Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky

by Sandra Dallas

  “I’m sorry,” Betty Joyce whispered as she followed Tomi and Ruth to the door. She picked up a sign that was lying face down on the floor. The sign said “No Japs” in big black letters. Tomi wondered if Betty Joyce had taken it out of the window on purpose.

  “I’d buy a ticket if I had a nickel. I don’t hate you,” Betty Joyce told Tomi and Ruth, as she put the sign in the window, hiding it behind a display of machine parts.

  “It’s okay. I don’t hate you, either,” Tomi told her.

  Tomi and Ruth were silent as they walked down the street. Maybe trying to sell tickets in Ellis hadn’t been such a good idea. Still, Tomi wasn’t ready to give up. When they reached the drugstore, Tomi took a deep breath and looked at Ruth. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “What do you want?” a man behind the counter asked. He wasn’t as mean as the man in the hardware store, but he wasn’t friendly, either. Maybe the drugstore had one of those ugly signs, too, Tomi thought.

  “We’re selling raffle tickets for a beautiful blue quilt the ladies at Tallgrass are making,” Tomi said. “They’re only five cents.”

  The man sniffed. “And where’s the money going? To help the Japs?”

  “It will go to the 442nd Infantry,” Ruth told him.

  “That’s an American division,” Tomi added.

  “It’s made up of Japs,” the man said. “Bet you they’re a bunch of cowards. You’re not selling any tickets in here. Go on with you.”

  Coming into Ellis had been a mistake, Tomi thought. She bit her lip and took Ruth’s hand. But just then, a boy sitting at a table near the soda fountain turned around. “I’ll buy a ticket,” he said, standing up. He was Dennis, the Boy Scout who had visited Tomi’s class the year before. “Hi, Tomi. What kind of quilt are you raffling off?”

  “It’s all blue with a little red and white. It looks like the sky,” she said. “In fact, we call it ‘Tallgrass Sky.’ ”

  “I bet I know a few people who would like to win a quilt like that. Why don’t you give me some of your tickets, and I’ll sell them for you.” He turned to a woman nearby and said, “You’d pay five cents to try to win a quilt like that, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Stroud? I bet it’s as nice as the ones you make.”

  “Probably better,” she said, taking a dime out of her purse and handing it to Tomi. “Some of the boys from Tallgrass are employed on our farm. If the quilters work as hard as those boys do, I know it will be a fine quilt. I’ll take two tickets.”

  “I guess I could buy one,” a high school girl told Dennis, counting out five pennies.

  By the time Tomi and Ruth left, they had made more than fifty cents, and Dennis had agreed to take the rest of their tickets. He even said he’d ask Mr. Glessner if the Boy Scouts could sell them.

  “Don’t let that man in there upset you. His son was killed in the South Pacific. He hates everybody,” Dennis said.

  “I guess I can’t blame him. After all, we’re Japanese,” Tomi said.

  “No,” Dennis told her. “Like you said once, you’re Americans.”

  1944 | CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  POP COMES to TALLGRASS

  MOM sat in the light from the window, sewing together pieces of the Tallgrass Sky quilt. She didn’t even raise her head when there was a knock at the door. “That’ll be Wilson. Answer it, Hiro,” she said.

  “Wilson doesn’t knock like that. He always makes three quick knocks,” Hiro replied. He was sitting on the floor surrounded by pieces of a paper airplane that he and Roy were putting together.

  “Maybe it’s Helen,” Mom said.

  Roy looked up at that. “Nope. Helen’s with a friend on the other side of camp, studying for a test,” Roy said.

  “Then it’s Ruth,” Mom told them.

  “It’s not Ruth either. She calls when she knocks,” Tomi said. She was sitting on her cot reading a comic book. “But I’ll answer it anyway.” There was a second knock, louder this time, as Tomi stood up and went to the door. It must be one of the officials from the camp, she thought. She opened the door slowly and stared at the man standing there. He was dressed in a rumpled suit and scratched shoes. He held a cane in one hand, a fedora hat in the other. The man was stooped and had gray hair. Tomi looked into his face, and for a moment she froze, too surprised to move. Then she cried, “Pop!” She threw her arms around him and said over and over again, “Pop. Pop. Pop.” She turned around as if the others hadn’t heard her and said, “Pop’s come home!”

