“We Norsker arrived before you,” continued the captain. “We were wondering how soon you Swedes would come along.”
They couldn’t understand all the Norwegian he spoke through his beard, but by and by he and his passengers were able to carry on a conversation. At last on this journey they seemed to have come upon good luck; after the cholera-infested steamer, they were now on a clean boat where the pestilence had not made its appearance, and where the captain himself welcomed them warmly as if he had long known them. The Red Wing was their sixth vessel, and here they felt more secure than on any of the other five, even though Captain Berger warned them that the river was so crooked a steamer sometimes met itself on the curves.
The Passengers
The travelers were now on the last stretch of their journey; the Mississippi was their last river, the Red Wing their last vessel.
The Father of Waters was emigrating to the sea, the steerage passengers on the side-wheeler were immigrating against the current to the northwest country. Yet both the river and the travelers were on the same errand — seeking new homes. Captain Berger said that all types of people were aboard his ship: settlers, traders, fur hunters, lazy rich men, restless farmers, high government officials, cardsharps, honest working people, happy-go-lucky adventurers. But the greatest number of his passengers were immigrants on the last lap of their journey.
There were German peasants who said Bayern at every second word — was it the name of their home parish? They were blond and wore blue linen shirts over their clothes, shirts with outside pockets like coats. Their women had thick legs covered with blue woolen hose; both men and women wore small, funny-looking caps. Among all the immigrants, the Germans alone still had something left in their food baskets. A sausage was always discovered in some bundle; the Germans were always eating sausage.
The Irish immigrants spoke loudly among themselves, seeming to be in a constant quarrel. About half of them were dark haired, the rest red haired. They drank whisky from large wooden stoups, as calves would gulp down sweet milk. Captain Berger said an Irishman would not work unless someone stood with a club over his head: he would no longer use them as crewmen, he preferred Negroes. But a German must be threatened with a club before he would quit work. The two races differed in another way: an Irishman could never get enough to drink, a German never enough to eat.
Then there was the large Jewish family which the bearded captain pointed out to the Swedes: a father bringing his ten sons, four daughters, five daughters-in-law, four sons-in-law, twenty-two grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren; all together forty-nine people. The old father, the head of the family, was a little man; he had a longish face with a black beard and a long crooked nose; he didn’t seem over fifty or fifty-five years of age. He always wore a small round cap without a visor, and when the family gathered together, he was always in the center. The little family father sat there, calm, silent, sure, smoking his long pipe, surrounded by his many descendants. Captain Berger guessed that this Jewish family was the largest one that had ever emigrated to North America, which to the children of Israel was the New Canaan; Jacob and all his sons were well represented here.
Karl Oskar asked himself how he could be so filled with concern for his own family of six, when he saw this little Jew with eight times as many.
The crewmen on the Red Wing were both colored and white; there were also men with yellow-brown skin, offspring of white fathers and black mothers. All seemed dirty, as if rolled in mud. All were half-naked. Deep down in the steamer’s bowels they stoked the engines; in the evenings they gathered on their own separate deck, sitting in clusters, singing their songs — or song, for it seemed they sang the same tune over and over again. In the evenings, when heavy darkness fell over the river, their song rang out over the black, wandering Mississippi:
We will be free, we will be free,
As the wind of the earth and the waves of the sea. .
— 1—
On a small deck near the prow, set aside for steerage passengers, the immigrants from Ljuder were gathered in a group. The deck was roofed but open at the sides, and in the melting heat the passengers sought their way up here to find coolness; some even slept here at night. They had lived so long on the water that a deck now felt like home to them.
A heavy thunderstorm had passed over the valley in the early morning, and fiery swords of lightning had crossed each other over the blue mountains; but the relief it brought had been of short duration. They could feel in the air that the thunderstorm was still near. The travelers from cooler regions sat listless and lazy in the stifling heat and gazed apathetically at the green countryside with its immense fertility, plants and herbs in great numbers spreading far on either side of the river. They pointed out to each other an occasional tree, a bush, or some clinging vine with unusual leaves; or their eyes might follow the flight of some unknown bird, whose name they would ask.
From time to time the river narrowed or broadened; at its greatest width they thought the distance must be about two American miles. At times the strong current slowed down their speed. But the steamer kept to the center of the stream and met the oncoming current with such force that water splashed over the forecastle. Behind them the smoke from the funnels hung in the air like serpentine tufts of hair behind a fast runner.
Time dragged for the immigrants; at sea the wind had delayed them, here on the river the stream hindered them. It was already the last week in July.
Fina-Kajsa lay outstretched full length on the dirty old blanket which she had shared with her mate before he was buried in the North Sea.
“Oh me, oh my! We’ll never get there, never! Oh me, oh my!”
From the lips of the old woman two questions constantly issued forth: Had anyone seen her iron pot? Would they never arrive?
With each day since landing in New York her health had improved, and by now she was as well as anyone in their company. She liked the heat; her old backache, a constant plague in the wet climate of Öland, had entirely disappeared. If they could put Fina-Kajsa into a well-fired oven and keep her there for a while, Jonas Petter had remarked, she might come out with new life and hop about like a young girl.
“Oh me, oh my! We’ll never get there! Oh me, oh my!”
If they ever arrived, they would meet Anders, her only son, who had emigrated five years before. And now as they were nearing their destination her fellow travelers began questioning Fina-Kajsa about him. She told them: As long as he had stayed at home he had been an obstinate and unmanageable scoundrel; she and her husband had beaten him harder than an unbroken steer to make him tractable. He was lazy, evil-tempered, drunken, and ready to fight anyone; he had spent his time in the company of loose women, obeying neither father nor mother. When he was only ten years old, they had realized his nature: at one time they had refused to let him go with them to a Christmas party, they had locked him up. When they returned, the boy had broken out and given vent to his unchristen nature by smashing nearly all the furniture, from their fine chiffonier to the porcelain chamber pot. But after he had gone out into the world he had regretted his behavior; a few years ago he had written from America, asking his parents’ forgiveness. Out here he had become a different person, he worked hard, and he was capable. And he had written and told them about his fine home and the extensive fields he owned in Minnesota. She was sure she would find security and comfort with her son Anders as soon as they reached his beautiful farm. And he would help them all get settled, for whatever else she might have said of her son, he was capable, he knew what to do. According to his letters, there would be farms for all of them where he lived; as soon as they reached Anders all their worries would be over.