Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  At noon they paused to eat lunch—rice, dried fish, pickled radish—from their bentō boxes and later sang Japanese songs as they worked to keep their spirits up. By the end of a long, backbreaking day they were all aching and weary, but no one complained. Tonight all anyone wanted was a hearty dinner, a hot bath, and a good night’s sleep—knowing full well they would wake the next morning before dawn and start all over again.

  As Nishi began to serve supper to Taizo and Jiro first, Taizo saw the hunger in his family’s eyes and suggested, “Inasmuch as we have all worked equally hard today, perhaps from now on everyone should be served at the same time.” Jiro made no objection, and another tradition toppled that day.

  Late that night—after Ruth had fallen asleep and Taizo and Etsuko lay uncomfortably in bed, struggling to fall asleep on a mattress much softer than their familiar futon—Taizo said, quietly, into the darkness: “I am sorry, Okāsan. I should have listened to you. You were right about him.”

  After a moment she replied, “What does the proverb say? ‘Let the things of long ago drift away on the water.’”

  She reached out, took his hand in hers, and they lay like that until exhaustion claimed them.

  * * *

  On Sunday, after Taizo and Jiro had returned from Sacramento—where they sold the truck for enough money to hire itinerant laborers to help pick the remainder of the crop—the family was just sitting down to dinner when there was a knock on the front door. Jiro opened it. Standing on his doorstep was the local sheriff, a white man in his fifties with a rugged, tanned face and a sturdy build. He was wearing work denims and boots and chewing something that might have been tobacco.

  “Evening, Watanabe-san,” he said, his emphasis making it sound less like an honorific than a pejorative. He peered inside. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt your supper.”

  Even from where he sat, Taizo could see that Jiro was startled.

  “Perfectly all right. What can I do for you, Sheriff Dreesen?”

  “I understand you got some family who’ve moved in with you.”

  “Yes. My brother and his family have come from Hawai'i to help me with the farm.”

  “I’d like to meet your brother. And see his passport. If you don’t mind.”

  The tone in his voice indicated this was not merely a request.

  Jiro turned and said, “Taizo—”

  “Yes, I heard. I shall get it.” Taizo went upstairs, retrieved his Japanese passport from his luggage, and came back to find his brother and Dreesen still standing on opposite sides of the doorway.

  “I don’t much like takin’ off my shoes,” Dreesen said. “Mind if we talk outside?”

  Taizo and Jiro put on their shoes, closing the door behind them. Jiro said, “Taizo, this is Joseph Dreesen. He is a local farmer and also serves as sheriff for the town of Florin. Mr. Dreesen, my brother Taizo.”

  Dreesen just nodded and chewed. Taizo gave him his passport.

  “It’s my understanding of immigration law,” Dreesen said, opening the passport, “that Japanese nationals in Hawai'i are prohibited from emigrating to California, or anywhere else in the mainland United States.”

  “That is true,” Jiro said. “But exceptions are made for close family and for those coming to work on established farms in which they have a financial interest, as my brother does.”

  Dreesen flipped through the passport with evident disdain, then laughed shortly.

  “You wily Japs always have all the angles figured, don’t you?” he said, dropping any pretense of civility.

  He handed the document back to Taizo. “Let’s take a walk.”

  He started out into the fields; all Jiro and Taizo could do was follow. “Looks like you got a good crop of Tokays this year,” Dreesen noted.

  “Thank you.”

  “Twenty-five years ago, white men owned all this land,” Dreesen said, squinting into the distance. “Like they owned all the shops in Florin. You Japs couldn’t be satisfied sharecropping or leasing our land, you had to go buy it all out from under us.”

  Dreesen turned and spat tobacco juice onto a strawberry plant.

  Jiro’s face hardened. “We bought low-quality land that white men did not want and with hard work turned it into productive farmland.”

  “You put native-born Californians out of work, then set about breedin’ like rats till you outnumbered real Americans.”

  Taizo could only listen in disbelief.

