Farewell to Manzanar

by James D Houston

  We were alone out there, too far from the road to hear anything but wind. I thought of Mama, now seven years gone. For a long time I stood gazing at the monument. I couldn’t step inside the fence. I believe in ghosts and spirits. I knew I was in the presence of those who had died at Manzanar. I also felt the spiritual presence that always lingers near awesome wonders like Mount Whitney. Then, as if rising from the ground around us on the valley floor, I began to hear the first whispers, nearly inaudible, from all those thousands who once had lived out here, a wide, windy sound of the ghost of that life. As we began to walk, it grew to a murmur, a thin steady hum.

  We turned the kids loose, watched them scamper off ahead of us, and we followed what used to be an asphalt road running from the back side of the camp a mile out to the highway. The obelisk—built in 1943—and the gatehouses are all that have survived intact from internment days. The rest of the place looks devastated by a bombing raid.

  The old road was disintegrating, split, weed-sprung. We poked through the remains of hospital foundations, undermined by erosion channels. We found concrete slabs where the latrines and shower rooms stood, and irrigation ditches, and here and there, the small rock arrangements that once decorated many of the entranceways. I had found out that even in North Dakota, when Papa and the other Issei men imprisoned there had free time, they would gather small stones from the plain and spend hours sorting through a dry stream bed looking for the veined or polished rock that somehow pleased the most. It is so characteristically Japanese, the way lives were made more tolerable by gathering loose desert stones and forming with them something enduringly human. These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete. Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep.

  Vegetation gets thickest toward the center of the site, where the judo pavilion once stood and where rows of elms planted as windbreaks have tripled their growth since the forties. In there we came across the remains of a small park. A stone-lined path ran along the base of a broad mound of dirt about five feet high. Stones had been arranged on the mound, and some low trees still shaded it and made an arch above the path. For a moment I was strolling again, finding childish comfort in its incongruous design.

  But after ten feet the path ended in tumbleweeds. The trees were dry and stubby, the mound was barren, and my attention was arrested by a water faucet sticking two feet out of the sand, like some subterranean periscope. One of these had provided water for each barracks. They stuck up at intervals in every direction, strangely sharpening the loneliness and desolation, sometimes the only sign of human presence in an acre or two of sand.

  My mood had shifted. The murmur turned to wind. For a while I could almost detach myself from the place and its history and take pleasure in it purely as an archeological site. I saw the outlines, patterns this city must have taken. I imagined where the buildings stood, almost as I once did nosing around old Roman villas in Europe. We saw a low ring of stones built up with cement and wondered who the mason was who knelt there and studied the shapes before fitting them together. We moved around the ring a few feet to find out. This was the old flagpole circle, where the Stars and Stripes were hoisted every morning, and the inscription scratched across the top said, BUILT BY WADA AND CREW, JUNE 10, 1942 A.D.

  The A.D. made me shiver. I knew that the man who inscribed it had foreseen these ruins and did not want his masonry identified with the wrong era. His words coming out of the stone became a voice that merged with all the others, not a murmur this time, but low voices muttering and chattering all around me. We were crossing what used to be a firebreak, now a sandy field devoid of any growth. The wind was vicious there, with nothing to break it, and the voices grew. The firebreak was where we had talent shows and dances and outdoor movies in the summer, and where the kids played games. I heard the girls’ glee club I used to sing in, way off from the other side of camp, their tiny grade-school sopranos singing, “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.” I closed my eyes and I was ten years old again. Nothing had changed. I heard laughter. It was almost dusk, the wind had dropped, and I saw old men squatting in the dirt, Papa and some of his cronies, muttering and smoking their cigarettes. In the summertime they used to burn orange peels under gallon cans, with holes punched in the sides, to keep the mosquitoes away. Sometimes they would bring out their boards to play goh and hana. The orange peels would smolder in there, and the men would hunker down around the cans and watch the smoke seep out the holes.

