Wandering Potatoes

By Margaret Blanchard

Wandering Potatoes: Best Historical Novel of 2003, Award by High Country Friends of the Tuolumne County, California Library, 2004

Wandering Potatoes focuses on life choices made by five women in an Irish-American family: Kate ONeill, who in 1839, marries, against her fathers will, and emigrates to America; Brigid, daughter of Kate, who travels west in 1877 with her husband and children to witness the death of Crazy Horse; Eileen, Brigids daughter, who in 1900 leaves an Oregon convent after ten years as a nun; Helen, Eileens daughter, who sails in 1949 across an ocean with four children to join her husband; and Katie, daughter of Helen, who in 1969 turns her back on marriage to join political movements for civil and equal rights. Based on stories passed on from mother to daughter, this novel provides a peoples history of Irish famine and immigration, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, women roles at the turn of the century, the Korean War, global expansion, the womens movement. Through these lives of adventurous women in one Irish-American family weave themes of oppression, discrimination, courage, compassion, integrity, the challenges of bridging differences and the contradictions of being both deprived and privileged, oppressed and oppressor, characteristic of American history.

"Dreaming back through the Motherline, Margaret Blanchard brings alive her own family's stories and, in the process, frees the trapped ancestral stories in us all. Compelling and compassionate, this books sings to the heart."

-Patricia Monaghan, author of O Mother Sun! and Dancing with Chaos, editor of Unlacing: Ten Irish-American Women Poets

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 11, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469775340

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Wandering Potatoes

All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Margaret Blanchard

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue to Wandering Potatoes

Blue Dress

Exiting

Culture Clash

Crossing

Brigid’s Story

Splitting Up

Passage

Homecoming

Epilogue

About the Author

In honor of Mary Ann McBride O’Neill Murphy. In memory of Margaret Murphy Keller. With gratitude to Ann Keller Blanchard.

The Family: Three Generations

1839: Ireland: The Irish Family

Kathleen Murphy (the grandmother) Rose Murphy (the aunt)

Patrick O’Neill (the father) Mary O’Neill (the mother)

Their children:

Rob O’Neill (his children: Ellen and Michael) Megan O’Neill (Sister Mary Francis) Kate O’Neill (married Daniel Burke) Sean O’Neill Molly O’Neill

1877: The Dakotas: The Irish-American Family

Brigid Burke O’Reilly (the mother)—daughter of Kate O’Neill Burke Her children by Patrick Casey, her first husband: Joe Casey Jane Casey

John O’Reilly, Brigid’s second husband

Their children:

Eileen O’Reilly Pierce O’Reilly James O’Reilly

Sarah Burke Sullivan (Brigid’s sister) Michael Sullivan

Their child:

Marnie Sullivan

1900: Oregon: The American Family

Brigid and John O’Reilly (the grandparents) Jane Casey Eileen O’Reilly (Sister Mary John)—Katie’s grandmother, Helen’s mother Marnie Sullivan James O’Reilly married to Alice O’Reilly

Their children:

Emily O’Reilly Polly O’Reilly

Yes, I heard voices down along the river somewhere—a man’s voice and a woman’s voice calling…I think I saw the river.—M.M. in Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)

In all the laws of physics that we have found so far there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and the future.—Richard Feynman in T. Moss, The Probability of the Impossible

(Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1974)

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water. That fountain is there among its scalloped green and gray stones. It is still there and always there with its quiet song and strange power.

Denise Levertov

Acknowledgements

Thanks

To Sister Marian Slattery, the source of so much valuable lore about Ireland;

To S.B. Sowbel, for her portrait of the author writing this novel and for her support throughout the process;

To Kathleen Herrington, for her insightful review of the manuscript.

And to the following authors whose work helped fit this fiction into historical contexts:

Mary Murray Delaney, Of Irish Ways (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Dillon Press, 1973).

Edward Laxton, The Famine Ships (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996).

Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse (University of Nebraska Press, 1942).

