halfshellvenus | Idol Mini: "Daring"

Daring
Idol Mini | week 2| 804 words
Sankofa (visiting one’s past to understand and build on the present)

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As a child, I’d heard the story of my grandfather’s journey to America. He'd sold himself into indentured servitude to pay for the cost of travel, and once his debt had been paid off, he'd kept working until he’d earned passage for his mother and younger sister as well.

I knew that it had taken a lot of courage to make that decision, and to leave everyone and everything he'd ever known to travel to the other side of the world alone, all for the chance of a better future. The choice made sense for someone who had grown up in the desperation of London’s slums.

But I didn’t really understand just how surprising that choice had been until a few years ago, when I saw the postcard:

Ellis Island in black and white on one side, and a message from Jack (not John, then) scrawled in pencil on the other, to let his family know that he’d arrived safely.

The childish lettering told the part of the story that had slipped by me each time I’d heard it. The logic of his decision had always obscured the hard truth of the full context: my grandfather had made that choice and that journey when he was only thirteen years old.

My mother had told us he’d only had an eighth grade education, but I’d assumed it was because he left school to begin working. That would have been fairly common in the 1910s, especially for children of the lower classes. But working close to home is different from crossing the globe to work for strangers and knowing that you probably will never return.

Maybe his age at the time of emigration had been mentioned when I was younger? I was a very competent child, shy but independent, and that idea might not have seemed quite as shocking when I was closer to the age he’d been. I mean, I left high school early at age sixteen to go off to college in another state, because I was fed up with my parents!

But hearing that information as an adult, when I had children who’d been thirteen not that long ago? It was appalling. The thought of them alone in the world, working long, hard days with no family to love them, was just tragic. Kids have enough trouble surviving middle school at that age, and at thirteen, our son still had all of his stuffed animals in his bed!

My grandfather grew up in harsher times, but I don’t think many children of his era would have chosen the future for themselves that he did. I can’t imagine making such a hard decision, though I know there are children coming across the border now who are making even tougher decisions every day.

He was never re-enrolled in school in the United States, although that had been promised as part of the agreement. He was in servitude to a carpenter, and worked all the same hours his master did. He even extended his contract so his mother and little sister could join him. Still, he learned a trade that he used to make his own living while he was able.

Sometime after he was freed, he enlisted as a soldier in World War I. The driving factor was the chance to become an American citizen if he survived. He returned and married, and took advantage of the Homestead Act to try farming in Eastern Oregon. It was twenty miles across the mountains from his property to the nearest town, a distance he had to travel by foot.

It was the lack of sufficient water there that defeated him, not the lack of sacrifice or dedication. He moved his young family to Western Oregon instead, and worked building houses and furniture instead. .

My mother caught his independent streak. She became a doctor at a time when women had the choice of being nurses, teachers, or secretaries. My own career history pales in comparison, but I did move across the country just after college, in order to break into the radio market. It was a hard, lonely choice, but it allowed me to be hired by a station in California just three years later.

My own daughter took a summer internship back East after her second year in college, and is now living too far away in Southern California. She went to summer camp for the first time at the age of seven, which was a year later than she would have liked. I wish I could say I didn’t understand her courage and ambition, both then and now.

I was never as brave as my grandfather, and I likely never will be. But looking back, I like to think that some small spark of his drive and self-reliance found a home in my mother, my daughter, and me.

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