Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  And then, without warning, she felt a searing pain ripple through her body, burning her skin, the pain so sharp she could barely breathe, her legs weakening, and then her body falling toward the ground. Everything went black.

  Chapter 12

  WHEN OBAACHAN WOKE UP FROM BLACKING OUT THAT afternoon in May of 1944, it took her a few moments to realize where she was. A metal cart with a stack of folded towels and thin, shiny instruments. A tall, white shelf stocked with glass mason jars and brown medicine bottles. The low hum of people bustling about and exchanging words. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she figured out that she was in the Heart Mountain hospital. Beside her, Ojichan sat in a sloped wooden chair, leaning forward nervously, and as soon as she stirred, he took hold of her hand and forced a smile. Her father stood in the corner, his brown hands folded at his waist, holding his fedora hat, his head lowered.

  “What happened?” Obaachan asked, her voice hoarse. Her hand moved instinctively toward her abdomen. “What’s going on?” She sat up in her bed.

  “Shhh,” my grandfather cooed. “Don’t try to get up. Be still. The boiling water from the tea, it spilled all over you on your way home. Nobody saw it happen, so we don’t know if you tripped or what happened.” He paused and glanced at his father-in-law. “Do you remember?”

  She shook her head and began to cry. “The baby?”

  My grandfather let go of her hand and looked away. “They can’t be sure yet.”

  The doctor, the same hakujin man who’d given my grandmother her initial checkup months earlier and reassured her that her pregnancy was progressing nicely, tapped lightly on the open door and walked in with his clipboard. Obaachan wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked at him, nervously fiddling with the sheets. The doctor glanced at my grandfather, trying to assess whether he had told Obaachan about the baby’s status.

  “We’ll need a day or two,” he said, tucking his clipboard beneath his arm and shuffling his feet. “You went through a good deal of trauma, so it’s just hard to determine the baby’s status right now. We’ll know in a few days whether you’ll be able to carry to full term.” Although she cannot recall what happened exactly, my grandmother does know that somehow, after she blacked out, she had spilled the kettle of boiling water all over the front of herself that afternoon in May—her abdomen and legs were badly burned.

  Today, so many decades later and with four healthy grown children, my grandmother can look back on this event and describe it as though it were just another everyday occurrence, a mere bump in the road during that era of her life. She admits that it was frightening, and that she was nervous about the outcome, but the incident must have been much worse than she lets on. Considering her months of trying to become pregnant, and considering my grandfather’s obsession with having children, I imagine Obaachan must have felt an enormous amount of anxiety. Those days in the small Heart Mountain hospital must have dragged on with unbearable slowness for both of my grandparents. With every sound of footsteps in the hallway, Obaachan would have looked toward the door, waiting for the doctor, hoping he would arrive in the doorway, smiling, his clipboard in hand, bringing good news. Although Ojichan said nothing about the boiling water during my grandmother’s time in the hospital, she knew even then how he felt about the duties of a mother. A part of him must have held her responsible for the accident. In the years to come, he would make clear to her the seriousness of her role as the mother of his children: “You alone are responsible for our children’s safety. It’s your fault if something happens to them,” he would remind her, long after they’d left Heart Mountain and had more children.

  While Obaachan would later take on that role of keeping the children safe, my grandfather would become the family disciplinarian. On more than one occasion, my mother has described Ojichan’s strict rules, his fiery temper—and his firm belief in that biblical proverb about sparing the rod and spoiling the children. My mother, outspoken, intense, and impulsive, took after Ojichan in terms of temperament, which frequently led to encounters with my grandfather’s infamous black-leather belt. Once, walking the family dog, my mother witnessed her older sister flirting with a neighbor boy and crying out for help. My mother, not realizing that her sister was playing around, ran to her aid and began thrashing the young man with the metal dog chain until she realized what was going on. This event resulted in both girls being punished with the belt.

