Fingy Conners & The New Century Read online

  It was obvious that the more cruel and bestial of the Irish nuns of the Good Shepherd Asylum of Limerick had themselves been similarly damaged, and thus acted much the same toward the inmates as they themselves had been treated, the result of the distress they experienced upon seeing their own torture reflected in these young girls’ faces. Some of these nuns had themselves been raped. Others were made to feel worthless and unwanted as children,. The nunnery provided one of the few avenues available to cast-off girls of that period to be respected and be cared for without stigma or shame.

  Those who found refuge cloaked in a nun’s habit would however find no true refuge from the sufferings of her own past other than burying it deep within her betrayed heart. And like most other human beings lacking the courage to confront those who hurt them, they instead lashed out at weaker targets, those they felt safely superior to, those they believed had no avenue of recourse against their assaulters.

  Bridget Sullivan was not allowed a visit with her brother unsupervised, but the nun who was her chaperone, Sister Bernard, was a kindly lady, and made a great fuss of having to unexpectedly step out of the visitors’ cell twice during the thirty minute visit, providing the siblings the privacy to say what they needed to say.

  “But can’t I hold little Michael, Sister?” John Sullivan asked the nun.

  “Oh, no, that is not allowed,” she admonished. “But as you leave today, my son, your sister will be waitin’ on the balcony with that tainted little fellow and you’ll catch a glimpse of him then.”

  “But I would like to hold him in me arms, Sister. He’s me nephew!”

  “No, I’m sorry, young man. You cannot. Those are the rules here, and they must be strictly obeyed.”

  The nun at that point, appearing to be overcome with emotion, rose again and left the cell.

  John watched as the door closed so he might speak in private. He was trembling with fright at the prospect of having to tell his sister that he would soon be leaving for America, possibly never to see her again.

  “Sister Bernard, she’s one of the nice ones,” said Bridget, after the nun walked out. “But she’s insulted now because ye didn’t genuflect to her.”

  “Genuflect? Are ye coddin’ me now, Bridget?”

  “No, Johnnie, I’m not. We must genuflect each time we encounter a nun or priest here, and sometimes that’s more than a hundred times a day.”

  John was appalled. The very same Irish priests and nuns irate about the requirement to bow or curtsy to British royalists expect their fellow Irish to bow to them?

  “Johnny,” Bridget sobbed, “they won’t allow us see our babies ever again once we’ve weaned them! At holy Mass on Sunday is the only time the others can even catch a glimpse of their older children, when the little ones go up to the altar rail to receive their communion. How will I ever recognize him at that age? How will I know him? Soon I will not be allowed to see or hold my little Michael, and I am so disconsolate over that prospect, that I think I might hang myself!”

  John was horrified.

  “No, Bridget. Ye mustn’t! I will find a way! Trust in me! I promise ye, I will find us a way!”

  His mind raced. He would be leaving two days hence, but now that Bridget’s predicament was made so painfully real, and extreme, Bridget so upset and John Sullivan so helpless in the short term to do anything about it, he completely lost his nerve to tell his sister of his plans.

  He looked down at the tortured hand he was comforting. Bridget’s fingers were red and cracked from scalding water and bleeding from scrubbing laundry all day. They stung and burned from the lye soap. Bridget had hoped to master the preliminaries of making lace, another source of income for the institution, so she might leave the Magdalene Laundry and its back-breaking labor behind.

  “We all work just like slaves in the laundry, John. The sisters take in tonnes of laundry, terrible laundry, from the hospitals, prisons, and butchers. We have to sort and mark the whole infectious filthy mess when it comes in, and we’re not allowed to wash our hands. I’m afraid to even itch meself, for fear of disease. It’s a horror just to touch it. We have to handle other people’s soiled knickers and underthings, baby clothes thick with shite and sick. ‘Tis an afflicted business, John. We aren’t allowed to speak at all, we must only pray and scrub, they remind us, scrub and pray our dirty sins away.”

