quitting Ireland

"Land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for!  For 'tis the only thing that lasts."



     The following passages from the novel Gone With The Wind describe Scarlett O'Hara's father Gerald O'Hara.

--------------- [excerpt] ---------------- Gerald had come to America from Ireland when he was twenty-one.  He had come hastily, as many a better and worse Irishman before and since, with the clothes he had on his back, two shillings above his passage money and a price on his head that he felt was larger than his misdeed warranted.  

There was no Orangeman this side of hell worth a hundred pounds to the British government or to the devil himself; but if the government felt so strongly about the death of an English absentee landlord's rent agent, it was time for Gerald O'Hara to be leaving and leaving suddenly.  

True, he had called the rent agent "a bastard of an Orangeman," but that, according to Gerald's way of looking at it, did not give the man any right to insult him by whistling the opening bars of "The Boyne Water."

For this and other reasons, Gerald's family was not inclined to view the fatal outcome of this quarrel as anything very serious, except for the fact that it was charged with serious consequences.  For years, the O'Haras had been in bad odor with the English constabulary on account of suspected activities against the government, and Gerald was not the first O'Hara to take his foot in his hand and quit Ireland between dawn and morning.  

His two oldest brothers, James and Andrew, he hardly remembered, save as close-lipped youths who came and went at odd hours of the night on mysterious errands or disappeared for weeks at a time, to their mother's gnawing anxiety.  

They had come to America years before, after the discovery of a small arsenal of rifles buried under the O'Hara pigsty.  

Now they were successful merchants in Savannah, "though the dear God alone knows where that may be," as their mother always interpolated when mentioning the two oldest of her male brood, and it was to them that young Gerald was sent.

----------------- [excerpt 2] -----------
...If the educational equipment which Gerald brought to America was scant, he did not even know it.  

Nor would he have cared if he had been told.  

His mother had taught him to read and to write a clear hand.  He was adept at ciphering.  And there his book knowledge stopped.  The only Latin he knew was the responses of the Mass and the only history the manifold wrongs of Ireland.  He knew no poetry save that of Moore and no music except the songs of Ireland that had come down through the years.  

While he entertained the liveliest respect for those who had more book learning than he, he never felt his own lack.  And what need had he of these things in a new country where the most ignorant of bogtrotters had made great fortunes? in this country which asked only that a man be strong and unafraid of work?


------------------ [excerpt 3] -----------------
...These twin lines of somber trees were his, his the abandoned lawn, waist high in weeds under white-starred young magnolia trees.  The uncultivated fields, studded with tiny pines and underbrush, that stretched their rolling red-clay surface away into the distance on four sides belonged to Gerald O'Hara -- were all his because he had an unbefuddled Irish head and the courage to stake  everything on a hand of cards.

     Gerald closed his eyes and, in the stillness of the unworked acres, he felt that he had come home.  Here under his feet would rise a house of whitewashed brick.  Across the road would be new rail fences, inclosing fat cattle and blooded horses, and the red earth that rolled down the hillside to the rich river bottom land would gleam white as eiderdown in the sun -- cotton, acres and acres of cotton!  

The fortunes of the O'Haras would rise again.

-------------------- [excerpt 4] ---------------
...Gerald was on excellent terms with all his neighbors in the County, except the MacIntoshes whose land adjoined his on the left and the Slatterys whose meager three acres stretched on his right along the swamp bottoms between the river and John Wilkes' plantation.

     The MacIntoshes were Scotch-Irish and Orangemen and, had they possessed all the saintly qualities of the Catholic calendar, this ancestry would have damned them forever in Gerald's eyes.  True, they had lived in Georgia for seventy years and, before that, had spent a generation in the Carolinas; but the first of the family who set foot on American shores had come from  Ulster, and that was enough for Gerald.

"As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."

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