But emigration to the United States
began long before Ellis Island
and did not end when it closed down.
Mexicans, Cubans, Koreans,
Vietnamese, and Cambodians have taken up
where the others left off
it was on Wednesday, May 31, 1978,
that Robert Bober and I first visited Ellis Island.
On the same tour were a couple in their
fifties (the wife’s mother, who had recently died,
had passed through Ellis Island)
and a very young woman who carried
in her arms a baby only a few days old
I doubt that anyone visits Ellis Island by chance these days.
People who passed through it have little desire to return —
their children or grandchildren do it for them, looking
for traces of the past. What had been for the others a place
of trials and uncertainties has become for them a place
of recollection, a pivot of the connections that identify
them with their history.
how can things be described?
or talked about?
or looked at?
beyond dry official statistics,
beyond the reassuring drone of stories
that have been told a thousand times
by guides in their Boy Scout hats,
beyond the official display of everyday objects
that have become museum pieces, the stuff of history,
precious vestiges, venerable images,
beyond the artificial calm of these photographs,
fixed forever in their misleading
black-and-white obviousness
how can you identify this place?
how do you reconstruct it?
how do you decipher these relics?
how do you move beyond,
move behind
not rest content with what we’re given to see
not merely see what we knew we would in advance?
How can you grasp what isn’t shown, what wasn’t photographed or catalogued or restored or staged?
How do you get back what was plain, trivial, routine,
what was ordinary and kept happening day after day?
| We walked down dozens and dozens of corridors, we visited dozens and dozens of rooms, rooms of every size, waiting rooms, offices, dormitories, laundries, latrines, storerooms, larders, each time trying to imagine what had happened there, what it had looked like, who had been there and why — who had gone along these corridors, or up these stairs, or had waited on these benches, how were the hours spent, and the days? how did all these people manage to eat, wash, sleep, and dress? | it’s pointless wanting to make pictures speak, forcing them to say what they can’t. for a start, you can only try to name things, one at a time, unemphatically, listing them, counting them in the plainest possible way, in the most precise possible way, doing your best to leave nothing out. |
for example:
a large white porcelain double sink,
with a hand-cranked spin dryer resting in it
four chairs
two ironing boards set on thick cast-iron legs,
one with a rectangular, the other with an oval base;
on one ironing board is an electric iron;
on the other stand the remains of a sleeve-board
covered in striped material like mattress ticking;
three sewing machines, two of which
— a Singer and a White Rotary —
are still intact