Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  Neither of them would have made much money in their jobs. The War Relocation Authority made a rule that no Japanese could earn more than a private in the army, whose salary was $21 a month. This rule applied to everyone, including teachers, nurses, and even medical doctors. Most of the prisoners were paid between $12 and $19 per month. Obaachan and Ojichan, both of whom would have been considered unskilled laborers, would have been in the $12 category. Generally, prisoners at Heart Mountain were expected to work forty-eight hours a week. In Obaachan’s case, that meant three short shifts a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, seven days a week. Many prisoners, like my grandmother’s family, who never would have complained about inequity, accepted their meager wages without protest. However, the discrepancy was obvious. For instance, while internee doctors were paid $19 a month at Heart Mountain, Caucasian nurses working at the same hospital earned $150 per month. At the Heart Mountain schools, Japanese American teachers faced similar discrimination, earning $228 a year, while Caucasian instructors were paid between $2,000 and $2,600 annually.

  My grandmother had never had a real job before becoming a prisoner, since she took care of her mother full-time after finishing high school, so she tells me she remembers being somewhat excited about having a source of income, rather than annoyed by the low wages. Her housing, food, and medical needs were paid for, so with her $12 a month, she was able to purchase things like clothing, snack food, toiletries, and other items. Plus, she had been raised without many luxuries, so limited money was not much of an issue for her.

  Each morning, Obaachan got up and headed to the Block 17 mess hall to measure out and then distribute to each prisoner the rationed one teaspoon of sugar. Her supervisor there was a young woman named Yoshi, and she was a few years older than the rest of the workers, probably around age twenty-four or twenty-five. Although Yoshi was not pretty, she was thin, had noticeably good posture, and moved with grace and confidence. While most of the workers had very little experience in food service, Yoshi had worked as a waitress back in California, prior to coming to Heart Mountain. She was very professional, and she was the type of person who would have embraced any job earnestly, whether it was in a prison mess hall or a fancy restaurant.

  “If jelly is served, you must wipe the rim of the jar before putting the lid back on,” Yoshi explained during orientation, efficiently wiping all the spilled jam from a jar, then replacing the lid. “Make sure the lid is on tight, too. We don’t want to create more of a mess for ourselves, and we certainly don’t have food to waste.

  “Waitresses,” she said, looking at her staff of young women, “as you know, during the meal you’ll be serving drinks. Politely ask people what they would like. Pay special attention to the elderly. Make sure you always ask them if they are in need of anything. It is our duty to be helpful and courteous to every single person who steps into this room, even those who are not always courteous to us in return. Does everyone understand this?” At that point, Obaachan and the rest of the crew nodded, half nervous, half mesmerized by the young woman’s poise and her comfort in commanding an audience. As a Japanese woman in the 1940s, Yoshi would have been unusual. Even the young men who served as busboys did not dare cross her or question her orders.

  “I would not say that we all liked her—or disliked her, for that matter—but we did respect her,” Obaachan explains. “If a waitress had a difficult person at one of her tables, Yoshi would step in to help mediate. If someone was getting behind, she would help the person catch up. So I guess she was a good boss.”

  The mess halls at Heart Mountain received their food supply from a number of sources. Milk came from a creamery in nearby Powell, and the camp did rely on canned goods for many of its meals. However, the camp also produced a good bit of its own food. For political reasons, the War Relocation Authority wanted to make the camp as self-sufficient as possible. If they purchased the food locally, the locals would resent losing their own sources. If they purchased it from outside the area, the locals would be angry that the local economy was not being supported. The best option, politically, was for Heart Mountain to produce at least some of its own food.

