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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?
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?
They cut the phone lines first, while the sky is still dark. At dawn, men in white armbands appear at doors, guns and lists in hand. By noon, nearly 1,200 striking copper miners and their supporters are driven into cattle cars rank with dung.
My great-grandfather takes Mule Pass instead, heat in his lungs and 2,000 vigilantes at his back. Dark smudges beneath greasewood are the only shade on Jovan Vaso Kulinovich’s escape from Bisbee, Arizona. His path, which locals call “the Divide,” is a narrow shelf blasted into rock by convicts a few years earlier. Blast marks and drill holes scar the stones. Rattlesnakes hold to the shadows. No shelter for 20 miles. The Mule Mountains in summer swallow mercy.
Still, the way ahead is safer. Behind Jovan, the posse breaks into boardinghouses, yanks a miner from behind a grocery counter, shoots another dead in his home. Their authority is the cloth band torn from flour sacks or pillowcases. Everything else is rage.
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.
My great-grandfather takes Mule Pass instead, heat in his lungs and 2,000 vigilantes at his back. Dark smudges beneath greasewood are the only shade on Jovan Vaso Kulinovich’s escape from Bisbee, Arizona. His path, which locals call “the Divide,” is a narrow shelf blasted into rock by convicts a few years earlier. Blast marks and drill holes scar the stones. Rattlesnakes hold to the shadows. No shelter for 20 miles. The Mule Mountains in summer swallow mercy.
Still, the way ahead is safer. Behind Jovan, the posse breaks into boardinghouses, yanks a miner from behind a grocery counter, shoots another dead in his home. Their authority is the cloth band torn from flour sacks or pillowcases. Everything else is rage.
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.
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