Great Hatred, Little Room

Out of Ireland have we come.

Great hatred, little room,

Maimed us at the start.

I carry from my mother’s womb

A fanatic heart.
—from “Remorse for Intemperate Speech,” W. B. Yeats

THE PLANE I am trying to get on is United. Flight 373 from O’Hare to Detroit. I never intended to be here at all, nor did any of my fellow pilgrims, all dumped here in Chicago by an act of God. Last night it was raining ice in Lower Michigan. The airport in Detroit was closed. So here we are, the morning after, the cranky and unshaven stranded from the canceled flights. There are travelers from Baltimore and Newark, Boston and New York who overflew the storm in Michigan. There are folks trying to return from Orlando and the Carolinas and the cities of the West, trying to get home, just like me.

I was en route from Reno where I’d given a speech to OGR—The International Order of the Golden Rule—an association of funeral directors whose slogan is “Service measured not by gold but by the Golden Rule.”

Do unto others, etcetera, etcetera.

I’ve lost track of the time zones and geographies.

Surely we are nearing the end. The news is booming from the TV screen: War in the cradle of civilization, the great cities under siege. The miserable weather is relentless. We’re bombing the enemy. There’s friendly fire. The dead are everywhere.

EVER SINCE THAT godawful Tuesday morning, that September in 2001 when United and American Airlines planes were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, the nation has been bombing what it can, the Afghans and Iraqis, who knows who is next? Those to whom evil is done do evil in return. Who said that?

Not only did they die, they disappeared—our dead that day—9–11. There’s the terrible fact of the matter. We never got them back to let them go again, to wake and weep over them, to look upon their ordinary loveliness once more, to focus all uncertainties on the awful certainty of a body in a box in a familiar room, borne on shoulders, processed through towns, as if the borderless countries of grief and rage could be handled and contained, as if it had a manageable size and shape and weight and matter, as if it could be mapped or measured. But we never got them back.

There are thousands dead and gone, Godhelpus.

We know this the way we know the weather and the date and dull facts of happenstance we are helpless to undo. There are many thousand bits and pieces, salvaged from the Fresh Kills landfill site. Families keep vigil at the city morgue. Good news is when they get their portion of the precious body back.

IN THE PAPERS this April is the image of a man kissing the skull that was found in the dirt of a shallow grave outside a prison in the city of Baghdad. The number on the grave corresponds to the number in the gravedigger’s log and the names of the people that are tallied there. The name and the number and the grave and the skull belong to the man’s son. He was taken away years ago. There is a hole in the back of the skull the size of a bullet. There is a litter of other bones, femurs, and ribs, and the man in the photo is strangely pleased. This is the seeing—hard as it is—that is believing. It is the certainty against which the senses rail and to which the senses cling. This is the singular, particular sadness that must be subtracted from the tally of sadness. The globe is littered with such graves as these, people killed by others of their kind, by hate or rage or indifference. Most of the graves will never be found and the dead wander in and out of life, never here and never really gone. Whether they are victims of famine, atrocity, terrorism, casualties of a widespread war, part of a national or global tragedy, they are no less spouses and parents, daughters and sons, dear to friends, neighbors, and fellow workers; they are not only missed in the general sense but missed in their particular flesh—in beds, at desks and dinner tables, over drinks and talk and intimacies—the one and only face and voice and touch and being that has ceased to be. And their deaths, like their lives, belong to the precious few before they belong to the history of the world.

THE PRESIDENT AND the prime minister are meeting in Belfast to discuss the future of Iraq—how warring factions of that invaded nation might be brought together when the “hostilities” have stopped. The clerics are rallying the faithful to the streets. The politicos are holding forth. The corporations are moving in. The press is embedded.

“Hate,” the president says, “and vengeance and history can be put aside in trade for a peaceful and prosperous future.” He says the Irish have shown us that. He’s never been to Belfast before. He’s never been to Iraq.

It sounds lovely, of course. Who’s not in favor of that? Forget the past. Let’s just all try to get along.

But really I just want to get home. I’ve been too long in this airport, too long in transit, too long up in the air. I want to go home now. I am standing by.

Sitting next to me, also standing by, also listening to the ugly, ubiquitous news blinking from the monitors, is a handsome woman from Los Angeles. Well, actually from Michigan. Well, actually from Belfast. She’s a traveler, too.

“I was born in Belfast,” she says when the news mentions Belfast.

She moved to Canada when she was a girl. Then to Michigan. Then to Los Angeles, from whence she was flying to Detroit yesterday when the ice storm forced her to land at O’Hare. She is going for her son’s twenty-first birthday. He was born in Michigan and still lives there.

We are all just waiting for our names to be called. The 7 and 9:30 A.M. flights were packed out. We’re hoping to get on the 10:55.

“I was born in Belfast,” the woman says.

“I have a house in Clare,” I say. She reminds me of my youngest sister, strawberry blonde, freckled, blue eyes, and a squarish, pretty face.

“Really!” she says. “What part of Clare?”

