Introduction
June 1, 1899
Days after my fatherâs funeral, my sister Ellen asked me to come to her house. She wanted me to see if there was anything I wanted from our fatherâs personal items. Among his things were his tools and a leather portfolio, hand-stitched at the spine with intricate leather crosspieces.
The portfolio had a leather strap on the front, fastened to a button sewn on the back panel, securing inches of handwritten pages inside. The precise finish of the portfolio made it clear that my father had crafted it himself.
As a child, I had often watched him work in his modest workshop, his hands steady and sure as he shaped leather into functional and beautiful boots and shoes. Sometimes, he shared storiesâtales of his journey to America, filled with both hope and hardship.
I asked Ellen what was in the papers. She said she didnât know because she hadnât read them, thinking they were just our fatherâs workshop notes. Our father was not a man of many words, preferring to express himself through his craft. And it wasnât unusual for him to jot down ideas and sketches for his projects, and we had long grown accustomed to his reserved nature.
Weeks later, I saw Ellen and her husband, Tom, at their house for Sunday dinner. I brought the portfolio with me. âIâve been reading and organizing the pages,â I told them. âTheyâre not his workshop notes. Itâs a journalâthe story of his life and our motherâs. Weâre all in it.â
Ellen broke down completely, sobbing into Tomâs arms. It was too much for her to take, so soon after our fatherâs passing. The journalâs contents were a window into a world we only knew fragments ofâ a world that shaped who we had become.
Over the following months, I pieced together the order of the journal as best as I could. Some of the writing was easy to identify by dates and significant events. Other pages contained random entries of thoughts and pasted newspaper clippings of events that seemed to belong where I found them.
It took months, perhaps a year, to finish arranging the pages. The more I read, the deeper I felt the connection to my parents, understanding their struggles and triumphs in a way I never had before.
At family gatherings, we read the stories and discussed the things our parents kept secret. Some stories were hard to read and hear. Our fatherâs early years in his native Ireland, the arduous journey to America, and the sacrifices they made to build a life hereâthese were the foundations of our familyâs legacy.
Everyone agreed that, since I was the youngest and would probably live the longest, I would keep the journal to preserve the family story of how we started in America. I will keep it closeâfor all of usâto remember how it was with them.
âMichael James Collins
A TALE OF TWO LIVES
I have lived in America for 38 of the 58 years of my lifeâas it is. My dearest wife, Johanna, is gone, and all of our children have grown and have families of their own to look after.
I am the only one not born in America left to tell the story of our two livesâhers and mineâone old and one new, one in Ireland, one in America.
When I am gone, there will be few left who knew usâthen, we will be forgotten.
It is the common fate of common people.
âCornelius Collins
August 14, 1890
THE ODYSSEY OF CORNELIUS COLLINS
Of all the things I can remember in my life, memories of my childhood before An Gorta MĂłrâthe Great Hungerâare not among them. Almost everything from before the Hunger is gone or nearly erased.
I was a boy of fourteen when the potato blight came to Ireland in 1845, ravaging the countryside with relentless death and suffering for seven long years until I turned twenty.
My life before that is a collection of vague memories: working in fields we didnât own and never ate from, seeing my mother and father exhausted from laboring from dawn till dusk to keep us fed and a roof over our heads. It was more than most people had.
We were no strangers to hunger. Most days, we had little to eat, and some days there was nothing at all, not even potatoes. But An Gorta MĂłr was the worst famine anyone in Ireland who survived it could remember.
The potato, which most people depended on for basic food, became infected with disease, leaving the fertile landscape a mixture of decay and healthy crops. Even the air smelled rotten, a constant reminder of our unbearable situation.
The Black â47
Death by starvation is a slow, merciless fate. Worse than the sight of it is the smell, which can make you retch whatever little you have in you. After that, you canât eat anything, no matter how hungry you are. The sight and smell linger in your senses, taking over your mind with no escape.
The year 1847 was the worst of it. Hunger, fever, sickness of all sorts, and human filth were everywhere. The unburied dead and dying covered the land like uprooted trees after a storm, strewn across roadsides and in open fields where starving dogs finished them off.
The air was thick with the odor of decay, mingling with the foul stench of human waste and the bitter smell of sickness. Flies covered everythingâfrom rotting potato plants to piles of human waste in front of mud huts to the dead and dying inside. The constant drone of their buzzing made every day feel like another rock had been piled on the mound of hopelessness we were buried under.
In the spring of that year, news arrived that a ship from America had brought food and supplies. The newsreadersâ voices were desperately sad as we listened in dread silence to what the Americans and others with them saw in Cork City.
