Life for Booty: A Historical Novel

By Gerald Clerie

Imagine…
Eleven generations of a family bearing a surname whose significance and meaning no one ever bothered to question in earnest.
Imagine a tribe thirty-two thousand strong, claiming a whole gamut of last names while all hailing from a single glorious ancestor.
Imagine adhering to a creed and living by standards handed down from fathers to sons from the days when first names were all that was needed for identification, and not perceiving how they came about and why they matter so much.
Imagine living in a land of recent adoption, vaguely remembering storylines from ancient ancestors who claimed to belong to another continent, another era, and were stripped from there by the force of circumstances to an enchanted island, only to become part of its gestation as a novel national entity struggling over two hundred years to find its place in the concert of nations.
Imagine . . .

Life for Booty is the amazing saga of a peculiar family that received the impetus of a pere-grination back in the sixteenth century from its original Ireland to southeastern France, on to north-western France, on to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola for a four-decade sojourn, only to land on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the Windy City for twenty years of an impossible adaptation.
This tantalizing story will inspire, illuminate, and prod to positive action the honest reader who approaches this book with an open mind and a tender heart to the plight of the oppressed peo-ples of an aging and tired planet—yet still groping for hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796086553

Gerald Clerie

Gerald is an ordained Baptist minister, who's professional career includes seven years as an educator and college president, forty years as a business manager and entrepreneur, a local church planter, and three times published author both in French and English. He is retired at present and devotes the bulk of his time to writing and counseling.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

History is ever crafted new, rich with surprises, at all hours of every ordinary day, in the confines of countless galaxies that teem in space with assumed boundlessness of life, as much as in the endlessness of the mysterious existence of pathetic mortal and flawed earthlings.

In all the dark corners of the Milky Way, still hardly explored by a seeming inexhaustible human curiosity, planets, black holes, stars, galaxies, mostly not apprehensible by the naked eye, gravitate with majesty in the deafening silence of the infinitude of space; incandescent meteorites glide flawlessly before vaporizing, violating hostile atmospheres; stars are birthed and stars die, as they flash off incessant distress messages to the silence of a disabused cosmos.

On the face of our minuscule blue ball, down in the abyss of every human breast, desires, dreams, and ambitions of all magnitudes and textures percolate, unnoticed, unacknowledged, despised. In constant motion from just existing to becoming, indefatigably, the creature evolves toward a redeeming end that remains as elusive as it proves unparalleled. Man’s ultimate destiny can only be caressed in imagination. We employ our best resources in the quest of fulfillment while every spark of the encrypted spirit flies into oblivion without ever igniting a fire, never combusting into signal acts deigned indispensable to the clenching of our highest ambitions.

We are but insignificant fibers of existential material exuded from the matrix of indefinite reality and caught in the interminable weaving of living species, stirred in the brew of the eternal present—be it a slice of family life, community experience, or common humanity.

If universal history might be assimilated to a gigantic loom, then the microcosmic thread unwinding from the coil of its constitutive events constitute the woof that patiently cuts a winding path through the strands of the warp, interposing itself between each vertical fiber and accumulating the weft of an eternal fabric started at the primordial decree of the Master Weaver.

In the artifact engendered as end product, individual threads entertain a rapport of interdependence, each one exerting a unique influence upon its immediate neighbors, being transformed moment by moment by and modifying the whole to produce a distinct anticipated effect. At the same time, an intimate correlation exists between the weft of the fabric and the threads of the woof on the loom, which, working in perfect harmony, conspires to maintain the associative, aesthetic cohesion of the whole in current as well as in timeless gestation.

Every human thought bursts to life as a garden bloom. Every gesture is painstakingly elaborated for precise impact. Every act posed synthesizes a vital actualization. It represents a unique intervention, a critical entry in the annals of the human experience that imparts reality to the moment while imputing form and substance to the future. Not through graceful jaguar leaps forward, but in imperceptible increments as of a sedate tortoise, is history constructed in the maze of time.

In the warmth of temporal actuality, it seldom occurs to us to pause and take stock of the importance of our faintest murmurs relative to the direction and profound influence each event in life exerts upon the totality of the experience that authenticates the instantaneous. Hence, we add to the seamless script of history with every breath of air our lungs process, with every molecule of vital oxygen our capillaries catalyze, and with every faint thought our cranium percolates. And it is only with the accumulation of passing years, when we chance a peek into the rearview mirror of the eons, that, scanning the distance covered, we gain an awareness of the depth and length of furrows cut in the entrails of the universal saga by our otherwise meaningless cogitation.

Each incremental new moment, as benign or as enormous as it appears at the precise split second of its initial burst, triggers a formidable impact on the immediate sphere of its chronological ancestor as much as on the inner walls of the social grid it initiates. As the pebble tossed in a pond, each affirmation of life, insignificant as it may be perceived to be at first, releases ever-widening concentric circles in both surface horizontality and depth verticality in the shapeless body of humanity, more often without an immediate assessment of effects, yet in time resulting in monumental consequences in terms of the resulting erosion through persistence and magnitude.

Too often dead letter on lifeless parchment, history derives meaning, importance, and vitality from the slow sedimentation of events that, precipitated and stratified, make up the fabric of life. The narrative of individual experiences, placed within the protracted framework of elapsing time, constitutes manifold attempts at human self-validation. Whenever we remember, whenever we engage in the conscious act of scrutiny of the past, we seize in reality the inestimable opportunity to bare out the raw forces that have served to hammer raw personality into the complex individuals we become. We thus discover, to our complete astonishment, the incalculable import each being has in the global march in time and space of our vast universe toward a coming climax.

We hardly take stock of existence, or act in the isolation of a shameful egocentricity, without affirming universal solidarity in the network of all the minuscule fibers of energy we are in the gigantic human tress, with the miracle of life to which we offer only lukewarm participation.

