Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  My grandmother’s disbelief that such a well-traveled, worldly man would take an interest in a quiet, demure young woman gets me thinking about why they did end up together. In some respects, she’s right: my handsome, intelligent, sociable grandfather probably would have had his pick of young women, and yet he chose her. And it seems just as unlikely that Obaachan would have been attracted to an ostentatious person like my grandfather, especially because she so deeply respected her own father, who was so quiet and steady.

  But perhaps my grandfather saw in Obaachan exactly what he was looking for. He knew that he could never be happy with someone vivacious and outgoing; that kind of woman would have stolen the attention from him. Instead, he needed someone who would listen to his stories, without interrupting or showing indifference, even when she had heard them a hundred times before—someone who would listen just because she loved him and knew that telling those stories gave him such joy. In other words, he needed someone like Obaachan. The fact that she had already proven herself to be a good caretaker probably didn’t hurt either. My grandfather wanted children so badly, and Obaachan would have seemed like a good candidate for taking care of a family.

  As for why Obaachan chose in the end to marry my grandfather—I simply ask her. The answer does not come quickly, or even directly. She sighs, thinking about it. “Well, I guess I can best explain it to you like this,” she says. “In The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy, there’s a young woman who receives a marriage proposal from someone who really loves her. But she isn’t sure she loves him back. When the woman asks her father what she should do, he tells her she should accept the proposal, because it is always better to be the one in a relationship who is loved more, not the one who loves more.”

  She pauses for a moment, pushing at the mochi with her chopsticks. “So what I can tell you about this is that I sensed that he loved me, even before we were married. That he really, truly loved me.” She says nothing more, and I conclude that his love, his devotion, was enough for her.

  By early August, Obaachan and her family knew that their time at Pomona was coming to an end. The authorities announced that within a few weeks, the prisoners would be relocated to their permanent camp. The family knew that across the country, there were ten camps, and although they had not been told where their permanent camp would be, they did understand that their departure was imminent.

  My grandfather was among the first to leave. The authorities had asked for men—specifically, young, strong, and single men—to go to the permanent camp a few weeks early, and he had volunteered. No specific details were provided regarding what he and the rest of the volunteer crew would be doing; all they knew was that they would be finishing a camp somewhere.

  “He saw it as a way to get out of Pomona, which he said seemed to grow smaller, hotter, and more crowded each day,” Obaachan explains. “Plus it was an opportunity to make extra money.”

  She takes the first bite of mochi and tells me that it’s delicious. “Would you like some? There’s another in the fridge. I can cook it for you.”

  I tell her I don’t like mochi very much, and she shakes her head. My brother and I are still not avid eaters of Japanese food, and Obaachan blames my mother for this. Years ago, she used to warn my mother that she needed to cook more Japanese food for us—that if we didn’t eat it often enough, we wouldn’t like it. Obaachan was right: we eat it, but we don’t love it. The family joke is that my cousin, adopted from Korea, adores Japanese food.

  “Well, just before Ojichan boarded the train to leave,” Obaachan continues, “he looked at me and said that he would find me as soon as he could. We understood that we’d be going to the same place—that everyone at Pomona would be sent to one permanent camp—but that’s about all we knew.”

  She pokes at the mochi with her chopstick, def lating it, and I sense how difficult it must have been for her then, saying goodbye to my grandfather. She was in the dark about so many details. Part of her feared that the rumors about being exterminated were accurate, and that my grandfather would be executed as soon as he arrived. And she felt that in those days, it was too dangerous to hope for good things—for marriage, for children, for a life with someone who cared about her. It was not so much that she didn’t trust the young man she was getting to know; it was more that there had been so many changes and disappointments in the previous ten months that she was hesitant to hope for anything.