  In the spring of 1943, a few months after my grandparents’ wedding, farming efforts began. First, the prisoners completed the Heart Mountain Division of the Shoshone Irrigation Project, helping with sixteen hundred feet of a five thousand-foot canal. This project, still in use today, allows barley to grow where the barracks of the prison once were. The prisoners’ next task was to clear several thousand acres of sagebrush so that cabbage, peas, beans, carrots, cantaloupe, watermelon, and other fruits and vegetables could be grown. Although the locals believed that crops could not grow in that part of Wyoming and actually laughed at the idea, the prisoners embraced the challenge and were able to transform the dry ground into fertile soil. That first autumn harvest yielded 1,065 tons of produce; the next year was even better, with twenty-five hundred tons harvested. Heart Mountain also raised cattle, pigs, and chicken for its own use, all on land that had been semidesert prior to the irrigation project.

  Late in the afternoon, in Florida, Obaachan calls me into her bedroom. She has recently purchased a new bedspread and wants to show me. “I’m going green,” she says with a sly grin, pointing to her bed, with its light and dark green squares. I run my hand along the stitching and tell her I like it very much. She shrugs. “It was time for a change.” My uncle Charles’s wife, who loves to decorate and shop, helped her pick it out. “We looked all over for the perfect one, went to so many places, and I finally found it.”

  Obaachan is funny this way. She is often flexible about details—she isn’t a person who fusses about colors or brands, and most of the time, her main priority is functionality. But on occasion, when she decides she wants or needs something, she knows precisely what she wants, and nothing else will do. She will keep looking until she finds that specific item, that specific shade of blue or gray, that particular material.

  I climb onto the corner of the bed and sit down, hanging my legs over the side. There’s a large mirror on top of the dresser, right across from the bed, and I see myself in the reflection. I look around the room: another dresser that matches the larger one, stained the same strange, yellowy shade. A nightstand beside the bed. A small bookshelf in the corner of the room, with a few of Obaachan’s favorites: Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility, and a handful of others. Despite her vast reading repertoire, she doesn’t own many books. On the opposite side of the room, Obaachan sits at her desk, gazing out the window at the golf course.

  “I don’t know much about golf,” Obaachan says, “but sometimes these old men look so funny when they swing.” We watch as a pair of golfers whirl past on their cart. The sun is high in the sky, and the golfers are wearing visors. Obaachan straightens a stack of papers and turns to look at me. “You have more questions for me?” she asks with a look of expectancy. She is all business today.

  “Yes,” I say with a smile, adjusting my position on the bed. “I always have questions. Are you getting tired of all the interviews?”

  “No,” she says emphatically, and I believe her.

  “Well,” I pause to figure out the best way to put it. “I guess I still don’t have a sense of how you spent your free time.” I realize the irony of the terminology—free time in prison—but don’t know how else to say it. “You know, what you did when you weren’t working at the mess hall, or taking care of chores. I mean, did you have free time?”

  Obaachan frowns, twists her mouth to the side, and says nothing for a moment. What did she do during those years at Heart Mountain—besides work at the mess hall, sweep the apartment, wash and iron clothes? How were those thousands of hours spent? Where were they spent? With whom? Oddly, the memories of everyday life are the most elusive. While she struggles to recall how she spent her time each day, and the names of the neighbors and coworkers she interacted with on a daily basis, my grandmother does remember, often with vivid clarity, special events and specific people who
made an impression.

  The first winter at Heart Mountain, sometime around when my grandparents married, the authorities had a local fire company come to the camp and flood a concave area to create an ice-skating rink. With the harsh temperatures, the water froze quickly. “I’d never ice-skated before,” Obaachan says, remembering, smiling a little. She adjusts her position on the chair. “But I ordered a pair of skates from the Montgomery Ward catalog.” In the end, she only skated a handful of times—the temperatures and wind made being outdoors too uncomfortable for her. But for many Heart Mountain prisoners, ice-skating was a popular means of entertainment during the long winters. “And then there was the Heart Mountain craft show,” she says. “Women, farm women who probably all of a sudden had time to do things they were very skilled at, made the most beautiful things.” Quilts with perfect patterns of calico prints. Embroidered pillows with intricate designs. Blankets crocheted with brilliant colors of yarn.

