BY ROSIE O’DONNELL
Tragedies. Traumas. Natural disasters. There are always far too many. Constant. Battering. So by the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, I had developed a new approach to surviving national emergencies—I would go there myself and personally help. Soon after the hurricane, I found myself in a place in Louisiana called Renaissance Village, full of survivors, most of them children, stranded with nothing.
I remember one night, while trying to clear my head, walking around New Orleans alone, I saw a statue of a woman—a monument in disrepair, the pedestal buried by weeds and surrounded by trash. I stepped closer, and the white, stained marble figure looked, well . . . familiar. She was stocky, maternal, her arm around a child. She looked like my mother and my grandmother and my grandmother’s mother all the way down the line. My line. She looked like the people I saw in photos when I did Who Do You Think You Are? for NBC, during which time I discovered the treacherous journey from Ireland to America that my own family had taken.
The statue stayed with me long after I left. It was the familiarity but also I think the sturdiness, the resolve. She looked like she had been standing there for hundreds of years and damn well intended to be there for hundreds more. A survivor here in a city that was reeling, among poor and suffering people themselves all fighting to survive.
I walked back to my hotel. Images from the morning scrolled through my brain—a refugee camp in Baton Rouge; thousands of people in beat-up trailers with swollen eyes and battered spirits; little kids running around in the summer heat with nothing to do, no toys to play with, no lemonade to drink—no relief. Those days in Louisiana haunt my mind and my dreams. I will never shake it. The hurricane had destroyed everything they’d known. The pain of watching it all was enormous. Sadness swallows me still.
The statue had been labeled simply margaret. Hello, Google, my digital disassociation addiction: #need2knowNOW.com. Margaret had lived almost two hundred years ago but was famous enough to be remembered by her first name alone. What, I wondered, had this woman done to be so well known? I knew I had to learn more about her. Maybe because she looked so much like me. Maybe because she was a survivor, and I was working on, in, and around survival. But what I didn’t know was the many ways in which her life would seem to mirror my own.
Margaret Haughery was born on Christmas Day, 1813, in Tully South, in the parish of Carrigallen, Ireland. The world seems to stop on holidays, and it would be no different there in County Leitrim. The village was small and poor, with basic houses made of mud. Simple wreaths dotted the doorways, and candles lit each window. Because food was scarce in 1813, that Christmas would have been a lean one.
My son Blake was also born on Christmas Day, in 1999. I took a plane to sunny California, picked up my new baby boy, and brought him back home to Miami in time to watch the new millennium arrive. None of my children are Irish, but they have all been raised by an Irish mother—which I believe, in some significant way, must make them Irish too. My boy, Blake, turned out to be the one who looks like me. In reality, he’s half Mexican and half German, but most people think we share DNA. When I am walking in the mall with him people say, “Oh, is this the one you had?” I answer, “Well, I didn’t have any, but they are all mine.”
No matter what challenges might lie ahead, the fact that Blake was born on Christmas makes him a little closer to God. Maybe that’s just in my mind, but I don’t care. And the fact that Margaret was also born on Christmas Day nearly two centuries before is no different. In her case, however, she was not lucky enough to be scooped up onto a plane and taken to a comfortable home. She was born into a country of famine and poverty and economic collapse. Still, she was a small miracle just like my son. All children are special, but some seem to come into this world full of light. Blake did. And I like to think Margaret did. I imagine her as bathed in yellow, with wide, luminous eyes.
Margaret was named after her mother—as I was named after mine. She would be called many things in her lifetime. Margaret was the Angel of the Delta; she was the Bread Lady of New Orleans, Margaret of Tully, and Mother Margaret. She was Margaret Friend of the Orphans, Lady Margaret, and, as on her statue, just Margaret.
She lived in the same Ireland my family emigrated from. By the time Margaret was two years old, a seemingly insignificant event changed the destiny of her generation. Mount Tambora erupted in the Dutch East Indies, eight thousand miles away. A thick layer of ash coated the skies in Europe and stole the summer and ruined all the crops. It was one of the wettest years on record, and it caused the potatoes to rot in the ground and the flour to harden in the barrels. People began to starve in Ireland long before the great potato famine. At two years old, Margaret already knew hardship and hunger.
