January 22, 2024
Greetings from the first,
There is no evidence that the house existed, or the narrow lot that held it, or the neighborhood that surrounded it. If you drove by the place on Ninth Street, as I have for most of my life, you would never know that my father lived there. In fact, I never did, until this week when my friend Clara told me.
When Hume Smith was sixteen years old, his mother brought him to the United States. It was 1947, Great Britain was scrambling to its feet, still reeling from the war. The little village where my father was born was largely spared from bombing, perhaps for the same reasons he needed to leave that place.
I don’t know much about what caused my grandmother to bring Hume to live with his cousins in Flint, Michigan, other than they lived in impoverished conditions back in Hamilton, Scotland, and the town was not swelling with opportunities. The coal mine had closed, and jobs at steel mills and the Hoover factory in Glasgow were not an encouraging future.
The land of opportunity beckoned.
And so they arrived in Flint and Hume was deposited with the Wylie family, where he would learn to be an American from his cousins. My grandmother got on another boat and went back to the old country. I’m trying to imagine what that first day must have been like for Hume, facing what would be the rest of his life, a stranger in a strange land.
Across the street from where the house once looked out, where other houses would have locked eyes with it, there is a twenty-foot-deep scar that runs through the city, and then in both directions for thousands of miles linking Canada and Mexico, the longest borders in the world. Twenty years after my father arrived, the neighborhood was paved over by this highway. So the empty space where he lived is mirrored by emptiness.
In post-war America, there were complex immigration policies, no less convoluted than today, but my impression is that my dad and his mother simply walked off the boat in New York and began the trip to a new life. There were about 24,000 legal immigrants from Great Britain in 1947, I assume including Hume Smith. They were absorbed into the fabric of the country, in pockets all over the map.
There are probably some who know all these stories better than I do, about the early days of Hume’s time in Flint. Like many other immigrants, my father began contributing to the Great American Dream through entry-level jobs. We know he got a job at the Durant Hotel, working in the Purple Cow restaurant. He found work at Downtown Buick, washing cars and making deliveries. He was industrious, and his ambition led to better opportunities.
Hume’s social life expanded, thanks to his cousins, and a few years after arriving he met Barbara. At their wedding, Jim Wylie was his best man and Ben Wylie sang. I am told the whole affair cost $45.00, which my mother paid.
And so, my father left the little house on Ninth Street. The Wylies, also in their first generation off the boat, spent more years there, but then the highway arrived from Canada, and the rest has been lost in the ether. It is a ghost monument to another immigrant boy’s start in an adopted country.
Hume worked hard, and found his work was appreciated, and he found better work and made a living to support his blossoming family. He bought groceries and cars and houses and borrowed money and paid taxes and raised the value of everything he put his hands to. He became part of the neighborhood, the church, the community, and the dream and possibilities of being in this country.
He helped others from Scotland get on their feet and get settled here. Some of those families lived with us. He loaned them money, he vouched for them, he connected them with others who were like them, and with jobs, and he showed them how to make a dream a reality.
None of that would have been easy, or maybe even possible, if not for the first steps. If not for a disgruntled wife who led her son four thousand miles to a place that held promise. If not for the courage it took to brave what waited at the dotted line in New York. None of it would be easy, or maybe even possible, without the Wylies, and the little frame house on Ninth Street.
Twenty years ago, Hume emigrated again. We saw him off, a somber farewell compared to the cheering crowds that lined the docks where the ships left for America and eased into the harbor in the shadow of Lady Liberty. He sighed one last time and left for whatever promise was in the next land of opportunity. And the five of us faced our native land and set off into our own dreams.
I drove around the block where the house once was. There was nothing there to hint at what had been. Not even the ghosts of the houses or the people that might have haunted them. It is sealed over by a parking lot whose size is optimistic at best, the empty yellow boxes painted on its skin a bright mark of hopefulness on a black palette. No shadows of trees, no creases in the grass from bicycles or oil stains from aging cars. No vestiges of dreams, or the worry of failure, or the fear of going back to a country that held little for my father. Nothing left behind to mark where Hume had been.
Just us. We took what spirit Hume brought to this country and quintupled it and more. We became Hume’s manifestation of the American Dream.
It's too easy to forget what was lived out on the house on Ninth Street, especially given the empty space there now. My siblings and I can’t picture a different life where Hume never made it past the dotted line in New York, where none of us would have existed, and this country would have been poorer for it.
We are a family of Smiths, an innocuous surname, one that doesn’t evoke much other than perhaps someone who makes horseshoes. But we have a rich heritage, one that extends in two directions, one into the deepest of the green places in Scotland and the other to the only peoples who were here before there were borders. I don’t speak for Smiths everywhere, only for me, in this first generation of citizens, where for seven decades I have lived in the privilege given to me by an immigrant. I am grateful for the honor and the possibilities, for me and for my children. Thanks, Hume.
Hope this finds you sharing the dream,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
Commentaires