Vigilantes at Dawn

Masha Hamilton | Longreads | February 19, 2026 | 5,309 words (19 minutes)

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.

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?

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Bisbee is a town built in a hurry and on a slant. Houses cling to hillsides as if paused mid-fall, stitched together by cement stairs poured whenever someone had a moment to pause. Some lead to front doors, others to abandoned shacks or to nothing at all. The town still bears that shape: provisional, vertical, and uneasy, as if it might slide back into the earth that made it.

In the 1910s, Bisbee packed some 35 nationalities onto ledges and into its gulches and streets, with Mexican and Balkan miners among the largest groups, most of them working at Phelps Dodge’s Copper Queen Mine. But a promotional issue of the local newspaper, published for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, flattened that diversity into three words: “white man’s camp.”

Slavs like Jovan didn’t count as “white men.” The preferred term was “Bohunk,” a slur that collapsed multiple nations into one. 

The tone wasn’t subtle. In January 1911, the respected Engineering and Mining Journal wrote of garbage-strewn mining camps, noting especially: “a ‘Bohunk camp’ where the laborer prefers filth to cleanliness.” In January 1916, it described a fatal accident as the loss of “one perfectly good bohunk . . . neatly obliterated,” revealing how casually Slavic workers were dehumanized.

The neighborhoods were segregated, and so was the pay: US-born white workers and Northern Europeans were funneled into the best-paying skilled jobs, Southern and Eastern Europeans were shoved to less-favored slots underground, and most Mexican-born workers were assigned to lower-paying surface crews. 

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?

The air in Bisbee was tight even before the strike. The Mexican Revolution had turned the town into a nervous garrison. Then 1917 stacked event upon event, shifting the legal ground under the miners’ feet: On February 5, Congress overrode Woodrow Wilson’s veto to pass the Immigration Act, widening exclusions; on April 6, the United States entered World War I, copper prices rising with the bullets; and on June 15, the Espionage Act armed the government to punish dissent.

Twelve days later, Bisbee’s miners walked.

Within a week, roughly half the 4,700-member workforce was out. Three of the miners’ demands sought improved safety; three challenged discriminatory practices; the last resisted tying wages to the price of copper. 

In secret meetings, a local scheme took shape and hardened. “You could almost smell fear,” said Miriam Tefft, 15 years old at the time. 

On July 12, it broke the surface.

“They got me out of bed looking down a double-barrelled shotgun. . . . In the boxcar I was in, there was nothing but sheep dung,” miner and deportee Fred Watson later recalled. When his wife urged him to put it behind him, he said: “I’ll forget it when I die!”

Matt Hanhila was 7: “We were awakened by a loud knock on the door. . . . I could see several men on our porch with rifles. They had come for my father.” His mother sold their home for pennies to join her husband in New Mexico and then Minnesota; they snuck back three years later and Hanhila’s father returned to the mines under a false name.

On the chosen day, the hastily deputized posse forced the deportees into 23 cattle cars, guards pacing the roofs. By late afternoon, the air pressed 90-odd degrees. Deputies carried water; little, if any, reached the men inside. Officials in Columbus, New Mexico, turned the train away, and so it backtracked; near 3 a.m., the cars opened at Hermanas, and the desert took the deportees in. Return, they were warned, and they’d be killed. About one-fourth of the deportees were identified as either Slavs or Serbians, a disproportionate share that shows how rumor and resentment sorted bodies. 

We don’t know how long Jovan wrestled with his choice; family lore is silent on that. The route suggests he moved before dawn to catch what shade he could. Twenty-four hours after it began, the roundup was over. Jovan came home. Like Hanhila’s father, he kept his head down. Silence was safest.

---

I arrived in Bisbee on October 4, 2025, to a town where the hills bleed rust into the sky and the people I know best are dead. The descendants I meet are still locked in their ancestors’ struggle. “On any given night at St. Elmo’s, we can still get into a bar fight about the deportation,” resident Charles Henry Bethea told me.

