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    Mercy
    Mercy
    Mercy
    Ebook59 pages51 minutes

    Mercy

    By Maureen McNeil and Mercedes Cabbagestalk

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In 1981, Maureen and her boyfriend Paul bought a house for six thousand dollars in the once thriving dockyard of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The golden light off New York Harbor, the community of old-timers and new-comers, and free parking made up for some of the grit and municipa

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRed Penguin Books
    Release dateNov 22, 2024
    ISBN9781637776704
    Mercy

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      Book preview

      Mercy - Maureen McNeil

      INTRODUCTION

      This collaborative memoir celebrates a forty year commitment to family, love and storytelling. Maureen met Mercedes as an eight year old but it wasn't until she turned twenty one that she asked Maureen to call her mom. Maureen gave Mercedes the only medicines she knew: love, and a notebook and pen. When Mercedes said that she didn’t know how to write, Maureen said that the words she put down on paper were her own, and that it was up to her to find meaningful stories and create the life she wanted to live. Maureen told Mercedes her story of keeping a journal as a way of surviving the mean girls at middle school, and that when Maureen told her mother she wanted to be a writer, her mom asked her college roommate Marguerite Phillips, who had a Ph.D. in English literature, to mentor Maureen. Eventually, Marguerite helped her publish her first poem in The Puget Sound Quarterly, and book her first public reading at University of Washington. Mercedes learned as Maureen did that it takes courage to write the truth about personal experience, and practicing this storytelling process makes us stronger and more resilient.

      CHAPTER 1

      MAMI MO

      I didn’t mean to fall in love with the girl next door—I already had two little kids of my own—but Mercy was a spunky eight year old flirt with braids who lived in the third floor apartment next door with her parents and siblings. She played on the sidewalk in front of our house with her little brother and asked a million questions about my mundane chores, like pulling weeds in the sidewalk and chipping century-old paint from our wrought iron fence, and about our dog she called Jingles. Sometimes I saw her looking down at me from her kitchen window as I hung clothes on the line in the backyard, and we waved to each other. Sundays I saw her leave the apartment with her mother and brother for Mass at Visitation church six blocks away. I wondered if Mercy, like me as a kid, believed everything she was taught in Catechism.

      It wasn’t until Mercy turned twelve that her mother allowed her inside our house. I hired her to babysit our two little boys while I wrote upstairs. She was surprised that we didn’t have a TV but liked building with blocks and Legos, reading stories to the boys, and listening to sea shanties on the record player. I remember once teasing her mother when we passed on the sidewalk that I wanted to adopt Mercy, and she broke into a great big smile.

      In 1981, my boyfriend Paul and I bought a house for six thousand dollars in Red Hook, Brooklyn. We had run into his college counselor listening to folk music at Manhattan’s Eagle Tavern on 14 th Street, who told us he bought a house in Red Hook for $7500 dollars and he invited us to stop by. I was smitten with his small tidy house without modern amenities: it looked like William Blake might have lived there. The street was paved in Dutch radiating cobblestones. Liberty stood at the end of it, so close I could almost touch her. The smell of coffee beans, stored in the Civil War warehouses, wafted in the salt air. Great thick vines of purple wisteria grew up the side of brick homes. I heard Taps from Governor’s Island. Stories seemed to float in with the tide.

      The neighborhood had fallen apart in the 1970s when The Port Authority of NY and NJ condemned entire blocks of Red Hook to expand for containerization, but instead, the shipping industry moved to New Jersey. Butcher shops, barber shops, bakeries, groceries, pharmacies, ice cream stores and the high school all closed as many of the old-timers moved away. The word on the street was that landlords set their buildings on fire for insurance settlements. Many blocks looked toothless, like ours, with only two intact buildings. A beautiful big brick wreck stood next door to us, but somebody regularly threw garbage into it. Every time we contacted the owner to buy it, he upped the price. Eventually, the city tore it down and it became a parking lot for school buses. Red Hook had a reputation as a Mafia dumping ground, and sure enough, a newcomer living

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