Whose story will go on?
What a visit to the Titanic museum in Branson taught me about preserving immigrant stories.
Hello, readers! School starts next week, so as summer comes to an end, I want to share a trio of travel-related stories I encountered this year, starting with a visit to Branson in late June. Next week, I want to tell you about the new First Americans Museum in Oklahoma.
(Yes, I saw “Barbie,” but I need some time to process the deep grief and ancestral connection I felt, especially during that last scene, before I write about it. *insert GIF of me ugly crying*)
I hope you’re staying cool this August! And thank you, as always, for your support on Substack. I love being part of the indie journalism movement; stories like this are excellent examples of pieces I might otherwise pitch to outside publications but instead publish here, directly to you.
Until next week,
Addie
Branson is a strange little place, and not where I thought I’d get a reminder about the importance of preserving immigrant stories.
Population 13,000, this tourist hub nestled in the Missouri Ozarks draws nearly 10 million tourists a year.
Every time I visit, I feel a little bit like a local, only because my dad went to high school there, my parents met at Silver Dollar City, and my great-grandmother and great aunts and uncles lived there when I was a child growing up nearby.
So, every few years, we’ll take a nostalgia-filled trip to Branson when I visit my mom, but I’ve never found much that I felt like writing about.
But that changed this year when I went to the Titanic Museum Attraction just days after the OceanGate implosion that killed five people en route to have their own encounter with this captivating shipwreck.
As a kid growing up in the wake of Bob Ballard’s discovery of the Titanic, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in the Titanic, but I am not the kind of person who wants to see the shipwreck itself or relics pulled up from the bottom of the sea.
But this ship-shaped museum that opened 17 years ago in the heart of Route 76 doesn’t feature relics pulled up from the bottom of the sea.
Instead, and to my surprise, it showcases the stories of the passengers and the outsized ship itself through some 400 artifacts that were associated with the Titanic, from letters sent from the first leg of the maiden journey and items pulled from the surface in the days after the wreckage to photos and personal effects from survivors and their descendants.
What I was most intrigued by wasn’t the wooden deck chair — only one of seven in existence — or a cork life jacket featuring signatures of survivors, but the somber reverence the museum had for the passengers and crew who died and those who survived that day.
Unlike the “Titanic” movie, which focused mainly on the first class experience, the museum gives the second and third class passengers equal billing.
Titanic had passengers from more than 40 countries, including 118 people traveling from Sweden, which was a voyage my own ancestors made twenty years earlier. They traveled on much smaller ships but likely carried the same hopes and fears as the nearly 1,000 would-be immigrants on Titanic.
My guide was Jamie, one of the uniformed “crew members,” a self-described “Titaniac” who could rattle off the names and stories of the passengers as if they were her own kin.
“After all these years of learning about these people, they start to feel like family members whose stories you know like the back of your hand. You hear someone else start to tell a story about them and you know the next part of the story,” she said.
Even though it seems like we know everything we could possibly know about the Titanic, Jamie said historians — both amateur and professional — uncover more about the ship, its demise and its passengers every year, even without going to the bottom of the ocean.
Jamie called it “the history lesson that never ends.”
Through preserved menus, we learn that first class passengers would have had a menu of fruit, rolled oats, boiled hominy, fresh fish, grilled ox kidneys, American dry hash, au gratin, graham rolls and buckwheat cakes with maple syrup.
Immigrant passengers in third class ate oatmeal porridge and milk, smoked herrings and jacket potatoes, tripe and onions, Swedish bread and marmalade, stewed apples and rice.
“There was no steerage,” Jamie explained. “They didn’t use the word, ‘steerage.’ On Titanic, these passengers were listed as third class, and usually, they would have had to bring their own food and linens, but instead, they had food and sheets and running water in the cabins.”
The third class tickets weren’t cheap, though. A thousand dollars in today’s money. (Compared to $16,000 for a one-way first class ticket.)