If names of persons and places are temporarily stripped from the narrative; if all personal allusions to specific events are enlarged into a generic story; then suddenly, all private history becomes but a critical chapter in the eternal human drama.

No tale is ever quite uniquely specific. All are fundamentally universal. When I delineate to you the résumé of my life, it is truly your life that I profile in your stead, that of any human being, in the infinitude of space with its particularities as indistinct and insignificant in appearance. We tell the stories of our lives not to assuage our thirst of individual meaningfulness or satisfy the hunger of our incredible impatience to take a seat in the cosmic council but with the humble desire to contribute our pale ray of light to the universal understanding in a sincere effort to advance the winding trek of humanity as a whole from the night of the past to its unpredictable fulfillment.

For the simple reason that any one person’s story, as insignificant as it may look at first, must be articulated in full for the Creator to be vindicated because it traces the luminous ascent of an anonymous gnome, from the fetid sediment of incognito to the splendor of the spheres of glory, when it does not retrace the descent of a pathetic larva into the abyss of utter annihilation.

Because a life fully lived amounts to the acquisition of the incalculable booty the Creator has promised, human life has incalculable significance in the final analysis. Just through the practice of a boring routine, seemingly remote and insignificant in itself, we together manufacture history in the universal participation of will, heart, and biology. This wondrous story is every time rehearsed with each chapter we refuse of shelter from prying eyes, with each paragraph that expounds the legitimate aspiration of the living to universal inclusion in the miracle of life.

Each small contribution to the grand cosmic story, each little detail in itself irrelevant, supplies vital additional information to the understanding of the whole by defining more accurately the otherwise indecipherable meaning of the message and by supplying one more little tile to the gigantic mosaic that depicts the inscrutable intentionality of the Creator, who reveals himself through inaudible uttering, through imperceptible rustlings ahead of the time marked in his infinite wisdom when he will finally strip away from time, space, and particularity the veil our finitude spreads over the masterpiece he is sculpting in the heart of the majestic silence of his handiwork, within the outer realms of the unfathomable, of the ungraspable, of the immeasurable.

°

As unbearable as existence might seem to the novice, to the inexpert apprentice, to the exhausted pilgrim and disabused skeptic, it is nonetheless worthy of a thorough in-depth exploration. Not in the peripheral security of eminent domain of humanitarian possessiveness but in the absolute freedom of complete abandon of the being to the most inscrutable profundity of the wonder we call our humanity. For it is where the toe no longer senses the comfort of the bottom sands of the lagoon of mystery that the incredible beauty of the blue submarine world is suddenly discovered by the bewildered scuba diver. It is where the mind loses itself in unhindered contemplation of infinite realms that we hear most clearly the unmistakable voice of the Creator God.

Why? Simply because we are the distinct, visible imprint of his immaterial reality, the spitting physical image of his absolute, indomitable greatness. Because it is through the continuing exercise of the collective prerogative of existence, without inhibitive reservations, that we become truly the earthly, finite, imperfect, but unique counterpart of the masterpiece the divine Artist is crafting with unimaginable precision and undeterred determination in the infinite reaches of the incommensurable reality of his undeniable, unfathomable, and eternal self-existence.

°

Frantz O’Piercey had worked all night at what seemed a voluminous manuscript. He had marked it with chapters, page numbers, and paragraph titles. He knew a new day was dawning for his singular life; and that before he said goodbye to his two boys, four grandchildren and his newborn great-grandson, he needed to set the record straight and preserve it for history unless the inspiring family saga remains a blurry, tangled tale in their minds. Other than in his grandma’s magic volume of One Hundred Beautiful Stories, he had never seen the enchanted Emerald Isle floating in the midst of an emerald sea that had rocked his childhood and adolescence in his tropical homeland of Camelot Village; regardless, with extreme trepidation, he was preparing for the eternal welcome the countless generations of his ancestors had reserved for him in the ivory palaces of the Celestial Land at the end of his wrenching terrestrial trek.

He slowly turned to me. His tired and moribund eyes, swollen with steaming tears of regret and pain, implored, Do you promise, dear Leon, my only friend and brother, after my body is laid to rest, to gather my devastated family and read to them the tantalizing tale I am confiding to paper? It is my last will and testament, the legacy I want them to take with them for the journey ahead. It will help them remember whence they came, who they are, for a greater appreciation of the glorious destiny that awaits them as a chosen family.

My lips were quaking, and my own eyes moistened as I enfolded my friend’s frail frame in my arms. Yes, indeed, Frantz, my dear friend, my great brother, it will be my honor and extreme pleasure to deliver this inestimable gift you are bequeathing to your precious family, make it my own in the process, and endeavor to be for them all you yourself have been to me for twenty-nine years. I release you from a life of suffering and anguish into the blessedness of a booty you more than deserve—a life of pure joy and complete fulfillment in the princely mansion your Lord has prepared for you way beyond the starry blue! Rest in peace, my brother!

In keeping that solemn promise, I release Frantz O’Piercey’s testament not just to his precious children but to a world that will wish it knew him as intimately as I did and paid just a scrap of attention to the words of knowledge and wisdom he so desired to share with all as a reminder that we are all special, all chosen by the God who became flesh to lift us to his perfection.

