was going to buy it.
The cover featured a girl wrapped in a blue shawl with red hair flowing down her back.
It is 1847, and Kathleen O’Connor is fleeing a potatoes-only famine in Ireland. Her siblings have died of starvation and fever, as has the man she was going to marry. She sails for America with her parents, but by the time the ship arrives, Kathleen is the sole survivor of her family. In Boston, signs in store windows say, “No Irish Need Apply.” She becomes a pickpocket but, eventually, she gets a job as a maid to a wealthy family and begins to adjust to her new life.
This cannot have actually happened, I thought, stunned. Who hates the Irish?
My paternal grandparents were from Galway. I always said the names of their towns as though they were one, the words of a magic spell. TuamBallinasloe. My mother was of Irish descent as well. But I had not known.
Kathleen is neither graphic nor entirely realistic. Of course, as a book for young adults, it’s not meant to be. Kathleen’s brother and sisters are already dead when the book begins, and they were buried. A graveside funeral is mentioned. Kathleen not only speaks English, but reads and writes it, a fact that is met with great disbelief, as it would have been. Kathleen’s father is a poor farmer so to excuse her literacy, the author made Kathleen’s mother a Protestant.
Kathleen sparked a lifelong interest in Irish history.
As an undergrad at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, I would take Irish Literature, The Irish Diaspora and The Political History of Ireland. There, I learned that The Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór, was more accurate because during the years 1845–1852, Ireland
produced enough food to feed her population several times over.
I’ve read many nonfiction books that detail and analyze the events of The Great Hunger. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith. This Great Calamity: Ireland: The Irish Famine 1845–52 by Christine Kinealy. The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly.
I’ve also read many other novels that are about the Great Hunger, in whole or part. In Leon Uris’s Trinity, it’s the background for rebellion. Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You moves back and forth between the end of the Great Hunger and modern Ireland, mending the two as her Kathleen attempts to reconcile them both. Peter Behrens’ Law of Dreams, features stunning scenes of workhouses and a gang of orphaned children living wild in the Irish countryside. Peter Quinn’s Banished Children of Eve brings the story to America, as does his nonfiction Looking for Jimmy, A Search for Irish America. Both explore the legacy of mass death and immigration, for the Irish and their American descendants. Ship Fever is a short story by Andrea Barrett about the influx of coffin ships at Grosse Île in Quebec and a medical staff overwhelmed by the tide of sick and dying Irish. My own novel, Ashes of Fiery Weather, is about a survivor of the Great Hunger, who never speaks of it, not even to her daughter, struggling to understand.
My copy of Kathleen disappeared, as things from childhood do. Years ago, I went online and bought one for about $25. I hold it sometimes though, a ghost turned substantive in my hands.
Epilogue or Prologue
My grandfather once said that the farm where he was born was not the original family home. The Donohues (the original spelling) were from Killarney. After the Great Hunger, they wandered north, and eventually found abandoned land in Tuam, Co. Galway. I don’t know when this was, if there was an actual house, or the barest remains of one, if they knew the fates of those who’d lived there before, if they even cared by then. I’m sure they understood that nobody was coming back.