  Mom had already thrown her sewing onto the floor and was rushing to the door. She put her hand on Pop’s arm and said, “Sam. You’re here. I prayed for this every day.” Happy tears fell from her eyes.

  Hiro and Roy jumped up from the floor, and now the four surrounded Pop, laughing, hugging, all of them crying, including Pop. “I knew you’d come back,” Roy told him.

  “Me, too,” Hiro said. “Are you going to stay?”

  Mom, Roy, and Tomi were quiet as they waited for Pop’s answer. Maybe Pop wasn’t back at all. Maybe he’d just come for a visit. What if he was being transferred to another camp?

  “I’m staying; that is if you let me come inside. I don’t want to live in the hall,” Pop said.

  “Hooray!” Hiro shouted, and they all drew back a little to let Pop enter the room.

  They watched as he took a slow step, then another. He used his cane to steady himself. As Tomi stood back to give her father room, she stared at him. Pop had gotten old. He no longer looked like the strong man who could lift crates of strawberries and swing them onto the truck. He had been proud of the way he looked when he dressed up, but now he was shabby. He had lost weight, and his hair was no longer as black as the coal they burned in the stove. He was Pop, but he didn’t look like Pop.

  Tomi glanced at Mom and saw that she, too, was shocked at Pop’s appearance. Mom was frowning.

  Roy took his father’s arm to lead him to the cot. But Pop shook it off and walked across the room on his own and sat down on a chair. Mom sat next to him and held his hand. “I prayed you’d come home,” she said again.

  Pop waved away her words, and Mom was quiet.

  For a moment, the rest of them were quiet, too, not knowing what to say. Pop looked around the room, using his cane to push aside the sheet that divided the space in two so that he could see where Roy and Hiro slept. At last, he said to Mom, “You made a little home here. You made a home without me.”

  “We made a home for you,” Mom replied.

  “Not my home. Where’s the kitchen? Do you eat in a mess hall, just like at the prison camp?”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad. Mom doesn’t have to cook. Now she has time to teach sewing,” Tomi said.

  Pop nodded, but he didn’t smile. “So, she has a job instead of being a mother.”

  Roy shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

  Pop interrupted. “Everything is changed. Everything is different.”

  “Our family is the same family. And it is complete now that you are home,” Mom said. She patted his hand.

  “Home,” Pop repeated. “I don’t want you to say that. A room in a barracks building in a camp that is surrounded by barbed wire will never be a home for me.”

  “Home is wherever our family is,” Mom told him.

  “Home is where I say it is.” Pop’s voice was hard.

  Tomi sat down on the floor beside Pop and put her head against his knee. “Last year, we tried to grow strawberries outside the barracks, but they didn’t do very well. You have to show us how, Pop.”

  He shook his head. “Strawberries don’t grow in dirt like this.”

  “I bet you could make them grow here,” Tom said.

  “Why should I try?” Pop asked quietly.

  Tomi felt like crying—but not happy tears this time. She was confused. Pop had been away for two years. They had hoped every day that he would be released from the prison camp and sent to Tallgrass. But this wasn’t the Pop she remembered. This man was old and bitter. What had happened to make him so unh
appy?

  Maybe Roy wondered about that, too, because he took Pop’s arm and said he’d show him around camp.

  “I’ve seen camps like this. Did you forget I’ve been in prison for the last two years?”

  “It’s not really a prison camp,” Tomi told him. “It’s a relocation camp. People are staying here until they get jobs. Then they relocate. We can get a pass to go into Ellis whenever we want to.”

  “You think I don’t know what a prison is?” Pop replied. “It’s a place with barbed wire and guards with guns, where you live in barracks and eat food I wouldn’t feed to the pigs back home.”

  “You are bitter,” Mom said. “But you are home … you are with us,” she corrected herself. “Now you must be happy. You have brought us great happiness by coming here.”

