Chapter Three

Elisa’s birthday celebration was held a few days later, on May 18, 1853. She received other gifts from the family, but none as precious as the French Bible.

The house was in disarray as the packing continued. At last, the day of departure arrived. On June 4, 1853, the family set sail from Pernambuco for Philadelphia.

Whereas many immigrants to America were crowded into cabins with other families or tossed about in storage, the consulate assisted the Bolli family in booking a more comfortable passage. They set sail on a ship named the John Farnum, and they were the only passengers on board besides the crew.

The trip took over a month. On board, the girls did their needlework, and everyone did a lot of reading and dreaming about life in America. Papa spent most of his time resting in his berth, while Mama gathered the children on deck and read to them from Swiss Family Robinson to give them an adventurous spirit.

“Will we be shipwrecked and get to live in a tree like the Robinson family did when we get to America?” little Adele asked. The older children laughed along with Mama when she explained that would not be the case, but they had been wondering the same thing!

After they got over being seasick the first few days of the voyage, Elisa and her brother and sisters were allowed to eat all of the ship’s stock of oranges that they wanted. They enjoyed feeding bits of orange to a Portuguese-speaking parrot named Columbo. This entertainment, plus the fun of watching the crew hoist the sails and move the giant anchors, gave them plenty to do.

Elisa read her new Bible every day—especially the Psalms that talked about God’s mighty ocean. When she watched the waves crashing against the sides of the ship, she drew great comfort from the verse in Psalm 139 that read, “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me.”

“There’s no reason for us to be afraid of the unknown as long as we remember that God is in control,” Mama reassured the children again and again.

“The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea,” Elisa read in Psalm 93. Committing this verse to memory, she whispered it to comfort her little sisters in their cabin at night when they were awakened by the tossing of the ship.

“Mama, tell us again why we’re going to America,” Albertine said one sunny afternoon when Mama and the girls were on deck, gazing out at the rolling waves.

“Papa wants us to be near my French-Swiss relatives in Tennessee in case something should happen to him,” Mama said. “We aren’t going back to Switzerland because there are really very few of my relatives left there. Because of the persecution of those who believe as we do, most have gone to the new country.”

Mama went on to explain why the Bollis would not have been free to practice their faith in Switzerland.

“The National Protestant Church is run by the government now. Like my relatives, Papa and I believe that living by the laws of God as taught in the Bible is more important than living the laws of man, but the government doesn’t seem to understand that.”

Mama didn’t tell the children everything she knew about the persecution. In letters from Switzerland, she read that relatives holding Bible studies in their homes had been dragged into the streets and beaten by the authorities. Such Assemblies of the Open Brethren were not permitted, and so Edouard and Elise Bolli could not return to Switzerland with their children.

Going back to Switzerland would not have been easier for the children anyway. They had been to Switzerland, but because their father was Swiss Consul to Brazil, they had never lived there. Although the language would have been easier for them because they could have abandoned Portuguese for the French they also knew, the country would have been as unfamiliar to them as America. Only the eastern coastline of Brazil felt like home.

Papa always led the family in studying the truth of the Scripture. One night, when he was feeling stronger than he had for a few days, he gathered the whole family into a cabin below deck and read to them by candlelight from the family Bible.

Elisa followed along in her own Bible as Papa read in Romans, chapter 10: “that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”

“Believing in Jesus Christ is the only way to have assurance of salvation,” Papa explained. “We do what the Bible instructs out of love for the Lord, but it’s what we believe that saves us, not what we do.”

In conversations the children had with their mother, it was more the sadness in her eyes than the words she spoke that made them wonder if Papa was even more ill than they thought.

The oldest children, Cecile, Emmanuel, and Elisa, watched their father carefully for signs of illness. He continued to be weak and short of breath, and sometimes he clutched his chest and seemed to be in pain. All the children noticed that Papa stayed in his berth more each day. Still, they couldn’t begin to imagine life without their dear Papa—in America or anywhere!

Even on evenings when Papa did not feel like having dinner, the family would dine in the ship’s dining room. Mama always had the place of honor next to the ship’s captain.

The captain, Mr. Cook, was pleasant for a seafaring man and had great fun with the children. He was a very tall man who leaned way over from the waist to talk to the children when he saw them on deck. When he smiled at them he showed all his teeth, including a gold one that gleamed in the sunlight. His eyebrows were so bushy, Elisa thought it looked like he had a hairbrush glued to his forehead when he squinted. Most days, he was dressed in a starched white uniform with gold buttons and trim.

“I spied you mateys watching the pilot today,” he said to Elisa and Emmanuel one night at dinner. “Glad to know you’re paying attention in case I have to ask you to pilot the ship.”

Elisa was glad Captain Cook didn’t mind that the children spent long hours watching the pilot at the helm. They also loved to watch the sailor up on the mast looking through his spyglass. “Do you see land yet?” they called up to him at least twice a day. All these activities helped the days spent at sea go by faster.