  Bridget’s eyesight was not clear, and she told how the nuns were cruel in their assessments and demands. Her hesitation in reciting in catechism class was not due to stupidity, as the nuns had berated, but rather the result of her seeing a blurry form where others saw a crisply defined written word. Her lace-making attempts could never come anywhere near to meeting the nuns’ standards because she could not see well enough to achieve such fine work. She concluded she might find herself doomed to working in the nightmarish laundry for the remainder of her days.

  “One poor little girl who I made friends with here returned only just last week from an eleven month hire up in Tyrone. The nuns sold her to a farmer and his family. She had to sleep on a pile of straw in the hallway, and every morning she had to be awake before everyone else, to light the fire and clean up every bit of straw before the others came downstairs. She had to go out in the freezin’ cold without warm clothes to bring in the cows and milk and tend to them. And the farmer violated her over and over, and now she’s back here, again with child, and the nuns treat her as if she were a prostitute! They placed that poor little girl into his evil clutches, and they took his filthy money for it, while she herself received not a penny for her labors. She’s not to blame for any of it! This is a prison, John, and we are no better than slaves. We are white slaves! I have been incarcerated, and my baby will soon be taken from me and incarcerated here too, or sold away from me. I am not a criminal, John. My baby is not a criminal, he’s my son! I hate our father! I hate our mother! How could they discard their own daughter rather than kill the priest who did this to her?”

  John’s head was spinning. He wished he could say that his father’s betrayal of his own child and his conspiring with the Church surprised him, but he could not. The emotional distance their father maintained from his own children had left all his offspring chronically insecure and fearful. Their father had himself been orphaned at an early age. He was never loved. He was not capable of giving what he himself had never been given.

  “I realize things are terrible now, Bridget,” said her increasingly panicked brother, not quite knowing how to process these alarming new revelations. “But where could ye possibly go? What would ye do? Father will not allow ye back home. I have no resources of me own as of yet, but I will. I promise I will. People are fightin’ tooth and nail for rotten scraps and dyin’ by the thousands from hunger in this famine. How would ye and the baby survive? There is no food in this bleedin’ country! As bad as it is in here, ye can’t be livin’ with yer baby somewhere out in a peat bog, eatin’ dirt!”

  Silently to himself John chastised Bridget for a moment. He wondered how his sister could ever allow that priest to do this to her. Why didn’t ye fight and scream!? he wanted to yell at her. But he was all too familiar with the overpowering dominance of the Church and how its leaders squashed the common people in both body and spirit as if they were of no more value than insects.

  When they were children everyone for miles around knew that the neighbor down the lane, a man of certain influence, was raping his own daughters, yet the Sullivan children were required to tip their caps and greet him respectfully as they passed him. But the neighbors whose son had resigned from the priesthood, they were told they must cross to the other side of the street and cast down their eyes when it was that family whom they passed.

  The hypocrisy was suffocating the country.

  Sister Bernard returned. It was time to end the visit. John held Bridget tightly.

  “I promise, Bridget. Remember that.”

  Bridget was escorted out first, and up the stairs. Then a few minutes later, John was shown out th
e door into the courtyard. Once outside, the nun pointed upward. There on the second floor balcony stood John Sullivan’s sister Bridget, dangling baby Michael in her outstretched arms as if in offering, alongside three other girls doing exactly the same thing with their babies. A stern nun stood behind them, prompting them, ordering them, admonishing them. The group was cruelly on display.

  “This is their shame,” loudly announced the nun from the balcony, her ridiculing voice echoing off the incarcerating walls glistening with shards atop. “They are showing ye their sin. See, now? Mind ye the sight of these girls! It is here with us they’ve been left, holdin’ the baby.”

  “That’s where it comes from, Jim, that saying, that expression,” his mother had told him after finishing her story. “The warning was, ‘don’t be left holdin’ the baby.’ The nuns meant it, literally.”

