Learning to See

by Elise Hooper

  “All right. I won’t do anything yet, but you have to take better care of yourself.”

  “Fine, I’ll rest now,” I grumbled, closing my eyes.

  The sounds of twilight descended. The buzz of crickets. A whir of insects against the screen in the window. I imagined Christina staring at me, annoyed and worried, but I refused to look at her. Instead I curled my knees into my chest to stretch my lower back. Finally, after a minute or so, the creak of a mattress spring released and the floorboards squeaked under her weight as she rustled around the cabin. The snap of the tin lid on our container of crackers reminded me we hadn’t had dinner, but the thought of eating anything made my throat close. I rolled over onto my side and breathed through the hot pain wrapping around my gut. Tossing and turning in the heat of the cabin, I slept fitfully, replaying the angry confrontation with Beasley over and over in my mind. What was his next move?

  When we awoke in the morning, Christina crept to the window next to our door to pull back the curtain. “Good Lord, he’s still out there. We’ve been watched all night.”

  She handed me a cheese sandwich from our supplies bag. I almost said no, but knowing I had to eat something, I bit into it grudgingly and then couldn’t stop myself from inhaling the rest. Christina rummaged through the bag and brought out crackers and a bruised pear. She set the paltry picnic at the foot of my bed. She then lay out a game of solitaire at the foot of her bed while I read through a draft of an article of Paul’s. I couldn’t focus on the words swimming on the page and gave up, letting the papers drop on my chest.

  From the parking lot, a sudden rumble of motors cut through the quiet. We exchanged worried glances. An insistent knocking at the door prompted me to bolt upright. Christina hopped off the bed and moved across the cabin in three long strides to open the door.

  “Colonel,” she said, a warning in her voice.

  I stumbled to my feet to join her at the door. The morning’s brightness blinded me, but I blinked and brought myself to attention.

  Beasley smirked, looking us up and down. Christina’s hair remained pinned in curls, and her wrinkled clothes smelled of sleep. I tried not to wonder when I’d last seen my hairbrush. He cleared his throat before announcing, “You two could use some primping. Since your assignment has been terminated, you now have all the time in the world to make yourselves presentable.”

  I sniffed. “The War Relocation Authority hired me; you’re in no position to fire me.”

  He raised his eyebrows and handed me an envelope. The return address stamped in the left-hand corner was from the WRA office in Los Angeles. Inside, typed on WRA letterhead, was a memo announcing my termination. He must have sent off one of his lackeys to Los Angeles the previous evening to retrieve this letter. Damn, he had outmaneuvered me.

  He held up a handful of my negatives. “And these will remain with me.”

  Without understanding, I reached forward to take them, but he pulled back.

  “No. See here?” He pointed at the edge of one of the negatives. IMPOUNDED was scrawled across the edges. “Your photos and negatives will remain with the army. The public will never see them.”

  Frozen, unable to breathe, I stood rooted to the lopsided step of our cabin, my brain unable to whir into action. The hairs on my arms rose despite the heat. If he had taken the pistol from his hip and aimed it at me, I doubt he could have stunned me more. I must have sagged under the shock of his announcement because suddenly Christina’s arm was around my waist. I leaned into her.

  “You can’t do this,” she spat at him.

  He ignored her, squared his shoulders, and pointed at me. “Your work threatens to compromise the safety of America. You both must leave Lone Pine now.”

  “Is that a threat?” I croaked.

  “Does it need to be?” He pointed to a jeep parked next to his own. “Sergeant Johnson is waiting for you in the jeep and will escort you back to your car and out of town,” he said, turning to saunter back to the car waiting for him. “Godspeed,” he added over his shoulder, the glee in his voice unmistakable.

  I remained in the doorway. A deep exhaustion settled over me.

  “I’ll bet Paul can do something about this.” The vehemence in Christina’s voice surprised me.

  I turned and reached for my suitcase on a stretcher next to the door. Holding it next to the small table between our beds, I swept everything—my travel clock, pill bottles, and a small notebook—into it. “This has never been his fight. Let’s go home.” The truth was that I could barely stand—barely even think—through the pain burning inside me. Despite all of my efforts, the government had betrayed me too many times. I’d made so many sacrifices but to what end? I needed my family.

  Chapter 43

  Once back in Berkeley, I worked the phones calling everyone I knew. Reporters, bureaucrats in Washington, local officials, board members from the university. I tried to get my impounded photos back. But no one could help. Instead I received new job offers from different government agencies, all eager to create images of how effective and strong the U.S. war machine was, but I committed myself to working near home so I could spend dinnertime with my family each evening.

  The Office of War Information sent Ansel Adams and me to Richmond, an industrial town north of Oakland, to capture the factories churning out ships and war matériel around the clock. Men and women crowded into the boardinghouses, bungalows, and temporary housing, enticed by an endless supply of jobs. One afternoon I stood on a corner in the downtown area watching the flood of people pass me on the sidewalks. The smell of diesel filled the air. I studied facial expressions: how people stared at the ground; how they held their shoulders; how quickly they moved. Using the evidence of what I saw, I made up stories about them. That gal’s frown and the way she keeps touching her tightly curled hair—she’s planning to break things off with her fella tonight. And that young man’s hands balled into his pockets—he’s just received a letter from home with news that his mama is ill.

