Godsil Family Myth
By Godsil
Ken Jenkins interviewed me from Stockholm and began with a wonderful reading of the text re the "Godsil Family Myth."
Here’s a partial version of the family myth my children have been offered since they were infants. Some of it is “real.” Some of it is “myth.” The difference between reality and myth is not always clear and sometimes does not really matter. Sometimes, nothing can be so real and practical as a good founding “myth!”
Indigenous, Ambiguous, and Universal
The Godsils have been taught that the blood of all people flows through our veins. As different family members have studied the history of God’s peoples on the planet earth, they have woven together this story to explain how it could be that a person like myself could be a distant cousin to everyone.
Our Beginnings in Mother Africa
They say that our family’s story can be traced no further back than three or four thousand years ago, in the gold mines of Mali, not far from where emerged the glorious city of Timbuktu.
I am told that the gold that was mined in Mali, near the Niger River, not far from Timbuktu, played a major role in the emergence of the civilization of the near East and the Mediterranean. It seems that our family got in trouble for speaking too loudly to power, and we sought refuge in Somalia, on the eastern coast of Africa, not far from the origin of the Nile River.
In Somalia we became sailors, artisans, and merchants, working on ships and with maritime commerce between Asia and Africa, including India and China. Memories suggest that we never did well with received wisdom or orthodoxies of any kind. We offended many groups by our openness to engage in dialogue, business, and even marriage with “out groups” not very appreciated by whatever “in group” we were identified with at the time. So we drank from the wine of such world religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and more. We also intermarried with Asians and considered ourselves Asian Africans.
Moving on to Europe
Our diaspora from Mother Africa began about a millennium ago, around the time when Mohammed’s armies conquered much of the world between Gibraltar and India. They say we tended to be cooks and chefs for the armies and ruling groups of Islam, settling finally, after centuries of westward movement across North Africa, in a great city named Cordoba. There we intermarried not just with the Spanish, but also with some German and Italian families that worked as blacksmiths and jewelers. Some say that one of our ancestors was a Jew, who was a right hand man of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order of priests. By 1588 one of our ancestors was an archer, who went with the Spanish Aramada to attack England.
During a great storm many of the ships crashed on the southern coast of Ireland. One of them, the Santa Maria de la Rosa, was destroyed on the rocks of the Blasket Islands, near County Cork. Our ancestor survived, became a soldier for an Irish lord, who himself paid a certain amount of homage to the hated English, and was eventually given some land to farm and raise a family.
This family eventually produced my great-great grandfather, Richard Godsil, a schoolmaster in Dublin, at the Prescott Catholic Elementary School. Richard Godsil was to be bludgeoned to death by an Orangeman, for his work on behalf of the nascent Irish independence movement.
To America!
Richard’s children became orphaned after his wife was institutionalized and their patrimony largely lost in a brickyard business run by an uncle. One son, Joseph, and daughter, Mary, were sent down to the southern tip of Latin America, then all the way up to San Francisco, where they were given to the care of a pub and inn keeper, methinks named Charles Godsil. Either Charles or his brother were said to have been soldiers in the Union Army, which fought the war against the Confederate Armies, which brought an end to 10,000 years of officially sanctioned slavery in Western civilization.
The girl became a nun in Belmont, California and her brother Joseph became a molder, i.e. a factory worker who helps make metal objects. Joseph eventually moved to St. Louis, Missouri, sort of like the Timbuktu of North America, i.e. a central trade route between east and west, north and south.
Not long before the Great World’s Fair of St. Louis (“Meet Me in St. Louie, Louie”), Joseph met my great grandmother, Mary Duncan, whose family had moved from Glasgow, Scotland, where she worked one half-day a week in a textile mill at the age of 10! One of their children, Joseph Godsil, my father, married Mary Patricia Donnelly in 1934, during the height of the Great Depression in America.
Grandma Mary, my Mom, was all Irish. My Sister Jo Ann tells me she was Mother Mary to dance a pretty good Irish jig. Grandpa Joseph was Scotch, Irish, and English. They told me they met at dancehall near Grand Avenue, just north of St. Louis University, where I got my B.A. and M.A.
We Are Family
So you can see that we Godsil’s feel a kinship with all of God’s children. I have a feeling that we have been part of the struggle of minority peoples wherever we live, eye on the prize of full citizenship rights, the most expansive envisioned for the times. Not only because that’s the right thing to do, but also because, in the last analysis, we are all family! The human race in one! And we must too become one with every living creature in the Earth Community, gratefully taking in, gracefully giving forth, life’s material and spiritual energies.
Why not?