Join us in congratulating Jay Morse. His nonfiction piece, "Triumph," first published in Issue 30 Spring 2024, was just listed among the "Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction of 2024" in The Best American Essays 2025.
You can read the story below:
Triumph
Jay Morse
Nonfiction
Basilio Nicolas Hage was an aspiring merchant, but he feared for his future. Signs of trouble were all around him. The Ottoman Empire was shrinking so fast its death rattle seemed to shake plaster from buildings right before Nicolas’s eyes. His hometown of Tripoli was the western terminus of the famous Silk Road and a port to Europe’s markets, but cheaper Chinese silk was making the local version obsolete. European merchants brought money, but American evangelical- built schools and whispered tantalizing tales of land and liberty. If America’s political power was not yet dominant, her economy and reputation were. Industrial United States cranked out products bigger, faster, stronger than anyone else. More whimsical. Having the world’s tallest building wasn’t enough; Americans built a machine one could ride to the top of it. Stairs were yesterday’s news. Americans invented refrigerators, straws, screen doors, slot machines, roller coasters, zippers, mousetraps, cotton candy. They invented the phonograph, the telephone, the telegraph. One American laid cable across the Atlantic, a reversed umbilical cord connecting two continents, allowing the queen of a dying empire to tap tap tap her congratulations to the democratically elected president of a rising one. Days of staid, Victorian handwringing surely prefaced composing such a laudatory note to her plebian cousin, but no matter. Her compliments were carried across the ocean fifteen times faster than had it been ferried by boat. The message itself was a white flag, even if the queen didn’t yet know it:
The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work.
Americans didn’t desire to do anything, thought Nicolas. They just did. America was the land of opportunity, jobs, freedom. Her streets, heard Nicolas, were paved with gold.
So Nicolas, like thousands of Syrians before and after him, chose myth over fear. He made his way to Le Havre, France, where he purchased a steerage ticket on the S.S. le Champagne to New York City. The ship’s doctor examined Nicolas prior to boarding, determining him to be neither an idiot nor insane (good my brother is not here to disagree, thought Nicolas), nor a pauper likely to become a public charge. The Second Officer agreed. He also attested that Nicolas was not suffering from a loathsome, dangerous, or contagious disease; had not been convicted of a felony or other crime involving moral turpitude; did not have more than one wife. The inspection took just minutes. Other than Nicolas’s confusion when asked his color (“white”, decided Second Officer Gaston), for each question Nicolas simply answered “no.”
The le Champagne left France on May 24, 1899. Ten days later, Nicolas tread his weary feet upon Ellis Island. He watched as an agent checked his name against the ship’s manifest, then, satisfied, put him on a ferry to the mainland. America.
Tripoli had been a water wheel for international powers since the Phoenicians in 300 BC, but New York City on the cusp of a new century was a different kind of melting pot. It was a volcano. Unbroken strings of tall buildings blocked the sun, skirted policewomen patrolled the streets, people prowled the sidewalks in numbers greater than Nicolas could count in a lifetime. Automobiles shared the roads with trolleys and horse-drawn carriages. Enough of the latter were still around that Nicolas thought America’s roads were paved not with gold, but with horseshit.
Nicolas had never seen anything like it. New York’s tenements housed 418,00 people per square mile, the equivalent of six human beings standing inside a box the length and width of one of Nicolas’s strides. Many were as new to America as was Nicolas himself – more than a third of the city’s 3.4 million people were born outside America’s borders. His journey should have better prepared him. The le Champagne manifest included people from a country for nearly every letter of the alphabet, but even the suffocating, fetid air below decks paled in comparison to New York’s streets. Nicolas missed space, clean air. He missed trees.
He wasted little time in New York. Nicolas skipped Lower Manhattan’s vibrant Little Syria, skipped the growing Arabic import-export business, skipped the street fights with the uncivilized Irish, skipped his opportunity to find a good Syrian Catholic wife. Instead, Nicolas headed west, eventually finding himself not in America but in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home.
What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder between there and here? What continued to push Nicolas west? Was it flight from, rather than to? Ghosts of repeated failures or lost loves in dogged pursuit? Serial reminders of stabbing epithets, slights, miscommunications? A simple thirst for adventure? It was, perhaps, a collective. Not just one driver but multiple, all of them exposing the potential in the new. Something untamed. Something only people like Nicolas could see in that precious-metal nimbus he watched drop daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed further west. An invisible finger drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun.
I want my great-grandfather to have found whatever he was looking for. I want to picture Nicolas in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, dirt under his leather boots now familiar enough to assuaging whatever homesickness he had for the cedars of his Mount Lebanon. His face nirvanic when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new hometown, his closed eyes turned upward to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”
Jay Morse
Jay primarily writes (mostly) nonfiction, and is currently working on a book about his experience as a US Army prosecutor in Afghanistan. He has an MFA from Antioch University-Los Angeles, and has been published in The Forge Literary Magazine and Tahoma Literary Review.