The Immigrants Read Free

spoke; they lined the rail and watched Manhattan drift away into the distance, their faces blank and hopeless.
    At the railroad yard, across the river, the contract laborers were fed slices of ham on stale white bread and coffee in tin mugs. Mancini, always smiling and cheer ful, assured them that arrangements had been made for their care and feeding on the trip across the country, and then he led them to a part of the yard where a boxcar stood.
    There he turned them over to a railroad official, who checked them off Mancini’s list and herded them into the boxcar. When some of the men began to protest, Mancini assured them that this was no ordinary boxcar. There were toilets at one end of the car, and it was divided into two sections so that the women might have privacy. There were mattresses on which to sleep. Each day they would be given food and fresh water. It would be an interesting and enlightening trip, and they would see a great deal of this beautiful country which they had chosen as their new homeland.
    So much for what Frank Mancini told the group of contract laborers in the railroad yard on the west bank of the Hudson River.
    There was much more that he might have told them that he failed to tell them—that the toilets were filthy and functioned poorly, that the stench would fill the boxcar in short order, that sixteen
     
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    additional men would join the group in Chicago, that the food would be wretched and in short supply, that they would not have enough drinking water, and that it would be cold beyond belief in the unheated car. He also failed to tell them that the trip across the continent would take seven days.
    Seven days in a boxcar, as Anna Lavette discovered, can be an eternity. There was a single primitive latrine built into one end of the car, a traveling outhouse of sorts. There was no heating, no seats, no blankets ex cept what the immigrants had with them, and the food, brought to them at train stops, was a dismal, unchang ing diet of cold sausage and stale bread. The population of the car was fragmented by language and origin. The men were quick to anger; frustration became rage. With no other place to vent their fury and despair, men turned on their wives, beat the submissive, inarticulate women, and turned like caged animals on whoever dared to interfere.
    For three days, Joseph and Anna huddled together for warmth and watched the life in the boxcar with a growing sense of hopelessness. On the fourth day, An na’s pain began, and at four o’clock in the morning, in the rattling, swaying, cold boxcar, Anna’s child was born. A Polish woman and a Hungarian woman served as midwives, and suddenly and miraculously, the strife in the boxcar ceased. Anger turned into compassion, and the tiny bit of squall-ing life became a sort of cove nant and promise to the immigrants.
    Jackets and coats were given to Anna to warm her and the baby, and in a way, the child became the triumphant possession of the entire population of the car. The husband of the Polish woman who had served as midwife produced a bottle of carefully hoarded plum brandy, and everyone drank to the health of the newborn babe. Their own misery was forgotten, and a babble of tongues and halting transla tions played the game of finding a name for the child.
     
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    Joseph fixed on the name of Daniel. The child was delivered in a lion’s den, or its vague equivalent. As for Anna, she was content with the end of the pregnancy and the fact of this lovely, healthy bit of life sucking away at her breast. At least she had milk, and the child would live. And sooner or later, they would find a priest who could baptize him.
    Thus Daniel Lavette came into the world in a boxcar rattling across the length of the United States of Amer ica. He weighed well over eight pounds, and he sucked manfully and grew fat and round.
    Years later, doctors would tell Anna Lavette that the manner of the birth and