In a country where suffering was the norm, life just kept getting harder. Things were breaking down. The banks were failing; farmers were leaving for the cities desperate to provide for their families. British rule oppressed the people more and more each day. The Anglicans and the Catholics were oil and water. The recipe was not good.
THE IRISH HAVE not cornered the market on suffering, although it can sometimes seem so. We are a vocal and a political people. And undoubtedly, politics was a topic in every household in Margaret’s time too. Two centuries ago when Ireland struggled under British rule, the Gaffney family, along with so many others, were fed up. William Gaffney, Margaret’s father, told his brother-in-law, Matthew O’Rourke, that he was leaving his homeland because he could no longer stand to live under English tyranny.
The Irish migration was just beginning. The people needed only to look out their window to see reasons to set sail. Every day villagers were dying. In a time when little was understood about disease, outbreaks of any kind were devastating. Typhus hit in 1817. Typhus is particularly brutal. It attacks the central nervous system, so people get delirious before they die. Myself, I don’t think that there are any great ways to pass, but watching loved ones lose their sense of self on the way to death seems crushingly cruel.
Margaret’s father, William, sold everything he owned and could still only afford passage for his wife and three of their six children. They made the gut-wrenching choice to leave the oldest three in Ireland. This is what happened to my father. He was one of eight children. He was sent over with my grandmother and the other three youngest. The rest of the children were left behind with his grandfather. Eventually they got all the kids to America and were reunited with the family, living in a tenement in New York City with rats running up the curtains, as my father loved to tell us. He wanted us to carry that with us—the identity of being an Irish family that “came over on the boat.”
Margaret was five years old when she got on one of those horrible scows that were like prison ships: toxic vats of illness and starvation. The trip was hell. The conditions on board were unspeakable. The passenger decks were overcrowded, with half a dozen people jammed into a space six-feet square. The narrow bunks had only straw mattresses, the body fluids of the sick leaking down from the bunk above.
As it turns out, Margaret’s family did not escape typhus at all. It was rampant on the ship, the screams of the dying mixed with the stench of illness: urine and feces and vomit and pain. Later these same vessels became known as coffin ships because so many people died during the crossings. But the dead were given no coffins. They were thrown overboard to the sharks that followed the boats waiting for a meal. Every day from morning until night, for six months of her life, Margaret faced a reality that would destroy most adults. What this child lived through, just on that ship, was enough to alter the course of her life. Does trauma make a tattoo on the heart, on the mind? And is it passed down, like emotional DNA, from generation to generation?
I TOO HAD trauma in early life. Not the same kind that Margaret had—illness, hunger, profound poverty—but trauma nonetheless. I see myself in her. I see myself from a very early age trying to survive against all odds. During an interview when I was at Renaissance Village after Katrina, the reporter kept focusing only on how difficult it was to navigate the red tape to deliver the kind of aid we were providing. I said, “I’ve lived impossible. I know impossible can be done.” People often ask me, “How did you survive the loss of your mother at such a young age? How did you survive your father’s drinking, his abuse?” I don’t have any answer for why some pieces of coal turn into diamonds and others don’t. I don’t know. It’s the combination of pressure and environment and timing. These all merge in a magical mix. This life of mine has been beyond anything I could have imagined.
And Margaret’s surely was too. So many times she achieved the impossible. And it began so young, on that ship, finding life and not death—making her way to a new land. I have to believe it sparked inside her a glimpse of all that she would prove capable of. It awakened something in her.
The Gaffney family arrived in America with almost nothing. Their trunk, along with the rest of the passengers’ luggage, was lost during the storms. But they found comfort and support in the Irish community. As poor as they were, they still had more than what they’d left behind. William sent “glowing accounts” of their new life in America back to his brother-in-law Matthew in Ireland.
While he had been a farmer and sometimes a tailor back in Tully, in Baltimore William would take whatever work he could get. Irishmen and black men competed for the lowest-paying jobs. William landed employment as a carter on the docks, hauling heavy loads of cargo from the ships in wheeled wagons, pulling and pushing like a draft animal. It was backbreaking labor, but he would have been happy to have it.
