Immigration

I snapped this shot at the Somalia exhibit at St. Paul's Minnesota History Center. I wanted a picture of the plow, that wooden contraption in the far corner, a venerable, ox-drawn ancestor of, well, this 21-bottom plow pulled along a Big Bud behemoth, 900 horsepower, if you're counting muscle.

Imagine, for a moment, coming from the mud hut above--a typical Somalian domicile--to the massive agri-world below. That Big Bud tractor could open up more prairie ground in an hour than you could hope to see in a decade behind a sweaty team of oxen and that old wooden doohickey.

Welcome to America.

Traditionally, Somalis were largely nomadic.  They carried their shelters on camel back across a divided country that is, save for valleys and coast lines, hot and desert-like. Today, tens of thousands Somalis live in Minnesota, an unlikely adopted homeland for so many black African Muslims. Just this week, a heat wave has descended over the "land of 10,000 lakes"; temps are expected to reach the 40s. I'm not kidding. Strange weather.

Because twenty below isn't rare here. Natives take some pride in the deep freeze--"thirty below keeps out the riff-raff," some whisper. But if you're a Somali "nomadic pastoralist," accustomed to scorching heat, Minnesota must be far beyond night-marish. What's more, to black Africans, Minnesota must seem to overflow with pale faces, full of blonde Nordics, their descendants anyway. 

If blondes have more fun, Minnesota ought to be an endless party. But they're Lutheran, many of them anyway. So they know their sin, right? And yours too. They're people who've been known only occasionally to smile.

Imagine, for a moment, being a devout Muslim Somalian displaced by never-ending bloodletting in a bloody civil war that all too regularly takes the lives of people you love. Imagine escaping the danger around that round house in the museum display, leaving that thick grassy roof behind you, getting on an airplane in Mogadishu, then flying across the world, getting out the airport, and walking into the Mall of America. It's as easy to underestimate the intense struggles of immigration as it is overestimate them. Somewhere in all of us, after all, there's this desire to be free and need to be loved.

Across town Minnesota's Swedish Institute is housed in a castle in downtown Minneapolis. Seriously. I'm not making this up. Right there, downtown Minneapolis, stands a European-looking castle built to a design its wealthy owners determined they wanted to bring to Minnesota. Think I'm kidding? Look for yourself.

Swan Turnblad and his reclusive wife, Christina, wanted a bit of Europe in the Twin Cities, and they had the bucks to build it, so they did. All of that is the American Dream, really, and the Turnblads, dirt poor immigrants from Sweden, are your classic Dreamers.

Just one of the features of this castle, inside, is a gallery of immense wood carvings that are just plain stunning. See for yourself.

It's an incredible piece of work, four-feet tall, cutting a sort of suspiciously randy pose, a Neptune-like bearded man with one arm sweetly up over his head like a flirtatious starlet, the other holding back a breech cloth we'd just as soon not see fall. There's probably intent in this art, some abiding moral, but I didn't care to stick around to discover what meaning it carries.

Right there beside it in front room, where you ascend the stairs, you'll find a couple of weighty banister carvings that feel classical, but are meant, our tour guide told us, as symbols--a pair of lions outfitted with eagle's wings. 

They were deliberately ordered up by the Turnblads and carved out by some old country craftsman to represent the world as Turnblads knew it. What they wanted was something to combine the cultures they loved--American eagles and Swedish lions. 

Makes for unlikely front room greeters.

They came from nothing, the Turnblads. What must be said is that Christina Turnblad's very first job, in Worthington, Minnesota, paid no salary whatsoever, no wage, no money. She and her parents had less than nothing when they came to this country, so the best she could do--with no English, no education, and no work experience--was on-the-job training in a hotel, where she was given room-and-board for endless toil that promised her this much at least: the work would teach her how to become a good domestic. 

She and her husband built a castle in Minneapolis and ascended open stairways attended by incredible, hand-carved lions adorned with eagle's wings. 

Is it any wonder why needy people have forever arrived on our shores? And is it any wonder why so many of us have resented them, and still do, even those descendants of their own ancestors "yearning to be free?" Is it any wonder why the very first order of business in a restructured U. S. House of  Representatives will be immigration? 

It's not easy, but it's something we do and always will, as long as people dream.