The Immigrants (2 page)

“It is a great railroad, far out to the west. You must understand that America is a vast country—as big as all of Europe. Now this great railroad, which is called the Atchison, has begun the construction of a spur line to connect its main line with the city of San Francisco.”

“San Francisco,” said Joseph. He had heard the name.

“A beautiful, splendid city that sits like a jewel on the Pacific coast of the United States. Now you under stand, of course—”

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“Please sit down,” Anna said. She had forgotten courtesy; she had forgotten that whatever this place was, it was, nevertheless, their home, and that the wealthy and elegant Mr. Mancini was a guest in their home.

Mr. Mancini examined the three wooden boxes that served as chairs. His expression was dubious, and Jo seph looked at Anna disapprovingly. Then Mr. Mancini seated himself gingerly and went on to explain the qual ifications for building a railroad, the specific one being men of firm muscle and large build.

“I hire such men,” he went on to say, “men who are not afraid to work hard.”

“My God,” said Joseph, “that’s all I want—to work and earn my bread. My wife is with child.”

“As I see. May it be born blessed! As I said, the work is hard. I will not deceive a countryman. But the pay is good, twenty cents an hour, two dollars a day, twelve dollars a week—with meals and a place to sleep.”

The sudden hope in Joseph’s heart died. “You see my wife’s condition. I can’t leave her.”

“But would we want you to? You will find others with wives, with children, too. It’s a hard life, but a healthy life. Better than living in a place like this.”

“How far is it?” Anna asked uncertainly. “Is it still America, or is it another country?”

“Because my son must not be born in another coun try,” Joseph said firmly.

“Good. Good. I admire that. But I must explain about America.

It is a group of states bound together. That is why it is called the United States. You will work in a state called California—a wonderful place, I assure you.”

He went on to assure them of all the joys and re wards that flowed from working for the Atchison Rail road. Then he took

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some papers out of his breast pocket. They were written in English, which Joseph could not read, but Mancini explained that they were only a simple work contract.

A troubled Anna watched Joseph sign the papers. The baby was kicking, moving constantly now. She could no longer remember whether she had calculated the weeks and the months properly.

“Tomorrow then,” Mancini said, “at the Lackawanna Ferry on the North River. Seven o’clock in the morning. You know where the ferry is?”

He nodded. That he knew, having prowled the waterfront from 14th Street down to the Battery, looking for work, any work. Now, God be praised, he had work.

That night, Anna pleaded with Joseph not to go, not to take them into another unknown. Her knowledge of geography, place, and distance was vague. She had never been to school, and she could neither read nor write, nor had she any English—for the simple reason that during her time in America she had only the most minimal contact with those who spoke English. Joseph had acquired a vocabulary of a few dozen words, but Anna had been made silent, bereft of voice and will. The passage from Europe had been an eternity of suf fering, and she knew that there was no way back ever—no way ever to reach out again and touch family or friends or the things of home, and she clung to the mis erable room they lived in as at least something known.

“We will die if we stay here,” Joseph said in answer to all her arguments, and she thought,
I will die any way
.

With the first light of dawn, Joseph put together their few possessions, and then they went out into the icy cold to walk across lower New York to the Lackawanna Ferry. When they reached the ferry slip, they joined a group of a dozen men and women and two or three children already gathered there; and by the time Mancini appeared, an hour later, the group had increased to eighteen men, six

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women, and seven children. Anna’s fear increased, and she clung to Joseph. Some of the men were literally in rags, dirty, unshaven, cold, some of them abjectly surrendered to circumstance, spiritless, hopeless, almost all of them immigrants, Swedes, Ital ians, Poles, their women subdued and troubled, the few children frightened and cowed by the sight of the broad, icy river, and the smoky cloudy unknown beyond it. Mancini was their shepherd. Smiling, confident, wholly in command of the situation, he herded them onto the ferry. Chilled, her fear frozen in silence, Anna watched the gray water slide by and felt cold tears congeal on her cheeks.