Meanwhile, Matthew, William’s brother-in-law, was still caring for his sister’s three oldest children. By 1822 William had saved almost enough to send for them. Things seemed to be looking up for the Gaffneys. But yellow fever changed all that. The fever took both of Margaret’s parents and her baby sister, Kathleen, most likely within a short time of each other. She would have seen them suffering with chills, nausea, and jaundice. Then the bleeding began. During that same time, her brother Kevin disappeared. Margaret was nine years old—a lone survivor.
She had met a Welsh woman, Helen Richards, on the ship coming over. Helen’s husband also died of yellow fever. When she learned of Margaret’s predicament, Helen took her in. I like to think that Helen was a loving maternal figure. No one can know for sure, as the records are hazy, but I hope Margaret found another mother in this woman.
I too was orphaned at that same age when my mother died. Even though my father was alive, he was not present, and I felt very much alone. The amount of terror is hard to articulate when you’re a child and your ballasts are removed. You can float away to somewhere in your own mind and never return.
In Margaret’s day and age, it was a common practice to take in orphans and turn them into unpaid help, but I believe Helen Richards must have loved Margaret in some way. What happened later in Margaret’s life tells me that somewhere she had been cherished, and that she had learned to cherish others. Margaret devoted her life to the health and the love of all orphans, thereby taking care of the child she once was.
MARGARET LIVED WITH Helen Richards and, when she was old enough, went into domestic service, as so many young Irish women did. We don’t know how she met Charles Haughery, but we do know that she married him on October 10, 1835, when she was twenty-two years old. Certainly, Margaret would have known the ache of intense longing for a family. Her marriage made her a family of two. She was no longer alone.
However, Charles was not a well man and would have already been sick at the time of their wedding. It was probably tuberculosis, called consumption in those days, growing progressively and inexorably worse, the cough, the blood bright on the handkerchief. Tuberculosis was a slow killer, and back then there were few treatments. Doctors recommended a change of climate, so only about ten days after their wedding, the newlyweds locked arms, and again Margaret walked up the gangplank of a ship. They arrived in New Orleans on the Hyperion about six weeks later.
Her husband got a little better for a time, and Margaret became pregnant. However, soon Charles’s health started sliding back downhill. This time the doctors suggested a sea voyage. He decided to go back to Ireland to visit his family, but he delayed his travels until after the birth of their child, a daughter, Frances. He set sail around 1837.
A few months after Charles arrived in Ireland, Margaret received a letter. She would have taken it to her priest, Father Mullen, for him to read. Margaret was illiterate, as so many immigrants were. The letter was a blow. Charles was dead. She must have mourned for him. But was there even time for grief? Margaret was now forced to find a way to care for herself and her child.
Within a few months of her husband’s death, baby Frances got sick. By some accounts, it was yellow fever. Not even one year old, Frances died in Margaret’s arms. Margaret wrapped her in a little blanket and carried her to the Catholic church. She asked Father Mullen to arrange the funeral.
Strangely, after losing her husband and daughter, it was then that Margaret came into her power. As quoted in her biography, compiled by an unknown family friend, Margaret said, “My God, thou hast broken every tie. Thou hast stripped me of all. Again, I am all alone.” Her words, both haunting and resonant.
Margaret got a job as a laundress at the St. Charles Hotel. Every day while she was on break she saw all these orphans walking with the Sisters of Charity. She was captivated by them. Again I see myself in her. My kids call me a “creeper” because when I see a bunch of kids playing in the park or at the mall, I am like, “Oh my god, look!” I am drawn to children like a magnet to metal. I find myself filled with joy just from watching kids play. Margaret was also a creeper.
While today’s foster kids are largely the children of living parents, in the early 1800s the young were forced to fend for themselves when their parents died. There were no laws protecting them. They were often left uneducated and put to work for minimal wages. Churches and wealthy philanthropists did their best, but many, many children fell through the cracks.
