In the mid 1980s when I was teaching at the University of San Diego, writer, poet and social activist Maya Angelou (1928-2014) made a presentation to the university community. Over the years I have attended dozens of talks by academics, artists and politicians but none of these compared with Angelou’s performance. In an often melodious voice that was forceful yet compassionate, she was spellbinding.

Angelou spoke about what we owe our ancestors who made the decision to leave family and friends and embark on often perilous journeys to the United States. In so doing they provided us with opportunities that did not exist in their countries of origin. Angelou recounted the travails of some of these individuals, male and female, young and old from across the globe.

Millions of immigrants came to America from Europe, millions more arrived from Mexico, Central and South America and toiled for a pittance as farm laborers. For African Americans like Maya Angelou, their ancestors arrived in the Americas involuntarily, bound in chains for weeks on disease infested slave ships where one in five died, their bodies thrown overboard like garbage. Those who survived the horrendous journey would forever live in bondage, treated no better than beasts of burden.

Asian immigrants, many of whom helped construct railroad lines in the western states, endured violent racist attacks. With the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans — who had been here for thousands of years — had to fight for their very existence, the Indian population declining from 6.5 million (some demographers are of the opinion it was much higher) in what is now the continental United States and Canada to just over 237,000 in this country by 1900.

I think of my grandparents and the opportunities I’ve had because of their hard work and tenacity. My paternal grandfather (Joseph Bryjak) came to the this country from Poland — then part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire — as a young man in the mid-1890s and worked in a bituminous coal mining town (Bitumen) in north central Pennsylvania. With few exceptions, the mine workers were immigrants from Sweden, Slovakia and Poland.

Working in the mines was exhausting, dirty and dangerous. Miners could be crushed to death by a collapsing roof, burned alive by gas explosions, poisoned by deadly fumes or blown to pieces by a premature blast. Women lived in constant fear that their husbands, sons and brothers would be seriously injured or killed in the mines. According to one estimate, between 1877 and 1940 approximately 18,000 men and boys (some as young as 7 years-of-age) working in Pennsylvania’s bituminous coal mines died in mine accidents.

Coal mining towns were deadly in another way as birth-related complications were likely to be fatal. Records indicate that while Bitumen had a physician, the nearest hospital was hours away. My grandmother, Julia, from Slovakia, died in childbirth at age 27 in 1906. Baby Julia, named for her, died nine weeks later.

When his mother died, my father was 3 years old and his sister, Mary Ann, 5. As miners typically worked six days a week, and there was no one to care for his two young children, my grandfather decided to return to Poland. And that’s when a life altering chance encounter for him, and his descendants, occurred.

In New York City, making arrangements for a voyage to Europe, my grandfather met Catholic nuns — Felician Sisters, at that time a religious order comprised almost exclusively of Polish and Polish-American women. The sisters convinced him that returning to Poland would be a mistake, that his children would have a much brighter future in this country.

My father and Mary Ann were raised by Felician Sisters at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Orphan’s Home near Buffalo. What an adjustment they had to make, losing their mother and father (who returned to Bitumen) in a few months and now living in a completely different environment. My father always spoke fondly of the nuns who raised him and Mary Ann. My aunt became a Felician Sister when she was 21 years old — Sister Salvatore. She died at age 29 from tuberculosis.

My maternal grandfather (Frank Nowicki), a skilled carpenter, died of stomach cancer at age 39, leaving Grandma Mary with five daughters between 5 and 17 years old. She worked as a cleaning woman at a Buffalo hospital to support her family. Grandma Mary met Joseph Mendyk a widower with two sons; they married and had a daughter. My mother and her sisters often remarked that Grandpa Mendyk was an attentive, kind and loving step-father.

The most important and meaningful gift from my maternal grandparents was a large, tight-knit extended family. With 16 children among the sisters there were always birthdays, confirmations, First Holy Communions, school events, graduations and holidays to celebrate together. Only as an adult did I realize how fortunate my sister Mary Lou and I were to have come of age in such a wonderful family setting. Perhaps no one appreciated this more than my father who had no surviving relatives when he met my mother. Grandma Mary died when I was 5 years old, my first experience with death. I had never seen my mother and aunts so distraught.

I have photos of my grandparents as young adults and there are few days that I don’t think of them and all they have given me. How fortunate I am as a consequence of their courageous decision to leave Europe and make a new life in this country.

The last lines of Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” emphasize the debt we owe our ancestors: “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.” Born slave or free, of any race, ethnicity and creed, we owe more to our ancestors that we can ever imagine. The way to repay them is through the sacrifices we make for a better tomorrow for our descendants. For everyone.

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George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego.

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Sources

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Felician Sisters of North America (accessed 2023) www.feliciansistersna.org

Maclean, A. (1908) “Life in the Pennsylvania Coal Fields with Particular Reference to Women” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Nov., 1908), pp. 329-351,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2762714

Martinyak, J. (accessed 2023) “A Slovak Town in America: Bitumen, Pennsylvania,” The Carpathian Connection, www.https://www.tccweb

McDowell, J. (accessed 2023) “The Life of a Coal Miner” ehistory, Ohio State University,

www.ehistory.osu.edu

“Overview: King Coal: Mining Bituminous” (accessed 2023) Explore Pennsylvania History,

www.explorepahistory.com

“Slave Ships” (accessed 2023) Encyclopedia of Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.or