My Family's Illegal Immigrant

I have an illegal immigrant in my family.

Well, at least one, anyway... that we know about.

He isn't Latino, or Asian.  He didn't smuggle his way here.  Nor did he pay some human traffickers thousands of dollars to get here.

In fact, we're not completely sure of how he got to America.  But according to family lore, at least as far as my aunt Helena is concerned, what we think we know tends to make sense, and the dates seem to work.  But we don't know definitively, because our family's illegal immigrant died in the 1950's.  As an alcoholic.  And because he was an alcoholic, he was not fondly remembered by his children when they'd recount their childhood stories to us.

My aunt, who died last year, and my Dad, who died the year before that, were his children.  So the illegal immigrant was my paternal grandfather.  My grandfather died before my own parents ever met.  And for years, Mom didn't know much about him either, because Dad, my aunt, and their mother never talked about him, since his life with them had been so miserable.  Eventually, Dad told us about the time he got home from work, as a college student back in Brooklyn, and opened the door to the apartment he shared with his family.  And there was his mother, and Helena, standing on the other side of a short, portly figure on the floor of their apartment's foyer.

It was my grandfather.  Dead.  My grandmother had arrived home first, and then shortly thereafter, my aunt.  And then Dad.  Dad closed the door, and the three of them stood silently, looking down at the man whose drunken stupors had become legendary in their Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park.  Dad recalled to us that his sister and mother and he were numbed by a mixture of relief and grief - but not grief that he was gone.  It was grief about how much the family had suffered, living with such a hardened alcoholic all those years.

Finally, if only to break the heavy silence, Dad asked out loud, "Well, who do we call to take the body away?  Will Halversen's do it?"

Halversen's is the name of a long-time Norwegian funeral home on Sunset Park's 8th Avenue.  But I'm not even sure there was a funeral.  Nobody ever talked about there being one.

My grandfather was born in Finland, in a sliver of the Nordic country that ended up being invaded by Russia in the Winter War of 1939, about two decades after my grandfather ended up in America.  My Mom has two silver spoons with which my grandfather's sister was able to escape as their family's home in Viipuri faced imminent danger from the Russian invasion.  The town of Viipuri, still in Russian hands, is today called Vyborg.

As a young man, my grandfather set off from Viipuri as a sailor, or seaman, or deckhand, working on trans-Atlantic steamships and freighters.  We have records of him attending the venerable Seamen's Church Institute on South Street in Lower Manhattan, along the docks that used to spike outwards from the Financial District.  At the Seamen's Church, worship services were geared to maritime workers from around the world, working odd shifts, and lonely from months-long stints at sea.

On one of the voyages my grandfather worked, a freshly-loaded freighter from the Caribbean headed towards Europe, the deckhands were strictly instructed to stay away from a locked portion of the ship's hold, below deck.  Which, of course, was like telling a bunch of teenaged boys not to do something.  Before too long, my grandfather and some of his shipmates had broken into that forbidden part of the ship.  And what they saw deeply distressed my grandfather.

There, in the locked part of the hold, were men.  

Black men, in shackles.

We believe this was sometime around 1916*, which used to make me dubious.  Slavery was still a thing, that long after America's Civil War?

Apparently, an illicit fragment of it was, since it was a topic of grave concern for the League of Nations during the 1920's.  Somehow, the ship's owners had arranged for these men to be smuggled aboard without the crew knowing of it, and somehow, ostensibly in Europe, they were going to be off-loaded, probably to be shipped to yet another destination.

We don't know many details about that discovery, but back then, my grandfather knew exactly what was going on.  And he wanted to be no part of it.  Absolutely not.

The ship's next port of call was New York City, with which we believe my grandfather was already familiar from previous visits.  He likely knew there was a vibrant Finnish community in Brooklyn, and that he could become culturally absorbed there without attracting much attention.  So when they docked in New York, my grandfather jumped ship - literally - forfeiting his pay in the process.  And he walked away from those caged human beings, off of the pier, out onto the streets of New York, never to work on ships again.

My father took this photo of his father - the older man at left, and again in the reflection top right -
in their Sunset Park apartment in the mid-1950's.  It's one of the few photos of my grandfather,
and we believe it was his last.  Nobody can remember who the other two men are.

Eventually, after he'd married and become a father, my grandfather obtained his United States citizenship.

