We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

  “Hey, why does she get to leave?” Paul says.

  “Mary!” Mom’s voice follows me outside.

  But I don’t answer, and I don’t stop.

  * * *

  When I get back, it’s after dinner, and Dad’s sitting at the table, smoking a pipe. While I take off my shoes at the door, Paul hops around me, asking where I’ve been.

  “Nowhere,” I say.

  I’m halfway back to my cot when Dad snaps, “Clean that up.”

  Turning, I see a couple flecks of mud on the grimy floorboards. With a sullen look, I grab a rag from where Mom’s folded them in the corner. Stan does too, and he kneels beside me. Like that’ll make me forgive him for being a No-No and making us come here.

  “Easy,” Stan says after a moment. “You’re gonna wear a hole right through the boards. What’re you gonna do when Dad makes you replace the whole floor?”

  I just scrub harder.

  “Aiko and Tommy came by,” he adds. “Ike says there’s a softball team.”

  “Good for her,” I grunt.

  We finish cleaning the floor in silence, under Dad’s baleful stare.

  * * *

  I was right. Tule Lake is bigger than Topaz. It’s got seventy-four blocks to Topaz’s thirty-six, divided into eight wards. The first seven wards are in regular formation, like the blocks at Topaz, but the eighth ward sticks out on its own at the far southeast end of camp. It’s still under construction, because more No-Nos are arriving every day, but the Tuleans are already calling it “Alaska” because it’s so isolated.

  Tule Lake already has double the population of Topaz, and the numbers are still climbing. People say they’re expecting eighteen thousand by the time the segregation is complete. Eighteen thousand to Topaz’s eight. That’s a lot of “troublemakers” in one place, if you ask me. What genius came up with that one?

  The WRA has canceled school while the loyal Tuleans move out and the No-Nos move in, but Dad enrolls me in one of the ad hoc schools the Japanese cultural organizations have set up in the rec centers. “It’ll be good for you,” he says. “Maybe you’ll learn some manners.”

  Every day, we speak Japanese, learn Japanese customs, do Japanese arts and crafts. It’s supposed to prepare us to return to Japan, I guess, and some of the other girls love it, but I spend most of my time reading books under the table and fantasizing about putting a pair of hashi through my eyes.

  I don’t want to go back to Japan. I didn’t even want to come to Tule Lake in the first place, only I was a few months too young to have any choice in the matter.

  One day, I’m reading a novel I borrowed from the camp’s English library and pretending to practice my kanji when the door at the back of the room opens and a set of footsteps echoes loudly down the center aisle. Clop-clop-clop. They come to a stop near my desk, and out of the corner of my eye, I spy worn leather work boots and laces that have been taped at the ends to prevent them from fraying.

  Annoyed, I look up.

  The interruption is a boy my age. He has wavy hair and a red-and-black plaid shirt, so neatly tucked, it’s clear he’s trying too hard.

  As if he can sense me judging him, he glances down.

  I glare at him and shove my book farther under the table.

  “Yes, Mr. Tani?” the teacher asks.

  But before he can answer, someone starts up. “Does anyone else smell smoke?”

  The rest of us straighten, sniffing. The kids sitting by the dingy windows peer outside.

  “There’s a fire by the gym!” one shouts.

  We charge out of the classroom, ignoring the teacher’s plea for us to retain order. A bunch of boys have built a bonfire between the newly constructed gymnasium and the Induction Center, where new No-Nos are processed every day. Clutching their luggage, the arrivals blink and stare dumbly at the blaze while the administrative staff try to hurry them inside.

  “Banzai!”

  Laughing, the boys heave a bench onto the flaming pile.

  Crash!

  The crowd gasps and steps back. Sparks fly upward like butterflies.

  I laugh too. Some people glare at me, but I don’t care. “Banzai” is a Japanese battle cry. Stan and his friends used to say it while they were jumping out of trees or sliding down the sand dunes in old fruit crates. I don’t know if these guys are trying to prove something or if they’re just being dumb kids, but sure, whatever. Let’s burn this place down.

  “What’s so funny?” someone asks.

