Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  “These are stables,” Taizo said in astonishment and dismay.

  “Yeah,” Ben allowed, “the first evacuees got most of the new housing. This is what’s left. But we’ve all got to pitch in for the war effort, right?”

  Stunned, the Watanabes walked down to the far end of “Barrack” 9. Some wag had painted on the exterior wall: SEABISCUIT SLEPT HERE.

  “Heh.” It was the best even Ralph could manage.

  Ben opened the door and led the way inside.

  As soon as Ruth entered, she choked at the smell of horse manure, which explained why all the neighbors had their doors open.

  The “apartment” was nearly dark, the sunlight barely sifting through two grimy windows on either side of the door. Ben reached up to switch on the single bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling.

  Illumination did not beautify the interior. The original horse stall had been divided into two rooms, each about ten feet by twenty feet. A pair of Dutch doors, gnawed over with teeth marks, marked the point at which the original equine tenant’s accommodations had ended; the front room, once intended for fodder, had been extended to create more space. The ceiling sloped down from a height of twelve feet in the rear to seven in the front, but the partitions between the one-room “apartments” didn’t extend all the way to the ceiling—so one could easily hear, from the other apartments in the barrack, the tinny blare of radios and the susurrus of people murmuring, talking, or just rustling back and forth.

  “Oh my,” Etsuko said softly, running her hand along a wall. It had received a slapdash whitewashing, creating a chalk-white frieze of spiderwebs, horse hairs, bits of hay, and insects, all shellacked to the wall in bas-relief. The floorboards were covered with linoleum of indeterminate color beneath a two-inch layer of dust and wood shavings—but there were places where the original manure-stained boards were exposed, and still pungent.

  Ruth felt the bile rising in her throat and struggled to keep it down.

  The only furnishings in either room were half a dozen Army cots, their steel frames and bedsprings spray-painted yellow, folded up against the wall. The only light fixtures were the bare bulbs, one to a room, dangling on their cords from the ceiling.

  “Where are the mattresses?” Jiro asked Ben.

  “Oh, just go to the mattress department—one of those big buildings we passed on the way here. When the block manager makes his rounds, he’ll get you some cleaning supplies to spruce up the place. And there’s plenty of scrap lumber around, enough to build tables, stools, whatever furniture you want.”

  The family stood there, silently aghast, until Frank finally thanked Ben for his help and the young man jauntily went on his way.

  Donnie wrinkled his nose and said in a small voice, “Mama, it smells bad in here.”

  Etsuko began to weep.

  Ruth wrapped her arms around her children and told them, “Don’t worry, we’ll clean this up and get rid of that nasty smell, I promise.”

  Taizo went to Etsuko and let her bury her face in his chest as she wept. “It will be all right, Okāsan,” he said with a gentle reassurance he did not truly feel. “We will gaman, and all will be right in the end.”

  Gaman was a word rooted in Buddhism that meant “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” Ruth had heard her father use it often after they moved to California. And now, after they had endured so much already, here they were, once more forced to gaman.

  There was a tap on the open door. Ruth turned to see an Issei woman standing on the threshold, holding two brooms and a dustpan in her hand. “Konnichiwa,” she greeted them. “Welcome to Tanforan. I thought you might wish to borrow these. We did not have any when we first moved in.”

  Etsuko quickly recovered herself and smiled. “Thank you, that is so kind of you. That is exactly what we need.”

  The neighbor introduced herself as Shizuko Kikuchi. She was tiny even for a Japanese woman, but radiated strength and composure. After Etsuko introduced herself and her family, Shizuko gazed into Etsuko’s eyes—did she notice the redness around them?—and quietly assured her, “You and your family will be fine. If you need anything else, do not hesitate to ask.”

  She bowed and left, but with this simple act of grace Shizuko seemed to bequeath a part of her strength and calm to the Watanabe clan. Etsuko began sweeping with a welcome purpose, as Nishi took the other broom in hand.

  The men went to the “mattress department,” which turned out to be a stable filled with bales of hay where they were given empty mattress tickings and told they could fill them with as much as straw as they needed. Someone would sew up the tickings for them once they were full.