My grandmother, who arrived in the United States years later, spent a night on Ellis Island because her American sponsor didn't show up to claim her.  That was one of the legal ways people got into the country back then - by having a sponsor in America vouch for you.  Officials on Ellis Island herded those migrants whose sponsors hadn't claimed them into a large cage with iron bars for the night.  My grandmother could hardly sleep, what with the utter lack of privacy, and worrying about what would happen to her.  Turned out, she made sure she was at the front of the cage the next morning - this big cage, probably similar to what my grandfather saw those slaves inside of - her face pressed against the bars.  Eventually, a sternly-dressed woman strode into the immigration hall at Ellis Island, having just gotten off of the boat from Manhattan.  She walked right up to my grandmother, and asked her in perfect Finnish if she wanted to get off that island.

"Of course I do," my grandmother eagerly replied.

"Well then, just follow my lead," the anonymous woman ordered.  She turned to an immigration clerk, and said she'd come to claim my grandmother, and had a job immediately for her in Manhattan.

"Is this true?" the dubious clerk half-motioned, half asked in broken Finnish to my grandmother.

"Of course it is!" my grandmother retorted, completely unaware of what that job was.

My grandmother Laitinen's first US employer
lived in this townhouse, 60 W. 11th Street
in Greenwich Village. I took this photo in 1986.
Historians call it "the 1843* Samuel Cooke
House", built by Andrew Lockwood and first
occupied by a ship captain named Samuel Bourne.
Lockwood was one of the developers of 11th Street,
which at the time was at the city's northern reaches.
The property's first auspicious owner had been
Cooke, who was rector at New York's famed
St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church.
Other owners would later rent it out
to various occupants, so we don't know who my
grandmother's celebrity employer was.
Among the home's worst tenants was a secret
abortion clinic, years before it was legalized.
More recent owners have included the son
of the late publisher Malcomb Forbes.
(*The historical plaque affixed to the
home's façade says it was built in 1842)

The two woman left the hall and got on the next boat to Manhattan as soon as possible.  And that night, my grandmother found herself working as a maid at a party at a townhouse in Greenwich Village that was rented at the time by a well-known silent movie producer.

As they say, "only in New York," right?

At some point, obviously, my grandparents met in Brooklyn, got married, and had children.  My grandfather never seems to have held down a steady job, and eventually came to be known mostly for his prodigious drinking, and for writing a regular column for the local Finnish newspaper, New Yorkin Uutiset.  He wrote pieces about current events, philosophy, and life on the sea under the pen name "X Seaman," since that's what he was.  Years later, my aunt learned that the prestigious New York Public Library had some of his articles on file as part of their cultural heritage department. 

Family friends who knew my grandfather in Brooklyn's old Finntown have told us that he wasn't as entirely horrible as his family remembered him as being.  And it's been suggested that one of the reasons for his drinking - despite the fact that Finns are notorious for their alcohol consumption - might have stemmed from his disturbing experience on that trans-Atlantic ship.  As a Finn, back in the days when Finland was virtually 100% Caucasian, my grandfather would have barely known about slavery, and to him it likely would have been something that horrible people had done back in another time and place.  Not on board a ship he was working!

So for all the agony my grandfather gave his family through his drinking, I've come to value his distress over having the concept of human slavery break into his reality.  I sometimes wonder if, today, we whites would do well to let ourselves be a bit more agitated over something we figure only happened to somebody else back in another time and place.

Because while it may not be our reality now, it remains part of family lore for many African Americans.


* Thanks to research my Mother has been doing in 2021, with help from Finnish cousins on both my paternal and maternal sides, we've learned that Walter had established mailing addresses for himself in Brooklyn as early as 1913.  So it's logical to assume 1913 is a more accurate date for his ship-jumping.

Lee Statue Removal Happens in Dallas

By the time you read this, Dallas will have one less statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee on public display.

Currently, the city owns two Lee statues; one towers over a small park downtown near city hall and the convention center, and another commands - or, commanded - a prominent knoll overlooking a swanky boulevard known as Turtle Creek, near some of the priciest neighborhoods in the entire state of Texas.

Even Lee's detractors can't deny that the statue in his honor along Turtle Creek, in a public park named after the general, is a fine piece of art.  At least, in terms of its workmanship and aesthetics.  But with America's current fixation on commemorations of Civil War leaders - at least, leaders from the losing side - Dallas city councilmembers have voted to remove the two Lee statues from city property.  And the first one they chose to have removed from public viewing wasn't the one downtown, within blocks of the city's historically black-majority neighborhoods.

It was the one along Turtle Creek, named after a real creek that winds its way through some of the whitest districts in Dallas' northern neighborhoods.

This particular piece of artwork is actually composed of two elements; an over-sized depiction of a caped General Lee on his horse, and then another horse of a slightly smaller stature with a young, anonymous man (ostensibly one of Lee's soldiers) riding it.  Some folks defending this statue say the young man supposedly represents an African-American teenager, but its anglicized facial features in no way convey such an interpretation, at least in the obvious sense.

