I came to America in 1975 and sensed immediately upon arrival that I had somehow stepped into the past.
The skyscrapers in New York did indeed tower magnificently toward the sky, and broad sidewalks moved quickly under my feet while I jostled through the rushing crowds. Huge cars and yellow taxis careened, blaring their horns in blinding sunlight as the avenues met the streets at dangerous intersections. A wildness filled the air. NYPD officers stood at every corner, bulging revolvers slinging from their hips, ever ready in this never-ending frontier. But this wonderful city in the New World couldn’t hide from its past.
European old-world ambiance, fixed in time, circled high above the skyline, frequently crashing down wildly and adrift some 3000 miles from home – when you’d hear snatches of Victorian speech from the gilded lobbies of hotels on Central Park South, Yiddish-speak from one-hundred-year-old Jewish delis on side streets, operatic voices and aromas out of old Italian establishments on the Upper East Side, Hiberno-English heard out of smoky half-door Irish bars from white-aproned barmen standing gaunt behind their mahogany counters, and guttural chatter from the beer halls of turn-of-century German-speaking immigrants along 86th Street.
These sounds, senses, and aromas laced with toxic subway steam rose to meet the newcomer, the new immigrant, the uninitiated, reminding them of their past, their present, and the possibilities for their future. It was all on offer, and it came as a package – best opened slowly and carefully.
What brought me to America was sudden and unexpected. I had been recruited as a nurse to a hospital in New Jersey, which had an acute nursing shortage at the time. The advertisement for nurses had appeared in the Irish Press, and out of curiosity, I applied. The quick response from the hospital flattered me, and I agreed to take the job. At 23, I had lived in London for two years, where the war in Northern Ireland loomed large in everyday social life and interaction. I wanted to leave. America sounded exciting, and I signed a two-year contract.
It is my second day in New York, and the CEO from the hospital in New Jersey came to pick me up. I waited for him outside the Statler Hilton hotel on Seventh Ave, and he arrived at the curbside on time in a red Lincoln town car. This big man got out of his car on a beautiful sunny April morning in New York, while across the street, a row of cherry blossoms fluttered star-like through the pink sunlight.
I almost laughed out loud. What could I possibly have to offer this important-looking man and his hospital that would go to all this trouble to bring me here? I was a little 5-foot-tall woman with just two years of post-graduate nursing experience. I felt they must have made a terrible mistake. But the man came over, greeted me warmly, and took me by the arm to his car. He took my beaten-up suitcase in his other hand and deposited me into the backseat of his Lincoln car, where I disappeared down into the white plush upholstery.
After living in London, I found New Jersey to be a backwater. Suddenly, I’m in the heart of American suburbia, where the average citizen at the time had difficulty locating Ireland on a map and was mostly unaware of its history and politics. But I didn’t need to hide my Irish accent here, which I had often done in London to hide my identity. There was no time to hide anything at all here, as I quickly discovered I had just entered the belly of another beast.
After a brief orientation to the hospital, I was assigned to the prison ward where sick men from the nearby penitentiary in Rahway were sent for medical care. I don’t know why hospital officials chose to assign me to this unit out of the 30 other Irish nurses, but they must have seen something in me, flattering or otherwise. I didn’t ask. Regardless, the prisoners loved my accent. Mostly, they didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, but they were all ears when I said it.
The prison guards were friendly but carried guns. I felt frightened as they opened one cell door after another for me to enter to perform my duties for my imprisoned patients. The first morning I entered a cell and greeted the patient in the bed, I turned to see the guard with a drawn gun pointed at us. It shocked me as the patients were vulnerable and sick. But, as time passed, I came to accept it.
After work and especially at night, I would often lie awake thinking of the prisoners’ grim existence. I thought of my mother back in 1958 in Cork, where we watched TV together as the newly elected Pope John XX111 visited Regina Coeli Prison on Christmas Day in Rome – bringing the prisoners gifts, consoling and cheering them on, and telling them not to despair. The old black and white TV screen of the new pope of peasant stock in 1958, embracing beaten-down prisoners, moved my mother to tears, as I, with my eight siblings, stood around her.
Now in New Jersey, I couldn’t wait to go to work the next day and see these men in my care. I felt my mother did the rounds with me, a guiding force through the walls, temporarily offsetting the inhumanity of incarceration.
I volunteered to work in the prison ward for the next year. Its grimness seemed familiar ground – my mother struggling in 1950s Ireland with young children in poverty while admiring Pope John on TV and crying with him as he made his pilgrimage to the forgotten and disposable of society.
I had indeed stepped into the past when I arrived in America, and I recognized it on my first day.
