Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri, an immigrant from Chicago. Amid the hubbub in the United States today over illegal immigrants, he remembered that his parents were illegal immigrants from Ireland a long time ago. They came because of the freedom the United States offered. Technically they were illegal but his father had no choice but to come and his mother likely did not know she was illegal. This is their story.
My Parents Were Illegal Irish Immigrants in the United States
~Donal Mahoney
Donal Mahoney has been writing poetry, fiction and nonfiction for a long time. When he began in the late Fifties, there were “little magazines” in print only. He used carbon paper and a small portable typewriter. Some of his online work can be found here: http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.OSYzpgmQ.dpbs=
My Parents Were Illegal Irish Immigrants in the United States
In
1920, my father, 16, was a guest of the British government. He was a
prisoner of their forces occupying Ireland at the time, a group called
the Black and Tans.
One
day he and seven other prisoners were brought out of their makeshift
cells to dig their own graves in a small walled compound. As tradition
would have it, they would be shot into their graves and other prisoners
would be brought out to bury them.
By
prearranged signal, the eight men dropped their shovels and broke for
the wall. Bullets stopped five of them but the other three climbed over
the wall and made it through the rural Irish countryside to freedom. One
of the escapees eventually went to Australia, another to Canada.
My father made it to America.
The
story doesn’t end there, of course, and he only told it once. But even
if you were only in eighth grade, as I was at the time, it’s not a story
you forget.
Ironically,
his first job in America was digging graves in New Jersey. Then he
boxed professionally in New York and sang in Irish nightclubs. He never
drank. He was an odd fellow in that respect and perhaps in some others
as well.
After
another boxer broke his nose he stopped fighting and emigrated from New
York, this time to Chicago, where without skills or experience he was
hired by the Commonwealth Edison Company. He spent 35 years there as an
electrical lineman who specialized as a troubleshooter called out during
big storms whenever they occurred anywhere in the State of Illinois. He
had to retire earlier than he would have liked after absorbing
12,000 volts of electricity trying to save a rookie he was training from
touching the hot wire that got him.
At
some point Joseph Francis O’Mahony, a native of Ballyheigue, County
Kerry, met and married my mother, Mary Therese Roche, an illegal
immigrant from Togher, Cork. She arrived in 1926 or so, got off the boat
and found herself, for reasons she could never recall, in the middle of
Harlem among the first black people she had ever seen. They helped her
locate her cousin elsewhere in New York. In time she used her cousin's
paperwork to find jobs cleaning the houses of others who could afford to
hire her.
My
father, apparently illegal as well, didn’t stop for documentation,
perhaps because the Black and Tans might have delayed his trip had they
found him.
My
mother was reared in rural Ireland with eight siblings in a
thatched-roof cottage in the middle of a cabbage field. An English
landlord owned the field.
My
mother didn’t know she needed papers to come to America. She had just
grown weary of harvesting cabbage and thought she might try her luck in
America. Apparently she had no problem getting on the boat.
These
two illegal immigrants had a good if not perfect life in Chicago
compared with the life they might have had if they had remained in
Ireland.
My
father earned good money as an electrician and saved a lot of it to
make it possible for his son to earn two degrees. He and my mother died,
however, before seeing their first grandson, Sean Owen Mahoney, win a
Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.
It’s just as well because my father would have been very unhappy to have a grandson studying in England.
Almost
as unhappy as he was to learn many years earlier that he had spent all
his hard-earned money to send his own son, the author of this piece, to
a university and have him come home with two degrees in English, of all
things.
Once again my father had proof that life isn’t fair.
Joseph Francis O'Mahony, first row, third from left, circa 1920, age 16, all dressed up and looking older than 16 as a
prisoner of the English on Spike Island a few years before he emigrated to the United States. There he became a
citizen and the judge told him to change his name to Mahoney, a decision he would bemoan like a banshee for years.
Permission to use photo obtained from the Waterford County Museum in Ireland.
~Donal Mahoney
Donal Mahoney has been writing poetry, fiction and nonfiction for a long time. When he began in the late Fifties, there were “little magazines” in print only. He used carbon paper and a small portable typewriter. Some of his online work can be found here: http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.OSYzpgmQ.dpbs=
