Sheridan from Cavan

‘That’s the house where General Philip Sheridan was born’, my mother would proclaim on the monthly Sunday trip to Killinkere. This voice came from a face with shapely jet-black eyebrows (all natural), clear skin (also natural), and thin lips covered in a decisive smack of matt lipstick. She was the leader on these expeditions, keeping us children distracted over the two-hour car journey. Above the top of the passenger seat, we could see the back of her dark hair and the shoulders of her petite tailored green linen dress. The house was an unoccupied stone cottage, with a plaque to himself on it. The road was narrow enough, the car slow enough, to read the inscription: ‘The birthplace of General Philip H Sheridan 1830 to 1888’. Mammy was proud to share the parish with the Cavan man, a career officer in the Northern Army during the American Civil War. An exotic hero from up the road. For the four children in the back of a 1969 Ford Cortina (blue, with white roof), this landmark heralded the last outpost of the journey from Dublin that started after early mass and ticked off each colonial landmark in order of appearance. The Royal Canal (Dublin), the house of the President (built for the English Monarch’s Viceroy), town of Navan (in Royal County Meath), and Virginia, the Planter Town named after the Virgin Queen. Turn off here, pass Sheridan’s birthplace, then it was Killinkere and Granny’s house.

Regular trips continued, and rumbling started in the back of the car. Older siblings grew into wise, judgemental teenagers. Muttering about, ‘do you know what he did?’ I wondered why you’d put a plaque on an empty house, and why his family did not live there anymore. My questions were lost in the barrage of other demands for information. As the journeys clocked up, I tried to make the connection with the American cavalry as I knew it from Sunday matinee cowboys and Indians. The Indians were the baddies. When called up, or needed, the cavalry would ride in to aid brave white cowboys and save the logcabin farms. I tried to connect the army of dusty bugle-bearing heroes, frequently led by John Wayne, to this General Philip Sheridan of Cavan. I could never make that leap, always thrown by the American accent. My three older siblings humoured our mother, but over the trips, the diminishing Sheridan was tossed around like a tumbleweed. There would be guffaws from my brother as he scoffed at the house and scoffed at the General.

‘How do you know he was even born there? Maybe he was born in Killinkere, maybe he was born on the boat on the way to America, maybe he was born in America.’

I argued inwardly for what I believed was the case of truth – if there was a plaque to confirm it, his parents must have put it up and of course, it was true. I was only learning to grasp concepts of time, generations, and memorials. False news and revisionist history were yet to be recognised by any of us.

As I grew older, my mother listened as I listed off the journey markers for her. Her Sunday hair was grey. She had stopped dyeing it as she clutched at straws in her attempts to combat the pernicious anaemia and crucifying periods that drained all her energy. Her skin was too pale and clear, eyebrows still jet black, matt pink lipstick intact. She sat tightly in the front seat, conserving her energy for the flurry of arriving in Killinkere and getting the chicken into the range as quickly as possible to have dinner ready for one o’clock.

While he may have fought against the Confederate pro-slavery forces, Sheridan was far from a hero in today’s terms. Guilty of war crimes against civilians, leaving them homeless and starving, and, later, genocide against the Native American population. He was a New World Coloniser, committing war crimes in the name of freedom in the American Civil War, then afterwards carrying out acts of genocide while clearing the ‘wilderness’, now known as Yellowstone Park, of its Native American hunter-gatherer population.

The first time I drove myself to Cavan on a Sunday was on my motorbike, for my granny’s memorial mass. She was dead a month. My mother, a non-smoking teetotaller, greeted me with an offer of Powers Irish Whiskey and a cigarette out of a packet of red and white Carrolls Number 1. It was half past nine on a Sunday morning. Her hair was flat and grey. She may have been wearing trousers. I don’t recall, but I assume she put on lipstick going to mass.

The last time I passed by the house with the plaque, it was derelict and overgrown. Sitting in the passenger seat, I automatically registered the outpost for my two children in the back. My husband nearly fell out of

Did I know who this man was? Did I know His knowledge was from the extensive reading he had done around American Native Cultures and Sheridan’s role in their genocide. I listened and nodded.

My mother listened on all those journeys too. She did not argue with us. What would she have achieved by facing off against a gang of selfrighteous teenagers who were out to make the world right for everyone? She listened and offered no opinion until asked, trusting us to find our own way of dealing with histories. My last memory of her in her home place is standing in the kitchen between the range and the dairy in Killinkere, in navy trousers and a cardigan. She was recommending a the car with astonishment. I what he was responsible for? book about Native Americans.

by Maeve McCormack