  Once he and his new bride Mary McGrady had become settled in Buffalo, John Sullivan from County Clare posted letters to his sister Bridget back in Ireland, and to his parents. He pledged to work hard so he could get Bridget and her son on a ship headed for America. He thought this would satisfy his parents, having Bridget and Michael clear across the Atlantic rather than just over the Sarsfield Bridge. But his pledge did not elicit the expected result.

  John wrote more letters to Bridget, promising her that by early 1854 at the very latest, and perhaps even sooner, he and Mary would have enough saved to give her and Michael a new start, a new life. “Just hold on, Bridget,” he implored.

  But Bridget did not reply.

  Perhaps she had no money for posting a letter. Or perhaps more likely, after opening and reading them first, the nuns kept John’s letters a secret from her, preventing Bridget from ever seeing them for fear of losing an industrious and profitable worker. John’s message may have been anathema to the sisters, for Bridget’s hands were needed more than ever in the laundry, times being as hard as they were; people’s filthy knickers were the convent’s main source of revenue.

  In 1852, a letter had arrived from Ireland from John’s parents that for quite some time extinguished any joy that John and Mary Sullivan were feeling over their first baby’s approaching birth.

  Bridget Sullivan had hung herself from a coat hook one rainy midday in the Magdalene Laundry as the others ate their porridge lunch.

  The nuns buried her anonymously, away from prying eyes in an unmarked mass grave, mixed in with all those other young sinners who had preceded her. The only record left of Bridget Sullivan was a notation of her name on a list of the deceased in a ledger tucked away in the back on a musty shelf in the Good Shepherd Asylum in Limerick, Ireland, where it would lay unread and forgotten for the next century and a half.

  Fingy

  Fingy Conners liked to boast that he had emerged from his mother’s womb already a brawler, delivering precisely targeted haymakers with both fists clenched and punching. As a baby it was said he flailed and kicked and hit at his parents so forcefully and unerringly that at the age of just a few months his mother found herself avoiding picking him up or holding him. Little Jimmy Conners was a baby who seemed to have little need or tolerance for tender touches, coddling, or a mother’s comfort. Mary Scanlan Conners even postponed changing her baby’s diapers for as long as possible, for the undertaking always proved a scatological battle.

  Just as did the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan, Fingy Conners held with a religious fervor the unwavering conviction that he was created superior to all those around him. That it was God’s will and His choosing that Fingy Conners should succeed wildly and be a leader of men. That anyone who might oppose him was in effect contradicting God’s plan and therefore deserved to be crushed.

  Many of the nation’s very rich were unabashedly partial to Charles Darwin’s axiom of natural selection as it pertained to the ascendant stature of a certain caliber of human. One’s applying this logic established the converse as well. The corollary, mostly whispered, being that the poor were such due to their genetic inferiority. This concept, that they themselves were solely responsible for being poor, initiated rage among the lower classes, motivating them to stage work stoppages and strikes and fueling their crusade to form powerful labor unions.

  To Conners and those whom he considered his peers—even as those “peers” scoffed at the absurdity of the street thug’s claim of being equal to their stature—labor unions were evil. Unions stood in the way of the natural order of things, in the way of progress and innovation. And profit. The laborer’s true and only place in life, these superior men claimed, was to be a barely-surviving cog in the great wheel of industry and to be grateful for being allowed even that much. Men working 84-hour weeks amid deadly conditions in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills were paid but $10. That seemed just about right to Fingy Conners, for if they were worth more, they would have certainly risen above the rest just as he had.

  Conners turned his back on institutional education at age 13 in order to ply the cobalt-blue Great Lakes as a steward and cabin boy less out of boredom with school than in response to a calling to satisfy his profound restlessness and get on with the seeking of his destiny as he perceived it. And to get away from pursuant police.

