I’m walking up my grandparents’ driveway. It’s Easter morning. I’m 2 years old. My dark hair lies against my head under a bonnet and a few strands squish out the sides. My lips form a firm line across my face.
I clutch my white purse tightly to my body and stare straight into the camera. My eyes are brown, matching my dark features. I don’t flinch at the flash, just continue walking.
The family laughs at this picture and says I look like I just got off the boat.
I never heard it called anything other than ‘the boat’. It had no name, no type and I never asked. But I always knew where it came from and where it docked. From Sicily to Ellis Island, I envisioned a giant cruise ship. Large rooms with curtains draping the windows, wall to wall carpeting and mints covering the pillows. I knew conditions were poor on the journey, but how bad could they be?
“Look there!” said the Commissioner, taking me by the arm and pointing, and I saw a monster steamship far away, and already a big bulk looming up the Narrows. “It’s the Kaiser Wilhelm der Drosse. She’s got—I forget the exact figures, but let us say—eight hundred and fifty-three more for us. She’ll have to keep them until Friday at the earliest. And there’s more behind her, and more strung out all across the Atlantic.”
“In one record day this month 21,000 immigrants came into the port of New York alone; in one week over 50,000. This year the total will be 1,200,000.”
—H.G.Wells, 1906
So let us say eight hundred and fifty-three arrive that day in steerage. Twenty-two days across the Atlantic cramped and huddled below deck. Locked away from fresh air and light, the heavy stench of unbathed, sweaty people can not dissipate. The boat rocks side to side, splashing into the crests of the tide. Passengers become sick. Vomit, body odor and garlic corrupt the air. No water is available to wash and many believe garlic will ward off seasickness. People breathe, sweat and eat it, adding to the rank smell pervading the cabin.
Angelina Migllorino breathed this air, lived these conditions. Her boat came from Sicily. She said they were packed together like slaves. Death, a common thing. They brought the dead to the upper deck and said a prayer. The deck hands then threw them overboard.
Angelina Migllorino is my great grandmother. She arrived in 1905 at age 15. Her parents remained in Ribera, in the providence of Agrigento, Sicily. She traveled with her brothers and sisters and a large group of Sicilians bound for America. Many were sick, coughing with illness. My grandfather remembers her words, “I was frightened I would catch what they had, forced to return to Sicily.”
“The ship we came over on wasn’t a clean ship. You couldn’t clean yourself anyway because even the water from the fountains was frozen. In order to drink some water we had to break the ice with something and melt it. So how can you keep yourself clean?”
—Rocco Morelli, Italian, arrived at Ellis Island in 1907, age 12
The boat I imagined had running water. My great grandmother would wake in the morning from her private room, wash her face and dress before her full-length mirror. I see her as a woman, graceful and delicate. But she was fifteen years old, starting a life away from the farmlands of Sicily. I was a two- year-old walking up my grandparents’ driveway.
My face was her face and the faces of all immigrants: serious, anxious, fearful. Hands grip possessions fiercely. They are signs of a previous life carried into the future. Now my boat is brown and gray; the people drab yet intense. At fifteen, Angelina Migllorino was a woman leaving homeland to find home, her lips—a firm line as she searched.
Everybody was sad there. There was not a smile on anybody’s face. Here they thought maybe they wouldn’t go through. There they thought maybe their children wouldn’s go through.
“Oh, did I cry. Terribly. All my sisters and brothers cried. So I cried. You don’t know why you cry. Just so much sadness there that you have to cry. But there’s more tears in Ellis Island to ten people than, say, to a hundred people elsewhere. There is all of these tears, everybody has tears.”
—Fannie Kligerman, Russian, arrived at Ellis Island in 1905, age 13
Some called Ellis Island the Isle of Tears. It wasn’t fear of what lay beyond the island, but the terror of the island itself. Men controlled the fate of other men. “What is your trade?” “Who is meeting you?” “Do you have a job waiting?” “Where will you be going from here?” Each answer was scribbled and documented with the help of an interpreter. The immigrants answered cautiously, hoping their responses were not grounds for deportation.
After the questions, they underwent a medical examination. For many, this was the ultimate decision. Doctors observed the way an immigrant walked — slow, steady, without labor. Their hair was parted for a scalp inspection, fingers and skin scrutinized. Many dreaded the eye examination. A boot hook peeled back the eyelids to look for contagious eye diseases.
A picture hangs in Ellis Island of eleven men sitting crossed legged on a tiny bench. It is a black and white photograph, and the men are clearly seen in grays. They look stiff in their dark suits with their hats resting across a knee. Hollow eyes stare from hard, expressionless faces. A small white X on their left shoulder has brought them to this room. They have been marked for mental retardation and wait to be further examined.