  “There are still many white farmers here in Florin,” Jiro pointed out, “and most of them have no problem with us. They only go to your Anti-Japanese League meetings because you intimidate them into coming. They fear the league will do damage to their ranches and farms.”

  Anti-Japanese League? Taizo tried not to show his alarm.

  “You got a smart mouth, Watanabe,” Dreesen snapped. “Just like those fifty-eight Jap bastards who got rode out of Turlock on a rail.”

  “Is that why you are here, Sheriff?” Jiro asked. “To ‘ride’ us out of town? Because you will not find us so easily ridden.”

  Dreesen spat out more tobacco juice and smiled. “Actually, I came here to help you, Watanabe-san.”

  Jiro laughed. “We do not need your help.”

  “Mr. Ochida says otherwise. Good man. I lease forty acres to his son—they make money, I make money, I keep the land. The way things used to be. Anyways, Mr. Ochida says you’re in debt to the tune of five thousand dollars.”

  Jiro said nothing. Dreesen took a step closer. “I’m willing to buy your whole spread, including the house, for six thousand dollars. Hell, that’ll give you enough of a grubstake to go back to Japan if you want.”

  “I do not wish to return to Japan. Why are you making this offer?”

  “So’s I can get another hundred acres outta the hands of Japs like you and back into the hands of white Christian men, where it belongs.”

  Barely concealing his contempt, Jiro said, “I am not interested.”

  “Then you’re a goddamn fool. You Japs are damn good farmers, I give you that—but even the best of you couldn’t get out from under that kind of debt. And you ain’t the best Jap farmer ’round here by a long shot. Sixty-five hundred, top dollar.”

  “How do you put it? ‘No deal.’”

  Dreesen looked at him stonily for a moment, then just shrugged.

  “No skin off my nose if the bank forecloses on this place,” he said. “Least then it’ll be goin’ back to the white man. But if you change your mind, I’d prefer to be that white man.” He turned to Taizo, nodded, and said with fine-tuned sarcasm, “Welcome to California, Taizo-san.”

  As Dreesen walked away, Taizo saw that Jiro’s hands were trembling with rage and—fear?

  “‘Anti-Japanese League’?” Taizo said.

  “Yes. They meet in Redmen’s Hall. But they are hardly the only ones who hate us. There is the Oriental Exclusion League, the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, the Anti-Asiatic League…”

  “Have they ever done what you said? Damage someone’s property?”

  “Not here, not yet. But in Turlock a mob of several hundred white men—with the help of the local police—did round up fifty-eight nihonjin workers, forced them onto a train, and told them never to return.”

  “They hate us because we buy farms? And make a success of it?”

  “Yes. And because they hate and fear the country we come from. They lust for a war between Japan and America. So Dreesen tells Collier’s Weekly and the Sacramento Bee that we have ‘taken over’ Florin and Walnut Grove and we will take over all the farmland in all of California unless we are stopped. And these articles keep stoked the fires of war.”

  Taizo felt as frightened as he did incredulous.

  “I encountered little prejudice against Japanese in Hawai'i,” he said. “We were a part of the community.”

  “You are no longer in Hawai'i, Taizo. For which I must apologize again.” He started back to the house. “No need to tell the family about th
is.”

  Taizo nodded dully. He felt unmoored, and afraid. He had dragged his family across an ocean to a failing farm in a land of race hatreds. He only prayed that he could keep his children protected from men such as Dreesen and from the bigotry and malice that made their cold hearts beat.

  * * *

  In September Horace enrolled at Elk Grove Union High School—Elk Grove being the next nearest town to Florin. Ruth, Stanley, and Ralph were to attend Florin Grammar School. On the first day of class the three of them—guided by several neighbor children, white and Japanese—traipsed through vineyards to Pritchett and McNie Roads, cutting behind Redmen’s Hall on Florin Road, then crossed the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. They passed the Florin Basket Factory, Morita’s Barber Shop, and Nakayama’s Shoe Repair before arriving at the schoolhouse on McComber Road. It was a U-shaped, green stucco building with a tar-paper roof, and inside the corridors were filled with students both Caucasian and Japanese. Ruth, excited and eager to make new friends, made her way to the second-grade classroom only to be told by a teacher to report to the first-grade homeroom. “I’ve already been to first grade,” Ruth objected, but the teacher was adamant. She marched her into the first-grade room, where Ruth reluctantly took an empty desk next to a friendly Nisei girl, who said, “Hi, you new?”