1

Ireland, the Emerald Isle …

The second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, and the twentieth-largest on earth, Ireland lies on the European continental shelf, part of the Eurasian Plate, at latitude 53.4129105 and longitude -8.2438898, in the Northern Hemisphere. Geographically, its main features consist of low central plains (bogs) encircled by coastal mountains and dotted with quaint villages, midsize and large cities, from Drogheda (population 40,956) to Dublin (population over 1 million). Though its landforms are not impressively lofty, the 3,405-altitude Carrauntoohil, its highest, rises in the MacGillycuddy’s Reeks, an impressive range of glacier-carved sandstone mountains. It also features a rugged western coastline with many islands dependencies, peninsulas, headlands, and bays, the sea Cliffs of Moher dropping 390 to 702 feet into the Atlantic on a 14-kilometer stretch along the southwestern edge of the Buren region of County Clare. It is traversed by many streams, the River Shannon (224 miles long) with its 63 miles estuary, being its longest; it flows from County Cavan in Ulster southward to the Atlantic, south of Limerick, and also boasts many lakes alongside its rivers, Lough Neagh noted as the largest.

Origins and Roots

In the prehistory that the Celts colonized in the world of Western Europe, the island became encrusted into a rich context of Celtic-Gaelic tradition, evolving from the Celtic polytheism of ante-fourth-century AD to the Celtic Christian influence at the end of the sixth of our era. Viking raids and settlements continued to be a major threat to Gaelic culture until the Battle of Clontarf (1014). The Norman invasion in 1169 resulted, once again, into a partial conquest that was rolled back by a Gaelic resurgence with the reestablishment of its predominance over most of the land.

The realm organized early in its political existence into fiefdoms, which, in the course of long centuries of sleeping silence, evolved into four socially distinct, politically stable provinces: Ulster, Connacht, Munster, and Leinster. When the English Reformation broke out in the sixteenth century, thousands of English and Scottish Protestants made their appearance. Understandably and progressively, religious affiliation became a pretext for social partitioning as, in parallel, linguistic considerations went on a downward slide until they disappeared completely while the Gaelic language receded to be ultimately supplanted by the dialect of England.

A predilection for Roman Catholicism prevailed throughout most of that history, going back to the immemorial days of the second half of the fifth century of the Christian era, more specifically between 432 and 490, when Saint Patrick crisscrossed the region and pioneered his highly successful crusade of evangelization. A millennium later, in the year of grace 1541, Henry VII assumed the throne and, almost instantly, found himself in conflict with the papacy. He agitated for a reformation of the national church, but his efforts were hampered by weak legislative action. Those of his citizens who associated Anglicanism and Protestantism with the unpopular English administration, as with its repressive measures, remained staunchly attached to Rome. As a consequence, in 1595 a revolt against the British, led by Hugh O’Neill, Count of Tyrone, was embraced by the leaders of Ulster, the only province that escaped English control. When Queen Elizabeth I finally won the Nine Years’ War, the prominent Gaelic princes decided to flee in manifest protest.

What’s in a Name?

O’Piercey is a distinctive English, Welsh, and Irish surname, first found in County Galway and appearing around AD 820, before hereditary surnames came into common use. Derived from Pierce (a cognate of the French Pierre), which has its distant roots in Greek and Coptic (Petros, stone or rock), it was one of the first-recorded family names on the continent. But in time, the O’Pierceys, once a dominant clan in Galway, declined in power and were forced out by the midthirteenth century when a prevalent branch of the family settled in Derry and Donegal, producing prominent historians and poets. To this day, the name Pierce, common mostly in Munster, is proudly claimed by millions in English-speaking Europe, the United States of America, and Mexico.

The family tag is directly connected to the court of Cleireach (born circa AD 820), the son of Guaire the Hospitable, king of the western province of Connacht, where the clan served as officials in charge of body piercing. In those days, the first name, in sole use, amply sufficed for identification as was the custom—for example, in the Old Testament—when tribal or paternal linkage provided sufficient recognition in society. The common use of hereditary surnames began only around the tenth and eleventh centuries of our era; and even though the surname Pierce remains one of the most distinguishable on the Old Continent, it happened to be one of the earliest registered—a fact that attests its astounding historicity and prodigious worldwide popularity.

Bred in a Protestant tradition since the sixteenth century, the O’Piercey tribe consistently subscribed to the principle of freedom of conscience in matters of politics, conduct, and faith in the days when such concept was in steady decline under the mounting threat of parochialism; but to the extent that many despaired to see their motherland take a strong stand against religious polarization, members of the family hopped on the bandwagon of a wild search for a social environment that would prove more conducive to the unhindered practice of their faith in Europe.

In the midst of that quest, they convinced themselves of having found a sure harbor of peace in the southeastern reaches of France in Provence, a region under the strong influence of Swiss Calvinism and where the wind of neighborly relations between the multiplying branches of Christianity had been blowing strongly since the August 5, 1570, Peace Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Religious wars halted, the rights of Calvinists to freedom of worship became once again affirmed. Under the auspices of this policy of conciliation, the expatriate Irish came to settle, at first tentatively in retrenchment, then gradually adjusting to the practices, expression, and culture of their new environment. Significant initial traces of their presence in the area can still be detected: a Pierce Fish Market in Marseilles, a Suzanne de Piercey in Montpelier, extensive archival artifacts in Nîmes, at the time, an inviting sanctuary of religious peace and social harmony in the midst of the tempestuous years of the continental armed conflict commonly known as the Thirty Years’ War (1816–1848).

Literal Fire Baptism

And behold, less than a quarter century later, political ambition puts everything in question once again for these conscientious objectors. Frazzled by the ascendance Admiral Coligny had over Charles IX, unsettled by the royal friendship with the Low Countries then in open rebellion against Spain, Mary of Medici, who enjoyed the de Guises’ support, instigated the Catholic princes to a reprisal of hostilities against Protestantism. In the night of August 23–24, 1572, without provocation, not less than three thousand Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris. Continued in the provinces in the ensuing days, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre propagated throughout France, triggering a mass exodus—a real social tsunami that engulfed all of France in the months following the bloodbath.

