The good (even holy) ship Dorothy Day
As the newest Staten Island ferry rumbled through New York harbor recently, it was easy to picture the woman it is named after in contemplation at a window. Her simple dress, her white hair in a braided crown, her eyes searching for the divine in the green-gray water.
THE Dorothy Day, for both an angular woman and a huge barrel.
The city ferries that provide free passage between Staten Island and Lower Manhattan are often named after well-known Staten Islanders: a high school football coach, a long-serving politician, a soldier killed in a war. But no description fully captures Day, who died in 1980 at the age of 83.
Journalist, reformer, anarchist, peace activist, Roman Catholic convert, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement – and perhaps saint; the Vatican has declared her a “servant of God”, a first step towards canonization. She is buried on Staten Island, where her religious conversion had taken root during lonely walks along the southern shores.
But solitude was not possible during the celebration of the inaugural run of the Dorothy Day ferry last month. The large gathering at Staten Island’s St. George Terminal included city officials and Catholic clergy, blue-uniformed officers and gray-haired pacifists, those sworn to uphold the law and those familiar with breaking it, at least in the name of civil disobedience.
Among them was Martha Hennessy, 67, whose long white hair and long history of peace activism reminded her grandmother, Dorothy Day. Ms. Hennessy served nearly a year in prison for entering a submarine base in Georgia to participate in a symbolic, nonviolent protest against nuclear weapons.
“I’m a convicted felon,” said Mrs. Hennessy, who had made a batch of chocolate chip cookies for the half-hour journey.
The mix of pamphlets handed out before the ceremony—the one about city ferries, the one about Day’s possible canonization—the secular and the sacred met. Combined, they offered a glimpse into Day’s life.
How she settled in a cottage on Staten Island in 1924 and gave birth to a daughter, Tamar, two years later. How her embrace of Catholicism helped end her common-law marriage to a biologist who rejected religion. How she and social activist Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, the radical lay movement that works for mercy, justice and hospitality for everyone in need.
How she remained a steadfast pacifist, protested nuclear weapons and was jailed repeatedly, the last time after taking a picket line with striking farm workers in California at the age of 75. How she struggled with her flaws, doubts and depression, but kept a set course.
“We all know the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes in community,” she once wrote.
The ceremony included those mandatory forms of a municipal blessing — speeches — including one by the city’s transportation commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez. He stressed that Day’s call to treat every human being with “dignity and respect” also included immigrants and workers.
“This is about more than riding a ferry,” said Mr. Rodriguez, a native of the Dominican Republic. “It’s to keep fighting for justice.”
Soon the Filthy Rotten System’s band was leading choruses of “If I Had a Hammer”, to mild consternation from transportation officials who were concerned about ferry schedules. But eventually the gates opened and the Dorothy Day, adorned with red, white, and blue flags, received passengers for its maiden voyage to Manhattan.
The ship jerked, as if shedding the shackles of the land, and moved away.
It will remain one of the eternal mysteries of what Day could have made of an $85 million, 4,500-passenger ferry named after her.
Would she have given that withering “look” of hers, suggesting she had no time for such nonsense? Would she have repeated the famous admonition often attributed to her? (“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to get fired so easily.”)
Or would she have welcomed the moment as an opportunity to promote peace, nuclear disarmament and the message to love each other?
Now, several afternoons after its inaugural run, the Dorothy Day was up as just another one of the orange-and-blue giants departing St. George Terminal nearly 60 times a day. All the bunting was gone and the brackish water began to streak against the new windows.
The stern gate lifted and the 100-foot-long Dorothy Day rose with a groan from its wooden slats. It hurtled into the harbor, where buoys bobbed, freighters slid, and the impossible skyline of Manhattan defined the horizon.
On the top and middle decks, dozens of tourists had lined up for the best view of the Statue of Liberty, just a verdigris smudge in the distance. But on the lower deck, regulars seemed to have taken their places on benches. Some dozed off, some studied their cell phones, and some got lost in the mesmerizing waters, just like Day once did.
For more than half a century she had lived intermittently on Staten Island, where she found space to escape the demands of editing The Catholic Worker newspaper and living in the Catholic Worker community on the Lower East Side – there are many dozens of communities around the world – where she helped with food, housing and other services.
For example, in the winter of 1927, Day boarded the ferry to Staten Island and, as Paul Elie recounted in his book “The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage,” sat on the deck and wrote in her journal . The water was restless, the sky foggy, her mind confused.
“A very consuming restlessness overcame me, so that I walked round and round the deck of the ferry, almost groaning in fear,” she later wrote. “Maybe the devil was on the boat.”
Two days later, Day attended a Catholic church in the Tottenville neighborhood of Staten Island and was baptized.
As Elie wrote, the ferry ride could be “a retreat and a pilgrimage all at once” for Day. She breathed in the salt-scented air, imagined the distant destinations of passing ships, felt the anxieties of city life wash away. The ferry induced meditation.
On another ferry trip, in 1950, Day recorded her thoughts: “The journey is so beautiful. The sky and water are so beautiful in all their moods that I often find myself just contemplating, and thinking ‘to the point’ about what is going on beneath the surface of my mind.
Now, on this ferry gliding across New York’s Upper Bay, you could almost see Dorothy Day at the window, save for some of the crowd on the water, taking in the awe-inspiring ordinary.
That hurried man who eats a sloppy sandwich in a hurry. Those seagulls dodging and darting away in the wake of the ferry. That mother chasing after her waddling toddler. Those two guys talk in Spanish about their video game. The hum of the engines felt in the feet. The dance of the swirling white water.
Unreal Manhattan became reality when the Dorothy Day reached its berth at Whitehall Terminal. Bells rang, gates went down and we made our way to solid ground, saints and sinners all.
Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.