My Family's Illegal Immigrant

I have an illegal immigrant in my family.

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

He was Caucasian, which might surprise you.  He didn't smuggle his way here.  Nor did he pay any human traffickers thousands of dollars to get here.

Although... a form of human trafficking does factor into his story.

We're not completely sure of how he got to America.  But according to family lore, as far as my aunt Helena was concerned, what we think we know tends to make sense, and the dates seem to work.  We still 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.

Neither in the quantity of stories they told us about him - which were few indeed, nor in the affectionate, poignant qualities relayed through what memories they did share.

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 long 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.  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 crumpled 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 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, not from emotion, but functional logistics:  "Well, who do we call?  Will Halversen's take the body away?"

Halversen's was a long-time Norwegian funeral home on Sunset Park's 8th Avenue.  But I'm not even sure there was a funeral.  A cousin in Finland actually found an old, grainy photo of somebody who looks like my grandfather in a casket with flowers displayed nearby.  But no notation anywhere as to the photo's subject matter.  It's possible that my widowed grandmother sent the photo to our Finnish family as a courtesy, or maybe the photo is of somebody else.

Do your family albums hold a lot of undated, non-notated photos like ours do?

We know he's buried in Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood cemetery, in an underground 3-level vault (even the graves are high-density in Gotham's cemeteries).  But the other two levels of his grave remain empty and unused.  My grandmother and aunt bought the set, but couldn't bear to be interred along with him.  They're buried elsewhere in Green-Wood.

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 several silver spoons with which my grandfather's sister was able to escape as their family's home in Viipuri faced imminent danger from a 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.

And this is where some unsubstantiated world history enters his story.  The following narrative comes from my aunt's recollections of something her father told the family at some point.  I didn't ever hear mention of it until after I was grown, and only from her.  I can't remember my father ever broaching this topic.  So while its provenance lacks proofs, it does answer some questions, even though - and even because - it's quite unsettling.

According to my aunt's version of her father's account, his last working sea voyage was a freshly-loaded freighter from the Caribbean headed towards Europe.  Oddly enough, the deckhands had been 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 teenage 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.

From factual evidence regarding a new mailing address he established for himself in New York, we believe this happened sometime around 1913, which initially made 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 apparently 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 more 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 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 mirror, top right -
in their Sunset Park apartment in the mid-1950's.  It's one of the few known photos of my grandfather,
and we believe it was the last one taken of him before his death.
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, but we don't know how that happened, either.

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 our 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 might happen to her.  The next morning, she made sure she was at the front of that cage.  In my mind's eye, I imagine her cage was probably larger than the cage my grandfather saw on that ship, but the possible irony seems eerie, right?  Both of my paternal grandparents, arriving in different ways, had cages feature prominently in their coming-to-America stories!  

Eventually, a sternly-dressed woman strode into the immigration hall at Ellis Island, having just gotten off of the visitor's 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 spunky 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.
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. 

A family friend who knew my grandfather in Brooklyn's old Finntown has 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, maybe there was an explanation:   his probable distress over unwittingly witnessing human slavery break into his reality.  Even though we can't know for sure, I understand we humans sometimes handle unexpected stress in a variety of unhealthy ways.  

Life often is unfair.  Sometimes egregiously so.  Both in what happens to us, and how we respond.  It's not the most comforting epitaph, of course, but maybe my grandfather's story exemplifies that fact.