Centuries

Posted by Paulette Simpson

Posted: October 23, 2009 - 11:09 am

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During the 2008 presidential campaign and immediately following the Inauguration, we heard a lot about our new President’s “narrative.” It reminded me of something I learned a long time ago about politicking: People don’t like lectures – they want to hear a story. So here’s one of mine.

One hundred years ago this weekend the 476’ long transport ship Duca degli Abruzzi sailed into New York Harbor with 1,836 passengers listed on the manifest - most from Southern Italy and Sicily and a handful from Turkey. The ship had steamed from Naples and Genoa some twelve days earlier. Eighty passengers made the journey in first class; sixteen traveled in second class quarters and the remaining 1,740 were in steerage. Among those third class passengers was my grandfather, Michelangelo Magistro.

Born in 1886, Michele had apprenticed as a shoemaker in his hilltop town of Sant’ Angelo di Brolo, near Messina in Sicily. After the death of his father in 1906 it was decided that he should join his cousin, Giuseppe Gallucio in New York. Michele’s older sister Illuminata and younger sister Carmela, both expert seamstresses, worked for three years to help pay his passage to America. In 1909, the one-way 3rd class fare was $35, roughly equivalent to $600 today.

According to the New York Times, the weather on October 24, 1909 was miserable. The twenty-one ships from around the world that docked that day were greeted by a fierce Atlantic storm that sent sheets of driving rain and icy winds to welcome the arriving immigrants. The first and second class passengers were quickly processed at the harbor while the third class passengers boarded small ferries for the requisite 3-5 hour medical and legal inspection at Ellis Island (famously depicted near the beginning of The Godfather Part II).

Michele went to work in a Prince St. shoe factory. His sister Illuminata died in 1911 and Michele brought Carmela to New York in 1912 where she went to work as a finisher at Stearns on E. 42nd St. Stearns was the largest silk dress goods factory in New York and there Carmela met a young Sicilian woman from Cerami whom she introduced to her brother. They married a few years later.

Between 1892 and 1924, over 12 million passengers and crew members came through Ellis Island. Most, if not all had a story to tell – a personal narrative deeply imbued by the immigrant perspective and the promise of a better future in America. My grandfather never returned to his homeland, not even for a visit, and until the day he died in 1970 he remained deeply grateful for the good fortune God had given him.

In the fall of 1609, three hundred years before my grandfather’s ship landed in New York, Henry Hudson explored the river now named for him in his 85’ ship Half Moon. The narratives never end. Twenty days before my grandfather’s arrival in 1909, Wilbur Wright commemorated the first navigation of the Hudson River waterway by flying his aeroplane, as the New York Times reported, “… with the grace of a seagull and the strength of an eagle” up the Hudson from Governors Island, around the Statue of Liberty, up to Grant’s Tomb and back with more than one million spectators watching, including I imagine, thousands of arriving immigrants.

Intersecting American narratives provide an endearing and enduring portrait of a country that began as an idea and set of ideals, a country that is always becoming and never quite done crossing oceans, exploring rivers and taking flight. Four centuries after Hudson’s “discovery,” it’s even more bewildering. Planes are masterfully ditching in the Hudson, immigration is politicized and young women still flock to New York for high fashion. And the ships that sail from New York’s piers are larger and more luxurious, sailing for leisurely purposes in the opposite direction.

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