“Why are we staying here, while others move out?” Brian asked Papa. “Let’s get out of here, too.”
When the Sakais, our next door neighbors, left, Brian and I became more vocal about it. Papa then cut a doorway between our room and the vacant one next door and gave the newly acquired space to Brian and me. He must have thought that would somehow placate us.
“It’s nice to have more space, but it’s not a substitute for leaving this place,” Brian said. “I don’t want us to be the last ones out of here.” It was getting to be a contest, the last one out of camp being the loser. Brian and I agreed that we would try to push harder for Papa to get a job. So each day we would ask, “When are we leaving?”
In response each day, Papa would come home with some crazy idea for a job outside.
One involved harvesting cypress-mushrooms in the area surrounding the camp. It would mean that we would move out of camp only to settle in rural Arkansas.
“We could live in the town of Rohwer down the road, and I could go into the forest and pick mushrooms.”
Earlier, camp authorities had given us a leave to visit the outside. “Outside” meant the town of Rohwer. When it was our turn, we rode a covered truck along with several others into the tiny town. There was a “five-and-dime” store and not much else. We spent our entire hour there. The owner was a very friendly woman who reminded me of Mrs. Bagley in San Francisco. We bought some bobby pins and barrettes from her and sat down to a strawberry ice cream soda. It wasn’t made with strawberry syrup or strawberries and vanilla ice cream. It was strawberry ice cream and soda, but it was a treat, nonetheless. However, the town of Rohwer was definitely not a place I wanted to ever call home.
“No, Papa,” Brian and I both said. “We don’t want to live in Arkansas. That would be like moving just halfway out of camp.”
Papa turned down the mushroom-job offer.
Then he came home with the idea of working on a farm in New Jersey. It was called Seabrook, and many from camp had settled there.
“You don’t know anything about farming, Papa,” Brian said. “Besides, I don’t want to live on a farm.”
“Neither do I,” I said. Mama wasn’t crazy about the idea, either.
“Chick-sexing” in Alabama was next. That was a job that involved examining newly hatched chicks and sorting them according to sex. It was said to be very hard work, but very lucrative.
“It pays real well,” Papa said. But we made it clear we didn’t want to live in Alabama.
Finally, Mama came home from work one day, excited with what she had learned at the office.
“Someone told me that there is a request for a presser and silk finisher in Denver, Colorado!”
“Perfect!” Brian and I said in unison. “Papa, you have to apply!”
The administration arranged for interested people to interview for jobs “outside.” Actually, that was supposed to be their mission: to “Relocate” us. That’s why we were in “War Relocation Camps.” Papa was permitted to travel to Denver for the interview and was hired along with Mama. With the assistance of the admininstration, he also found an apartment for $12 per month. He was gone for a week making the arrangements.
We were permitted to leave as soon as there were enough people headed west to fill a railroad car. Five days after his return from Denver, our family gathered in the area behind the kitchen, next to the coal pile. The same spot we arrived two years and nine months earlier. A cluster of people assembled to see us off as we boarded the covered truck. Giving folks leaving camp a “send off” had become a ritual. Lately, I had been a member of several of these send-off groups. At last, we were the ones being sent off. It felt good.
The truck carried us to the railroad tracks on the other side of camp, retracing the path we took when we arrived. But the view had changed. What had been barren barracks when we arrived had been transformed into homes surrounded by vegetable gardens and flowers, alive and vibrant. I felt a tinge of sadness as I watched it all recede into the background. Soon we were at the tracks on the other side of the administration building, where we joined a group of others waiting to board the train. A soldier helped me up the steps. That was my last encounter with the MPs.
CHAPTER 18
“Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”
JOHNNY MERCER
Once again, we stood at an outdoor train station next to the railroad track that ran just outside the camp. From the top of the steps, I turned to look back. It didn’t look or feel as I had remembered. The climb up the steps was easier. They had lost their steepness. And I was filled with excitement. We were headed for Denver to a normal life. It was not a journey to nowhere.
We were a mix of people headed west. We, to Denver, and others, to St. Louis. We arrived first at St. Louis and had a short layover. We were allowed to alight.
We were actually in a real train station. It had a roof that soared to the sky. It was also the first time in three years we were without an armed escort. I looked around thinking they were lurking about somewhere and would suddenly appear. As I scanned the crowd milling about the station, I felt that this must be what it is like to be in a foreign country. Then I spotted a group of people with Japanese faces.
“Hi . . . My name is Amy. Welcome to St. Louis!” said a cheerful lady breathlessly as she raced toward us ahead of the others.
“We’re also from Rohwer and thought you might like a snack during your layover.” She found us seats among people waiting to board their trains and presented us each with a little brown paper bag stuffed with sandwiches and fruit. Seeing her and the others gave me a feeling of being wrapped securely in their protective warmth. Being “outside” felt like suddenly being thrust in the ocean after being in a swimming pool. No sides to swim to. Although we were meeting for the first time, she and the others felt like family. They gave us a tour around the station and chatted until it was time to leave. Our next stop was Denver.