I WISH I could hear Margaret talking, expressing her thoughts and revealing her feelings, but since Margaret could neither read nor write, most of her words did not survive her. What does live on in the archives of the Williams Research Center on Chartres Street in New Orleans is a lean collection from which I have been able to learn about this extraordinary woman. When she was around twenty-five years old, Margaret got to know the Sisters of Charity, who ran the Poydras Orphan Asylum. She quit her job at the laundry and applied to work with the orphans. Margaret talked about her strong passion and desire to work with children. The Mother Superior, Sister Frances Regis, looked into this young woman’s eager face and replied, “There is no future here. Only a constant struggle.”
I remember when I was getting my communion, right before my mother died. We were walking through Christ the King Catholic Church, where my mother was on the parish council. She was wearing her claddagh ring and had her five Irish Catholic kids in tow. I said, “Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a nun.” And she said, “Don’t do it, honey. The pay is really bad.” Margaret’s story reminds me of that day. “There’s no future here, only a constant struggle.” Or to put it another way, the pay was really bad. But Margaret knew what she wanted and shortly thereafter she was working and living at the orphanage.
I believe this is how Margaret began to save herself. I think that the orphanage filled her heart with something that she really needed. When a car runs out of oil it seizes and never works again. With so much death, damage, and abandonment in her life, Margaret was low on oil. So she immersed herself in the blindingly pure love of children.
There’s a story about her that I think really defines who she was at this point in her life. Her first job at the orphanage, in addition to taking care of the children, was to find enough food to feed them. One day she went to a greengrocer and asked if there were any extra vegetables. She told him that she was working at the orphanage and that the kids were hungry. She was still in her twenties and looked quite young. The grocer was not terribly nice. He knew the orphanage was far away. He had a wheelbarrow, and he filled it. He piled on everything that he could, but the vegetables he chose would have been a little old and wilted—items he couldn’t sell anymore. He said to her, “Okay kid, if you can push that wheelbarrow home, you can have it all for free.”
Margaret hoisted the load onto the front wheel and put her weight behind it. After this skinny young woman had gotten it a couple hundred feet, defying all the laws of physics, the man could see her dedication. He was so impressed, he told her, “I’ll do it for you. You’ve proven you’d do it.” But, “No,” Margaret responded, “I always keep my bargains.” And she pushed it all the way home.
Quickly, Margaret saw that the orphanage needed a reliable source of milk, and so she bought two cows, either with savings or borrowed money. In this way, she was able to have not just milk but cheese and butter too. She even had enough left over to sell some, thereby bringing in much needed cash.
It started with two cows, but Margaret would eventually have a dairy of forty head. The larger her herd grew, the more customers she had. She talked to every single one of them about her orphans. She used most of the profits from her dairy for the kids—for maintaining the orphanage and building new ones.
Although run by Catholic nuns, the Poydras Orphan Asylum was owned by the city and administered by a committee of Protestant ladies. One day they told the nuns that they were going to have to include Presbyterian teachers for the children, in addition to the Sisters of Charity. The nuns, wanting autonomy, felt they had to move. Who did they turn to but Margaret. Not only did Margaret help them do it, she involved the orphans themselves. She had the kids, two at a time, out canvassing the neighborhoods, looking for a suitable property. I think Margaret wanted to give them a sense of control, a feeling that however young, they could help shape their own fate. I also think she knew a twenty-odd-year-old Irishwoman doesn’t pull on the heartstrings quite like young orphans.
Margaret eventually found a dilapidated house on New Levee Street. The story goes that she saw old Judge Kennedy on the porch. When she asked him if it was he who owned the house, the old man groused back about women who start asking him questions before he’s had his morning coffee. Margaret heard opportunity knocking. Before uttering another word, she walked right on inside and made him a pot.
As soon as Judge Kennedy had had a few sips, she started in again. The kitchen was almost bare. What was he even doing there? As it turned out, the judge had recently moved with his son uptown. “A new house?” Well, Margaret didn’t see what use he could have for the broken-down old one they were standing in. Might he let the orphans stay in it for a while? She told the judge they would fix it up and live there just until they had raised enough money to build a brand-new orphanage for the Sisters of Charity. By the time he got the house back, she promised, it would be fully repaired and worth much more. Judge Kennedy agreed, asking only that every time he visited, Margaret make him another pot of coffee.