With the death of Mazarin in 1661, a surface calm returned. Consolidating power, Louis XIV (1638–1715) chose to govern in despot and decided to bend all of France to his iron will when defied by the Huguenots. Under pressure from his second wife, the bigoted Madame de Maintenon, and at the urging of his Jesuit confessor François de la Chaise, he promulgated the infamous Dragonnades in 1681. Entire battalions of French soldiers called Dragons, which had served in peaceful times in the perception of tax overages as a strong deterrent against continued evasion, were authorized by the courts to be embedded inside noncomplying citizens’ homes as a strong irritant against continued belligerence. Then the king redefined their mission by reassigning the soldiers to the catalyzing of abjuration in the sect. Originally intended to simply intimidate the Huguenots, the action produced the contrary result of spurring religious persecutions. Ostracized as heretics, the Huguenots rallied and rose up as an elite corps to resist what they denounced as tyranny. With a stroke of a pen, they were erased from the social fabric of France as on October 22, 1685, the Fontainebleau Edict revokes that of Nantes, suppressing their fundamental human rights—the freedom of conscience with the imposition of a way of thinking and of choosing on them. The destruction of churches and the closing of schools throughout the kingdom became the norm of the day, the Roman brand of Catholicism a precondition for citizenship.

Major socioeconomic stirrings were created by this political strong-arm policy throughout Europe. Proving that the regime had made a false calculation in minimizing the demographic extent of the Protestant Reformation and in silencing religious freedom of expression, the king’s action prompted an exodus as much unexpected as uncontainable. Over the ensuing two short decades, between 210,000 and 900,000 blue-collar workers, businessmen, intellectuals, inventors, industrialists, and writers of Protestant stripe fled the country in search of political asylum in England, the Low Countries, Sweden, Prussia, and Denmark. Forsaking all possessions, industries, and employment, the vast majority left empty-handed, taking with them an inestimable capital of technical know-how, commercial expertise, and family secret practices and recipes that were never to be replaced or recuperated. The best estimates concurred that this mindless hemorrhage of the nation’s rich human treasure retarded France’s accession to the modern age by many decades.

Hence, the Crown panicked and sealed its borders. Trapped, under increased surveillance by agents of the totalitarian regime, forbidden to assemble even in the sacredness of the bed chamber for the practice of their faith, the Huguenots hardened into inflexibility. They constituted the assemblies of the wilderness and raised a phalanx of combatants known as Camisards (simple shirts), as pastors went on the lam, only to resurface at clandestine services of catechization and baptism in night gatherings convened in isolated places. A complex network of communication was then developed for secure dissemination of information about whereabouts and secret points of rallies or armed defense. As can be imagined, this was extremely risky business, both for organizers and supporters, who paid a high price for participation. Government agents, posted in strategic spots, spied on them day and night. Through brutal arrests and repressive measures, they inflicted misery on all under the spurious charge of religious cause.

In the southeast, the commune of Aïgues-Mortes (rallying point for the Crusades) mutated into a penitential station for the Resistants de l’ombre. Until December 24, 1769, the towers of Constance and Carbonnière, built by Duke Philip le Chauve not too far from the Mediterranean as a bulwark for Crusaders, were retrofitted into prisons and centers of torture for women. When caught, Huguenots were detained there. Hundreds of courageous victims ended their lives in these dreaded facilities. At Constance, prisoners were kept on the second floor, the only lighting coming from long and narrow slits in the walls, after the fashion of medieval redoubts and donjons. In the center of the floor, a circular hole gave guards below a peripheral view of the cells at all times.

The penitential authorities made sure that the center met the highest criteria of impenetrability from hostile forces as much as of efficacy in facilitating exposure to the detainees of daily sessions of open and egregious torture. Some of the prisoners remained in captivity under these conditions of inhumanity for unnumbered years in constant quasi-darkness. Some gave birth to babies they were carrying at the time of apprehension or raised their children in the rigor of this hostile environment. For example, in 1730, a fifteen-year-old girl was brought there under the charge of being a Protestant pastor’s sister while the middle aged Marie Durand ended up there for attendance of a nocturnal clandestine assembly in the wilderness. Durand’s captivity lasted not less than thirty-eight years, time during which she ministered as spiritual conscience to her fellow prisoners, cared for the sick and dying, wrote letters for the illiterate, and encouraged all with psalm recitation and jubilant singing of familiar hymns of assurance and Christian comfort.

In spite of daily visits by priests-confessors, specializing in psychological methods of persuasion, and the constant pressuring of detainees to renounce their faith through specious arguments and rogue offers of bogus clemency—even knowing that these offers were fallacious when extended—these soldiers of the cross remained irreducible, faithful to the Savior whose constant mystical presence was made palpable to them, inciting to courage and exultation in suffering until physical death, by the course of nature or by public hanging, abbreviated their martyrdom.

As for the men, in violation of all jurisprudence norms, they were subjected to mock trials in front of sham tribunals. Routinely denied representation by counsel, never allowed to dispute the charges against them, they were invariably sent to the royal galleys, where the majority succumbed in a matter of days to a combination of hunger, exhaustion, and physical battery at the hand of tormentors. At death, the emaciated bodies, plucked loose from the shackles, were routinely fed to the sharks without the benefit of a prayer of minute of silence. Their names remain, however, etched in the marble of an eternal monument to the confidence and faith they held in the transformational power of the gospel of glory that had turned them into bold heroes of faith.

Far from masking the truth, we admit that too many prisoners of either gender turned recusants. The Catholicism that pursued them with such persistent ferocity, as long as they remained free to worship God in their own way, received them back into its fold. Never assimilating, they were branded new converts despite the glaring evidence of the manifest torment of conscience that characterized their day of blight biological survival. They had earned the right to corporeal subsistence even after losing all dynamic vitality, the dignity of universal freedom of conscience.