There, we were greeted by a couple of kind, generous men, also former internees. They had come in their trucks to drive us and our belongings to our new home. It felt strange to be in a car. It was close and stifling. And there were so many other cars surrounding us. So close to ours. It was a miracle that they didn’t crash into us or each other, I thought. We finally came to rest on a busy street in front of two stores that flanked a skinny door like two thick slices of bread and a sliver of filling. Upon the grimy glass transom was written “1920” in digits large enough to be seen a mile away, if buildings were transparent. We were on Lawrence Street. 1920 Lawrence Street, Denver, Colorado. Our new address.
The entrance to the building was at street level next to a tofu factory. Once inside, stairs led up to our apartment on the second floor. I trudged up the steep staircase and waited at the top for Papa to lead the way. He walked down the dimly lit hall to a padlocked door. He fiddled with it and the tumbler dropped out. Without the tumbler, he was able to unlatch the door. He picked up the pieces and put it back together.
“Actually, we don’t need a key for this lock. Just jam something into the hole and pull the tumbler out,” said Papa. Although I was anxious to see our new home, I waited, along with Brian and Mama, for Papa to pick up the pieces of the lock before we tried to enter.
It was an old room with faded wallpaper and a tall, narrow window on the far wall to the left. Upon the clean oriental carpet, whose intricate pattern was interrupted by threadbare areas, was placed a double bed, a well-used bureau, a small table, and four chairs. Directly opposite the door was a sink, next to a small cabinet topped by a double gas burner. Just inside the room was a doorway to the right that led to another room just large enough for a double bed and bureau. It was decided that Mama and I would share the bed in the front room and Papa and Brian, the other.
“Where’s the refrigerator?” I asked Papa.
“There isn’t one. We just can’t buy any more than we can eat at one time. And there can’t be any leftovers. We will just have to shop carefully.”
He walked over to the window, pulled the lacy curtain back and pointed to a store across the street.
“That’s the fish market,” he said. “The grocery store is just a block away, so it won’t be that bad.”
“That means we’ll have to shop everyday,” said Mama. “How am I going to do that when I will be at work? I may not get home before the store closes.”
“Marie can do the shopping,” said Papa, without skipping a beat. It was as though he had considered this before he rented this place.
“She’s big enough now. You just make a list for her and she should be able to take care of it.”
We were just released from camp. I hadn’t had any chores to do and suddenly, I’m responsible for buying groceries.
“I guess that will work,” Mama said. “It will have to work. Marie, we’re all counting on you. Actually, it all seems so strange. Having to go buy groceries and having to cook after all this time having it done for us.”
“What’s really strange is asking me to do it! I don’t know anything about shopping, I wouldn’t know where to look for things,” I said. “Why can’t Brian do it? He’s older.”
“Because he’s a boy,” Papa said.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I said. “I can find things in a store more easily because I’m a girl? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You can ask the store clerk for help. Don’t worry. It’s not that difficult,” said Mama. “I’m really sorry to have to ask you to do this.”
“I’m not stupid, I guess. I guess I can manage. I’ll just have to remember to get correct change,” I said. “But I still think Brian should be the one to do it. . . .”
* * *
It was frightening to me, and I was nervous about it. At the same time it felt good to think that everyone thought I could manage it. It also felt good to be useful.
Eventually, I was allowed to plan the menu as well. I bought a lot of fish at the Granada Fish Market that was directly across the street. I fried river smelt, which was ten cents a pound. Squid was also very cheap. We had a lot of squid sashimi. Fish could also be bought without ration points, unlike meat. But every now and then I bought hamburger at the grocery store on Larimer Street. That was also where I bought Chef Boyardee spaghetti. It was a kit with spaghetti, sauce, and grated cheese. We ate a lot of that, because it was simple to make.
There was a single faucet over the only sink in our apartment, and it was not connected to a drain. A five-gallon bucket caught the used water. It had to be emptied into a toilet that was located about fifty feet from our apartment. Fantastic! A five-gallon bucket, I thought. Not a dinky little chamber pot. We wouldn’t have to empty this as often. We once allowed the bucket to fill up. It was then we learned that it was nearly impossible for any of us to carry a bucket that size, much less empty it without creating a huge, sloppy mess. Papa and Mama slid a broomstick through the handle of the bucket to share the load, and left a soggy trail on the old patterned carpet that ran the halls to the toilet as they fought in vain to keep the waste water from sloshing as they walked. They then managed to flood the floor around the toilet as the water poured out uncontrollably when they tipped the bucket to empty it. There were twelve other apartments on our floor and we shared that one toilet. A line had begun to form as the other tenants waited for us to mop up the mess.
“That was so inconsiderate of us,” Mama said. “That must never happen again! It was a terrible inconvenience for everyone.”
We also shared a “bathtub,” an old, darkened, slimy barrel that had been sliced in half and set in a makeshift closet whose walls were lined with large metal signs scavenged from who-knows-where. The words “7 Up” on one of the signs peered through a large ventilation hole cut high up in the door.