The day the ship neared the equator, Captain Cook called the children to him and told them to look into his telescope.

“See if you can see the equator in there,” he instructed. “We’re about to cross it, you know.”

Elisa peeked in first. There was definitely a line across the center of the lens, but she didn’t think it was the equator. The captain laughed as all the Bolli children took turns looking into the telescope. To tease them, he had put a hair across the lens, hoping to make them think they were really seeing the line they were about to cross. They did cross the equator on their journey, but the line was not really visible.

Fresh fish was often served when the family joined the captain for dinner—fish the sailors caught with a hook and line. Imitating the sailors, Emmanuel and Elisa tried bending pins into hooks, attaching them to strings, and fastening them to the ship’s railing in hopes of catching fish.

“I think I have a big one!” Elisa squealed to Emmanuel during one of their fishing efforts.

“Elisa, it’s only a glob of seaweed,” Emmanuel said when he helped her pull her catch over the ship’s railing.

Elisa saved a sample of the seaweed, pressing it between the pages of a book.

Day after day, the family and their vessel sailed north through the Atlantic Ocean as they made their way from the easternmost point of South America, Pernambuco, to the northeastern shore of the United States. At long last, the children heard the sailor on watch yelling, “Land ho!” and they all ran to the railing to see the coastline of America in the distance.

*  *  *

On July 18, 1853, the John Farnum was towed from the Atlantic Coast up the Delaware River to Philadelphia. The children waved wildly at passengers on other boats and saw flags of many nations waving in the summer breeze.

The first three days the Bollis spent in America, they stayed in a boarding house near the home of one of Mama’s cousins, Samuel Mange, and his family in Philadelphia.

There were three daughters and a son in the Mange family, and the boy was named after William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. At dinner, Mr. Mange gave the Bolli children a history lesson, interjecting as much French as he could to help them understand his account of all the historic sites in and around the city.

Elisa thought it was funny that Mr. and Mrs. Mange insisted on referring to their son by his full name, but after she learned more about the Quaker William Penn who established the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682, she understood their pride.

“Please pass the huckleberry jam,” William Penn Mange, who was more interested in eating than in hearing about his namesake, said to Elisa.

Elisa looked around the table, but she had never seen jam made of huckleberries in beet sugar before. She had never seen sweet churned butter, either. She stared at both of the small crystal bowls, wondering which one to pass. Finally, one of the Mange sisters reached around to get the jam, sparing Elisa any further embarrassment.

When the family had a chance to see the historic sights in Philadelphia the next day, Elisa was glad Mr. Mange had told them something of the city’s history. They saw Independence Hall, the very place where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and stood by the grave of founding father Benjamin Franklin at Christ Church.

“Was that really the Liberty Bell we saw?” Emmanuel asked at dinner the next night. “I thought it would be so much larger.”

Elisa and Cecile couldn’t stop thinking about the house where Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag. When they climbed the narrow stairs to their attic room in the boarding house that night, they unpacked their samplers and pretended they were Betsy—stitching by candlelight to get the flag ready in time.

The children were also fascinated with the more modern sights of the city. The ships in the port weren’t unlike the ones they were used to seeing in Pernambuco, but the huge department stores seemed like giant treasure chests the girls couldn’t wait to explore.

When the family went on shopping excursions in the city, Papa stayed behind to rest. Being in the marketplace without him made Elisa sad. The sights and smells of the flowers and fish made her remember all the Saturday mornings she had gone with Papa to the marketplace in Pernambuco.

“Papa, we saw the most beautiful gold watches in the jewelry store window,” Elisa ran to tell him after one shopping trip. “And the diamond rings! Oh, Papa! They are even more dazzling than the ones in the stores in Pernambuco.”

*  *  *

After three days, the family left Philadelphia on a large steamer and went to Charleston, South Carolina, then on to Savannah, Georgia. In Savannah they boarded a train, the first train the children had ever seen, and rode all the way to Loudon, Tennessee. From the train windows they took in the rolling green hills, the rivers, and the trees of East Tennessee. In the distance, a hazy blue mountain range reminded Elisa of a rumpled comforter on an unmade bed.

The conductor took Emmanuel with him to collect the tickets from passengers on the other cars.

“There are so many cars I lost count of them,” Emmanuel told the girls breathlessly when he got back to his seat. “And you should see how much coal they have to shovel into the big steam engines.”

From Loudon, the travel-weary family took a stagecoach to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they spent the first night in the Lamar House on Gay Street.

“Is this our new home?” little Adele asked Elisa as she lifted her sleepy, blonde head off her sister’s shoulder and saw the fancy chandelier in the foyer.

“No, silly girl.” Elisa laughed. “This is a boarding house. We’ll only be here one night.”