  It’s the boy with the loud boots. I glower at him, hoping he’ll take the hint and leave me alone.

  “Mary!” From my left, Aiko appears among the other students, elbowing them aside the same way she’d wrestle to the front of a crowd at the Topaz co-op on ice cream day. Her cheeks are flushed with excitement.

  I turn my back on Boots Boy. “Hey,” I say to her. Aiko’s just about the only person I can stand in this whole damn camp, maybe in this whole damn state. I mean, at least she didn’t choose to be here either.

  “Should we do something?” she asks.

  Maybe if we’d still been in Topaz. Maybe if we had the rest of the group to back us up. But we’re in Tule Lake now, and Stan and Tommy are both out of school. It’s just Aiko and me.

  So I shrug. “Why bother?”

  She blinks, and I try to ignore the hurt and disappointment in her face. After a second, she says, “What about the fire department?”

  Boots Boy answers from behind me: “The fire truck’s been having trouble.”

  I scowl at him. “No one asked you.”

  He blinks, surprised.

  “Jeez, Mary!” Aiko says. “You don’t have to be so rude.”

  I bite back a retort.

  “Banzai!”

  Crash!

  In the center of the yard, another bench lands in the bonfire.

  * * *

  Dad and I fight all the time now. It always starts out quiet: Dad hissing at me for stomping around the apartment, for not tucking in the corners of my sheets. Because God forbid any of our nosy neighbors hear that Katsumoto-san’s daughter doesn’t make her bed properly.

  But it doesn’t take long for things to escalate to Dad snapping at me for not helping around the barrack enough. I should be sweeping the floor. I should be doing the laundry. I should be giving my mother a break.

  “You made me go to Japanese school, remember?” I grumble. “What’s your excuse?”

  Dad’s face contorts into something ugly and mean. Here it comes.

  “I am the head of this family!” he roars. “You will listen to me when I—”

  What about Stan? I want to say. I don’t see you yelling at him.

  But I shut my mouth. Let Dad yell.

  I don’t know what Stan does—I don’t even know where he is right now—but he doesn’t have a job either, because the WRA cut back on jobs to save money, and Dad’s not always harping at him about refilling the kettle or mopping the floors or whatever.

  Since we’ve come to Tule Lake, no one’s been able to find work. Mom should be working in the mess hall, because the food they serve stinks, literally, and there’s hardly any rice because one of the cooks is stealing it for his sake still, but the old Tuleans have all the good jobs, and with the work shortage, there’s no way they’re giving them up to us.

  “—if you don’t change your attitude—” Dad’s still shouting. He slams his fist on the table. Something something. “—intolerable—” Something something. “—ungrateful—”

  I throw down the coal bucket. Grateful? There’s a leak in the ceiling, and we have to put a cup under it to collect the water when it rains. For this?

  He’s still yelling at me as I jam my arms into my coat and my feet into my shoes and storm out the door. Surreptitiously, our neighbors peer through their windows. They want to see Katsumoto-san’s ungrateful daughter, I guess. But I’m too mad to care, and soon I’m too far away for them to spy on me anymore.

  Outside, the camp is gray. Every
thing is gray here. The gunmetal gray of the tanks. The gray of the silt from the old shallow lakebed where the camp now stands. The gray of smoke from the coal stoves. Primitive street lamps buzz and flicker from their brackets on the sides of the barracks, illuminating gray streets and gray walls and nothing else.

  In San Francisco, you’d be able to see every street lit up like it was Christmas, crossing signals flashing red and yellow and green, windows glowing with life from within. There’d be the sounds of cable-car bells, the foghorns in the distance, people yelling and moaning and listening to Your Hit Parade.

  Here, there’s nothing. Because we’re nothing, I think.

  Bang. Somewhere nearby, there’s a sound like something dull striking something hard. Like a fist against a door, maybe.

  I look around, frowning.

  Bang. It’s regular, not like that beating we saw back at Topaz, punching and kicking and yelps of pain. Bang.

  Fisting my hands in my pockets, I follow the sound to the next block. There’s a girl tossing a baseball against the side of a rec center and catching it as it bounces back again.

