Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  In Wyoming, the winter could drag on for nine months, with the snow falling and drifting and piling up along the barracks. Obaachan grew tired of having to walk cautiously along the icy paths, and of having to clean up the chunks of snow that fell from their boots each time they came into the apartment. She hated worrying about that coal stove—there had been so many fires, flames swallowing the buildings and everything within.

  To add to the stress of their first few months together, shortly after my grandparents’ wedding, Obaachan’s Mama took a turn for the worse. Living at Heart Mountain had never been easy for her or Papa. Mama’s activity outside of her room was limited to occasional trips to the bathrooms to bathe. Obaachan would gather up the soap, shampoo, towels, and clean clothing for her mother, then walk the hundred yards to the bathrooms to draw her a bath. Although most prisoners showered instead of taking a bath, there were tubs in one section for those who were unable to take a regular shower.

  Even Mama’s meals were taken in the room. She would not have been able to walk all the way to the mess hall. The harsh temperatures alone would have been taxing for her, not to mention the high winds and icy walkways. Obaachan’s Mama did not eat the same meals that the rest of the prisoners ate. Because of her heart condition, she was served healthier food from a specially cooked menu that the camp’s nutritionist had designed for people with poor health. Obaachan remembers toasting the slice of bread that Mama often saved for her, as a snack, later in the evening. She used the hot plate Papa had purchased right before they left Los Angeles and smeared a teaspoon of jelly, also from Mama, on top.

  Papa was the one who took care of getting Mama her meals. Three times a day, Papa took a plate, bowl, and cup to the mess hall to pick up her food. After the workers dished out her special meal, he carefully wrapped it in a giant blue handkerchief to try to keep it warm, and then rushed it back to the apartment. Once Mama had been taken care of, Papa went back to the mess hall to eat his own food, alone. Usually, he could not stay with her while she ate because in the meantime, the mess hall would stop serving, and he would miss his meal. Obaachan worked during all the meals, so she was never available to help with Mama’s food.

  “Meals were difficult,” Obaachan says, running her finger along the metal edge of her beach chair. “In Los Angeles, I never appreciated sitting at the kitchen table with my family for dinner. I never gave it a thought. But then, at Heart Mountain, when we had to stand in those long lines, and eat whatever they gave us, and eat at a certain time, not when you were hungry, but when the cafeteria was open …” She shakes her head, twisting her mouth in distaste. “After awhile, I just hated it.”

  I think of my first few weeks at Messiah College, and how on certain days the smell of the Lottie Nelson Dining Hall would nauseate me when I walked through the doors. Chicken-fried steak was the source of the stench, I think. (We didn’t know if it was chicken or steak.) And some attempt at Mediterranean-style fish, with tomatoes and chickpeas. Those two were the worst. I often ate salad and softserve—but at least I had choices, different stations, sandwiches, soups, pizza. I remember missing my parents’ meals, and the intimacy of the island in their kitchen, where we had most of our dinners. After a semester, I was convinced I could cook better meals in the dormitory kitchen and began begging my mother to get me off the meal plan. As I imagine my grandmother at Heart Mountain, I wonder if part of the reason why she is so meticulous about what she eats now is because she spent three years eating whatever was scooped onto her tray.

  “It was hard on my father,” Obaachan says, her voice stiff and quiet. “Taking the meals three times a day, emptying the chamber pot each morning. He never complained, never showed anger or frustration.” She turns to look at me and smiles a little. “He was not like your Ojichan.”

  Even when the minister, the man renting their house back in Los Angeles, began to swindle them, Papa showed no anger. Obaachan’s family never saw the minister again after they parted ways on that April morning, on the sidewalk of Pico Street. The arrangement he and Papa had agreed to was that after they reached their final destination, Obaachan would write to the minister and give him their permanent address. The minister promised to mail the rent check at the beginning of each month. This agreement, however, did not end up as Papa had envisioned.