  Certain people remain in my grandmother’s memory as well. In my grandparents’ barrack, there was a curious family of four. The daughter was probably close to Obaachan in age, and she was polite, but always quiet, the type of person whose shyness seemed to inhibit her from even looking at people she didn’t know. Her brother was a giant. He towered over everyone in camp, and his huge frame moved clumsily through the lines and crowds. His eyes had a sort of vacancy, and his mother was with him at all times, nudging him forward, holding on to his elbow, protecting him. He rarely spoke, but occasionally, he would smile, and when he did, his face would brighten like a warm spring day. This bulky, intimidating young man was really as harmless as an infant.

  “And then there was Cowboy Joe,” Obaachan says with a giggle, leaning back in her chair. Long before blue jeans were fashionable, this young man wore them every day. Along with his jeans, he sported a tan cowboy hat with a wide brim, and a pair of worn brown-leather cowboy boots. He seemed to rotate his flannel shirts, wearing the red one, then the blue one, every other day. “The only cowboys I’d seen were in movies,” Obaachan says. “You know, Westerns. And of course I’d thought there was no such thing as a Japanese cowboy.” She wondered where he had lived before the war. Had he been a ranch hand? Had he ridden horses for days, driving cattle across thousands of acres? Or did he simply like the cowboy style of clothing? My grandmother never learned the answers to these questions—she didn’t actually ever speak to the young man—but Cowboy Joe was a source of interest and curiosity among the women Obaachan knew, particularly during long and tedious hours on the job.

  Another memorable character from camp lived in Obaachan’s barrack, just a few doors down. He was very flamboyant and effeminate, powdering his face each morning so that he looked almost like a geisha, and always walking with a notable sway in his hips. Before the war, he had been an actor or director in a theatre, and he continued his theatrical work at Heart Mountain. One year, for the big New Year’s celebration, he dressed as a woman. He stuffed his dress so that it appeared as though he had enormous breasts, and he wore lots of blush and eye makeup in addition to his usual face powder. Around and around he danced at that party, spinning and laughing as though he was having the time of his life. At the time it was one of the most bizarre events my grandmother had ever seen. She still recalls the experience with a fit of shy laughter.

  But of all the interesting and unusual people my grandmother came into contact with at Heart Mountain, perhaps most memorable of all would be the one hakujin who had willingly come there as a prisoner. The woman was tall and had shoulder-length blonde hair, and in the sea of shorter, black-haired inmates, she was always easily spotted. Her name was Estelle Ishigo, and after the evacuation from the West Coast was announced, she had decided to go with her Japanese husband.

  This woman’s choice to marry a Japanese man was in and of itself an act of rebellion and courage. Not only was it taboo to marry outside of your race at the time, it was actually illegal for a hakujin woman to marry a Japanese man in California. Their marriage was legally legitimate, so they must have traveled out of state for the ceremony. When Estelle had learned of the evacuation from the West Coast, she had written and asked for permission from the U.S. government to join her husband at the camp, and they allowed her to do so. The stipulation, however, was that she herself would be treated as every other evacuee. She was not to expect any preferential treatment whatsoever, the government informed her.

  My grandmother did not know Estelle Ishigo personally, but she would say hello to her when their paths crossed. When I imagine Estelle, I think of her as the type of person my grandmother would have looked up to—despite their very obvious differences—and I think Obaachan respected this incredible woman, who drew and painted and played the violin in the Heart Mountain mandolin band, and whose convictions and devotion to her husband forced her away from her own family and into years of imprisonment.

  Of course, during her imprisonment, my grandmother never would have imagined that all four of her children would end up marrying hakujin, that almost three decades later, long after every prisoner had left Heart Mountain, long after the rickety wooden barracks had begun to decay, long after my grandparents had moved to the East Coast to start a new life and raise a family, my hakujin father, a young man who’d recently returned from a tour in Vietnam, would marry their daughter. His father, my Pap-Pap, a quiet man with steady green eyes who had fought in the Pacific during the war, never expressed any disapproval of the union, at least not that I know of. At Heart Mountain Obaachan would not have imagined that her oldest grandchild would have light brown hair; that all of us would end up not with the dark eyes of our Japanese parent, but with varying shades of hazel and green; that the Japanese in us would, generation by generation, be growing less distinct.

