Lessons From an Unwritten Autobiography
TWICE, PUBLISHERS HAVE approached me to suggest I write a memoir or an autobiography, and both times I instantly recoiled from the prospect. I can’t say quite why I did, perhaps because of the implication that my life was over when to me it seemed so intensely in progress. But just recently a friend suggested a title, The Unfinished Education of Jack Miles, that opened the closed door just a crack. It was the word unfinished that loosened things up, suggesting that whatever had been learned, there was more still to be learned. So perhaps now, homebound amid a pandemic, I could allow myself to tell a few stories about lessons learned long ago.
A first story. The scene is Ireland in the mid-19th century. Because of English colonialism, the rural population has been forced off all the good agricultural land and into the Irish badlands, where little can be cultivated but potatoes. And then something terrible happens. A deadly disease, the potato blight, strikes the island, and famine results—severe, ghastly famine. Potato blight is first identified in County Monaghan, an impoverished chunk in the center of the island, and before the blight is finally contained, 30 percent of Monaghan’s population will die. Now, Owen and Mary Gunn, owners of the farm where the blight is first identified, happen to be my great-great-grandparents. Their daughter Bridget marries a Monaghan man named James Campbell. James and Bridget have a daughter, Catherine Campbell, my grandmother. Catherine emigrates to England to work as a domestic servant in the household of the royal physician. There in England, she meets and marries a laborer named Michael Murphy. Catherine and Michael, Kate and Mike, immigrate to Chicago, where Kate finds work as a cleaning lady and Mike drives a streetcar for the public transit system until he is laid off in the Great Depression. Kate and Mike have a daughter, Mary Murphy, born in 1919, who marries a man named John Miles. John and Mary Miles have a son, whom they name John
