Ellis Island: One Immigrant’s Story

We’re filing in and the ladies and gentleman are looking at everybody. They’re asking us if these are our own shoes, and where we came from, and if we were brought up in a religion and who our people were. They’re checking our teeth, they’re looking at our skin to see if we have diseases. They’re looking at us like we’re geese going up the ramp to have our necks cut off, but they’re also trying to look at us in a way that makes us seem like people. It’s a cross between the two. They’re making me feel important by asking me these questions, but they’re also making me feel inhuman because I don’t know why and nobody will really explain it to me.

In front of me, there’s a girl who looks like she couldn’t be more than 15 and her teeth are all broken and one eye looks like it’s shut. She’s a poor thing. She’s skinny, but she still has color in her face. This is someone else that they can throw in the water, but she’ll bob up again. When they start to ask her lots of questions, I can see that she’s about to cry out of her one good eye, and I tell them that they don’t need to ask her questions. I mean, I say in my own tongue, they can see that she’s no more than 4 feet and no more than 80 pounds and they can see that her one good eye is blue. Why do they need to ask her anything else? Can’t they look for themselves? What the hell do they want?

One of the guards tells me not to swear at the doctor and I tell him to go —- himself—and when he hears me say this, I see he understands my language and he throws his head back and laughs. One of the things I’ve learned, you never know when you say something like that to a man, if he’s going to laugh or punch you in the jaw. It’s turning up a card in a game of chance: You don’t know what’s going to come up next. We come out of the belly of the boat and they give us each a number. The air smells good because the boat smelled so bad. The dock here smells salty, like the water—maybe, too, it smells like blood. I am happy to be outside. I don’t like confined spaces. Very little good has ever happened to me in a confined space.

The two other women who come in after me are very loud and very big. The small girl and I seem silent next to these two booming healthy creatures who look like they’ve been raised out in the fields next to oxen.

They have round cheeks, and big breasts, and white skin, and forearms like a man’s, and they look like they’ve been hauling pots of milk around. Yet the guard still smiles at me even when their voices sail above everything.

The little girl, who still hasn’t told us her name is looking up at these women as if she’d never seen people like this before. Everyone is sizing everyone up, down here. We were kept under close watch on the boat, with our one tin cup to drink out of and one tin bowl to eat out of. Some people cried because we would never see our homeland again in our lifetime except in our dreams. But I looked back and spit. I spit into the wind even though I’d been told that was not a wise thing to do. I didn’t care.

The little girl is standing next to me, I don’t know if it’s the wind, but she starts to shiver and she starts to shake, like she’s having a fit, but she isn’t. I put my arm around her bony shoulder and I run my hand up and down her arm. She stands still and trembles, not moving towards me or away, either. I feel the coarse wool of her sleeve and her little bird-bones through the wool. I think about how either this will kill her outright or make her into the toughest creature the world could create.

But she has to be still so they don’t think she’s sick. We have to be well in this new country. All must be well.