Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  I sometimes wonder whether my grandmother gets lonely living by herself in Florida. Her days vary little here, and her life is characterized by precision. She goes to few places: the Publix grocery store nearby, the Suntree Public Library down the street, and, on occasion, the Bealls outlet, a discount warehouse with thousands of items that did not sell at the main Bealls store. On Sunday mornings, Obaachan watches a Charles Stanley sermon on television, leaning forward and squinting at the lean, tall figure on the screen, but on most other days, she takes her morning walk and then spends the afternoon at home. Between noon and twelve thirty, she makes lunch, a bowl of miso soup with a sliced apple for dessert, or something else light and healthy. In the afternoons, she’ll read an article from Time, clip a recipe or two from Real Simple, do a Sudoku puzzle. And at five thirty, she begins cooking dinner. She watches the evening news on the small, old television set in her dining room while she eats. But she insists she isn’t lonely, likes that Emily Brontë line from Wuthering Heights: “A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”

  Once, when I encouraged her to have some more local contacts in case of an emergency, she shrugged and said, “I have a friend, a Japanese lady, who lives in the next neighborhood over. We both walk in the mornings, so sometimes I see her. She has my number, and I have hers.” Her Colombian neighbor, “the gentleman,” could also be called upon for help when absolutely necessary. She didn’t need any more acquaintances, I inferred from her furrowed brow and pursed lips—or advice from meddling grandchildren.

  Obaachan has fostered this same sense of independence in her four children. Even though my grandfather was the one who made all the decisions in the house, the one who controlled the atmosphere and timetable of every day, it was my grandmother, I believe, who possessed the strength to keep the family together through so many transitions and hardships. It was Ojichan who relied on my grandmother to make things happen for him.

  At Heart Mountain, one such thing was to have children. The pressure began shortly after their wedding in December of 1942. Obaachan wanted children, she assures me, and in fact, she quickly became obsessed with getting pregnant. Lots of young people got married at Heart Mountain—Obaachan was not the only one to feel the strain of the war when it came to securing a partner—and lots of them were having babies. With so many infants and toddlers coming through the line at the mess hall, Obaachan began to feel ready to have a child of her own, but she felt it took her awhile to get pregnant. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that my grandfather was desperate to start a family; he undoubtedly would have been vocal about this desire. Each month Obaachan hoped and prayed that the small red stain would not make its regular appearance, but each month, it showed up. “Not this month,” she would have to tell my Ojichan, her eyes lowered, her mouth twisted to the side in disappointment. “I’m sorry.”

  When my grandmother at last missed a period, two months before their one-year anniversary, she didn’t mention it to my grandfather right away. She couldn’t bear to get his hopes up and then disappoint him. She studied the calendar posted at the community center, counted out the weeks, and calculated that the baby would probably be born somewhere around her birthday, in July. She felt relieved that she would not have to be concerned about caring for a newborn in the cruel winter months. The drafty room and bitter-cold days would have been difficult: keeping the child warm enough, bathing, cleaning the cloth diapers, and scheduling trips to the restroom whenever someone else could watch the baby would be only a few of the challenges. In July, the weather would be hot and dry, and she would have until September until the snow began—just enough time to get used to motherhood, she thought.

  When he heard the news about Obaachan’s pregnancy, my grandfather was elated. After spending four years completely alone, with his loved ones on the other side of the Pacific, family had become very important to him. Having a child of his own was something he’d been dreaming about for years. “I’m going to be a father,” Ojichan would say, repeating the words over and over when they were in their room or sitting on the small wooden porch at the entryway. He talked about the baby constantly—whether it would be a boy or a girl; good names for a child and whether to choose a Japanese name or an American one; how he hoped his children might one day meet his mother. Although Ojichan’s father had passed away by the time the United States entered the war, he always hoped he might see his mother again one day, and now, he would have a grandchild in tow.

  Meanwhile, Obaachan suffered from terrible morning sickness. At first, she thought something was wrong. No one had explained to her that it was a common issue. Her mother never talked to her about sex or pregnancy or other private matters of the body, so she assumed the frequent vomiting was a bad sign. Obaachan had no appetite, and she even lost weight in her first trimester. Certain foods and smells—things she had always eaten—would overwhelm her with nausea. Going to the mess hall for the morning meal was always difficult. She was weak because she couldn’t hold down anything she ate, and many of the kitchen aromas made her sick.

  Obaachan’s first visit to the hospital at Heart Mountain helped put her mind at ease. In the small white room, a hakujin nurse ordered her to slip into a gown and then returned to check her blood pressure and weight. Her doctor was one of the two hakujin doctors hired by the War Relocation Authority to serve the ten thousand internees at Heart Mountain. He looked a little young to be a doctor with his thick blond hair and fleshy red cheeks, but he seemed knowledgeable and confident during the checkup. When he gently pressed his fingers into her abdomen, Obaachan twitched nervously. She still did not look pregnant, and no man besides Ojichan had ever seen her stomach.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked as the doctor jotted down a few notes on his clipboard.

