Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [35]
“Viva l’America!” was shouted, men waved their hats, women bounced and kissed the children in their arms, prayers were murmured, and tears swallowed.
Sailing forward, Giovanna’s eyes didn’t leave Liberty’s face. “You welcomed my Nunzio, but you didn’t protect him. You devoured him like the women said,” accused Giovanna, although her face bore none of the emotion that her heart felt.
She felt both excitement and paralyzing sadness at the idea of soon walking where Nunzio had walked and sleeping where Nunzio had slept. The boat turned into a dock away from the statue, but before Giovanna lost sight of Liberty’s face, she asked her, “And what plans do you have for me here in l’America?”
At the pier, the steerage passengers waited while the first- and second-class passengers were cleared through onboard customs and then disembarked. From the deck, the immigrants watched the happy reunions on the dock. They were only a few feet from l’America, but still an ordeal away. The people in steerage were boarded onto a barge that had pulled alongside the Lombardia. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they waited in anxious anticipation for the sound of the motor and the last leg of their journey. But nothing happened. Instead, torturous time passed while they stood rocking in the wakes of passing boats. Word filtered through the immigrants that Ellis Island was crowded.
“I told you l’America was filled up!” the man in Giovanna’s steerage compartment shouted to Luigi.
“Boccalone! We’ll be there soon,” reprimanded Luigi.
It wasn’t soon, but six hours later the barge pulled into the dock at Ellis Island. The mood was solemn as the immigrants stepped onto land to waiting crew members who pinned a paper number to each foreigner’s clothing. Giovanna looked at her “27” upside down and wondered if they had her age wrong, but then she noticed a child with “102.”
They entered a large redbrick building where they were instructed to leave their baggage. Giovanna hesitated but let go of her belongings when she saw the fear that she felt mirrored on the faces of the other immigrants as they parted with all that they had.
The crowd moved up a staircase into a huge hall that was divided into aisles by iron railings. They were no longer being prodded by the ship’s crew but by people in uniforms who filled one aisle at a time. Instructions shouted in many languages by exasperated and overworked immigration officials echoed throughout the great room, and nervous whispers were amplified in the cavernous hall. In an attempt to understand what was happening to them, the detainees whispered messages up and down the rows.
“There are men checking people and writing on them with blue chalk,” was the first message to reach Giovanna. Writing on them? Didn’t they have paper? In the aisle next to her, the line of communication broke down at a group of Poles sandwiched in among the Italians.
Giovanna advanced far enough down the line to glimpse an inspector in a navy blue uniform outlined in braided trim holding a piece of blue chalk in his hands. From the moment someone reached the head of the line, the man scrutinized that person. Giovanna watched him order a mother carrying an older baby to put the child down and make him walk. The mother set the boy on the floor. He stared at the shiny, black knee-high boots in front of him and screamed. His nervous mother swatted his bottom, forcing him forward.
When each immigrant reached the inspector, after walking a closely observed ten feet, the inspector thumped on the foreigner’s chest, picked up their arms, lifting their sleeves to look at their skin, and then inspected their fingernails. Giovanna looked at her own fingernails. Would they not let you into l’America if you were dirty? The pungent body odors in the room convinced Giovanna that cleanliness couldn’t be the reason for checking fingernails. The smells were so strong that Giovanna was taking long breaths with her face nearly imbedded in the basil plant of the man in front of her. Various plants were clutched like gold throughout the hall, and Giovanna