Guerrilla in the Cévennes

If Lutheranism dominated in the north of Europe, Calvinism had similarly found fertile ground in southern France. Hence, Nîmes, Marseille, and Montpelier became reputed bastions of Swiss Reformation. Aïgues-Mortes, the launching pad for Louis IX’s seventh (1248) and eighth (1270) Crusades, the epicenter of Roman Catholic repression of Protestantism, threw finally open its doors to the Reformation in 1560. The town mutated into the new nervous center of the Huguenot movement with a large church built against Louis XIV’s assent, the unfolding events finally overwhelming the despot. For the heretics, the Cévennes (eastern section of the Central Mountains of France, between the Hérault and the Ardèche) loomed as the living geography of a Reformation uprising. Their high peaks of shistic rock, blanketed in dense forests, offered a natural theater for counterattacks in guerrilla warfare against the intrusion of governmental forces when the valiant Camisards took arms in 1702 at the beck and call of illiterate but vehement prophets, who rose up where pastors and lay leaders had bravely fallen to the destructive tactics of Versailles.

The war was prosecuted indefatigably until 1710, with the rebels taking advantage of their intimate knowledge of the rugged terrain to camouflage reserves, adroitly blending into the habitat and setting up medical care centers in the grottoes without number that dotted the geography of the region. Jean Chevalier, their defiant leader, would be finally defeated on April 19, 1704, by Marshall de Montreal; and a temporary peace intervened, intermittently interrupted by bloody sequels that led, in the process of time, to the signing of the Edict of Tolerance in the year 1787.

It was within that chaotic universe that the migrating O’Piercey clan sought sanctuary among the Huguenots. Scattered throughout southeastern France, they left behind deep footprints of their painful peregrinations in towns and villages, where they lent themselves to social assimilation, participated in a simple but trying novel lifestyle. There, as a flower in the midst of an inclement desert, we meet a young woman by the maiden name of Jeannine O’Piercey, espoused to a Thomas Lalanne, who was listed as a resident at the tower of Constance. She had been seized on March 19, 1694, on charges of harboring terrorists; and certain to end her days a ward of the state, she drafted her last will and testament less than two months later, on May 3, whereby she left a sizable fortune to Rieu, Fournier, and Capture, her still-young children. Three years later, Jeanine met her anticipated fate when she suffered martyrdom by hanging on March 25, 1700. She went to her death serene and glowing, singing the praises of her Lord for the extraordinary honor to lay down her life in exchange for the prospect of an imperishable crown of glory in heaven above.

From Fathers to Sons over Multiple Generations

Understandably then, eight generations of O’Pierceys rightly and proudly identified with these heroes of triumphant faith by claiming a royal pedigree (the root of Jesse, King David’s father) and reckoning themselves of noble temper. That was hardly vain boasting, a bold affirmation of the living reality of their patrician heritage. Among family jewels were to be found delicate necklaces, exquisitely decorated with pendants of Huguenot crosses, beautifully enhanced with gleaming emeralds, and crafted to endure the test of time, as witnesses to their enduring faith. Grandmothers and grandaunts jealously preserved this priceless family lore in carved oak cases they handled with the utmost of care, displaying them to their descendants only in bedroom intimacy, as they drew them out of key-secured armoires. With veneration, they recounted the incalculable sacrifices unnamed ancestors of a distant age and land had consented not just for the outward adornment of the relics but more importantly for the defense of the banned faith. These priceless tokens of ancestral grit, upheld before the malleable conscience of succeeding generations the beauty of an epic worth treasuring in sustained profession and example centuries later.

The Diagonal Migration to Brittany

Having thus survived such times of testing, a slim remnant of the family, led by a strong determination to outlast adversity in all its evil manifestations, resumed its exilic trek on the path to a redeeming, if imaginary, terminus. Crossing France on a southeast to northwest diagonal, exhausted in their pursuit, and surrendering to the pull of the irresistible magnet of the Northern Atlantic coast, they came to settle at long last in Saint-Malo. Believing they were finally healed of their compulsive peregrinations, longing for a return to a sedentary lifestyle, these Irish French pilgrims cast a tentative anchor, having learned from the King of Navarre the surrender to unconditional absorption into the socio-religious context of seventeenth-century France. Against their best instincts, they sued for a truce; blended in with the prevailing culture of Brittany; and then, under the influence of the doctrine of conciliation, brought about by the implementation of the November 7, 1787, Edict of Tolerance, they lapsed into the night of an indeterminate era of complete anonymity.

In the Torment of the French Revolution

Accumulating dark clouds on the horizon of an increasingly threatened continent obscured France’s skies to usher in the horrors of political revolution. After their fiery trial of faith, the O’Pierceys weathered the new storm, three generations languishing into this fog of unknown, until a dying remnant engineered a daring change of course when, rediscovering the glory of their spiritual heritage, with characteristic boldness, when heads were being chopped off under the blade of the guillotine, they recovered their spiritual senses and reintegrated the Reformed faith of their native Ireland after crossing the Atlantic to claim a tiny strip of land lost in the vastitude of the Caribbean Sea. There, these nomads of the faith recovered long-held convictions and, with characteristic fervor, gave themselves all anew to the sacrosanct rituals of their origins while, upholding with assiduity indefectible allegiance to the transcendent God, the Old Rugged Cross remained their compass in the storm, the essence of an unabashed testimony to the saving power of the gospel.

To what ultimate destiny were they reserved? What secret and public battles would they have to fight just for the right to remain a peculiar tribe? The ensuing story captures the essence of the plight of ten generations for the fulfillment of a noble call that extended to four centuries along the winding pilgrimage route of over ten thousand miles. As it unwound, their saga involved an amazing variety of countries, ethnic identities, and family surnames, the ones more exotic than the others. They mingled Gaelic-Celtic with alien blood to produce a kaleidoscope of individualities as remarkable as the imagination can conjure, character remaining the distinctive trademark of their personality behind faces and skin hues that embrace the entire spectrum of humanity itself.

