Mary Arnold
LITR 4333
American Immigrant Literature
April 18, 2001 

Poe Family Immigrant Experience

It seems to be a common phenomenon among immigrants that when they come to America, they do not "settle" down in one place. Rather, they keep moving: east to west, north to south and sometimes back again. This is certainly true in my family’s immigrant story. Since the first Poe landed on the shores of America, each generation has moved to a different area in the United States, sometimes two or three times in their lifetimes. My story begins with my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather David Poe.

David Poe was Scot-Irish, a native of the Parish of Fenwick, in Ayrshire, Scotland. He emigrated to Dring Parish, County Cavan, Ireland during his lifetime. The exact date of this migration is not known, but it is very likely he was part of the British plantation of Ulster in the 1600s. David and his wife Sarah had three surviving children, John, Alexander, and Ann. Since both of their sons immigrated to America, it is unlikely that the Poe family owned any property in Ireland; they were most likely tenant farmers.

David and Sarah’s youngest son John married Jane McBride in Ireland, and they came to America in 1743 with their two young sons, David and George. They landed at New Castle, Delaware, and immediately joined Alexander in Marsh Creek, Pennsylvania, where he had emigrated to in 1739. John and Jane’s other children born in America are Mary, Hester, John, Jane, James, Samuel, Robert, and William. John and Jane later relocated to Cecil County, Maryland, and then to Baltimore, where they are buried.

John and Jane’s oldest son David, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, was born in 1742 in Ireland. While living in Baltimore, MD, he became very prominent in public affairs, serving as Quarter Master General in Maryland during the American Revolution. David contributed much of his wealth to the Revolutionary War, which impoverished him. David married Elizabeth Cairnes, and they had seven children: William, John Hancock, David Jr., Eliza, George Washington, Mary, and Samuel. David died in 1816, Elizabeth in 1875, and both are buried in Baltimore.

Their son David Jr., born in 1784, earned his living through acting in Baltimore. He married an English actress, Mrs. Elizabeth Hopkins (nee Arnold) in 1806. They had three children: William Leonard, Edgar Allan, and Rosalie. After Elizabeth died in Richmond, Virginia in 1811, Edgar Allan Poe went to live with his godfather John Allan, a Richmond merchant. John Allan provided the young Edgar with a classical education in England and Scotland during 1815-1820. Edgar later attended the University of Virginia in 1826 for eleven months, but his gambling losses caused his guardian to discontinue the tuition payments. Edgar moved to Boston and published his first volume of poetry in 1827. During his lifetime, Edgar lived in Richmond, Boston, New York, and Baltimore. He married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, who was only 13 at the time. Poe’s poem "The Raven", published in 1845, propelled him to national fame. Virginia died on January 30, 1847 after a long illness. During his lifetime, Edgar Allan lived in relative poverty; ill-paid for his poetry and short stories, as many writers are. He died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, and was buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery at Fayette and Green Streets, in the lot that had belonged to his grandfather, David Poe.

Edgar Allan’s uncle, John Poe, who was my great-great-great-great grandfather, married Elisabeth Parks and they moved to Chatham County, Virginia, where their two sons, John and James, were born. They later moved to Franklin County, Virginia, where the elder John died in 1849. The younger John Poe (my great- great-great-grandfather) and his brother James both migrated to Fayette County, Alabama in 1815. John married Sarah Threet and had ten children: Alfred, William Thomas, John, Betsy, Oliver Perry, Mary, Sarah, Jane, Matilda, and Shreptie.

It is certain that the younger John Poe must have felt a need to reconnect to the Old World (Ireland), since he and many of his friends and relatives settled an area of Saline County, Arkansas, which they named Belfast in 1854. Sadly, this city was discontinued in 1866, but a monument to these pioneers has been erected west of Highway 35 between Sheridan and Benton, not far from Poe Cemetery. Also its evident that at some point the Poe family became involved in the slave trade, since John Poe came to Arkansas with at least twenty slaves. There is a family legend that John Poe exceeded 350 pounds, and forced his slaves to pull him around the farm on a sled.

John and Sarah’s son Oliver Perry (my great- great-grandfather) was born in 1826 in Alabama. We do not know much about him, other than he married Mariah Nall and they had five children: Molly, James Alfred, Sarah, Thomas Franklin, and Oliver Perry. He died while visiting his father in Arkansas, and is buried in Poe Cemetery, which his parents John and Sarah had established January 10, 1859.