John Pintek’s grandparents, Mike and Katie, came from Croatia in 1907, worked mines in Michigan and Texas, and settled here in 1914. Tuberculosis had already found Mike underground, so they opened a grocery and taxi business. They gave miners credit, so on the morning of July 12, the posse came for Mike. Katie charged to Warren Ballpark, where the men were penned. She told them they couldn’t take Mike—he had TB and would infect every man there.

“They told him, ‘Okay, then get your ass out of town,’” John recalled. Mike slipped into Mexico for a while, dying in 1921. Katie lived to 98, running the store, raising the boys, taking on boarders. “She was fierce—oh, Jesus, she was something,” her grandson recalled as we sat on the porch of his ranch off Highway 80. “She hated Phelps Dodge for the rest of her life, and so did my dad.”

Jovan came home. Like Hanhila’s father, he kept his head down. Silence was safest.

Richard Hodges played Sheriff Wheeler in staged recreations in Robert Greene’s documentary Bisbee ’17. He lives on a 372-acre ranch along the Mexican border, homesteaded by his great-grandfather in 1898. He first learned of the deportation from his cousin Gus Hart, who was 16 when he was deported. “He was so angry when he told me about it, talking like it happened yesterday,” Hodges recalled. “Only later did my grandmother tell me he was recounting history for me that was 50 years old. It was still that fresh for him.”

Travis Bishop’s great-grandfather rode with the posse. “He was a hard-nosed miner, a heavy smoker with fat, muscled fingers from working underground,” recalled Bishop. “He couldn’t understand why anyone would complain because miners were paid so well. My great-grandfather said that the next day, the whole town celebrated because the troublemakers were gone. It always made sense to me.”

A federal commission called the roundup “wholly illegal” and autocratic. The US Justice Department indicted 21 mine bosses and officials. Then United States v. Wheeler et al. stripped federal jurisdiction; the state cases withered. No one was punished. Fissures hardened.

---

I half-lived in the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum for much of October. I dragged open file drawers that groaned on their runners, thumbed old street directories gone soft as felt, traded stories with the docents and the director, and tugged on plastic gloves to handle thin, brittle pages. Each scrap narrowed the distance between their century and mine. I touched Jovan’s name in an ancient Bisbee directory, as if touch itself might call back more of him.

I asked to hear the oral recording I’d been told my great-aunt Anne had made. The catalog confirmed it, a neat line on a card like a promise. But when the docents went looking, there was only air. Misplaced, perhaps, or discarded when the tape went bad, they told me. I spent a day coming to terms with the news.

In my last week, the museum’s collections manager met me smiling: “We found it—up in the vault.” We carried the cassette to the archival room and closed the door. A click, a hush, the soft breath of the machine. The pause stretched. And then her voice, precise and measured as always, her chuckle, and a memory: Anne sipping a glass of sun tea over ice, watching me thumb through a book she’d brought me. This is what I’d been searching for: not just information, but presence. Tears stung while the past cleared its throat and spoke back to us.

For days, I sat in that mix of past and present. The nights had other plans. I’m not given to nightmares, but in Bisbee they came. I was fleeing, or I couldn’t make myself understood. I’d wake with fear lodged in my chest, breathing until it loosened. Then a fevered cold sore bloomed on my lip and stayed, a quiet ledger of strain I hadn’t yet named. I kept touching it to see if it was shrinking.

I came looking for history. Instead, it began asking something of me. Not remembrance—that was easy—but response. My body seemed to register the demand before I could name it. I was starting to understand how much Jovan and Maše gave me, but not yet what I owed in return.

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I’m on a narrow lip of sidewalk along Highway 80. Velvetpod mimosa snags my boots; my eyes ache from squinting into the glare as I scan the rust slope for any trace of 308 Naco Road, the house in Dubacher Canyon where my great-grandparents raised four children. My mom and her three siblings found cement steps years after the house was gone. I’m searching for something to prove they were here, and that what they built still counts.

At the Copper Queen Mine Tour, manager Doug Graeme opened a Sanborn fire map on his desktop computer and tapped an outline of the home. “Wraparound porch,” he said, and suddenly I could see it: the kids spilling out in the morning, Jovan with his feet up at night. Then Graeme walked me outside and pointed down the road. “Right about where that truck is turning. If you’re lucky, you’ll spot a corner of the foundation.”

