Here we finish Chapter One of my
memoir–which is currently titled Shoplifting
at Dracula's, by the way, for reasons that will become apparent if you
stick around. (Photo: Rural Co. Tyrone.)
4. My mother’s bunch were Irish
too, but they were (or became) Prods, “Scotch-Irish” in the parlance of then,
an entirely inaccurate label because they were God-mad Erse through and
through, those Catholic McRorys from the county Tyrone. The Catholic McRorys
from Tyrone remade themselves into the Protestant Rogerses from Delaware to get
ahead in the New World, common enough protective coloring in the nineteenth
century, especially in small-town America where no ethnic ghettoes existed and
where the norm was Anglo and God a Protestant and milk the beverage of
preference at hearty chaste full-breasted Thanksgiving dinners, the marriage of
plenty and Puritanism….
Anyway, in their Irish beginnings my
maternal great-grandparents, the McRorys, were farmers near Ardstraw, Co. Tyrone,
a hardscrabble townland hard by the Sperrin Mountains, a landscape empty of men
and peopled with rocks, not a million miles (about forty, in fact) from the
Boylan hog holdings in Monaghan. A hundred pre-Celtic standing stones are a
testament to the Milesian ancestors of the McRorys of yore. Our lot did quite
well as sheep farmers and the like for awhile, then in the mini-famine of the
1820s—the dress rehearsal for the big ‘un a quarter century later—they, along
with their neighbors the Mellons and the Hugheses, went bankrupt, and were
harried by the bailiffs and the beadles and reduced to virtual slavery as
tenant farmers of a Lowland Scot planter for a heel of bread and a pot of grog
and the back of the landlord’s hand. Sod this for a lark, they said in unison. Philadelphia, here we come! said the
Mellons and the Hugheses. Good idea, said Tom McRory, my great-granddad, and
together they all made it over sometime in the late ‘20s aboard the M.S. Hook of Holland out of Belfast and
Liverpool. Wary of cities, the McRorys shunned booming Philly, then the third
city of the world, and sought the rural work they knew. Whereas the Mellons
thrived in town, and of course went on to become the richest family in the
universe (Mellon Bank, Carnegie-Mellon University, etc.), and the scion of the
Hughes clan became Archbishop of New York (but no relation, as far as I know,
to the future recluse of Las Vegas), heaven for the McRorys was a chicken farm
in South Delaware, that rural backwater of horizon-busting flatness and wandering
creeks and small crossroad settlements like Johnnycake Landing (abandoned pier
lurching into the reed beds of the Delaware River) and Magnolia (the first
whiff of the not-so-distant South) and Odessa (not a hint of Ukraine did I
detect during a ten-minute visit to the place), a hinterland reminiscent in its
remoteness of the western reaches of Tyrone in the lee of the Sperrins, minus
the hills; reminiscent, too, of the not-so-remote American South, itself so
steeped in Irish lore. “The northernmost county of Mississippi,” as the region
has been called, with less wit than accuracy. This was the McRorys’ road to
Damascus. Tired of excessive Paddy-baiting on the part of the ignorant locals,
they decided to go one better and converted to Protestantism and rewrote their
names, and their identities, on the rolls of WASP America. But there’s no
denying the Tyrone backbone of old Tom McRory: when he died, in 1898, he owned
all thirty acres of that chicken farm, and it would have enriched his family
for generations to come had his son, my maternal grandfather, not sold it to a
gentleman from nearby Maryland named Perdue, inventor of the broiler chicken,
who even back then saw great possibilities in a chicken in every pot—and who of
course reamed my grandfather solidly up the kiester with an entirely inadequate
purchase price. Grandmother protested, to no avail. (The gals just had to put
up with it, in those days.) But with the proceeds of the farm sale, Grandfather
Rogers bought a grocery store on Adams Street in Wilmington, and purely by
coincidence a grocery store was exactly what you needed to weather the Great
Depression—by which time my dad’s lot, the Boylans of lower-scale French
Street, were having a rough time of it and Dad was thinking seriously how dashing
he’d look in an Army uniform.