Most of the tenants on our floor were single women, with the exception of one woman, Bernice, and her six-month-old baby. They lived down the hall and around on the other end of the floor. Our hall ran into an enclosed porch, which extended about twenty feet to the left to the room with the “bathtub.” To the right, was the toilet. Outside the toilet was the common sink. Another hall extended from there, parallel to our hall.
Bernice’s apartment also looked out onto the street. She had just come outside from the Amache Relocation Center in Granada, Colorado. Her husband was serving in Europe with the 442nd, and she was awaiting his return. Her pencil-thin eyebrows arched high over her almond-shaped eyes, and she wore her lipstick outside her natural lipline. Her hair was rolled in pompadours in the front and fell in a pageboy in the back. She spoke with a rasp as though she had a permanent cold. When she laughed, she sounded like the actress Betty Hutton.
“As soon as Jim comes home, he’ll take us out of this dump,” she said. She walked over to the large calendar with the words “GRANADA FISH MARKET’ emblazoned across the top.
“Take a look at this. See this day with the red circle around it? August 31? That’s when he’ll be home! It’ll be so exciting. Jim’s never seen Darryl, you know.” That was the baby’s name.
The atomic bomb was dropped on my father’s birthplace, Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. Three days later, the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. Horns sounded deep into the night in celebration of the end of the war.
Jim, my neighbor’s husband, had served in the unit in Italy along with my uncles and had been recuperating from a wound at Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland. Three weeks later, Bernice and Darryl were gone.
* * *
Every Friday was payday, and Papa and Mama were paid in cash. The amount varied, because they often worked overtime. Papa would gather us around a leather suitcase, which he slid out from under the bed. When the war started, many people lost money they had in banks.
“You can’t trust banks,” Papa said. “This way we know exactly where our money is.”
Our suitcase soon filled with cash. Each week, he separated the money by denomination and carefully counted the bills he and Mama had brought home.
“Brian, write what I count.” Papa said. “That’s eight twenties. You got that? Okay. Two fives, and six ones. What’s that add up to?”
Then he gave me sixteen dollars for groceries and separated the rent and money for incidentals. He added what was left to the rapidly growing pile of bills that was leftover. The highlight of the evening was counting that stack. Papa had Brian keep track of it in a tablet.
“We’re doing a great job saving,” he would say. “We’ll be able to buy a car and our own business in no time.” When he finished the money-counting session, we would celebrate.
“Okay. It’s time to go to the drugstore and buy our cokes and twinkies. Come on, let’s go!”
We walked together as a family to the drugstore which was on the corner of 20th and Larimer. That was the highlight of our week. We would buy our treats and whatever else we needed at the drugstore and take them home to eat. When winter arrived, Brian would put his coke outside our window to chill it. Every now and then, it would freeze and break the bottle when he forgot to retrieve it.
* * *
Reiko Baba was a girl a couple of years younger than me. She wore bangs and pigtails always pulled to the front, and had droopy eyes like Ann Sothern, the movie actress. She not only resembled Ann Sothern in a Japanese sort of way, but spoke like her as well. She had a drawl and would often run out of breath before she finished a sentence. It made her sound as though she were playing a dramatic role in a movie. She shared a bedroom with her parents in the tofu factory downstairs.
When she and her family stepped out of their bedroom they were in the middle of a factory with huge round vats and a kitchen area. The vats were used to make soy milk out of soybeans, which in turn was made into tofu. The smell of simmering soybeans didn’t appeal to me, so I was glad I didn’t live there.
Reiko’s family used a small two-burner hotplate in their room for cooking. They used the factory’s kitchen for water and washing whenever it w
as free. Although they had a toilet, there was no bath or shower. They bathed at the public bath house around the corner on 20th Street. Occasionally, Reiko used the community bath in our building. It was closer and, of course, free. I went over to Reiko’s room fairly often, but we weren’t allowed to play in the work area during the week. That was fine with me. On the weekend, the entire factory was our playground.
Sadly, Reiko moved away a few weeks after I met her. It was just before school started.
After Reiko left, I found a job at a wholesale produce store on 20th Street. It was “piece-work,” as Papa would say. Instead of being paid according to how long I worked, I got paid for the amount of work I did. My job was to shell peas. One gunny-sackful, shelled, was worth two dollars. It took me the entire day to shell one gunnysack. Tall piles of empty gunnysacks grew next to the adults while I barely emptied one. It was hard work, hunched over, pulling pea pods out of the limp sack, cracking them open and scraping the peas into a bucket. By day’s end, my hands were sore and my back ached.
But whatever I made was set aside for my allowance. I spent it on occasional expanded hot lunches when school started. A slice of white sandwich bread liberally slathered with gravy was seven cents. If a mound of mashed potatoes was added to that, it was ten cents. A piece of meat brought the price up to fifteen cents. It wasn’t something I could eat every day. Mostly, I brought a sandwich from home.
Two doors down from our apartment was the Henry Hotel. Many families recently relocated from camps lived there. There was also a service alley that ran behind the buildings. A steep wooden staircase led from the covered porch of our apartment building down there to the garbage cans. The alley was also the gathering place for the kids on our block.
CHAPTER 19
“Sentimental Journey”
DORIS DAY
The Little Exile Page 18