2

The very first recoverable trace of the expatriate branch of the family reaches back to an Eoin-Clermont O’Piercey, a 1730 native of Saint-Malo, Breton City, in the peninsular French province that extends into the Northern Atlantic between the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay.

Transitioning to Saint-Malo

How many generations since the uprooting of the fleeing ancestors from an Ireland rendered inhospitable? No one can tell with certainty, the public archives silent on this chapter of the intriguing saga. What history yield with certainty is the emergence from the historical night of a single family figurehead, Eoin-Dermott by name, and his marriage to a Breton, Soizic Esben, his junior of eight years. In 1758, the newlyweds joyfully welcomed into the family a male child whom, along with the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church, they gratified with the unusual name of Eoin-Lorie. This Irish Frenchman remains the second to receive the traditional first name that became so characteristic of the family. To it successive generations clung with rare tenacity and pride either in simple feminine correspondence of Eonine, in compound form of ancestor name coupled with that of his father, as in the ninth-generation cases of Eoin-Randy, or in combination of multiples first names, as evidenced in at the later Jean-Claude-Francis Eoin.

An Ancient Coastal City

Ancient city established upon a fortified island on the right bank of the Rance River estuary, Saint-Malo controls not only its broad mouth on the French side of the English Channel but also the strip of land that forms the promontory linking it to the continental mass: Le Sillon. Her St. Vincent cathedral dates back to the twelfth century of our era, dominating the skyline with its long and pointed bell tower that, to this day, keeps watch over this picturesque corner of France with serene dignity even after centuries of tumultuous history and disfiguring scars of continental wars.

The city traces her origins to a monastic community founded in collaboration by Saint Aaron and Saint Brendan in the opening years of the sixth century. Her name derives from a disciple of the later: Maclou or Saint-Malo. In the wake of the 1492 discovery of the New World by the Genoese Christopher Columbus, her ideal strategic geography attracted high-sea bandits and pirates in great numbers, outlaws who turned it into a choice refuge from which sprang the unflattering surname of Corsair City, inflicted by detractors. From the wide destruction suffered during the Second World War, Saint-Malo rose back to life at the cost of enormous investments, the restoration of her historical sites completed over decades. Today, she displays to the world’s admiration the austere majesty of her granite ramparts as a forefront to the glory of manorial estates reputed as having belonged to extravagant fleet owners of days of yore. She also boasts a five-hundred-year-old quadruple-towered castle, later turned into historical museum.

Important touristic station, contemporary Saint-Malo offers pleasure seekers beautiful beaches of fine ivory sand, a casino, a sports complex, a maritime club, and fishing facilities even if, at the example of the surrounding department, she stands at the social antipodes of the rest of national France. In fact, Brittany continues jealously to constitute a separate universe within the European Common Market, a slice of the doulce France more insular than continental, richer in tradition and folkloric superstition than in modernity. In the sixteenth century, though, Saint-Malo stood at the forefront of the policies of openness of a kingdom aspiring to globalization by virtue of her proximity to the British Isles and her strategic position within Europe. It’s the noted point of departure of maritime expeditions bound for America, its ancient port teemed with mercantile activity, serving as a transit platform for continental manufactured goods destined to the New World as much as an exotic source of commodities, precious timbers, and spices imported from the West Indies.

Saint-Malo was also a safe rendezvous for old sailors dying of nostalgia, who wound there to no precise object other than to ruminate memories of the glorious era of their globetrotting adventures on aging caravels. For hours on end, they would stand in awe of the gracious profile of the marvel of the age—the frisky frigate, freshly launched from the bustling shipyards of Europe and introduced amid universal applause to long-distance navigation, a science in process of reinvention in a day of technical breakthrough and discoveries. There, also, captains, sailors of all rank, circuit travelers, and adventurers in search of survival or fast fortunes beyond the dreary horizons of a universe untouched by their miserable lot gathered to share the lore of their common repertory of legends, their dreams of crowning tomorrows that never dawned for them, the dregs of a society in transit, for whom the tales of crews, fresh back from the West Indian Islands and vaunting about nautical exploits as much as of tantalizing opportunities that awaited under the eternal azure, would often cause profuse salivation of envy. There, many would learn of the affordability of crossings easily negotiated by penniless adventurers for the willingness to gamble a slice of bleak future on the continent for the lifetime opportunity of sailing on a south-westward voyage.

The place of birth, often cited as a determinative influence on character and personality, let us indulge in a brief detour to Saint-Malo, there to glean some helpful insights into the climatic and social factors that have defined the makeup of the family. The capital of the borough of Ille-et-Vilaine, maritime province of northwestern Brittany, Saint-Malo stands as a singular center of cosmopolitan culture, combining Celtic and French to produce a type and expression (patois) that is typically Breton. It is an odd mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French, characterized by the rolling of the letter r in an enunciation that borders on l-r (grand sounding as gland, and roche, loche). Roman Catholicism remains the dominant faith even if tainted with folkloric and pagan practices—gracious dances and rustic music, used in frequent and fervent religious processions as well as colorful festivals. Wherefore, the O’Pierceys would have an easy time adapting to future-changing customs, climate, and dialects since exposure to Gaelic-Saxon had prepared them well for the cultural chock of a primitive Caribbean province and dialect of adoption.