  Taizo looked down at the empty ticking in his hand and the shame he had been trying to hide from his family cut like a tantō blade to his heart. But he had no choice but to provide for his family as best he could, and gaman.

  Peggy and Donnie needed to go the bathroom, so Ruth took them to the nearest latrine—a small, tar-papered building, men’s on one side, women’s on the other. Unwilling to let Donnie go into the men’s room alone, she took them both into the ladies’ room, which, to Ruth’s shock, was equipped with communal toilets lined up in two rows, back to back, with no partitions or curtains between them. Afterward she lifted the kids up to wash their hands in a long tin “sink”—like a feeding trough—that ran the length of a wall. Halfway through washing Ruth noticed a handmade sign, written in Japanese, that had been taped onto the mirror above the trough. Ruth’s Japanese was a bit rusty because her parents spoke more English these days, especially around Donnie and Peggy, but she had no trouble reading:

  PLEASE DO NOT EMPTY BEDPANS INTO THE SINK!

  Ruth blanched and quickly scooted the kids outside, where she said cheerily, “Let’s have some fun and go for a walk!”

  These were just the words to nudge Donnie out of his stupor: “I wanna see the racetrack again!” Ruth lifted Peggy and followed her son through the thicket of eucalyptus trees. The track was still crowded with pedestrians making way for the occasional Army supply truck. Inside the track’s oval, young men were playing baseball, which captivated Donnie; they watched the game a while, then wandered down to listen to the Tanforan Band practice “America the Beautiful.” Once again, everyone around them was smiling, as if they were taking in the county fair. Ruth wondered if they had been issued regulation smiles from the Army and hers had yet to be requisitioned. Or maybe, she admitted, they were just trying to make the best of a bad situation.

  Ruth and the kids returned to their barrack to find the door and windows open, the floor dust-free, and the linoleum revealed to be an odd reddish mahogany in color. Etsuko told her, “The house manager came by with Army blankets. Tomorrow he’ll bring us mops, soap, and buckets so we can wash the windows and give the walls and floor a good scrubbing.”

  “If there’s still horse poop on the floorboards under the linoleum,” Ruth said, “that might not help much.”

  “Then maybe it will help a little,” her mother replied stubbornly.

  Ruth laughed but was pleased by her mother’s spirit.

  The men returned, sheepishly delivering eight lumpy, straw-filled mattresses. “There are only six cots,” Frank said, “but we made two extra mattresses. Ralph and I can sleep on the floor and the kids can share a cot.”

  “Tomorrow we will build some chairs and table,” Taizo said. “We can make the necessary tools from scrap metal.”

  They further divided the two rooms with bed sheets hung from the rafters. Jiro insisted that Taizo, Etsuko, and the Haradas occupy the front room. “The children need fresh air. We will make do in back.”

  By this time they were all starving—the last food they’d eaten were the sandwiches Helen Russell had made for their train trip. Mess Hall 5 was closest to them; they arrived to find at least a hundred people standing in two lines. The Watanabes waited for the better part of an hour to get inside, where the line then inched and squiggled between steam counters and scor
es of internees eating at picnic tables. At the head of the serving counter, there were stacks of plates and bins of silverware—no chopsticks.

  It was Etsuko’s turn to feel shame. All these people holding out their plates for food—it reminded her of the breadlines during the Depression, vagabonds begging in soup kitchens. Now she was holding out a plate—homeless, like many on those breadlines—and she couldn’t help but feel as if she, too, were begging. Her shame and embarrassment was almost greater than her hunger; she nearly walked away, preferring to starve. But when she reached the first steam counter she fought back her pride and held up her plate, her hands trembling. A cook reached into the metal pan, took out a plain boiled potato with his fingers, and put it on her plate. The second man also used his fingers, picking up two Vienna sausages and dropping them next to the potato. The third used a ladle, at least, to scoop up a wad of yellowish-green spinach, and a girl at the end of the counter gave her two pieces of sliced bread. Etsuko looked at her plate in dismay: She had debased herself, and for what? Canned sausage and overcooked vegetables?

