Silver Like Dust

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

  As a teenager I didn’t see my grandfather’s death from my mother’s perspective, as one losing a father, or from Obaachan’s perspective, as a woman losing her husband of over fifty years. Even though my grandfather had moments when he must have been nearly intolerable as a spouse—he was demanding, particular, and sometimes severe—he was still very much a part of my grandmother’s existence. Having married so young, and having spent their first years as a couple imprisoned, they shared a deep bond, one that could only be formed after experiencing five decades together. Neither one seemed to believe in having friends. They were friendly toward their neighbors, said hello if they passed on the street, knew people’s names on their block, but never arranged times to meet for dinner, go out for a round of golf, play bridge, or anything like that. The two of them were one another’s primary companions. When they retired to Florida, they drove to a nearby fitness trail early each morning, before the weather grew too hot, and exercised together. They kept track of their progress on a chart on a small clipboard: their balance abilities, how long they could hang on the metal bar, how far they walked.

  In those early years in Florida, before Ojichan got sick, my brother, mom, and I joined my grandparents on these morning trips when we visited. What I remember most distinctly is their persistent warnings about the deadly fire ants. “Don’t go anywhere near those mounds,” my grandfather warned, pointing to one of the tiny hills the fire ants had built. He was referring to the red fire ants that were introduced to the state from Brazil. Nonnative species, the ants both sting and bite, and they are notoriously aggressive. Aware of my brother’s deep curiosity about insects, Ojichan worked to instill a strong fear of the ants in both of us. “They’ll attack you,” he warned. “The whole colony. They’ll cover you and they can kill you.” This was of course an exaggeration, an example of my grandfather’s flare for the dramatic, but at the time I was terrified. Having been stung by hornets at the age of three, I had no desire to have a run-in with the stinging and biting red ants, and made sure to keep myself—and my little brother—away from them. Even as an adult, I’m careful not to make the mistake of stepping into a colony of those ants.

  At Heart Mountain, my grandmother found herself growing restless in that tiny room.

  “I couldn’t stand it any longer,” she has told me many times, with the same look of frustration, her eyes squinting, her mouth pursed in disgust. “I just couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

  Despite her parents’ many lessons on seeing the good in every situation, after two years in Wyoming, Obaachan could no longer force herself to believe that those good things were enough. When she imagined her son spending his childhood at Heart Mountain, going to school with all the other war babies, graduating, and then finding some menial work around camp, as my grandfather and Obaachan’s Papa had been forced to do—when she pictured him living forever inside barbed wire, she shuddered. She wanted her son to have the opportunity to walk the streets of a town somewhere, to have meals at a kitchen table with family rather than in a mess hall crammed with strangers. She wanted him to go to a real school where there were not only Japanese students who had grown up in an internment camp. She hoped that he might know what it was like to buy an ice-cream cone and eat it in the bright sunshine of a summer afternoon. She wanted something better than what Heart Mountain could offer.

  And it was not only for her son that my grandmother was anxious. She began to resent the sameness in all the faces, the dark hair and eyes, and even more so, in all the thinking. “Shikataganai,” everybody would say with a shrug of their shoulders. You cannot change the conditions of your life, so just accept them. She grew fed up with this pervasive apathy that seemed to infect everyone, the depression, the looks on people’s faces that announced they’d given up.

  And yet, my grandmother had not resisted or complained either. She, too, was stuck in a pit of indifference, and she knew it. There were those who protested their subjugation, those infamous No-No Boys, who answered “no” to two important questions on their loyalty questionnaires, plus other “troublemakers” who were sent to Tule Lake, or federal prison. And in January of 1944, when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had ruled that Japanese Americans were eligible for the draft, some young men rebelled by refusing to serve in the armed forces of a government that imprisoned them and their families. In fact, sixty-three Heart Mountain men were convicted and sentenced by a Wyoming judge to three years in a federal penitentiary for draft resistance. As a person who had been raised with an emphasis on obeying the rules, though, my grandmother never would have opposed the U.S. government, at least not openly. Doing so would have felt like a direct defiance to Mama and Papa, like she was turning her back on everything they stood for. Of course, she was probably frightened, too. She could not afford to be sent away, away from Charles, Ojichan, Papa, and Mama, even out of principle.