  Ruth nodded. “Just moved here.”

  “From where?”

  “Hawai'i.”

  “Wow, I never met anyone from Hawai'i before! I’m Chieko Yamoto, my friends call me Cricket.”

  “Ruth Watanabe.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seven.”

  “Me too. I should be in second grade, but at the end of last year the principal demoted every Japanese student up to fifth grade, on account of our English wasn’t good enough and we needed a year to make up.”

  “That’s what they did to me,” Ruth said, “even though I took first grade already in Honolulu!”

  “Your English sounds good to me.”

  “So does yours.”

  A white girl in front of them turned in her seat and introduced herself to Ruth as Phyllis. “Yeah—goofy, isn’t it?” she said, then to Ruth: “You’re from Hawai'i? Can you do the hula?”

  “No.”

  “You ever been to Waikīkī Beach?”

  “Oh sure. Lots of times.”

  “Yeah? What’s it—”

  Just then the teacher entered and quieted the room: “Settle down now, class. I’m Mrs. Jenkins. I teach first grade.”

  “We know,” Cricket called out. “We were here last year!”

  The students laughed. Mrs. Jenkins smiled a nervous, ill-at-ease little smile. “Yes. Well. Before I take the roll, I need you to listen carefully.” Looking as if she would rather not be doing this, she said: “Will all the non-Japanese students please stand up, take your schoolbooks, and line up at the door.”

  There were puzzled murmurs from everyone in the room.

  “Class, please do as I tell you,” Mrs. Jenkins said, more emphatically.

  The white girl, Phyllis, turned to Ruth and Cricket, shrugged, and joined in as the white students obediently got up and formed a line at the door. Another teacher entered the classroom and asked, “Are they ready?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Jenkins replied, voice quavering a bit.

  “Good. Students, follow me.”

  As the teacher led them out of the room, Cricket leaned over to Ruth and whispered, “That’s Miss Thomas. She’s nasty. If she catches you speaking Japanese in class, she’ll make you stay after school.”

  This was all baffling. Mrs. Jenkins tried to distract the Nisei students by asking them to open their English primers. This worked until they heard the sounds of students gathering on the lawn—at which point all of the remaining pupils rushed to the windows to look out, over Mrs. Jenkins’ objections.

  Ruth saw dozens of white children standing in a line that wrapped around the building, while teachers passed out little American flags on sticks to each one. Then, after roll had been taken, the teachers proceeded to march them away from the school, westward down Florin Road.

  “Where are they taking them?” Ruth asked.

  “They’ll be fine, class, they’ll be going to school somewhere else, that’s all. Now, let’s all get back to our—”

  “Why?” Ruth asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are they going to another school and we’re not?”

  Her patience exhausted, Mrs. Jenkins declared, “Back to your seats, everyone, this minute!”

  Ruth took one last look at her new friend Phyllis, disappearing down Florin Road, and wondered if she would ever see her again. She hadn’t even gotten to tell her what Waikīkī Beach was like.

  Chapter 5

  1923–1930

  Later, the parents of the Japanese students learned that their white classmates had been led across the railroad tracks to the Florin Community Hall, where they would attend classes for a few weeks until a new red-brick, two-story school building could be completed for them. They were shocked and anguished at this latest indignity. Issei—Japanese nationals—were already prohibited by law from ever becoming American citizens; the Alien Land Laws forbade them from owning land in their own names; and now their children were being treated as inferiors, undesirables, unworthy of studying alongside their white neighbors. The only consolation was that the Japanese and hajukin—white—children were, in fact, neighbors. Although segregated during the school day, the Nisei continued to play as they always had with their white friends—fielding softball teams on vacant land or sharing chocolate cones at Kato’s Ice Cream Parlor. If the school board’s goal had been to separate the races socially, it failed miserably.