  From that firebreak we cut across toward the first row of pear trees, looking for what might remain of Block 28. There wasn’t much to guide us but the trees themselves and a view I remembered of the blunt, bulky Inyo Range that bounds the eastern limit of the valley. When we were close enough to smell the trees we stopped. They were stunted, tenacious, tough the way a cactus has to be. The water table in that one area has kept them living through all these years of neglect, and they were ready to bloom at any moment. The heady smell was as odd in that desert setting as the little scrap of park had been, as odd yet just as familiar. We used to picnic there in blossom time, on weekends, if we got a wind-free day.

  The wind blew it toward us now—chilled pear nectar—and it blew our kids around a high stand of brush. They came tumbling across the sand, demanding to know what we were going to do out here. Our twins were five years old at the time, a boy and a girl. Our older daughter had just turned eleven. She knew about “the evacuation,” but it would be a few more years before she absorbed this part of the family history. For these three the site had been like any wreck or ruin. They became explorers, rushed around hoping the next clump of dusty trees or chunk of wall might reveal the treasure, the trinket, the exotically rusted hinge. Nothing much had turned up. The shine was wearing off the trip. Their eyes were red and their faces badly chapped. No place for kids.

  My husband started walking them back to the car. I stayed behind a moment longer, first watching our eleven-year-old stride ahead, leading her brother and sister. She has long dark hair like mine and was then the same age I had been when the camp closed. It was so simple, watching her, to see why everything that had happened to me since we left camp referred back to it, in one way or another. At that age your body is changing, your imagination is galloping, your mind is in that zone between a child’s vision and an adult’s. Papa’s life ended at Manzanar, though he lived for twelve more years after getting out. Until this trip I had not been able to admit that my own life really began there. The times I thought I had dreamed it were one way of getting rid of it, part of wanting to lose it, part of what you might call a whole Manzanar mentality I had lived with for twenty-five years. Much more than a remembered place, it had become a state of mind. Now, having seen it, I no longer wanted to lose it or to have those years erased. Having found it, I could say what you can only say when you’ve truly come to know a place: Farewell.

  I had nearly outgrown the shame and the guilt and the sense of unworthiness. This visit, this pilgrimage, made comprehensible, finally, the traces that remained and would always remain, like a needle. That hollow ache I carried during the early months of internment had shrunk, over the years, to a tiny sliver of suspicion about the very person I was. It had grown so small sometimes I’d forget it was there. Months might pass before something would remind me. When I first read, in the summer of 1972, about the pressure Japan’s economy was putting on American business and how a union in New York City had printed up posters of an American flag with MADE IN JAPAN written across it, then that needle began to jab. I heard Mama’s soft, weary voice from 1945 say, “It’s all starting over.” I knew it wouldn’t. Yet neither would I have been surprised to find the FBI at my door again. I would resist it much more than my parents did, but deep within me something had been prepared for that. Manzanar would always live in my nervous system, a needle with Mama’s voice.

  A gust of wind rushed through
the orchard, bringing ice off the white slopes, and more blossom scent. It hurt to inhale deeply. I pulled my coat tight, ready to head for the cars warmth, but also wanting to hold this moment a little longer. I might never be back here again. I was poking around brush clumps and foundation chunks looking for something else. One more sign. Anything. I found another collection of stones, off by themselves, but so arranged that they could not have been accidental. Nearby an edge showed through the sand. I uncovered a single steppingstone, slightly worn, that led nowhere, yet lay as a subtle appendage to the small rock garden. One of these had Iain outside our barracks door, a first step below three wooden ones. It could be ours. Perhaps not. Many barracks had such entrances. But this one would serve. I could call it the rock garden Papa put there. Almost the sign I wanted. Not quite. Not quite enough. There was more to all this than the lovely patience of these gathered stones. They were part of it. But there was something else, in the air. A sound. A smell. Just a whiff, hanging on that gust from the orchard, or blown down the ghostly alleyway of what used to be the street we lived on. I was hearing Mama’s voice once more, but differently, louder now, right in front of me, and I smelled cork burning. That was one of Papa’s remedies when her back knotted up. He would take little coins of cork and place them on the tension nodes and light them, and the cork would burn dark rings into her skin as she hunched on the porch steps groaning with relief.

