My Immigrant Parents
By Mavis Allen
I arrived 45 minutes early for my cousin Mammy's funeral. A frail man in a stiff, dark suit showed me to the small, semidarkened room that would serve as the viewing room and the chapel for the service. I entered the room and sat there alone.
I never really knew how old she was. Only the permanent dark circles that lingered under her eyes bore testament to the kind of life she had lived.
I refused to look in Mammy's direction. I've attended three funerals in my life: Mammy's was the second.
My cousin Mammy, whose real name was Agnes Griffith, immigrated to the United States in 1924. She came on her own and was sponsored by the family that employed her. She has had a big effect on my life. Mammy provided my parents with their first rooms when they emigrated from Jamaica to this country in 1951.
Her small apartment in Harlem served as a family beachhead in the United States. As my parents tell it, when it came to finding a place to live, New York City in the 1950s was as segregated as any rural Southern parish. If you were black, you lived in Harlem or Brownsville, Brooklyn. In Harlem the housing was cramped and overpriced. To get a place you had to know someone. They knew Mammy.
Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends drifted into the room and it
was a relief not to be sitting in the small parlor alone.
As I greeted my relatives that day, my thoughts returned to the impact of Mammy's life on mine. I looked around the small chapel filled with two generations of my family: the small group of aging pioneers and my generation.
After the service, everyone retired to my parent's apartment in the Bronx. There was food, of course, and the apartment was thick with the aromas of Jamaica. There was rice and peas, curried goat, roast chicken, stew peas and dumplings and fried plantain. Sorrel punch, usually reserved for holidays, and soda washed the food down.
That was seven years ago. Today I understand the part that I played in my family's history. Mammy and my parents forged a way for themselves in a new land. Their new life was buoyed by every immigrant's dream, to build a better life for their children.
The fact that my parents immigrated to the United States on an airplane, spoke English as their native language and had jobs when they arrived in New York somewhat confuses the issue. There are no Ellis Island tales or sweatshop horror stories to testify to the hardships they endured.
"I kind of think of immigrants as having a language barrier, and having difficulty
getting around," says Janet, my second oldest sister. "These horror stories I don't associate with us. My language, culture and religion were all mainstream."
In place of the "horror stories," however, there are other tales.
My mother tells the story of arriving in Miami and going to the airline window to get a boarding pass for her connecting flight to New York. She stood before the white reservation clerk for 20 minutes. He never acknowledged her. Eventually, a black man mopping floors in the terminal explained to my mother the facts of life in America circa 1951. No matter who you were or how much money you had, blacks were served at one counter only, the far one.
My father remembers that in the beginning he was forced to work as an elevator operator even though he was a trained machinist. Few opportunities were available to blacks in those days, he recalls.
Yet even as they suffered these indignities, they remained steadfast in their optimism that in the United States, through hard work and ambition, they could make a better life for us and themselves, always in that order.
Raising six children in the South Bronx during the 1960s and 1970s wasn't easy but they realized their dream. Between myself and my brother and sisters there are five bachelor's degrees and three master's degrees.
Like the millions of immigrants that
passed through New York harbor 100 years before them and thousands of immigrants that arrive in our country every year, my parents just wanted to fit in. "They wanted to be American," my brother Bill recalls. "I remember Mom cooking all this stuff like spaghetti and meatballs, corned beef and cabbage, and tongue. She would be so proud that she had cooked an American meal."
Today, 22.5 million people living in the United States—one out of every eleven was not born here. As a result of changes in immigration laws in the 1960s, the flow of immigration is the highest it has been since the turn of the century. And though they may look and sound different than earlier newcomers, the motivations driving immigrants to come to our nation remain the same.
Today's immigrants share my family's zeal for a better life. These new immigrants bring to our shores the same work ethic that has made our nation great. They bring with them enthusiasm and untainished reverence for the American dream that eludes many native-born Americans. Most importantly, they appreciate the promise that the Statue of Liberty represents: the promise of opportunity.
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