“Near Kilkee, in the West, a wee cottage only.” The wee is an adjective I’ve stolen from friends in Ulster and in Scotland, from whence many of the Northern Irish families came. The only at the end, trailing the adjective—instead of “only a wee cottage”—is another affectation. If not a brogue, I have achieved a mid-Atlantic syntactical style. Talk of Ireland makes me talk like that.

“I’ve heard the seaside in West Clare is lovely.”

“Lovely,” I tell her, “entirely.”

She left Belfast as a girl. She was ten. It was 1964. Her father and mother could see what she called “the handwriting on the wall.”

She says she has promised never to teach her children to hate. She’d been taught to hate as a girl.

“I can’t believe my parents did that to me,” she says. “It was crazy. It hurt.”

It is the thing she remembers about her childhood.

“‘I’d know them by their eyes,’” my mother would say, “‘those squinty eyes.’”

“Which had the squinty eyes,” I ask, “Catholics or Protestants?”

“Oh, Catholics,” she says.

“I see, I see.”

“I’m Lorraine,” she says.

“Tom,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

Lorraine had a friend who was Catholic, a girl named Eileen who lived down the street. That was fine with her parents until Lorraine went with Eileen to “chapel.” When her father got word of her going into a Catholic church, he beat Lorraine in the way that other parents might spank their child for running into a busy street, only harder.

“As if I might ‘catch’ something there,” Lorraine says now, still embittered by the injustice and betrayal of it. “God, where does such hatred come from?”

She looks out over the thickening traffic of stranded travelers.

“I might as well turn back and head for home. I have to be back to work day after tomorrow.”

“Have faith,” I tell her, as if I had it, “you’ll still make it for dinner.”

“It snowed like crazy the day my son was born. They closed the schools. Amazing, April of ’82—twenty-one years—seems like yesterday.” Lorraine has lost any semblance of a brogue. She has the accent of the network news. “I never taught him to hate.”

SIX MONTHS AFTER the towers fell, I am in New York City at the invitation of David Posner, senior rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, the largest Jewish house of worship in the world. He has asked me to speak on the Book of Job. I rise early from a night’s sleep in a room on Bleecker Street and go out for a morning walk, drawn to what has come to be called Ground Zero. I walk down Broadway to Fulton Street, where a “viewing platform” has been constructed so people can look over Church Street at the gaping wound. Some days, twenty-five thousand people come, lining up like mourners at a wake, for a look. They have to see. The recently constructed ramp is for people to queue up alongside St. Paul’s Chapel, with its churchyard of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stones. George Washington prayed here after his inauguration. It is Manhattan’s oldest public building in continuous use. There is a broad deck facing east from which groups of maybe twenty can take a look at what isn’t there. It has become, in most ways, negative space. Cameras click into the open air. Men in hard hats work below, in the pit, in the massive open mass grave. Everything stops when “something” is found. Something flag-draped and horizontal is carried slowly up out of the hole to an ambulance. Work resumes. On the boardwalk that leads back to Broadway, there is a wall on which the names of the dead are listed alphabetically. It begins with Gordon M. Aamoth, Jr., and ends with Igor Zukelman. There are Murrays and McMahons, Collinses and Keanes, Curtins, Maloneys, and Mahoneys, all names of my neighbors in Moveen and names from the far-flung and neighboring townlands: Doherty, Dolan, Doyle, Crotty, and Curry. Like the dead, the Irish are everywhere. And when I come to the Lynches in this grim litany, I am shocked to see the names of my own boys—Sean and Michael—I count them all: Farrell Peter Lynch, James Francis Lynch, Louise A. Lynch, Michael Lynch, Michael F. Lynch, another Michael F. Lynch, Richard Dennis Lynch, Robert H. Lynch, Sean Lynch, and Sean P. Lynch. Ten of them—a bond trader, a property manager, stockbrokers, firemen, and cops; and two brothers of immigrants who worked together at Cantor Fitzgerald. One over fifty, two over forty, the rest in their thirties—primes of their lives—all murdered in the one madness, in the same sixteen-acre killing field at the south end of an island city of the world between 8:46 and 10:28 on a Tuesday morning. The only name with more murdered there was Smith. There are a dozen Smiths. There are ten Kellys, too—James and Joseph and Richard and three Toms—and ten Murphys—Raymond and John Joe, Edward, and Kevin and strangely, as I read it, no Michaels or Seans. In all, sixty-four names that begin with “Mc”—McAleese and McCourt, and McSweeneys. Four O’Briens, four O’Connors, one O’Callaghan, two O’Keefes, an O’Grady, O’Hagan, O’Sheas, and O’Neils. Oh God, it seems so Irish and American. So very sad and beautiless. It seems like a chapter from the Book of Job.

I walk down Church Street from the plywood wall of names crossing Liberty into Trinity Place and slip into the old Trinity Church there, High Church Episcopal, where Dr. Deirdre Good, officiating at Morning Services, was giving a homily on Christians and Jews—how they must achieve reconciliation. At the time I remember thinking that Jews are having more trouble with Muslims of late. For Jews the Book of Job is real.