  For the rest of the inmates at Pomona, the exodus began about two weeks after Ojichan left. It was a slow process: all five thousand of them could not leave at once, so the authorities divided everyone into groups and sent people away five hundred at a time. Those who remained would watch as a long line of prisoners stepped out beyond the barbed wire and marched toward the waiting trains. The armed guards, who placed themselves at every twentieth person, shouted to keep people in line. “Two feet between each person! Slow and steady!” Because small children were part of the line, everyone was ordered to walk slowly enough that the little ones could keep up.

  Obaachan, standing with her father, stared as the procession of prisoners passed. Their faces showed fear, weariness, sadness, confusion. She watched the elderly struggle to keep the correct pace and worried about her own mother, who she knew would soon be making this same march. Children, just a few years old, reached for a parent’s hand to hold. Some of them raised their arms to be carried.

  “I wonder where it is,” Obaachan said softly, hoping for some word of comfort from her father. Maybe he had heard a piece of news that he could share.

  Papa shrugged. “The ten camps are in isolated locations,” he said in Japanese. “Far away from coasts and major cities. Some are in the South, some in the North.” He turned to look at her. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Maybe it will be another fairground, like Pomona.”

  He did not respond to Obaachan’s speculation, but instead watched the passing line of prisoners, who left in their wake a long train of dust.

  Chapter 6

  THE FOLLOWING MAY, OBAACHAN FLIES TO Pennsylvania again to attend my college graduation and spend two weeks visiting my family, and she announces that while she is here, she plans to begin making a quilt. “With a pineapple pattern,” she says. “For your aunt’s new house in Hawaii.” She’ll embroider the individual squares of stiff white cotton, stitching each pattern of X’s with yellow and green embroidery floss, and then she’ll send the squares to the local Amish to be sewn together and quilted into the final product.

  My mother, grandmother, and I have gathered in my parents’ kitchen on a dreary afternoon. We’ve just returned from a trip to Buchanan’s, the fabric store in the nearby Amish village of Belleville, and our purchases are strewn in disarray across the kitchen table, the brown bags spilling their fabric, a yellow measuring tape draping over the stacks. Even though I tend to dislike crafts, I agreed to ride along to Buchanan’s in order to spend some time with my grandmother. Somehow, three hours later, it turns out I’m making a quilt of my own, a patchwork, with no embroidering required. My mother, who has always wanted a daughter who was able to sew and “be useful” in the way of household activities—she bought me a sewing machine for my graduation present—has roped me in. Now that I’ve spent over eighty dollars on flannels and batting, I’m regretting my decision to join them.

  Obaachan and my mother, drawn to quilting and the idea of women circling up for an afternoon of gossip, are anxious to begin, and they offer their help. (Perhaps they also sense that if they don’t get me started, the flannels and batting will be shoved back into their brown bag and tossed forever into a closet.) As my mother searches for some sewing supplies in her office, Obaachan stands in front of the woodstove, its warm air blowing against her back. It’s unseasonably cold for this time of year and damp from all the recent rain.

  My grandmother and I last talked about her imprisonment the previous fall, six months earlier, and I’m anxious to find out more about her relationship with my grandfather
, along with what things were like for her at the permanent camp. So far, we haven’t talked about the place where my grandparents spent over two years of their lives. But I’m nervous to ask about those years, because I still feel as though I’m prying information from her that she prefers to keep to herself, especially now that we are getting to the details about her life at Heart Mountain. That childhood conversation with my mother, when she whispered, with a hint of shame in her voice, that my grandparents had been in prison during World War II, still comes to mind sometimes. All of my questions feel like an intrusion, a ripping open of memories and years that have been sealed for a long time.

  “Obaachan,” I begin, peering out the window, trying to sound casual, as though we’re simply continuing a conversation from an hour earlier, “Ojichan left California early, with the work crew, right? And then how long was it until you met up with him again?” I hope that returning to a detail we’ve already discussed—the final weeks at Pomona—might make things less awkward.

  She frowns, twisting her mouth to the side, trying to remember. “Well, he left before the camp was officially open, so that was maybe in early August, maybe late July. And I think my family followed three weeks later. I don’t know how long exactly, but probably fifteen or twenty days after he did. Something like that. The days really blended into each other there. It’s hard to remember.”