“We lived through a famine in Russia and almost starved to death. Every day the Board of Health would come to our door and ask if we had any dead. Finally we left Russia for Poland—a frightful experience. We traveled by train. We would get on a train and ride a few hours until we were thrown off. We used to spend days and nights in the fields, waiting to get on another train. From Poland we came to America. My mother said she wanted to see a loaf of bread on the table and then she was ready to die. So you see, we lived through so much before we came here that Ellis Island was a blessing.”
—Rose Backman, Russian, arrived at Ellis Island in 1923, age 10
My great-grandfather, Giovanni Montalbano, passed through Ellis Island. He left Ribera, Sicily in 1902 at the age of 16. Ribera held nothing for him. A rural community supporting itself mainly on farming and grape vineyards, but he was not a farmer. Alone, leaving everything behind, he boarded a boat of dreams.
I approach the island and press my nose against the boat window. I need a closer look, but my steamy breath fogs the glass. Vainly I rub it away, two, three, times before I run to the upper deck. The air is salt filled and windy. My hair is a mangled mess around my face. I hold it down and watch myself being ferried closer. Is this what he felt, this anticipation? I fumble for my camera and snap off a picture. Ellis Island rises from the land, looming, sculptured. There is a feeling of curiosity tinged with welcome and suspicion. Flashes blink around me. My finger moves for one more picture. But I stop. I am not a hungry tourist.
“All day long, through an intricate series of metal pens, the long procession files, step by step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner and that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the clerks. At every point immigrants are being picked out and set aside for further medical examination, for further questions, for the busy little courts; but the main procession satisfies conditions, passes on..”
—H.G. Wells, 1906
It’s empty now. The hardwood floors have been waxed and finished. Few benches remain on either side of the Great Hall. Old and dirty-colored, they have deep imprints from where people carved names and dates into the seat. In pictures, this room is filled with benches and people sitting, leaning against them, surrounding them—all waiting. Legs cannot be stretched without hitting the bench in front. Now I walk one end to the other in this room of thirty and do not touch another person. Anything above a whisper echoes from the walls and the mothers hush their children for being too loud. Three tall wooden desks without chairs are on one end of the Great Hall. I stand on tiptoes to see over them. The immigration officers stood there, checking in the arriving. I close my eyes and imagine the officers marking down answers to their questions. Scribbling over the wooden top, they listen to the interpreters as the immigrants’ language hums unnoticed.
There’s a little boy at the desk next to me begging his father to lift him onto the wooden top. The father picks him up by the arms and holds him steady. But the child squirms and the desk wobbles under the weight. I cringe and look away.
A balcony hangs above the Great Hall with doors that open onto it. The doors lead into the sleeping quarters where beds, bunked one on top of another, held the immigrants. They are made from a rough canvas and tied to metal poles. Stacked five high and ten across leaves only a small space for a body. As I trace the balcony with my eyes, I realize the size of where I am.
The vaulted ceiling reaches far beyond the balcony and even farther beyond me. The tiles have mold around the edges where the caulking has worn away and little corners are missing. I imagine they shined at one time. Maybe my great grandmother crept from her bed at night and watched them with the moonlight pouring in and dreamed.
“People have migrated endlessly to the New World, through every historical shock, and in great waves of longing and desperation. Ellis Island is the migrant’s monument... silent and empty, with images of our ancestors fading in its shadows like memories of dreams.”
—E. L. Doctorow
Their names, my great grandparents’ names, are on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor at Ellis Island—John Montalbano, Angela Migllorino. Two of 420,000 other names engraved forever. Names on the wall were not why they crossed the Atlantic. But I still run my fingers across the bronzed wall, feeling the curves and bumps that mean them. Words of my father resound: Keep the family together. I listen harder this time. There are shadows of my grandfather in that voice. I strain to recognize, and the words become his. And in those words are an echo of my great grandparents. I say “keep the family together,” and it’s not just my voice anymore.
I have stepped where they stepped, passed through halls they passed, sat where they once waited. Images haunt me of who they were and of a history I can only imagine. I once boarded a boat bound for Ellis Island, marveled at its presence and tried desperately not to betray how overwhelmed I was. But I wasn’t fifteen and I hadn’t left everything behind.
It’s not fair to compare, but I do. I look at the picture. My family looks. Remarking at the resemblance— the eyes, solemn face, pursed lips. I look into the picture and recognize more. My mind weaves remnants of the past into what I see now. But I keep looking back and rediscovering. And so the weaving continues.
Faculty