I am not lucky. Later, I scramble up a hill to peer over its edge. My oldest son, visiting for two days, flies his drone to search from the sky. I watch the small screen in his hands, waiting for something solid to appear. Boulders, then asphalt, car roofs, a white line dividing lanes. But of the home, nothing. The highway moved for the Lavender Pit, an open wound banded green and blue with a black sump. The porch and rooms are under traffic now.

What do you do when the very earth has been rearranged, and there’s nothing left to touch? How do I hear them when the land holds no trace?

I came looking for history. Instead, it began asking something of me. Not remembrance—that was easy—but response.

On the recording, Anne brings that house back: an apricot tree in the front yard, peach trees and lettuce on the slopes. Inside, a bookcase and a round table, lace curtains that breathed when the door opened, a potbelly stove. Below the kitchen, a cellar. Phelps Dodge owned the land; they owned the house. After both parents died, Anne sold it for $400. 

“My father was priceless. He loved us very dearly, he worked very hard in the mines and he grew to love his work,” Anne said on the tape. “He became interested in the minerals,” though he never wanted his boys to work in the mines. “My mother was quiet. Though she wasn’t an aristocrat, she had the bearing of good manners always, and she taught us to be mannerly. We had to sit straight with our legs underneath our chairs, and our skirts over our knees.” 

Dubacher Canyon bled into Chihuahua Hill, and neighbors were mostly Mexican. Without a common language, Maše baked. When a baby was born, she arrived with a warm loaf—a ritual Anne cherished.

Both parents stressed the importance of the education they’d never had. “My parents wanted us to be somebody,” Anne said. She loved school; her oldest brother Maxim, not as much. He was known for being mischievous, once tugging a goat up into the Central School bell tower, the kind of prank that made people remember the Kulinovich family as originals, not threats. 

The parents sent their children to Covenant Presbyterian Church for Sunday school, though they themselves did not attend. “My dad worshipped nature,” Anne said. “He used to sit on the porch, dead-tired from having worked all day in the mine, and I know he got something out of watching that moon rise and set. . . . We were a very happy family. We were poor, but we did not know we were poor.”

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Anne applied to teach in Bisbee after three years of school in Tempe because her father was already ill, lungs scarred by years of inhaling dust. “You were allowed to teach on a three-year certificate,” she said, and she wanted to be close to home. Though her friends got jobs, she wasn’t offered one. So she went to see the school superintendent; her mother warned her not to show anger, no matter what she learned.

“Is there something wrong with my credentials?” Anne asked.

“Oh no, your credentials are fine,” the superintendent said. But the board president had asked, “What kind of a name is this? We don’t want a foreigner teaching our kids.” 

“When she said this, I was seething inside,” Anne recalled. “But I remembered what my mother said. She wanted me to be a lady, polite.”

“Why don’t you change your name?” the superintendent said.

“What would I change it to?” Anne asked, incredulous.

“How about Anne Collins?” she said.

“I looked her straight in the eyes,” Anne said. “‘I’m not going to change my name. I think I’m just going to try to go back to Tempe to get my degree. I’m going back and I’m going to come to Bisbee, and I’m going to teach in Bisbee and I’m going to put my name on the board, Miss Kulinovich, and the children are going to call me Miss Kulinovich.’”

In tears, she aimed herself for home. Years later, she wouldn’t repeat everything her father said in response to that exchange, only the part that mattered most: “That’s the best thing that could happen to you. You go back to Tempe and work on your degree.”

Names. In a town that had sorted her family with slurs and lists, keeping her name was its own small strike. It was her way of saying: We are here, and we are not done yet.

In Bisbee records, Maše appears as Mary, Martha, or “Mashe,” when a rare clerk tried to keep the sound while losing the little smile of the caron over her š. It evolved one more time for me. Each version keeps a little of her and lets a little go.

Jovan and Maše’s oldest son—Maxim, the mischievous one—became my grandfather Mike. He left Bisbee for Phoenix soon after his marriage to my grandmother Frankie, and had four children of his own. He named his firstborn after his father, with his adopted American name: John V. Kulinovich. He never mentioned the deportation.

