The story of Annie Moore

Seagulls flapping in the breeze, crying. Good stiff wind. Cold enough to make me wish I’d dug out my jacket from the boot. Still, it’s bracing. Better than the stale moist air inside those gloomy Titanic rooms. Could hardly breathe in there. Just imagining the air in steerage on a ship like that. As it was going down. Worst way to drown, I should think. Trapped below deck, icy water rushing in. Must have been a lot of screaming. Last thing you’d hear. Cries of drowning men.

And here, looking out over the water is young Annie Moore and her two brothers. First immigrant to pass through newly-opened Ellis Island on January 1, 1892. Imagine a 14-year-old girl crossing the ocean with brothers only 11 and 7. Parents in New York already for several years. Annie and the boys left behind in Cork, waiting. Until a letter comes with money for passage. Just enough to crowd into steerage and spend 12 days making the crossing, seasick almost every day, scared out of her wits.

Sail pass the Statue of Liberty on New Year’s Day, 1892. Which just happens to be Annie’s 15^th birthday. What was she thinking? Probably tough as nails by then. Had to be. Can’t spend almost two weeks in the hold of a ship with two boys to look after and not age quickly. A barge unloads them and shuttles them to the new landing place, Ellis Island. A ramp is lowered. And the first one down, tripping as she goes, is Miss Annie Moore. And there to meet her is an official with a bushy walrus mustache who hands her a $10 gold piece. What’s this for? she asks. For being first, says he. First what? The first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island.

What must she have thought? More money than she’d ever seen in her life, she tells a newsman. I’ll keep it forever as a memento, she says. But surely it was spent. No doubt she held out her palm to show her father, who was waiting for her and the boys, and she never saw it again. Can’t hold on to a gold piece like it was a ticket stub. Not in a poor Irish family with four children trying to make a go of it in New York. That gold coin was spent. No doubt.

And what of Annie? Married a German immigrant, of all things. A fish monger. And had eleven children with him, some of whom died before they could walk. And Annie died young herself of heart failure. Only fifty. Buried in Queens. Never did see Ireland again. Maybe that’s why they designed her sculpture here the way they did; with her gazing back towards Ireland. Forever gazing back.