  Pop thought that over. Then he smiled for the first time. “You are right, Sumiko. I have waited a long time to be with my family.” He patted Tomi’s head and said, “You must tell me how you are doing in school.” He turned to Roy. “You are a man now. We must make plans for you.” And finally he reached out for Hiro. “My little boy has grown so much I would not have recognized him.”

  Finally, he squeezed Mom’s hand and said, “I missed you. All of you. Now we will be happy that we are together again.” He jingled the coins in his pocket. Tomi could hear them clunk against the silver dollar. Pop had kept it all that time.

  She squeezed Pop’s knee. She was happy, happier than she’d been since the day Pop was taken away. But she was uneasy. Pop was home, but he wasn’t the Pop who had left them in California. What had happened to Pop to make him so angry? What if he made the rest of them bitter, too?

  1944 | CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  POP’S STORY

  MOM fixed tea. She put the teakettle on the stove to heat the water, then poured the water on top of the tea leaves in the china teapot. She took out her best teacups, not the everyday cups but the fragile ones that she had packed in California and unwrapped only for tea with Mrs. Hayashi. Other than that, they had been saved for Pop’s homecoming.

  Although there was a fire in the coal stove, the room was chilly. Pop shivered. Tomi took a blanket off the bed and wrapped it around her father.

  He pulled it close and said, “I have been sick, you know.”

  Roy told him they didn’t know. “Too much of what you wrote in your letters was blacked out,” he said.

  “We don’t know anything that happened to you,” Mom added. “You must tell us.”

  “It is over,” Pop said. “What good does it do for me to talk about it?” He shrugged.

  “Maybe it will help you,” Mom said.

  Pop scoffed.

  “Maybe it will help us, too,” Tomi said.

  Mom poured the tea into the cups, and holding one with both hands, she gave it to Pop. “Tell us. The truth cannot be worse than what we have imagined.”

  Pop let the steam rise to his face, then took a sip. He turned to Tomi. “I taught you and your brothers that the two most important things in life were your family and your country. Now I think it is only family.”

  Tomi felt as if someone had hit her. Was this really Pop talking? He was the most patriotic person she’d ever known. He had taught them America was the best country in the world because it welcomed everyone and gave everyone an opportunity. When Tomi memorized the pledge of allegiance at school, he had given her a dime. He insisted Roy, Hiro, and Tomi speak English at home instead of Japanese, because that was America’s language. And at harvest, he donated part of his strawberry crop to a church that gave meals to poor people. He believed he was giving back to the country that had been good to him.

  “You don’t believe in America anymore, Pop?” Tomi asked.

  Pop shrugged. “What kind of country puts people in jail for nothing?” He repeated the word. “Nothing. They charged me with nothing.”

  “Then why were you in prison for two years?” Roy asked.

  Pop finished his tea and handed his cup to Mom. Slowly he began to tell his story.

  The FBI men who arrested him took Pop to a jail, where he was held with other Japanese men. The government men sat Pop down at a table and asked him questions. They wanted to know who he was sending information to in Japan. Pop denied he was contacting anyone in Japan except for his parents, who were farmers and very old.

  “Then why do you have a radio?” he was asked.

  “You can’t send messages with a radio. I listen to the baseball games. I like the New York Yankees.” When the men didn’t smile, Pop added, “Maybe you are not Yankees fans. Maybe you don’t even like baseball. Are you un-American?” He smiled, thinking he had made a great joke.

  “I ask the questions,” one of the men replied.

  Then he asked Pop why he had bought so much gasoline and fertilizer. Did he plan to use it to make bombs? The man put his face close to Pop’s face.

  Pop looked at the man as if he were crazy. “I’m a farmer. I use it on the land. I raise the best strawberries you ever tasted. Come to my house when we are finished here, and my wife will make you a strawberry shortcake. I will give you a nickel if it’s not the best strawberry cake you ever ate.”

  “I’ve been to your house, and it wasn’t for cake.”

  Pop looked from one man to another. He realized he had better stop joking. This was serious. Mom would be worried if he was late getting home. He wanted the questions to end. Not until that evening did he realize he wasn’t going home. He was spending the night in jail.

  “Mr. Lawrence got a lawyer for you,” Roy said.

