I
recall as a boy of maybe six or seven, walking down a street in the South Bronx
with our mother, the six of us in tow. We ranged in age from nine to infancy,
and—as children will do—the older of us gawked as we passed at the stack of
furniture piled at the curb.
“Don’t stare at those poor unfortunate
people,” our mother chided. “Something terrible has happened to them.”
As
with the other times we’d witnessed such a scene, someone always stood guard. A
man, someone’s neighbor, having been evicted for not paying his rent, watched
over his worldly possessions, his face masked in a steely frown or grimace.
Perhaps his wife had gone off with the children to ask some relative to take
them in. Or it might be the mother and children who kept the watch, the father
himself having gone in search of lodging or work. They were, by all
appearances, just like us.
“Say
a prayer,” my mother urged us as we passed by, seeming not to notice so as to
avoid embarrassing them.
I
realize now that such an eviction with a family’s possessions piled on the
sidewalk was about the most disgraceful calamity that could befall the
Irish-Americans of the South Bronx in the early 1950s. The fear that one’s own
family might be only a paycheck away from a similar fate was at times nearly
palpable. “It could happen to anyone,” was a common refrain among those proud,
poor, hard-working people. “There but for the grace of God . . . .” But the
searing shame of such misfortune was inescapable.
Irish-American
families by the mid twentieth century were four generations removed from the
horrors of the Great Famine that ravaged the population of Ireland in the
1840s. Yet the cultural memory of those dark times a century ago had been kept
alive, eventually passed down in history and song in succeeding generations.
One searing image that lingered in the folk memory from famine times was the
spectacle of a tenant farmer and his family, unable to pay their rent because
of the potato blight, being evicted from their cottage by the agent of an absentee
landlord accompanied by the British constabulary and some Irish housebreakers,
themselves desperate for work. To
avoid paying taxes on the empty cottages—or at times to clear the land for the
more profitable expansion of sheep or cattle raising—the landlord would then
tumble the cottages, forcing the evicted family to live in a ditch or take to
the road, foraging for food along the way.
A
century later, in the streets of the South Bronx, such images of dereliction
among the famine Irish had largely retreated to the realm of the unconscious,
fading like the sepia tint of an old photo of ancestors no one even recognizes
anymore. Yet--despite the years--the treachery, fear, and shame of eviction
still lingered in the folk memory of their descendants.
