“The letter wasn’t just for Pop. Roy sent it to all of us. He addressed it to Mr. and Mrs. Itano, Tomi, and Hiro.”
“That’s true, but you know Pop believes the letters are his.”
“You do other things Pop doesn’t like. You work as a teacher.”
“That cannot be helped.” Mom put the needle into her sewing and looked out the window again. “I am afraid that Roy has been hurt and that your pop does not want me to know. He is trying to protect me.”
Tomi nodded. She had been thinking that, too. She went across the room and put her hand on Mom’s shoulder. Mom stared down at the sewing in her lap and gave a little laugh. “There. Look at what I’ve done. The stitches are so bad I will have to take them out.”
“That’s because you’re worried. What is better, knowing or not knowing?” Tomi asked.
Mom thought that over. “I think it is not knowing. Maybe Roy was hurt only a little. I would be happy to know that. It would be better than worrying that he is in a bad way.” She gave a little gasp. “What if he is dead, and I don’t know? Your father has no right to keep that from me.” She put the sewing aside and stood up. “You won’t tell if I open the letter, will you? I can’t bear not knowing what is in it.”
“Of course I won’t tell. The letter is for me, too, Mom.”
“I am a poor wife,” Mom said.
“But you are a good mother.”
Mom squeezed Tomi’s shoulder. Then she went to Pop’s coat and drew out the letter. She took a deep breath and opened it. “Dear family,” she began. She read the letter quickly to herself, and then her eyes grew wide, and she looked up at Tomi.
“What?” Tomi asked.
“I understand now why Pop hid the letter.”
Tomi came close to the paper and tried to make out the writing. “Is Roy hurt?”
“Oh, no.” Mom put the letter down by her side for a moment. Then she raised it and said, “I’ll read it to you.” She moved her finger down the lines of writing until she found the place she wanted. Then she read,
Pop, you sent me the best present I ever got. It and Hiro’s flag pin will keep me safe. I never thought you’d part with your lucky silver dollar, because I know what it means to you. I will carry it with pride and honor until I come home and return it to you.
Mom looked up with tears in her eyes.
“Pop sent Roy his lucky dollar?” Tomi asked. She couldn’t believe her father would part with it.
Mom nodded. “Pop did not want us to know. He was afraid we would think him foolish. He must be proud that Roy joined the army after all. “Mom folded the letter and put it back into Pop’s pocket. She took a deep breath. “It is our secret. Now you must finish your schoolwork, Tomi.”
Tomi nodded and sat back down at the table. She knew what to write in her essay. She picked up her pencil and began.
1945 | CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TOMI’S ESSAY
ALMOST everyone in Tomi’s class wrote essays about “Why I Am an American.” Mrs. Glessner took them home that night and graded them. The next day, she handed the essays back to the students. All but Tomi’s. “I will see you after class, Tomi,” she said.
Tomi’s face turned red, and she looked down at her desk. Mrs. Glessner didn’t like her essay. Tomi had thought her idea was a good one, but now she wasn’t so sure. She’d written the essay in a hurry. Perhaps it was sloppy. Mrs. Glessner wouldn’t like it if she’d misspelled words or used poor grammar. Tomi hoped her teacher wouldn’t visit Mom and Pop again and tell them Tomi had lost interest in her schoolwork.
Tomi fidgeted until the bell rang, ending classes for the day.
“You want me to wait for you?” Ruth asked, as she picked up her pencil and arithmetic book.
Tomi shook her head. She’d be embarrassed if Ruth heard Mrs. Glessner bawl her out.
After the other students left, Tomi went to the front of the room and stood beside Mrs. Glessner’s desk.
“Sit down,” the teacher said.
Tomi swallowed. Sitting down meant a long conversation. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“I read your essay last night. In fact, I read it four times,” Mrs. Glessner began.
“I’m sorry if …” Tomi started to say, but Mrs. Glessner held up her hand.
“And I find it the finest writing you have ever done.” Mrs. Glessner smiled.
“Really?” Tomi couldn’t believe she had heard right.
“In fact, it is the best in the class.”