  Pop shook his head. The FBI men wouldn’t let him talk to a lawyer. He never talked to anybody who was on his side.

  He was held in jail in California for a few days, not allowed to see anyone. Then he was sent to prison in New Mexico with half a dozen other Japanese men. “They said we were working for the Japanese government, that we were spies. I asked them for proof, and they said they had plenty, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was,” he said. “I told them I was one-hundred-percent American. They said I wasn’t American at all. I wasn’t even a citizen.”

  “But you couldn’t be,” Roy said. “The law doesn’t let Japanese immigrants become citizens. Germans and Italians can, but not Japanese. Only Nisei—second-generation Japanese like Hiro and Tomi and me—can be U.S. citizens. How can they blame you for what the law doesn’t let you do?”

  Pop only shrugged his shoulders.

  “They must have believed you finally, because they let you come here,” Tomi said.

  “They didn’t believe me ever. Maybe it’s a trick. I think they are watching me all the time, watching you, too.”

  He shivered again, and Mom put her hand to Pop’s forehead to see if he had a fever. “Tell me what is wrong with you. You are not well,” she said.

  “The camp was very cold, and there were only thin blankets. I didn’t have a warm coat. We had to stay outside in the bad weather. I got pneumonia.”

  Mom gasped. People at Tallgrass got pneumonia from the cold and the coal smoke that hung over the camp. Some had even died. She said Pop must get into bed. She turned down the blankets on Tomi’s cot. Tomi realized that it was Pop’s bed now. Mom then told Roy he must find a cot and a blanket for Tomi.

  “We will get you well, Sam. You must be well when we go home,” Mom told Pop. “The war will be over one day, and we will go back to California and start again. I’ve been thinking we should raise celery and melons with the strawberries.” She smiled at him.

  “You tell me what to do? Are you head of the family now?” Pop was angry.

  Roy and Tomi exchanged glances. Mom had done everything she could to keep the family together. If Mom hadn’t taken charge, who knew what would have happened to them. Pop should be proud of her, not angry.

  “It will be your farm,” Mom said. “And it won’t be long before you are raising the flag over it.”

  “Bah!” Pop said. “I will never raise the red, white, and blue flag again.”
>
  “But you have to, Pop.” Tomi didn’t like what Pop was saying. “We’re Americans. You taught us that.”

  Pop scowled. “I am not an American.”

  “You’re not Japanese anymore,” Mom told him. “The Japanese are our enemy.”

  “No, I am not Japanese either.” Pop stood up and went to the window and looked out over the camp. “What am I? I am nothing.”

  1944 | CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A SECOND-CLASS AMERICAN

  THE wind whipped at Tomi’s legs as she hurried from her barracks to Ruth’s apartment. When she’d first seen snow two winters before, she’d rushed outside and stuck out her tongue to catch the flakes. There had been only snow flurries that day, and Tomi had complained that there’d never be enough snow to make snowballs.

  But by now, well into her third winter at Tallgrass, Tomi had seen enough snow to last for a long time—and enough cold. She didn’t care if she never saw another snowball. The winter wind whipped across the prairie that day with nothing but barbed-wire fences to stop it. Tumbleweeds pushed by the wind caught on the wire or rolled into the camp and piled up against the buildings. The wind brushed one against Tomi and scratched her hand.

  Mom had ordered boots for her from the Montgomery Ward catalogue, and they kept Tomi’s feet dry in the slush and mud. But there were the places between the tops of her boots and the bottom of her coat where the wind blew grit from the street onto her bare skin and made it sting with cold. She missed the sunny days in California.

  Tomi forgot about California now, as she ran down the street. She thought about what she would tell her friend about Pop. Tomi always went with Ruth to supper. Today, however, she would have to say she couldn’t join her friend. Pop had insisted they eat together as a family.

  “But it’s different here. Families don’t sit together in the dining hall,” Tomi had protested.

  “Our family will sit together,” Pop had said in a firm voice. “Our family has broken down since I’ve been away. I am head of the family now. I say we eat together.” He looked at Mom when he said that, and she stared down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Tomi wondered why Pop blamed Mom for the changes he didn’t like.