  They were sitting on the steps like that—Mama hunched, Papa tending the blackening rings—one morning a few days before we left camp. Now that smell and those voices in the wind from the orchard brought with them the sign I was waiting for: the image of a rekindled wildness in Papa’s eyes. Twenty-seven years earlier I had carried it with me out of camp only half understanding what it meant. Remembering now, I realized I had never forgotten his final outburst of defiance. But for the first time I saw it clearly, as clearly as the gathered desert stones, and when I left today for good I would carry that image with me again, as the rest of my inheritance.

  It was the day Papa suddenly came back to life and decided to go into Lone Pine and buy a car. Mama had been packing, and that brought the uncertainty of our future to such a sharp point, her back went into spasms. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted to concentrate on the rings of heat. She let Papa rant a long time before she reacted.

  “That’s crazy, Ko,” she said.

  “Don’t call me crazy! You think I’m going to ride that stinking bus all the way to Los Angeles?”

  “It’s cheaper than buying a car.”

  “Cheaper! What is it worth—to be packed in there like cattle? You call that cheap?”

  “We don’t have money to buy a car.”

  “I know how much money we have!”

  He jumped to his feet then, rushed into the house, came out with his hat on and a shirt half-buttoned, and his walking stick and his turtleneck sweater tied around his neck, and took off striding toward the main gate, leaving Mama with her back full of smoking cork, which had done no good at all, since this new move of his merely bunched her muscles up worse than ever.

  It was late afternoon when we heard the horn, still blocks away. Without looking out the door, Mama said, “Here he comes.”

  As the honks came closer we heard another sound, like a boxer working out on a flabby punching bag. Mama moved to the doorway. We all did—Chizu, May, me—in time to see a blue Nash four-door come around the corner, with its two front tires flat and Papa sitting up straight and proud behind the wheel, his hat cocked, his free hand punching at the horn. Heads were appearing at doorways all up and down the street.

  He stopped in front, racing the engine and grinning, while he eyed Mama and fingered the shiny-knobbed dashboard gearshift. On the seat between his legs he held a half-empty quart bottle of whiskey. He yelled, “What do you think, Little Mama?”

  She didn’t answer. He had not been drinking much at all for about six months. She stood there waiting to see what he was going to do. He laughed and made the engine roar and demanded to know where all his boys were, he wanted to show those yogores what a real car looked like. Kiyo was the only son still in camp, and he had gone off to help someone else load furniture. So Papa announced that he would give all his women a ride. Mama protested, said he ought to get those tires fixed if we expected to take this car all the way into Los Angeles. Papa roared back at her, louder than the engine, and with such a terrible samurai’s scowl that we all went leaping and piling into the car, Mama last, slamming the back door and climbing into the front seat next to him.

  “You think it’s a pretty good car?” he said, pleased by this show of power.

  Mama said nothing. She sat very stiff, cool, enduring him.

  Chizu was the placator now, leaning forward from the back to pat him on the shoulder. “Its a line car, papa.”

  “You watch!”

  He grabbed the gear lever and rammed it into low. The Nash leaped, and we were cloppeting down the street on those two flats and two good tires, with Papa laughing, sipping from the bottle. At the first corner he said, “You think I can’t pick out cars?”

  Softly Chizu said, “You did real good, Papa.”

  He stepped on the gas, hitting maybe thirty, swerving crazily. In the back seat we were all thrown around, flung from door to door like rag dolls, with Mama bouncing in front of us and Papa’s hat crunching up against the ceiling.

  May cried out, “Not so fast, Papa! You’re going to wreck your car!”