  I remember my grandfather explaining to me as a child that because I was not one hundred percent Japanese, it was possible that I would be looked down upon in Japan—I wasn’t “pure.” I don’t believe he said this to upset me, or to express his regret over my parentage. He did, after all, like my father very much. Instead, I think Ojichan wished to compliment my country of birth, a country he loved and believed in. Despite what he had experienced here, America was, for the most part, more tolerant than the Japan of his youth. I’m supposing Ojichan had made that determination about racial “purity” based upon his own experiences in Japan, back in the 1920s, when the country remained suspicious of Western influence. He knew with my green eyes and my hair that was not quite dark enough, I’d immediately be marked as a hapa, or person of half-Japanese descent.

  Today, this prejudice has changed significantly, and Japan is known for its great interest in American culture, with its brand names and styles. Young people dye their hair lighter; they wear colored contacts to conceal their dark brown eyes, and, alarmingly, they even have surgeries to make the crease in their eyelids more pronounced. In their magazines, it’s common to see biracial models, precisely because they exhibit hakujin characteristics. In the 1940s, however, in the depressing and segregated corner that was their existence, my grandparents would not have dreamed that such a world could exist.

  At her desk, Obaachan takes a sip of water from one of the sepia Honda glasses she and my grandfather have had for decades and wipes her mouth with a napkin.

  “With that snake in my courtyard, though, the one I killed, well, at my age, Kimi, I have to just go ahead and do things,” Obaachan says, changing the subject after there has been a pause. It becomes clear to me that the killing of the snake is a milestone of sorts, a major accomplishment for her—as I suppose it should be. “You see, I couldn’t let my fear keep me from doing what I needed to do. I don’t climb up on ladders anymore, and I don’t mind asking for help when someone’s here visiting, but I can’t be calling people, the neighbor or your aunt and uncle, and asking them for help any time something’s a little difficult. I need to take care of myself.”

  This sense of needing to handle things on her own is not a characteristic Obaachan ha
s grown into in old age—it’s something gathered over a lifetime, I think—but when did it begin for her? Was it in her teenage years, when, as she herself has told me, the duties of taking care of her mother and the rest of the household chores simply fell upon her shoulders? Was it in her first few months of marriage, when she realized, too late, that my grandfather was so demanding, and that he would not be the source of comfort and support that she’d hoped? Was it when she had children of her own? Or maybe it’s something else, one of those events she has chosen not to tell me about.

  Chapter 11

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, OBAACHAN STANDS IN HER kitchen, leaning against the white countertop, the Florida heat growing dangerously warm outside, the air conditioning humming softly. In her left hand she holds the periwinkle dish towel I bought her in Stratford and sent from England the spring I studied abroad there. (I think she gets it out each time I visit, maybe the morning I’m to arrive, because each March it’s clipped with a clothespin to the handle of her stove, for drying dishes, as though that’s where she keeps it, always, in plain view.) The towel is composed of squares with sketches of Shakespeare characters in famous scenes, each from one of his plays: Iago whispering to Othello, Hamlet holding a human skull, three witches hovering over a cauldron, and others.

  It’s noon. Obaachan has already exercised—an abbreviated walk around the neighborhood, not the two-mile loop she used to do, when I first began visiting her. Around Christmastime, she fell in her bedroom, and since then, she is not as sure on her feet. She now limits her walks to a mile. By this point in the day she has already aired out the house and closed it back up, and watered the plants in her courtyard as well. If I weren’t visiting she would spend the afternoon reading at the desk in the corner of her large bedroom, where the window overlooks the golf course, or maybe watching a movie from the library on the portable DVD player my uncle Jay recently bought her. She just bought Girl with a Pearl Earring for $5.50 at Walmart, she tells me, which she read and loved as a novel. “In the movie, Colin Firth is the painter,” she says with a grin. “You know Colin Firth. ‘Mr. Darcy,’” she adds in a British accent, referring to the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice.