Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  Each area of each city was assigned a specific meeting place, a building or parking lot where the families needed to be by noon on April 7, with all packed belongings in hand. It was all detailed on the posted instructions.

  “Ours was the church where my family attended,” Obaachan says. She leans back in her chair, then dabs her lips with her napkin and takes a sip of water. “It was strange, of course, going to a place you knew well, and had been to many times before, but under such different circumstances.”

  The seven of them shuffled the few blocks to the church, the sewn knapsacks slung over one shoulder, the suitcases gripped in the opposite hand. Papa carried Mama’s things. In the parking lot a few hundred people gathered, and they huddled together in quiet clusters. Papa and Uncle Kisho went to stand in line and register their families. “We became numbers at that point,” Obaachan says, cutting a shrimp in half and swirling it in the sauce. She leans back in her chair. “You were registered as a number, not as a name.”

  A pair of scales was set up at the registration table, and a stern group of burly, uniformed men roughly picked up each suitcase and slammed it onto a scale. Those who had brought too much luggage were treated with cold impatience and commanded to remove items from their bags until the required weight was reached. These belongings were left scattered on the street outside the church, and they were scavenged the moment the buses pulled out of the parking lot. Today, photographs of these meeting places—with open suitcases, clothing, musical instruments, and other items tossed about, and hakujin looking for things worth keeping after the busloads of Japanese had been carried away—capture the event.

  At first Obaachan’s Mama tried to stand in the church parking lot, but before long she grew too tired. She sat on the concrete steps that led to the church entrance. Other women sat in circles nearby. Red Cross workers carried trays of coffee through the crowd, as if offering comfort in a natural disaster.

  Finally, buses with armed military police pulled up. Standing outside the bus, gripping their rifles and looking straight ahead, the police ordered everyone aboard. At this point still not knowing where they were headed, hundreds of people filed into the buses. Obedient, quiet. “Nobody resisted,” Obaachan remembers. “I think people had the mind-set that this was what we could do to help. We loved America just like everyone else, and if this was the way we could serve our country, we were willing to do it. We saw it as our duty.”

  The Japanese American Citizens League, a civil rights organization consisting of only Nisei (those who were American citizens), had encouraged people to believe this though the discriminatory legislation continued. Their creed, written in 1940, included these words: “Because I believe in America, and I trust she believes in me, and because I have received innumerable benefits from her, I pledge myself to do honor to her at all times and all places … in the hope that I may become a better American in a greater America.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the JACL had pledged loyalty to the United States while condemning the treachery of Japan. When a mandatory evacuation was announced, they urged the Japanese to leave without resistance—to do their duty by obeying the rules.

  The Nisei who made up the JACL would have been young, optimistic folks, some of them college educated. I can’t help thinking about the 1960s, when twenty-somethings protested the Vietnam War and the government, and about now, when my friends march at anti–death penalty rallies and insist on buying fair trade coffee. Were this type of roundup to happen in my own day, I feel confident that my generation—my post–civil rights, optimistic, unafraid generation—would unite to oppose what it would undoubtedly deem unjust. But, as my grandmother has pointed out to me, we did not grow up in the same world.

  As the caravan of buses drove through the city of Los Angeles that April day, people stopped to stare. Some pointed and a few yelled. “You don’t belong here!” hollered a middle-aged man. “Dirty Japs!” shouted a young girl. “This is what you deserved!” yelled a mother, holding her infant son to her chest.

  Even though my grandmother had always lived in, and was quite accustomed to, a country that resented her race—even though she had seen all the headlines and heard the radio reports with their accusations and assumptions—she had never felt so despised as she did riding through Los Angeles that April afternoon. She was ashamed to be Japanese. She was ashamed to be American.

  At the Thai restaurant, when we’ve at last filled our stomachs and scraped what we couldn’t finish of our meal into two Styrofoam boxes, Obaachan takes out her red wallet and places a few crisp bills on the table. Offering to cover the tip would offend her. This dinner, she reminds me, is my birthday gift. I thank her again for the outing, and we walk to the car. Whenever she has visitors, my grandmother does not drive. Although she has never had an accident, she prefers sitting in the passenger seat to driving, especially at night. She hands me the keys. I push the button to unlock all the doors, and help her into the car. Sometimes, the seatbelt is difficult for her to reach on that side.