  “No rice?” Taizo asked the last of the cooks.

  The man shook his head. “Not today. Maybe later this week.”

  The family found a table and sat down to desultorily eat their supper. “What is this?” Donnie asked, poking a sausage with his fork.

  “It’s just a hot dog without a bun, silly!” Ruth improvised. This changed everything, and he attacked the sausages with gusto. The same could not be said for the rest of the family. Nor did the mess hall lend itself to relaxing dining: it echoed with the clatter of dishes, the clangor of pots and pans colliding in the kitchen, and the cacophony of hundreds of people conversing all at once.

  Frank went away for a few minutes to speak with one of the cooks, and when he returned he said, “The kitchen staff is overwhelmed preparing three meals a day for eight thousand people; they need all the help they can get. Tomorrow I’ll apply for a job; maybe I can even help improve the fare.”

  By the time they finished dinner it was dark out and a chill, cutting wind flung dirt into their faces. There was no outdoor lighting, so they stumbled blindly over tree roots, felt the sting of eucalyptus branches, and walked into a webwork of clotheslines strung between barracks. Finally they reached Barrack 9, stepped inside, and immediately breathed in the stench. The atmosphere was poisonous, but it was too cold to open the windows. So they turned on the single light in each apartment, Ruth got the children into pajamas, and the adults prepared for bed as well. Donnie sat on his prickly bed of straw and said what everybody was thinking:

  “Mama, I want to go home.”

  Ruth’s heart ached. She couldn’t find the words.

  “Please, Mama, let’s go home,” he said plaintively, and began to cry.

  Peggy echoed, “Home, Mama,” and also started to cry.

  Frank lifted her up and rocked her, saying “Shh, shh, it’s all right, baby. It’s all right…”

  Ruth took Donnie in her arms. “We—we can’t go home yet, honey. We have to stay here for a while. But remember the fun we had today? Watching the baseball game? And that big track—you can run all the way around it tomorrow, if you want! Will you do that? Show Mama how fast you can run?”

  “Okay,” Donnie said uncertainly, sniffing back tears.

  “Good boy.” She tucked him into bed, his sister next to him, covered by the same Army blanket. She kissed them both on their foreheads. “G’night.”

  Frank bent down and kissed them too. “We love you, babies.”

  “I’m not a baby,” Donnie said, pride trouncing sorrow.

  Taizo and Jiro turned off the lights. There was no heat in the stall, and they all shivered under thin blankets as the wind gusted through cracks in the thin walls. The combination of manure and the sickly-sweet smell of hay made them all want to gag. Almost as bad, there was no privacy, no quiet. Through that foot of open space between the ceiling and the top of the partitions, the Watanabes could hear their neighbors’ snores, the chattering of teeth in the cold, the colic of babies … but most unnervingly, they heard weeping. The weeping of grown men and women, cries of hopelessness and loss, separation and misery. And in that collective lament, Ruth heard one closer by, muted in its shame: the sound of her own father’s sobs, shocking in its newness, his familiar strength and solidity, like a once-sturdy oak, now riven with such grief and despair that it broke his daughter’s heart.

  * * *

  They finally fell asleep, only to discover during the night that they shared their quarters with other tenants: tiny horse fleas with a vicious bite, flies drawn to the manure under the floor, mice that could be heard scuttling from room to room in the dead of night. Ralph and Frank quickly came to regret their decision to sleep on the floor. By morning the family was covered with flea bites and grumpy from what felt like sleeping on cacti. Ruth took the kids into the ladies’ latrine to brush their teeth; others were doing the same as water streamed from the spigots down the length of the trough. One woman spat out a gob of tooth powder and Ruth watched in horror as a chalky tendril of saliva came floating downstream past her.

  Oh my God, she thought. Are we really expected to live like this?