  When Obaachan received the first of the minister’s letters, she discovered that only a portion of the amount he and Papa had agreed upon was enclosed. She read the note and translated it, explaining to her father what the minister had written and why he had not paid the full amount: the heater, according to the minister, had stopped working, and he had been forced to hire someone to fix it. The minister had deducted the amount he supposedly paid for this service from the rent money. Papa only nodded as Obaachan read the letter, but he seemed perplexed that the heater had broken since it had hardly ever been used. Heaters, as Obaachan understood but did not state aloud, were rarely needed in Southern California.

  When the second letter arrived, Obaachan again translated it to her father. This time, the minister explained that the refrigerator had stopped working, and once again the full amount owed was not paid. Again, Papa said nothing. When Obaachan opened the third letter to discover that there had been some plumbing issues, and that the rent payment had yet again been reduced, she grew angry. She knew the man was being dishonest about the problems at the house—Papa had always been fastidious about keeping it in perfect working order—and yet she was hesitant to accuse a minister of deceit. Surely a preacher would not lie to them. Surely the leader of a church would feel guilty about cheating them of what little they were asking from him. She wanted to believe that the man was a scrupulous person. But she knew deep down that the minister was indeed cheating her family. Despite his apologies that April morning when Papa handed him the keys, the sympathetic look in his wife’s brown eyes as they left, and the fact that he was a preacher, he was obviously taking advantage of their imprisonment and the fact that they had absolutely no recourse if he chose to underpay them. In the end, over the three years Obaachan’s family spent at Heart Mountain, the minister never once sent the full amount.

  “Ojichan would not have stood for that kind of behavior the way my father did,” Obaachan says. “He would have had a fit.” She kicks at the sand, shrugs her shoulders, then looks at me with her eyebrows raised. “But then, he only would have caused himself more stress. There was nothing we could do about it. Who would we tell? Papa understood that we were helpless, that no one had time to listen to our complaints.” They were prisoners, the lowest of the low. And it was wartime.

  “Shikataganai,” Obaachan says with a faint smile. There are things that cannot be changed, and you don’t try to change them. You make the best of your situation and keep your head held high.

  As I watch my grandmother on this warm March afternoon, and see the acquiescence in her eyes and the sense of calm with which she tells the story, I realize that shikataganai is not the same word for me as it was a few years earlier, when she first taught it to me. It’s no longer just the state of mind that prevented my grandmother and her family from resisting their imprisonment sixty years ago. It’s no longer a simple act of throwing in the towel or giving up—not exactly. It’s that the family resigned themselves to their fate, and in that way, strangely, managed to preserve their dignity, their humanity, and, most importantly, their sense of self. This same mind-set of shikataganai is the one that allows my grandmother to move on with her life after a lumpectomy and a series of physical therapy visits, to sit on a beach with me just hours after a draining radiation treatment, to drive herself to the next appointment, and the one after that, morning after morning, even when I have flown home to Pennsylvania, and left her.

  Chapter 10

  OBAACHAN HAS KILLED A SNAKE. SHE’D JUST RETURNED from the library in Melbourne, and as she made her way across her courtyard, she saw it, thin and green, stretched across the bright concrete, warming itself in the sun. She didn’t know what ki
nd of snake it was, its breed or name, but she knew immediately that she had to kill it. She explains this as we walk through her courtyard and into the house, a year after my last visit, in March again. I follow her, rolling my small suitcase noisily over the concrete. Oddly, I find myself responding like a fretting mother to her story: Doesn’t she know how many poisonous snakes there are in Florida? Couldn’t she have called her neighbor, the nice Colombian man she refers to as “such a gentleman”? And what would she have done if the snake had struck her?

  “It was the size of a fat man’s thumb,” she says, ignoring my concerns. She holds her own small thumb at arm’s length, showing me. “I knew I only had one chance to kill it. If I didn’t, who knows where it might show up.” Once, she found one of the lizards that are so abundant in central Florida on her pillow, its brown legs extended, its skinny tail twitching. Somehow, it had squeezed its way into the house, through a crack in the foundation, or a space in the painted cedar siding. Knowing that the snake could do the same thing—surprise her somewhere inside with a flash of its shiny green skin, or worse, a bite—was enough to prompt action.