  Those final weeks at Pomona were restless for Obaachan. She had been passing the long hours in between her shifts at the mess hall with my grandfather. With him gone, there were no evening strolls down to the racetrack, no thrilling stories about Ojichan’s early life in the village of Iwakuni with its lovely arched stone bridges, no dashing tales of adventures in San Francisco. For Obaachan, the hot summer days in that barbed-wire enclosure seemed endless. She wondered where my grandfather was and where she was going. There were so many questions, and in spite of her father’s insistence on keeping a positive attitude, the uncertainty was beginning to bother her. Perhaps for the first time since she had met my grandfather, Obaachan felt like the prisoner she had been all along.

  When her family’s turn to leave Pomona finally arrived, for the second time in five months, they packed up their belongings in their five leather suitcases and the three canvas bags she and her cousins had sewn. Before they left their fairground room, her father checked to make sure each piece of luggage was labeled with their family name, and, more importantly, that their identification numbers were displayed on the white tags that hung from the handles. He stood in the doorway of that room, hands tucked into his khakis, looking at the spare walls and rough wooden floor, just as he had done before leaving the house on Pico Street earlier that year. The only things remaining in the room were the seven flimsy gray mattresses the family had dragged there on their first day. What would things be like in this new place? Would they manage to stay together, or would they be separated? And what of Mama? The future was so uncertain.

  Papa turned away from the room and picked up his and Mama’s belongings. By this point, the packing, unpacking, and repacking—the labeling and double-checking—had become exhausting to my grandmother and her family. The whole process of uprooting, settling, and uprooting once again seemed such an inefficient use of energy. Such a waste of life.

  The two-mile march to the railroad tracks was more than Obaachan’s mother was able to handle. She was ordered, along with the other handicapped and elderly passengers, to board a large Army pickup truck that would haul her to the train station. As Obaachan watched Mama pull away in that truck loaded with weary and sick passengers, she raised her hand to wave, and, for a moment, a menacing fear gripped her. What if the authorities were taking Mama to another camp? What if they sent her far away, in another direction, where no one could take care of her? Obaachan stood still, debating over whether to run after her mother. But then she remembered her father’s warning about following the rules and not showing any sign of resistance. She did not dare disobey. She’d heard about what had happened to those two men at Lourdsburg, who’d been shot, and about the gardener at Fort Sill, who’d also been killed. She forced herself to look away, focusing instead on her feet, and continued marching.

  After walking for over an hour, slowly, with their luggage in tow, the long column of prisoners arrived at the train station. Obaachan searched the swarm of people for her mother. Ahead, Mama was still sitting in the back of the truck with the other sick and elderly, hunched over, her hands wrapped tightly around the handle of her small suitcase. The truck was parked right next to the train tracks. Papa ran over and helped his wife to the ground, holding her at the waist.

  Slowly, one by one, the group of five hundred got on the train. The old steps groaned as each person boarded. “We still didn’t know where we were going,” Obaachan reminds me. She shrugs. “I guess they figured we had no need to know. I mean by that point, where we were going was sort of irrelevant.”

  Had my grandmother and the rest of her fellow inmates known about Hitler’s camps, and the long train rides hauling unsuspecting prisoners to those camps—had they seen the eerie parallels between these early phases of their own internment and that of the European Jews—they might not have boarded that train with such composure. Might they have resisted, hollered and kicked, pushed at the armed men in their drab olive uniforms, or attempted some unified revolt? Would someone have put up a fight? When I picture myself in this situation, I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t have led such a revolt myself. Just like my grandmother, I would have been too scared. The stories about the men who’d been shot, and those stern-looking soldiers watching nearby, and their gleaming weapons—I would have obeyed and tried to blend in, too.