  Struggling to read by lamp light in his tiny bunk at night deep in the ship’s hold, he became convinced of the ideology of Manifest Destiny, the belief whereby the lands and resources of the North American West were created solely to be at the disposal of superior men, the assets existent for the sole accruing of superior individuals’ wealth and power. Conners extended this philosophy to every area of his life, whereby everything was there simply for the taking, as was only apropos for one as exceptional as he by way of his grabbing it from whomever happened to be holding it at the moment.

  During his travels on the inland seas he observed how crucial those waterways were proving to the growth of the two nations that shared them. Other men were mining, harvesting, grazing and exploiting the resources of the North American West, but Fingy Conners saw clearly the link that was the transporting of all these resources to the consumer. At every port in which the boy’s ship stopped to off-load or take on freight, desperate laborers duked it out with each other on the docks for the privilege of earning a few pennies an hour breaking their backs. He was fascinated and disgusted by the competition among the masses for the most menial of jobs. He knew in his soul he was never meant to end up one of these.

  As he grew into adulthood, it became apparent that Fingy’s own special brand of brilliance was in his corralling, bullying and controlling of men and the exploitation of the unfortunate circumstances in which they found themselves. His first taste of power came at the age of twenty three when on the wave of one of the numerous labor upheavals that plagued Buffalo’s docks he rose overnight from lowly longshoreman to assume leadership of his own gang. To establish his authority among older and larger men, he addressed the detachment of freight handlers waiting for the turn-to from their freshman boss to start them off on their initial toil.

  ”If dere’s a mudder’s son in dis here gang dat t’inks he kin lick me, let ‘im come up and do it right now,” he challenged. It was a commonplace enough provocation, for men on the docks rose to become foremen and retained that position largely through their readiness to use their fists on all comers.

  A muscular man over six feet tall stepped up to respond to the ultimatum.

  “So, you t’ink yous is good a man as me, Pat?” asked the neophyte boss.

  “Tis within an inch of yer life I’ll surely be after baitin’ yous, Fingy Conners, just as soon as ye take yer coat off,” boomed the grinning Irish longshoreman to the prompting cheers of his fellow workers.

  “Well den, Pat, yous is fired. I won’t be havin’ me no man in dis gang wot t’inks he kin lick me.”

  Among the roustabouts of the First Ward it was a given that a boss longshoreman must be a boss walloper first and foremost; that a foreman must prove his mettle by licking every member of his gang and retire from that p
osition the moment he proved no longer up to the task. And so with a mixture of brute force and cunning that would become his formula for success, Fingy Conners began his steady and unstoppable rise from relative illiteracy to the apex of power and wealth to become one of the largest individual employers of labor in the United States.

  He accomplished this by instituting a system perfected from his string of saloons from which men were hired, paid and fired. A portion of their weekly wage was paid not in cash, but in the form of brass slugs which could be redeemed for one thing only, alcohol at a Fingy Conners saloon.

  The laborers who spent the most money over and above their brass slugs each week in his saloons were the first to be hired again the following week.

  His boss longshoremen and boss grain scoopers, most of whom ran saloons of their own, were installed by Conners to manage the many gangs of common dock laborers. These bosses earned their lucrative and profitable positions in part by buying all their beer for their saloons from Fingy’s Magnus Beck Brewery, and in another part by functioning as Fingy’s goon squad.

  On the docks a scam was initiated early on whereby each boss longshoreman would create a number of nonexistent employee positions on his work gang. A fixed rate would be bid to unload a ship. Come payday, that money would be divided equally among all the men, including the phantom workers. The boss pocketed the wages of these phantom workers for himself. Because few men worked more than a week or two for the same boss, they would be unfamiliar with the other men on the gang, and never suspect the scheme.

  The boss longshoremen additionally were an instrumental cog in Fingy’s self-perpetuating machine by their freely distributing brass checks among their penniless gang for use as advance credit to purchase drinks at Fingy’s saloons to ensure their future hiring. Hot and thirsty, needing to unwind, hesitant of going home to face their spouse’s certain wrath with pockets empty, fearful of being without work the following week, the tokens’ temptation was oftentimes too great to resist.