  And so as 1944 passed slowly, once again Obaachan absorbed herself in novels, hauling my infant uncle to the library, exchanging one book for another. As the September snow began to fall and the boy’s feeding schedule stretched to every three hours, she found that she could almost enjoy the stillness of afternoons in her small room. Ojichan stoked the coal stove in the mornings before he left for work, and after Charles had fallen asleep, she would pull her cot toward the stove, bury herself beneath the army-issued wool blanket, and read. In books, she could enjoy the illusion of being someone else, in another time, another country, another world. She was not in Wyoming, trapped by long lines of fence and surrounded by an endless brown expanse. Instead, she was Jane Eyre coming back to find Mr. Rochester, pitying his blindness and loving him more than before. She was Elizabeth Bennet, discovering the true nature of the elusive Mr. Darcy. She was anyone but herself.

  But changes, my grandmother would soon realize, could come as unexpectedly as a Wyoming storm. One moment, not a cloud could be seen in the sky; the next moment, ominous thunder echoed across the plains. One moment, she was chatting with friends on the front steps of her family’s church; the next moment, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and threw the world into a frenzy. One moment, she was in despair about spending her life at Heart Mountain; the next moment, she and Ojichan were hastily making arrangements to leave.

  It was a chilly afternoon in the fall of 1944 when my grandfather arrived at their room in Block 17, breathless, full of excitement. There was a posting, he explained to Obaachan, on the bulletin board at the community center. There were job openings for young, able-bodied people willing to leave Heart Mountain. “A man has a factory, a farm and factory, actually, and he’s willing to relocate people from the camps to come and work for him. He’ll provide housing, plus we’ll be paid.” Most importantly, the three of them could leave Heart Mountain, its short but stifling summers; its white, tiring winters; the lack of privacy; the rumors and gossip. He would not have had to explain all of this to my grandmother. She knew this was an opportunity to leave and finally have a chance to live their lives on their own terms.

  Obaachan was of course interested, and Ojichan immediately began to investigate the details of the factory. When my grandmother tells me this story, I sense that she and my grandfather saw the possibility of moving, and starting from scratch, as a simple decision, something they did not have to ponder too much, and certainly not something to be viewed with any suspicion. And yet my own instinct is to question the motives of the factory owner, Mr. Charles F. Seabrook. Clearly, he had much to gain in offering a way out of prison—the only way out, really, at that time—to young Japanese Americans like my grandparents. How trusting they must have been, how desperate to take on any risk, if that risk would allow them to get out of Heart Mountain. But what life lay ahead for them? Might it be worse, more demanding, more crowded, more suffocating, than their square-mile existence in Wyoming? Was Mr. Seabrook an honest man, or might he cheat them, as the minister had done with the rent money? And what about Obaachan’s parents? What about Mama? I’m sure these questions might have cross
ed my grandparents’ minds, but the desire to leave and start over must have overpowered their doubts and concerns.

  “What’s the name of the place again?” Obaachan’s Papa asked my grandfather, taking a puff on the cigarette he had just rolled. He tapped it lightly on the edge of the porch steps, letting the ashes fall to the dry dirt and the crust of old snow.

  “Seabrook Farms. They grow and package frozen foods,” Ojichan told him in Japanese. “From what I understand, it’s a pretty big operation.” I imagine my grandfather would’ve tried his best to sound confident in this conversation—he would’ve wanted to sound like he knew what he was doing when he explained his plans to move to Obaachan’s father. Of course, there was no way he could really know what type of life awaited them on the other side of the country, and my greatgrandfather was aware of that. Plus, my grandfather, with his knack for storytelling, might have taken the liberty of filling in any missing details.

  “And where is it located?”

  “New Jersey. It’s far, I know, all the way on the East Coast. But they provide housing, and there will be a job for me.”