  Bang.

  It’s Aiko.

  “Oh, hi, Mary,” she says. She sounds more tired than I’ve ever heard her. Tired and sad.

  Bang.

  “You’re going to piss off the neighbors.”

  “Yeah.” Bang. “Well, I gotta practice somehow.”

  The next time she throws the ball, I catch it. It stings my palm a little without a mitt, but she didn’t throw it that hard.

  “What d’you mean?” I ask, tossing it back to her.

  She smacks the ball into her mitt a couple times. “Dad won’t let me play on the Tule Lake team. He says it’s not Japanese.”

  I snort. “Bullshit.”

  “I know.” She lobs the ball at me, and we start a game of catch—Aiko to me to Aiko to me—the ball floating back and forth between us.

  After a while, she says, “I’m gonna be out of practice.” She stares at the ground, her voice wavering. “Yuki’s gonna be so mad at me.”

  “What?”

  “When we get back to San Francisco.”

  I turn the ball in my hands, tracing the red stitches. “You still think you’re going back to San Francisco?” I ask, throwing it back.

  She snatches it out of the air and shrugs.

  Her parents haven’t requested repatriation back to Japan, but we both know they don’t want to be Americans anymore. Not that they were ever really allowed to be.

  The ball comes at me high. I have to jump for it.

  I mean, good for the Haranos, I guess. For acknowledging the unfairness of it. For being fed up with everyone saying, God bless America! Land of the free! and then locking us up in a place like this, a prison that no one wants to admit is a prison, even the prisoners.

  But their kids are American—technically, anyway—which makes it worse. I don’t know about Tommy, but Aiko’s an all-American kid. She loves baseball, comic books, and Charleston Chews. What’s she going to do in Japan?

  “I’ll practice with you,” I say.

  She sniffs loudly. If I were closer, I bet I’d see tears on her face. But I don’t go to her. I just toss her the ball.

  * * *

  The next weekend, Aiko, Tommy, and Stan drag me to a basketball game, which I hate. Worse, they bring Boots Boy, too.

  They tell me his name is Kiyoshi, but whatever, I’m still going to think of him as Boots Boy. At the concession stand, he buys a bag of peanuts, carefully counting each coin the way I’ve seen Mom do at the co-op because, without any income, all we’ve got is our dwindling savings.

  Tommy and Aiko seem to like him, I guess, so that’s probably a point in his favor. He and Tommy talk about music as we climb to the top part of the stands. You can hear the wistfulness in Tommy’s voice when he talks about his old records, the ones he had to sell when we left San Francisco. He talks about musicians like they’re old friends he hasn’t seen in years: Bing, the Duke, ol’ Benny, Billie, the Count.

  Boots Boy says he wishes he could hear some of them live.

  “Come to San Francisco,” says Tommy. “I’ll take you to the Golden Gate. All the greats play there.”

  I cross my arms and slump into my seat as the referee blows the whistle and the ball goes soaring into the air. From here, you can’t see the fences, the barracks, the soldiers, the tanks. Inside the gym, it’s like everyone’s trying to pretend we’re kids at any other high school.

  But how can they forget that the government has packed so many of us in here, it’s overloading the plumbing? How can they forget the work accidents or the food shortages? How can they forget the administration isn’t giving the coal workers enough breaks? Or protective gear?

  I grimace as Aiko, Tommy, and Boots Boy cheer. I kind of hate them for being able to forget, for being stupid and happy, but I kind of envy them too. Sometimes I think it’d be easier to be stupid, because then at least I wouldn’t be miserable all the time.

  On Tommy’s other side, Stan just sits there, miserable as me.

  I finally found out where he’s been going. Since he and Tommy can’t find work, they’ve been hanging out in the camp’s English library. Tommy’s been teaching himself to read music. Stan’s reading law books and following cases like Fred Korematsu’s. Korematsu was arrested and convicted for defying the exclusion order last year, but he’s been appealing his case, and Stan’s been following every news article about it.

  That’s the thing about Stan. He knows what’s going on here, even if he won’t say it.

