Frank McCourt14: On escaping the signs of poverty

What were you thinking when you came to America at the age of 19. Out of this background, full of anger at your circumstances, at the church, at the lack of opportunity, what was in your mind when you came here? What were you looking for?

Frank McCourt: When I arrived here my condition was very poor, emotionally, psychologically, even physically. I had no self-esteem because of what I came from. No education. Everybody was saying, "Oh, you have to have a high school diploma in this country." I couldn't say I only went to primary school in Limerick.
The minute I opened my mouth they'd say, "What you should do is join the cops." I didn't want to join the cops. So I didn't know what to do with myself since I had no self-esteem. I was very angry over having no education. I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know how to find the door into America. Here I was. I didn't know anybody. So I was mostly alone and floundering.
Other people come from Italy and Czechoslovakia and places like that, and they have to grapple with America, and they have to grapple with trying to master the English language as well. At least I had the language; that made it more convenient for me. But I had to deal with something else that people rarely talk about. It's an ethnic story in a way.
The minute I opened my mouth then they'd say, "Oh, you're Irish." Suddenly I'm labeled. I wasn't a human being. In Ireland I was just a low-class type, but here I'm a low-class Irish type, an Irish low-class type. So I didn't know. Somehow I had to deal with that. "Oh, you're Irish." And at that time, that was 1949, there was still some kind of a lingering residue of prejudice against the Irish. People used to tell me, all the people, up and down New England (I'm in New York) there would be signs saying, "No Irish need apply." And even the Irish-Americans would listen to me and they'd patronize me. I was a bit simple as if I had just come off a farm. And I knew better than that. I knew I was better than that. People who -- Irish-Americans who were running elevators and working as porters, they were looking down on me, and I knew then that I was again at the bottom of the heap.

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