  Obaachan’s Papa said nothing for a moment, but his shoulders sagged a little bit as he looked off toward the mountain, high above the plain, the peak white with snow. Watching his daughter, son-in-law, and new grandson leave would be difficult, but he had never been one to meddle in his children’s affairs, especially after they were married. When his oldest child, Obaachan’s sister, Sachiko, had announced that she would be going to prison with her husband’s family, not hers, Papa hadn’t uttered a word of protest. Despite any worries he might have had, Papa knew, as my grandparents did, that an opportunity to leave and start a free life might not come again for some time—if ever. He sighed and took another puff. “This is a good opportunity for you. It’s a chance to get out of here, to really start life together.”

  By the fall of 1944, the tide of the war had clearly turned in favor of the Allies, and my family would have at least had some reason to hope that it might end soon. In Europe, on June 6, over 160,000 Allied troops had landed on the French coastline and had begun fighting on the beaches of Normandy. By August, Paris, occupied for four years by the Germans, had been liberated. In October, Athens was liberated. That same month, General Erwin Rommel, the infamous “Desert Fox,” who had tormented the British in Northern Africa, committed suicide.

  The Allies found success in the Pacific theatre as well. American forces won the island of Saipan, strategically important to both the Allies and the Japanese, in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. A vicious and bloody battle, this loss was especially terrible for Japan, with only one thousand of their thirty thousand troops surviving it. Especially shocking for American troops invading Saipan, however, was the large number of Japanese civilians who, petrified of capture and ill treatment at the hands of American troops (a result of vehement propaganda on the part of the Japanese government), committed suicide. After this event, the Japanese government began encouraging all its citizens to follow suit. Military policy had always been death before surrender—but after the loss at Saipan, it became civilian policy, too.

  Still, despite the possibility of the war ending sometime in the near future, my grandparents decided to take the opportunity to leave Heart Mountain. And so, quite suddenly, the two of them were packing up the few belongings they had accumulated during their nearly three-year stay at Heart Mountain—the herringbone suit Obaachan had worn on her wedding day, the calico maternity smocks she had sewn, the crocheted baby blanket from the Philadelphia Quakers, the barely used ice skates ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog, my grandfather’s tall leather boots, and a handful of other items—and preparing to leave their small room in Block 17.

  Their departure, I imagine, must have brought a strange blend of emotions. On one hand, they would have been elated to leave. My grandmother would have looked forward to escaping that shikataganai attitude that saturated the camp. At the same time, she must have understood that leaving would also involve saying goodbye to Mama, whose health had steadily deteriorated since their arrival. She would’ve understood that she was risking not seeing her mother again. And she must have feared the unknown. While their life at Heart Mountain was undesirable, at least they knew what to expect. In New Jersey, they would not have the support of family and friends. There, for the first time, Obaachan and Ojichan would really be alone.

  On their final morning in Block 17, Obaachan swept the dust out of the small apartment with the worn yellow broom she had used every day for over two years. Their suitcases and bundles were already outside. Ojichan stood in the corner watching, holding Charles. Mama, by this point too weak to get out of bed, remained in her room across the street. Solemnly, my grandparents said their goodbyes to Obaachan’s parents. They loaded their belongings onto the bus, and drove off.

  The bus took them—there were about twenty people in all, mostly younger folks like my grandparents—to Billings, Montana. There, my grandmother recalls going to a restaurant for dinner and ordering a steak. Ojichan insisted on some small gesture of celebration. It would have been the first time in years that they could actually choose what to eat, rather than eating what the servers in the mess hall piled on their plates. It would have been the first time my grandparents shared a meal together at a restaurant as well. Without a doubt, however, there would have been some stares from the hakujin folks who lived in Billings. While Montanans might have been accustomed to seeing work crews of Japanese prisoners in the sugar-beet fields, they would not have felt too comfortable seeing them walking their streets or eating at their tables.

  After a night in Billings, my grandparents caught a train to Chicago, where they stayed overnight in a hostel that was run by Japanese people. (Only those Japanese living on the West Coast had been evacuated; those who lived inland or on the East Coast were not sent to prison camps during the war. Still, although they were permitted to stay in their homes, I imagine they faced their own struggles outside the barbed wire.) The next morning, my grandparents took another train to Philadelphia, where a bus from Seabrook Farms was waiting for them. As they boarded that bus in Pennsylvania, and as Obaachan observed the anxious faces of the few other families who had come with them on their long journey, the reality sank in: Heart Mountain was now two thousand miles behind them.

