The Immigrants Read online

  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 America. 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 certain complications that must have occurred destroyed her ability to bear additional children. Now she knew only that the pain was over and that a fine, healthy child had been born.

  For the first three months of Daniel Lavette’s life, he was nursed in railroad camps while his father drove spikes and handled steel rails. Of all this, he was happily unaware. He was equally unaware of the day when his father first saw the hills of San Francisco and decided that this was the place where he would live and be, and his first memories of his father and mother were of the flat on Howard Street that Joseph Lavette had moved into after he found a job on one of the fishing boats that went out of the wharf. The misery of Anna Lavette’s illness that came out of a confinement in a filthy boxcar was also prior to his consciousness. He was the only child. There would be no others.

  Joseph Lavette had saved forty-two dollars working on the railroad. The experience had turned him into a careful and thrifty man who lived with a nightmarish dread of ever again being penniless, and as the years passed, as he learned to deal with the English language, his life took on a single focus–to become the owner of a fishing boat, to be his own master and never again to be in the position of hopelessness, a leaf blown by the winds of chance.

  In 1897, when young Daniel was eight years old, already adept in that strange, complex, and convoluted language called English–still a mystery to his mother–and already going to school and learning all sorts of incredible things about this place, this San Francisco, this California, his father had managed to save six hundred dollars. It had been no easy task. It meant scrimping and saving and going without anything but the barest necessities, and still it was only half of what he needed to buy the boat–not any boat, not one of the lateen-rigged sailing craft that most of the independent Italian fishermen owned, but one of the new power-driven boats; and as far as Joseph was concerned, it was either a power-driven boat or nothing. For this too was the manner and the ideology of the immigrant. The boat was not for him; the boat was for Daniel. Twice already his boss had allowed him to take the boy with him in the off season. His reward was young Daniel’s excitement and joy at being out in the bay, and he boasted about it to Anna.

  “And why must he be a fisherman?” she asked him. “He’s a smart boy. You know how smart he is.”

  “Meaning that I am a fool.”

  “No, no. But this is America, and there are other things. Maria Cassala told me that her boy will be an accountant one day. An accountant sits at a desk and wears clean clothes.”

  “I can’t argue with you,” Joseph said. “There are things you don’t understand–too many things.”

  Maria Cassala was a kind, openhearted young woman, a Sicilian who was married to a Neapolitan bricklayer named Anthony Cassala. They had been in San Francisco since 1885, or rather her husband had. Maria had married Anthony in 1892, the year she came to America from Sicily. She had met Anna while shopping, and she had taken the frightened, frail young woman under her wing. To Anna, the Cassalas were a source of inspiration and wonder. They lived in their own house, a frame house on Folsom Street, which Anthony Cassala had built–for the most part with his own hands.

  One day Anna confided to Maria Joseph’s dream of owning his own powerboat. “He’s never content,” she said. “Nothing for today–only for tomorrow, and it will never be.”

  “Why will it never be?”

  “Because he needs five hundred dollars. In ten years more, we will not save another five hundred dollars.”

  “Then,” said Maria, “you send him to see my man, Tony. Tony will lend him the money.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? What a foolish question! Because Joseph is a good man.”

  “But how could we ever pay it back?”

  “Joe will have a powerboat, and instead of working for a boss, he’ll be the boss. You’ll make the money and you’ll pay it back. Please, Anna, tell him to go to Tony.”

  Anthony Cassala, slender, dark-skinned, dark-haired, was indeed that very rare individual, a happy man, happily married, content with his lot, devout and dedicated to his home and his children. He and Maria had two children, Stephan, who was eleven, and Rosa, who was nine. Entirely without schooling, he had taught himself to read and write English, and his son, Stephan, had passed on his grammar-school lessons to his father, teaching Anthony the simple elements of arithmetic.

  Early in the year 1903, a small Italian contractor for whom Anthony worked occasionally begged him to lend him a thousand dollars for a period of three months. He promised at the end of that time to pay back the loan with a bonus of two hundred dollars, twelve hundred dollars in all. Cassala knew nothing of the rules or laws or history of interest, he had not the faintest notion that he would be repaid in terms of 80 percent, 20 percent for three months, 80 percent per year, nor was he able at that time to calculate percentages. Neither had he ever heard the word usury. He took his life savings and gave it to his friend; and at the end of three months, the contractor repaid the debt with the two-hundred-dollar bonus. Fortunately, the contractor was also an honest and decent man, and several times more, having to meet a payroll or bills, he turned to Cassala, borrowing and paying, and each time adding a bonus that in yearly percentage figures varied between 50 and 80 percent.

  In a community of Italian working people, where wages were low and unemployment and layoffs were frequent, word of Anthony’s generosity–for they saw it as such–got around, and he found himself lending small sums here and there and more and more frequently. Because of the very fact of his nature, he was almost always paid back, and within a year after the initial loan, he had become in himself a very small loan company. He asked for no security other than the character of the man who made the loan; he never harassed his debtors; and where it was necessary to extend the loan, he extended it.