One person has already died in Dallas's push to remove Turtle Creek's Lee statue.  Last Wednesday was the council's vote to remove it, and work began immediately, which surprised many Dallasites, used to a far less efficient city hall.  A small crowd hurriedly gathered in Lee Park to either protest or celebrate the historic occasion.  But then the city's more commonplace tendency for lousing things up kicked back into gear.  The first crane hired for the job proved unable to handle the 6-ton bronze piece, which is - sorry, "was" - affixed to a handsome granite base.  The second crane brought to town for the job was hit by a red-light-running tractor-trailer truck this past weekend, and the 18-wheeler's driver was killed.  Even as late as last night, city leaders were guessing - at least to the media - as to when the statue could be removed.  A non-profit group sympathetic to keeping the statue intact had booked a protest at Lee Park for this coming Saturday, and it looked inevitable that the general would indeed be present during the protest to serve as a backdrop to the group's rallying cry.

Initially, Dallas budgeted over $400,000 for removing the Lee Park statue, and currently, it's unknown how much extra these delays have added to that budget.

Then, this afternoon, Dallasites were again caught by surprise at the sight of a new crane heading for Lee Park under a police escort.  And all during the statue's removal, police officers in body armor, with rifles in hand, stood guard around the perimeter of the work site.  The six-lane Turtle Creek Boulevard was closed to vehicular traffic, allowing bystanders a relatively unobstructed view of the proceedings.  And sure enough, by seven o'clock, the statue was down, without incident.

Of course, to some folks, the entire removal of Lee's statue is more than an incident - it's a travesty of justice and a refutation of history.  By now, we're all familiar with the arguments against removing statues such as this one in Lee Park  - a park that will likely soon revert to its original name, Oak Lawn Park, which it held before the Lee statue was erected in 1936.  Incidentally, it was then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, who dedicated the statue, which kinda flies in the face of a more modern narrative that only right-wing conservatives value the historicity of figures like General Lee.

In fact, history can be a complicated thing, as our bickering over America's Civil War proves.  Even Abraham Lincoln, long heralded as a hero for African Americans, did not consider blacks equal with whites.  It is now known that although Lincoln lead the Union in its quest to abolish the institution of slavery, at the same time, he was quietly negotiating to expel freed blacks from the continental United States after the war, to islands in the Caribbean.*  That inconvenient reality hardly fits seamlessly into the historical narrative most people want to believe about our national heroes, so it is not widely taught, or discussed.  I also knew a black woman whose family - in Mississippi, if I remember correctly - actually owned slaves as well, although it was a factoid of which she wasn't proud.  Still, she told me it was part of the reality of Southern economics at the time - if you owned a lot of farmland, it was cheaper to purchase workers to help with the crops rather than employ them, whether the landowner was black or white.

So is there really much of the Old South that's worth venerating, as many Southerners nostalgically claim there is?  Southern gentility is a concept that may have a romantic component, both now in the imaginations of people who never actually lived it, and back then, if you were wealthy enough to benefit from it.  But since it was largely based on an economic system sustained by slave labor, the gentility factor is corrupt in its practice, if not in its theory.  The plantation system was mostly a hold-over of the baronial British aristocratic system, which kept poorly-paid workers in perpetual servitude, subject to the whims of feudal honor, which itself is mostly derided in modern Britain today.

Then there's the question of modern America honoring a traitor to the republic such as Lee was, if you want to consider the literal definition of the term and its application to military justice.  Granted, none of the Confederacy's generals were ever tried for treason, mostly because Union lawmakers were afraid about how the public, deeply wounded and raw after such a bloody war, would react to a verdict one way or the other.  The overarching sentiment at the time was a desire to move forward as best as possible for the cause of national healing, but even that noble goal was eventually thwarted by unresolved issues over how freed blacks should be treated on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.

You see, racism was never defeated.  The Civil War didn't so much end because right had might; it ended because the South ran out of soldiers first.

That was back in 1865, but as we all know, the Civil War ain't over.  When my family moved to Texas in 1978, we were called "Yankees" by many native Texans, and kids in our neighborhood played "North against the South" - something my brother and I had never heard of up in rural Cleveland, New York.  Cops and Robbers?  Yes.  Cowboys and Indians?  Yes.  But I didn't even know what the Mason-Dixon line was until we moved to Texas.

