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Chapter 1. An Irish Family Heritage
- University Press of Mississippi
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16 chapter 1 An Irish Family Heritage A family trait—bucking the system. —Anne McCaffrey, e-mail From a family cauldron of Irish heritage and a tradition of iconoclastic beliefs and behavior emerged a wild child who was a loner. Anne McCaffrey’s family background, explored in this chapter , provided much of the raw material that would, decades later, be transformed into science fiction. Like most families, Anne’s provided contradictory experiences for her, but she always had a sense of being loved and being special. Even as a very young child, Anne was aware that she had family qualities and traditions against which she would be measured. Her Irish family heritage, her unusual parents, and her brothers provided her with a strong sense of identity. The qualities that were needed to produce her writing began in her family traditions. Anne’s Irish heritage encouraged storytelling and a trust in psychic power. As a middle child and the only daughter, she struggled to create an identity that would impress her father. She learned about military discipline and structure from her father and about using writing to deal with her emotions from her mother, while her grandparents’ and her parents’ distrust of conformity and their belief in “bucking the system” allowed her to create heroines who did the same. Anne felt that she was different in some way, but when she was a child, this sense of difference did not present the problems that it would for her in adolescence. A happy and well-loved child, she acquired a sturdy sense of self 17 An Irish Family Heritage from her family. That self-image incorporated the freedom to be different, the importance of excelling at something, and the determination to succeed, even at a cost. These qualities, along with boisterousness and a belief in psychic phenomena, would at first cause Anne trouble, but those same traits would also enable her, years later, to become a successful author. Anne’s sense of her Irish American heritage came mainly from her grandfather McCaffrey and her grandmother McElroy (née McCann), her other grandparents having died before she had a chance to know them. Three of her four grandparents were Irish American in a time and place, nineteenth-century Boston, when bias against the Irish was common. In the middle of the nineteenth century, job ads placed in the newspapers often read “Help Wanted: Irish need not apply.” Requests for domestic servants advised that only “Protestant foreigners” would be considered . Anne’s grandparents and parents lived through the NINA (no Irish need apply) times, and they were bitter about the rampant prejudice. While the blatant discrimination would disappear later in the twentieth century, at the beginning of it, the Irish in Boston were “still concentrated in low-status, blue-collar jobs.” As they struggled to survive economically amidst virulent antiIrish prejudice, her grandparents displayed patient resistance, determination, and hope. Anne’s grandfathers were typical Irish Americans, one working as a policeman and a boat purser, the other as a journeyman engraver. However, they wanted more for their children than secure but dead-end jobs. Most Irish Americans remained a part of the working class usually for a second and third generation, but Anne’s grandparents succeeded in pushing her parents into the upper middle class by means of education. The one exception to the family Irishness was grandfather McCaffrey’s wife, but Anne never knew her. Selina died before Anne McCaffrey was born in 1926, but she has pictures of her; each one has her tall grandfather seated to minimize her grandmother ’s shortness. They had three daughters and a son, George Herbert, who became Anne McCaffrey’s father. A photographic portrait of Anne’s grandfather George Hugh, dated 1882, was the first picture he ever had taken. The print shows him in his State [54.221.26.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:21 GMT) 18 An Irish Family Heritage of Massachusetts military uniform, tall and thin with large hands, standing erect and unsmiling. A picture of him as an elderly man reveals a shock of white hair, big bushy eyebrows, a large unruly mustache, and a severe expression. There are no photographs of him holding his grandchildren, and Anne doesn’t remember ever playing with him. She was afraid of him. He towered over her, his large bristly mustache protruding toward her, and he was gruff. His house was scary, with enormous dark furniture. It smelled funny. He was her grandfather...