  We pull out of the parking lot and head home. In the hour or so we have spent at the restaurant, Melbourne has grown dark. The bright lights of strip malls illuminate the sides of the road: dry cleaners, 7-Elevens, banks, and real estate agencies flash past.

  From the floor of the backseat, our leftovers are beginning to soak the air with their heavy scent. Beside me, my eighty-year-old grandmother holds her purse on her lap, her hands resting on its top. She is quiet now, tired from a long day of remembering, and ready to head home.

  Chapter 4

  ON THE FINAL DAY OF MY SECOND TRIP TO FLORIDA, Obaachan asks me to help her pick the grapefruit. Outside the kitchen window, in the small patch of yard between her house and the row of shrubs lining the road stand two trees that she and my grandfather planted when they first moved here, in 1989. Each now stretches over twelve feet tall and has wide branches with thick, shiny leaves. Swollen yellow fruit, dusted with a chalky black substance, burdens the branches, and they sag a little from the weight.

  “We’ll need this,” Obaachan says, pointing to a four-foot wooden ladder in a corner of the garage. I grab it, haul it awkwardly to the closest tree, and set it up, checking its strength by trying to rock it back and forth in the grass. Obaachan places a cardboard box once used to haul Dole bananas on the ground at the foot of the tree. “The kind they use for bananas are the best,” she explains. “The sturdiest.”

  Like Obaachan’s Papa, my grandfather, too, had always been interested in growing things; he’d helped my aunt create a colossal vegetable garden at her Maryland home, where he and Obaachan had lived for a while before moving south. “I can’t keep up with them,” Obaachan says, pointing to the branches and the hundreds of heavy grapefruits that hang from them. “Even if I ate two or three a day, I couldn’t. I’m sending a box home with you, for your mother. And for you, if you want some. It’s easy to take them. You just tape up the box and check it with your other luggage.” Her other spring visitor, my uncle Jay, has recently taken a shipment of grapefruit home to Denver.

  I climb the ladder, a little wary of its creaking wooden rungs, and then heave myself onto a branch. Obaachan slides the cardboard box a few feet along the ground so that it’s resting just below my perch. I pull at the first grapefruit, feel it firm and full in my fingertips. I twist it just a bit until it gives and then drop it into the box. It weighs nearly a pound, and lands loudly on the cardboard.

  Since dinner at the Thai restaurant two nights earlier, Obaachan and I have not talked about the evacuation. We’ve watched The Four Feathers and the original Sabrina and taken advantage of her senior citizen’s discount at the nearby Ross store. I’ve introduced her to chai lattes, and she has taught me how to make perfect popcorn on the stovetop. All of this has been fun, and throughout all of it, I’ve been surprised by just how easy it has been to spend a week with a woman I still feel I don’t know that well. We have a good bit in common, I’ve realized. We both like reading, watching movies, and cooking,
and we’ve enjoyed exchanging recipes and book recommendations. But I begin to worry that she has decided she has talked enough already—that she has exposed too much. I feel that she has gotten to know me this week, but I sense that there’s still so much I don’t know about her. And, as she warned me from the very beginning, she does not like to talk about herself.

  I worry, too, that although we have managed to navigate through the easier details of childhood, through the years before the war and the camp, the difficult memories lie ahead, and I wonder if my grandmother will find reasons to shift our conversations to something other than the war itself. Backward, to those early years on Pico Street, in her Papa’s giant garden; or ahead, far ahead, to the quiet years in southern New Jersey, after the war, when she and my grandfather were busy raising four children. I realize I must find a way to dive back into the story, right to where we left off a few days ago. “When you left Los Angeles and got on that bus,” I call to her from the branches of the grapefruit tree, trying to defuse the question by tossing a grapefruit into the box, “did you go straight to Wyoming?”