The Plains Indians: An Aesthetic of Mobility, Sacred Circles: 2000 Years of North American Indian Art

Prologue to Wandering Potatoes

Yet so many stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories. Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories—like her life—must be recorded.

—Alice Walker

My mother’s stories are the only tangible remnants linking me, like genetic codes, back through generations. Twenty years ago I wrote this novel, Wandering Potatoes, as transportation for family stories. I hoped this roomy vehicle would bring these stories together and give their dusty feet a rest while providing all of us a tour of where we’ve been, collectively speaking. For twenty years that vehicle idled upon the shelf. I’d woven the stories together by the theme of matrilineage, but the key voice of this matrix was missing: my mother telling her own story.

Once, years ago, I asked Mom if she’d mind if I told in writing the stories she’d told me about her mother and her grandmother, if I could. She said, Sure—that’s a great idea. But I want to tell my own story. So at that time I wove my own wrap around the stories she’d told me, then researched and invented another story from her few threads about the generation we didn’t know, the ones who first came over. I hoped in doing this to tell my story as nested in my mother’s story as nested in my grandmother’s story, as nested in her mother’s story, like Russian dolls.

But the novel remained unfinished for a number of reasons, including the fact that Mom never had time to tell her own story. She was too busy building nests and moving nests and being the nest to describe how she did it. Although she features as a character in my story, she isn’t telling her own story, and it certainly isn’t her point of view. How could I have a matrilineage of stories without a mother-story? Would these stories remain like Penelope’s robe, woven all day by this earnest writer, unraveled every night by the flightiness of dreams and the fragility of memory?

Even though Mom’s a born writer, she’s never had much time to write. She’s been busy with her marriage of 65 years, her four children, her four grandchildren, her seven great-grandchildren, with transporting her family from post to post, with her many friends, neighbors, and other family members, with church and charities. In later years she’s been busy caring for Dad who was ailing, then caring for the household after he died. Only with the onset of blindness has she realized with regret how much she longed to write down her own story.

As for me, while I don’t have plenty of time to write, because I also have to love and work and care for others, I have made writing a priority. I decided early on, I guess, not to compete with my mother whose kindness, beauty, grace and charm were so special, whose marriage was close to perfect, who was the ideal mother in so many ways. So I tapped into her unfulfilled dream and became a writer. Which is why I’ve been sitting here with a postponed novel, waiting for the crucial part from a blind and aging mother to get the whole running smoothly, ready to move out into the larger world.

The solution we discovered to this dilemma was a simple tape recorder. Overcoming her resistance to electronics (my father’s area of expertise) she has mastered, at the age of 89, that little machine well enough to begin to tell her stories. I realized upon listening to the first one, entitled Our Hardest Trip, that her voice was indeed the missing link. Here’s a scrap of that story, written as an amendment to the taping, in fairly firm and legible script:

[Insert after ‘bossy.’]

"Later, on the train, it was decided by the highest—and only—court (me) that while Bobby would have jurisdiction over Mary, that I would have sole responsibility for the behavior of Margaret and Ann.

"As we approached the train, Ann, Jr., age 8, clutching tightly to my right hand, eyes wide with wonder, lagged behind, assessing every detail of her surroundings and how she might best react. She glanced often to her mother for guidance, having perfect trust that I would safely transport them to their father. Still there were twists and turns that required study.

9 yr. old Margaret had my left hand as firmly but was usually two steps ahead pushing forward not so much eagerly as with intense curiosity, determined not to miss any of the sights and sounds.

Her taped story has now been transcribed—in her own voice, at last, her own words, chosen and told by her alone—to complete this novel, as the Epilogue, the concluding chapter. Worth waiting for. Or skipping ahead to. It seems odd to end, rather than begin, this matrilineage with my mother’s voice. But mysteriously, that’s the only way to make my own story connect, loop back to the beginning. If you read between these stories, you’ll find the answer to the puzzle of why it has taken so long to untie the knot and release the line which pulls it all together, how this is also a story of separation from and reunion with the mother, lost and found.