  Unlike Obaachan, who determined early on that there was no point in arguing with my grandfather and that it was unwise to anger him, my mother had no qualms about voicing her opinion. She refused to let my grandfather get the last word in during any confrontation, which only angered Ojichan more. “If you’d just learn to keep your mouth shut,” her sister told her, “you’d be punished much less.” But my mother couldn’t help herself. She’d argue and complain, insist that she had not been wrong, sass my grandfather, even when his belt was in his hand. My brother and I never saw this side of my grandfather—he was not allowed to discipline us—but in the moments we witnessed flashes of his temper, we understood not to anger him.

  After a few long days, the blond doctor showed up again at my grandmother’s hospital room that May of 1944. He held the stethoscope to Obaachan’s abdomen, pressed his fingertips into various places one more time, examined the purple streaks and blisters on her stomach and legs. He smiled. “We’re letting you go home,” he said. “The baby seems to be doing just fine.”

  Overwhelmed with relief, Obaachan buried her face in my grandfather’s shoulder. Papa, who had stayed at the hospital as much as his duties permitted him, nodded, relieved as well, and without a word, slipped on his fedora hat and walked home to tell his wife.

  In Florida, Obaachan and I are watching the Oscars in the front bedroom of her house. There’s a bed here, but the mattress is old and uncomfortable and moans and veers from side to side when someone sits on it. There’s a television (a new flat screen, which my uncle Jay, the most technologically inclined one in the family, purchased for her on his last visit), and a wicker table with a glass top where Obaachan sometimes sits and works through Sudoku puzzles in the afternoons. There’s also a tall bookshelf that almost reaches the ceiling, and it’s full of family photographs and an assortment of hardback books purchased from the local library’s annual spring sale.

  I’m sprawled out on the bed, a stack of lumpy down pillows stacked behind my back, and a large stainless steel bowl of popcorn propped between my knees. Earlier in the evening, we made the popcorn on the stovetop, according to Obaachan’s directions. Measure three tablespoons of canola oil into a saucepan over medium-high heat. Toss in two kernels, and when they pop, you know the oil is hot. Then add in a third of a cup of popcorn, replace the lid, and shake the pan to let the steam out until the popping ceases. Immediately remove the pan from the burner. Divide the popcorn; add sea salt, no butter.

  In the front bedroom Obaachan is seated on a wooden chair with a thin, worn blue pad, where she always sits for movies. Tonight, she has seen more of the nominated films than I have and knows the predicted winners according to the local newspaper. Compared to her, I haven’t been following movies too well this year.

  “Don’t talk to me about George Clooney,” she says, drawing out the double-O in his last name, wrinkling her nose when he steps on screen in a sleek black tuxedo. Her slight Japanese accent is noticeable when she says his name. “I can’t stand him.”

  Surprised, I ask her why. “Isn’t he sort of that old Hollywood type of guy from your generation?”

  “I just don’t like to watch him.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I just don’t like his face. And I never have, not even when he was on ER.”

  We watch in silence for a few moments, gaping at the expensive gowns and fancy suits, and then she begins asking me about various Hollywood figures. She likes Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman, disapproves of Angelina Jolie, except for the fact that she gives a lot to charity. She reminds me that she named my mother after Rosalind Russe
ll, a woman my grandmother admired for playing strong, gutsy characters who knew how to stand up for themselves.

  When the Three 6 Mafia arrives on stage to sing “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp,” Obaachan gets up from her wooden chair near the door and leaves. I listen as her slippers shuffle across the carpet and hear her bedroom door close softly behind her. She never comes back, and I’m left to wonder what happened. I’d been holding the remote—should I have changed the channel? Did the song offend her?

  The next morning, at breakfast, she explains her exit, shaking her head with a look of disgust. “I can’t stand rap music. Maybe it’s because I’m old. You know, things are just too overwhelming, too loud.” A few years earlier, I’d taken her to a nearby movie theatre in Florida to see Chicago—which I thought she’d like, since it was a film about “her” time—and she’d hated it. Too much flash, too much flesh.