  “You looking for just the right shot?”

  I turned and found Ansel standing beside me, watching the crowds push past.

  I shook my head. “The right shot is everywhere you look.”

  “Well then, where’s your camera?”

  “I’m just watching for now, trying to see.”

  He scratched the side of his neck. “I don’t pretend to understand how you work.”

  I laughed. “You’ve got no imagination.”

  “If you say so,” he said, smiling. “Anyway, I just packed up all my gear. Christina’s waiting.”

  I followed him to where the car was parked in front of a row of boardinghouses, each with signs hanging in the windows advertising HOT BEDS in big red letters. With the factories running around the clock there was always someone who needed to sleep. Why not rent beds by the hour when you could fill them with different shifts of workers? A truck idled in the street, awaiting our parking spot, so I slid inside. Ansel revved the engine and we pulled away from the curb.

  “Don’t drive so fast!” I yelled.

  He groaned, but it was six o’clock, shift-changing time, and the streets were clogged with workers leaving the factory from their day shifts as other workers headed to their night shifts. Never before had I seen so many different people—laborers, engineers, switchboard operators, clerks, and managers—packed into several city blocks. Such humanity! But the melee held no interest for Ansel. He liked the orderly process of photographing the industrial landscape of the port and factories—the cranes, the enormous ships, power lines, and the blocks of buildings. I liked contradictions, but even with the tensions that existed within this convergence of people and industry, my interest was waning. I’d been yanked around a few too many times by the government and my trust, my enthusiasm, had faded. I dared not throw my passion into this project, as I had so many others. Who knew when I’d be handed a pink slip?

  After our stint in Richmond, the WRA hired Ansel to photograph Manzanar. And as I knew he
would, his photographs highlighted the stark magnificence of the landscape and the beauty of the evacuees. Instead of photographing the guard tower, he managed to get inside one and photograph a sweeping view of the camp. At first, I’d been livid with him for being so compliant with the government’s agenda. He faulted my criticism for being unpatriotic. At a stalemate, we proceeded as we always had: annoyed by each other’s intent but respectful of each other’s craft.

  ON ONE OF my final trips for the Office of War Information, I reluctantly agreed to leave Berkeley and travel to North Carolina. There, in front of a filling station, I found a bunch of men, all white, wearing baseball uniforms for a local team. While I snapped several photos of the players, they mugged for the camera before heading off to play. In the background sat a Negro man, watching the shenanigans with a tense, unconvincing smile. After turning in my negatives, the OWI office transformed my photo into a propaganda poster by cropping the image. Only the white men grinned into the camera. Gone was the Negro. Gone was the stack of tires piled on the porch of the decrepit shop, the broken tools peppering the dusty yard, and the building’s grubby and chipped clapboard siding. Ramshackle shops like it could be found along every road in the South, but the government edited this truth right out of the image. A message ran along the top of the poster: This is America . . . Where a fellow can start on the home team and wind up in the big league. My own caption, had I written one, would have said something far different, but I had fallen out of the times. No one cared about the small guy anymore. Everyone only wanted winners.

  The war limped along toward its end. Newspapers described the daily deterioration in FDR’s health. When he died in his beloved Warm Springs, both grief and relief coursed through me. And then my own health fell apart. Bleeding ulcers and a gallbladder disorder landed me in the hospital. I needed over twenty blood transfusions before my condition stabilized. Dan returned home only to vanish again. Five years passed. Hospitals, diagnoses, treatments. I couldn’t register it all. Maynard died. Everything changed. Much of the world I’d known, explored, and loved vanished.

  ONE EVENING ABOUT a year after Maynard’s death, I opened the kitchen door to go out into the backyard and found Dan slumped against the side of the house, pale and gaunt, a feverish glint in his eyes. He smelled of sleepless nights, fear, and sickness. Kneeling next to him, I could feel the heat rising from his skin. I eased him to his feet, held his arm as he wobbled inside the house. Upstairs I helped him to undress and tucked him under the sheets of his bed, where he spent the next several weeks recuperating from fever.

  One afternoon, he found me in the backyard on my knees, weeding some of the herb pots. Surprised to see him out of bed, I asked how he was feeling.

  “Better,” he said. He lowered himself to the ground next to me. “Thank you.”

  My hand, bulky in dirty cotton gardening gloves, stopped in midair. When was the last time he had thanked me for something?

  Seeing he had my attention, he continued, “May I interview you? I have little to offer by way of gratitude, but I’d like to try.”