Tomi’s mouth dropped open. “I thought you didn’t like it.”
“You did? Why?”
“Well, you didn’t give it back. And you asked me to stay after school.”
Mrs. Glessner smiled again. “Oh, I’m sorry. I made you worry. But you see, I couldn’t talk about it with you in front of the class.”
Tomi didn’t understand.
“I want you to recopy it. You crossed out some words, and one word is misspelled. I want it to be perfect.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to enter it into the Colorado essay contest. It will be Tallgrass’s entry. I didn’t want the class to know because, well, Tallgrass wasn’t exactly invited to participate in the contest. I think it was an oversight, but who knows?” Mrs. Glessner said.
Tomi stared at her teacher, and her eyes grew big. Her essay was going to be in the contest! But how could that be if Tallgrass students hadn’t been invited to submit entries?
Mrs. Glessner looked uneasy. “I hope you will understand what I am going to say,” she said and waited until Tomi nodded before she continued. “I’ve asked one of the teachers at the Ellis school to send it in with the Ellis entries.”
Tomi thought for a minute. “Would the judges throw it out if they knew it came from a Japanese girl at Tallgrass?”
“I don’t know that for sure, but I wouldn’t want to take a chance. It’s not right to have to mislead them, of course. But it wouldn’t be fair if you were eliminated because you are Japanese either. This way, your essay will have an equal chance with all the others. Your work will be judged on its merits, not on the race of the person who wrote it.”
“But what about my name? The judges will know I’m Japanese if they see my name.”
“Tomi Itano. You know, it sounds Italian to me,” said Mrs. Glessner.
Of course, Tomi didn’t expect to win. But she was thrilled that her essay was good enough to be entered in the contest. She carefully copied it, then gave it to Mrs. Glessner. When the two of them agreed it was perfect, Tomi folded up the original and put it inside her book.
Ruth was playing outside when Tomi left the classroom. Tomi was surprised to see her. After all, she had stayed in the classroom for a long time. “What did Mrs. Glessner want?” Ruth asked.
Tomi shrugged. “I had a misspelled word in my paper.”
“It must have been an awfully long word.”
“Oh, we got to talking.” Tomi didn’t tell Ruth about her essay. Ruth might think she was showing off. Besides, her entry was a secret.
Hiro came up to her then. “Wilson and I are going to play baseball. Want to watch us?”
“Sure,” Tomi said, glad to change the subject.
“Ruth said you had to stay after school,” he said. “Were you bad?”
Tomi laughed and poked her brother in the arm. “Not as bad as you are as a baseball player.”
“Hey, I hit a double last time I was at bat.” Hiro played baseball every chance he could.
“Dumb luck,” Wilson teased him.
Tomi thought again how fortunate the younger kids were that they had adjusted to the camp. She wondered if Hiro had forgotten about the farm where they had lived. Maybe that would be a good thing.
But he hadn’t forgotten. “When we go home to California, everybody’s going to be surprised at how good I am. I’ll be the first one picked when we choose up teams.”
“You’re kidding yourself. Those guys have gotten better, too. They have go
od baseballs and bats, better ones than we do. And they have those fancy ball fields with grass. No dirt fields like Tallgrass,” Wilson said.
“That just means we’re tougher.”
“Come on, tough guys. You’re not playing at all unless you get to the ball field,” Tomi told the two boys.
As they walked to the field, Hiro said, “I’m glad you like to watch me play baseball, Tomi. Pop never comes to see me play. Everybody else’s dad does. Even Helen comes to see Wilson.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like baseball,” Tomi said.
“Sure he does. He went to all of Roy’s games in California. And remember how he used to play catch with me? Maybe he doesn’t like me,” Hiro said quietly.
Tomi put her arm around Hiro. “Of course he likes you, Hiro. Pop loves his family. He’s just unhappy with America.”
“What can we do?”
Tomi sighed. “I don’t know. Mom doesn’t either. Maybe when the war is over, Pop will turn into the old Pop.”
“I hope so,” Hiro said. “I miss him.”
