Extract from The Last Days of Ellis Island by Gaelle Josse

Today I’m pleased to share an extract from The Last Days of Ellis Island by Gaelle Josse which has been translated into English by Natasha Lehrer. 

New York, November 3, 1954. In a few days, the immigration inspection station on Ellis Island will close its doors forever. John Mitchell, an officer of the Bureau of Immigration, is the guardian and last resident of the island.

As Mitchell looks back over forty-five years as gatekeeper to America and its promise of a better life, he recalls his brief marriage to beloved wife Liz, and is haunted by memories of a transgression involving Nella, an immigrant from Sardinia.

Told in a series of poignant diary entries, this is a story of responsibility, love, fidelity, and remorse.

Nine more days wandering the empty corridors, the disused upper stories and the deserted stairwells, the kitchens, the infirmary, and the Great Hall, where for a long time only my steps have echoed. 

Nine days and nine nights until I am to be sent back to the mainland, to the life of men. To a void, as far as I am concerned. What do I know of people’s lives today? My own life is already hard enough to fathom, like a book you thought you knew, that you pick up one day and find written in another language. All I have left now is this surprisingly urgent need to write down my story, I don’t even know who for, as I sit here in my office that has no purpose any- more, surrounded by so many binders, pencils, rulers, rubber stamps. It’s a story that for a few decades has largely been much the same as that of Ellis Island, but it’s some events specific to me that I wish to tell here, however difficult it may be. For the rest, I’ll leave it up to the historians. 

I’m surrounded here by gray: water, concrete, and brick. I’ve never known any other landscape than that of the Hudson, with its line of skyscrapers that I’ve watched grow up over the years, climbing, meshing together, stacking up to create the rigid and ever-changing jungle we know today, at its feet the movement of boats and ferries in the bay, and Our Lady of Liberty, or Lady Liberty, as immigrants arriving from Europe sometimes called her when they first caught sight of her on her stone pedestal, majestic in her copper-green robe, face impassive, arm aloft over the water. 

Whatever the season, the river is always gray, as if the sun has never been able to illuminate its depths, as if some kind of opaque material beneath the surface pre- vents it from dipping down into the water to alter its reflection. Only the sky changes. I know all its nuances, from the most intense blue to the softest violet, and all the different shapes of the clouds, wispy, puffy, dappled, each endowing its own character to the new day. 

Now all I have authority over is the walls. Grasses and plants have grown wild, taken seed, borne by the wind and the birds. It wouldn’t take much for a meadow to grow up here, untamed, along the water’s edge, watched over from a distance by a triumphant Liberty tethered securely to her rock. At times it feels as if the entire world has shrunk to the borders of this island. The island of hope and tears. The site of the miracle that destroyed and redeemed, that stripped the Irish peasant, the Calabrian shepherd, the rabbi, the Hungarian pencil pusher, of their original nationalities and trans- formed them into American citizens. Here they are still, a crowd of ghosts floating around me.