This novel is, obviously, autobiographical, and in that sense true, if not factual—but at least 80% of the whole is also fiction. To put flesh on the skeleton of our genes, we must imagine, we must invent. To arrange the shards of story together, to weave together the remnants, we have to do the kind of mending which fiction supplies. These stories were given to me by generations of women who experienced them, imagined them, remembered them, bore them across oceans, plains, and deserts. To carry them with me, I’ve woven this novel shawl as a satchel around them, full of many inherited and discovered colors. My own story is only one particular strand in this particular weave, and even it is, in some sense, fiction.

When I say it’s fiction, I simply mean my imagining from the inside of the person herself, what it must have been like to have been where she was, who she was, when she was, whether I knew her personally as I did my grandmother, or imagined her instead, or have tried to recall my own younger self. When I say it’s true, I mean the stories, I do not know the facts for sure, although I’ve studied them. I only know some truths by expanding the stories back into the larger contexts out of which they emerged: political oppression, famine, immigration, discrimination, westward movement, assimilation, global expansion, various forms of liberation, and repeatedly, relentlessly, in the background, war, war, war—and the kinds of collateral damage women and children seem to feel most defenselessly.

Each time I tell this story, it makes me feel more whole. As Mom might say about the act of telling stories, It helps soothe frayed nerves. One reason our stories may never be completely finished is because they are not meant to be done, as long as there are people who need to tell them and people who want to listen to them. The healing we feel on telling and listening is only one share of a longer, larger process.

This novel is also about leaving behind sacred places, homes we’ve known, and mothers who made them, about moving on to worlds completely new, utterly unimaginable. Women in each of the past five generations of my family have done just that. My great great grandmother came west across the Atlantic, leaving behind her homeland and her family. My mother sailed east with us back to our civilization’s cultural roots, then back again to America. As she puts it in her story, Like turtles, we carry our homes upon our backs. That’s how we know that home is where the heart is.

These foremothers of mine, all wanderers, are also, by way of our genes, Irish, known for their itchy or wandering feet. One of our family names, Murphy, is so common that all who share it are called Spuds in Ireland. Although you’d think people named after potatoes might be homebodies, maybe even stick-in-the-muds, none of us have remained on ground where our roots were. Like the potato, whose family name is Nightshade and whose roots are in the Andes mountains of South America, we have traveled back and forth across the ocean, exotic delights in one context, rotten failures in another, associated with culinary exploration one moment and with famine the next. It’s a wonder that the potato, whose whole childhood, so to speak, is spent buried in earth, should be such a wanderer. It’s a quandary too that to preserve the harvest of our heritage, we have to dig ourselves up by the roots, sink our inquisitive hands into soil to save ourselves.

As nests shift from womb to home to world, this narrative itself never dwells long in any one place; it rocks from side to side over bumpy ground, through rolling waters, as we balance on thin air, gripping our lanterns. To map this reading for you, let me provide this much of a guide: first you’ll be journeying with me forward through my story while at the same time we are wandering backward, by way of Mom’s stories, through each generation, starting with my grandmother, then continuing with her mother, and her mother until we come to the end of my journey and the beginning of my mother’s, by which we have returned to the source of all these stories, the story teller whose telling changes the route of our heritage.

The first clue was a seed in a story Mom told me: by some mysterious route I’d landed in Baltimore where my grandmother’s mother was smuggled into the country, an infant born in steerage on the way over from Ireland, the very same port. They sneaked the baby in so she could be native-born—but how? This seed settled in the soil of my imagination.

Mom also told of the family men drafted into a civil war like one erupting periodically in the homeland they just fled, like one then raging in my family over the Vietnam war, and I understood a bit of what split us, split me. The seed began to sprout.

My first tale is about fear, one emotion scarcely tolerated in my family, yet also one most often, and necessarily, present whenever there is both mobility and danger. This story is about anxiety in an age of trauma.