Names. In a town that had sorted her family with slurs and lists, keeping her name was its own small strike.

His younger brother Peter changed his last name to Klyne. In family lore, he worked for the FBI; there’s a letter from J. Edgar Hoover commending him on a special job he’d done at the border. I never met him at family gatherings; he lived on for me in a single 1946 newspaper clipping, which showed him as a homicide inspector for the Orange County, California, Sheriff’s Office, bent over a piece of clothing belonging to a missing 6-year-old girl. He erased the name Anne insisted on keeping. What that meant to him, I’ll never know.

Anne married Lee Medigovich, a fellow Slav and professional gambler who lived in Phoenix. But when she began working in Bisbee, women teachers were required to be single or widowed—a rule that stayed in effect through much of Arizona until World War II. She kept her marriage secret. 

Despite the bias that prompted a school superintendent to suggest she change her name, Anne loved Bisbee. She became the town’s legendary high school English teacher. “Hell’s bells, people,” was her cry of frustration when she didn’t think her class was paying sufficient attention or learning quickly enough. On the chalkboard, she wrote her name as she’d promised: Miss Kulinovich.

---

Bisbee preserves history and erases it at the same time. Just as Jovan and Maše’s house vanished, so did discussions of the deportation—almost at once. It wasn’t taught in classrooms or shared at dinner tables. Both sides kept quiet: the men who planned and executed it, and those who were targeted. The story slipped under the floorboards. The company kept meticulous records of every ton of ore, every drill bit, every time card. But a man’s terror, his wife’s waiting—there is no ledger. 

“The topic was fully taboo until the mines shut down in 1974,” said local historian Mike Anderson. “When you live in what is basically a company town, you march to their orders.” 

Darleen “Punky” Martin didn’t learn that her maternal grandfather, Vuksov Lazovich—another Montenegrin—was deported until 99 years later, when filmmakers arrived to make Bisbee ’17. “Mike Anderson asked what I knew. I didn’t know anything,” she said. “So I asked my Uncle Mike, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, but we never talked about it.’” 

Both sides kept quiet: the men who planned and executed it, and those who were targeted. The story slipped under the floorboards.

Copper Queen manager Doug Graeme first learned of the deportation from a gun sale: Weapons used that morning were discovered in a warehouse and offered to the marketplace. His father bought a Colt .45. “First gun I ever shot,” said Doug, a fifth-generation Bisbee resident.

“First and foremost, the deportation was a clear violation of human rights,” says his younger sister, Annie Graeme Larkin, executive director of the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum. “If something like that were to take place today . . . well, actually.” She broke off with a quick, awkward laugh. Then, in a quieter voice, she added: “I think the silence after the deportation exemplified the shame felt by those who wore white armbands. Shame was the primary reason.”

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As the sun slid down the sky one afternoon, my son Cheney and I stepped away from Jovan and Maše’s grave at Evergreen Cemetery and found we were locked in. We’d chased our family through the rows of history and headstones until the light thinned to copper. Sunset is an indefinite time. When we headed out, we found only a chain and silence.

We called the police. The sky darkened while we waited. Almost an hour later, an Evergreen employee arrived with keys and a knowing smile that said this wasn’t the first time the living had needed rescuing from the grounds of the dead. We drove out, sheepish, grateful, the dust of the past coating our shoes.

Evergreen sprawls like old Bisbee, improvised. Maps appear online or hang on boards—letters on one, numbers on another—but they never quite match the ground. I returned half a dozen times, with cousins Beca and Karla, with Cheney, searching row after row through desert grass that surrounds and sometimes swallows the graves. Red-winged grasshoppers as long as a finger snapped up in front of us like sparks. 

When Beca and I finally found Jovan and Maše’s shared headstone, its size startled us. We’d expected something more modest. The inheritance left for their children, Anne recalled, was a tin can found in the cellar: a $20 gold piece, a $10, and a $5. Olga, the youngest, got the largest; the others split the rest. “There was absolutely nothing to fight about,” Anne said, laughing. “We had nothing, but we had everything.”

