What is the meaning behind Jeanne Charters’ novel Shanty Gold?

Shanty Gold is so named because in many Irish-American communities, there are three distinct socio-economic classes. The poor and uneducated are called “Shanty Irish.” As a family progresses into middle class, they are deemed “Lace Curtain Irish” (my second book of the trilogy, Lace Curtain). When they become successful and financially secure, they are named “Silk Stocking Irish” (my third novel, Silk Stocking).

Each class holds its challenges. Each novel tells the story of a particular girl and how she survives or is destroyed by the trials of her time. Each girl is the daughter of the woman in the preceding novel.

How did I choose my first heroine, Mary Boland?

My great-grandmother, Mary Bolen, was a woman I never knew. I heard her name whispered by my mother and aunts, though she died before they were born. The name was mythical in my family. Extensive research in Ireland turned up nothing about her. My family spelled her last name Bolen—a name I never found in any Irish county, probably due to illiteracy. However, in Kinsale, I saw a store called Boland’s. Voila! That gave me the possibility of her correct name and town.

From the time I was a little girl, I had a recurring dream of a young girl with red curly hair riding a horse bareback along the coast of Ireland. She wore a sack-cloth dress and that flaming hair streamed behind her like a banner. Finally, I realized that it was Mary and that she wanted me to tell her story. She came to me in dreams, informing me when I screwed something up. Irish women are bossy, you know. That’s because we’re descended from goddesses and banshees. Both of these legends play into Mary Boland’s character.

Several years ago, the New York Writers Institute, under the direction of William Kennedy, accepted me into a ten-person juried writing group. I was one of two women in the group. It was taught by then poet laureate of Ireland, John Montague.

In this class and others since then, I learned that a novel should begin at a time of great change for the protagonist. Shanty Gold opens as Mary Boland leaves Kinsale on foot headed to the Cork Harbor in August, 1849. She is thirteen-years-old and starving. She is illiterate and ragged and has just buried her mother and baby sister, dead of the famine. She must get on a ship to America to find her beloved Da, gone there to earn money to bring his family over. But she hasn’t a farthing in her boot.

Although Mary is betrayed by a British woman at the harbor who sells her as a sex slave to the crew of a coffin ship, she survives with the help of an African slave boy, Kamua Okafor, son of an African witch doctor. Kamua becomes Mary’s life-long soul brother. Both Mary and Kamua eventually accomplish their destinies, he as a successful medicine man and she as a life-saving midwife.

The novel has many moments of terror, but at its heart, it is a story of character. The character of an Irish girl. Jeanne Charters www.jeannecharters.com (release 2015)

Published by Rogue Phoenix Press www.roguephoenixpress.com

Represented by Loiacono Literary Agency https://loiaconoliteraryagency.com/authors/jeanne-charters/