The Immigrants

In one of the first blogs I posted was about a book called “Immigrant Voices”, a collection of first person stories told by immigrants to America from 1773 to 1986. The first story was the diary of a man who came from the Shetland Islands as an indentured servant to a tobacco plantation in Virginia, where he taught school for the plantation owner’s children and also accepted other pupils.


In October of 1776 he wrote in his diary, “I seed a Company of 70 Men belonging to one of the Regiments of Regulars raised here for the defense of the rights and liberties of this Colony in particular and of North America in Generall. They were on their March to Williamsburg.”


(In the 18th Century even educated people were uncertain about punctuation and spelling.)


Of particular interest to me was a trivial matter. In naming of the pupils in his school he wrote that John Pattie enrolled his children, William, Lucy, and John. It is all there in print. John Sr. was my ancestor; John Jr. my great-great-grandfather! I pictured my grandfather’s grandfather as a little boy, sitting in that little one-room Virginia schoolhouse learning his ABC’s from a semi-illiterate Scotsman while George Washington and other Virginians were fighting the American Revolution.


After that discovery, I put the book aside, taking it up only occasionally while trying to keep up with the torrent of weekly magazines which the postman brings. Time, Newsweek, and the New Yorker keep me diverted, one for each of the days I am in dialysis every week.


This week the latest New Yorker was buried under other stuff in one of the boxes hastily packed for moving, so, as I started for the elevator to go to dialysis, I grabbed the only book that was visible in the mess of the apartment: “Immigrant Voices.”


The last story in the book is about the Nguyen Family who came from Vietnam to Chicago in 1975. That was almost 200 years after that Scotsman came to America. Where did the Nguyens take refuge? In the Chicago neighborhood where I lived with my new husband when I was an immigrant from Texas to Illinois in 1952.


“Immigrant Voices” tells how the Vietnamese adapted to their new environment. In the ‘70's the Uptown neighborhood was different from the place I remembered. But even in the ‘50's it was very different from Fort Worth. Next time I will tell you about my experiences there.