  On my parents’ back porch, my father finishes the last sip of his beer, folds over the corner of a page to mark his reading spot, and stands up. He checks the white bucket hanging from the pergola and fingers the skinny tomato plant hanging upside down from it. He shakes his head.

  “People at work say this is the best way to grow tomatoes,” he says. “I thought I’d give it a try, but as you can see, it’s not very impressive.” His other tomatoes, planted in his garden, are staked to support the bulging red fruit. The bucket tomato has not even blossomed.

  He needs to pick the Hungarian Wax in the garden, he tells me. As usual, there are hundreds of those hot yellow peppers, and they’ll need to be pickled and canned or stuffed with meat and frozen because there are too many to eat fresh. “Mom’s going to have her hands full.” He squeezes my shoulder as he walks past. “Things will work out with your Obaachan,” he says. “It’s not your place to worry about it.”

  Chapter 14

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER I LEARN ABOUT THE FAMILY’S PLANS to relocate Obaachan, my mother decides to attend her fortieth high school reunion—her first ever—and she asks if I would like to join her on her trip back to South Jersey, to the small village near Seabrook Farms where she grew up. “There’s a museum in Seabrook,” she says, hoping to convince me to make the five-hour trek with her. “It has information about the factory where Obaachan and Ojichan both worked. Photos and other things that people have donated. Maybe even some artifacts. Plus you can see where all of us lived. The house, and where I went to school, and where your grandparents were after they left Heart Mountain.”

  Since I’ve never been to my mother’s hometown, the place
where my grandparents began life after their years in a Wyoming concentration camp, I can’t resist the opportunity. I agree to go along. On Black Friday, the two of us are crossing the eastern half of the state, driving through swarms of traffic in Harrisburg and Lancaster. (I insist we avoid Philadelphia and instead we veer south through Delaware and must cross a long bridge over the Chesapeake. As we cross it, however, that inherited fear of bridges takes hold, and I regret my decision.) I grip the wheel, knuckles white, palms clammy.

  “South Jersey is very pretty,” my mother tells me as we drive, looking straight ahead. “You know New Jersey is called the Garden State, don’t you? It’s all farms.”

  I remind her that things might be different, that life might have changed in the last forty years, and that she shouldn’t expect everything to be as it was when she left. Since I’ve recently been to northern New Jersey, I have a suspicion that my mother’s expectations may be off. She doesn’t believe me, though, and feels sure that her beloved Garden State will be little changed since the fifties.

  After four hours of driving, at last we cross into New Jersey. Immediately, I’m struck by the long, wide fields, the endless rows of soybeans, the giant irrigation systems stretching across the countryside, the absence of highways. “See,” my mother says, looking out the window, taking in the farms that have not altered in decades.

  I have one distinct memory from my grandparents’ life in New Jersey, and the memory is not from Seabrook, but from Ocean City, where they initially moved after retiring. In their small condo in Ocean City, Obaachan, Ojichan, my mom, brother, and I cluster at the kitchen table, watching President Reagan on their small, jittery television. I remember that their condominium complex was dark brown on the outside, and that we could walk to the beach, but I don’t remember being at the beach or what anything looked like inside their home. I’m not even sure how many times I was there, although I do remember traveling a good bit as a girl, and there are plenty of photographs capturing moments from this era. My mother hauled us kids all over the place back then. My father, who worked various shifts at the time, rarely went along, but Mom was always determined to see her family and therefore made it happen. She didn’t believe in eating fast food, and still doesn’t, so instead she packed loads of snacks—almonds, raisins, apples, crackers, yogurt—and tucked us into her old mauve Volkswagen Rabbit. She sang songs and had a policy that she would stop at as many ice-cream parlors along the way as we wanted. I could never eat more than one cone of soft serve, so the little green Dairy-Freez along 522 in Orbisonia, about forty-five minutes from our home, was the only place I ever got my ice cream. My mother and brother always tapped out after two. Still, to us children, the sheer idea of unlimited ice cream was thrilling.