  In the courtyard, Obaachan watched the snake for a few moments, then crept toward the garage and grabbed a shovel. “I had to line up my angle,” she says, pointing to where the snake had lain. “I had to think through how I’d do it, and then concentrate.” She inched closer to the snake, which still lay in the corner of the courtyard, right beside her tomato plants. She swung the shovel, its metal ringing loudly off the concrete, and then she continued to strike the snake, again and again. In moments it lay dead in two green pieces, splattered in blood, the thin bones exposed, the head severed.

  “Afterward, I had to get the hose and clean up the blood,” Obaachan says. She frowns, mildly disgusted by this part of the event, all the carnage splayed across her entryway. “I hooked the snake over my shovel and carried it out to the end of the driveway, where the trash can was. I showed my neighbor. He was working in his yard and so I called out to him, ‘Hey, look at this!’ and he came over and couldn’t believe I’d killed it on my own.”

  I’ve witnessed this ruthless side of my grandmother only once, when she used a spray bottle of Windex to “stun” a lizard perched on her living-room windowsill, before finishing the job with the yellow fly swatter she keeps under the kitchen sink. But still, a snake is different from a lizard, more sinister and unnerving, more of a threat, and picturing my gray-haired, hundred-pound grandmother clubbing a snake to death with a garden shovel is somehow comical, bewildering, and impressive, all at once.

  “I used to be afraid of snakes,” she says, placing her red purse on the glass table in the courtyard. She steps into the shade of the house and uses her foot to straighten the doormat. “At Heart Mountain, I remember that your grandfather wanted to hike out across the desert and up to the mountain, but people always talked about seeing rattlesnakes up there in all the rocks, and I was scared.”

  Prisoners were permitted to hike out to Heart Mountain, the tall, rocky hill after which the camp was named, and many did. It was, aside from heading to Cody to obtain a marriage license from the justice of the peace or joining a work crew to pick sugar beets in Montana, one of the few opportunities the prisoners would have had to step beyond the barbed wire. The guards, armed with their machines guns, could see the venturing prisoners from their tall watchtowers, and with so many miles of desert surrounding the camp on all sides, everyone knew the prisoners’ chances of surviving an escape attempt were slim. In the four years Heart Mountain remained open, no one even tried, although a sixty-three-year-old chef was shot to death by a sentry who claimed he thought the man was trying to escape. (It was later discovered that the old man had been inside the barbed-wire fence, and facing the guard.)

  “Put on your most comfortable pair of shoes,” Ojichan told my grandmother one warm summer afternoon, standing in the doorway of their room, the sun at his back, his khakis clean and starched, his tall, knee-high leather boots polished and bright. “And pants,” he added, glancing at the white cotton skirt that fell just below her knees. “You need pants. We’re going for a hike.”

  Obaachan obediently placed her work aside. She knew better than to tell him she didn’t feel like trekking out to the mountain in the hot, dry heat; that she was nervous about the rattlesnakes young men liked to kill, bring home, and spread out on their rickety front porches for spectators; that she saw no point in getting a bird’s-eye view of their prison. His words, she understood, were more a command than an invitation. So she stood up and asked Ojichan to close the door while she changed.

  “What are you working on now?” he asked, shutting the door and walking toward her to check out the thin piece of cloth she’d laid aside on her cot.

  “Another belt,” she said. She was referring to a Belt of a Thousand Stitches, or senninbari, an old Japanese tradition. Whenever a man went off to war, someone from home—a wife, mother, or sister—would cut a sash of cloth, and pass it around to various women. Each person was to sew a single stitch in the fabric, so that, in total, there were a thousand stitches by a thousand different people. The soldier would then wear the belt at all times, and the belief was that it would protect him from harm and guarantee safe return. These belts circulated frequently, my grandmother remembers, from friends and friends of friends, and over her years at Heart Mountain, Obaachan ended up sewing her single stitch into a number of them.