Thomas Franklin was my great-grandfather. He was born in 1856 in Alabama. He later moved to Mississippi. His wife was Martha Colley and they had eight children: Asenath, John, Sally, Albert, Mary Elizabeth, Rubye Mae, William Oliver, and Robert (who died young). Thomas Franklin (still exhibiting the wandering Irish spirit) later moved to Barbers Hill, Texas (which was renamed Mont Belvieu). He died in 1934 and is buried in Mont Belvieu.

Thomas and Martha’s son Albert Addison is my grandfather. He was born in 1891 in Mississippi, and spent part of his childhood in Barbers Hill, Texas. He moved to Beaumont, Texas, after his first wife had died, which left him with three small children: Allen, Carson, and Myrtle. In Beaumont, he met and married my grandmother, Louise Hargrave. They had five children together: Rubye Joyce (died in infancy), Albert Jr., Fannye Catherine (my mother), Nettie Selma, and Mary Louise. Albert and Louise later moved to Baytown, Texas. My grandfather died in 1978, when I was nine. I don’t remember much about him, except that he was a wonderful storyteller and he loved children. My grandmother lived for another twenty years after the death of her husband, but passed away in 1995. They are buried next to each other in Channelview, Texas.

My three uncles, Carson, Allen, and Albert Jr. (Buddy), also possessed the Irish wanderlust spirit, while the daughters were content to stay close to home. Carson and his wife Elaine moved to Salem, Oregon. Allen and his wife Alice lived in Whitecastle, Washington, and Buddy and Donna currently live in Moorestown, New Jersey.

My uncles Carson and Allen were both drafted during World War II: Carson into the army and Allen in the navy. My Uncle Buddy was a career Marine who fought in Korea. My Uncle Allen was stationed in Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, when the Japanese attacked. He had just left his ship to purchase a magazine minutes before the attack. When he returned, the ship was gone. If not for a lack of reading material, my uncle would have still been on that ship when it was bombed.

My mother Fannye Catherine Poe married twice. She had four children with Edward Wagner, a second-generation German immigrant: James, Linda, Catherine, and Leo. My father C.T. Martin was also previously married and had three children of his own: Frank, Mark, and Lynnea. My parents had two additional children: Carolyn Tracy and myself, for a combined total of nine offspring. Of this generation, only Cathy has the wandering Irish immigrant nature: She has lived in Louisiana, Florida, California, Colorado, Washington, and Michigan. She currently is living back home in Texas.

While the Poe family immigration story illustrates the common trait of the wandering spirit, it also possesses another common factor of the immigration narrative. This factor is the tendency to separate oneself from the past and the Mother Country. I was never told any Irish stories, nor was my mother, or my grandfather. Its evident that the Poes assimilated to American culture very quickly, as testified to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe which distinctly were not Irish in nature. But I, a ninth generation Irish immigrant, am endeavoring to reconnect to the past by learning as much as I can about Irish history and culture, which I hope to keep alive in my children’s memory.

Frank McCourt: Profile of an Irish Immigrant Author

Frank McCourt was born on August 19, 1930, in Brooklyn, NY. His parents, Malachy and Angela (nee Sheehan) were recent immigrants from Ireland, who met and married in New York. Angela hailed from Limerick, while Malachy was from Toome, County Antrim in the northern part of Ireland. When Frank was four years old, his parents moved back to Ireland with their four small children, Frank, Malachy, Eugene, and Oliver. They left their only daughter buried in America. The family settled in Limerick after briefly staying in Antrim and Dublin.

The family’s life in Limerick was extremely impoverished due to the elder Malachy’s inability to find and hold a job. Malachy’s Northern Ireland accent precluded him from finding work easily, and when he did get a job he would not last long due to his alcoholism. The family lost the twins, Eugene and Oliver, through disease, but Malachy and Angela later had two more sons, Michael and Alphonsus which survived childhood.

When Frank was nineteen, he and his brother returned to the United States. The two brothers made a living with their own vaudeville show for a while before Frank turned to teaching. He attended New York University and taught in the New York public school system for many years, including McKee Vocational and Technical School on Staten Island and Peter Stuyvesant High School.

Frank McCourt began writing after his retirement from teaching. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography/autobiography, and the Pulitzer Prize in biography, both in 1997, for Angela’s Ashes.

McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

McCourt, Frank. ‘Tis: A Memoir. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2000.

McCourt, Frank. "Scraps and Leftovers: A Meditation." The Irish In America. Ed.

Michael Coffey. New York: Hyperion, 1997. 8 – 13.