After walking up a replica of the grand staircase featured so prominently in the James Cameron movie, visitors enter a room with a grand piano dedicated to the musicians who famously played as the ship sank.
A British crew member, whose name I didn’t catch but who has been working at the museum since it opened, said he learned how to play the piano, in part, so he could fill the room with the same notes played in the cold air that night the ship sank.
He occasionally paused between pieces to chat with visitors. “History shouldn’t be people shouting at you and us repeating what the TV tells me. History is a conversation,” he said. The musicians wouldn’t have known each other before meeting on the boat, and they had to memorize more than 300 pieces. No sheet music allowed.
“Although they all had the same job, they weren’t the same people.”
To emphasize the unique lives of the people on the ship, the museum staff has written mini biographies for more than 500 passengers.
Each visitor to the museum gets a “boarding pass” with a different passenger’s story, but without an “ending.” Their fate is unknown to each guest until the end of the museum.
In the very last room, visitors stand in front of the wall that lists everyone on the Titanic to search the alphabetized list to find out if their passenger survived.
It was a moving experience that made me think about all the people who have traveled to this county who won’t be remembered and studied and revered in this way.
That’s the purpose of the museum, to tell those stories, especially now that all of the survivors have died.
We learn that Titanic survivors from every economic background went on to live across the United States.
Some returned to their home countries in Europe, but those who immigrated permanently — like so many millions of people who leave their home countries for a better life somewhere else — they arrived with a harrowing story that was often too difficult to tell again and again.
This trauma is perhaps best exemplified in a pair of children’s shoes from a third class passenger named Luise Kink, whose daughter wanted her mother’s shoes on display during this year that the museum is highlighting the stories of the children on the ship.
Her mother didn’t have a gilded life like Kate Winslet’s Rose Dewitt Bukater. Luise was 4 years old at the time of her family’s immigration to the U.S. and the sinking of the ship, which she survived by making it onto a lifeboat with both of her parents. (Only a quarter of third class and crew survived, compared to 62 percent and 42 percent of first and second class passengers, respectively.)
Luise finished seventh grade before starting her working life, and for many decades, she refused to talk about the tragedy. That changed after the shipwreck was discovered in 1985, when something shifted in her that caused her to pull the shoes out of the cedar chest they’d been stored in.
Until her death in 1992, she traveled around the country with those shoes in tow to talk about the terrifying journey she endured to become an American.
Her shoes were so worn that they had a hole in the bottom.
When I saw the sole of that shoe, I thought about all the other ravaged pieces of clothing that tell immigrants’ stories of walking impossibly long distances or crossing raging rivers or thick, muddy jungles.
I thought: How many other relics of our forebears' immigration stories are sitting in closets and boxes and storage units?
How many other stories will die when we die because they are too painful to share?
"you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land"
— Warsan Shire, "Home"
I know relatively little about my own immigrant ancestors, but what I do know has fueled my desire to know more. Not only about my own history but about yours and yours and yours.
Who came here? Why did they come? What was it like when they left? What hardships and luck and kindness did they encounter on the way? What hurdles did they overcome that eventually made it so their offspring’s offspring could exist today?
I had no idea what to expect at the Titanic museum, but it certainly wasn’t this flood of questions swirling in my head about how so many of us got here.
If you don’t have an immigration story, I hope you can find a thread in your family tree to unravel one.
And if you don’t have an immigration story because you don’t come from immigrants, you definitely won’t want to miss next week’s story about the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City.
It’s a must-visit place for every American.
Apropos the food aboard Titanic, you might find interesting a 7-episode series of videos from "Tasting History with Max Miller," which re-creates menus served on board (first-, second-, and third-class) during its voyage.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIkaZtzr9JDlFDMpTL3Xyjbuj9I2yvZeI
I was surprised to learn that the Titanic's home port was Liverpool where I visited recently. The perimeter was outlined on the Liverpool dock area.