As I strolled along St George Street last week, I noticed a lot of activity at The Spanish Quarter museum. As it is one of my favorite places in the city anyway, it makes me happy to see it so busy. You can peek in over gates and through shutters as you pass by, and seeing the interpreters chatting with visitors I was reminded of an experience I had there a number of years ago.
In 2001, late August, my friends Mack and Barb wanted to visit St Augustine with me and here’s why: Mack had just become an American citizen and he wanted to celebrate by visiting the nation’s oldest city. He’d had a long, hard road to becoming an American and visiting St Augustine was very meaningful to him.
Mack was quite well-known in his field in his country of birth. One day, a wealthy American visited his place of business and was so impressed with Mack’s skill that he offered Mack a job with his company in the States. The offer was salary, a rent-free apartment, a car to drive, and a weekly food allowance. Having dreamed all their lives of being able to go to America, Mack and Barb packed up their young son Anthony and headed for the “land of the free.”
Unfortunately, the situation was very different than Mack and Barb had been promised. They got everything they were offered but not in the context in which it was promised. Their “apartment” was a trailer with a hole in the roof of the living room, a pittance of a salary, a bag of groceries left on the steps once a week, and the use of a broken-down old station wagon if transportation was needed which it wouldn’t be because the owner would “see to all their needs” and Anthony could ride the school bus. They realized they’d been lied to, but their new “employer” held them powerless with threats of a call to the authorities.
Desperate to save his family, Mack got in touch with a local church to ask for help. On a particularly brutal winter’s day Barb stood at the stove cooking a pork chop for Anthony, who had had to stay home from school because he was terribly sick. A church minister opened the door to the trailer, startling her, and said, “You have to come now.”
It was snowing, and snow was drifting into the living room over Anthony who was wrapped in a blanket and trying to stay warm. Barb was so stressed and startled that she fought the minister and made him wait until she had found something to put the pork chop in so she could take it along because that was all she and Mack had to feed their sick little boy. The church moved them little by little to another state where there was a legitimate job waiting for Mack, and the church helped get them started in an apartment with furniture and an old car. Pretty soon things were going pretty well for the family.
Some years later, Barb and Anthony had gotten their American citizenship but Mack had fallen through the cracks. By then he was well established in a good job with a strong clientele, but because his citizenship process had gotten a kink in it somewhere he very nearly ended up having to leave the United States which he most definitely did not want to do. Miraculously, the kinks were straightened out in the nick of time and he took his oath of citizenship on the last Friday morning in August of 2001. He and Barb immediately hopped in their car and headed off to meet me in St Augustine.
The next morning, all bright and sunny, I took them to the Spanish Quarter. Because I practically lived there most of the interpreters knew me or at least knew of me, and when I showed up with Mack and Barb everyone was happy to see me and to meet my visitors. Mack was wearing an Old Navy T-shirt with an American flag on it, a hat with an American flag on it, and carrying a little American flag around. He was wonderful to be with. He is an emotional man anyway and most of the day he had tears in his eyes and told anyone who would listen that “I am vorld’s younkest Ameddican!”
One of the guys at the Spanish Quarter took me aside and asked me if Mack was okay, and I gave him the short version of the story. He proceeded to literally take Mack and Barb from me and parade them around the museum, proclaiming them to be “brand-new Americans in America’s oldest city.”
All the interpreters and employees, as well as the visitors, took on over Mack and Barb, shaking hands, slapping Mack on the back, and the overall feeling of goodwill just from being American was thick everywhere. Mack openly wept at how people treated him, and how special they made him feel. It was like a party, and when we left everyone hugged and kissed Mack and Barb and everyone cried. I have never forgotten that, and what my adopted city did for two people I loved dearly and how much it meant to them.
Less than two weeks later, the Twin Towers fell. On that day, Mack told me that now he knew what really felt like to be American.
I first read of St Augustine’s Tyler Southern earlier this year. Tyler, a Marine, lost both legs and an arm to a land mine in Afghanistan.