Donoghue, Denis. "Some Day I’ll Be In Out of the Rain." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes, by

Frank McCourt. The New York Times Book Review 15 September 1996: 13.

Elson, John. "Reliving His Bad Eire Days: A Cold and Catholic Boyhood in Limerick."

Rev. of Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt. Time 23 September 1996: 74.

Foster, R.F. "’Tisn’t." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt. The New Republic

1 November 1999: 29-32.

Jones, Malcolm Jr. "From ‘Ashes’ to Stardom." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes, by Frank

McCourt. Newsweek 25 August 1997: 66-70.

Jones, Malcolm Jr. "Hard Luck, Good Tales." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes, by Frank

McCourt. Newsweek 2 September 1996: 68-69.

Kakutani, Michiko. "Generous Memories of a Poor, Painful Childhood." Rev. of

Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt. The New York Times 17 September 1996.

King, Nina. "With Love and Squalor." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt.

Washington Post Book World 29 September 1996: 1,10.

History of Irish Immigration to America

(Guido of Ivrea)

It is not hard to imagine the Irish immigrants fleeing their homeland during the Great Hunger in the mid nineteenth century singing this Hymn to St. Brendan, the Voyager on their journey to the New World. This hymn is strikingly similar to the Jewish story of their Exodus to Canaan, the land of milk and honey. This similarity is not surprising because the Irish have long thought of themselves, "not as voluntary immigrants seeking opportunity, but as involuntary exiles, compelled to leave Ireland by British tyranny and landlord oppression" (Miller 13). Consequently, like the Puritans before them, many of the Irish equated the United States with Canaan, the Promised Land. This belief shaped their perceptions of America and their lives here for centuries to come.

Although the mid nineteenth century witnessed the mass exodus of the Irish into America and other countries, the history of Irish immigration does not begin with them. In the 17^th century "between 50, 000 and 100, 000 left Ireland, most of them transported overseas as indentured servants" (Miller 10). Some of these Irish pioneers were "prisoners, Irish rebels, and felons" sent to America because they "had been sentenced by the British courts to long terms of banishment and involuntary servitude on the tobacco plantations along the banks of the Chesapeake" (Miller 10).

The second wave of Irish immigration occurred in the 18^th century when as many as a half million people came to America "looking for land on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and elsewhere in colonial America" (Miller 10). The majority of these immigrants were Scotch-Irish Protestants from Ulster, who were part of the "migration organized by the British Crown [in the 1600s] and known as the Plantation of Ulster" (Miller 10). These Irish immigrants assimilated quickly into American culture, probably assisted by the ruggedness of frontier life.

In the early part of the 19^th century (1800-1830), an estimated one million Irish came to America, about "half of them Catholics" (Miller 11). Irish Protestants arriving during this time were skilled as "weavers, blacksmiths, stonecutters, and tailors" and had "at least enough money to establish a business or buy a piece of land" (Coffey 137).

The unskilled Irish (most of whom were Catholic) had to work as laborers; they "performed the backbreaking, dangerous labor that was needed to build up the young nation" for very low wages (Coffey 137). For most of these Irish Catholics, "public works projects from the Erie Canal to the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration provided [them] with opportunities that were denied them not only in Ireland but in America’s hostile cathedrals of commerce" (Coffey 140). The Irish laborers followed the work to New York, New Orleans, the West, and wherever else jobs were available.

And then An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger) struck Ireland in 1845, when the potato crop (that the Irish poor depended on almost exclusively) was decimated by a fungus from America. In the years between 1845-1851, a million people in Ireland died from disease and starvation. Over a million and a half more immigrated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, South Africa, and Argentina, but most came to America. Most of these Irish immigrants were poor Catholics, and some had had their passage paid by their landlords which was more economical for them than allowing the Irish tenants to remain on the land. These immigrants settled primarily in the great cities of the northeast, "spurning the farming life that had so cruelly betrayed them in Ireland" (Coffey 31).

With the poor Irish tenants came the priests and nuns; together these groups built many Catholic parishes to replicate a "rural Irish village" (Coffey 48). The Irish helped "invent the parish as a quasi-political unit, a network of like-minded people, a community unto itself, enclosed by a wall to keep out hostile forces and preserve the faith and devotion of those within" (Coffey 48). It was these poverty stricken Irish Catholics that built the "network of schools, hospitals, orphanages, asylums, and specialized institutions that duplicated services already available, but offered them in a Catholic setting, away from the hostile motives of Protestant reformers" (Coffey 66). In this way, "a form of Irish-American separatism, as defined by the Catholic parish community, was both a reaction to violent hostility from anti-Catholic naturists and a logical extension of the society the immigrant Irish left behind" (Coffey 67). Catholic universities, such as Fordham University, Boston College, and the University of Notre Dame (which "quickly became a bastion of Irish Catholic culture and education") were established (Coffey 80).

