Pearl Read Online Free PDF

or to start the construction of vest-pocket parks, who worked on school board elections and traveled to Albany to lobby state senators about universal pre-K education. The language of this new politics was large; history was invoked, in poetry and song: colonialism, oppression, the true spirit of the Irish land. Heroes were called
martyrs
. Her spine thrilled when she heard the word; she’d discovered it secretly, on her own, as other children might discover the term
sadist
or
coprophilia
. She had never heard the word
martyr
spoken aloud.
    But her mother had heard the word and spoken it; it was a word her mother was born knowing. So would you say that it was part of Pearl’s background even if it was silenced, rendered invisible? Maria Meyers was raised Catholic, but she was determined that her child would not be.
    The most venerated martyr of them all was Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands, a hunger striker, dead by self-starvation in November 1982, when Pearl was almost four years old. She saw his smiling face first over the mantel in Finbar’s apartment, a place of honor that in other Dublin apartments, the kind of apartment she would never see, would be reserved for a picture of the Sacred Heart, Christ with hair the same length as Bobby’s but not smiling, no, not smiling at all.
    Pearl first saw the picture of Bobby Sands framed in Finbar’s flat and then, later, enlarged, huge, on the wall of the room where the Cumman na Gael, the Gaelic Club, held its meetings. She enjoyed it there, enjoyed hearing Irish spoken, listening to the songs, moving on to the pub, and then to other meetings where the face of Bobby Sands was also on the wall. And she heard stories of great cruelties on the part of the British: torture, discrimination, civil rights denied; the innocent murdered, the guilty set free. She was excited because she felt that this, finally, was life, the life she dreamed of, where things were serious and people knew what was important and would say it. In Ireland, Pearl felt for the first time that she was a part of history. In America, history had no meaning for her. She could never see herself as part of American history: the founding fathers, with their pigtails and their faith in human goodness. It was in Ireland, beginning with Bobby Sands and his faith in the power of suffering, that she began to take her place. A place where people talked in large terms and sang songs about life and death and sacrifice, plaintive songs that seemed not about violence but about the loss of the hills, the mother, the beloved brave young man.
     
    Finbar’s first gift to Pearl was the complete writings of Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands described himself as an ordinary young Belfast boy, a boy who loved playing games, particularly Irish football, who loved walking in the mountains, who was particularly interested in birds. He did not begin by being political. He even played football on a Protestant team. He worked as a kind of mechanic for a company that repaired buses. And then the Unionists destroyed his neighborhood, setting fire to streets he’d lived on all his life, and evicting his family from their home for nothing, for being Catholic. He was eighteen years old. He said he joined the Irish Republican Army not because he loved violence but to protect his home and those he loved. He was arrested for participating in a demonstration that turned bloody, put into prison, set free; arrested again, found with a gun in his car. Put in a nightmare prison, a prison that became a synonym for inhumanity: Long Kesh, the H Block.
    At first when he was imprisoned, he and his comrades were classified as political prisoners and therefore not required to wear uniforms or to engage in ordinary penal work. They were permitted to meet together, to study, to consult. These privileges were revoked by Margaret Thatcher. The imprisoned IRA men were reclassified as ordinary criminals, no different from murderers or rapists. They were required to wear