  It was from his son, Stephan, who went to school and read books, that he learned he was a usurer, and after he had confessed in church and grappled with his own guilts and surveyed his fortunes, he decided to give up moneylending. But the pressures of his countrymen were too great. He fixed his rate of interest, thereby, at 10 percent per annum. His profits were small; he continued to work as a mason, but more and more he found himself pressed into the role of banker for people who had no other place to turn.

  In Joseph Lavette’s way of thinking, to borrow was to humble oneself. He had endured poverty and hopelessness and despair, but he had never stooped to borrow, and thus he saw it as surrender and humiliation. For weeks he held out against the urging of his wife, but finally his longing for a boat of his own overcame his pride, and he went to Anthony Cassala.

  “I have never borrowed before,” he protested, “but if I borrow, you have my word as a man of honor–”

  He might have gone on and on, but Cassala put him at his ease. “Please, do not lessen my pleasure,” Cassala insisted. “I have been waiting for you. The money is yours.”

  In fact, the money was repaid in a single year, and Joseph Lavette found a friend whom he treasured. But now, the whole sum necessary for the purchase was in his pocket. “No school for Daniel for today,” he told his wife. “I go to buy a boat and I will not do so without my son.”

  “School is more important,” Anna said.

  “Is the boat for me or for him?”

  “He is nine years old. Leave the boy in peace.”

  “Ah, women,” he said in disgust.
“The boy goes with me.”

  That day was one that remained with Dan Lavette all his life. Boat after boat–the wonder and mystery of the new gasoline-powered engines–the lore of boats, the cut of the bow, the curve of the side. A boat, his father explained, is a thing alive. Only when it lies at dockside is it quiet, supine; but when a man fishes, the boat is a part of his living existence. His livelihood and his life too can depend upon the boat. Finally, Joseph Lavette made his decision, and a power-driven fishing boat was theirs.

  From that day on, the boy Daniel Lavette lived for Saturdays and for the two summer months when school was out. Each Saturday, before the sun was up in the morning, he was awakened by his father, shaking him gently and whispering, “Up, up, Danny. We fish together.”

  Then dressing in the cold darkness before dawn, sitting down half asleep to drink hot tea and eat his oatmeal, while Anna protested the barbarism of awakening the child at this hour, then tramping down the steep hill, his hand in his father’s; how exciting, how wonderful life could be! Most mornings the bay lay under a feathery cover of mist and fog, before the sun rose and burned the mist away; then the excitement of making the boat ready. Usually, there was a boy to meet them, one of the Italian youngsters whom his father hired–but no more after Daniel turned twelve. Then he did a man’s work on the boat, and that was his greatest joy. He adored the enormous, strong, easygoing man who was his father, and he suffered through his school years, hating every one of them, dreaming only of the moment when summer vacation would come and he could spend all his days on the boat with his father.

  The good days and the bad; the hot sun or the icy, pouring rain, a glassy bay that was like a fishpond or a raging, churning inferno that took all his father’s skill and seamanship to survive. So it went, and the years passed, and the boy who loved the sea became a long-limbed, self-confident young man.

  “It’s in his blood,” Joseph told his wife proudly. “That boy is one damn fine seaman.”

  Anna, on the other hand, had been undergoing the Americanization of the immigrant, she had other ideas, and she would plead with Joseph, “Why? Why must he be a fisherman?”

  “And what is wrong with fishing? Haven’t I kept a roof over our heads and food on the table? I’m a fisherman. My father was a fisherman. Why shouldn’t my son be a fisherman?”

  “Because this is America. It’s not Italy. This is San Francisco. Italians are not peasants here; they are lawyers and doctors and storekeepers.”

  “We never had lawyers in our family. A lawyer is like a bloodsucker. Must my son be a bloodsucker?”

  “He could be more than a fisherman. Every day when you go out, I pray to God, bring him back safely, please, please. Is that a life?”

  “It’s a good life. I don’t force him. Ask him. He’s sixteen years old. Ask him.”

  But thinking about it, Joseph wondered. Again and again, during the long summer of 1905, he made mental notes to have a talk with his son. Perhaps Anna was right. But then he would ask himself what meaning there was to any of it if his son left the boat? When the summer ended, Dan announced that he would not return to school. He had a single year remaining to complete high school; but, as he insisted, it was pointless. He had no interest in school. He was a fisherman, as his father had been. Joseph tried to argue with him. Anna wept and pleaded, but already Dan Lavette, not yet turned seventeen, was his own man with his own mind, already an inch taller than his father, strong, a head of black, curly hair, dark eyes, a round face and a firm chin. Self-sufficient, confident, he was not to be treated as a child, and that he made plain.

  “I’m a fisherman,” he said. “That’s my life and that’s what I want.”