Not Joseph, not any of the contract laborers spoke; they lined the rail and watched Manhattan drift away into the distance, their faces blank and hopeless.

At the railroad yard, across the river, the contract laborers were fed slices of ham on stale white bread and coffee in tin mugs. Mancini, always smiling and cheer ful, assured them that arrangements had been made for their care and feeding on the trip across the country, and then he led them to a part of the yard where a boxcar stood.

There he turned them over to a railroad official, who checked them off Mancini’s list and herded them into the boxcar. When some of the men began to protest, Mancini assured them that this was no ordinary boxcar. There were toilets at one end of the car, and it was divided into two sections so that the women might have privacy. There were mattresses on which to sleep. Each day they would be given food and fresh water. It would be an interesting and enlightening trip, and they would see a great deal of this beautiful country which they had chosen as their new homeland.

So much for what Frank Mancini told the group of contract laborers in the railroad yard on the west bank of the Hudson River.

There was much more that he might have told them that he failed to tell them—that the toilets were filthy and functioned poorly, that the stench would fill the boxcar in short order, that sixteen

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additional men would join the group in Chicago, that the food would be wretched and in short supply, that they would not have enough drinking water, and that it would be cold beyond belief in the unheated car. He also failed to tell them that the trip across the continent would take seven days.

Seven days in a boxcar, as Anna Lavette discovered, can be an eternity. There was a single primitive latrine built into one end of the car, a traveling outhouse of sorts. There was no heating, no seats, no blankets ex cept what the immigrants had with them, and the food, brought to them at train stops, was a dismal, unchang ing diet of cold sausage and stale bread. The population of the car was fragmented by language and origin. The men were quick to anger; frustration became rage. With no other place to vent their fury and despair, men turned on their wives, beat the submissive, inarticulate women, and turned like caged animals on whoever dared to interfere.

For three days, Joseph and Anna huddled together for warmth and watched the life in the boxcar with a growing sense of hopelessness. On the fourth day, An na’s pain began, and at four o’clock in the morning, in the rattling, swaying, cold boxcar, Anna’s child was born. A Polish woman and a Hungarian woman served as midwives, and suddenly and miraculously, the strife in the boxcar ceased. Anger turned into compassion, and the tiny bit of squall-ing life became a sort of cove nant and promise to the immigrants.

Jackets and coats were given to Anna to warm her and the baby, and in a way, the child became the triumphant possession of the entire population of the car. The husband of the Polish woman who had served as midwife produced a bottle of carefully hoarded plum brandy, and everyone drank to the health of the newborn babe. Their own misery was forgotten, and a babble of tongues and halting transla tions played the game of finding a name for the child.

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Joseph fixed on the name of Daniel. The child was delivered in a lion’s den, or its vague equivalent. As for Anna, she was content with the end of the pregnancy and the fact of this lovely, healthy bit of life sucking away at her breast. At least she had milk, and the child would live. And sooner or later, they would find a priest who could baptize him.

Thus Daniel Lavette came into the world in a boxcar rattling across the length of the United States of Amer ica. He weighed well over eight pounds, and he sucked manfully and grew fat and round.

Years later, doctors would tell Anna Lavette that the manner of the birth and certain complications that must have occurred de stroyed her ability to bear additional children. Now she knew only that the pain was over and that a fine, healthy child had been born.

For the first three months of Daniel Lavette’s life, he was nursed in railroad camps while his father drove spikes and handled steel rails. Of all this, he was hap pily unaware. He was equally unaware of the day when his father first saw the hills of San Francisco and de cided that this was the place where he would live and be, and his first memories of his father and mother were of the flat on Howard Street that Joseph Lavette had moved into after he found a job on one of the fishing boats that went out of the wharf. The misery of Anna Lavette’s illness that came out of a confinement in a filthy boxcar was also prior to his consciousness. He was the only child.

There would be no others.

