Triumph

Basilio Nicolas Hage was an aspiring merchant, but he feared for his future. Signs of trouble were all around him. The Ottoman Empire was shrinking so fast, it seemed its death rattle shook the plaster from Syria’s once magnificent buildings right before Nicolas’s eyes. His hometown of Tripoli was the western terminus of the famous Silk Road and a port to Europe’s markets, but cheaper Chinese silk was making the local versions obsolete. French and British merchants brought money, but American evangelicals brought schools and tantalizing tales of land and liberty. If America’s political power was not yet dominant, her economy and reputation was. Industrial United States produced twice as much as did Great Britain, and she built things bigger, faster, stronger. More whimsical. Having the world’s tallest building wasn’t enough; an American invented a machine you could ride to the top of it. Stairs were yesterday’s news. America’s citizens invented refrigerators, lightbulbs, drinking straws, screen doors, slot machines, roller coasters, Ferris wheels, zippers, mousetraps, and cotton candy. They invented the phonograph, the telephone, the telegraph. One American laid cable across the Atlantic, a reversed umbilical cord attaching two continents, forcing the queen of a dying empire to tap tap tap her congratulations to the democratically elected president of a rising one. Days of staid, Victorian handwringing surely prefaced composing such a laudatory note to her plebian cousin, but no matter – her compliments were carried across the ocean fifteen times faster than had it been ferried by boat. The message itself was a white flag, a surrender, even if the queen didn’t yet know it:

The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work.

Americans didn’t desire to do anything, thought Nicolas. They just did it. America was the land of opportunity, of jobs, of liberty. Her streets, heard Nicolas, were paved with gold.

So Nicolas, like thousands of Syrians before and after him, chose myth over fear. He made his way first from Tripoli to Beirut, then to Le Havre, France, where he purchased a steerage ticket on the S.S. le Champagne to New York City. The ship’s doctor examined Nicolas prior to boarding, determining him to be neither an idiot nor insane (good my brother is not here to disagree, thought Nicolas), nor a pauper likely to become a public charge. The Second Officer agreed with Doctor Lucien, and added that Nicolas was not suffering from a loathsome, dangerous, or contagious disease; had not been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime involving moral turpitude; and did not have more than one wife. The inspection took just minutes. Other than his confusion when asked his color (“white”, wrote Second Officer Gaston), for each question Nicolas simply answered “no.”

The SS le Champagne left France on May 24th, 1899. Ten days later, after a trip that a reporter would observe as “vile and disgraceful treatment” by the steamship companies of the immigrants below decks, Nicolas tread his weary feet upon the terra firma of Ellis Island. He watched as a man checked his name against the ship’s manifest – one of almost two thousand times the customs agent would do so that day – then, satisfied, put Nicolas on a ferry to the mainland. America.

New York confounded Nicolas. Tripoli had been a water wheel for international powers since the Phoenicians in 300 BC, but New York City on the cusp of a new century was a different kind of melting pot. It was a volcano. Unbroken strings of tall buildings blocked the sun, policewomen patrolled the streets in skirts, people prowled the sidewalks in numbers greater than Nicolas could count in a lifetime. And cars! The first would not be seen in Beirut for seven more years, but New York’s streets were clogged with automobiles, sharing the road with trolleys and horse-drawn carriages. Enough of the latter were still around that Nicolas thought America’s roads were paved not with gold, but with horseshit.

Nicolas had never seen anything like it. New York in 1899 was the second largest city in the world, but it was surely the densest. Tenements housed 418,000 people per square mile, the equivalent of six human beings standing inside a box the length and width of one of Nicolas’s strides. Many were as new to America as was Nicolas himself – more than one-third of the city’s 3.4 million people were born outside of America’s borders. His journey should have better prepared him. The le Champagne manifest included Armenians, Austrians, English, Finnish, French, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Montenegrins, Polish, Russians, Scots, Swiss, Syrians, and Turks, but even the suffocating steerage air paled in comparison to New York’s streets. Nicolas missed space and clean air. He missed trees.

He wasted little time in New York. Nicolas skipped Lower Manhattan’s vibrant Little Syria, skipped trying his hand in the growing Arabic import-export business, skipped the street fights with the uncivilized Irish, skipped his opportunity to find a good Syrian Christian wife. Instead, Nicolas headed west, eventually finding himself not in America but in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home.

What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push Nicolas west? Was it flight from, rather than to? Ghosts of repeated failures or lost loves in dogged pursuit? Was it a condemnation? A serial reminder of stabbing epithets, slights, miscommunications? Perhaps it was simply a thirst for adventure.

It was, I think, a collective. Not just one driver but multiple, all of them exposing the potential in the new. Something untamed. Something only people like Nicolas could see in that precious-metal nimbus he watched drop daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed further west. An invisible finger drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun.

I want my great-grandfather to have found whatever he was looking for. I want to picture Nicolas in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots now familiar enough to assuage whatever homesickness he had for the tall cedars of his Mount Lebanon. A nirvanic look upon his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new hometown, his closed eyes turned upward to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”