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| Courtesy of Wiki-Commons |
Waiting outside with a group of people who look exactly like and nothing like us-- all from somewhere else, California, Mississippi, Georgia, Canada maybe; waiting to get in an old building with a little doorway. Only guided tours and so we follow someone talking. My mind is sliding in and out of the movie The Godfather. Wasn’t it here or a couple of streets over where they shot it? Vendor calls sing in my mind, horse-drawn carts fill up the street crowding out shiny cars parked so tight, I can’t see how they’ll be able to pull out into the street. The hallway is dark. I hear the story of the lights and no lights and bars and saloon fights, the falls to the death hallway, the no lights hallway, the dark on the way to the outhouse hallway, generations down the stairs by day and night, filled with the smells of food outside, food cooking inside, the laughs, the drinks, the drunks, we’re still in the hallway and I reel to the thought of no running water here, the inside and outside here, and I love it and fear it and shake with terror and excitement but it’s all strange, nothing ever quite like it here but it’s America and I know it here and I don’t know it here. Not a world of emptiness, but a crush of people, a crush of America and I always had a crush on it, and the crush is blooming again into a real love, a true love, an historical love, a place that is other in the middle of what made this place my love, my home, my dream of America.
My grandmother, her grandmother, Granny Donnell –their images from life, from cracked photos flit through my mind as I try to place them in this hallway leading to an apartment, a “flat”, up a flight, a flight to a story of ice men bringing relief, coal and wood men delivering heat, and all familiar strangers speaking different languages. Cultures merge in the dark and all I really hear is the tutored news reader voice telling about certain residents known to live here among hundreds, did she say thousands, over the years. I’m at the back in the first little room with a tiny kitchen. I am hearing a jillion voices and the story is strange. It seems it belonged to a model, or a seamstress. I’m not sure I am keeping up. My inner voice is speaking in counterpoint to the guide. Then she tells us about the fire. I’m listening now. The fire—the Shirtwaist Triangle Factory fire of 1911. This girl may have died in the fire. They had to jump to their deaths or be burned alive. She was very beautiful. A model for the clothes, she also did detail work –finishing for the dresses made there. In the next room, a little factory itself with a sewing machine set by a window. This was one of the industrial workrooms for the garment district. And I’m seeing a big blond man in a tank type undershirt sitting by a window, ironing, and sewing, cutting and sewing, until it’s night --when he eats, sleeps and rises by dawn to begin again to get out the dry goods. I’m feeling smothered, and at the same time exhilarated when at last we enter the apartment on the top floor and then somewhere between déjà vu and my third eye, the movie really begins.
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| Orchard Street - New York Archives |
I hear no one talking now. The voice tells us things, of course but I’m in it (not hearing it)-- living it. I see her. I see her first and last. I see her of many ages. I see her young, I see her middle aged, I see her old. I see the kitchen table and it says everything. Life is food, food the source, food the culture, food her gift, food her history. Food brought to this table, food sorted on this table, food served on this table on the dishes and suddenly I see the dishes – two sets. Kosher, this tiny kitchen is kosher and I know it. I don’t see anything that says who they are; yet I know who they are. The husband here and not here, he’s a mirage wavering between the kitchen table and the bedroom with the huge bedstead and the short (really short) bed. He’s bearded, he’s frail, he’s coughing, and coughing. She sits and mourns him here and moves on after shiva.
There are children. Three or four, yes eventually five boys and the one girl– they’re all over the place. Crouched on the floor, the ever so clean floor, the scrubbed floor and studying, reading, writing, by candles, they’re reading and writing, and praying and I hear them. One sings, is singing Lithuanian folk songs; music rises up through the floor boards as the heat must have risen up to the top through the hole that ran from basement to roof as a way of ventilating the building. The movie runs forward and backward. The children walk in and out at all different ages. The one sweet little bed separating the kitchen from the living area; it, facing windows that looked into other people’s windows. That was the girl’s bed. Later a boarder shares it with her. It is so narrow and yet the family needed one of the factory girl’s rent to pay expenses. Boys grow to men and sleep sitting up on a sofa, their feet on straight chairs from the table, but like boys everywhere, they roll up in balls, kick their brothers, tickle and tackle until shushed by their mother and bossed by their tiny sister from the Jenny Lind spindle bed.
I’m mesmerized. People are leaving. I’m seeing history flowing through the windows. I feel this one space in the city change. It’s 2002, and the time has flung our planet through the universe during my life, and I’m feeling the miles traveled in this three room world of a family who lived here from 1907 to 1942. I hear the history, it rings the building, the sounds of skyscrapers rising, tenements falling, neighborhoods changing, friends moving. The mah jong game goes on. Her best friend from China from a few blocks over stays until the twenties. Then she moves to Boston with her sons who had Harvard scholarships. The boys so smart, all the boys so smart, so studious, so disciplined. That’s the only way to get ahead in America – plan, save, study. And the women are sitting at THE table and reciting cures, and telling maladies, the saving gossip of how to secure, how to protect, how to stay alive, how to survive solitude, misery, poverty; the festivals, the overlay of religion, of medicine, of ethics and I breathe it and it’s fine air—the air of freedom, the freedom of faith, of speech, of congregation, of enterprise in the city that welcomes all who yearn for it in a neighborhood in sight of that beacon to our shores, Lady Liberty herself.
© Gay Reiser Cannon * 2012 * All Rights Reserved
Posted for Poetics on dVersePoets Pub hosted 5/24/12 by Victoria C. Slotto
More information regarding The Tenement Museum here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_East_Side_Tenement_Museum
