It is July 12, 1917. My great-grandfather is 42. Back at home in Dubacher Canyon, his wife Maše, whose name I will later carry like a promise I don’t understand, keeps their four children close—especially the oldest, Maxim, almost 13, who resists confinement and routinely skips school to scramble the steep hills. Women and children have been warned off the streets today. Maše’s English is still broken-backed, insufficient to meet whatever is coming.
More than two decades earlier, 19-year-old Jovan fled Montenegro to avoid military service. He crossed the ocean below deck on a steamer, the cheap end of hope. Wooden bunks were stacked three high, passengers shared tin cups of thin soup, and sleep came in stolen fragments punctuated by the engine’s pounding.
He’d built a life by force of will: a family, a home, a job below ground. Now, he drives himself forward again, step by step, mile by burning mile.
A century later, my cousin and I walk the same stony path until it disappears beneath asphalt. Instead of fear, we carry water bottles, smartphones, the luxury of choice. But our lungs still sting on the grades. And we bring a question.
My great-grandparents crossed water and rock to plant roots in unknown ground, hoping their children might belong. They wrestled with a new language and customs, and never saw their families again.
I’m here to map the silences they chose to keep, the identities they held or hid, the costs they absorbed to belong. Is their way of securing our future what I’m meant to honor now, as deportation lists circulate again and citizens are recruited to carry them out?
What keeps faith with the dead?
Bisbee is a town built in a hurry and on a slant. Houses cling to hillsides as if paused mid-fall, stitched together by cement stairs poured whenever someone had a moment to pause. Some lead to front doors, others to abandoned shacks or to nothing at all. The town still bears that shape: provisional, vertical, and uneasy, as if it might slide back into the earth that made it.
In the 1910s, Bisbee packed some 35 nationalities onto ledges and into its gulches and streets, with Mexican and Balkan miners among the largest groups, most of them working at Phelps Dodge’s Copper Queen Mine. But a promotional issue of the local newspaper, published for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, flattened that diversity into three words: “white man’s camp.”
Slavs like Jovan didn’t count as “white men.” The preferred term was “Bohunk,” a slur that collapsed multiple nations into one.