“WHY DIDN’T YOU take the Jews to America?—There’s plenty of room.”

So asked the man who drove the cab that brought me to the airport this morning from the Best Western Hotel in Des Plaines, where I was able to get a room last night after they diverted our plane to O’Hare. He is Palestinian, angry, and named Mohamed.

“It’s all about oil and the Jews. Bush and Blair are criminals. Why do you think people blow themselves up? Because they won’t live like this!” He’s lecturing the rear-view mirror, shaking a finger. “They’d rather die.”

He thinks of Jews as colonizers, foreign occupiers, settlers sent by a larger power to dominate an indigenous population, the way Sinn Fein thinks of the Presbyterians who were planted in Ireland generations ago. Or the way Native Americans or South Africans think of white Europeans or the way white European pilgrims thought of the ghetto Irish in New York and the way the ghetto Irish thought of freed slaves, or the way white Detroiters thought of blacks from the South who came north for work in the last century, or the way the blacks think about the Jews, or the Jews the Arabs, or the Arabs the infidels, or the Koreans the Japanese, or the Tibetans the Chinese, or the guy without the boarding pass, the guy who does—everyone fighting for his piece of the rock, his bit of the planet, his vision of the truth, a seat on the bus or boat or plane.

I’m feeling a little cramped in the cab, hostage to Mohamed’s increasing rage. Great hatred—Yeats was right—and little room.

My mother’s dearest friend was a Jew. Renee Friedman and Rosemary O’Hara grew up in brick bungalows next door to each other on Eileen Street in Northwest Detroit. Renee’s mother, a Russian, and her father from Hungary met and married in New York then moved to the Midwest at the end of World War I. My mother’s parents, children of Irish immigrants who worked in the copper mines in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, met as students in the class of 1918 at the University of Michigan, where he played in the marching band and she studied music. Renee’s mother kept a kosher kitchen. Rosemary’s served no meat on Fridays. Both of the mothers upheld the other’s rules for each other’s daughters. They kept different Sabbaths, different customs, and different holidays but shared a respect for faith and rubric and devotion. Renee and Rosemary grew up constant friends. They prayed together when their boyfriends went off to the war, rejoiced together when they returned. And married within a few months of each other, both wearing the one dress, each barred by the other’s religion from “standing up” for the other. Renee raised seven children; Rosemary nine. The families shared bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, First Communions and Confirmations, Passovers and Easters, wakes and shivahs, Christmases and Chanukahs. They tried to teach their children not to hate.

“Jews and oil,” Mohamed says, grabbing my bag from the trunk of the cab. “That’s why they are killing Iraq. For the Jews and oil.” The fanatic heart beats in every breast. He hates them all—Jews and the president and the life he has. And though I do not share his particular hatreds, I know what an adrenaline high it is—to hate and rage against the facts of one’s life. I try to commiserate but I’m spending my hate this morning on having had to bunk in Des Plaines last night, on the time lost to an ice storm, on the lines already forming at the curbside check-in booths, and on the fact that I’m a middle-aged white man, with more money than time, and I’m willing to pay whatever it takes and still I’m stuck here, standing in this endless line, trying to get a boarding pass, here only two hundred fifty miles from home. I don’t need an upgrade or exit row or aisle seat. I’m not looking for anything special at this point. Can’t they understand? I just want to get home.

And the more time I spend in the airport, standing by, the more I’m beginning to dislike everyone with a ticket and a boarding pass and the sureties that belong to such as them. And I’m beginning to hate the airlines and the professional sangfroid of the agents at the counter with their “have a nice day” corporate-speak and the industrial-strength smiles behind which they are paid to keep the reasonable contempt they have for me for showing up here looking for some kind of guarantee when the whole room full of us are standing by and there’s not a thing anyone can do about it.

I hate the woman calmly reading in the seat across from me and the young man next to her who will likely outlive me and the inconsolable child on the other side of the room yelping at the top of her lungs with an earache or sore gums or God-knows-what discomfort. I hate them all and am more or less certain that they hate me, until I meet Lorraine, who is stuck in the same predicament as I am and is, like me, made crazy by all of this. I can see it in the way she is just barely hanging on to the slimmest thread of civility.

Maybe we were maimed from the start. Maybe it is the little rooms.

I think of the cramped quarters in Moveen; my great-great-grandparents huddled around a fire on the floor with their expanding family, all of them afloat between intimacy and aggravation, familiarity and contempt—the weeping baby, hungry toddlers, the adolescents fighting for their place by the fire, in the family, in the room. They sleep on straw, in earshot and arm’s length of each other’s dreams and flatulence, masturbations and copulations. Their defecations and urinations are done outside. They eat potatoes mostly, sea grass, periwinkles, a bit of herring or mackerel, meat at Easter and Christmas. There’s a bucket of water in the corner, a few sods of turf stacked in another. There is one table, one fire, one candle, a pig. There is never enough of anything—food, warmth, privacy, space. They have rent and penances to pay. Sometimes they count their blessings. Sometimes they fight over the shortfall. Some days the struggle fills them with fellow feelings. Some days it fills them with a quiet rage. Is this where the hair trigger of my temper comes from? The low-grade, ever-present fever in the blood—was it carried from my mother’s womb, my own fanatic heart?

