Sophie Sivertsen, Norwegian immigrant

Sophie Sivertsen came to America in the early 20^th century as an indentured servant. In order to afford passage across the Atlantic, she had pledged by contract to serve a farmer in the Midwest, who had lost his wife and who had four small children to raise.

Sophie didn’t say a lot about the experience of coming to America. She didn’t describe what it was like to leave the remote farm in Norway where she had grown up, the only world she had known. 

She did tell a story of baking bread when she first arrived at her house of servitude. She had never used packaged yeast before, having only baked with sourdough back in the Old Country. She didn’t know English and certainly couldn’t read it. So she put in the amount she thought was right, and the dough rose, and rose, and rose. It would not stop rising.

In panic that she was creating this huge mess in the new kitchen, she fed the dough to the pigs. The pigs all died. The farmer came home and they were all feet up in their yard with bloated bellies. He never knew.

Sophie had a brother who had emigrated to Seattle before her. At some point, Sophie wrote him a letter. Her brother in turn wrote to the sheriff in the town nearest the farm, with money for passage to Seattle. The sheriff showed up unannounced at the farm and collected Sophie and her belongings, and put her on a train to her brother in Seattle. The farmer was outraged. “You cannot do this!” But the sheriff was a good man who said yes, he could. And he did.

All Sophie would say was that the farmer was not a nice man.

Every time I retell or hear this story, my heart skips at this point. We can only surmise what “not a nice man” means, but it takes only a little imagination, doesn’t it? Did he rape her, this young virtually-enslaved teenager on his isolated farm? We’ll never know. Even if she were still alive, it would never be something that she would talk about beyond “not a nice man.” The shame would be too great.

Sophie Sivertsen was my great-grandmother. She married Anton Noreide, my great-grandfather, in Seattle and they moved to Petersburg, Alaska. On my mother’s side, all but one of my great-grandparents, and many of their siblings, emigrated from Norway through Canada or around Cape Horn, finally arriving in Alaska.

Norwegians came to this country in a flood similar to that from Ireland, driven by many of the same factors: Lack of land, over-population, extreme poverty.

They came out of a certain desperation and a desire to make a better life. They suffered great hardships coming here: My great-grandfather was a cabin boy on board a ship that traversed Cape Horn. When at anchor in San Francisco, the captain asked who could swim and my great-grandfather and his friend said they couldn’t.

The crewmembers who could swim were locked belowdecks during the night. Those who claimed they couldn’t swim were allowed to remain on deck as they wouldn’t be able to escape and swim to shore…except that Anton and his friend could swim. They broke their contract and the law and swam to shore.

I have no idea what the legal status of those great-grandparents was in our country. Yet here I am today. I am safe from ICE.

Just as my heart skips a beat at the story of the not-nice man, it has skipped many beats at the story of Avellaneda Delgado. He was a 68-year-old illegal immigrant who lived for the last 40 years in the United States, raising a family here, working on tobacco and vegetable farms. I don’t smoke, but I surely could have eaten vegetables that he picked.

He died being transported in the back of a van from a county jail in Georgia to a detention center. 

My heart almost stops at the plight of the 15,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Yes, those Haitian immigrants, who do not eat pets. They come from a lawless country run by gangs and without a functioning government, where even today people are beheaded in the streets of Haiti’s capital Port au Prince.

They have been in the United States of America legally, under “temporary protected status.” Each Haitian immigrant has their own harrowing story of their path to America.

They have revitalized Springfield. They have jobs, families, lives in their new and safe country. More than 1,000 babies have been born to these immigrants in the time they’ve been here. 

They have been ordered by the Trump administration to leave the U.S. within 60 days. Their exit from Springfield will decimate that city and leave it on its heels. Almost no one there wants it. The Haitian immigrants are terrified and hiding in their homes from the federal police of our own nation.

I think of my hard-working great-grandparents with their strong Norwegian accents – even my Bohemian great-grandmother had a Norwegian accent from living with Norwegians. I think of Sophie and Anton, being scooped up by masked men and loaded into unmarked cars, being deported to … anywhere. Losing it all, their children, their grandchildren, their farms, their fishing boats. My heart skips again.

But wait. No. My great-grandparents were white. They were Norwegian. They were much, much harder to hate and to vilify than those being targeted now in this horrible scourge on our country.

I am from immigrants. I am dedicated to my home, my city, my country. I am stunned by the wanton cruelty of this administration. Why are we as a country being like this? Why are we allowing this vicious behavior in our country? Can we as a people not do better?

• Michelle Bonnet Hale’s roots go deep in Juneau and Southeast Alaska. She and her partner share their household with various relatives and three dogs. She served for six years on the Juneau Assembly.