Part 2
After forty days at sea, the ship docked in Boston. The MacMahan’s had no money and no place to live. Fortunately, Pat’s mother had some relatives and his parents knew people from Pat’s village who were living in Boston’s North End. Their relatives let the family stay with them for a few days while Pat’s father went out looking for work. Some of the places he went to find work wouldn’t hire him because he was Irish and said he was trying to take work away from native-born Americans. Within a week, with the help of the men who came from the village back home, he found a job down on the docks loading and unloading ships. The pay was $0.65 per day.
After a few weeks, Pat’s mother found a job as a seamstress in the Garment District at $0.45 per day. Before long, there was enough money to rent a cellar room in the Fort Hill area. Pat stayed home all day with the baby while his parents went out to work.
There seemed to be a lot of money coming in, especially compared to what the MacMahan’s had in Ireland, but the rent was high and food expensive. Mrs. MacMahan bought some cloth and showed Pat how to make shirts. Now Pat could help out as well, but still the family could save only a few dollars each month.
After the third year when Pat was ten years of age, a relative found Pat a job in a garment factory across the river in Charlestown. Pat quickly learned that some of the workers in the factory didn’t like it when immigrants replaced the American laborers. They complained that the Irish were robbing them of their jobs. They said that the immigrants forced some of the laborers to lower their standard of living because the newcomers would work for less. Pat also discovered that these Americans disliked his Catholic religion and the fact that the newcomers were taking over some of the political wards in the city. Despite the animosity of some of the American laborers, the managers of the factory continued to hire immigrant children. They would work for even less than their parents. Pat was paid $0.45 for a ten-hour day, six days a week.
Now Pat’s mother had to stay home with Timothy, but she found she could make almost as much money doing piecework at home as she made working in the factory. Pat’s mother considered herself lucky, since many Irish women became domestic servants. Pat’s mother heard that some servants earned more money than she did, they didn’t have food expenses and they lived in nice neighborhoods instead of the tenement her family lived in. However, Pat’s mother was able to remain with her family instead of only seeing them on the servant’s only day off, Sunday. Things were starting to get a little better financially. Pat’s father was talking of sending Timothy to school when he was old enough. Maybe the MacMahan’s would make it in America after all.