  She doesn’t answer. I wait nervously in the branches above her, yanking fruit with both hands, holding to the tree with my legs. I fear I’m pushing her too much.

  Obaachan steps to her left so that she can get a clear view of me through the branches, and looks up, shielding her eyes from the sun. “The real camps weren’t built yet. We didn’t get to Heart Mountain until months later.” She hesitates for a moment to think about the timeline, to sift through the days and figure how long it really was. She pulls a grapefruit from a low branch, turns it in her hands, rubbing a little at the black substance. “It wasn’t until August, I think. For those months in between, we were at Pomona.”

  Named after the ancient Roman goddess of fruit, the city of Pomona was a little town originally known for its fertile land and its abundant fruit trees. Thirty miles west of Los Angeles, it offered a perfect holding spot for the Japanese. It was close enough that the prisoners could be transported there quickly, and it was far enough away from the coast to put General DeWitt and the War Relocation Authority at ease—at least until other plans were in place.

  Before it became a housing project for over ten thousand Japanese evacuees, Pomona was where the Los Angeles County Fair was held. The fairground, first constructed in 1922 as a 43-acre parcel, had continually been expanded, and by the time my grandmother got there in 1942, it had grown to 105 acres. It featured a racetrack, multiple exhibit buildings, and numerous barns. The roaring sound of horses racing, the cheers of crowds, the harvest exhibits, the gambling, the band, the smell of salt and vinegar—all of this was no doubt a welcome diversion from the hardships of the Great Depression. But when my grandmother arrived that spring, she was greeted by hundreds of military police armed with machine guns. The Army had been using the site as a base since December, right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

  “The bus ride was short,” Obaachan says, pulling another grapefruit from a low branch. “Less than an hour. Pomona was not far at all. But somehow, it was a very long trip.”

  The bus, though crowded, was marked by a startling silence. Even small children sat gravely in their seats, leaning against a parent, clutching a favorite doll or toy truck. A young boy played with his Slinky, its rings clinking. The buses pulled into the fairground, slowed, and quieted their engines. Everyone was ordered to exit. Obaachan’s mother struggled to make her way down the aisle, and she gripped the backs of the bus seats with each step. Military police called out the numbers on each bundle or suitcase, and when Obaachan’s family number was called, the seven of them gathered their belongings and headed toward the registration line. There, soldiers searched their bags for razors, flashlights, and other banned items. They unrolled Papa’s bundle and examined the contents. They opened Mama’s suitcase and sifted through the neatly folded clothing, feeling for sharp items in the layers. Obaachan, embarrassed when a young hakujin soldier rummaged through her hundreds of sanitary napkins (a perplexed look on his face), averted her eyes. She looked at her feet, the shiny black shoes already dusty from the dry fairground and all its human traffic.

  Noticing Mama’s condition, her weak body and breathlessness, one hakujin man took her aside and allowed her to sit on a stack of giant burlap rice bags. She sat down, her shoulders sagging a little from exhaustion, and kicked at a stone. After their belongings were searched and found to be satisfactory, Obaachan’s family was given an apartment number and sent to pick up their mattresses. They later learned that they’d been lucky to get actual mattresses; when those ran out, the government officials distributed straw-stuffed sacks instead.

  Wearily, Obaachan followed Papa and Uncle Kisho, dragging her mattress and her homemade knapsack. The rest of the family trailed behind. Hundreds of doors led into Pomona’s buildings, and each of those doors had a number painted on its front. When Obaachan’s family finally came to their new home, they stopped and stared—maybe bewildered, maybe too exhausted to be disappointed, maybe still as dutiful as ever. My grandmother, her parents, her aunt and uncle, and her two cousins were allotted a single twenty-by-twenty-foot room, a space they would share for the months that followed.