  It makes me want to take him by the collar and shake him until he admits this place is awful. This place is worse than Topaz. I don’t know what I would’ve said to the questionnaire if I’d been old enough to answer it, but I know that if I’d brought us here, if I’d done this to us, I wouldn’t be sitting there pretending everything was hunky-dory.

  Crack!

  From outside, something hits the window above us. The glass splits but doesn’t shatter.

  Someone screams. Aiko, Tommy, and Stan jump to their feet, but Boots Boy is rooted to the spot, his soft eyes wide, the bag of peanuts clenched tight in his hand.

  Crack!

  Another window, ten feet away, breaks.

  People are running for the exits. Some of the basketball players are stumbling around like they don’t know what to do with themselves if there’s not a ball to chase.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Stan reaches for my arm, but I jerk out of his reach. He looks hurt, but whatever.

  Boots Boy still hasn’t moved. He seems like he’s frozen in place.

  “Come on, Kiyoshi!” Aiko cries, tugging his arm.

  That seems to snap him out of the spell he was under. His face reddens—I’m not sure if he’s angry or embarrassed or what—and he nods at Aiko gratefully.

  We scramble down the bleachers, stepping on peanut shells and candy-bar wrappers. My shoe slips in someone’s spilled drink.

  Outside, a crowd is forming near the side of the building, where people are pushing and shouting at one another. As I run into the darkness with the others, I glance over my shoulder. The broken windows of the gymnasium are lit up from behind like giant, glowing eyes, always keeping watch on us.

  * * *

  Aiko and I normally walk back to the barracks together, but one day in mid-October, she has to stay behind for some reason, so I’m trudging alone through the light snow when a fire truck goes roaring past the next intersection, its sides painted a blazing red.

  Two seconds later, there’s a screech.

  A crash.

  People start yelling. All around me, they’re flinging open their doors and racing for the intersection.

  Lowering my head, I turn and stalk away in the opposite direction.

  I haven’t made it a block when someone shouts behind me, “Hey, Mary! Wait up!”

  Glancing over my shoulder, I see Boots Boy jogging toward me. He’s got on the same red-and-black p
laid shirt he was wearing the day of the bonfire.

  I keep walking, but he catches up to me anyway.

  “Did you hear the crash?” he asks.

  I shrug.

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  This guy can’t take a hint, can he? “How should I know?” I say.

  “It wasn’t like this in my old camp,” he continues as if I’m not being rude to him. I wonder if he’s dumb or just nice. “Gila River was the camp they showed to the public, you know. It wasn’t like—”

  A WRA warden races past us, and Boots Boy’s voice trails off as we watch the man run toward the site of the accident.

  In Topaz, after Mr. Uyeda was shot and the camp almost rioted, most of the guards were removed. But here, there are military police; wardens, most of whom are nihonjin; internal security officers, most of whom are white; and Immigration and Naturalization Service officers, too. They all wear different hats and different uniforms, but they’re all there to do the same thing: contain us.

  “Anyway,” Boots Boy says, “there weren’t any fences at Gila River, except for these little white picket ones in front of the barrack—”

  I was determined to ignore him until he went away, but that gets my attention. “You didn’t have fences?” I interrupt.

  He shrugs.

  “And you didn’t run away?”

  “Where to? They put us in the middle of the desert for a reason, and barbed wire would’ve made it look bad for the First Lady and the cameras that came with her. That’s what I told her, anyway . . .”

  I stop for a second. I mean, I knew Eleanor Roosevelt visited Gila River in April, but I didn’t think she’d really talked to any of the people who had to live there. Boots Boy is still walking, so I have to jog to catch up. Normally I’d be annoyed, but right now he’s too interesting to be annoyed at. “Wait,” I say. “You met Eleanor Roosevelt?”

  “Yeah. She was saying we had to be in camps because we hadn’t been integrated into the rest of American society like the Germans and the Italians, and I told her we hadn’t been integrated because we weren’t allowed to buy or move anywhere except into neighborhoods that were already Japanese, so whose fault was it that we couldn’t integrate?”