  Joseph gave in because he deeply wanted what his son wanted. What is wrong with the life of a fisherman, he asked himself? Compared to the months during which he had swung a hammer, working on the spur line of the Atchison Railroad, it was an almost heavenly existence. He now owned his own boat, which would be his son’s boat. San Francisco Bay was a place with a limitless harvest of fish; his fiat was clean and not uncomfortable; every night there was food on their table; and in any case, his ancestors had been fishermen for uncounted generations. He had learned to speak the language, and he was no longer a blind and voiceless immigrant, to be cheated and driven aimlessly by chance and necessity. And he was in a city that was a place of beauty, a city of high hills and open vistas where day in and day out the air was washed clean by the cool winds of the Pacific, and where there were thousands of Italians, most of them immigrants like himself.

  And there was his friend, Anthony Cassala, and his wife, Maria, who loved Anna. How much more could a man ask of life?

  The year was 1906–almost seventeen years since Joseph Lavette and his wife, Anna, had come to San Francisco.

  On Wednesday, the eighteenth of April in 1906, the City of San Francisco was the proud queen of the Pacific Coast of the United States. It had all the attributes and virtues and sins that history requires of a great city, a population of about four hundred and twenty-five thousand, great hotels, splendid mansions of the rich, wretched hovels of the poor’ churches, cathedrals, synagogues, colleges, hospitals, libraries, a political machine that competed with Tammany Hall of New York in rapacity and unconcealed mendacity, a city boss named Abe Ruef, a hundred or so wealthy families who displayed their new riches and vulgarity with the same lack of self-consciousness that they displayed toward the piracy of Abe Ruef, and, at the other end of the scale, a criminal element that was already world-famous.

  This criminal element ruled and inhabited a district of the city known as the “Tenderloin,” or more widely as “The Barbary Coast,” a section more or less defined within the limits of Grant Avenue, Clay Street, Broadway, and the waterfront, and appropriately named after the pirateinfested coast of North Africa. Here was a free and dangerous jungle of whores, purse-snatchers, hoodlums, pimps, confidence men, murderers, and thieves of every variety; but since they preyed for the most part on themselves and on seamen off the ships and on citizens who were foolish enough or daring enough to venture into the Tenderloin, the ruling elite of the city tolerated them and their city within a city.

  Some five years before this morning of April 18, the teamsters, who were the lifeblood of the city, went on strike. It was a long, violent strike, with no quarter asked and none given, and out of it there came into being a sort of political workers’ party, known as the Union Labor Party, and in the election of 1902, the candidate of this party, Eugene E. Schmitz, a leader of the Musicians’ Union, was elected Mayor of San Francisco. But as with so many other dreams of organized labor, this one went up in smoke, or as so many put it, down in garbage. Schmitz could only boast that he himself was not a crook; but he was weak and easily corrupted by the crooks who still ran the city, and he gave them full sway and an open field.

  Such, very briefly, was the situation of the city on the morning of April 18, 1906. On that morning, a few minutes before 4:00 A.M., Daniel Lavette awakened and looked at the dock next to his bed. His mother and father were still asleep. “Let them sleep,” he told himself. It was not the first time he had awakened this early and gone down to the wharf and made the boat ready, so that his father, after a precious extra hour or two of sleep, would come down and find the boat ready to slip its moorings. It gave Dan a good feeling, a sense of his own manhood.

  In the kitchen, he made a breakfast of crackers and milk. When his father joined him later, there would be a jug of hot coffee and wine and sandwiches for their noonday meal; now he would not even risk the slight noise of setting water to boil.

  Loping down the steep hill to the wharf, he enjoyed as always the sense of being entirely alone in the sleeping city, in the gray broken night that was the dawning, the wonderful feeling of discovery and renewal that always came with watching the first tint of the sunrise.

  At the wharf, he leaped onto the boat with the easy agility of youth, stowed away his oilskins, and began to take the nets from the lockers
. He glanced up, almost as an act of worship, as the first rays of the rising sun broke through the mist, thinking to himself that if he ever found a girl he was really stuck on, this would be the place and the hour to win her. Then his glance went to the ferry building, where the big clock read thirteen minutes after five o’clock. He took out his own watch to check the time, and then, as he looked at it, the noise began, a great, monstrous rumble of sound, as if the whole world had begun to scream in agony.

  At that moment, deep in the bowels of the earth, one great plate of the North American continent, pressing against and building up pressure against another great plate, found the strain unendurable, and the earth slipped. Deep under San Francisco, the earth began to tremble and vibrate. There was the sound of a great, inhuman beast growling and roaring, and then the stable eternal earth shook and trembled like a mass of jelly, and for forty-eight awful seconds this trembling continued. Brick buildings collapsed, furniture danced and skittered, plaster ceilings crumbled and fell, tall, steel-reenforced structures rocked and swayed yet stood firm, but the older buildings of stone and wood crumbled in upon themselves.

  Yet when the main shock was over and the thousands of half-dressed or half-naked citizens poured out into the comparative safety of the open streets, they still had no notion of the appalling tragedy that would overtake their city. Strangely enough, the earthquake itself had done fairly modest damage, for 90 percent of the city was constructed in frame houses and they withstand an earthquake best; but in the poorest sections of the city and in the Tenderloin, the oldest structures collapsed; wood and oil-burning stoves had overturned; water mains were broken; and fire began.