“Tomi had to stay after school,” Hiro announced when they went inside the apartment after the baseball game.
Both Mom and Pop looked up from what they were doing. Pop frowned. “What did you do?” he asked.
“We don’t know that she did anything,” Mom said. “Maybe she just helped clean the blackboards.”
“We don’t have blackboards,” Tomi said. She shrugged. “It wasn’t anything.”
“Not anything?” Pop said. “You have to stay after school, and it’s not anything?”
“You haven’t lost interest again, have you?” Mom asked.
“Mrs. Glessner just wanted to talk to me about my essay,” Tomi explained.
Mom put down her sewing. She was using scraps of the blue cotton that Mrs. Hayashi had given her to make a pillow. “Did she like it?”
Tomi shrugged. “I guess. She made me recopy it.” She looked down at the floor. “I had a misspelling, and some of the words were crossed out. She said I was sloppy.”
“Serves you right,” Pop said.
Mom fitted two tiny pieces of blue together and pinned them. “I would like to read it, Tomi. Wouldn’t you, Sam? Tomi says it’s called ‘Why I’m an American.’ ”
“No.” Pop picked up the camp newspaper. “Tomi’s a Japanese American. That’s not any kind of American at all.” He began reading again.
“Well, I still want to read it,” Mom said, putting aside her sewing.
“You can’t,” Tomi said. “It’s at school.”
Later, Tomi remembered she had put the original copy of her essay into her book, but she didn’t say anything about that. She didn’t want Mom to read it. What if Mom said Tomi had no business writing what she did?
1945 | CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE WINNER
IN APRIL, the war in Europe was over! Victory in Europe, or VE Day, the end of that war was called. Tomi heard the whistle go off at the sugar beet factory in Ellis. Then there were the sounds of firecrackers and car horns. In a few minutes, the school principal rushed into the classroom to announce that Germany had surrendered. The children cheered, and Mrs. Glessner asked them to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Then they sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Mrs. Glessner dismissed the class, and the children ran outside. There weren’t many schoolchildren left at Tallgrass. Most of the men at the camp had taken jobs in Denver and moved away. Some had left Colorado for work in other states. Pop refused to get a job, which was why the Itanos had remained in the camp. Fortunately for Tomi, Mr. Hayashi worked in the camp office, so Ruth had stayed at Tallgrass, too.
Although Helen had hated the camp when she arrived, she chose to stay on after she graduated from high school. She said Mrs. Hayashi was like a grandmother to Carl, and she didn’t want to take him away from her. Besides, if Helen found employment outside the camp, who would look after Carl and Wilson? But Tomi thought Helen was really waiting for Roy to come back. And he would come back. The war was over, and Roy was safe!
Now the children stood near the school, shouting, “The war’s over!” and “We won!” Those who had bikes tied red, white, or blue scarves to the handlebars. Hiro rushed around yelling, “Whatcha know, Joe? Do you know it’s VE Day?” Tomi and Ruth ran home to the Itanos’ apartment, where they found Mom making tea. Mr. and Mrs. Hayashi and Carl were there.
“Did you hear?” Tomi yelled as she came through the door. “The war is over.”
“Only in Europe. There’s still a war in Japan.” Pop said.
“But it will be over there soon,” Mom told him. Mr. and Mrs. Hayashi brought special tea to celebrate. It is very good tea. It came with them from San Francisco.”
“I saved it for a celebration,” Mrs. Hayashi said. “And what better celebration than that the war is over and we won!”
“Why do we care?” Pop asked. “America still thinks we are the enemy.”
“You’re a spoilsport, Sam. I, for one, am a true blue American,” Mr. Hayashi told him.
“You are just in time,” Mom said to Tomi. She had heated water on the stove. Now she poured it into the china pot and set out her best tea cups. She let the tea steep. Then Mom poured it into the fragile cups and handed them around.
“To American victory,” Mr. Hayashi toasted. He raised his cup. Ruth and Tomi, along with their mothers and Carl, raised their cups, too, and at last, so did Pop.
“Are they going to close the camp now?” Mrs. Hayashi asked.