  “Do you like rap music, Kimi?”

  I tell her I don’t mind some of it, on occasion.

  “I read about one guy, a rapper, in Time.” She pauses, silently forming letters with her lips. “Kona? Keen? I can’t remember. His name started with a K.”

  “Kanye West?”

  Her face lights up. “That’s him. You know him? Do you listen to him?”

  I laugh then, the whole conversation striking me as odd and fascinating. My mother is wildly out of touch with pop culture, and proud of it, I think, and yet my grandmother, in her eighties, has read about Kanye West. I tell her I’m impressed, and she shrugs. “I read, watch the news. Even though I’m old, I don’t have to be completely out of the loop,” she says with a smile.

  At Heart Mountain, all new mothers received a kit packed with various items a newborn might need. In each kit were cloth diapers; a little vest; flannel kimonos; pads to prevent soiling the baby’s sheets; soakers, which were crocheted or knitted and used to put over the diapers; and two gowns. A group of Quaker women from Philadelphia made all of these items, packed them up, and shipped them to the internment camps across the country. Quakers, who as a whole protested the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, voiced their opposition prior to removal, but their opinions were drowned out by more powerful forces, so they did what they could to help. When I contact the Quaker Information Center in Philadelphia, I have no luck in tracking down more information about these women and the care packages they sent to Heart Mountain. Perhaps it was the American Friends Service Committee who oversaw this project, or a Friends school, or even a local congregation—we can find no record of the event.

  Still, my grandmother distinctly remembers receiving that package from the Quakers. As she opened the kit and took out the clean, pastel-colored items, all of which were neatly folded and placed into a basket, she fell silent. Having just returned from her scare at the hospital, and still in a lot of pain from the burns, seeing the small green vest and feeling the soft kimonos moved her. She had done enough sewing and crocheting to understand just how much time and effort had gone into preparing the package, and a feeling of gratitude overwhelmed her.

  “Whenever I felt myself getting angry about all that had happened to us, or sad about losing our home on Pico Street, or when I was frustrated by all the dust and the cold weather, I thought about those women. About their generosity to us, even though they were from the East Coast and wouldn’t have known any of us.”

  After all, even her own neighbors back in Los Angeles—people her family had known for decades—had abandoned them after Pearl Harbor, refusing to offer help with packing up or storing items. My grandmother pictured those Quaker women bringing their handmade items to the meeting house and tenderly organizing them into kits, and in that image of kindness and compassion, she found comfort. There were people outside their barbed-wire prison who had not forgotten about them, who did not see them as the cruel, vicious race of enemies described in the papers and in the newsreels, but as human beings, caught up in forces beyond their control.

  “I should have thanked them,” Obaachan says, shaking her head, frustrated with herself. “There are things I should have done. I see them now, too late. I should have sent a letter or something. To let them know what it meant to me. When you’re older, you look back and you realize there are people who lifted you up, who helped you.”

  But at the time she was very distracted, not only by the coming of her baby, but by her mother’s health, which continued to decline. Toward the end of Obaachan’s pregnancy, her mother was taken to the Heart Mountain hospital, where she would remain for months.

  “We always knew,” Obaachan says softly, folding her hands and placing them on the blue cloth placemats on the dining-room table. She straightens out a wrinkle in the tablecloth. “We knew that she would not live for long, even from the beginning, back when I was just a teenager. The doctors told us. It was only a matter of time.”

  Shortly before Obaachan’s due date in July, my grandfather decided to head to Montana with a work crew. This decision seems slightly out of character for him, as he had not done this before, and it also strikes me as odd, given his anticipation about becoming a parent. Wouldn’t he want to be there for the baby’s arrival?

  “We could use the extra money,” he explained when he came home and told my grandmother he’d signed up for a team that was leaving the next day. “For the baby.”