The next day, the Bollis, along with all their trunks and other belongings, moved in with the Esperandieus, a French-Swiss family who had settled on a farm at Third Creek near Knoxville four years earlier. Mrs. Esperandieu was a first cousin of Mama’s, but the Bolli children called her “aunt” and her husband, Reverend Esperandieu, “uncle,” as was the Swiss custom. The Esperandieus had five children—Lily, Mary, Adele, Berthe, and Frederick.

The Bollis spend almost a month with the Esperandieus. The children loved exploring the farm with their cousins. And the cousins were pleased to help Cecile, Emmanuel, Elisa, Albertine, and Adele learn English as they played together on the farm. The teaching and the learning were both made easier because all of the children spoke French.

Mama and Papa had a lot to learn too. Although the terrain in East Tennessee was not completely unlike what they remembered of Switzerland, they knew nothing about the farming life they seemed destined to have. While the children played and learned English from their cousins, Mama spend long hours in the kitchen with Aunt Esperandieu, learning how to put up produce for the winter.

Papa learned about the laws of property ownership from Uncle Esperandieu. Frequently, he would borrow the Esperandieus’ wagon to go looking for land or to run an errand in town. Elisa and Cecile would ride along whenever they could.

“May we go with you, Papa?” Elisa asked one day when she noticed her father hitching a horse to the wagon.

“You don’t even know where I’m going!” Papa teased. “Hop in. I’m just going to look at some land. You girls may go if you promise to practice your English with me as we ride along.”

Eagerly Elisa and Cecile scrambled into the back of the wagon. They had hoped for a chance to chatter together in French or Portuguese since they were alone together, but Papa didn’t want to miss an opportunity for all of them to learn.

“All right, girls,” he said. “I want you to give me the English name of everything we pass along the way.”

“Maple tree,” Cecile called out.

“Born!” Elisa said and wondered why Cecile and her father dissolved in laughter.

“I believe it’s barn, dear,” Papa said at last. And so it went all afternoon.

On the way back to Esperandieu farm, the girls noticed that their father was barely able to sit up and steer the wagon. When they pulled up to the house, he called for Emmanuel to come help him down and tend to the horse.

“I had hoped Papa was just tired from our trip from Brazil,” Cecile said to Elisa when the two sat on the front porch, snapping beans for dinner, “but he doesn’t seem to be getting stronger.”

“I know, Cile,” Elisa said. “Do you think we’ll be able to stay in Tennessee if Papa doesn’t get well enough to work again?”

“We came here so Mama’s relatives could help us, Elisa, so yes, we could stay. But it’s too soon to worry about that. We just have to keep praying that Papa will get better soon.”

During the month the Bollis spent with the Esperandieus, Elisa’s mother was reconnected to all her relatives from Canton de Vaud in Switzerland. No reunion was sweeter than that of Mama with her sister, Cecile Chavannes, who had moved from Switzerland with her husband, Theodore Chavannes, just a few years before to settle on his parents’ farm. Whenever the Bolli children couldn’t find their mother at any of the big family gatherings, they would find the two sisters huddled together in a corner someplace talking, laughing, and hugging one another until it was time to go home.

Five families of French-Swiss descent had come to Tennessee in 1849 to escape religious persecution, joining three families already in residence. By the time the Bollis arrived in 1853, more families were joining the new colony of immigrants each year. The Bolli children were surrounded by caring aunts and uncles and many fun-loving cousins.

The welcome celebrations went on for days. Every meal the families shared was full of stories of their passages, introductions to their children and spouses, and the warm feeling of love and acceptance that makes a place soon feel like home.

“If only Papa wasn’t sick, everything would be wonderful here,” Elisa whispered to Cecile one night as the two of them snuggled in bed together.

Soon Papa purchased a 265-acre farm a mile west of the Esperandieus. The farm included a large two-story frame house, a smaller log house, and stables.

Finally it was moving day again, but this time the Bollis were moving into their own farmhouse. There would be no servants in this home, and Papa had still not recovered from the trip and spent most of the day in bed. That left Mama and the children to do most of the moving in themselves.

“Elisa, you’re not holding your end up,” Cecile complained as she and her sister struggled to get one of the trunks up the front stairs of the farmhouse that would be their new home.

“I can’t even see my feet, Cile,” Elisa said. “How can I tell if I’m holding the trunk up or not?”

At last, everything was in the house.

“I know we don’t have many places to store things,” Mama told the girls. “Just unpack what you can, and I’ll ask Emmanuel to carry the rest of the boxes up to the attic.”

Almost all of the family’s furniture had been left in Brazil, including the fine mahogany tables, the mirrors, the piano, and the heavy iron bedsteads. But the farmhouse had several built-in cupboards, and the other families brought over any furniture they could spare. Soon the unpacking was done.