Amoskeag

It’s amazing what you can learn after you leave school. –Raymond Dubois

I find that as you get older, if you reminisce about the old days, and you’re not looking forward to a better way of life, better things, you’re getting ready to die. –Raymond Dubois

When the French Canadians first came to Manchester, having many children was the only way they could survive. That was one reason why they had such large families. My mother had twelve kids, and she tells us she was always either pregnant or nursing. The only way that they had to prevent having children was nursing. Even today they say that if you nurse, you aren’t apt to become pregnant. We’re all two years apart, almost in a neat order, which shows the trend of her thought: she nursed them until they were about fourteen months old, then the minute she stopped, she’d get pregnant again. My father was not the type of person who would stop having sex, and he was too moral to go with another woman. He wasn’t that kind of man either. His upbringing wasn’t like that. So I guess they were left no choice….I had a Caesarean with my fourth child, and I didn’t have any more after that. I’m sure they tied my tubes or something, but I was such a Catholic they wouldn’t tell me. My parents still had that very strong Canadian-Catholic tradition. If my husband had made the decision not to have any more children, I would have gone along with him, but I would never have made that decision myself. It was in my marriage all the way through: that you have to have children and do nothing. I don’t see it so much in my daughter. But in my mother’s time, and even my own, most of the French people were not rebellious in any way. They were not given to revolution. They had lived very poor lives, even at home in Quebec. They were people with a deep, simple, religious faith….We had a big stove in the kitchen and three grills in the ceiling, so in the winter a little bit of heat went up to the second floor but hardly any at all reached the third and fourth floors. My mother had a whole set of those old-fashioned irons with the detachable handles. We’d all undress downstairs, and we’d each get one of those hot irons that had been heated in the kitchen stove, wrapped in a towel. We’d run upstairs with the towel, stick that under the covers, two or three of us in each bed, and put our sheet on that. –Alice LaCasse

The doctor said they almost lost me and the baby, too. I asked the doctor how long it would take before I got repaired, and he said, “Two or three years.” I said, “You better talk to my husband.” The doctor talked to him. My husband went and talked to the priest. First he went to the parish priest, which was St. Augustine’s. He wanted to use something so that I wouldn’t get pregnant. The priest said that he wouldn’t give him absolution if he did that. So he went to St. George’s. The priest there told him that he needn’t worry. He said, “Did your wife ever say ‘no’ to you?” My husband said, “No.” The priest said, “Your wife is always ready, she never says ‘no’ to you?” and my husband said, “No.” So the priest said, “You do just the same thing you always do, and nothing will happen to your wife,” and the priest proved true. I had seven children after that. My husband died before me. He was forty-four when he died, and I’m still alive. –Maria LaCasse

My father was very strict. He was so totally against going out with other nationalities that we would have been expelled from the family. Lorenzo continued that same strictness. He checked out who we went out with. We all did marry French Canadians, every one of us but the younger ones. It’s changed with the younger ones. They are like a second generation. My brother married an Irish girl, and my last sister, Lucille, married an Irish boy. Her husband died, and she remarried. Her husband is Irish. My sister Yvette also married an Irish boy. For us, though, it was understood that you married French. It came not only from the family but from the Church. They’d say, “First of all, if you don’t marry in your own language, then you won’t communicate as well; then, if you don’t marry Catholic, you’ll lose your religion. It’s hard enough to get together when you’re of the same religion and the same language; how much harder it will be if you’re not. It’s hard enough to be married, so try to get your own kind.” –Alice LaCasse

An interviewee, Marie Anne Senechal: as the oldest child in her family, she had to serve as a surrogate mother to her younger siblings. Marie Anne raised all of them to adulthood, then continued to assist them, as well as to care for a chronically ill brother and a sister who lived with her. As a result, she postponed her marriage until she was sixty-four, when she married her fiancé after forty years of courtship. Widowed after five years of marriage, she continues to live in what was originally her husbands home. She shares her flat with her sister and brother-in-law and keeps another sister and brother-in-law in the one upstairs….After the Amoskeag shut down, my father didn’t go back to the mills because he was too old. He worked in the cemetery about ten or twelve years, but we never got a cent. He gave up [working] at eighty-seven years old. Eighty-seven years, with no pension, nothing. …When my father died, he was ninety-four years old. He lived upstairs with my sister for two years, and he lived with me for twenty-three years, so I never was alone, to tell you the truth. I was alone only when my husband died, because that was after my sister got married….The sister who helped me the most is the one that is living with me. She stayed unmarried, too. She had a fellow, but he died. She finally got married when she was fifty-four….My husband and I waited forty years to get married. Forty years! The first year I met him, he was eighteen years old and I was six years older. I couldn’t get married because I had to bring up a family, and he had to take care of his mother. When she died, she was ninety-four. He kept taking care of his mother, and I kept on bringing up my family. I thought I’d never marry. I was sixty-seven years old when I got married. And I’m seventy-nine now.

People don’t say very much when they’re leaving. They’re sad, and a lot of them cry. It’s a bad thing when there are no jobs to be had. If only you could say, “Well, the heck with it. I’ll go out and get another job.” But there’s just no place to go. After you put that many years into a place, it’s like a second home. You go every day, you know how much time it’s going to take you, and you come home at a certain time. Just a nice routine. You knew what to do and how to do it, and you knew how long it would take you. Nobody bothered you.

You knew you had a job to go to. It was a good feeling. Now you know your time has come, and you feel lost. You just have no place to turn. I’ve spent half my life in the mill, really, because I’m fifty years old, and I’m going on twenty-three years in the mill. If there were other mills, you could say, “I’ll go to another mill. That mill is just as good.” But there are no other mills to go to. –Bette Skrzyszowski