The American Pilgrimage

To adore the Mother of Exiles

We take the escalator down into the hot breath of the subway that will deliver us to Battery Park. We are tourists, among super models, panhandlers, hustlers, stockbrokers, suits and more tourists.

The train rocks and rattles as we roll south under the city to the escalator up into the humidity of Battery Park where the battery of cannons that once guarded Manhattan are represented by one cannon pointing to the pier where hundreds have lined up to board the ship to see the woman who’s carried a torch for America’s ideals for as long as I can remember.

Waiting in the packed crowd of teeming humanity yearning to board the ship that would ferry us out to see the Statue of Liberty I wonder if this is what it is like for the millions of Muslim pilgrims who make the Hajj in Mecca. This devout American is visiting the collossus in the harbor to worship at the altar of Liberty, Democracy and Freedoom. This believer in democracy has seen Yorktown, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Appomatox, the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution and my dear brothers and sisters I believe this short boat ride across New York harbor is the pilgrimage every American should make to our republic’s most holy site, the island where Lady Liberty’s torch burns for the world.

As we jostle on the ferry I barely recognize the multitude of languages spoken by the multitudes we’re among and I am moved. By the parents chastising their brats in Farsi, the teens gossiping in French, the mama cooing Mandarin to her baby, the lothario wooing his date in German or the old man telling his family in Vietnamese where to look. Look, as Manhattan grows small behind us and look, as Liberty rises before us. Soon she towers over us all and we’re tethered to the wharf and herded off the ship and we circle her like awestruck children. Mother Liberty we are at your feet and the world is here to salute you with our cellphone cameras.

In the musuem, among the banners emblazoned with words like “Liberty” and “Freedom” a quote from Harry Belafonte speaks to me. “Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.”

Dissent is a sign of life. Dissent is what refreshes Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty from time to time.

At Ellis Island I search the records and find the ship’s manifest for Simon Fitzsimmons who arrived here at the age of 23 in 1860 on board the “Australia”. My Simon, my homeless, tempest tossed wretched refuse of Ireland. In 1870 at 33 citizen Simon is sentenced to 10-years in Sing Sing for armed robbery. Upon his release Simon becomes a carpenter for hire. In a few years Mr. Fitzsimmons opens a hardware store. Simon buys a home in his new homeland at about the same time Bartholdi’s gift to America, a statue, a likeness of a goddess with a crown and a torch, is assembled in the nearby harbor.

Emma Lazarus, a woman and a Jew, would describe the torchbearer in the bay as “A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name, Mother of Exiles.”

Walking home in the rain we stop in at a Manhattan bar to toast Simon. And America’s magnificent Mother of Exiles.