The First Malouin Ancestors

Enjoying no special social position of favor, boasting no ancestral fortune or distinctive education, since his family had lost everything when it fled the religious persecutions in Ireland, Eoin-Dermott was nourishing serious doubts as to the legitimacy of permanent settling in Brittany. For a while, he indulged in dreams about his lost motherland and questioned the authenticity of his Catholicity, the validity of his engagement to a local girl of a French province he felt condemned to remain an alien in. Who was this Solenn Quinn he was engaged to marry? About her ancestry, upbringing, and dates of birth or death, no details are available. The one thing we can ascertain for sure is that she was born between 1728 and 1788, was a devout Catholic who fell in love with and wedded the man of her dreams, and whose cup she filled to overflowing by giving him a son whom they named Jacques-Odom. As a father, Eoin-Dermott took his responsibilities very seriously, completed an apprenticeship in land surveying and estate management, and worked hard to provide for his adoring wife and petulant son a decent measure of economic and social respectability.

The Love of the Sea and Adventure

At the end of his days, absorbed in business dealings, Eoin-Dermott would invariably wind up at the ramparts for a bit of decompression. There, the bustle and hustle of maritime operations best expressed itself in this North Atlantic seaport. Feeling trapped in a constant pursuit of material gain, held captive to rituals, he sensed life devoid of real significance, the future unappealing to his compassionate heart that cried for deeper meaning. The sight of the unending coastline was a tempting invitation to slow aimless walks of introspective activity. He loved to abandon himself to the fascination of the legendary tales, rehashed in constancy by aging sailors on furlough. The spectacle of their idleness, the emptiness of their dissipated life, their heart-wrenching regrets deepened his own anxiety, made him question his unspectacular hopes and aspirations.

By sheer mental projection, he started to compare the beauty and technological advances of the docks of his fog-shrouded Brittany with the sunny, unimproved estuaries of those otherworldly islands he kept hearing about: they were luxuriating with the emerald and the azure of a nature unspoiled by progress, not yet tainted by human greed. He could hardly catch the vision of caravels and galleons of all sizes and styles, unfurling to the wind the French tricolor, while sleeping at anchor in natural creeks of crystalline waters under the balmy shade of wild mangroves as rudimentary barges painstakingly transferred cargo to and from shore. Sketching for him the profile of high mountains blanketed in lush greenery, mirroring in placid bay waters, and echoing the paradisiac song of colorful exotic birds, these dreamers described to him narrow, profound, and fertile valleys, in which unending stretches of bountiful harvests matured in eternal summer. With a robust dose of complacency, they opened to him tempting avenues of public sector service, as well as private tropical enterprises, spoke of easily acquired productive landed domains against the price of hard and patient labor, fertilized by a strong sense of strategic entrepreneurship and destiny.

He particularly heard them extol the virtues of a grand isle crowned the Pearl of the Antilles, on which expatriates like himself were feverishly accumulating fabulous fortunes to facilitate a retirement of blissful ease back on the continent, leaving the greater majority of a people mired in a hopeless quest for self-determination. In an appeal as much to her adoptive sons, which the black trade had stripped from Mother Africa’s fecund womb only to abandon there to a bleak fate, their gulag of imposition was imploring all people of goodwill to rally to the rescue. Could it be that him, Eoin-Dermott, was marked by Almighty God to contribute the strength and ardor of his youth, expertise, and passionate love of freedom to the prosecution of this cause célèbre?

He was vaguely aware that since the Ryswick treaty, and not without daunting challenge, French buccaneers and filibusters—men of rustic lifestyle and guarded ambition—had undertaken a patient infiltration of the paradisiac New World. They contested choice swaths thereof to the crown of Spain and arguing more and more successfully in favor of a policy of international tolerance that smacked of the Edict of Nantes, which had triggered Eoin-Dermott’s ancestors’ flight from their land of birth. By and by, this exotic island had become a key French possession since a considerable contingent of colonists were tapping into the cheap labor pool of an enslaved black population in the exploitation of plantations to produce an abundant harvest of coffee, cacao, and exotic spices for consumption in the metropolis. Increasingly, it was question of a new frontier consisting mainly of broad and deep bays sleeping at the extreme end of a narrow peninsula, a virgin realm lying untouched in neglect and abandon. At the end of its broad arc, fertilizing a dormant soil, they found a surprising succession of streams, the deepest of which became in their minds emblematic of the entire region; they appropriately christened the area Bellance Valley.

A Tantalizing Tale

On a cold, fog-dripping morning, his usual stroll brought Eoin-Dermott back to the old port. How invigorating the brisk sea mist! How stimulating to the soul the feverish activity of these quarters! Slowly and longingly, he ran his palms on the rough hulls of moribund caravels, tied to a forlorn section of wharf that had been turned into a maritime burial ground. The blackened waterlines of dried lichen, the foul smell spewing out of open hulls, spoke loudly about past exploits halfway around the globe—tall swaying masts, fists of anger brandished in the face of the limpid azure, sagging sails hanging down limp and torn, like bloody skirts around frail victims of rape in the moribund sun. He went to warm himself up at a makeshift campfire a band of silent admirers had built as they intently listened to the tale of a silver-haired adventurer. Fresh returned from a tour of duty in the New World, the sailor sported a deeply sunburned face and a whitening flowing bushy beard. He painted the savage beauty and wondrous richness of this enchanting realm, where spring lasted all year; and his blue eyes, moist with tears of remorse, were lost in the distance. If only I had taken advantage of these opportunities in the days of my idiotic youth!

Captivated by the tantalizing tale, Eoin-Dermott considered more seriously his own expatriation not for the same reasons as his Irish ancestors had invoked when departing the Emerald Isle, yet for equally valid humanitarian motivations. Inquiring at the wheel room of active ships, he learned how countless Frenchmen, challenged like he was, had enlisted in the brave cohorts of desperados, landed in that broad realm of fortuity to gain, at the end of just a few years, full admission to the privilege of property, taste the blessing of an incredible respectability. According to his informers, the French Revolution had found fertile ground on these islands of broken dreams for their natives, who were engaged in a determined struggle against the domination of heartless continental leeches. That contest was entering a decisive phase. In a moment of illumination, Eoin-Dermott identified with the distress of these pariahs who, never consented to transfer to the Western realm, had been hijacked to cater to the greed of colonists.