The election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish American Catholic, to the presidency in 1960 effectively ended the "second-class citizenship in America for the Irish and for Catholics in general" (Coffey 104). During the decade of the 1960s, the wandering Irish began to move up the social and economic ladder. During this time, the Irish were "leaving the old neighborhoods, the ancestral parishes, the transported villages, and moving to suburbia" (Coffey 228). To the descendants of the Irish immigrants of a century before, the "struggle for acceptance, the self-segregation into ethnic ghettos, the obsession with economic security, became remnants of a world that existed only in bittersweet memory" (Coffey 228). For the majority of the Irish, especially the Catholics, the "road to assimilation" was where "identity was submerged by a culture of conformity and middle-class respectability" (Coffey 230).

In the 1980s, many parishes such as those from Woodside, Queens, South Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco witnessed the most recent "influx of new Irish immigrants" when Ireland’s economy collapsed (Coffey 85). Although these new immigrants did not experience such widespread racism as did their countrymen before them, they were often "confused and uncertain in their new home" (Coffey 85). However, these new Irish Americans are fortunate in that they can maintain their ethnic identity in the modern global world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Therefore, the New Irish can hold on to the Old World, while embracing and absorbing the New World with "an increasingly balanced confidence" (Coffey 231). The appreciation for Irish American culture has reached all across America, and has given the "old" Irish Americans the desire to reconnect to their past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coffey, Michael, ed. The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

Guido of Ivrea. Trans. by Karen Rae Keck. "Hymn to Saint Brendan." Analecta

Hymnica #48.88. 8 April 2001 <http:ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/reading/St.

Pachomius/Western/brendan.html

Miller, Kerby and Paul Wagner. Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to

America. Washington, D.C.: Elliott & Clark Publishing, 1994.

Review of Irish Immigrant Literature

Although the Irish had lived in America since the seventeenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that and Irish American writer made "the Irish immigrant experience a central issue in his writings" (Coffey, 203). In Mr. Dooley in Peace and War (1898) and Mr. Dooley in the Hearts of His Countrymen (1899), as well in his other works, Finley Peter Dunne "celebrates the gifts of the Irish – intelligence, range of interest, loyalty to Ireland and the United States, and to families in both countries, and their quite inimitable gift to turn the raw of language into sparkling conversation" (Coffey, 203).

In the 1920s, the Irish American playwright Eugene O’Neill recorded the Irish immigrant experience in several of his plays. Most notably of these plays were O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, which narrated the story of the Tyrone family.

Although Finley Peter Dunne "provided Irish-American writers with a language and a voice", many Irish American writers chose to suppress their ethnicity in their writings. One of the most famous Irish American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, only used Irish characters in his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) and his last novel, The Last Tycoon (1941). John O’Hara, another Irish American writer, displays "a mixture of ambivalence and hostility to his ethnic background" in his novels Appointment in Samarra (1934), and Butterfield 8 (1935).

The Irish immigrant experience was also used in many of John Ford’s films, such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Although on the surface the film shows the devastation to farming families in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, Ford himself said the story "was similar to the famine in Ireland, when they threw the people off the land and left them wandering on the roads to starve – part of the Irish tradition" (Coffey, 195).

In the field of poetry, Brian Coffey is thought to be the first Irish American poet to use the immigration experience in his poetry. In the lengthy poem "Missouri Sequence", Coffey "compares and contrasts life in the United States with life in Ireland" (Coffey, 244). The more recent poetry of Sean Dunne and Thomas McCarthy also used the immigration experience as themes in their poetry. Coffey, unlike Dunne and McCarthy, "describes the act of leaving as well as the impact of settling somewhere else, the effect of which seems profound and life altering" (Coffey, 245).

Since the late 1980s, America has seen an enormous growth of Irish American literature, as well as films, poetry, music, dance, and other art forms, as many more Irish immigrants came to America in the latter part of the twentieth century. Helena Mulkerns, an Irish born writer living in New York City, observed that:

New Irish immigrants do reflect, as with any exiled group, the

loneliness of exile and separation from home and family, but they

also – importantly – embrace and absorb the influence of the new,

and do so with an increasingly balanced confidence (Coffey, 231).

Mulkerns credits Ireland in Exile (1993), edited by Dermot Bolger as being the first anthology of Irish American immigrant experience.