  Work crews frequently left Heart Mountain to pick the sugar beets and beans that grew in Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Prior to the establishment of the Heart Mountain camp, there had been a severe labor shortage in all three of those states. While many Wyoming residents initially opposed the construction of the camp, farmers did realize the potential labor that could come out of this new population. By the time my grandparents arrived in 1942, farmers were filing requests with the Wyoming government to obtain workers from Heart Mountain, inundating their senator with telegrams begging for help.

  The process, however, was not all that simple. First, agreements had to be reached among the WRA heads Milton Eisenhower, Dillon S. Meyer, and especially Governor Nels Smith, who wanted assurance that the Japanese would be promptly returned to the camp after their emergency work was done. The good people of Wyoming, he explained, did not under any circumstances want the Japanese setting up permanent residence in their state. He didn’t agree to work releases until he was satisfied that wouldn’t happen. To further complicate matters, the sixty-three percent of the prisoners at Heart Mountain who were American citizens could not be forced to work. The remaining thirty-seven percent were not legally allowed to become citizens—Obaachan’s parents, for instance, would never be permitted citizenship—and could not be forced to work either. It was necessary then to ensure that all those who worked outside of the camp did so voluntarily, and were paid well for their efforts. It was also necessary for area politicians to attempt to distribute the workers evenly, according to acreage farmed. Wyoming farmers tended to resent this arrangement—why should they have to share the workers with Montana and Nebraska?—but in the end they were forced to accept the stipulations.

  While many young men from Heart Mountain did end up taking this opportunity to earn additional cash, it did have its drawbacks, the primary one being that there was never a set return date, and there was no way to get in touch with someone once they’d left.

  Still, Obaachan didn’t argue with my grandfather over his decision to go to Montana. She knew better than to question his judgment, and, besides, he promised to be back in time for her due date. The two of them arranged for Obaachan’s Papa to check in on her regularly, just to make sure everything was all right. Because his apartment was on the same block, just across the dirt street that separated the rows of barracks, he could easily stop by several times a day.

  As fate would have it, Obaachan’s water broke a few days after my grandfather left, one warm July afternoon, two weeks before her due date. She was at home in the apartment, in between shifts at the mess hall. She had Papa request an ambulance, and shortly thereafter, one pulled up in fron
t of her apartment. Two men helped her struggle into the back of the ambulance and then drove her the short distance to the hospital.

  Obaachan smiles as she recalls this memory. “I knew absolutely nothing about labor,” she tells me—her mother had not prepared her with a single word of explanation or warning—“so I wasn’t the least bit afraid. I’d read an article in a newspaper that told of how a baby had been miraculously born in a car on the way to the hospital, and once I’d heard about how a mother had given birth in a department store. And based on those stories, I guess I thought that when the time came, the baby just sort of slipped out.”

  My grandmother’s naïveté about the realities of labor shocks me—surely she didn’t really think a baby “slipped out” when it was ready—and yet my shock is, I realize, just another sign of how vastly different the worlds we grew up in were. Obaachan had no clue what to expect on her wedding night, or how to track her cycle when she wanted to get pregnant, or even what she was getting herself into when she decided to have a baby.

  I had my first sex-ed class at Alfarata Elementary in the fourth grade. The teacher split us up according to our gender, and we watched a video on how babies are made, what to expect when your first period arrived, and how to use maxipads and tampons. My grandmother, on the other hand, lived in a world where sex was not seen or discussed, where schools wouldn’t have dreamed of offering classes on sex education, and where mothers (at least her mother) did not give the opportunity to ask questions about menstruation or childbirth. A world in which, if a teenager got pregnant out of wedlock, she might be so ashamed that she’d give birth and leave the baby in a Dumpster—as one young girl did at Heart Mountain.

  Two days after Obaachan’s labor began, things really started. “They should’ve sent me home,” Obaachan tells me. “They should’ve told me to go home and call for an ambulance when the labor pains grew stronger. Looking back, I think that’s what would’ve been best for everyone involved.”