  The doctor assured her she seemed to be in good shape. “I see here that you told the nurse you’re having some morning sickness,” he added, reading over Obaachan’s file. “You needn’t worry about that. Many women have it early in the pregnancy. Give it a few more weeks and I bet you’ll be feeling just fine.”

  Obaachan wondered whether this was true, or if the doctor was simply trying to console her. Surely she could not survive nine months of daily vomiting and consistent waves of nausea or continue to have no appetite and lose weight. In these early months, my grandmother felt so sick that there were moments when she wondered why she had so desperately wanted a baby. But, just as the doctor predicted, by the third month, she no longer had morning sickness, and her pregnancy became much easier.

  As soon as Obaachan began feeling better, she became a very conscientious mother-to-be. Although it was difficult to do so because of the limited options at the mess hall, especially in the winter months, when the prisoners could not farm the nearby fields, she tried to eat properly, following the doctor’s recommendation to try to eat vegetables and protein as much as possible. She also made herself drink three servings of milk a day, which she knew was important for the baby’s growth. At each meal, she sat down after her shift, and sipped milk from a tall, thin mess-hall glass. Realizing that Heart Mountain was not going to be the most idyllic place to raise a child, she wanted to give her baby the best opportunity to be as healthy and strong as possible by taking care of him in the womb.

  I can’t help wondering how I would have felt about having children if I were in my grandmother’s situation. Given the poor living conditions and especially the uncertainty about what the next day would bring, I find it somewhat surprising that she would have wanted to have a child at all. She and her fellow prisoners had no idea whether they would be there for a few more months, or years, or—and most certainly, this terrifying thought must have haunted them in dark moments—forever. Then again, perhaps the idea of raising a child was in some way an attempt at autonomy, a desire to create a better future. I feel just a little bit guilty for questioning my grandparents’ strong yearning to start a family. I know I’ve never faced the hardships and inequalities they have—it’s hard to
say how I would have acted.

  After all, it seems that everyone, both authorities and prisoners, tried to make the best of the situation by creating a sense of longevity at Heart Mountain. The Heart Mountain hospital was sufficiently equipped and staffed. There were also a number of options in terms of entertainment. In addition to the movies that were shown two times a week, there was a community center that hosted activities like art exhibits, featuring work done by some of the prisoners, including paintings and handmade crafts. People created bands that performed concerts. In the summer months, the authorities filled a hole that a group of young men had dug, creating a swimming pool where many prisoners spent the long, hot afternoons, and where children splashed for hours on end. But what would it be like for a child to grow up in a small, dusty room, with no meals ever taken together as a family at a kitchen table, no trips to the grocery store, no family excursions, no memories except what was permitted within that barbed-wire enclosure? Wouldn’t it be strange to discuss democracy, the Constitution, and the merits of America?

  Aside from that cruel paradox, the education available at Heart Mountain was certainly not ideal. Most people wouldn’t really think about their child’s education so early, but my grandparents, both of whom were obsessed with it, probably did the minute Obaachan became pregnant. The teachers at Heart Mountain were expected to sign year-long contracts, rather than nine-month ones like their colleagues employed in “regular” school districts. (They were paid $2,000 for twelve months; their peers working outside of the camp were compensated $1,920 for nine. And Wyoming Congressman John J. McIntyre still argued that the Heart Mountain teachers were being overpaid for their services.) Moreover, the student-to-teacher ratio was forty-eight to one in the elementary school and fifty to one in the secondary school.

  When the schools opened in October of 1942, classes were held in uninsulated barracks with one dim light that hung from the center of the barrack. Students had no desks, and they were forced to share limited textbooks. In other words, if a high school student had chemistry homework to complete, she would have to return to school in the evening and sign out a book. Hopefully, another student would not have beaten her to it. Chalkboards were made of a simple piece of plywood painted black. By May of 1943, though, a high school building had been constructed, complete with an auditorium, a gymnasium, a home economics room, a machine shop, and a wood shop. The high school students, the Heart Mountain Eagles, even competed with other local teams in athletic events. There was, overall, a great attempt to make life “normal” for the young people at Heart Mountain, which probably helped to put the minds of parents at ease.

  I’m not sure when my grandparents’ passion for education began—although Obaachan’s desire to go to college suggests that it was always important to her—but both of them made it a top priority in our family. Ojichan, concerned that I would not learn to multiply, quizzed me on my times tables when I was in third grade. He would get out his globe, spin it slowly, fingers spread out and pressed to it, and point to various countries to help me get a sense of world geography. Even though he never finished high school because he’d left Japan just shy of seventeen, he read constantly and made an effort to be learning, always, whether it was about nutrition, or gardening, or the stock market. Obaachan has since told me that she still regrets not attending college, and that she did not want to raise her family in the way that her own parents did. The daughters, she would always insist, must have the same educational opportunities as the sons.

