Deep Purple

by Parris Afton Bonds

  From all around came the crackling of the straw as others settled in their stalls. On either side of them was the murmur of conversations. The entire stables seemed to echo with rumbling snores, babies' crying, and the grinding of teeth. As she lay in the darkness, listening to the sounds of human habitation, she thought nothing could be worse.

  The reality of the next day was. Roll call was held at 6:45 A.M. and again at 6:45 P.M. by the house captain of each barracks. And always there existed the “queue-ups”—for mail, checks, showers, meals, laundry tubs, toilets, clinic service, everything. And in between there existed only the boredom.

  To pass the time until they could be transferred to the more permanent settlements now under construction, people made victory gardens, knitted, read, or played cards. But as Amanda ambled aimlessly about the track that first day, she noticed that many people, mostly the issei from the old country, sat idly, even sleeping in the open beneath the grandstands. Detained in a camp, life held no promise. Daily existence was desultory, monotonous, and worse, self-defeating.

  She was determined she would not let this apathy happen to her father. The next week she organized goh and shogi tournaments—Japanese games somewhat similar to the American chess and checkers. Her father and a lot of the other issei men particularly enjoyed these matches and showed up every night in the mess hall after dinner. By the end of the second week the supply of game boards was exhausted, and she had to appeal to the camp director to order more boards from the Sears catalog—this time the American chess and checkers.

  About that same time, to her delight, her correspondence courses began to arrive. With something to keep her busy, she did not find herself with empty time on her hands as did many of the other women. Day in and day out she plowed through the law journals until her eyes hurt with the strain.

  Her father sometimes drilled her through the course’s questions, but she noticed that he looked as tired as she those days. She compelled him to visit the camp clinic. There were no facilities for testing for tuberculosis, but one doctor, an overworked young Japanese, agreed with her opinion that her father had the disease.

  “Almost all the war relocation camps are located in the desert areas,” he told them while his fingers massaged his bloodshot eyes. “There—on the desert—I feel your condition will not deteriorate, Mr. Shima, and may even improve as it did when you lived in Tucson.”

  The doctor offered hope. More than that, he offered romance, or Amanda supposed she would call it that. He began to stop by and visit with her and her father once or twice a week, ostensibly to check on her father. But more often than not the doctor talked with her.

  Bob Niiyama was of medium height and slender; and attractive. Like herself, he spoke Japanese fairly well but could not read or write it. His manner was gentle and courteous, and, as they talked of different things—philosophy, religion, education (but never the war)—she found that Bob reminded her of a younger Paul Godwin.

  Sometimes she and Bob would attend the motion pictures which were shown weekly in the grandstand, elbowing for a place on the floor alongside the other patrons who brought blankets and pillows. At other times they would play a game of shogi, and she won almost as often as he did, which did not seem to bother his Oriental’s masculine pride.

  All her life it seemed she had known but one man, that like a homing pigeon she knew only one direction—Nick's. She thought of it as a hate/lust relationship. Thus when Bob’s fingers sought and curled about her own in the darkness of the makeshift movie theater, she let herself take another man seriously for the first time.

  That was the way it should be, she told herself. She had been trying to fit in a world where she did not belong. She was not of her father’s old world, nor did she belong in Nick’s Anglo world. Bob, a nisei like herself, understood that netherworld.

  She alone joked with him. "The least the war relocation authorities could have done was to run the horses once a week. It would relieve the tedium and”—she smiled at him—"add some money to my pockets. I was getting to be a pro at betting on the horses.”

  "You’ve been here before?” They were walking along the infield at sunset, holding hands. Bob stopped and looked at her, really looked at her, his warm brown eyes moving slowly over her face. "There is so much about you I do not know, that you do not say. I want to know all about you—what you were like as a child and how you grew into such a beautiful person.”

  “I was a tomboy,” she replied curtly and changed the subject.

  It was bad enough that the thought of Nick tended to crop up without her summoning him, but worse was the occasional sight of his name in the newspapers to nag at her the rest of the day like an unrelenting fly.

  In addition to the political notes the newspapers carried about Arizona’s most colorful politician, there appeared innuendoes in the gossip columns. "What roguish mayor from the Grand Canyon State was seen in Hollywood escorting a very lovely (and quite married) actress to the Brown Derby?” asked Hedda Hopper. Walter Winchell said, "The old-world custom of dueling may soon return to Hollywood if a certain rakish politician out of Arizona continues his ‘love em and leave em’ courtship of Hollywood’s top film stars.”

  When Amanda and her father had been at Santa Anita a little over two months, she received a letter from Mr. Browne. Inside was her Bachelor of Law certificate and a congratulatory note confirming that the State Bar Association had confirmed his "on motion” in her behalf.

  Bob showed up that evening with a jar of real oolong tea. “All you lack is the swearing-in,” he told her, "and you are a full-fledged lawyer.”

  While she poured the black tea into tin cups, Bob talked to her father. "I have come not only to celebrate your daughter’s achievement, Mr. Shima,” he said, bowing low, “but also to request your permission to marry her.”

