In January of 2008 I gave myself a week in New York City for my fortieth birthday. Not for work; purely as a tourist, purely as a present to myself. One cold, bright morning, fortified by a bagel from Katz’s, I took the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island with a camera and a MetroCard.

That’s the whole distance of this post, right there, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to write it for a while now. It’s the Fourth of July weekend as I put this together; we just crossed into the country’s 250th year, and I told y’all on Friday that my feelings about all of it are complicated. This is me trying to say why, honestly, the way this blog tries to say everything: through the people who came, the doors they came through, and the food that came with them.

You take a little ferry out. The skyline slides by, the water is the kind of cold that has opinions, and then she’s just THERE, bigger than you expect and smaller than you want, holding up that torch. Look close at the tablet in her left arm and it reads JULY IV MDCCLXXVI. July 4, 1776. The exact date I was chewing on all last week. She’s been standing there holding our founding up like a receipt the whole time.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about her: she wasn’t built as a monument to immigrants. She was a gift from France in 1886 about liberty and the end of slavery. The “huddled masses” poem got bolted on later, when the meaning of the harbor changed underneath her. That’s how symbols work. We decide what they mean by who we let stand under them. Keep that in your back pocket; we’re going to come back to it.

The room

Ellis Island opened for business in 1892 and ran until 1954. Something like twelve million people were processed here; by one estimate, close to half of all Americans can trace somebody back to this island. You walk up the same stairs they walked up, except for them the stairs were the test. Public Health Service doctors stood at the top and watched you climb, looking for a limp, a labored breath, a clouded eye. They called it the “six-second physical.” Theodore Roosevelt stood right there in 1906 and watched steerage passengers file past for their six seconds each, and mostly what worried him was that the doctors weren’t washing their hands.

If something looked off, a doctor chalked a letter on your coat. E for eyes. H for heart. L for lameness. Ct for trachoma, the eye infection they dreaded most, the one they checked for by flipping your eyelid back with a little metal buttonhook, the same tool you used for your shoe buttons. X for suspected mental defect; a circle around the X if they were fairly sure. About two in ten people got marked. Some of them, quick and desperate, turned their coats inside out before the end of the line so the chalk wouldn’t show. Imagine being that close. Imagine the whole ocean behind you and a smudge of chalk between you and the rest of your life.

And then you waited, in this. The Registry Room. Two hundred feet long, a hundred wide, the ceiling fifty-six feet over your head, and it’s beautiful, which is its own kind of cruel when you’re terrified. Here is the part I love, the part that reorganized how I think about the whole place:

That ceiling is the work of an immigrant. Rafael Guastavino left Valencia, Spain, in 1881 and brought over a way of building self-supporting vaults out of interlocking tile, no steel bones, just clay and mortar and geometry doing the work. When an explosion across the water tore the roof off this room in 1916, it was the Guastavino firm (by then run by his son) that laid the vault you see now, in 1918. Something like twenty-eight thousand tiles. During the 1980s restoration, after seventy years, they had to replace seventeen of them. Seventeen.

So sit with that. The room where this country decided whether immigrants were fit to enter is roofed by the craft of an immigrant family, and their work is the most durable thing in it. The doctors and their chalk are long gone. The tile held.

The wall, and the honest part

Outside, along the sea wall, there is the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, and on Panel 539, my family.

I need to be straight with you about what that wall is, because “Honest History” isn’t just a tagline I put in the header to look good. The Wall of Honor is a wall of donated names. Families paid to have an ancestor inscribed, and you don’t have to have come through Ellis Island to be on it. So the McAuliffes on Panel 539 are there because someone in my family loved them enough to buy them a spot in the granite. That’s one kind of true.