MARGARET’S COMPASSION AND caring was not limited to orphans, and she became known throughout the city as someone you could count on. During the Mexican-American War, when General Winfield Scott attacked Mexico City, in 1847, five nuns belonging to the Sisters of Charity were imprisoned. The order went to Margaret. She was sick in bed, but they went into her room and woke her up anyway. “Help us,” they said. And that was all Margaret needed to hear. She rose up, got dressed, and went immediately to the docks. She hired a ship to rescue the nuns, giving the captain half of his payment upfront, the other half to be delivered when the task was completed. Then, while the ship was en route, she negotiated with the government and General Scott for the nuns to be released.
In 1853, the yellow fever epidemic took an enormous toll on the city of New Orleans. Port cities have many advantages, but they also sometimes receive unwanted cargo. This time the ship Augusta, from Jamaica, brought in mosquitoes that would change the city’s destiny. Salt marshes and drenching heat created a perfect breeding ground. Two hundred people a day were dying. Yellow jack, as it was called, took lives, while the treatments—bleeding and purging—did nothing but weaken the patients.
Margaret risked her life at the bedsides of the dying, helping when she could and taking in the orphaned children when she couldn’t. At least five nursing sisters died. Bodies were lying in the open streets. The smell of death was everywhere. One tenth of the population succumbed that season, leaving more and more children orphaned.
Margaret and her lifelong friend Sister Regis came up with a new dream out of the epidemic: to build an infant asylum. Margaret called it a “baby house.” She had already completed St. Teresa’s, as the new Sisters of Charity orphanage was named. Now she turned her energy to this new venture. She just leapt in. “Build the asylum,” she said, “and God will pay for it.”
I’m with Margaret. That’s the only way to get things done: Leap in. Believe. Because if you are all too aware of how impossible the challenge actually is, you’ll never even try. I was a kid who, from a very young age, had to run my own life. So was she. In 1862, the St. Vincent de Paul Infant Asylum would open its doors. And Margaret still wasn’t done.
A woman who clearly had a head for business, she had loaned so much money to a bakery that over time she’d become the major shareholder. When the bakery went bankrupt, Margaret was faced with the choice of losing her sizable investment or running the business herself. Once again, she just leapt in. She sold her dairy and used the money to update the baking equipment. The bakery would become known simply as Margaret’s—the first steam bakery of its kind in the country. It was an instant hit; people supported the bakery because Margaret made the best bread in New Orleans. Driven to succeed, Margaret soon realized she would have to sacrifice one of her greatest joys: living with the children.
And so it was that Margaret moved out of her room with the nuns at St. Theresa’s and moved into an apartment above Margaret’s bakery. She would rise before dawn to bake her loaves, basting them with butter in the early light. She made crackers and cakes, cookies and macaroni, her hands dusted with fine powder. The smell—it must have been its own kind of heaven.
And certainly it fell like manna to New Orleans’ poor and hungry, for Margaret never turned anyone away. She cut her loaves in half so the recipients couldn’t sell them off for liquor, but she happily fed everyone. All were served: white, black, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and soon enough blue and gray.
THERE HAD BEEN rumblings of war in New Orleans for a long time. Lincoln was elected in 1860. Louisiana seceded from the Union the next year, and shortly after, war became a reality. A port city is a valuable asset and therefore a high-value target. The Union navy blockaded the docks, and the city’s booming economy went bust.
New Orleans was not decimated, but it was occupied by a sometimes-brutal Union army. General Benjamin Butler was put in charge of the city. Butler was a former criminal lawyer who knew nothing about being a soldier. One of his first official acts was to condemn a man to death for flying a Confederate flag. The general soon became known as “Beast Butler.” After a woman spat on him in the street, he passed what was known as the Woman Order. It relegated any woman found alone on public walkways to prostitute status for the pleasure of Union soldiers. It was to this man Margaret had to appeal when the blockade threatened the supply line for her bakery. The port of New Orleans was closed, but there was flour in nearby states, and Margaret desperately needed it.