  When I ask my grandmother about whether she was aware, at the time of her own imprisonment, what happened to European Jews, she shakes her head. “We were ignorant,” she says. By the time my grandmother was leaving Pomona, Hitler had been shipping prisoners to concentration camps since 1941, and he’d been gassing them for months, but the Allies did not discover those camps until months later, in December of 1942. Obaachan sighs. “In a strange sense, I guess our ignorance protected us.”

  As Obaachan and her family settled into their seats, armed guards arrived to pace the aisles. The air in that train, crammed with its five hundred passengers, quickly grew thick and stifling. Outside, the August temperatures were unrelenting, and the odor of five hundred people who’d just walked two miles in those temperatures became nauseating. Finally, with a tired sigh, the train began to ease forward.

  In those initial hours on the train, the excitement of leaving behind the crowded room at Pomona gave Obaachan a renewed sense of hope. She tried to guess where they were headed, and what the new apartment would be like. Maybe this permanent camp wouldn’t be so bad, she told herself. Maybe Papa would have a garden again, a small one, with irises and tulips, and maybe there would be a front porch where Mama could sit in the afternoons.

  “At first, the trip was sort of a thrill,” Obaachan says. “Aside from my trip to Japan as a little girl, I’d basically never left Los Angeles. So this was almost like going to another country for me. We went through parts of the United States that I’d never seen before, parts I thought I’d never see.”

  My grandmother watched as the Arizona desert raced by, its sand and rocks a blur at the window. She saw the landscape slowly shifting to where outcroppings of rock jutted up from the ground, sharp and red, imposing and towerlike. “I didn’t see as much of those states as you might think. Through some of the towns, they made us close the blinds,” Obaachan explains. On previous train trips, the residents of these towns, provoked by the sight of so many Japanese, had hurled rocks at the windows of the train and hollered insults. The officials decided it was best to avoid such outbursts by hiding the prisoners from the angry crowds outside.

  After several hours, the sun, now sinking behind them, grew orange and began to cast long shadows, and those passengers who were riding backward squinted and shaded their
eyes. At last, night began to overtake them. Obaachan watched as the desert’s rocky hills formed into outlines at the window, and then faded into complete darkness. Some passengers were able to sleep, exhausted from the packing, marching, and sitting, but many remained wide awake. Obaachan’s back was badly cramped from sitting for so many hours without moving, and she struggled to get comfortable. These days, as a woman in her eighties, she seems able to fall asleep just about anywhere, and she often nods off on long car rides, or even as she sits at her desk reading, but when she was young, she had trouble sleeping in an upright position. To her left, in the aisle seat, her mother slept, leaning against her side. Obaachan wanted to stretch her back and legs, but since she didn’t want to wake Mama, she tried not to think about the pinching pain in her back and forced herself to be as still as possible.

  She thought instead about that young man she’d said goodbye to three weeks earlier: his wavy black hair, parted and combed carefully to the side; his clean, starched button-downs; and his wide, easy smile. She imagined him waiting for her at the train station. Even though my grandmother had not made up her mind about him just yet, she hoped that he hadn’t lost interest in her. After three weeks without contact, Obaachan feared that with his sociable nature and his dislike of being alone, he might have moved on to someone prettier or more interesting. She shifted her thoughts from my grandfather to other things. The feel of Papa’s fresh bamboo shoots in her palm. Sunday afternoons at the beach where the sand was so hot it stung her feet. Sitting around a campfire and roasting hot dogs on sticks. Eating fresh watermelon on the front porch with Jack and Papa, the sweet, pink juice trickling down her chin. Eventually, late into the night, she drifted off.

  By early morning, the children were growing restless on that train. They squirmed in their mothers’ laps and kicked at the backs of the seats in front of them. Obaachan felt sorry for them, for their cramped muscles, hunger, boredom, and exasperation. The sensation of being trapped with nowhere to go. Some children cried or whimpered, and when one would begin, often another child would hear it and begin crying as well. It reminded her of how sometimes the dogs in her neighborhood back in Los Angeles would join each other in barking, how a cacophony of howls would start from a single yelp.