More battles are waged over the morsel than the meal. Is it the little rooms or the privations? Poverty or lack of open access? Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the Famine Irish, West Africans in slaving ships, oppressed Shiites, slaughtered Kurds, the homeless Palestinians—all want, all hunger, all hate.

There’s new looting in Baghdad, old contentions in Belfast, suicide bombers in Jerusalem. CNN is everywhere.

Detroit is full of Iraqis and Irish, Jews and African Americans; there are Asian and Hispanic and Native Americans too. It was the factory work and the easy borders with Canada that brought us all here. There are mosques, synagogues, and churches of every kind—Sunnis and Shiites, Chaldeans and Kurds, Catholics and Protestants, Black Muslims, Black Christians, Black Buddhists, and Jews. There’s more than enough religion to go around. There’s sufficient history. There’s no shortage of anger, no shortage of fear.

YEARS AGO I joined a men’s Bible study group.

“We’re looking for a good Catholic,” Larry said when he called. He’s Lutheran, an attorney, a neighbor and friend, and good on all counts.

“Let me know if you find one,” I half-joked, then asked the who and when and wherefores.

Larry told me we’d meet Tuesday mornings at half past six, a dozen of us, like apostles, at the Big Boy restaurant.

I figured on two weeks maybe, two months at the outside, before we’d come to our senses. But twelve years since and it’s still going strong. A couple have died, a couple moved away, a couple quit. They’ve been replaced. There are three attorneys, some retirees, sales reps, engineers, local businessmen. We’ve done the letters of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles, Genesis and Exodus, Kings, Chronicles, and Revelation. When it was all the rage, we did the Prayer of Jabez. We open with prayer and close with oatmeal. By half past seven, we’re on our way.

Lately we’ve been studying the Book of James. It has things to say about the rich and the poor, faith and works, and intemperate speech:

How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not be so. —Chapter 3: 5–10

But so it is.

Between Tuesdays we forward things—jokes and stories, preachments and prayer requests—by e-mail and the Internet. Recently the following made the rounds, forwarded from one of our twelve, who got it from his pastor who got it from some other “reliable” source.

Allah or Jesus?

by Rick Mathes

Last month I attended my annual training session that’s required for maintaining my state prison security clearance. During the training session there was a presentation by three speakers representing the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim faiths, who explained each of their belief systems.

I was particularly interested in what the Islamic Imam had to say. The Imam gave a great presentation of the basics of Islam, complete with a video. After the presentations, time was provided for questions and answers.

When it was my turn, I directed my question to the Imam and asked: “Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that most Imams and clerics of Islam have declared a holy jihad [holy war] against the infidels of the world. And, that by killing an infidel, which is a command to all Muslims, they are assured of a place in heaven. If that’s the case, can you give me the definition of an infidel?”

There was no disagreement with my statements and, without hesitation, he replied, “Non-believers!”

I responded, “So, let me make sure I have this straight. All followers of Allah have been commanded to kill everyone who is not of your faith so they can go to Heaven. Is that correct?”

The expression on his face changed from one of authority and command to that of a little boy who had just gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He sheepishly replied, “Yes.”

I then stated, “Well, sir, I have a real problem trying to imagine Pope John Paul commanding all Catholics to kill those of your faith or Dr. Stanley ordering Protestants to do the same in order to go to Heaven!”

The Imam was speechless.

I continued, “I also have a problem with being your friend when you and your brother clerics are telling your followers to kill me. Let me ask you one more question. Would you rather have your Allah who tells you to kill me in order to go to Heaven, or my Jesus who tells me to love you because I am going to Heaven and He wants you to be there, too?”

You could have heard a pin drop as the Imam hung his head in shame.

Needless to say, the organizers and/or promoters of the ‘Diversification’ training seminar were not happy with Rick’s way of dealing with the Islamic Imam and exposing the truth about the Muslims’ beliefs.

I think everyone in the U.S. should be required to read this, but with the liberal justice system, liberal media, and the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized. Please pass this on to all your e-mail contacts.

This is a true story and the author, Rick Mathes, is a well-known leader in prison ministry.

Whether it was the “gotcha” religiosity, the thumping triumphalism in this codswallop, or the haplessly appended anonymous commentary in the last three paragraphs that put me in mind of the letter of James and what he had to say about the fire of tongues—it made me think of my youth among the nuns. Our Protestant neighbors—the parents of my pals Mark Henderson, Jimmy Shryock, and Mike McGaw and their sisters who taught me precious truths—had heard it rumored that we Catholics kept a stash of guns in the basement with which we would someday during the Kennedy presidency rise up and take over the nation in the name of the pope. In the meantime, I was taught that Mike and Marcia, Jimmy and Cathy, Mark and his older sister Jane, were no doubt bound for a certain hell for their failure to believe in the One True Faith. The world, this scurrilous e-mail showed, was a larger, World Wide Web–connected version of the old neighborhood with its grudges, mistrusts, and xenophobes, blessed and cursed in exactly the way James wrote it was. The Catholic crusaders who rode off to save the Holy Land from “Mohammedans” centuries ago, like the Episcopalians gleefully hanging Quakers in the New World, bore in their hearts and minds the religious passions and the species blindness of the jihadist and holy warrior who fails to see the creator in all of his creations.