  Living arrangements at Pomona had been created in two ways. There were barracklike buildings that had been thrown together as quickly as possible, and some of the existing fairground buildings had been partitioned into apartments as well. The barns, sheds, and exhibit buildings that had once housed cows, rabbits, horses, and other farm animals were cleaned out and transformed into homes for the prisoners. The walls dividing up these buildings into “apartments” were constructed of what appeared to be scrap wood, and they did not allow for much privacy with their wide spaces in between each board, and the gaping knots in the wood. Not only could Obaachan’s family hear the people on either side of them—they could also see them. Shortly after their arrival, some families tried to patch the wide cracks with a mud and straw mixture, but Obaachan’s did not bother. They strung sheets from pieces of wire and divided the apartment into three rooms: a bedroom for her parents, a bedroom for her aunt and uncle, and an open room that everyone had access to, where she and her cousins slept.

  Meanwhile, just three days after my grandmother arrived at Pomona, on April 10, 1942, the infamous Bataan Death March commenced in the Philippines. On the ninth, American and Filipino troops handed over their weapons and left themselves to the mercy of Japanese soldiers—only to realize, too late, that Japan had no intentions of abiding by the Geneva Convention in their treatment of prisoners. Without food or water, and in the steaming heat of the South Pacific, over seventy thousand starving and sick Allied POWs began the grueling sixty-mile march to Camp O’Donnell. While a handful of them decided to escape and risk the jungles of Bataan, between five thousand and eleven thousand of them perished along the way. As this horror unfolded in the Pacific, my grandmother and her family unpacked their belongings and tried to settle into their new home at the fairground.

  Obaachan examines the growing collection of grapefruit in the Dole box, and she picks one up and rolls it around in her hands. She presses her fingertips into the thick yellow skin and then holds it to her nose, smelling it. “At first,” she says, “Pomona was sort of fun, at least for us young people.” She shrugs. “I know that sounds funny, but I guess it was like summer camp or something. There were so many people my age to meet. It was exciting, sort of.”

  The exhilaration of meeting new people and making new friends may have been enough to temporarily distract a young person like my grandmother from the hardships that Pomona posed. Although she’d been forced to surrender her dream of attending college, she did not, at age twenty-one, have all that much to lose. She had few possessions, no money, no house, and no assets.

  Her parents, on the other hand, had lost everything. The life they’d built together in America was now very much behind them, only thirty miles away, but completely out of reach. While Obaachan spent her evenings s
trolling around the grounds and hanging out with new friends, her father dreamed of the house on Pico Street. He’d paid cash for each piece of furniture, every appliance, lamp, tool, and tablecloth. He’d saved up to buy the house and paid extra for the double lot. Most of all, he thought of his garden. The tulips with their fleeting bursts of red. The oleanders, white and fragrant. His darling camellias. Without consistent watering, the camellias would dry out and die. Papa wondered if any part of his beloved garden, or even his beloved home, would be there upon his return—if there was a return.

  What made the adjustment to Pomona even more of a strain was its layout and daily structure. The hundred-yard walk to the lavatories was no easy trip for someone like Obaachan’s mother, who was supposed to stay in bed and avoid physical activity at all times. And waiting in line and eating at a mess hall proved to be difficult, as well, for those with infants and young children, who were often fussy, tired, and wary of the unfamiliar mess-hall foods.

  “It was a different kind of diet,” Obaachan says slowly. Beneath me, she adjusts her bright white hat with its wide, bonnetlike bill, and then tugs at another grapefruit. “It took some getting used to.”

  Many of their meals consisted primarily of cereal, rice, bread, canned beans, and hot dogs. The food was never spoiled, stale, or anything like that—but they were not foods Japanese typically ate. My grandmother’s family, accustomed to a diet of fresh vegetables, fish, brown rice, and Japanese seasonings like shoyu and dashi, had difficulty adjusting to a bland, high-starch diet. Many of their friends suffered from diarrhea and stomach pains. Papa lost weight. Still, in those early months of incarceration, her father made it a point to remind Obaachan to be grateful, and not to complain. He pointed out that many Americans—not just Japanese but also lots of hakujin—had suffered through months and even years of hunger due to the Great Depression. Obaachan tried to take to heart what he told her, and his care in not mentioning his own anxiety and sense of loss must have helped shape her positive experience of Pomona.