Eighteen
May 1917

Frania stood knee-deep in the Mississippi River, watching for floating driftwood and remembering the kerchief that her mother, Magdalena, had worn over her hair. It was Frania’s clearest memory—her and Mama, gathering wood while the city women watched from the bridge above, as if the Flats residents were zoo animals.

She spotted a floating log with stocky trunk and smaller branches. Perfect. Papa Pawel came home from the mill exhausted, and she didn’t want him taking on chores that she or her daughter could do instead. Pawel had been a champion loader—first with barrels, later with 140-pound sacks—at the Washburn Mill for over thirty years now. But the brute labor was becoming too much, and he’d developed a dry, hacking cough. Miller’s lung, they called it.

After the horrible explosion in 1878, Pawel had managed the boardinghouse during the two years it took to build a new mill. Frania had been only four years old when her mother had disappeared in what the newspapers called “The Minneapolis Horror.” Pawel and the neighbor women had raised Frania, who gradually took over the boardinghouse. No one knew what Magdalena had been doing by
the mill, but Pawel was certain she’d been killed.

At seventeen, Frania had married a millworker of her own—a quiet, gentle Pole with a lopsided smile and kind eyes and dreams of returning to the old country. Two years later, a month before Lidia was born, his sleeve had caught in a piece of machinery. After the funeral, Papa Pawel had painted Widow Frania’s Boardinghouse on the sign by the front door of their whitewashed cottage. Frania became famous for her poppyseed cakes, gingerbread, and especially pączki, the filled doughnuts Poles held dear. Sometimes as many as a dozen newly arrived Poles paid two dollars a month for sleeping space, meals, and clean laundry.

But the Great War brought changes. Fewer European men arrived in the Flats these days. More women, war widows of one sort or another, were taking in boarders. If only—

“Mama!” Frania’s daughter, Lidia, stood on the shore, waving wildly. Tomasz, the black-haired boy with her, lifted a polite hand. Like Lidia, he’d been born in the Flats to immigrant parents.

Frania grasped a branch and towed the deadwood, trying to smile. Tomasz made her nervous—always talking about leaving the Flats. He’d tried to enlist when the United States entered the war, but his limp—legacy of a childhood injury—kept him out of uniform. Now he labored at the flour mill, courted Lidia on his free day, and spoke hungrily of “life above.”

Before Frania reached land, Tomasz said something to Lidia and limped away. Frania untucked her skirt’s hem from the waistband and kissed her daughter’s cheek. “Were you and Tomasz walking out?”

Lidia nodded happily. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier to help, but it’s such a fine spring day …”

“What do you two speak of?”

Lidia took a deep breath. “Mama, I’ve been thinking about college.”

“College?” Frania repeated blankly.

“Some girls do go, you know. I could get a good job after graduating. Tomasz thinks it’s a fine idea.”

Frania was tempted to ask if Tomasz going to pay for these classes, but she realized in time that she might not like the answer. Tomasz was smart, hardworking, and ambitious. It wasn’t surprising that he would encourage Lidia to dream of something so unimaginable.

Frania sighed. All men wanted to do better for themselves and their families. Tomasz, though, seemed particularly eager to leave all things Polish behind.