Uncle Jimmie

When I was eight years old, my dad told me that his great-grandfather Jimmie was a stowaway on a ship from Ireland, and was the first Hamilton to place a foot on American soil. When I asked him why Jimmie would pull such a foolish stunt, his answer was short and sweet:  “Son, that’s about as far back as we wanna go.”  We never talked about it again much, and I reconciled to the fact that our big family came from the luck of an Irishman, prolly a horse thief, named Uncle Jimmie.

I was really happy that his great-grandson had been my dad, and that my dad had married the girl next door, because that meant that my grandfathers were neighbors, and both their farms were my back yard.

I was related to half the county and was privy to their farms also.  Acres of meadow-green fields were connected by dirt paths, that curled around fence-lines, ponds to fish in, hay lofts to jump from, and gullies to explore after a storm.  I would walk barefoot for miles to collect pop bottles along dusty roads, and trade them for a few pennies worth of candy and comics at Buster’s general store.  I remember how the air smelled before a rain, like sweet ginger mixed with jasmine, and going to sleep on a feather bed to the sound of whippoorwills.

Soon the family scattered and moved to Nashville.  Dad became a big shot, I became a college grad, and the farms became a distant memory.  That was a half century ago.

The old community is now gone, replaced by its name on a two-lane blacktop.  If you follow it long enough, you will cross Hamilton Road.  Not that we were famous, but that we were the only ones who lived there.  Today, other than the empty, small-planked, decaying house with a patch-tin roof, still tilting on cinder blocks, my paradise is all but forgotten.

Where did we come from?  I decided to do some Google research and uncovered the true story of Uncle Jimmie.

It was during the Black Winter of 1847.  In that time, the potato crop had failed in all of Ireland, and throngs of citizens were forced to flee their country, which was wrought with starvation and poverty.  Family lineages vanished into obscurity as malnutrition left the most vulnerable to disease and death.  Many of these poor souls, who were able, managed to board wooden ships (termed “coffin ships”) and sailed away to escape the famine, leaving bloodline, church, language and kin.  The unlucky were brought to England where they were tormented for their catholic faith, and the luckier landed in Canada or the United States, where they found a lesser evil.

One such Irishman was a boy of sixteen named Jimmie.  In the spring of 1847 he boarded a ship bound for Manhattan named “The Floridan,” a 500 ton American-built bark, which had made many such perilous voyages across oceans, carrying cargos of emigrants who traded away their life-savings in exchange for the hope of a better future abroad.  The boy was delivered safely to Manhattan, and by some strange affliction (a Forrest Gump moment), decided it was a good idea to put on a peddler’s pack, and walk a thousand miles from New York to West Tennessee.

Later, during a terrible storm in the October of 1849, this same ship would strike a shoal off the coast of England and be cut in half, drowning all one hundred seventy souls on board, save for three survivors found later hanging on its foremast.  A famous painting now hangs in the Munich Museum that depicts the worst maritime disaster of that year.  It is named, “The Wreck of the Floridan.”

Jimmie found a girl, planted some potatoes, and in the free and fertile rolling hills of Tennessee, he started our family.

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So we didn’t come from a horse thief after all, but from a scared kid just making a run for it, barely succeeding with the luck of the Irish.  These days I am thankful, and I feel a bit lucky in the decisions that I’ve made.  But sometimes at night, just before a rain, I wish for those days when I felt as one with the land.  I miss the farms, and my family, and the world, in which lay the richest, most poignant bloom of my youth.  But I know that world disappeared long ago.

I imagine that Uncle Jimmie, too, felt the same way.