  “Think the car can’t take it?” he yelled back at her. “You watch this!”

  His gaiety turned ferocious again. He stomped the pedal, pushing the speedometer up to thirty-five. His right front tire had shredded and it flopped like a mangled arm. It lashed out, upending a garbage can. I started to cry. Chizu, her calm shattered, was yelling at him to slow down, Mama was too, and May was screaming. He wouldn’t listen and told us to hold on, while he swung into the street, careening past emptying barracks where suitcases and duffel bags sat stacked. As we passed people standing by the baggage, Papa swerved from one side to the other, waving. He laughed, growled, made faces. In front of us, a laden family was hiking out toward the main gate. Papa swung wide, honking, and waving.

  “Hey! Hey!” he shouted.

  They turned, too amazed to wave back.

  “Don’t miss that bus!” he yelled.

  At the next corner he spun off into a deserted section of barracks. These already looked like the ones we’d first moved into, sand piling up against foundation blocks, the clotheslines empty, all signs and markers gone. It made no difference to Papa that no one was out there to witness his performance. He aimed for tumbleweeds lying in the roadbed and shouted with triumph each time he squashed one. Chizu and Mama and May had quit trying to control him. I’d stopped crying. We grabbed for handholds, covered our heads, hoping simply to survive until he hit something hard or ran out of gas.

  We came to a firebreak and Papa plunged into it, began to cut a twisty path across its emptiness, shouting “Hyah! Hyah!,” gouging ragged tracks through the dusty sand. The way this firebreak lay, there seemed to be nothing in front of us now but sagebrush and open country, rising in the distance south of camp to the range of round, buff-colored hills rumored to be full of rattlesnakes. The few times I’d wished I could walk in one direction for as long as I wanted, the threat of those rattlesnakes deterred me. And now, farther south, beyond that visible barrier, out in the world I scarcely remembered, there loomed the dark, threatening cloud I’d heard grown-ups talk about. The way we seemed to be heading, I should have been frightened into a coma. But for this once, I was not. Watching Papa bounce and weave and shout in front of me, I was almost ready to laugh with him, with the first bubbly sense of liberation his defiant craziness had brought along with it. I believed in him completely just then, believed in the fierceness flashing in his wild eyes. Somehow that would get us past whatever waited inside the fearful dark cloud, get us past the heat, and the rattlers, and a great deal more
.

  At the fence he had to turn, sending up a white billow of dust. Where the fence met the highway we cornered again, heading for the bus stop. A crowd waited there, standing idly, sitting around on scattered baggage. They all turned to watch when they heard us coming. Papa tooted the horn and yelled out, “No bus for us! No bus for us!”

  The young kids were mystified by this and stood openeyed, watching. Some of the older folks smiled, waving as we hit a chuck hole and bounced. Papa swung left, and we clattered out onto the wide, empty boulevard that ran the length of the camp, back to where our own baggage waited and the final packing.

  Afterword

  The making of this book began in our living room in 1971, when Jeanne was finally ready to talk about what happened to her and her family during World War Two. For the first couple of months we just talked back and forth, as she spoke her memories into a tape recorder. At the outset we weren’t at all sure what form these memories would take. The original goal was a short recollection for the immediate relatives and for our thirty-six nieces and nephews, some of whom were born at Manzanar yet knew almost nothing about the experience. A year later it had become much more than that. Even so, at the time we could not have imagined that a family story based on these memories would have such a long life and eventually find its way into classrooms all across the country.

  It has been deeply gratifying to see the audience for this book continue to grow, and meanwhile we have watched with fascination as perceptions of the material have changed with time. Each reader brings to such a story his or her own particular history. When it was first published in the early 1970s, we often heard comments such as, “It’s too bad the Japanese got locked up, but that’s what happens in wartime. After all, what do you expect? Didn’t your people do the same thing to our soldiers, putting them in those terrible camps over there in the Philippines?”