Fiction 3
"Baby Rose and the Shaydjook" Copyright © 1998
Baby Rose and the Shaydjook
by: Richard J. Waters
AUTHORS NOTE:
Those who have read the autobiography of Sammy Davis, Jr. will recognize the nicknames "Massey" and "Mose." The meeting of Hank Locknane and Mr. Davis, when the latter was eleven years old, is fictional as written but based on an actual incident, as are almost all of the circumstantial elements of this book. Details have been invented, of course, to flesh out the bare bones of history but the essentials are based in truth __or at least as close to truth as family legends ever come.
My friend and father, Captain Henry Waters, NYPD, was the model for this book's hero and my beautiful mother, Rosemary McDonald Waters, for the heroine. Perhaps the word "model" is not really suitable here since this story has more been reduced from reality than enlarged in some ways. Unfortunately, they both passed away long before this book was even conceived, leaving me bereft of more than mere literary detail. Unlike Shakespeare's Caesar, however, their good deeds and good natures survive intact and all those who knew them will quickly realize that any imperfections I have ascribed to their fictional analogues are, of course, strictly my own.
The Reader may wonder more than occasionally throughout this book if there really was such a culture as I have described for the Irish Travellers. Be assured that there was and still is, in one form or another. If aspects of their part of the story seem exaggerated or even unbelievable, please be patient with this book and its author: they are true to the best of my memory.
There are a number of myths concerning the Travellers' origin in the old country. Those all seem to me on the one hand, fanciful, and on the other, insupportable. It is safe to say, however, that in nineteenth century Ireland the Travellers __or Tinkers, as they were called by outsiders__ lived in an uneasy symbiosis with the poorly mixed mainstream cultures of feudalism, colonialism and tribalism. Always a diminutive minority, they were raised above an "untouchable" status not by the tolerance or goodwill of their "betters" but only by their skills, which were in great demand.
Those skills were traditionally divided in their exercise by gender, as was common at the time. The men were generally horse-breeders and/or traders, often metalworkers and tinsmiths specializing in ingenious repairs. The women's contributions were more directly essential to the monetary income of the families and clans, however, than those of their settled neighbors.
Traveller wives were primarily successful peddlers of merchandise, occasionally peddlers of fortunes, blessings or curses and sometimes mendicants asking for "a penny for the children, Mum." More often than not, the begging was an afterthought, an habitual practice, not unlike the picking of berries along the roadside simply because they were available with a minimum of effort. But on more than a few occasions, such pennies were really all that could be counted on truly to feed the children.
They were outlaws in the passive definition: people deprived of the benefits of the law; excluded from the commonwealth of the greater nation.
In fact, the direct economic interdependence of male and female Travellers was more analogous to that of a hunter-gatherer society __also nomadic__ than of any other culture on Earth, saving only the Romany Gypsies, I suppose. (Neither people welcome such comparisons.) Those of the Irish Travellers who came to America, and there were many, __perhaps tens of thousands now living in the U.S.A. count themselves as such, including your Author__ generally arrived penniless, counting on those unschooled skills of both genders as their only assets.
In a thirty to forty year period every single such asset on which they could count was rendered insignificant. The automobile replaced the horse, inexpensive mass production and distribution virtually eliminated the need for the wandering tinker or peddler, and Universal Education and the Women's Suffrage Movement threatened to destroy even the illusion of Manhood __stress the capital "M"__ that remained to their men.
The Clan was sundered, split along many lines, and remains so to this day.
The descendants of Rose Burke McDonald __Rose Quirk, in this tale__ number many men and women of exceptional character and achievement whom I am proud to call Cousin. Almost all have been raised away from the Life, as it is often called by Travellers. Some like myself have tried to take it up again with limited success. A few have remained on the road to follow it all their lives, and with honor.
Still, a great number of our extended family remain trapped in a descending spiral of alienation and depredation, some of them outlaws now in the active sense. It is a great tragedy and, were it not for the courage and determination of Rose McDonald and her daughters, it might have been a greater one.
The names of the principal characters in this story have often been partially or completely changed to allow for more freedom of expression on my part in writing it. Too often, using the real names of their historic counterparts, I had found myself unable to maintain the unobtrusive tone required for the narration of a fictional work: thus the changes. However, all of the characters in this book are depicted exactly as I thought them to be long ago and/or naturally, where passing time has dimmed my memory, as I want them to have been today __with a reasonable deference paid to historical accuracy.
The sole exception to the above principle concerns Michael Quirk __Michael McDonald in real life. It is my mother's image of him that is preserved here. My uncle Michael disappeared long before my birth, in the circumstances described within, remaining to this day a man of impenetrable mystery for me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The short prose sections at the head of each chapter are taken quite out of context from the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay, Representative Men, published in 1846 and even more relevant at the close of the Twentieth Century than during the middle of the Nineteenth. Dr. Emerson has expressed no objections to this cavalier treatment __to the best of my knowledge.
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