“Not yet,” Pop told her. “America hasn’t beaten the Japanese. We have to stay here.”
“Nobody has to stay here. There are jobs all over America for us,” Mr. Hayashi said. “You’re just stubborn, Sam.”
“No jobs in California,” Pop told him. “They don’t want us there.”
“There will be jobs soon enough.”
“Not for me,” Pop said.
“No more unhappy words,” Mom told him.
Pop was quiet then, as the others talked about VE Day. Mom fixed more tea. Then the Hayashis went home, and Pop left to sit in the sun with the old men. Tomi fetched a bucket of water, which Mom heated on the stove, and the two washed the teapot and cups.
“I thought Pop would be excited about Victory in Europe,” Tomi said, as she picked up Mom’s delicate cup.
“Sometimes I think he is tired of complaining, but he doesn’t know how to stop. I think he would like to be the old Pop again, but he doesn’t know how.”
Mom started to say more, but Ruth came back into the apartment and asked Tomi to go into Ellis with her. “Father gave me money for ice cream,” she said. So the two walked down the dirt road to Ellis where people were waving flags and blowing toy horns. A band played. A girl handed Tomi a noisemaker and yelled, “We won! We won!” At the drug store, a man was giving away ice cream to everyone. “Here, girls, have some ice cream. It’s VE Day!” he cried, handing cones to Ruth and Tomi. “Tell everybody at Tallgrass to come in for free ice cream.” Nobody called Ruth and Tomi Japs.
“Maybe Pop’s the only one who remembers we’re still fighting Japan,” Tomi said. “I wish he’d come here to Ellis and see how people are treating us.”
“Will he?” Ruth asked.
“I don’t think so.”
The following day, the children were still too excited to pay attention in class. They talked about the German surrender and how they could all go home now that the war was over.
“But we’re still at war with Japan,” Ruth said in a loud voice.
“What does that mean, Mrs. Glessner?” a boy asked.
“It means that Japan no longer has any allies—friends to help them fight. The American army is beating the Japanese army. So the end of the war in Europe means the war with Japan will be over soon. Then Tallgrass will be closed. You’ll be allowed to go wherever you want to, even California.”
“Does that mean they’ll let us be Americans?” Ruth asked.
Mrs. Glessner smiled.
“You already are. You’ve always been Americans. You are Americans because your parents chose America for you.”
Tomi turned red and looked down. Those were words from her essay. She hoped Mrs. Glessner wouldn’t read it to the class. The contest had been over for a long time, and if she’d won, she’d have heard about it by now. If Mrs. Glessner read the essay, the others would know it was the Tallgrass entry in the contest and that it had lost. Tomi would feel she’d let everyone down.
“I have something to tell you, something that will make you proud,” Mrs. Glessner said. “I was going to announce it yesterday, but we were all too busy celebrating Victory in Europe.” She paused, then continued. “Most of you wrote essays about ‘Why I Am an American.’ They were very good, but the best of them was Tomi Itano’s. That was why I entered it in the state contest.”
Mrs. Glessner paused and smiled at Tomi, while Tomi slunk lower in her seat. This was awful. Now the whole class would know she was a loser.
“The state judges thought it was the best, too, because they awarded it first prize!”
Tomi stared at Mrs. Glessner in surprise. “I won?” she mouthed. She sat up straight.
“Yes, you won,” Mrs. Glessner said.
“My essay won?” Tomi couldn’t believe it.
Mrs. Glessner nodded.
“First place?”
“First place. Your essay was the best one in the whole state.”
“But I’m Japanese,” Tomi said.
“What does that have to do with being an American?” her teacher asked.
Tomi was too stunned to say anything more, but Ruth wasn’t. “Hooray for Tomi!” Ruth yelled, and the students clapped.
“Read your essay,” a boy said.
“Yeah, Tomi, read it,” another student added.
Tomi blushed. She didn’t want to stand up in front of the class and read her words. “I don’t have it. Mrs. Glessner sent it in,” she said.
“I sent in the copy you rewrote. What about the original? Don’t you have it?” the teacher asked.
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