The headstone made sense once we deciphered the three letters beneath Jovan’s name—F, L, and T for Friendship, Love, and Truth. He belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF). Maše was part of the women’s auxiliary known as the Rebekahs. Fraternal lodges like IOOF often handled burial costs for miners who had no insurance.

Beca and I knelt beside the headstone. We took some selfies for our other cousins. Silently, we added rocks in a pile of remembrance. A century after Jovan walked the Divide, the distance between us and our great-grandparents thinned.

On the next visit, Karla and I located the burial site for Vladimir Kulinovich, my grandfather’s baby brother, dead at two months in 1913. These were the days when disease moved faster than doctors; we counted scores of infants as we paced those rows, searching. We found Vladimir by finally realizing Jovan and Maše would likely choose a burial site close to their baby son. Later in the archives, I held Vladimir’s funeral notice and a bill for $26.50 for the coffin, the outer box, and a carriage to carry him to the cemetery. The funeral, the notice said, was held at home. Locating the notice was complicated by the fact that Bledso, the certifying physician, misspelled both the baby’s first and last names.

Back in our rented house, I found myself thinking about Maše after that loss. Anne left me a studio portrait, likely taken soon after. Jovan sits centered in a dark suit. Three-year-old Anne is in a frilled dress on his lap. Maše stands just behind, one hand steady on his shoulder—more pact than embrace—her other arm draped across Pete, the second-born. My grandfather Maxim tilts in from the left, unsmiling, already giving off that let’s-be-done impatience that fit him. Olga would arrive in 1915; in this frame, she is still only a possibility.

Once they left Mojdež, a village above Herceg Novi in Montenegro, Jovan and Maše never saw their parents or siblings again. But many years later, Anne described going with her husband, Lee, to meet those families from whom her parents had come. 

“We had to climb to get to my mother’s home,” she said. “Here were these blond people, tall, slender, nice-looking, dignified like my mom, good manners. They had a table spread with a white tablecloth and napkins. . . . I never slept in such a clean, neat bed in my life.” 

The next day, they descended to her father’s house, where the kin were darker, shorter, full of loud laughter and a love for homemade whiskey and wine. “They were cheerful, much less formal,” she said. “Here for the first time in my life, I knew who I was. . . . a combination of the whole thing.” Up until then, she said, she’d felt like “a pendulum swinging from this American culture into this Slavic culture and back again.”

---

Underground work is what finally killed Jovan, though not in the way many others died. Hard-rock mining was among the deadliest trades in the early 1900s. Doug’s twin brother, Richard Graeme—a former miner himself—documented many of these deaths in the book 7 Bells: Mine Safety & Accidents at Bisbee, Arizona.

“They always told us that Bisbee was the safest mine in the world, and it did become safer and safer,” said Richard, “but the newspaper in 1912—the company-owned newspaper—showed a miner killed every three weeks.” 

In the 98 years of mining at Bisbee, over 350 miners were killed, Richard said, and that count is soft. “If you died on a big news day, you might not make the newspaper. If it took you two weeks to die of mining injuries, you might not make the count,” he said. “We’ll never know the real number.”

In this way, Jovan was lucky. I found a listing for only a single accident, on June 2, 1928. The medical ledger offers four blunt words: “barring down—rock fell.” Then the verdict: “comp. frac. bridge of nose.” Barring down meant using a six-foot scaling bar to test the roof after a blast. In the lamp’s small halo, one seam let go and peeled away, turning the world white with dust. The entry leaves the rest to imagination: the blood, the packing and setting, the ache beneath the bandage, the way a nose heals a little crooked, and then, when the swelling ebbed, the cage clattering down again to the same dark work.

Reading it, I felt a delayed grief take hold, an intimacy arriving out of order, as if I were learning how much Jovan endured only after it was far too late to matter to him.

Over time, the drills salted his every breath with silica dust, leaving him sick for several years before his 1935 death. Eventually, he was likely constantly coughing and couldn’t cross a room without gasping for air. The death certificate lists pulmonary tuberculosis, with silicosis as the underlying cause. Maše died six years later.

Decades after that, when hoists fell silent in 1975, Bisbee’s underground ran for more than 2,000 miles on roughly 43 levels—a city folded beneath a town of just five square miles.

