When the men are away, the women live in trailers at the back
The receptionist behind the plate glass at a rural South Carolina town hall looks confused when asked for directions to Murphy Village, a community that’s just a 15minute drive away. She pauses a few moments before the look of recognition creeps across her face – tinged with more than a hint of apprehension.
‘Oh, you mean the gypsy village?’ she drawls. ‘That’s what we call it, the gypsy village. You’ll see all these real big, pretty houses.’
Pretty houses is an understatement. The dwellings along this stretch of Highway 25 are nothing short of mansions. Two-storey windows give glimpses of spiral staircases; elaborate marble statuary and ironwork decorate the fronts of many homes, just feet away from statues of saints, the Madonna and Jesus. On a Monday afternoon, a red-headed little girl of about six years old plays behind one home backing onto Shannon Drive.
This is Murphy Village, the largest settlement of Irish Travellers in the United States. Located between the South Carolina towns of Edgefield and North Augusta, the community has existed in the region since the 1960s, but while the Travellers are well known to locals, most Americans (and Irish people) aren’t even aware of the American Travellers’ existence.
One Eddie Izzard programme, The Riches, briefly higlighted the culture, but it was neither mainstream nor popular. That’s all set to change with the advent of My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, which features the extravagant nuptials of a South Carolina family – and the Murphy Village residents aren’t very happy about it.
The wedding indeed took place outside a Murphy Village home, on Kerry Court, but some raised their eyebrows about the authenticity of the gypsy celebration. The bride, Tamara Riley, was a non-Traveller from Tennessee; the groom, William McKown Jr, was the son of a Traveller mother and a non-Traveller father. No Traveller friends or family participated in the show, as it’s anathema for them to speak to the media. The bride – who wants to pursue a career as a country singer – told a local paper the show was a great chance to plug her music.
‘It was a mockery of a Traveller wedding they were filming,’ says Bill Bradley, one of the only ‘country people’ – the Traveller word for everyone who isn’t a Traveller – accepted by the Murphy Village community. The former highway patrolman has been doing business with the Travellers for more than 40 years, helping them with everything from legal troubles to reading and writing.
While the Travellers refuse to speak about the upcoming TLC-produced programme, Mr Bradley is more forthcoming.
‘They came down here wanting to do this, and promised them this, that and the other thing,’ he says. ‘It was just a big fiasco.’
TLC refused to comment on the show, and the bride did not answer interview requests. But the upcoming episode, which is scheduled to air later this spring, has sparked an online debate. ‘Looks to me like the couple saw the UK edition, and because TLC was footing the bill, tried to imitate it,’ one Facebook poster writes.
Even the bride’s father waded into the row.
‘You should wait to see the storyline before making assumptions that she is trying to impersonate a traveller,’ Kevin Riley wrote on a Facebook discussion page.
‘She very well knows where she comes from and that our family are from Tennessee and never knew about Murphy’s Village until we moved to SC.’
He continues: ‘My only advice is to watch the show and do not ever volunteer for reality television.’
It’s not the first time Murphy Village has felt betrayed and misrepresented. It’s one of the main reasons they keep to themselves. The ‘Traveller’ wedding that the TLC show will feature is emblematic of the rumour, misunderstanding and distrust that has swirled around this group for centuries.
The Travellers already feel misunderstood by the locals in South Carolina; the use of the term ‘gypsy’ by the town hall employee was a perfect example of a fundamental disconnect. Murphy Villagers consider the word as tantamount to a racial slur; they are Travellers, not gypsies, and proud of it.
That’s despite the fact the Travellers have lived in the community for nearly 50 years.
Large numbers of Travellers emigrated during the famine. Many were horse traders, and during the US Civil War, they saw an opportunity to head south and trade mules. Pockets of them lived for decades in parts of Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a local Irish priest in North Augusta, Father Joseph Murphy, urged many groups to move to one area.
First they lived in tents, then trailers, then in increasingly large houses.
South Carolinians are suspicious of the community, and the Travellers don’t do much to dispel that. They are reclusive and secretive, often using cant to communicate with each other when out in public places. They talk about lackeens – the same word for girls used by Travellers in Ireland – and the ‘shayjo’, their word for police. Few women work or integrate in the community, and the men are transient labourers who leave town in the spring. In the summer Murphy Village is ‘a ghost town,’ according to Mr Bradley.
The men load up their pick-ups and SUVs, heading all over the country for painting jobs, asphalt work and seal coating. They travel to Kentucky to paint horse barns, west to do odd jobs, up and down the eastern seaboard to often annual clients. When South Carolina schools finish in the summer, many women and children go to join the men for eight or 10 weeks. Some older Travellers stay in the community to keep an eye on things, but Murphy Village basically shuts down. Even the parish priest takes trips to the locations the workers visit, preaching to his congregation while they’re on the road.
Just as in Ireland, however, some Travellers have a reputation for being scam artists. Some law enforcement agencies warn they overcharge, do shoddy
work or distract elderly customers while they ransack their houses looking for cash or jewellery.