  After breakfast Etsuko and Nishi began mopping the floors and scrubbing the walls with Ajax cleanser as the men went foraging for scraps of metal and lumber. Ruth wanted to help but all she could do was get the kids out of the way long enough for the apartments to be whipped into something fit for human habitation. She could at least return the borrowed brooms to their neighbor, and when Shizuko came to the door she invited Ruth and the children in for tea made on their little hot plate. Ruth was pleasantly surprised by their apartment, which was cheerfully covered in linoleum liberated from the bar at the former Tanforan Clubhouse and furnished with attractive handmade furniture—chairs, table, benches, shelves, closets—as well as a radio and a phonograph. The Dutch stable doors had been taken down and replaced with a curtain separating the two rooms; colorful maps, painted scarves, and college banners adorned the walls.

  Shizuko introduced Ruth, Peggy, and Donnie to her husband, Nakajiro, and her daughters and sons, including Charles, an affable graduate student the same age as Ruth. “Welcome to the neighh-borhood,” he said with a laugh. “Say, this just came out, you might find it useful.” He gave her the latest issue of the camp newsletter, the Tanforan Totalizer, for which Charles was a staff writer. One of the headlines announced MEMORIAL DAY SERVICE SET.

  “I have nothing against Memorial Day,” Ruth said, “but isn’t this a little … paradoxical? Saluting the flag as we’re surrounded by barbed wire?”

  “I understand how you feel. But we have to show we’re loyal Americans. We have to be better than the way they’re treating us.”

  “Do we? Why?” Ruth asked sarcastically.

  “Because there’s a war on, and in the end there is more hope for us in America, with its democratic traditions—and all its flaws—than under the dictatorship of Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. And if we’re to have a place in postwar America, we have to show that we are Americans.”

  Ruth thought bitterly: Why don’t the damn Germans and Italians have to prove that they’re Americans?

  Everyone was doting on Donnie and Peggy, and Ruth thanked Shizuko again for the loan of the brooms. “Did you make them yourselves?” she asked.

  Shizuko shook her head: “Montgomery Ward catalog.”

  “We can order things by mail?”

  “Sure,” Charles replied wryly, “the Bill of Rights still guarantees us the freedom to shop.” Ruth had to laugh. He explained that copies of the Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck catalogs were available at the post office, as were postal money orders. “Some of us still have a little cash in hand, and those who don’t can work jobs here and make enough money to buy little amenities like gardening equipment, clothing, small appliances…”

  She thanked Charles for the information and left with the kids to check out the nursery school Ben
had pointed out yesterday. She was impressed by what the teachers had wrought there out of scraps: orange crates covered over in wallpaper were used as tables and colorful cut-outs of flowers decorated the windowpanes. There were sandboxes, a homemade seesaw, beanbags, blocks, and other toys to occupy the children. Donnie and Peggy seemed to like it so she enrolled them, starting the next day.

  It was a foggy Bay Area morning but the weather was mild and the wind kinder than it had been during the night. As they explored the camp Ruth found herself surprised by the ingenuity of the residents, who—even knowing their stay here was only temporary—had opted to lend their homes as much grace and beauty as they could. There was an artificial pond in the infield where residents sailed boats or practiced fly-casting, as well as a little park decorated with flowers, a bamboo fence, and an old Japanese lantern—an oasis of serenity in a desert of drab utilitarian buildings, dusty roads, and military green. Ruth could see it was a favorite of the Issei, many of whom came to sit and meditate in this small semblance of a homeland they might never see again. For recreation there was also a six-hole golf course, baseball diamonds, basketball, tennis, football, boxing, badminton, and sumo wrestling.

  Ruth took the kids to lunch in the main mess hall in the grandstand. They didn’t care for the egg foo yung but gobbled up the pork and beans. Ruth thumbed through the Tanforan Totalizer and read about the latest war news, art lessons being taught by the well-known painter Chiura Obata, as well as something of potential interest to Jiro.

  After lunch the fog lifted and Ruth took the kids up into the grandstand. Donnie tackled the hundred-odd steps eagerly. The stands were a popular place to while away the time: some residents dozed or sunned themselves on benches; others played dice or board games like go or shogi. When they reached the top Ruth put Peggy down on a bench, forced Donnie to sit still for one minute, and looked out at the surrounding city.