  “I never asked which side they were fighting for,” Obaachan tells me, her voice low and secretive, as though realizing maybe she did something wrong all those years ago. She shrugs, still standing in the courtyard, her Transitions lenses growing dark in the bright light. “Maybe I was sewing stitches in a belt that would end up being for someone fighting for Japan. It was not the kind of thing I could ask, really. It would’ve been inappropriate. If a woman asked me to do my part, I stitched and passed it on to the next person. I didn’t ask questions.”

  It’s very unlikely—impossible, rather—that my grandmother was stitching belts for someone fighting for Japan. Instead, she was likely stitching for one of the twenty-five thousand Japanese Americans who participated in the US war effort. All of them, whether volunteers or draftees, fought in their own segregated unit, one comprised only of Nisei. The all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team had to work hard to earn the respect—and trust—of their fellow hakujin soldiers during the war. However, after liberating the town of Bruyères in Northeastern France and rescuing the “Lost Battalion,” they did gain that respect, at least within the military. Overall, eighteen thousand total awards were bestowed upon the 442nd, including ninety-five hundred Purple Hearts, fifty-two Distinguished Service Crosses, and seven Distinguished Unit Citations. To this day, the 442nd remains the most decorated military unit in American history. Over nine hundred men and women from the Heart Mountain camp served on America’s behalf in the war, so many of the belts my grandmother stitched would have been sent to a friend’s nephew or son, maybe even someone she’d seen in the mess hall or movie theatre.

  Besides, prisoners were not permitted to send any mail to Japan, which is why so many families lost touch with their Japanese friends and relatives during the forties. And all mail, incoming and outgoing, was read by the authorities and checked for signs of espionage or language that appeared suspicious. When my grandmother received letters from her sister, the seal was broken and taped shut. When the African American minister’s mail arrived, it, too, had clearly been read. Everything my grandparents sent from Heart Mountain would have been checked as well. The authorities weren’t willing to take any chances with their prisoners—no “Jap” could be trusted.

  Despite the fact that the Axis was facing major losses on all three fronts through the summer of 1943—the Allies were targeting mainland Greece and Italy, and the Soviets defeated the Germans in the Battle of Kursk—and despite the fact that the tide of the war had clearly turned in favor of the Allies, the American view of the Japanese was not growing
any less harsh. After all, the war against the Japanese in the Pacific had by this point become known as “A War without Mercy.” An example of the American attitude toward the Japanese could be summarized by the words of the controversial but ever-popular Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who explained that his formula in the war was to “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs.”

  In her room at Heart Mountain, Obaachan slipped from her skirt, folded it, and placed it neatly on her cot while my grandfather waited by the door. She eased her feet into a pair of thick wool socks, grabbed a pair of pants from her shelf, and selected a pair of shoes to wear for the hike. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, too, to protect her skin from the intense Wyoming sun.

  There are photographs of this day in the sparse album of my grandparents’ early years as a married couple. Obaachan, lipsticked and pretty, her hair shoulder length and wavy from the pin curls she slept in each night, sitting on a boulder, her legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles, her head tilted back, her chin high, like the pictures of movie stars from that era. Ojichan, standing, one foot resting on a rock, the tall leather boots dark against his light clothing, his collared shirt unbuttoned at the top, his face young and serious, but happy. High up on the mountain, there is no barbed wire in sight.

  However, excursions like the one in the photograph were rare for my grandparents. As each month of 1943 passed, they continued to settle into the monotony of life at Heart Mountain, which over time began to function much like a small city. (With a population of 10,800, it was, in fact, the third largest “city” in Wyoming from 1942 to 1945.) Work helped distract them and provided structure. My grandfather tended to grow tired of the tedious jobs available at Heart Mountain rather quickly, and switched positions often. He worked as a block manager for awhile, served as a clerk in the electricity department, and eventually traveled on the work crews that occasionally left Heart Mountain. Obaachan continued to work the same job she’d had at Pomona, in the mess hall, through the entirety of the war.