Blue Dress

She’s getting married! Almost as soon as the news spread to the last far-flung relative, Katie cancelled the engagement. They all wanted to know why. She wasn’t sure. It felt more like panic than choice. She had no great objection to marriage—for all she cared, she was already married—so she decided it was an attack of nerves.

She recognized the symptoms as she paused outside a bridal shop to imagine herself wearing one of the lacy dresses—a far cry from her usual, her aunt would say sloppy, her friends would say casual, outfits. She imagined everyone flattering her as she revolved in mincing steps while her mother adjusted the hem—and suddenly went numb. She couldn’t bear the idea of a wedding.

Later, depressed by the confusing tangle of notes of either congratulations or condolence still arriving, she dreamt she saw a unicorn cavorting in a field and wondered if it was real or just a deer who’d lost one horn. In response to her attention, the unicorn came up to her and stuck its head toward her crotch, like her dog did when she was menstruating, not menacingly but with a friendly sniff. Although she felt affection for it, she also felt invaded and a little wary of its horn, so she curled into a protective ball and other animals—a horse, a deer—joined the unicorn to shield her. They stood around her without touching her, breathing their warm breath upon her as she slept peacefully.

When she woke, still dreaming, she found herself playing with a baby unicorn, small enough to hold in her hands like a fat puppy, and she could see this was real because its horn was growing out of the middle of its forehead like an emerging seed. From the background, a woman good-naturedly asked her to keep an eye on the baby unicorn because she didn’t want a mess on her new rug.

The mood of the dream, more than its possible meaning, took her back to the threat she’d experienced at eleven. Looking back on it now, she was tempted to laugh. What right did she have to complain? Many of her friends had actually been sent away, or had to run away, had been abused or abandoned. She’d been blessed with a happy family. But some numbness remained, for reasons she didn’t understand. She imagined herself back inside a blue bubble, one of the untouchables. When she read an article about David, the boy whose failed immune system forced him to live in an artificial bubble-like environment where no one could touch him, she identified with him and followed his story from the time he was just an infant, never to touch or be touched, until puberty when they let him out and he died of the flu.

The sticking point wasn’t, she realized now, just the curse, her inheritance as a woman, the constricted role she actively crusaded against these days. Somehow the crucial issue was one of trust, at root a question of betrayal. The strands of genetic material which tied her to her mother and grandmother and great grandmother no longer seemed to be evolving as they should through beautifully coordinated dancing spirals. Somehow they had tied themselves into a knot she couldn’t untie.

But after four years of living with Jeff, she wanted to share him with her family, and her family with him, and she knew the only way in, past her mother’s protection of the hearth, was through the arch of marriage. A wedding also offered hope of her becoming the prodigal daughter; she was weary of the black sheep role. So despite how the broken engagement had hurt everyone’s feelings, including the reluctant fiancé’s, and despite her recognition that she alone had orchestrated this grand No, she brought Jeff home for Christmas. Everyone was painfully polite.

One evening Katie described a psychology course she was taking, talking about different roles in the family, when her mother said, I’ve always thought as the middle child you weren’t in the best position because you never had the babying you should have; you were so tiny when Amy was expected.

That’s for sure, Katie said a little too sharply, thinking not only of the middle child but also of the scapegoat role. Then she glanced at her mother and noticed how sad and moist her eyes were. She changed the conversation but not before her mother disappeared abruptly into the kitchen. Her father and she were the only ones who noticed but when Katie looked inquiringly at him, he just shook his head. For the rest of the visit they avoided all the controversial topics which had split them apart, from anti-war marches to the sexual revolution.

But the day before she and Jeff were to return to their faraway city, they were each confronted: Katie, in the bedroom by her mother, over her having children; Jeff, in the dining room by her father, over his marrying Katie.

When Katie, in retreat, saw her mother enter with her jaw dutifully set, she exchanged a quick glance with her. On some deeper level they both knew they were trapped in this encounter, and from time to time their bodies and gestures conveyed what words could not.

