When I went to get Giuseppe Rota, I found the officials at the immigrant home were very loath to let him go. He was seated at one of the long tables of the big barracks-like house, with forty other men, women, and children, and was enjoying a hearty meal, notwithstanding his anxiety as to his ultimate fate. Since he had got into their hands the management was chary of relinquishing him to me, even though I had committed him, and poor Giuseppe protested volubly that I had been more than a father to him, and that his only hope of reaching his uncle was through me. After a tiresome explanation I signed a receipt for him and gave references for myself, which were promptly looked up, and then we were allowed to depart.
The next task was to find Ferruchio Vazzana, a Gualtieri man who at that time had a small store on East Fifteenth Street near Second Avenue, and to whom Nunzio Giunta was “raccomended”; then Tommaso Figaro, a painter from Gualtieri, who would be sponsor for Nicola Curro. His address was 520 East Fourteenth Street. Nicola and Nunzio went with Antonio and me, and we had barely entered the Italian district of that part of the city when two or three men from different directions came flying toward us, throwing their arms about Nunzio, Nicola, and Antonio. They were all Gualtieri people, and in a few minutes I found 229myself outside of an excited throng centred about the newcomers and talking at a rate that left me entirely in the dark as to what was being said. When they did remember me, the boys found great difficulty in explaining how I, an “American proper,” came to be so closely associated with them, and I noticed a marked cooling of the enthusiasm among the people about. They were extremely suspicious of me.
In the crowd were two brothers of Tommaso Figaro, and they led the way to his little two-roomed home, for the first of a series of visits about the tenements of the neighborhood, among old friends from the village, which I was compelled to terminate at last by dragging Antonio away and starting for Ellis Island to look after the baggage. Nicola and Nunzio were left in the midst of their friends, who were chaffing them, calling them “greenhorns,” and poking fun at their “old-country” clothes. We met other lately arrived immigrants, some who had been with us on the Prinzessin Irene, and pressure was being brought on them to get them to lay aside the attire which marked them as new arrivals. A month later Nunzio and Nicola did not look like the same men.
When we arrived at the Barge Office, Mike Delaney, the veteran Battery policeman, who has handled millions of immigrants, was lining up the aspettati to go on board the boat which was substituting for the old John G. Carlisle, she having broken down at last, and we found ourselves jammed among hundreds. It happened that the morning newspapers had had articles concerning the arrival of our party, and wherever we went the word was passed among the immigration officials that Antonio and I were the leaders of the group.
230We found that a part of the baggage had already been sent to the pier of the Stonington Line, but some of the trunks had heavy customs charges against them, and the owners, Concetta, Nastasia, and Pulejo must sign the papers in Boston. We contrived to get through in time to catch the second boat back, and only emerged at all from the tangle of checking, expressing, and receipting at the Barge Office by the kindly aid of the officials there. I found myself wondering how the immigrants who persist in bringing such confused quantities of baggage ever get it to its destination at all, and was thankful that our troubles with our impedimenta were about over. Vain was my fancy, for there are tracers out for some of it yet.
On the returning boat I had an interesting talk with a Russian Jew by the name of Mottet Ianjge, who had just arrived. He came from near Odessa and had been met by his brother, a hatmaker employed by a Waverley Place firm, who acted as interpreter for us.
Mottet had just finished his term of enforced service in the Russian army, and had more than once been compelled to act in procedures against his own people, whom he said were driven about from pillar to post by the Russian authorities in a way that made America seem like a heaven to them; and when letters came from their relatives here, telling them of how free and easy life was, they were wild to escape from their surroundings, and many more would have followed his example but for the fact that officially circulated reports hinted of strange dangers and hardships which the immigrants must undergo. Before he entered the army he had been working for a farmer who paid him about $2.50 a week. The farmers through all that part of the country owned their own land, and their farms averaged in size from forty to fifty acres. Mortgages on these farms were increasing in number, and many of them were held by wealthy Jews in the towns. In the army Mottet averred his pay was forty-five cents per month, and his treatment was of the roughest sort. He was in fine physical condition, though, and looked forward to his work in this country with great eagerness.
Mr. Broughton Brandenburg, as He Looked when He Passed through Ellis Island as an Immigrant
231He pointed out to me a man, twenty years older than himself, heavily bearded, wearing the odd Russian cap, and with boots to his knees, whom he said had been cruelly treated by the Christians in his village, and had lost all his property through fire, as well as his wife and daughter. His only son was a conscript, and his father did not even know where he was, so he had borrowed enough money to come to America to begin life over again at the commencement of his old age.
By using great haste we got the party assembled and down to the Stonington Line pier in time to catch the night boat. I had intended to go with the Squadritos to Stonington, to see them entirely through to their destination, but an unforeseen obstacle arose in the form of Giuseppe Rota. Because he refused to be left alone to look after himself, I had been lugging him about all the latter end of the afternoon, and when we made our way down to the boat it suddenly occurred to me that if I went to Stonington I must either take him along, leave him standing in the darkness on the pier, or find some one to take care of him. It seemed easy enough to call a messenger boy, but when the uniformed mite arrived and I committed Giuseppe to his care to be taken back to 147 West Houston Street, Giuseppe raised his voice to heaven and bellowed like a bull, 232clinging about my shoulders and protesting that he was afraid I was sending him away to lose him, so that he might never see his uncle or any of his compadres from Avellino again, and if I did he vowed he would end all his suspense and suffering by plunging off into the dark river then and there, so I dismissed the messenger and took the party aboard, bade them good-bye for a short time, and took Giuseppe home again.
The group was quartered in the steerage compartments forward, which are often filled with two or three hundred immigrants, and inasmuch as they knew they would arrive in Stonington about two o’clock the next morning, they refused to try to get any sleep, but sat about talking and singing while the boat ploughed up the Sound. Ina, however, went to sleep in her mother’s arms, and her mother alternately laughed and cried, and hugged and kissed the sleeping child as she thought of the diminishing hours that separated her from her husband.
There were many other Italians aboard, all bound to the New England manufacturing towns, and they made merry on the way, and related the wonders which they had seen so far in the great new country.
At last the big whistle sounded in a long blast, and the boat slowed down. Soon she was bumping against the pier, and an officer was routing out the immigrants and getting them ashore.
Antonio and Giovanni Pulejo were the first on deck, and as they appeared at the end of the plank a wild shout went up from a black group in the shadow, and they heard the familiar voices of Giuseppe, Tommaso, and Carlino calling their names through the darkness.
Soon all were ashore and mingling in a wild scene of embracing and kissing, men and women, men and 233men, women and women. When Camela had Giuseppe’s arms about her at last, all she could do was to lay her tired head on his shoulder and weep, while Ina stood at one s............