  Despite all this, Etsuko liked living in Florin. It was a close-knit, rural community not unlike the one she and Taizo had grown up in. Their closest neighbors—the Nobusos, the Kishabas, the Nakamuras, and the Isas—were hardworking, generous people. So were the people she and Taizo met at the Florin Buddhist Church. During one of the first services they attended, Reverend Tsuda quoted Buddha’s words: “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” This was wise advice, and Taizo and Etsuko sought to heed it by casting aside their setsubō—longing—for their old life and embracing this, the only life they had.

  Surely the finest exemplar of this was their own daughter. Ruth was flourishing like a transplanted flower in the fertile soil of Florin, whether picking handfuls of juicy wild blackberries or patiently watching an orange-and-black monarch butterfly emerge from its chrysalis. Cricket, her ebullient new friend, eagerly showed her all the best and muddiest places to play. But Ruth never tired of the playground of their farm, whether she was feeding and watering the horses, Bucky and Blackie, milking the cow, or collecting eggs from the henhouse as she greeted each chicken personally: “Konnichiwa, Isabel. What do you have for us today? Oooh, what a big egg! Good girl!”

  As her years in Florin piled up like eggs in a basket, they crowded out most of her memories of Hawai'i, including the four years she had spent at Kapi'olani Home. She still went to bed hugging her stuffed cow, and though it remained a source of comfort, she no longer remembered who gave it to her.

  But there was one reminder of those days and Ruth thought of it each time she looked in a mirror or heard the voices around her at dinnertime: she neither looked nor sounded quite like the rest of her family. Yes, her eyes were the same, but her skin was slightly darker, her nose a bit wider, her whole face a little broader than anyone else’s. That word, hapa, still stung, like a wasp in the fields. It wasn’t until her tenth birthday—her actual birthday, February 8—when she could articulate her feelings that she asked Etsuko, “Okāsan? Why did my—Hawaiian mother give me up?” In a small voice: “Didn’t she love me?”

  “Oh, butterfly,” Etsuko said, “I am sure she did. But she had no choice.”

  “Why not?”

  “You are not old enough to underst
and, little one. But I am certain that she would have kept you if she had been able. Do not judge her for that.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. But I know what is in a mother’s heart, and I am sure she loved you.” She took Ruth’s hands in hers and squeezed them. “And wherever she is, I am sure she would be happy to know that you have a mother and a father and brothers who love you more than you can know.”

  Ruth smiled, mollified by her mother’s assurances—for now.

  * * *

  For nearly seven years Taizo had done his best to trim the farm’s expenses while increasing its yield. He succeeded in making the mortgage payments in full and on time, and slowly their bank ledger ceased bleeding money. Taizo still felt shame and anger for allowing himself to be duped into giving up everything they had in Hawai'i for this cruel lie. But at least their credit was now good and they were taking in more money than they were losing, even in the midst of the financial recession that had begun that year.

  All of that progress came to an end on October 29, 1929.

  The stock market crash was an earthquake felt first in New York City, but it wasn’t long before its temblors radiated across the continent and shook the foundations of everything Taizo had been building. Public uncertainty about the economy reduced consumption, and food prices plummeted into a financial chasm.

  Bank foundations were rattled too, as depositors demanded to withdraw their money, only to be faced with long lines and empty hands. Then, unthinkably, banks across the nation began to collapse into insolvency—financial sinkholes swallowing up the life savings of tens of thousands of working-class people. The banks that were still standing, desperate for cash, called in all their loans.

  Sumitomo Bank in Sacramento called in the balance of Jiro’s loan—$4,500—due immediately, or face foreclosure.

  Panicked, Taizo and Jiro first sought an advance on their strawberry harvest from Mr. Nojiri, who distributed their berries through Nojiri and Company. He was a kind, generous man, always willing to help out a farmer when he could, but this went beyond his financial auspices.