Even today, the rebel flag - the "Stars and Bars" - is deeply revered by many as a symbol of not just the Confederacy, but the whole idealized notion of whatever the antebellum South was supposed to be.  "The South's gonna rise again" is a phrase that isn't entirely obsolete in the Southern lexicon.  And opposition to the removal of statues honoring Confederacy heroes such as Lee and Stonewall Jackson, just to name two, is potent here.

With all this in mind, if Dallas leaders wanted to make a statement against the Confederacy and its connotation with racism, why remove the Lee statue in Turtle Creek first?  Remember that other memorial here in Dallas?  It doesn't have only General Lee in it.  Lee is just one of four Confederacy heroes celebrated by this far more imposing structure, which consists of a main 60-foot pillar surrounded by four shorter ones, made of granite and marble.  It's called the Confederate War Memorial, it was dedicated in 1896, and it's considered the oldest public artwork in the city.

And the inscriptions on it? 

• “The brazen lips of Southern cannon thundered an unanswered anthem to the God of Battle.” 
• “It was given the genius and valor of Confederate seamen to revolutionize naval warfare over the earth.” 
• "This stone shall crumble into dust ere the deathless devotion of Southern women be forgotten.” 
• “The Confederate sabreur kissed his blade homeward riding on into the mouth of hell.” 
• “Confederate infantry drove bayonets through columns that never before reeled to the shock of battle.”

I guess such romanticized notions as these are part of that Southern gentility thing.  But don't their contrived notions of valor - at the unmentioned expense of slavery - make the Confederacy memorial downtown worthy of more attention than what Dallas' city council paid to the Lee statue?

Meanwhile, this is what President Roosevelt had to say when he dedicated Lee's newer statue along Turtle Creek:

"I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee.  All over the United States we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general.  But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that.  We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen."

Hmm.

At the end of the day, much of our perception of the past depends on the rhetoric that tends to fit our worldview, doesn't it?  In other words, if you really want to believe Lee was as hateful a Southerner as his detractors claim him to have been, you will support the narrative that memorials to him must be obliterated from our country.  On the other hand, however, if you really want to cling to the notion that being a "great American gentleman" (whatever that means) should lead us to venerate people like Lee, you probably will be angry that Dallas removed a statue of him today.

So what do I think?  Personally, I neither believe Lee was personally as hateful towards blacks as he's been portrayed as being.  I suspect he was a flawed product of his time who couldn't see past the Southern economic model of slavery.  Does that make him a racist?  Yes, but then again, many folks today are racists; they're just not defined as one the way Lee has been.

Nobody can argue that we don't still have a problem with race relations in our country.  And it's past time for us to admit that we need to work harder at overcoming the prejudices that have sabotaged racial harmony since before were were a nation.  So to that end, I think the magnanimous thing to do would be to remove from public land icons to the Confederacy that likely are misinterpreted and misrepresented today by people with various motives.  If there are historical organizations that want to house these icons on private land, then they should be allowed to do so, but the best memorials will be those that portray a broader and more wholistic representation of the Civil War, the Confederacy, and the Union, warts and all.

I can understand why taxpayers who aren't white don't want their tax dollars used to maintain statues that could be used to celebrate a way of life that mistreated people.  But more than that, since Lee is - to put the best possible spin on it - associated with a culture that sought to perpetuate the ownership of human beings, is that really something for us to so conspicuously celebrate?  After all, do we celebrate the owners of brothels?  Do we celebrate Aaron Burr, who was the third person to be vice-president of our fledgling United States, but was put on trial for treason?

What's the harm in removing statues to Lee and other Confederate legends?  Who's going to forget about those men?  Certainly not all of the Southerners who insist that "the South shall rise again"!  And the Civil War isn't going to fade away from our national consciousness anytime soon.  So what's the big deal?

Part of me wonders if the agitation so many people feel at the removal of Confederacy statuary reflects not simply frustration at the changing political and social landscape of America, but also a shadow of some latent racial issues that folks don't want to admit exists inside of them.

If I touched a nerve with that, then maybe I've got a point?

And if you agree with me, don't gloat.  No matter how you look at it, this should be a somber time for America, since we all have things to learn from it.
_____

* What preserves Lincoln's reputation is the fact that he was assassinated before ever being able to implement any part of any plan to deport newly-freed slaves.  Educators and historians like to assume that by the war's gruesome end, Lincoln's mindset had changed enough so that he would not have pursued the re-colonization idea. 
_____
Update - June 7, 2019:  A Dallas lawyer purchased the Lee statue at auction for $1.43 million.  A condition of the sale is that the statue can no longer be displayed within view of any public property.

Mabel, My Belle

My 'hood in Arlington, Texas

I'm got a thing going on with a girl named Mabel.

