Doumit & Victoria Joseph
Doumit Youssef Antoun El-Safi
February 6, 1889 - August 31, 1952
Qnaiouer, Lebanon - Detroit, MI
Victoria Daniel Elias El-Hitti
May 20, 1895 - February 12, 1989
Qnaiouer, Lebanon - Detroit, MI
These were the pillars of the Joseph Family. Lebanese immigrants from a tiny mountain village that has almost as many spellings of its name as it did buildings in the village itself. Knaywer, Qnaiouer, Qniwer, etc. Resting in the Anti Mountains, 30 miles due north from Beirut, it would take them the best part of two days to walk to the Mediterranean port and another two days to return. Doumit was a peasant farmer while Victoria worked the fields. As the story goes, Doumit was smitten with Victoria. Her parents wanted Victoria to marry a man who was rich. Doumit climbed to the second story roof of St. Mary's Church in their village and declared his love to Victoria and to the entirety of their hometown. In Arabic he said "Mub heb ghay reek." The translation of what he espoused to her that day was "I will never love anyone more than I love you." Victoria went against the wishes of her parents and wed Doumit in that very church on September 4, 1911. They would come to America ten months later and settle in a growing Lebanese community of Wheeling, West Virginia. They would move to Detroit in 1929. I have envisioned their legacy in a writing entitled SKYSCRAPER.
SKYSCRAPER
1.
The steamship nosed into the squalling sea.
The nauseating roll see-sawed the Transatlantic steerage.
Seven hundred crammed where half would be twice too many.
Dozens would succumb in the filth to the fever,
never to touch neverland.
Doumit and Victoria stood fast.
your tired, your poor.
A farmer, an olive picker and their unfolding future.
They would have a fortnight
to rosary for an unborn son -
to survive the dreadful dungeon of ocean passage.
Thirty dollars for a one-way ticket
and thirty borrowed dollars in his pocket -
the price to blaze an ancestral trail.
The steel green Lady Liberty
beaconed the White Star liner into New York harbor.
The ‘third class’ immigrants were barged to Ellis Island.
Answer the twenty-nine questions and pass the six-second physical,
1912 America was yours, if you possessed the mettle.
Doumit and Victoria stood fast.
your tired, your poor.
At once - at last - a breath of fresh - and free, air.
The first-ever train ride would
traverse four hundred miles to more mountains.
West Virginia’s.
And a home in the slums of
Alley 18 in Wheeling.
This was it.
The ground broke.
The skyscraper plan ensued.
No blueprint.
Two simple souls set the cornerstone
not unlike Giza five thousand years before.
2.
Immigrants, it’s said, know the land in the dark.
The farmer turned peddler - the olive picker, now mother
left reading and writing unlearned.
Their offspring became their letters – sentences – novels.
Prayers in their native tongue baptized each story.
One new floor swelling into more…
Each son his own…
and his daughter and his son …
and children’s children …
and theirs…
Each level multiplying.
Each tier a progeny of the progeny before.
Mushrooming by generation.
Descendants ascending.
3.
Doumit would see 19 floors built when his 8 children and 11 grandchildren would weep his passing and soothe his widow on a Detroit summer night in 1952.
37 years would pass…Victoria would witness their skyscraper soar 91 stories before she was lowered into the Mt. Olivet earth…side by side…dust to dust.
4.
The tower’s earliest floors now museum.
Founding families like statues in time.
Mezzanines of memories.
Room after archived room.
Relics in photos and films and sagas.
Rooms where peasant women with old-country names like
Autla, Manoosh and Afifa are
forming balls of twice-risen dough
baking loaves of life…
bread to break…
like their English.
Rooms where the dented Turkish coffee pot
pours coal-black caffeine into miniature cups
for unannounced visitors.
No one ever turned away.
Rooms where the greatest generation would gather.
Every week.
Every week an homage to heritage.
Every week a praying, cursing, laughing, assembled family.
Each visit constructing paradigms -
illustrating honor -
erecting future.
5.
We, the scions, admire the construction
as it scrapes the heavens.
“Doumit and Victoria Arms” burgeoning skyward.
Each story its own story -
hundreds of them now -
layer upon layer –
their structure can be viewed
from Detroit across our land - right to left coast -
and from disparate countries and continents
all the way to a small mountain village,
Qnaiouer, Lebanon,
a day and half walk to the sea…
Mary Stephen Haikal Hatty
Mary Stephen Haikal Hatty (Mariam Astephen Haykel)
July 22, 1872 - October 15, 1955
Mary Stephen Haikal Hatty (Mariam Astephen Haykel) is the mother of Victoria. In 1895, while pregnant with Victoria, Mary attempted to emigrate to America thru Canada and was denied passage into the United States. While returning to Lebanon, Mary gave birth to Victoria in St. John's, New Brunswick, Canada. The legend exists that Mary, unable to name her infant daughter took the suggestion of the midwife and named Victoria after the, then, Queen of England. Mary and family, returned to Lebanon later that year. Victoria and her new husband, Doumit, returned to America in 1912. Mary would finally make it to the U.S. in 1949. An iconic photo of her arrival at the Michigan Central Depot exists in our Photo Gallery. In 2005, fifty years after her death, I envisioned Mary's journeys in a story entitled OLD SITU which is what we, as children, called her to delineate her from her daughter Victoria who we simply called Situ.
I've only recently discovered her correct birthdate. July 22, 1872 in Basloukit, Edhen, Mount Lebanon. Following her passage on October 15, 1955, her family gave her a completely made-up Birth date of October 15, 1867. In tracing our genealogy, I have discovered the correct date as well as her daughter Victoria who was also given a completely concocted Birth date of February 12, 1896. The date was chosen by her sons in honor of Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Victoria's actual birth date is listed as May 20, 1895.
Mary Stephen Haikal Hatty
OLD SITU
The close of the nineteenth century brought our ancestors
steaming the ocean toward this land of possibilities…
She was left behind to pick the olives and club the meat to edible
and mourn the too young passed from their rugged lives…
She dared the immigrant - February, 1896
but our shores did not welcome and they flung her back
with a newborn at her breast –
Returned, on native soil, did her fields seems as ripe -
and her earth smell as honeyed ?
She was Gibran’s bow as, one by one, her family
arrowed toward the promise of America…
And what of her offspring, decades gone from her mountains -
full lives lived unknown to her -
a legacy only imagined in her lonely prayers
And once the known earth interred her husband
only then did she abandon the only land she ever knew
that patch of earth still encrusted to her…
September, 1949, how foreign her passage
like Jonah, save the constant rosary
and she was all she owned –
eighty-two years bursting the seams of a battered trunk…
from ship
to train
to the arms of relatives…
these strangers were her children
and their children
and us children…
What bounty must this new world have been
where abundance was your daily bread
and to witness the lives she sent forth multiply like loaves and fishes
October, 1955, the earth half a world away from her birthplace
received her matriarchal bones -
Most of her descendants will never know her
or catch her crooked walk with that crooked cane…
or hear her chant the “old country” alive in high-pitched tones
not a syllable of English, just her mother tongue
a voice that resounds in each of us
a bloodline noble in the knowledge
that she is alive 50 years gone…