Childhood

"Lowell, Massachusetts is an early nineteenth-century textile town built on the banks of the Merrimack River, thirty miles north of Boston. Settled largely by Polish, Irish, Portuguese, Greek and French immigrants, it was a resolutely working-class town, where men worked five-and-a-half days a week and walked home for lunch, while the women cleaned, cooked and reared their children in Greek Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism. Every ethnic group formed a close-knit community. There were five French parishes alone in Lowell, a French language newspaper and school where all the lessons were in French." (p.29)

Kerouac – Angelheaded Hipster
Steve Turner, London: 1996, Bloomsbury

This multi-lingual town doesn't really fit in with my mental map of America. It sounds very tribal: "The French Canadians were called Canucks, and spoke a crude patois, joual, which led to their being scorned as outsiders. They lived in ghettos called ‘Little Canadas,’ intermarried, and regarded everyone outside the tight little community with a suspicion bordering on paranoia. Unfortunately, their narrow-mindedness and racism found their way into Kerouac’s novels, but their unity and bravery are also woven into his life and work." (pp.7-8)

Subterranean Kerouac – The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac
Ellis Amburn, New York: 1998, St. Martin’s Press

You get a sense of this tribalism when Kerouac's daughter describes meeting her father for the second time in 1967. She went to Lowell and looked in the phone book:

"I was astonished to see a whole list of Kerouacs. I'd never in my life seen my name in a directory.... I began by calling the ones spelt like mine, and before I knew it we were at the home of Doris Kerouac, amid a crowd of stocky French-Candian relatives, all excitedly speaking patois and embracing me. 'The daughter! Jean never told us he had a daughter!" Shaking their heads and gesticulating, they bore us over to Jack's house on an ocean wave of strength, morality and good will.... So these were my people, hearty people with souls of gold. I wanted to stay with them and belong."

Baby Driver

Jan Kerouac, New York, 1981

No wonder Kerouac spent his life bouncing back and forth between wanting to escape the smothering attention of his hometown and mother and hitting out on the road, and the other half of the time trying to get back home where he felt secure.

Many of Kerouac's biographers say that everything Jack wrote was biography and all of Jack's narrators were personas that he had been busy inventing since he was a kid imagining himself as an American football star. He reinvented himself, and his home town over and over again in his books. Childhood is strong stuff. Parents take care.