We know Margaret was of strong, broad Irish stock. She gave everything she had to others and counted herself happier for having done so. By her own grit and fierce determination, she had been able to cross the state line more or less at will. That is, until she was caught smuggling. She was brought before Beast Butler. Her friend Father Mullen came with her. Against the backdrop of the Woman Order, Margaret held firm. She had defied the rules that she thought ridiculous. In doing so she had risked rape, murder, and arrest. Now, to Beast Butler, she said,
I understand you have threatened to hang me if I continue sending food to starving people. I’ve come to tell you that I will not be stopped by your threats. I will continue until you hang me. I wonder if you feel it is Mr. Lincoln’s opinion that there is a military advantage in starving helpless people to death and am I wondering now if you have any reverence for God? If so, you will not hang me for I am needed here.
The general was reportedly amused by her courage and provided her with signed papers allowing her to travel as needed.
IN MARGARET’S LIFETIME, she donated at a minimum $600,000, the equivalent of over $16 million today. And before she was done, she opened four orphanages: St. Teresa’s Orphan Asylum on Camp Street, the Louise Home for Working Girls on Clio Street, St. Elizabeth’s House of Industry on Napoleon Street, and the St. Vincent de Paul Infant Asylum at Race and Magazine Streets. She would contribute to countless others. She had built up an empire, an orphanage empire.
As generous as she was with others, she was parsimonious with herself. She owned only two dresses: an everyday dress for the orphanage and the bakery and a black silk dress for Sundays and special occasions. She wore a Quaker bonnet, her signature. And she was, like me, plump, what we call plus-size. For some reason, I like this fact.
She devoted herself, body and soul, to her work, but although she never remarried, she did have some sort of personal life. Margaret found her two closest friends among the Sisters of Charity: Sister Regis, the Mother Superior who first hired her, and Sister Irene. Although little has been written about anything other than Margaret’s good works, her personality shows through in what sources we do have. In one instance the Daily Picayune called her “the kind, good natured dame who drives the milk cart of the Orphans’ Asylum” and reported that Margaret had quietly gone to court to speak to the magistrate on behalf of a black woman, a servant at the asylum, who had been arrested for getting drunk. With Margaret’s support the woman was let go with a warning.
In 1853 her friend Sister Irene became ill—with what, we do not know, but it was significant enough that she left the convent and resumed using her given name, Louise Catherine Jarboe. Louise became Margaret’s personal assistant, most likely managing private and business correspondence. This would have been of great value for the illiterate Margaret, who appears to have been embroiled in a handful of lawsuits stemming from her inability to understand contracts she had signed with an X.
At the age of sixty-eight Margaret suddenly fell ill. The sisters took her to their private hospital, but though Margaret spent many months there, she never recovered. Pope Pius IX sent his blessing and a crucifix. The nuns prayed at her bedside. It may have been a brain tumor, although we’ll never know for sure. She died on February 9, 1882, and the entire city went into in mourning. It was an abrupt ending to an extraordinary life. The newspapers of the day were edged in black. This illiterate Irish immigrant received a state funeral.
If you go to New Orleans today you can visit Margaret Place. The statue, now restored, sits in a small park between wide, empty streets underneath an interstate overpass. It is only the second statue in the United States to have honored a woman and the first in a public square.
It has been a while since I have visited the monument, though I have been back to New Orleans a number of times since Katrina. Still, I think about Margaret often. If you don’t see yourself reflected in history, then you can’t adequately define yourself. When, that day years ago, I first looked into Margaret’s eyes of stone—there I was. I discovered in her my archetype, my ego ideal, something, or rather someone, to stretch for, to be like. I am a mother who has adopted five children. Children born of other women, but whom I am loving and raising—who are now my own. But it is a peculiar exchange, this giving, because I am getting so much back—I am saving myself. And I feel it must have been this way for Margaret. Two hundred years ago or right now, we are here to help each other along, and we do it for each other, as well as for ourselves.
I sometimes dream of Margaret, her fine-as-flour hands, her butter-basted breads, her vermillion heart with flower chambers just like mine and yours, yet larger in some admittedly mysterious way than all of ours. Margaret gives to me across the centuries, and I like to think, in this telling, that maybe I am giving a little back. So that some circle is closed, some salve applied, for the both of us—as it always is.
There at Margaret Place in New Orleans, the stone softens and a living, breathing being steps before me. I don’t believe in ghosts, but this I know: Margaret is always near.