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At the museum, I found a note from Charles Henry Bethea, a music teacher and administrator. He’d heard I was researching the deportation and my family, and wanted to talk about my great-aunt Anne.

We met a few days later in a room next to the archives. Aunt Anne, he said, “transformed my life. I cannot say enough about how influential she was.”

Many students feared her. “Man, she was tough. . . . She would poke you on the forehead and say, ‘Use that brain! It’s what you’ve got,’” he said, tapping his own head forcefully to show me. “She must have taken a lunch break, but all I remember is her working all the time. She taught me how to write, but it was more than that. It was a whole approach to discipline and focus and dedication to what you do.” 

He told me exactly where to go in the cemetery to find Anne’s headstone. “Anne Medigovich,” it reads. “Dedicated Teacher.”

Bethea was grateful Jovan escaped over the Divide. “It surely wasn’t easy for your great-grandfather,” he said. “You have to assume when he went back to work, he was under the eye of suspicion for the rest of his life. You can imagine they never quite trusted him.” He paused. “But my life would have been very different if he’d been deported. The family would have had to leave. I never would have had Anne Medigovich.” 

He drew a deep breath. “I’m 77 years old,” he said, “and I still miss her.”

---

We talked for two hours. At last, I asked Bethea the question that had been pressing against my ribs: What do those of us so recently permitted here owe to our predecessors, to each other? What would my great-grandparents want me to do now? I asked it more than once, as if repetition might coax an answer. 

“That’s a tough question,” he said. “What are we leaving our kids? I worry about that more than anything else. We are up against big forces.” He hopes that someone with political or monetary power will come to their senses. 

Others answer differently. My cousin Karla says it’s our responsibility to listen carefully and recognize the ways we are alike. Annie of the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum said until we can celebrate our differences, the winds of the deportation will be our future as well as our past. To Doug Graeme, the parallels with the past seemed clear. “Both then and now, a group of people were demonized,” he said. “We need to ask ourselves again, is that demonization right or wrong? We need to take a deep breath. We need independent thinkers.” 

What do those of us so recently permitted here owe to our predecessors, to each other? What would my great-grandparents want me to do now?

Jovan traveled to Tombstone to become a naturalized citizen in 1913, a year after Arizona became a state. At his urging, Maše made the same trip a year later. He wanted to belong on paper and in practice, to put his name in the book and his hand on the ballot. “My dad always voted,” Anne said. “That’s a privilege they never had.” 

She recalled walking to the polls with her father one Election Day. He asked how she was going to vote. She tucked her arm into his and laughed, surprised he even needed to ask. When she stepped up to the ballot box, the deportation was there again: a 7-year-old’s fear of the guns outside and a father gone over the Divide. “Those were difficult times,” she said. “They left an impression on us. And I’ve always been for the working man.”

The second time Cheney and I returned to the cemetery, we brought a small cargo in the car’s trunk: orange and red stones gathered from the places my great-grandparents walked—inside the Copper Queen Mine, along Dubacher Canyon’s slope, over the Divide. We set them at the base of the headstone. I took a photo with my phone, my shadow draped across the grave. 

What does it mean to keep faith with the dead? To hold fast to the belonging they carved out, or to risk it and stand for others in ways no one stood for them?

There is, of course, no single answer—only the one I can live with. I understand how silence after the 1917 deportation kept people alive. It was a choice made in love, in fear, in devotion to children who needed their parents to come home.

I choose differently. I pay attention to my own street, to neighbors whose safety again hinges on a label, to the small signs that precede a knock at the door. I blow whistles. I take cellphone photos. I bear witness when violence erupts where we thought we were safe. 

It’s what I owe.

We don’t know who will visit the Kulinovich gravesite next. When I can, I will return with my cousins. The little cairn will wait. For now, these stones declare that their story is still here. This is how it carries on.

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Masha Hamilton is the author of five acclaimed novels, including 31 Hours and The Camel Bookmobile, and the founder of two global literary initiatives, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and the Camel Book Drive. She began her career reporting from the Middle East and Russia, where she spent a decade covering conflict, politics, and culture.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin