WHAT A FAMILY TRUNK, CAST-OFF BACKPACKS SAY ABOUT AMERICA
On a reporting trip to the U.S. border with Mexico some years ago, I was taken by an immigration expert to an arroyo on the outskirts of Tucson.
My guide took me there to see an enormous carpet of discarded packs so thick you could walk for the length of several football fields while stepping only on backpacks: old canvas ones, cheap nylon ones, some marked with familiar swooshes and others blazoned with Disney princesses.
I stood amid that sea of frantic goodbyes. Each pack was the residue of a person’s home, a person’s family, a person’s memories. The owners of that poignant detritus had carried what they could of their pasts across the thirsty desert and, with their destination in sight, dropped everything to vanish into America.
Those backpacks welled up in my memory the other day, when a heavy, old trunk with wrought-iron handles came out of a delivery van and into my front hallway. A stranger had telephoned a few weeks before. When my wife answered, the caller said he was from St. Louis. He had come across this old trunk for sale, he said. A name was clearly painted on the side — “B.H. von Drehle.” The caller wondered if this artifact had some connection to me.
I had no idea how to answer. Some families cherish their lineage from generation to generation. Other Americans were ripped from their roots before arriving on this continent as enslaved people or refugees. My family’s past was not stolen. It was freely surrendered, like the pasts of countless other immigrant families from Germany.
According to the Library of Congress, in 1894, there were about 800 Germanlanguage newspapers published in the United States. Around that time, my grandfather was born. As a boy, he spoke German at home and in church. But in the space of some 30 years, the United States went to war twice against Germany, and that was the end of German identity. My father spoke not a word of German. From Lou Gehrig to Doris Day, millions shucked off their immigrant ancestry and gave everything to America, their beer and hot dogs, their Christmas trees and Santa Claus, their pretzels and kindergarten.
Genealogical research that once required years can be done in minutes today. Thank the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In hopes of saving as many past souls as possible, the Mormons have created a dazzling database, available through the genealogy database Ancestry. It whisked me to the B.H. von Drehles in my faraway family tree.
One was a farmer born in 1800 in the countryside near Hanover. The other was the farmer’s oldest son and namesake: Bernhard Heinrich von Drehle. With his younger brother (my grandfather’s grandfather), B.H. packed what the two of them could carry into this trunk and left home forever in 1854 — one of the heaviest years of German immigration to America.
They sailed into a storm of antiimmigrant backlash. The “KnowNothings,” as opponents of the major political party dubbed its members, wanted to keep America for Americans.
The difference between my trunk and those backpacks in the Arizona sand is not necessarily a difference between welcome and hostility. Welcome and hostility have always been mixed.
The difference, it seems to me after staring a long while at the trunk, is that my forebears were able to carry this stout container openly into their futures. Five generations later, it surfaces like Queequeg’s casket. That will never happen for those backpacks in the desert.
I don’t know every story of those from the Global South diaspora who cannot come to the United States with even a bagful of their memories. I don’t even know my own family story. But I know this trunk and those backpacks are expressions of the same truth, the same hope, the same dreams. All of us who come from elsewhere, with memories or without them, owe it to the past to share the future with those who travel behind us.