  Obaachan turns to look out the kitchen window at her grapefruit trees, which are heavy with the full yellow fruit. “After we found out we were having a baby, maybe something clicked in me,” she says softly. “It’s hard to explain, but all of a sudden I started growing so tired of everything.” She shakes her head, folds her hands, and turns to look at me. “I just couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

  It was not so much the rules and the physical limitations of the barbed wire that got to her, or even the homesickness or brutal Wyoming winters. It was, in my grandmother’s own words, “all those Japanese people” that began to wear on her. She grew frustrated with the shikataganai attitude, the swarms of sad faces that made no effort to change their plight, the sense of hopelessness that pervaded the camp.

  My grandfather, too, began dreaming of life after Heart Mountain. “I don’t think we should return to California,” he announced one day.

  Obaachan looked up from her position on her cot. She was sewing herself a smock for later in the pregnancy, one of her two maternity shirts. She’d bought the fabric, a soft yellow calico cotton, at the Heart Mountain dry-goods store.

  “Because it won’t be the same, you know,” my grandfather continued. “People won’t want us there. They never have. And if you thought it was bad before, imagine how it will be when the war ends. Plus,” he added, pausing, “we need to go out on our own. Start life on our own terms, the two of us.”

  Obaachan said nothing. While she desperately longed to return to her old home and old life, to the way things were—the house on Pico Street with Papa’s camellias, the buzz of shoppers, and the thick smell of shoyu in Little Tokyo—part of her must have realized that the life she had known before the war would never return. Ojichan was right. It was probably best to leave that life behind. To move on. She wondered where the rest of her family would end up. Would her parents return to Los Angeles? Or would they seek a fresh start as well? What about her sister, brother-in-law, and nephew? Where would they go? And what about her brothers, both of whom had enlisted? She wondered about her family, even though she had already begun to lose touch with them. She had seen her older brother a few times—he worked as a pharmacist in a German POW camp in Indiana and would come to Heart Mountain whenever he had leave—but she had not seen her younger brother or her sister since the spring of 1942.

  “We should be farmers,” Ojichan continued, his voice determined. “Like the book says. All you need is five acres, and you can grow enough to sustain yourself. You trade the things you grow for other things you might need, like meat. Imagine being completely independent—not needing anyone! No government telling you what to do or where to go, no people charging too much at the store. It would just be us, our family,” he said, looking at Obaachan, studying her face.

  My grandfather was referring to a book he had recently borrowed from the Heart Mountain library: Five Acres and Independence. Written in 1935, this classic back-to-the-land how-to is still in print today. How enticing that title would have been to them! On my grandfather’s insistence, Obaachan read it when he was finished. The book talked about how with five acres and a careful plan, it was possible to be self-sufficient. Both of them found it inspiring, and my grandfather, who was easily caught up in exciting schemes, was especially enthralled.

  “As soon as the war ends and we can get out of here, we’ll take out a loan and buy property. Somewhere in the Midwest, maybe. Good farming country there. And I think people won’t be so against the Japanese. They might be more open to having us as their neighbors. It’s gotta be better than the West Coast. I’m sure of that.”

  Obaachan did not wish to deter his enthusiasm, and she’d already learned not to disagree with her husband, so she simply raised her eyebrows in an approving way, smiled, and returned to her sewing. At the back of her mind, she probably considered the many pitfalls in my grandfather’s plan. First, would they ever be allowed to leave Heart Mountain? Wasn’t he getting ahead of himself? And besides, if they were permitted to leave, would they be able to own property? Would there be a day when hakujin people didn’t mind having Japanese neighbors? Or would they always be eyed with suspicion and disapproval? She suppressed the urge to speak of these things. There was no point in smothering Ojichan’s dream if it helped him get through the long days in their prison, nor was there any use in spoiling his good mood. Since learning that a baby was on the way, he had been especially cheerful and helpful. It was springtime, and the baby would be arriving soon. Ob
aachan needed my grandfather to be in the best of spirits for the months ahead.

  “My pregnancy was going along smoothly, but then, in May, I had a, well—” Obaachan pauses, watching the branches of the grapefruit tree lift and sway as the afternoon breeze picks up. “A close call, I guess you could say.”

  She was trying to brew Ojichan a cup of tea. She grabbed the copper kettle in their apartment and waddled toward the laundry room down the block, which always had boiling water available. Inside, a woman she recognized but did not know glanced at Obaachan’s swelling stomach and asked how far along she was.

  “Eight weeks left,” she told the woman, smiling. My grandmother only gained about twenty pounds with each of her four pregnancies, so she would not have looked all that big, even in her third trimester.

  As Obaachan walked slowly back to her apartment, the boiling kettle in hand, she looked ahead, at the mountain, rising up from the plain, sharp and almost pretty with just a little bit of snow left near its peak. After eight months of winter, Obaachan could finally sense spring in the air, in the meadowlarks that flitted about the barracks and the green stems of tulips that were just beginning to emerge from the ground. The sun felt warm on her face and her bare arms, and she took a deep breath, content.