WHEN LORRAINE’S PEOPLE left Belfast, the Protestant majority made no effort to hide the fact that “Roman Catholics need not apply.” It was there in bold print in the shop windows and newspapers. It was the subtext in every conversation. It was the quite boldly spoken ugly truth that there was a cultural and religious divide between those with access to education, employment, finance, and power and those without.

In Detroit it is done on black and white, or variations on those themes of race and ethnicity. In London it is done on “class.” In Calcutta, “caste.” In Baghdad as in Belfast, it is sect and tribe and party politics.

The president and the prime minister are telling the world that Iraqi oil will benefit Iraqis. The president is anxious to prove his critics wrong. It is not about oil and Israel but liberation and democracy. There’s looting in Baghdad, the statues are falling. No one seems to know exactly who is in charge.

My last time in Belfast, two years ago on literary duties, I was struck again by the Irish gift for understatement. To call the decades of damage in Ulster “Troubles” is like calling cancer “difficulties.” What has happened in “The North of Ireland” or in “Northern Ireland,” depending on your politics, is trouble indeed, and difficult, and cancer. It is hate.

In Belfast a standing joke goes:

“Are ye a Catholic or Protestant?”

“God knows I’m an atheist.”

“Sure, but are you a Catholic or a Protestant atheist?”

In Belfast as in Baghdad, there is no choice to opt out of the conflict. Everyone is something. Everyone believes or disbelieves in something. Whether lapsed or devoted, militant or indifferent, orthodox or not; whether disbeliever or misbehaver, nonconformist or reformer, everyone is bound by ancient codes of tribe and blood, belief and conflict. And hate, like love, forms its habits and attachments.

Among the young writers, teachers, and professionals I know in Belfast, there is always talk of the comfort of going south, into the Republic, or farther still, to the Continent or Canada or the United States, and the chance it gives them to “turn the radar off”—to disengage that terrible wariness of what they might say and whom it might offend or infuriate. These are well-meaning people who are sensitive to their neighbors’ sensibilities, who hunger for peace, who abhor the posturing of extremists but who are, nonetheless, to various degrees, Loyalists, Nationalists, Protestants, Catholics, damned if they do and if they don’t say anything. Damned for their beliefs or lack of them, targeted for the faiths they profess or renounce. Among these border towns where flags and banners and the writing on the walls proclaim the differences, the “other” is said to “dig with the wrong foot.” The road signs are variously defaced. One side crosses LONDON off of LONDONDERRY while the other crosses the DERRY out. “What’s in a name?” we ask. The answer in most places is, “What is not?

MY FATHER’S MOTHER became a Catholic mostly to marry my grandfather. The priest shook water on her, she always told us, and said, “Geraldine, you were born a Methodist, raised a Methodist, thanks be to God, you are now a Catholic.” One unseasonably warm Friday evening the following spring, she was grilling burgers in the backyard when the neighbor, Mr. Collins, one of my grandfather’s brother knights from the K. of C., leaned over the back fence to upbraid her on the subject of what other people would think about a Catholic woman preparing meat for the dinner on a Friday in Lent. With water from the garden hose, she “converted” the beef, saying, “You were born a cow, raised a cow, thanks be to God, you are now a fish.”

“All God’s children,” she would often say.

IS IT DERRY, then? Or Londonderry? Is it The North of Ireland or Northern Ireland? Is it Sean or Sidney? Mabel or Maeve? Lorraine or Kathleen? Do you dig with the right foot or the wrong one? Are you wide-eyed or squinty? Are the violently conflicting views of Ulster rooted in race or sect, language or doctrine, poverty or pride or power-lust? “Whatever you say,” wrote Seamus Heaney famously of this painful case, “say nothing.”

WE HUMANS HAVE these troubles everywhere. Religion, race, and nationality; gender, age, affiliations—these define and divide us. We are ennobled and estranged by them. These “conditions” are, unfashionably, not matters of choice. I am Catholic in the way I am white and American and male and middle-aged—irreversibly, inexorably, inexcusably. However lapsed or lazy or lacking in faith I am on any given day, I am, at the same time, a lapsed, lazy, and faithless Catholic. I sin and am forgiven according to the language I learned as a child—a dialect of shalts and shalt-nots, blessings and beatitudes, curses and prejudices. Surely it is no different for the children of observant Jews, Muslims, Methodists, and secular humanists. Religion is the double-edged sword that unites, protects, and secures while it divides and conquers and endangers, always and ever in the name of God. The subtextual message of all religions is that, while we are all God’s children, God likes some of his children better than others, and that heaven, wherever it turns out to be, will be populated by those of one kind and not another.

Of course in Belfast, as in Baghdad or Jerusalem, the issue isn’t doctrine or observance. There are fewer true believers than we like to think, and true believers honor true belief in others even when it is not a belief they share. The issue is “otherness.” How we separate ourselves from other human kinds. Religion is just one of the several easy ways for the blessed and elect to remain just that. The haves and the have-nots around the world maintain their status—as victimizer and aggrieved—on the narrowest grounds of difference. Race, religion, tribe, caste, class, club, color, gender, sexual preference, denomination, sect, geography, and politics—everything we are separates us from everyone else. In the border counties of Ulster, where it is hard to tell Kenneth from Sean, or Alison from Mary, where everyone is fair and freckled, “he digs with the wrong foot” and “she has squinty eyes” are both the sublime and the ridiculous truth. It is the same in Baghdad, where it is impossible to say who is Sunni and who is Shiite, who is Baathist and who is not. Everyone on the news looks the same to me. Does it have something to do with the headgear, the eyes? What’s in a name? Everyone here is Muhammad or Ali.

LAST YEAR I read in the Irish Times about Muhammad Ali’s Irish roots. Ms. Antoinette O’Brien of the Clare Heritage Centre in Corofin had traced the connections.

Was there ever any doubt?

“The Greatest,” it will come as no surprise to Claremen and Clarewomen ’round the planet, has roots in the Banner County. Like my great-grandfather, Ali’s great-grandfather came from that poor county bordered by the River Shannon and the North Atlantic, famous for poets and dancers and knock-down handsome men who float like butterflies and sting like bees.

“Up Clare!” is the only thing to be said about it.

Born in the gray city of Ennis in the 1840s, as grim a decade as ever was, Abe Grady left for the New World in his twenties. He got the boat at Cappa Pier by Kilrush—not ten miles upriver from my ancestral hovel in Moveen—and made west for The Better Life.

Mr. Grady found his way to Kentucky, where he was smitten, in circumstances undocumented by Ms. O’Brien, like men of the species since time began, by the dark beauties of an African woman. Like my great-grandfather, in his youth Abe had never seen a visage that wasn’t freckled, blue-eyed, pale-faced, and blushed-red. Little wonder that he found her lovely and exotic, enchanting altogether. She was, to quote my late and sainted cousin Nora on this theme, “pure black.”

A son of their union, an African Irish American, it is reported, also married a black woman, and one of their daughters, Odessa Lee Grady, married Cassius Marcellus Clay the elder in the 1930s and settled in Louisville, where The Greatest, formerly known as Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., was born to them on January 17, 1942.

The world, of course, has been the better for it.

The Irish Times reports that Michael Corley, chair of the Ennis Town Council, would be extending an invitation for The Champ to visit.

“We would like to honor him because the town is proud and delighted to have played a part in producing one of the heroes of the twentieth century,” the councilman is quoted as saying. No doubt they plan a suite at the Old Ground, a feast at Bunratty, and a tour of the Turnpike area where Abe is reported to have hailed from, though all of the thatch-roofed lodges have been leveled.

The Champ, who like me lives in Michigan, has not said when he intends to return to the country of his ancestors.

What part did Ennis play, we might sensibly ask ourselves, in the production of Muhammad Ali? Is there something in his dance, his duck and weave, his combinations and his “rope-a-dope” that might be traced to his roots in Ireland? What got Abe Grady to Cappa Pier with his ticket and tin box marked, as my great-grandfather’s was marked, “Tom Lynch—Wanted,” meaning, I have often supposed, that the contents were precious to him?

History is a sad and instructive study. The County Clare that Abe Grady left was, per capita, the most decimated by emigration of any county in Ireland. They did not leave as tourists. They left like the Jews of Europe left a century later for Israel—withered, starving, having just survived. They left like Somalis and Iraqis and Cherokees and Bosnians—because they had no choice. For most emigrant Irish of the nineteenth century, the choice was fairly simple: stay and starve, surely, or leave and live, maybe. Abe, we might imagine, was in the same circumstances.

MY GRANDFATHER SAID “nigger” the way Mark Twain wrote it, or LBJ or Harry Truman said it, the way I used to say “tinker” before I was told that I oughtn’t talk like that. He said it the way you might say “February” or “pomegranate” or “twelve.” It was a word, like any other word, that he had learned to say from hearing it said, or reading it. He was unaware of the hurt and harm it could do.

He worked with black men and women, who all looked the same to him, in the way he looked, to them, the same as his Polish and German and English fellows—white. They said “cracker” and “mick” the way he said “nigger,” not so much in hate as ignorance and indifference. Micks and mackerel snappers, kikes and hebes, spics and Polacks and wops and chinks and jigaboos and hunkies and honkies and spades and guinnies and all the other derisive derivatives of our melting pot—such was the vocabulary of kind and color and identity.

Ali’s great-grandmother’s people came as slaves, in boats built in Belfast, like the one that Abe took down the Shannon and across the sea. Colonization, abject poverty, forced emigration by starvation, eviction, and political domination—all close and distant cousins, of a kind—bondage done up in the Sunday dress of steerage, slavers turned into coffin ships, the human cargo stacked like chattel in the hold, a third of them dead en route or on landing, all of them well below tourist class, all of them looking for a class of people worse off than themselves.

FOR THE IRISH—starved, evicted, long oppressed, spewed out on the docks of America—the only ones they could find worse off than themselves were the blacks they had never seen before. If the Irish owned nothing, they owned themselves. “Darkies” were chattel.

Needing more fodder for the Civil War, the Republican president Abraham Lincoln ordered a military draft. The Enrollment Act of Conscription, issued in March 1863, like drafts that followed, weighed most heavily on the poor. Married men were exempted, as were those who could provide a substitute or those who paid a three-hundred-dollar fee. The Irish of the northern city slums were too poor to marry and too poor to pay the “commutation fee” and were losing their lowest-rung-of-the-ladder jobs to the influx of former slaves moving north. Prejudiced and living in poverty and urban squalor, and shocked by reports of the horrors of Gettysburg, the immigrant Irish found the prospect of going to war to free slaves who would compete with them for down-market jobs was all tinder for the riots that broke out in New York City in mid-July 1863. A mob of fifty thousand, most immigrant Irish, burned down the draft office at Third Avenue and 46th Street, and then turned their anger on blacks around the city. Blacks were lynched and drowned and there were brutal beatings. Buildings were burned, including a church and an orphanage full of black children on the corner of 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. Over four days, there were hundreds of dead and wounded, and a million and a half dollars in damage was done before the Army of the Potomac was dispatched to restore order. A headline in one Pennsylvania paper read: “Willing to fight for Uncle Sam but not for Uncle Sambo.” What’s in a name?

In the way that abusers become abusive, victims of racism become racists too, and the Irish, with an uninterrupted history of taking it, got good likewise at dishing it out.

“Prejudice,” Muhammad Ali has said, “comes from being in the dark. Sunlight disinfects it.”

ONE NIGHT IN August 1970, I went to the Mars Ballroom in Kilrush. It was packed with the local and visiting young, drinking and dancing as the young will do. A new face in a small place, I drew the scrutiny of the West Clare girls. Emboldened by two pints of porter, I asked a dark-haired beauty for a dance, and though I’m a clumsy waltzer and worse at rock and roll, she nonetheless remained my partner for the night. The band played American country music and Beatles tunes, lights reflected off a large disco ball hung by wires from the ceiling. We drank and talked and walked up the town for fresh cod at a late-night chipper. We went back to the Mars and danced some more. When the night finished with the playing of the national anthem, all of us standing there in the smoky dance hall singing to Dev, she rose on her tiptoes and kissed me. I kissed her back, then she disappeared, arm in arm with her giggling friends. “Call to me tomorrow,” she had told me. “I’ll be waiting for ye.”

Back in Moveen, Tommy had taken himself to bed. He’d been all day drawing turf from the bog in Lisheen. But Nora, ever vigilant, was up and waiting by the fire. She made tea and commenced her interrogations.

“Were there a fair few there?” “Had ye drink taken?” “How were the band?” “Did ye meet anyone?”

I told her that I had fallen in love, was likely going to be staying in Ireland, marrying a Clare woman and raising a family.

“Wooo! . . .” said Nora. “Now for ye! And who’s the lucky lady I wonder?”

“Sheila Delaney from Kilrush.”

Nora’s eyes narrowed and she straightened up, rummaging through the inventory of names and particulars she knew.

“Never mind that lady,” she said in a low, cautionary tone, “Delaney’s a tinker.”

“But Nora. . . .”

“Never mind that lady, boy. She’s a dead loss,” Nora continued. “From the terraces,” she said, referring to the public housing estates built by the County Council. “What would you want with one of that crowd?”

There was in Nora’s preachments on this theme none of the usual lilt in the words. The volume was lowered and the tone was flat, unambiguous, and intense.

I KNEW WHAT tinkers were. In 1970, you’d still see their red-and-green-painted wagons encamped outside of the larger towns—on the outskirts of Ennis and Galway and Kilrush. And there’d been a wagon down in Goleen, a little inlet of the ocean where Moveen edged up against the sea. And I remember a woman and her daughter coming to Nora and Tommy’s door with a variety of secondhand household goods for sale. Nora sat her in by the fire and called her “missus” deferentially and bought a bit of carpet from her and gave her whiskey and her daughter pennies and sent her on her way with thanks and blessings.

There was about the encounter this vast ambivalence—Nora was glad for the visit and liked talking with the woman, questioning her on what she’d seen in her travels, but clearly thought of her as “the other.” She was a tinker, a traveling person, a member of a class of people known for their music and horses and tinsmithing—from whence the name—and feared for their separate lives, separate language, separate lifestyle, separate laws.

And a tinker gone into the terraces was worse, to hear Nora tell it—like American Indians on the rez—the noble savage tied down to the dole.