She's beautiful, black, and very well-groomed.  Most days, she's sporting a stylish kerchief around her neck.  We live on the same street, and meet in the evenings, as the sun is setting and the temperatures are cooling.  I go out for a walk and stroll by her place; she sees me and comes out... so we can share some private time together before she quietly goes back inside her home.

Mabel is a beautiful black lab who lives around the corner from me, in what we long-timers in our neighborhood call the "Taco Bell House."  In actuality, the Taco Bell House looks nothing like a Taco Bell restaurant, but it does have a red roof made of those undulating tiles, and it has stucco walls, in contrast to all of our brick homes.  The Taco Bell House features a courtyard with a vine-covered archway opening to a fenced-in dog run that parallels our street.  And that is Mabel's domain.

Mabel's courtyard is mostly walled by sliding-glass doors, so from several rooms inside her home, Mabel can see who's passing by outside.  Her owners have built a little doggy-door into one of the glass doors, so she's free to go in and out whenever she feels like it.  At various times, as I've been talking to her owners, lounging in their courtyard, I've witnessed Mabel making loop after loop through an open human-sized door, and her doggy door.  Around and around.  It's as if she's afraid she might miss something interesting inside while she's outside, and vice-versa.

This summer, I guess Mabel has learned that I usually take a walk in the evenings, and she's started to watch for me from inside her Taco Bell House.  Last night, as has become our custom, I walked by the fence along her dog run, next to the courtyard with the arched entryway, and a familiar pattern played itself out yet again.

I'll hear the quiet flapping noise of Mabel's doggy door after I've passed, and as I continue walking along, with my back to the Taco Bell House, I'll hear a muffled bark and a moan from Mabel.  I turn around, and there she is - standing up against the fence, looking at me, with her soft, black eyes and floppy, fuzzy ears, waiting for me to turn around and return to her.

For all I know, she may do that with anybody who walks by, and we have a lot of people who walk for exercise in our leafy neighborhood.  Yet I've seen other neighbors walk by Mabel's home, and she never comes out to greet them.  So I like to think I've got a little something special happening with her.

And she knows I can't resist her.  Yes, I turn back around and stroll over to Mabel, whose seems to be begging for some attention, since she wants me to think her owners don't give her any...  which I know is a lie on Mabel's part...  but I let her think I haven't caught on to her little ploy.  Some people say a dab of deception is good for a relationship.  I don't know about that, but I know that it gets Mabel what she wants.  I reach through the wrought-iron fence and scratch behind her ears, rub her head, stroke her neck, and pat her on her back.  I talk to her and tell her how beautiful she is.  It's all an ego trip for her, of course - we both know that - and she drinks it up.  And then, after a short while, she backs away.  Her ego has been well and truly restored.  Without a sound, she turns around to head back inside.

I realize that these secret meetings of ours probably aren't the best basis for a long-term relationship.  But we seem to have had little problems with the racial thing; her being black, and me being white.  Even the species thing hasn't been much of a problem.  And there's little commitment involved, which works well for both of us.

Although... I've begun to worry a little bit about what will happen to our relationship this fall, when our human clocks get set back an hour, and the sun sets so early.  My walks will be in the dark, so will Mabel be able to see me?  Will she be looking for me before the sun sets, which will then be a couple of hours before my walk?  I hope she won't be devastated if she doesn't see me.  Or... will she forget all about me?

At least I can find some solace in the fact that the two of us will have had the Summer of '17.

_____

Update - March 5, 2019:  Yes, during the two dark winters that have passed since Mabel and I began our little thing, there were times when I'd walk by in the darkness, and Mabel happened to see me, and she'd come out of her little doggie door so we could steal some quality time together. 

Or, so, that's how it seemed to me. 
 
The other day, however, I was talking with Mabel's human mommy, and my bubble was burst.  It seems that Mabel goes out to greet EVERYBODY who walks by, whether she knows them or not.  And we have a lot of folks in our neighborhood who walk, and they carry doggie treats with them for furry friends like Mabel.  They've asked Mabel's parents for permission to give her the treats, and they feed them to Mabel through their wrought-iron fence. 

When I learned that, I realized Mabel comes out to greet me, not because she has a special affection for me, but because I'm just another humanoid passing by who probably has a treat for her... that's why she eagerly sticks her nose through the fence.  And when I never provide one, after about a minute, Mabel cuts her losses and goes back inside. 

And here I thought we had a thing going on!

Actually, while learning the truth is hard, frankly, it fits more with the way my life's experiences with romance have gone.  Perhaps I guess I expected a different result from "man's best friend."  

Oh well - at least Mabel keeps giving me a chance, right?