The revival of Irish culture in America has had many effects on the art world. In dance, Michael Flatley’s Riverdance and Lord of the Dance have been enormously popular. These performances combined the "traditions of Irish dance and the innovations of a Chicago-born Irish American" [Flatley], and helped establish admiration for Irish culture and art.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coffey, Michael, ed. The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

Mary Arnold

LITR 4333

American Immigrant Literature

April 17, 2001

Jones, Malcolm Jr. "From ‘Ashes’ to Stardom." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Newsweek 25 August 1997: 66-70.

In his review of Angela’s Ashes, Jones describes how a little publicized work from an unknown author could make it to the bestseller list for over a year and earns its writer a Pulitzer Prize in autobiography. Jones asserts that the success Angela’s Ashes is having "isn’t supposed to happen in modern publishing, a world where ‘literary’ and ‘best seller’ are never used in the same sentence" (Jones 67). When it takes "50,000 copies" for a book to be "in evidence" in a book store chain such as Barnes and Noble, it is very surprising that Angela’s Ashes, with a first printing of 27,000 copies, could achieve such widespread popularity (Jones 67). Added to that is the fact that McCourt’s autobiography did not receive much publicity: He only appeared on the Today show after he won the Pulitzer, and has never been on Oprah (as of the article printing date).

Jones admits McCourt’s autobiography is an "encyclopedia of Irish cliché – the alcoholic pa, the long suffering ma, the wee lads without a crust between ‘em" (Jones 67). But Jones believes the success of the book is attributable to how McCourt "sidesteps sentimentality with a litany of hardship that would make a cynic flinch" (Jones 67). Thus, the reader is given a description of Irish life that is difficult and sometimes heartbreaking, but also humorous and heartwarming.

Mary Arnold

LITR 4333

American Immigrant Literature

April 17, 2001.

Donoghue, Denis. "Some Day I’ll Be In Out of the Rain." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes by

Frank McCourt. The New York Times Book Review 15 September 1996: 13.

In his review, Donoghue responds to McCourt’s claim that "worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood" (McCourt 11). Raised as an Irish Catholic, Donoghue asserts that McCourt’s "miserable childhood" is not the product of being an Irish Catholic, but rather the blame should be placed on McCourt’s father, who was an "idler, a drunkard, a layabout, a singer of patriotic ballads, a praiser of gone times, a sentimentalist, a slob, a sot addicted to the company of sots" (Donoghue 13).

While Donoghue’s father was a " sober man, hard working, an ungregarious character, a minder of his own business," Donoghue still sees many similarities between his Irish Catholic upbringing and McCourt’s. For example, Donoghue equates McCourt’s Leamy’s National School with his own Christian Brother’s School in Newry, and McCourt’s Mr. Benson with his Patrick Crinion, who "taught [him] Irish and Latin with an equal fervor" (Donoghue 13). Donoghue even had a sibling die from pneumonia as McCourt’s brother Eugene did. Although Donoghue’s father did not suffer from the Irish stereotypical "craving" as McCourt’s father did, nonetheless, the two shared a similar upbringing as far as education went, which negates the criticism leveled at McCourt that his book is largely based on typical Irish cliches.

Mary Arnold

LITR 4333

American Immigrant Literature

April 17, 2001

Foster, R. F. "’Tisn’t." Rev. of Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis: A Memoir by Frank McCourt.

New Republic 1 November 1999: 29-32.

In his review of Frank McCourt’s works, Foster accuses McCourt of ‘milking the Irish cow,’ as pictured in the cartoon accompanying the review. This means that, according to Foster, McCourt’s portrayal of his family’s poverty in Ireland feeds the American view that "the Old World is a sow who devours her own farrow, and everything will eventually come right in America" (Foster 32). This is exemplified by America’s indoor toilets and running water as opposed to Ireland’s chamber pots and "shared privies in the back lane" (Foster 29). Foster disbelieves that a child of three, as McCourt is in the beginning of his narrative, could "retain absolute concrete memories from the time of his conception, and retail word-for-word conversations exchanged and letters written" (Foster 29).

Besides the many Irish stereotypes which Foster claims McCourt makes use of, Foster asserts that many characters and incidents in Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis are strikingly similar to other author’s characters and events. For example, Foster writes that "there is a fire-breathing priest’s sermon to guilt-ridden boys that is straight out of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and an "aged female moneylender" who "owes a large literary debt to Dostoevsky and Dickens" (Foster 30). Foster maintains that the McCourt’s autobiography should be classified as fiction.