When the four young Buddelmeyer sisters lay down to sleep on their wadded straw mattress on a damp gray evening in 1871, they expected that night to be the same as all the others. They would wake up in a few short hours, after squeezing together, front to back like spoons, trying to wriggle their knees, elbows and feet under and between each other in search of warmth. In the morning, they would tend to the cows.
Instead, just past midnight their mother shuffled over to the mattress and shook the oldest sister, Bernadina, by the shoulder. Then she took her by the wrist and led her past the other mattress holding her three sleeping brothers, into the second, smaller room they used as a kitchen.
Shivering in the unheated lean-to, Bernadina thought not about the cold but about the dark. She could make out lines surrounding the panes of glass in the small window over the cookstove. Faint flecks of light from pale stars dotted the dark, dusty glass. Her eyes shifted to a slumped shape against the wall: a small leather satchel yawning open, crumpled handles dangling at its sides.
Her mother handed her a threadbare flax dress with buttons down the back and motioned for her to put it on. This was the dress that she wore to church on Sundays, and not the stained muslin dress that she wore every other day to milk the cows and dig potatoes. A question started forming in Bernadina’s throat, but her mother pinched her arm— hard—and she swallowed it. She laced up her boots, fingering the frayed laces around the metal hooks, and she watched the dark silhouette of her mother as she placed dusky objects into the satchel: the everyday dress, her knitted hat and mittens, some boiled potatoes, and several folded pieces of paper.
Bernadina was nudged out the door with her thin coat around her shoulders and her thick hair roughly combed. She stumbled across the rocky yard. Her mother helped her into the waiting cart and placed two sepia photocards in Bernadina’s hands, one of a man and one of a woman. The browns and tans of the photographs were lit by a bit of moonlight, and when she looked at the image of the woman, she was puzzled by her eyes—two pale ovals.
Her mother kissed her forehead and stepped back; her father tapped his riding stick on the rear end of Lotte the horse, and the cart jerked forward. In the starlight the outlines of branches gestured slowly to her, as if they were waving good-bye.
Throughout the night Lotte pulled the cart from Oldenburg toward Bremen, a full ten hours away. At first Bernadina sat upright, alert with confusion and fear, but eventually her eyes grew heavy, and she slept, braced between sacks of potatoes and bales of hay. She was jolted awake in a hazy morning light when Lotte lurched to a halt in a crowded street near the docks of Bremen. There, Bernadina would board a steamer—along with a family she’d never met, and nearly four hundred other ragged, tired people from the towns, villages, and farms of northern Germany. She was eleven years old and she was going to America, to Ohio she was told, to live with the man and the woman in the photographs.
During the voyage Bernadina was tossed and tumbled in the gloomy maze of bunks and people below the decks. Occasionally, the light above would filter through the gridwork and she’d see dust floating down. It reminded her of the stars she’d watch through the small high window of her house when she lay next to her sisters at night. She wondered if she’d ever see them again. Feeling by turns hungry, nauseous, and frightened, she soothed herself by singing songs and quietly reciting the names and birth dates of all her family members.
After two and a half tumultuous weeks, she stepped shakily off the steamer at the Port of Baltimore, weak and dizzy. Her weakness was matched by the dull tones of her surroundings—even in full daylight, the somber shades of brown brick, gray steel, and ashy wood permeated the cityscape.
Bernadina felt overwhelmed with sadness. But two colors saved her. The first was a flash of bright copper on the weathered wood dock. She crouched between the legs and skirts moving all around her and shot her hand out to pick it up. It was a shiny coin with a raised image of a face circled by an ornate headpiece on one side and the letters O-N-E C-E-N-T on the other. The stately profile with its feathery crown didn’t look like any images of royalty she’d ever seen. Nor were the words familiar. She’d learned her alphabet, but these letters didn’t spell anything recognizable, even when she tried to sound them out: “ohhneey schent.” The strangely beautiful coin told her with jolting certainty that she was no longer at home—yet this discovery was exciting. She quickly dropped the coin in her dress pocket, her heart racing. She’d been told not to take things that weren’t hers, but surely this gift from the new place did belong to her somehow.
The second color that saved her appeared later, after she was herded through gates and lines and ropes and benches. She was pushed through a stile and when she looked through the crowd at all the faces, one seemed familiar. It was the woman from the photocard. But where the two pale ovals had been, there were now two bright cornflower blue eyes.
Until now, the whole of Bernadina’s trip had been a forward churning motion, all moving away from home, from all she knew. Everything propelled her ahead. And at each juncture she tried to will the trek into reverse. In her mind Lotte would buck and turn the cart around, the ship would circle back, the lines of people would change direction. But now as the crowds thinned, she stood still. There was neither forward nor back. She noticed a little sparrow—der sperling—hop on a pillar, watched a brown and white horse not unlike Lotte clopping past her, and felt the slight weight of the coin in her pocket. The cornflower blue eyes shifted and caught Bernadina’s. The woman smiled and Bernadina’s heart slowed to a calmer, steadier beat.
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Lisa Rost Lewis enjoyed teaching English as a Second Language and Freshman Composition for over 30 years— in Japan, Detroit, and at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She was always in awe of how resilient her students could be in the face of unfamiliar cultures and new environments, and is still inspired by them. Since retiring, she’s excited to have time to write.
Lightwood 