Michael Collins

"But do you know at all who Michael Collins is?" An Irish UN staffer asked me this, her eyes twinkling but insistent. This was years ago. I was an intern just back from Vienna. "I certainly hope so," I said; but she gave me the bio anyway—an anti-portrait of myself that measured the mismatch between my face and my bittersweet historical name. Show tells nothing in my case. But the staffer saying "Michael Collins" made me see the syllables stir on top of her thoughts, like loose down still clinging to geese as the birds take flight, working out their V and honking at the sky, which of course doesn't move out of anyone's way but stays stitched in the eyebeam—even of the astronaut circling above it—as if to say, "did you hope that after all I'm not the home of God?" Michael Collins' invisible army moved as though Under the protection of God's sky against Dublin Castle, his Flying Columns harpooning the English occupiers till Britain sent in Black and Tans to burn and torture and fight to win the price on Collins' head. Strange that I, who've fought no more than color line profiteers, should sign the name of guerrilla war's inventor—one whose smallest deed, larger than my words, helped show Mao and Ho and Castro how it's done. No doubt my name traveled a secret route across the British empire, like a fugitive smuggled out of Ireland, to make its ironic comment on my life. No doubt it set out in the1600s, following some route that trade had blazed, like John Holman leaving England for the slave trade in Sierra Leone, and taking up with an African woman who bore him children while he grew rich. The route must have been like the one he followed from Sierra Leone out to South Carolina, where his half white offspring married Collinses and lived off slaves. In short, it didn't take long for the name to split in two, sported by masters and branded into slaves like a special bitterness, like the bitter wit of Josiah Collins' slaves when their plan to escape from him was foiled; sold, they sang fear into the hearts of the North Carolina hamlet they were held in for transshipment. Ha! Collinses bought and sold and buying; Collinses running away, Collinses fighting against and Collinses for Lord Salisbury's claim that neither Hottentots nor Irishmen were fit for self-rule. Collinses in old Ireland like their counterparts in Mendeland tallied up as talking child-bearing money— Collinses in throat-cutting revolts, Collinses putting them down. My name, my famous me-obliterating name can make any enemies list in the world, or any list of saints. Michael Collins himself, having done a deal with England, was shot down as Judas and bitterly mourned as a Jesus. Proof that there's no destiny and hardly any me—nothing much more than fortune and flesh and history—the never-ending fugue of belief and disillusion that we each shut up in a name.