Tag Archives: immigrants

Sins, Blessings, and Responsibilities

Sometime in the past, when the future United States was a colony of Great Britain, three young men from northern Ireland (so the family lore goes) left their native land and immigrated to this country.

At least one of them worked during the American Revolution as a “wagoner” of some sort for the American army. Apparently, people on both sides of my family served in some capacity for the American cause. After the war ended, according to records researched by my mother, the three immigrants settled in the southeast on land newly available for war veterans. I don’t know if the brothers took into account that native Americans may have been displaced for some of the land the veterans settled on.

Their descendants became farmers and small landowners. At least one of them owned a black slave and fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Records indicate he was captured by union forces and died in a federal prison camp, partly from malnutrition. Apparently, the food supply of my ancestor and other prisoners was purposely limited in retaliation for malnutrition allowed in Confederate prison camps.

After the Civil War, members of my family became a bit more well off. Some became farmers. One became a county sheriff and later moved to Nashville and became a police officer. Another did reasonably well as a foundry worker.

My father and my mother met in a Nashville public school, grew up, and fell in love, then married and began a family. My father took a bookkeeping course for free in a Nashville adult education school, founded to provide free vocational education for those unable to afford private schools. With his new training, he was able to take a job as a bookkeeper in an insurance firm, later advancing to sales. My parents moved to a new suburb just outside Nashville, where my brother and I were born and grew up.

My father’s company survived the great depression of the 1930’s, but reduced everyone’s salary to do so. My parents were saved from losing their home by one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which produced lower payments by allowing more years to pay house loans.

Our growing suburb sprouted churches for all the new families. We ended up attending a very loving Christian church, and I chose to follow the Christian faith when I was about nine years old.

My parents made sure my brother and I had the college education they weren’t able to enjoy.

My life has been blessed beyond what anyone could ask for. I can never pay back the countless people who have contributed: parents, teachers, pastors, friends, this country’s freedom. I owe it to them to live a life that blesses others as I was blessed.

Because we are blessed in order to bless others.

Place Lovers

 

We are creatures of place. In novels and movies, the setting of the story can prove as important as any character: the Russian Jewish community of Fiddler on the Roof, or Gilead’s Iowa religious setting, or Flannery O’Conner’s southern gothic background in her short stories. We are shaped by place, even in this era of generic fast food restaurants and blockbuster movies.

Place is felt strongly by the displaced. The first who felt it were the native Americans in the United States who were displaced by European settlers. The English who left homes in the British Isles for America experienced their own displacement as they tried to make early colonial America a subset of their former home. Germans moved in among the English-speaking communities. Jewish, Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants arrived. The descendants of freed slaves moved north after the Civil War. Southern whites dealt with an increasingly changed landscape. Asians, Hispanics, free Africans, and Caribbean islanders came. Recently, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners have wandered in.

Love of the old place, left behind family, and foreign heritage compete with attachment to the new place. Volumes have been written about the hybrid-American young adult seeking identity between two cultures.

Both old and new communities lay obligations on us. Americans of long duration in this country do well to recognize the gifts that newcomers bring, from the crop picker to the Ph.D. engineer. Newly-naturalized Americans retain pride in former cultures yet owe an allegiance to this country that supercedes allegiance to the old.

Not so much a bland melting pot as a rich-hued tapestry, somber tones alternating with cheerful ones.