When her mother asked how she could have children if she wasn’t married, Katie, sitting on the bed, folded her legs into a knot and picked at her big toe before saying, I don’t think I’d make a good mother.

But darling, her mother protested, you would. You have a way with children.

Katie suspected flattery, but noting her mother’s fond gaze, stared out the window, caught between hurting her mother and making her point. In her head she ran through all the reasons she didn’t want children—if in fact she’d actually decided that—aware that this rejection of her mother’s lot could be construed as insubordination, and had the smell of spite.

But she held on to the main reason she hesitated to stop birth control: she was too crazy, and for this she blamed her mother. Besides, she wouldn’t want any kid of hers to suffer as she had. So admitting I’m not steady enough for kids, she felt a whine rise to a complaint, I’m too moody.

Her mother’s face darkened. As she watched Katie then shrink before her, she said firmly, No, you’re not.

Recognizing her mother’s kindness here, Katie couldn’t take in; it stuck in her chest like a cough.

Her mother, rebuffed, folded her arms under her breasts. Why do you have to make such a life or death issue out of this?

Katie pressed her elbow into the pillow, holding onto her point for dear life. There are just too many other things I want to do, Mom. Despite her conciliatory tone, her eyes were sharp. You can’t do everything.

No, you can’t, her mother shot back. But why can’t you those things and be a mother too? she cried out, her voice cracking.

Tears rose to Katie’s eyes but she fought them back, for fear she might empathize too much. God damn you, she thought, collapsing against the pillow, you couldn’t do everything else and be a mother too. Are you expecting me to do it for you? I want the choice, she responded.

But don’t you have to choose soon? Suddenly Katie felt something inside her, like a mine, about to explode. She sat up and slammed the pillow into the mattress. This was why she’d make a bad mother.

Her mother sighed. Katie flipped the pillow and poked its soft center. Why was her mother so upset by this? She might’ve guessed by now that Katie wasn’t likely to reproduce.

Her face set, her mother rose from her chair and marched out into the dark hall. She’d done what she could, her body said; it was up to Katie now. Her chin was firm as she headed out, but as she crossed the threshold, it trembled.

Katie ran a finger around a square in the quilt and groaned. Her mother was right; she wasn’t getting any younger; soon it would be too late. But she was adamant. Not to do what her mother had done was the only way there could be atonement between them. As she stared at her mother’s back, like no other back she knew, except her sisters’ and perhaps her own, she wasn’t sure why.

She watched darkness close around her mother’s graceful, sturdy figure, then followed her to the door, longing to leap across the gap between them, to step into the hall’s narrow embrace and hug her, assuring her she’d been the best of mothers—but no, she decided, the struggle isn’t over yet.

Once out in the hall, her mother turned to look Katie in the eye. Katie stayed back. At that moment she realized that inch for inch, eye for eye, gaze for gaze, they were equals.

As Katie looked into the eyes opposite hers, so much like her own, she saw tears well up in them and spill over. She felt shaky, but, remembering old betrayals, held herself safe on the other side of the threshold, suspended between rage and compassion.

Gazing into her mother’s sweet, aging, puzzled face, she was petrified further estrangement would mean they’d lose each other forever. But she looked away, fearing that if she stepped over the abyss cut between their generations, she’d become just like her. No—she’d rather be a mutant than a rubber stamp.

As they stared at each other, the abyss suddenly erupted, revealing a depth of hurt and anger not to be spoken of, even now. Despite the risks, despite tears, neither was going to give, and both knew it. Nonetheless, a misty, affectionate light shimmered between them before Katie blinked and her mother was gone.

She collapsed on the bed, tears flooding from her at last, when suddenly her stomach recoiled and shuddered as she recalled her mother’s face, years before, as the door slammed shut between them and she yelled through thick wood, I hate you.

Was this, then, what life was all about, a continuous reenactment of age-old traumas? This, why you had kids so they too could run through it over and over, ad nauseum?

Hadn’t she recovered from that wound she’d suffered twenty years earlier? Why did every confrontation with her mother feel like a tightening of the knot?