The other kind of true is in the passenger records, the actual manifests of who actually walked up those stairs. When I searched those, the McAuliffe name (and every spelling the clerks improvised on the way) turned up one thousand four hundred and forty-nine times between 1892 and 1925. Fourteen hundred and forty-nine. My mother’s side was Irish. My 2nd great-grandfather, Charles Patrick McAuliffe, his brother, Patrick Joseph, and Charles’ future wife, Margaret Collins, were all somewhere in that list. And in that number is the beginning of me.

Both walls matter. One is love; one is evidence. I’m not going to blur them together to make a prettier sentence.

What came with them

Because here is where a food blog earns its keep: what came through that gate was never just people. It was pantries. It was the whole memory of how to feed the folks you love, carried in the only luggage that weighs nothing. The Irish brought soda bread and a genius for potatoes and a stubbornness about Sunday dinner. The Italians brought the tomato into its American glory. The Germans brought the pretzel and the lager and, God help us, hot dogs. Every wave that climbed those stairs rewrote the American table, and we’ve been eating the argument ever since.

But I’m not going to hand you the greeting-card version, because it’s a lie by omission. The American table wasn’t built only by people who chose to come and were let in. Its deepest foundation was laid by people who were brought here in chains and never got a vote on it. Rice, okra, field peas, the greens, the whole backbone of the Southern food I grew up on and cook every week: that’s African and African-American genius, and if you want it told right, read Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene [Bookshop.org | Amazon.com] and Jessica B. Harris’s High on the Hog [Bookshop.org | Amazon.com]. They came through no gate of hope. There were doors on the other side of the Atlantic that history calls the Doors of No Return, and they opened one way. (That’s its own post, and a darker one, and I’ll write it when I can do it justice. Not today. But I’m not going to pretend today that it’s not there.)

The same country that lit a torch in this harbor for some had, by 1882, already slammed the door on others; the Chinese Exclusion Act meant that while my Irish were climbing these stairs, Chinese immigrants were being turned away by law, or held and interrogated for weeks out at Angel Island on the other coast. One gate. So many people this country decided didn’t get to use it.

I love this country. I told you that Friday and I meant it. But loving it the honest way means holding the torch and the chalk and the buttonhook and the closed doors all in the same hand.

The table I set

Here is where all of it lands, for me, in a kitchen in Georgia.

My Nana’s side was California-Irish, and that’s a specific and wonderful thing to be. From her came Papa’s soda bread (still on the blog, still the one I make when I need my hands to remember something). From her came the artichokes, steamed whole, leaves pulled one at a time and dragged through butter, a ritual she handed to my mother Carol and my mother handed to me; three generations of women at a table, quiet, working through the leaves toward the heart. From her coast came the seafood, the clams and the oysters and the abalone that tasted like the cold Pacific she grew up next to.

And then there’s Meemaw’s table; Texas and Southern, biscuits and collard greens, the food I have already told you owes its soul to people who did not come here by choice. My kitchen is the place those two tables sit down together: Irish soda bread next to Southern cornbread, Pacific shellfish next to a pot of greens. That negotiation is not a metaphor for America. It’s just America, plated.

This fall I’ll finally post the beef stew my family has always called Irish and that no actual Irish person would recognize (it has Guinness in it and a whole philosophy behind it; more when it runs). There is colcannon in the works too. Because that’s what came through the gate, and through the doors that did not open, and off the boats and out of the fields: all of it ended up here, on a Tuesday, in a bowl.

Two hundred and fifty years in, the receipt is still in Liberty’s arm. The tile is still holding. And I’m still setting the table for everybody who got us here, the ones who chose it and the ones who did not.

That is the country I’m celebrating this weekend. The real, messy, still-becoming one.

P.S. Seventeen tiles in seventy years. I cannot get my grout to last through a single Atlanta summer. Rafael, teach me your ways.

P.P.S. The buttonhook detail wrecked me. Grown adults turning their coats inside out to hide a chalk mark.

P.P.P.S. Yes, I know “California-Irish” and “abalone” and “soda bread” do not obviously belong in one sentence. Come sit at my Nana’s table sometime. They did.