Five million from Italy,
four million from Ireland,
six million from Germany.

1. Steerage 

Both of my grandfathers
and one
great grandfather,
were part of the multitudes.
When I looked them up
in the Ellis Island files,
I found more than a dozen
with the same names,
both first and last. 
And they remained
unknown to me
faces on photographs,
a few stories
without the full context.
 
From both sides of the family
relatives scattered
across states and provinces,
three countries;
and where they scattered they died
their untold stories
buried inside of them. 
There is no one left to ask. 
I have to read
what survivors remember,
their crossing,
so different from mine:
 
how they slept on triple bunks
pushed close together,
iron cots with canvas
stretched across them;
how they ate on the floor
out of little tin containers
that fit one on top of the other
in a bucket--salt fish and potatoes,
soup, stew and more potatoes--
crowded elbow to elbow
back to back on the floor,
the women with the women
the men with the men,
when they weren't sick
or repelled by the stink:
smoke, vomit, unwashed bodies. 
 
The ships plied back and forth
in rough and fair weather,
cutting traveling time
from two months to three weeks, 
their self-loading cargo
packed in every class, on every level,
as many as 2,000 below the water.
 
Where the mechanism used to be
for steering the sailing ships,
the human fuel for the new economy.
 
 
2. Ellis Island 

                                   In droves
the immigrants went up the stairs
of the Ellis Island processing center
bumping and crowding each other
with their burdens, their elbows, their feet.
And while they watched themselves
and watched their neighbors,
someone watched them from above.
Anyone who coughed,
wheezed, limped or shuffled,
got a strike against him. 
 
In droves
they went from room to room
carrying and dragging their baskets
and trunks, their home-made carpet bags.  
 
Iron bars in their line of vision,
iron bars above their heads, 
they waited in the pens like cattle,
like animals in their cages.
 
They stood and waited, they sat and waited,
holding their papers:
 
passports, birth certificates, baptismal certificates,
certificates of good character, of good standing
in the church, of honorable discharge from the army.
Papers of indenture and medical papers.
Papers from the maritime companies
declaring the bearer  
vaccinated and unloused.
 
I imagine the small men in my family,
the tall man in my family
lost in the crowds that waited,
moving with the others from room to room,
from examiner to examiner.

The next to be called
stopped with people at his heels,
and stood still holding his luggage,
while doctors poked and prodded,
looked at his teeth,
turned his eyelids up
with a finger or button hook,
listened to his chest.
 
They were given toys to play with
and wondered what it meant.
Was it a trick when they asked,
How much is two and two?
 
They saw how some people
were marked on the sleeve with chalk .
The chalk was blue. Was that good or bad?
In school the teacher
had marked their small mistakes in red,
their big mistakes in blue.
 
X for mental illness, E for eyes,
CT for trachoma, P for lungs,
H for heart, L for lameness,
G for goiter, Pg for pregnancy.
 
They didn't know as we do
what the letters meant.
But none had to go back,
or throw himself in the sea
in shame and desperation.
 
They went to what lives awaited them,
stamped and ticketed like parcels:
landing cards, inspection cards, tickets
and railroad cards pinned on their clothes.
 
Please show the bearer
where to change train, where to get off,
as this person does not speak English.
 
Remembering how it was,
Anne Vida, an immigrant from Hungary, said:
We must have looked
like marked-down merchandise
at Gimbel's basement  . . .

3. From Ellis Island to . . .

An anonymous Italian story tells it like this:

I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out that  the streets were not paved with gold, that  they were not paved at all,  and that  I was supposed  to pave them.

My mother's father, a stone mason,
found work as a bricklayer.
The others went from below the water,
to below the ground,
trekking across wide open country 
to disappear inside the mountains
of Utah, British Columbia, West Virginia. 

First appeared in the Paterson Literary Review