  A Caucasian female would more than likely have been surprised, and perhaps chagrined, that her suitor had not consulted her first, but Amanda, like Bob, had part of the Far East in her blood. The three of them sat on the two cots—her father and she on one and Bob opposite them.

  Bob continued to speak, earnestly but in a low voice, for there were always ears to hear. “Mr. Shima, your daughter is everything I have ever hoped for in a wife. Beauty, intelligence, warmth. She is good for me; she makes me forget for a few hours the conditions here—the people and the burdens they carry. She is what my soul has been waiting for. I would like to take her as my wife.”

  “Assuming that Amanda feels the same,” Taro said, "I would deem it an honor to have you for my son-in-law.”

  Bob held out his hand to her, smiling tenderly. She swallowed the lump that was lodged in her throat. She put out her fingers to touch his, but her hand fell limply on the mattress. “I—I’m sorry,” she incredulously heard herself say. "But . . .”

  “But what?” Bob asked patiently.

  She could not speak for fear of crying. Her father said, “I believe, Dr. Niiyama, that as your soul has been waiting, so has my daughter’s . . . and it has not yet found what it is it waits for.”

  Bob looked down at the cup of tea he held in his interlaced hands. “Love, honor, justice,” he said slowly. "They are only abstractions. They can be dealt with. But the searching of the soul . . .” he let his voice trail off.

  Setting aside the cup, he rose and bowed low once again before her father, then took her hands, which lay lifelessly now in her lap. "Amanda, I will not easily forget you. I hope we will continue to be friends.”

  For a few more weeks they were friends. She even began to assist Bob in the clinic with the other nurses, but at the end of the day she left the clinic on shaky legs and with a queasy stomach. The gashes, the diarrhea, the vomiting—apparently nursing was not in her blood.

  Bob was always grateful for her assistance and politely attentive, and every so often she caught those intelligent eyes watching her wistfully. Yet their friendship did not and could not return to the same easy one it had been before he declared to
her father his desire for her to be his wife.

  Thus it was almost with relief that she received the news that she and her father would be among the first of five hundred shipped out to one of the newly completed war relocation camps.

  She knew that Bob must have been aware that they were among those leaving, but he never mentioned it. When the day arrived for their departure, he was conspicuously absent from the clinic. She thought about searching for him. Instead she picked up her duffel bags and made her way toward the line of gleaming luxury buses waiting to take away the five hundred evacuees and the fifty military policemen. Bob knew what he was doing . . . a goodbye among friends was sometimes better left unsaid.

  Her last glimpse of the Santa Anita Assembly Center made her smile. Some of the evacuees had climbed to the stable roof and were holding up large bon voyage signs while others waved. She saw Bob among them, waving. “He is a good man,’’ her father said.

  Quickly she blinked and turned her face back to the window as she blindly waved goodbye.

  The trip by train was miserable. The aged engine creaked rather than chugged. Inside, dust covered everything. And the gaslights did not work most of the time, leaving the passengers in total darkness because of the rule that all shades were to be drawn and no one was allowed to look out of the windows.

  Some of the Japanese became trainsick and vomited. These were people who had never traveled farther than the walk required through the Japanese ghettoes of San Francisco or Los Angeles. On the aisle across from Amanda a woman nursed her five-day-old baby. The infants cried incessantly, and the older children were restless.

  At last, after a day and a half, the train halted. More buses waited to transport the evacuees through nineteen miles of grease wood-covered desert. The last half of the distance was over rough, newly constructed dirt roads. Straining to see through the alkaline dirt that the line of buses kicked up, Amanda gradually realized that the relocation project—their home indefinitely—looked, if possible, worse than their temporary assembly center had.

  Desolation stretched out before them with only the hundreds of tar-paper black barracks marching row upon row to relieve the landscape. Barbed wire, about which soldiers could be seen patrolling the area, encircled these barracks. Every quarter mile or so were formidable watchtowers. A few telephone poles stood like sentinels to remind her that a type of civilization did exist out there.

  There, according to the large sign over the guarded gate, was the Poston, Arizona, War Relocation Camp. The buses halted one by one to disgorge the evacuees into the mess hall, which served as the induction room. It was a scene of confusion as clerks (both men and women), stenographers, interviewers, guides, and baggage carriers wove their way among the tables.

  Amanda looked about her, feeling a great sorrow for the sweating people who clutched at their children’s hands and held onto bundles as they tried to assimilate what was next happening to them. While they waited to be assigned barracks a dust devil rotated through the camp, spraying clouds of alkaline dust into the mess hall and sending papers flying in all directions.

  Her father began to cough violently, and one young Caucasian lady was nice enough to point out the row of cots in the rear of the room. There another young girl gave him ice water, a salt tablet, and wet towels. “I’m all right,” he reassured Amanda. “Return to your place in the line.”

  He closed his eyes wearily. She was reluctant to leave him but knew the sooner they were assigned a room the sooner he would be able to rest.

  The female interviewer asked her about her former occupation, and Amanda learned that they were all to be assigned jobs—with the unskilled workers receiving twelve dollars a month and the professional and highly skilled qualifying for sixteen to eighteen dollars.

