On Strangers and Friends

Anastasia felt fear, reluctance, about leaving her tiny village in Greece’s Dodecanese islands. For her entire life, she made her home in Aperi, a wee village on the island of Karpathos. Living near the Aegeian Sea, she breathed the ocean breezes every day of her life and gazed upon the extravagant splendor of the deep turquoise ocean.

Today, she could not breathe at all, her very breath became a suffocating gasp of fear. “I cannot leave,” she thought, “How can I leave my home, my patritha,* with a man old enough to be my father?” That man, Panayioti, was her husband, their marriage arranged by Anastasia’s father when she was an infant.

With bags of all the belongings they were allowed to take, Anastasia and Panayioti sailed for America, a huge country across the ocean that seemed to Anastasia to be a celestial, magical place where everyone found their fortunes. She was thinking, though, that her fortune was in Aperi and could never be anywhere else. She thought to herself, “What more fortune could one want when they already see life as a beautiful blue graced by accents of white — blue skies, sparkling blue ocean waves cresting with white, glistening foam?”

Anastasia obeyed her father like a young Greek girl always did. She left with Panayioti and their children — baby Fotene and toddler Vasso — to build a new life in the land of promise. She had read about the words engraved on the stately statue that seemed to rule over New York Harbor: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” 

“How odd,” she thought, “I cannot breathe at all in the presence of this most beautiful Lady Liberty, who lifts a torch that offers a light of welcome.” Then she entered the long, crowded, unfamiliar lines at Ellis Island. There were lines of immigrants as far as she could see, and she thought that the mothers probably felt just like she felt, probably were just as afraid as she was.

“Perhaps they can’t breathe either, fearing this new land, fearing for the children they are bringing here.”

At Ellis Island, the lines of immigrants seemed endless to Anastasia. The air was damp and heavy, with a musty smell of people who had crossed oceans to get there. It was a difficult kind of air, with smells and unpleasant scents. She couldn’t breathe. Because of the dank air, because of her fear? She really didn’t know. She did know how it felt being completely surrounded by strangers, and she felt tears falling down her cheeks.

Before long, the immigrant families began to talk to one another. They shared their names and where they came from, their stories, their feelings, their lives. Anastasia began to breathe again, at least a little easier, because she discovered that all the new friends around her also began to breathe easier. “It’s because these strangers became friends,” she thought, as they shared their stories with one another — how they were feeling, what dreams they had, their hope for the future, where in the United States would they go.

The hours and hours of showing passports, health records, spelling your name over and over were almost coming to an end. The hours had been grueling, exhausting. Everyone feared they would have to be quarantined after their medical examination. They even feared being separated from their children or even losing them in the crowds. Anastasia always believed that they could even be deported. Back to where they came from — an idea not so troubling to Anastasia, who never wanted to leave her home country in the first place.

“What will it be like to adopt a new home land? Or maybe I should say a home land adopts us. Either way,” she thought in a pensive moment, “I never dreamed of being here in this unpleasant, disconcerting place.”

So Anastasia was in a line that felt like the last one, spelling her name and her children’s names one last time.

“Thankfully!” Anastasia thought. While still in her village, she had practiced spelling her name in English over and over, but still she simply could not, as hard as she tried. She had never spoken any language but the Greek of her village. So her newly found friends met while standing in the immigration lines had now scattered . . . en route to Birmingham, Charleston, Chicago, Wheeling, everywhere, to places Anastasia had never heard of. 

“Strangers again,” she thought. I have brought my baby girl and my little boy to a land of strangers. I have separated them from aunts and uncles and cousins and the people in Aperi who loved them. What have I done?”

”Let me get up from here and go, immediately, before I start to cry.” Anastasia had no time for tears, so she stood up and moved on, resolutely, with baby Fotene in her right arm, Vasso holding her left hand and Panayioti walking behind her.

It was a scene to never forget in Anastasia’s life drama. The young woman wearing a nice dress and a flattering hat was a sight to behold, standing as tall as she always had and walking with a confident, determined stride. She had pushed out her fear hours ago. Now she moved ahead, ready to go with her two little ones into a foreign environment. She knew she could survive this life change, and from that moment, she steeled herself to live and learn and accomplish everything she encountered on this journey.

When they arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, they were greeted by a host of cousins and aunts and uncles who were overjoyed to see them. Some of them Anastasia had never met before, but they were definitely not strangers. They were countrywomen and men, compatriots who never spared a thing in the grand welcome feast they had prepared.

After an almost endless round of hugs and kisses, Anastasia was graciously guided to her seat of honor at the feast table by a cousin she had never seen before. This cousin was instantly not a stranger. Instead, she would be a friend, even more than a friend. She would be a mentor and guide, an interpreter and teacher of English, a “godmother” to Anastasia’s two little ones. 

At that huge dining table, surrounded by dozens of TV trays for those who could not fit around it, Anastasia looked around and realized that these strangers had become her friends.

Then she took a long, deep breath.

*Patritha means homeland.