The status of traveling people in Ireland is much like the status of “others” everywhere. Whether the otherness proceeds from racial, ethnic, religious, economic, sexual, or behavioral variations, the human response to otherness seems the same. We are attracted to it and frightened by it. Suspicious and covetous, begrudging and enamored—we find “the different” compelling and repellent. We are divided by our loves and hates.

ON THE FIRST anniversary of September 11, I am back in New York at the City University for a conference on the question of “What Have We Learned Since 9–11 About Death and Grief and Bereavement?” I’ve given my keynote speech the night before. Once again I find myself walking downtown, to see the “remains” surrounded by flags and flowers and eulogists.

The year gone by seems like a long national wake or shivah. We have behaved like a large, closely knit, and occasionally dysfunctional family, quibbling over blame and money and the proper memorials. Twenty-five thousand people a day have stood in line to pay their respects. The worst of the ravages have been removed: the nearly twenty-thousand body parts, the fewer than three hundred bodies, the horrid mountain of disaster.

At Ground Zero, while the litany of the dead and gone was read, achieving the cadence of lamentations, a wind blew through that open space, filling the air with dust and flowers. And all I could hear were the lines of a poem written years ago by a friend in the midst of a sickness—a mortal peril that threatened his son, his household, his family’s future.

MERCILESS BEAUTY

Look to the blue above the neighborhood,

and nothing there gives any help at all.

We have seen the fuchsia, and it doesn’t work.

Time flows away. The mystery it fills

with our undoing moves aside awhile

and brings a new reality into play,

apparently—and here is the main idea:

the wind of time appears to blow through here,

the periwinkle and the mayapple

trembling in wind that is of their own kind,

a gorgeous color of a clarity

that fills our eyes with brightness to see through,

for all the good it does us, and to tell

the morning glory from the glory of God.

—from Love’s Answer: Poems by Michael Heffernan,
University of Iowa Press, 1994

The blue above the neighborhood was quiet. The wind of time indeed blew through the place. The politicians said their pieces. The pipers from the Emerald Society, having marched thirteen miles to the place, piped “America the Beautiful.” There was nothing in the weather or the music or the words that offered any clue as to what we had learned in the year just spent among the ruins and the dead. The “gorgeous color of a clarity,” by which I might have seen something new to tell “the morning glory from the glory of God,” was nowhere.

The smaller the world gets, the greater the hatreds seem. April this year is full of unseasonable weather. The Jews are celebrating Passover; the Christians, Easter. The Shiite Muslims in Iran and Iraq are making their pilgrimage to Karbala by the hundreds of thousands. They are going to the tomb of Hussein, the founder of their sect and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was murdered by Sunnis 1,400 years ago, the way Christians say Christ was, by Romans and Jews. For twenty-five years it was forbidden, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, for Shiite Muslims to make this pilgrimage, to observe the holy days of atonement, self-flagellation, chest thumping, and ritual sacrifices of lambs in commemoration of an event equivalent to the Crucifixion of Christ for Christians. The Shiites are thanking God for the end of Saddam Hussein and calling for the infidel Americans to leave. The clerics are jockeying for position.

In Ireland they are marking the fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement by which, in 1998, all of the hateful parties to the “Troubles” gathered in a room to sort out how to organize their hates into a manageable government. As a friend of mine, born in Fermanagh, living in London with her husband and children, said, “Peace has broken out in my country!”

Maybe this is what the president’s speech writer meant when he wrote that Ireland gives us hope for Iraq—that while we have no choice about our hateful natures, we can sit great hatreds down in the one room and organize a peace. We can seize this from the other possibilities. The themes of slavery and liberation, death and resurrection, oppression and freedom, sacrifice and miracle, new life, old grudges, pilgrimage and exodus, rage and tolerance are an important study. The world’s grim history of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, holocaust and resettling, jihad and forced migration is a blight upon our human nature. What Oliver Cromwell did to the Irish in the seventeenth century—the ethnic cleansing—required him to see the slaughter of Irish peasants and their forced resettlement in the barren West as “the judgement of God on these barbarous wretches.” Our species has not evolved much past such evil.

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double-helix molecular structure of DNA. In 1990, the Human Genome Project took up its ambition to map the DNA structure of human beings. It turns out that we are, each and every one of us, one of a kind and all the same. Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler have much in common. George Custer and Catherine of Siena, Mandela and Milosevic are genetically much the same. We all trace our mitochondrial roots to an Eve in Tanzania 150,000 years ago. The Mother of All Humans adrift in the world.

AND HERE I AM, now, a traveler. I look into Lorraine’s large blue eyes and wonder if she can see me squinting. She is a traveling person too. We are both standing by for a flight to Detroit. I’m looking at my fellow pilgrims in this little room. We are each one and only and one and the same. When we cut each other, each of us bleeds. To any stranger, we all look the same. That I am Irish or American, a Clareman or Michigander, whether home in Milford or Moveen, the truth of my humanity is that I am none other than my species mates around the globe. We hunger, thirst, sleep, and long for peace. We all want to get home through the storm. The plane we are trying to get on is United.