He grasped the validity of the desperate pleas, ignored frustrations, and latent desperation of this race of dark-skinned slaves whom his compatriots had crushed and abused for far too many centuries as to be downplayed as a time of ignorance. He realized how, in spite of her oft-acknowledged moral obligation to ameliorate their plight, revolutionary France continued to pay lip service to the lofty ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for all men due to blindsidedness by her own enrichment to ever be appalled by the toll of the incredible humiliation her inept ambassadors imposed on the unfortunate victims. He was moved with compassion for the incredible suffering of this doomed humanity under the yoke of oppression, even though no one paid them any mind. This defenseless people in a world claiming the advantages of civilization, scientific progress, and religious superiority, this despoiled folk who stood all alone in the face of genocide in an age of enlightenment—were they not deserving of his support? Wasn’t their plight worth the sacrifice of his own lackluster existence? Devotion to their cause—wasn’t it capable of sparking new meaning to his own life, lift him up from insignificance to the stature of universal manhood? Jesus Christ—didn’t he leave heaven to redeem humanity from the curse of universal sin?

His sense of social justice and his innate consciousness of the universal rights of man and the citizen to life and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of nationality, ethnic extraction, hue of skin, religious beliefs, degree of education or natural habitat, buttressed by his instinctive compassion, came to transcend all personal considerations. Concluding that the French experience had not been beneficial to his uprooted family, he understood how, under clerical domination for centuries, his adoptive land faced the destructive threat of national antagonism. He longed for a country where the people were free to decide their own destinies without monarchical imposition and resolved to strike out in a new direction. When he confided his newly found hope in Solenn, he was surprised to find her nodding in agreement. She fully shared his anxieties about Europe’s immediate future, doubted whether they were up to the challenges of the dawning new age. Renewing their marriage vows, the couple determined to take to the high seas for a crossing that would engraft forever their branch of the family upon the living stump of the nascent nation, longing to profoundly mark it with the imprint of their ardor even if that meant the sacrifice of their lives.

In return, they were about to ally themselves with a Caribbean Africa, far removed from Guinea, Dahomey, the Congo, and the Ivory Coast. The transplanted Black denizens who awaited them there had been raped of their humanity by those who should have been morally responsible to protect and nurture it. They were no longer a people but an Antillean European province living in the nightmare of her final healing from imperialist expansion rapacity, atavistic bent for self-inflicted intestinal warfare. It was a Caribbean, Creole Brittany, as folkloric and superstitious as the continental one, as maritime and insular, as singular in ethnicity and linguistic expression as the one they would soon walk away from, one that would soon break her fetters, liberated to float unfettered in the immensity of a vast ocean of redefined social equality and political fraternity.

3

This bleeding, dying strand of humanity inhabited a patch of tropical earth, a magical island that her uninvited, Johnny-come-lately European intruders had dared to rechristen Hispaniola, a mere three centuries prior, in an act of flagrant denial of millennia-old and rich ethnic identity.

The Island of Hispaniola

Discovered on the morning of December 2, 1492, on the third leg of Christopher Columbus’s initial voyage, right after the Bahamas (Guanahani, October 12) and Cuba (fifty-four days later), the Isle of Haiti (Arawak for Rugged Land) was promptly rebranded for political expediency reasons by her unwelcome visitors. By virtue of this daring dictate, the ambitious navigator abrogated millennia of native culture to add a pristine new world as a jewel to the Spanish Crown of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, his obliging patrons. In his ritualistic genuflection on the sand beaches of Aragon Bay, the site of his first landing there, the discoverer had delivered on his solemn promise to claim all lands reached in his exploration as Spanish territory; and since Spain was a fiefdom of the Holy See, he was, in fact, surrendering to the Church of Rome the people and natural resources of this pristine island. Thus, the aborigines who gathered on the beach out of curiosity were unwittingly subjecting to a new religion, instruction into which would systematically stamp out their animistic beliefs and practices. Coerced conversion thus meant acquiescence to a two-pronged program of conquest: surrender of their primitive way of life and self-rule and endorsement of the bane and bliss of fifteenth-century Western European civilization.

Ethnicity and Political Organization

As it turned out, at the time, the island was peopled by tribes of West Indian Arawaks known today as Tainos, Amerindian tribes of sedimentary nature; pacifists by disposition, they were scattered throughout the Caribbean archipelago, having replaced the Siboneys who, long before, lived exclusively on hunting, fishing, and reaping. It was not red-skinned rascals that Columbus had happened upon, no more than the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas were brown-skinned savages when Cortez, Pizarro, and Montesinos raided the region of Mesoamerica later on. The European explorers had come into contact with sophisticated primitive civilizations that existed for eons of time and survived as self-sufficient, autonomous nations in complete ignorance of the Old World.

Even without the benefit of established borders, those natives were organized into caciquats, or independent realms, whose mere existence was justified, not simply in pure terms of social organization and political autonomy but also by the absolute imperative of self-defense against external foes. Thus, an intricate form of government prevailed on the island at the time of discovery. It was remarkably representative in nature for the time, and its social institutions were functioning democracies without the benefit of federalism at the point of the European interjection. Each realm was headed by a cacique, who shared authority with a number of deputies, serving in more or less symbolic roles to exercise absolute hereditary power over naitanos, or provinces, by assuring order in time of peace. In periods of existential threats coming from unfriendly raiders coming rom the southeast they elaborated defensive strategies. These subdivisions were as follows:

The Marien, administered by Guacanagaric, incorporated fourteen naitanos and covered the entire northeast of the island. With its political seat at El Guarico, not far from the later Cap-Français, it was the first to roll out the welcome mat to the Spaniards in Hispaniola; and by a sad irony of history, it would be the