Joe Livingston, an investigator with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, has been monitoring the Travellers for decades. He says many reports are exaggerated. Amongst the Travellers, the scam artists in their community are called ‘yonks’.
‘Those tend to be on the lower economic scale of the village,’ Mr Livingston says. ‘The ones that are fairly affluent, those are legitimate contractors.’
The majority of the workers, who do skilled and lawful work, can’t stand the criminal element. They’ll even resort to leaving towns if the scamming Travellers arrive to work in the same area, keen to avoid being associated with the ‘yonks’.
At the same time, it’s often hard to distinguish the legitimate contractors from the scammers.
All the men have nicknames, and it makes them hard to track. Similarly, Mr Livingston says many consumer complaints focus on overcharging, which could be a matter of opinion.
‘If we can get the Travellers to make restitution up front, that’s even better. Then the victim gets the money, the Traveller gets his freedom, and the police officer doesn’t have to worry about working the case.’
For anyone passing through Murphy Village, however, it’s hard to imagine how travelling labourers can support such elaborate houses and expensive cars. Insurance policies, apparently, are the answer.
‘You get the insurance on grandma and grandpa; they’ve been paying on them for years, nothing wrong with that,’ says Mr Bradley. ‘Instead of going out to eat steak, they’ll eat a sandwich at home. The number one thing is to make sure those insurance policies are paid up. When some of them die, that’s when they start building the houses. It’s like a dowry for the children. It’s sort of like having a bank account; that’s their retirement.’
Not that the insurance policies are always entirely legitimate. It’s not unusual to have dozens of policies taken out on one person with different companies, according to Mr Livingston.
‘I understand there’s one guy down there, who is rumoured to have 30 or 40 insurance policies on him,’ he says. ‘He’s not dead yet, but my informants tell me they’re waiting for him to kick the bucket. He’s only 52 or 53. The insurance companies will expect him to live another 30 years. But they send a ringer in to take the physical so he looks good on paper.’
However they are funded, the houses of Murphy Village are incomparable – although most are barely lived in. The Travellers throw open the homes for holidays and parties, showing off the marble fixtures, the statues, the chandeliers. When the men are home, the families live in the mansions. But for much of the year, many women and children live in trailers at the back. Mothers-in-law often live in the trailers on the land, and the women and children live with them when the men are away. Much of the cooking is done in the trailers rather than the fancy kitchens – even when the ornate homes are opened. It’s not unusual to see the windows of the mansions covered in foil or paper; many locals think the Travellers do it to ward off evil
‘They even put make-up on the babies,’ says one local waitress
spirits. The reason for the coverings, however, is much more mundane: to prevent the sunlight from fading the expensive carpets.
Everything is built and decorated to magnificent scale in a game of oneupmanship. When Travellers hold parties in the village, they put out huge stages and hire a DJ to introduce family members and brag about how rich the men are. There are only a handful of surnames in Murphy Village: Connors, Carroll, Gorman, Mulholland, Riley, Sherlock.
The DJs introduce people with names like ‘Mikey Boy Sherlock’ as billionaires. Everything is intended to be ostentatious status symbols. Newly bought vehicles, for example, are parked in front of Traveller homes to show off the purchase.
The women – and young girls – dress up in heavy makeup, big hair and sequins for parties, and sometimes even when they go out to dinner or the mall. All that contributes to the suspicion and rumours in South Carolina; the children aren’t dressed up all the time, but usually when locals see them, it’s for an occasion – so they’re dolled up.
‘They even put make-up on the babies,’ one local waitress says incredulously. The Travellers and ‘country people’ know little about each other and neither side seems eager to learn more. All the children go to a Catholic primary school
together, but the Travellers usually pull the students out early, often in their pre-teen years. That’s something Father Cherian Thalakulam, the Indian priest who’s been serving the Village for a decade, is trying to change.
He brought in tutoring, which many girls attended, and encourages families to keep their youngsters in school.
‘They know the value of education, but when they hear about something happening in the school, they fear for their children,’ he says. ‘For the boys, most of them like to follow their parents’ job. When they are 15 or 16, they have enough money to buy sports cars. But I tell them to think about the future.’
Children are integrating a bit more, playing on baseball teams with ‘country’ classmates, and many are staying in school longer. A handful have even gone to university; one Traveller has become a doctor, another a nurse. But many in the community disapproved, unwilling to see Travellers giving up the old ways.
For the Murphy Village Travellers, family and tradition are the priorities – surpassing everything else. Marriages are still arranged, although one Traveller woman tells me, strictly off the record, that they won’t be forced if either man or woman is dead set against it. Just as mothers-in-law often live behind the massive homes, extended families build their houses next door to each other.
‘Here I found family values we used to have at home in India,’ Fr Cherian says. ‘Respect for the family and the parish, participation in Mass and parish activities.’
Although the Murphy Village Travellers don’t really keep up with Traveller groups here in Ireland, the language, the surnames and the traditions have all survived.
Murphy Village is the hidden bastion of Irish Traveller tradition in the US, and has existed below the radar for years. But with the popularity of gypsy wedding shows and the upcoming episode featuring the community, it’s impossible to tell how long that will last and what the cultural consequences will be.