âOn Monday of this month (April 1847), Captain Robert Bennet Forbes, commander of the USS Jamestown, arrived in Cork Harbour from Boston with some eight hundred tonnes of relief provisions for distribution. He visited the city in the company of Father Theobald Mathew and was shocked by the scenes he saw in the side streets and back lanes. Captain Forbes was heard to say, âI saw enough in five minutes to horrify me. Hovels crowded with the sick and dying, without floors, without furniture, and with patches of dirty straw covered with still dirtier shreds of humanity. Some called to Father Mathew for water, and others for a dying blessing.ââ
For seven endless years, people lived in fear of being found dead in the fields or alone on the hills, without a priest or family to bless them and comfort them in the last moments of a wretched life. Every week, entire families were found dead inside their one-room mud huts, the doors nailed shut from the inside to prevent anyone from entering and seeing them still clinging to life in their miserable state.
The poorest people, unable to pay the landlordâs rent, were sent to workhouses where three people lived in spaces made for one. Disease killed hundreds weekly, and the inmates were put to work digging great pits in the surrounding fields to bury the dead by torchlight until well after dark.
The sight of so much death made you numb. Lifeless bodies became objects no different from rocks or tree stumps. But the invisible, horrible stench in the air could not be escaped. The wind pushed it up your nostrils and down your throat, making you gag with every breath.
Death by Avoidable Causes
At the heart of the troubles was the fact that almost all the farmland in Ireland belonged to a small group of English and a few Irish landowners. The rest of us rented huts as tenants on the land we worked for the landowners. Everything was under their control, including the small patch of dirt near our hut just big enough to grow the potatoes we needed to feed ourselves.
Earning the lowest of wages, we planted the landownersâ fields with oats, rye, and other grains that we harvested for sale in English markets. The dirt unfit for the landownersâ crops or grazing their animals was given to us to grow âlumpers,â the ugly pale brown potatoes covered in lumps that a working man would eat a stone weightâabout thirteen to fourteen poundsâa day. Most days, we only ate half a stone weight so everyone had something.
The boiled yellow mush tasted like paste unless you were lucky and had milk, butter, or sometimes scallions to chop and mix in. Eating it every day was work, shoveling it down your throat, swallowing hard, and drinking water to fill your empty stomach. If you didnât force yourself to eat it, the hunger cramps felt like someone twisting your guts with a stick, much worse than eating lumpers.
We always lived in danger of famine. That was the truth of it. The old people remembered the potato crop failing dozens of times before 1845, causing hunger until a new crop came in. But this time, the crop failed for almost seven years, causing greater misery and death than anyone had seen before.
The newsreaders, who kept us aware of government and landowner developments, said that spokespeople for Ireland argued with the English Parliament to stop exporting grain and other crops grown in Ireland when the potato crop first failed. These crops should have been sold in Irish markets.
But the English and Irish landowners, with their influence over Parliament, claimed the crops were their property. Parliament had no right to interfere with the free market, and the crops grown in Ireland were needed just as desperately to feed English laborers. If Parliament stopped the export of Irish crops, they said, England would suffer the famine instead of Ireland.
The English Parliament did not interfere with the free market, and the landowners continued exporting crops. Eventually, they changed the law to allow direct aid from outside sources like America, bypassing the English review authorities who always took large fees before sending us what was left.
With the law changed, Irishmen who served in the Queenâs troops in India and Irish American organizations in Boston and New York sent aid directly. The Quakersâ Society of Friends, who always provided aid, formed the Central Relief Committee in Dublin at the beginning of the troubles to set up soup kitchens and distribute food around the country, saving many from starvation, including my family.
When âThe Black â47â came, the Quakers gave out turnip seeds to plant, helping thousands survive. Fishermen, too weak to work, had to pawn their boats and tackle for money to buy food. The Quakers lent them the money to buy back their equipment and start new fishing stations, keeping the trade going.
There is a gratitude you cannot truly express when you are among the invisible of the world, teetering at the edge of existence. An outstretched hand makes the difference between clinging to life, as miserable as it is, or letting go forever to be with the forgotten.
Irish Lace
Women like my mother didnât like depending on government aid during the famine and looked for ways to support their families. In our community, certain women sponsored lace schools to teach others how to make lace and find buyers for the finished work. Before then, lace making was done in workshops in the north of Ireland and mostly in convents where we lived in Cork.
At the community lace school my mother attended, the teacher learned to weave by undoing an expensive piece of lace stitch by stitch to see how it was made, then putting it back together again. Thatâs how my mother, Julia Kilty Collins, learned to weave laceâstitch by stitch. The lace was intricate, each thread pulled tight with delicate precision, creating patterns as beautiful as spider webs.
I remember a story she told about some children at the lace school whose parents were sent to a workhouse. The children stayed with a relative who sent them to the lace school where they learned to weave so well, that they earned enough money selling their lace to pay the workhouse debt and free their parents. Then they taught their parents the lace trade, so the whole family could earn an income.
âThe ability to earn a productive living,â my mother said, âinspires people with hope and dignity that handouts, though much needed and appreciated, can sometimes destroy.â
It is a lesson I have never forgotten.