  Since practicing law was out of the question, she was assigned to the local newspaper, the Poston Preview, receiving sixteen dollars a month. Her father requested a job, despite the fact he didn’t need to work, and was assigned a position as cook for twelve dollars.

  Finally they had their fingerprints taken and were trooped out across an open space and into another hall for housing allotment, photographs, and a cursory physical examination before being loaded onto a truck with their hand luggage and driven to their appointed barracks.

  She and her father were assigned to Block 9, Barrack 11, Room G. They discovered there were six rooms to a barracks and twelve barracks to a block. Every block had its own mess hall, recreation hall, and combination laundry, showers, and toilets. The two of them trod to Room G and were left to survey a room ten by twenty feet with bare boards and beams and knotholes through the walls. In that space as many as three to five people were to live indefinitely!

  It was completely bare, furnished only with a ceiling light, a closet space near the door, and three army cots. But they did have two windows. A two-inch layer of alkali dust covered the Masonite floor. They were told each room was intended for three and that they would soon be receiving a new member to their “family.”

  Forty-five minutes later the third member knocked at the door. Amanda opened it to confront a middle-aged, stout man with broad features and a large handlebar mustache. To her he looked exactly like a sumo-tori wrestler.

  He introduced himself as Sam Tsuruda, a keibi—an American citizen who had been educated in Japan. After he settled his luggage, he began a nonstop discourse, telling them he was a widower from Portland, Oregon, who worked as a salesman for a wholesale produce company and going on to tell how he later operated berry farms in Washington.

  But always as he talked Amanda could feel his eyes sliding over her, assessing her. She knew that the next day she would appeal for another member to be selected for their “family.”

  For that night she had to be content to string a blanket, sectioning off her and her father from Tsuruda's ogling eyes.

  CHAPTER 55

  “Amanda, you got that column ready yet?”

  She looked up at Betty Yasaki, the copy editor of the Poston Preview, and shook her head, sighing. “After the administration staff sees this, I may find myself looking for another job.”

  The young woman smiled and pushed her rimless glasses back atop her head. “The worst that can happen is they’ll haul you out of the barracks in the dark of the night and shove you before a firing squad. Here, let me see the column."

  Amanda took a deep breath and handed it to her. For three months she had been writing the "Poston Patter,” an innocuous column that kept the residents informed about the center. Her duty consisted mainly of collecting the suggestions and news items turned in by each of the barracks’ stringers she had delegated and combining the news into a twice-weekly gossip column.

  But Thanksgiving was the following Thursday, and she had decided that a special column was in order. Perhaps reading of Nick’s election to the state senate two weeks before spurred her on. For three days she had agonized over each word of the column. She knew the words by heart.

  The precious freedom of which we Americans are so proud is not stolen from us in the sinking of the Maine or the riddling of Pearl Harbor, for this only fires our patriotism to greater effort. Our freedom is forfeited inch by inch through such innocent words as "compromise” and "convenience,” and "it’s not that important.” Then one day we find that our freedom has evaporated. Not only in the small daily things we do but, shockingly, in the spirit of our lives.

  “I see what you mean,” Betty said. "I feel censorship hiding around the corner. You want me to take it on over to the administration offices with the rest of the columns, or do you want to appeal to the administrators in person?”

  She shrugged. “I think my appeal would make little difference.”

  Surprisingly, the Poston administration offices chose to run Amanda’s column. Thanksgiving Day she was stopped many times in the mess hall and congratulated. And that evening people living in their barracks came by to thank her for expressing their own feelings about patriotism. For actually, most of the
interned families were very proud of being Americans.

  Privately, Amanda often wondered how they could feel so, especially when two weeks later a family in Betty’s barracks received word their son had been killed in action in Italy . . . while they were still behind barbed wire. A mass meeting was held the following Sunday for a memorial service to honor the Japanese-American soldier. All the faiths were represented— Buddhist, Shinto, Christian—and even some former members of the American Legion participated.

  About this same time Sam Tsuruda began to make trouble for Amanda. She had been able to persuade administration that if her father and she had to share their quarters with another member, they preferred a woman. Tsuruda’s dignity was highly affronted, and he moved out his belongings in a huff. As it turned out, the young woman the administration offices assigned to their room had just married three weeks before the evacuation in April. Less than two weeks after she settled in their stall the red tape was processed, and she was happily on her way to join her husband at the Topaz relocation camp in the Utah desert.

  The affair with Tsuruda was not so happy. For the first few months Amanda merely felt uncomfortable in his presence. But then, toward the end of the month, he was appointed their barracks house captain. It was the house captain’s duty to make the rounds once a day and report the roll call held every morning and evening at curfew. Amanda began to notice that Sam lingered longer in their room, supposedly checking their quarters for, as preposterous as it seemed, weapons or communications apparatus. For a while she and her father managed to ignore him.

  Nick, it seemed, she could not ignore. Once Betty caught her reading an article in the Saturday Review about a business deal Nick had syndicated between Howard Hughes, the government, and several minor investors. “The business coup of the year will mean a Hughes Aircraft Company site near Tucson and more jobs for Arizonians,” announced the Saturday Review.

  “Why the sudden interest in Howard Hughes?” Betty asked, reading over Amanda’s shoulder.