FOURTH OF JULY: JOSEPH O'CONNORfamously visited all the Dublins in the US – there are 11 in all – and it was near a Dublin in the Deep South that he had a conversation he has never forgotten. In honour of the Fourth of July, this extract from his new book reflects on that simple conversation and the changes that have since occurred
ALL IN ALL, I’d say I have spent a month in the American South, just roaming around and looking at things and talking to people and being late for everything and making notes and collecting facts for my book. I never once saw anything we might call “racism” and I often found myself wondering why. For this had been the homeland of slavery and segregation. A place where human beings – plenty of them Irish – had sold one another, and owned one another, and branded one another like livestock, and gambled for one another at card tables, and left one another to their children in their will. A place where rape was considered an employer’s perk and where the truths of how life was lived until not all that long ago are so intensely disturbing that you wonder just how it is lived now. And then one night I found myself in a town not far from one of the Dublins, having one of those small, trivial, unimportant conversations you remember for the rest of your life.
I was in a taxi at the time, having only recently arrived in town. It was a beautiful spring evening. There was blues music on the radio. And until you’ve driven the streets of a southern American town, as the dusk is coming on, and the air smells of crushed lilac, and you’re so very far from home, and anything could happen, you mightn’t understand how beautiful the ordinary can be. I asked the taxi driver where he would recommend me to go later in the evening for a beer and a few laughs. “Well now,” he said, happily, indicating the right-hand side of the street, “We go over here.” Before adding, “And they go over there.” For a moment or two, I didn’t know what he meant. We go over here. And they go over there. And then slowly it dawned on me that he was talking about race. I asked if there was anywhere in town where everyone went. The blues music played. A moment or two passed. “Not really, sir,” he said, as though surprised by the question. “We go over here. They stay there.”
It’s a conversation I’ve never forgotten, for it was an education, a revelation. The greatest things we learn, in my own experience anyway, are not in the classroom, the textbook or the church; they are in the everyday moment of the apparently simple, the thrown-away remark to fill in time. And I thought it often in the days, weeks and months leading to Barack Obama’s electoral victory. He chose not to make an issue of his race, to appeal to all who wanted change – all who were willing to alter the world by the simple act of crossing the street. Had you told any black person in the South, even as recently as the 1960s, that in the year 2008 a man whose father was African, and whose wife is the direct descendent of an American slave, would be elected to the most powerful office in the world, you would simply not have been believed. How could you be?
Many years after that visit, I was researching another book, this time in the New York Public Library. It was my novel Redemption Falls, the story of a group of Irish immigrants drawn into the American Civil War, when some fought for freedom, and some fought for slavery, and most fought because they were ordered to fight by the wealthy, the people who have never done the dying in any of America's wars. As part of my work I read the transcripts, made in the 1930s, of Edison-recorded conversations with a number of American former slaves. These brave, comradely, irrepressible people, who were bought and sold, their culture destroyed, but who had lived – unlike many of their loved ones – into the era of technology, when a voice could be transferred to a crackling wax disc.
One of them, an elderly woman, remembered the words of a powerful old spiritual that would be quoted by Martin Luther King to an audience of millions, but which she herself had often sung – quietly, to herself – in the cruel years when their promise seemed impossible. “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, I am free at last.” And it seems to me now, at this beautiful moment for the whole world, that it is not only the descendants of that woman who are free. But all of us, in some small, precious way.
Extracted from The Irish Male: His Greatest Hits (Including the RTÉ Drivetime Diaries)by Joseph O'Connor, published by New Island, €15.99