Joseph Lavette had saved forty-two dollars working on the railroad. The experience had turned him into a careful and thrifty man who lived with a nightmarish dread of ever again being penniless, and as the years passed, as he learned to deal with the English language, his life took on a single focus—to become the owner of a fishing boat, to be his own master and never again to be in the position of hopelessness, a leaf blown by the winds of chance.

In 1897, when young Daniel was eight years old, al ready adept in

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that strange, complex, and convoluted language called English—still a mystery to his mother—and already going to school and learning all sorts of incredible things about this place, this San Francisco, this California, his father had managed to save six hundred dollars.

It had been no easy task. It meant scrimping and saving and going without anything but the barest necessities, and still it was only half of what he needed to buy the boat—not any boat, not one of the lateen-rigged sailing craft that most of the inde pendent Italian fishermen owned, but one of the new power-driven boats; and as far as Joseph was con cerned, it was either a power-driven boat or nothing. For this too was the manner and the ideology of the immigrant. The boat was not for him; the boat was for Daniel. Twice already his boss had allowed him to take the boy with him in the off season. His reward was young Daniel’s excitement and joy at being out in the bay, and he boasted about it to Anna.

“And why must he be a fisherman?” she asked him. “He’s a smart boy. You know how smart he is.”

“Meaning that I am a fool.”

“No, no. But this is America, and there are other things. Maria Cassala told me that her boy will be an accountant one day. An accountant sits at a desk and wears clean clothes.”

“I can’t argue with you,” Joseph said. “There are things you don’t understand—too many things.”

Maria Cassala was a kind, openhearted young woman, a Sicilian who was married to a Neapolitan bricklayer named Anthony Cassala.

They had been in San Francisco since 1885, or rather her husband had. Maria had married Anthony in 1892, the year she came to America from Sicily. She had met Anna while shop ping, and she had taken the frightened, frail young woman under her wing. To Anna, the Cassalas were a source of inspiration and wonder. They lived in their own house, a frame house on Folsom Street, which An thony Cassala had built—for the most part with his own hands.

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One day Anna confided to Maria Joseph’s dream of owning his own powerboat. “He’s never content,” she said. “Nothing for today—only for tomorrow, and it will never be.”

“Why will it never be?”

“Because he needs five hundred dollars. In ten years more, we will not save another five hundred dollars.”

“Then,” said Maria, “you send him to see my man, Tony. Tony will lend him the money.”

“Why?”

“Why? What a foolish question! Because Joseph is a good man.”

“But how could we ever pay it back?”

“Joe will have a powerboat, and instead of working for a boss, he’ll be the boss. You’ll make the money, and you’ll pay it back.

Please, Anna, tell him to go to Tony.”

Anthony Cassala, slender, dark-skinned, dark-haired, was indeed that very rare individual, a happy man, hap pily married, content with his lot, devout and dedicated to his home and his children. He and Maria had two children, Stephan, who was eleven, and Rosa, who was nine. Entirely without schooling, he had taught himself to read and write English, and his son, Stephan, had passed on his grammar-school lessons to his father, teaching Anthony the simple elements of arithmetic.

Early in the year 1903, a small Italian contractor for whom Anthony worked occasionally begged him to lend him a thousand dollars for a period of three months. He promised at the end of that time to pay back the loan with a bonus of two hundred dollars, twelve hundred dollars in all. Cassala knew nothing of the rules or laws or history of interest; he had not the faintest notion that he would be repaid in terms of 80 percent, 20 percent for three months, 80 percent per year, nor was he able at that time to calculate percentages. Neither had he ever heard the word
usury
. He took his life savings and gave it to his friend; and at the end of three

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months, the contractor repaid the debt with the two-hundred-dollar bonus. Fortunately, the contractor was also an honest and decent man, and several times more, having to meet a payroll or bills, he turned to Cassala, borrowing and paying, and each time adding a bonus that in yearly percentage figures varied between 50