Commentary
Despite the highly theoretical sounding title of this commentary this is really a part of the very prosaic working class story that I have written about in several earlier commentaries in this space. As I have mentioned previously, this space is usually devoted to ‘high’ politics and the personal is usually limited to some experience of mine that has a direct political point. Sometimes, however, a story is so compelling and makes the point in such a poignant manner that no political palaver is necessary. This is the third part of what now has turned into a trilogy of the fate of a working class family from my old neighborhood. Let me continue the tale.
In An Uncounted Casualty of War (hereafter, Uncounted), written last May, and The Working Class Buries One of Its Own (hereafter, Working Class), written in January, I mentioned that I had recently returned to the old working class neighborhood where I grew up after a very long absence. I wrote in Working Class that maybe it was age, maybe it was memory, maybe it was the need at this late date to gain a sense of roots but that return has haunted me ever since. I have gone back a few times since last May to hear more of what had happened to those in the old neighborhood from a woman who continues to live there and had related the above stories to me. Uncounted was about the fate of my childhood friend Kenny. Working Class recounted the fate of Kenny’s mother, Margaret, and here I present the story of Kenny’s father, James. (Check the archives for the previous two stories.)
As I related in Uncounted and reemphasized in Working Class my own family started life in the housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching my parents saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. The house was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, my parents and others including Kenny’s parents, to own their own homes and not be shunted off to decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder. That is where I met Kenny and through him his family, including his mother Margaret and his father James. She seemed like a nice woman although I never got to know her well. His father is just a distant, vague memory.
I also mentioned in Uncounted that in my teens I had lost track of Kenny who as he reached maturity took the death of a friend who died in Vietnam very hard. The early details of his behavior changes are rather sketchy but they may have involved illegal drug use. The overt manifestations were acts of petty crime and then anti-social acts like pulling fire alarms and walking naked down the street. At some point Kenny was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Then came the inevitable institutionalizations. Apparently, with drugs and therapy, there were periods of calm but for over three decades poor Kenny struggled with his inner demons. In the end the demons won and he died a few years ago while in a mental hospital.
Needless to say Kenny’s problems were well beyond his mother and father’s ability to comprehend or control. His father, like mine, had a limited education, few marketable skills and meager work prospects. They were always, as many workingmen in the neighborhood were, on the edge-last hired, first fired when an economic downturn came. Thus, there were no private resources for Kenny and he and they were thus consigned to public institutionalization schemes. The shame of this, among other things, led to his father’s early death many, many years ago in the mid-1980’s. This is where James’s story comes into focus.
Kenny’s woes, as I found out this January, were only part of this sad story about the fate of Margaret and James's sons. Kenny had two older brothers, James, Jr. and Francis, whom I did not really know well because they were not around. Part of the reason for that was they were in and out of trouble or one sort or another and were not around the neighborhood much. My neighborhood historian mentioned in January that at some point both sons had dropped out of sight and had not been seen by their mother for over thirty years. They are presumed to be dead or that is the story Margaret told my historian. If I have time at some point I may try to track down what happened to them and then we will have a five-part story. At that point I will surely need the literary resources of someone like James T. Farrell in his Studs Lonigan trilogy for guidance.
For now, however, let me continue with James’s fate. My historian friend told me that James and my father when they were young married men were very, very close buddies, something that I was totally unaware of. Thick as thieves, as the old adage goes. Apparently they liked to go drinking together, when they could afford it. Nothing startling there. I do find it odd though that a South Boston-raised Irishman and a Kentucky-raised hillbilly hit it off. However, as James lost control over the behavior of his sons he became more morose and more introverted. At this point their long friendship faded away.
James, apparently, was like many an Irish father. His sons, good or bad, were his world. Hell, they were his sons and that was all that mattered. They were to be forgiven virtually anything except the bringing of shame on the household. I know the intricacies and absurditiies of that shame culture from my own Irish mother. The boys in their various ways nevertheless did bring shame to the household. Kenny we know about. It is hard to tell but from what my historian related to me for James, Jr. and Francis there were bouts of petty and latter grand thievery and other troubles with the law. She was vague in her recollections here although crimes, great and small, were not uncommon in the greater neighborhood. The old ironic saying in the neighborhood that a man’s son was destined to be either a thief or a priest ran truer here than one might have thought.
Well, the long and short of it is that James started to have severe physical problems, particularly heart problems and had trouble holding a steady job. In the end the shock of his sons' disappearances without a word literally broke his heart. Anything, but not abandonment. His end, as my historian related the details, was not pretty and he suffered greatly.
As I said in Working Class I am a working class politican. That is the great legacy that my parents left me, intentionally or not. As I have asked previously at this point in relating the other parts of the story -are there any great political lessons to be learned here? No, I do not think so but this family’s saga of turning in on itself in the absence of some greater purpose and solution goes a long way to explaining why down at the base of society we have never had as much as nibble of independent working class political consciousness expressed in this country. That, my friends, is why this saga can aptly be entitled history and class consciousness, but let us put them in small letters. As for Kenny, Margaret and James may they rest in peace.
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