Almost as soon as she was back in her apartment, she was on the phone to her sister Amy. When I try to analyze who betrayed who, it feels like I’m rummaging through a drawer of rusty keys. I feel like a Judas, betraying the Christ-Mother.

Maybe you feel guilty for being angry still.

Yeah, I guess. It’s horrifying to discover you’re still so stuck.

Maybe it’s not stuck, maybe it’s just safe, Amy ventured.

You mean it’s easier to stay the victim than to see your own power?

Maybe. You remember when Mom said once, after you’d apologized to her for losing your temper, she couldn’t forgive you?

Yeah, Katie sighed. I couldn’t believe it. Who did she think she was—God?

Well, maybe now you’ve refused to forgive her.

Umm, Katie murmured, feeling a qualm of truth. As soon as she could, she took herself back there, to that bleak time when everything and everyone seemed out of whack.

Following her brother into the desert Katie remembered her dream only as the dread she woke with. Her body relaxed as they ran in the warm sun toward the arroyo to search for whatever they might find—jackrabbit, fool’s gold, prickly pear, or dreaded Gila monster—while she tried to shake off the image of explosion and lose herself in the hunt. Behind them straggled Amy, pausing to watch a beetle or gaze into a blossom of barrel cactus.

This was their home, this flat, dry, mysterious country of distant mountains, coyote howls, heart-wrenching sunsets, surprises of cactus blooms and hummingbirds: home because it stayed even as they moved, where they returned during their father’s war service, to grandparents they loved and the same cool adobe house, an oasis of stillness in their changing world. But this last time their grandfather was gone, having died in their absence, and the house had a hollowness to it. So the children turned more to the desert to seek life reflecting their own vitality.

With the acuity of a wild young animal Katie sensed a threatening presence, stopped, then jerked back as a snake slithered across the path between them and wound into the meager shadow of a mesquite tree next to her brother’s feet. She screamed out a warning and Frank spun around, startled, but missed the danger, seeing only shade. His look questioned her, testing to see if she was teasing him as he so often teased her.

But she’d been thrown across an ocean. Shocked into remembering her dream in full, she saw herself walking with her father along a country road next to frozen rice paddies, their feet crunching through soft snow, the day bright and silent, the call of birds saluting the newly risen sun, when suddenly the world exploded into a shower of blood, a hail of flesh, a severed hand falling behind her, her father vanishing into the settling dust.

Pressing her palms into her eyes, she started to sob, as her brother, hearing the snake’s rattle, now afraid to cross its path, watched her in confusion.

It’s just a snake, he called to her. Walk around him. But be careful.

No, no, she cried out, unable to move. I can’t.

Don’t be a sissy, he teased, stuck in his own fear.

I’m not a sissy, she protested, losing the sharpness of the dream, almost grateful for the distraction.

Well, quit acting like such a baby then. Ever since their baby sister was born, they’d been tripping all over each other to avoid acting like babies themselves.

Unable to share with him what she’d seen in her dream, for fear he’d make fun of her, she withdrew. He left her there, went on to the arroyo by himself. Bereft of his guidance—she loved these times he sought out her and Amy rather than playing with his friends, the other boys—she wandered back toward the house wondering where her sister was—probably off shopping with their mother.

Wait, please, she wanted to cry out to him, help—but like the rest of the family lately, except for Molly, she resorted to their best defense, silence.

Too bad for him, she pouted. He won’t have me for a scout, or as a steer to lasso. She stared out at the edge of their world, marked by giant-toothed mountains and sequaro cactus, remote sentinels, tall, stiff, their arms held up in warning for the children not to venture too far. A wren poked her head out of a barrel cactus; a gopher dashed into a hole. As Katie bent down to peer into the hole, she saw one of the worms which rise up out of the ground after rain and recalled once when her grandfather accidentally cut one in half with his hoe, how each end wandered off on its own. Then she remembered the severed hand in her dream and shuddered.

This dream frightened Katie. At eleven she couldn’t