  I exhaled and dipped my hand deep into the loamy soil of the pot to ease a basil plant next to a clump of lemon verbena. When he had vanished over the years, we had often found him in the library, reading and writing. The idea of him exercising his creativity relieved me, but I feared for him too. He was so fragile, so sensitive to the opinions of others. I’d seen too many people wither and crumple under the pressures of producing art. Could he withstand the pains that creativity brought? Did he have the discipline? The tough skin? I was about to ask him all this, but stopped, inhaling the sharp tang of basil. It wasn’t my place to ask. He had to try. “Of course,” I said.

  That moment marked the start of our tentative partnership. He earned five hundred dollars for writing the piece, the first honest money he had earned in his life. As he commenced on his new career, I resumed my own. At just past fifty years old, my ulcers still bothered me and my throat began hurting all of the time for reasons that perplexed my doctors. All of my weight loss from the last few years left me smaller and wizened, but somehow, I felt reinvigorated and ready for whatever came next.

  Chapter 44

  Spring 1957

  Berkeley, California

  Dorothea? Paul says you’re leaving to teach your class soon, but I told him I’m sure you wouldn’t mind seeing me.”

  I turned to find Imogen pushing open the screen door to my studio. She carried several bags and placed them on the floor while describing her bus ride over to the house. After arranging her possessions, she plunked down in a director’s chair next to me, leaning forward to look at the photo I’d been examining. I attempted to block her view by sliding a nearby folder on top of it, but she stopped me.

  “What are you working on?”

  “Oh, an assignment for my students.”

  “Let me see.”

  I rolled my eyes at her, but let her take the photograph. “I’ve assigned my students to create a photo that they should title Home.”

  Imogen said nothing and continued to study the photograph.

  “I’ve been doing all of the assignments I give my students,” I continue. “It keeps me fresh and makes things interesting.”

  Still, she said nothing. Just stared.

  What would my students make of my photo? They were all so young. Smooth-skinned, thick-haired. Bright-eyed. They were clever and sure of themselves in the way of people who have never known real hunger, or worried about telegrams arriving with bad news, or feared that they could lose everything. They were a new generation and I envied them in many ways. But I was still unsure how much depth lay within them. They reminded me of white sugar, refined and sweet but without substance. Hopefully they would prove me wrong.

  “This is home for you?” Imogen asked.

  I nodded.

  “You’ll knock them sideways with this, you know. I expect they’ll produce a slew of photos of windows and apartment doors. All predictable.”

  “I’m hoping they will surprise me.” I’d taken to teaching this class at the California School of Fine Arts more than I expected. “Will it surprise you to know that I’m learning just as much as they do? And possibly even more.”

  “More than those rubes?”

  “Well, the more I learn, I realize how little I know. I quite enjoy the feeling. Whoever said curiosity killed the cat had it all wrong. Curiosity is what gives that cat nine lives. Curiosity is the key to living creatively.”

  Imogen nodded slowly. “You never fail to impress me with everything you’ve got hidden away under the hood. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: you’re the toughest old lady I know.”

  “Well, then that makes two of us.”

  “We sure are.” She laughed and raised her balding gray eyebrows. Her eyes twinkled behind the large circular lenses of her glasses. “Why, even my laugh is more of a cackle now. Maybe we’re a pair of old witches. Our magic lies in conjuring images out of nothing. We could form a new camera club, make it more of a coven.”

  “A coven for creatives,” I said, chuckling.

  She placed the photo back on my work counter and we both settled into our chairs. Imogen’s hair had gone almost completely white. Long wisps of it clouded around her face.

  “I’m thinking of asking Dan to join me on a new assignment for Life.”

  “I thought Ireland was a debacle.”

  “It was no such thing.” A couple years back, Dan and I had traveled together to Ireland’s County Clare to complete a photo-essay for Life. I complained about how he drifted in and out of the project. He accused me of being too controlling. I threw up my hands and left him to spend his days sitting in pubs while I took photographs in the field. “Sure, we fought. Nearly every day, in fact. But we still met up every night for dinner. It was progress.”

  “Considering your history, I’d nominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize.”

  “Ha, I’d settle for sainthood.”

  “Wou
ldn’t that be rich? The two of us, patron saints of nagging mothers.” Imogen’s raspy laughter ebbed and she placed one of her pale hands on my forearm. Veins fanned out underneath her thin skin like cobwebs. “But you know, you’re doing well with him. You two have come a long way. For years, I worried you were going to lose him.”

  I rested my hand on hers. “Every day I still worry I may lose him.”

  We fell silent and our eyes traveled back to the photograph on my work counter. It showed my withered right foot, bending awkwardly to the side, pale, vulnerable, and imperfect. I wasn’t one for self-portraits, but this one was different. All of these years I’d been looking for the gestures, the angles, the expressions that revealed a person. Well, here was my most telling feature in black and white. “I’ve had a recurring dream ever since I had polio. In it, I’d run, just run, faster and faster. It was the most joyous feeling, but then I’d awaken and it would all hit me. The grief, the anger, all of my sorrow over my foot.”

  “How often do you have the dream?”

  “Once a month, maybe? More during times of stress.”

  Imogen clucked sympathetically.

  “But here’s the thing,” I said, “I can’t remember the last time I had it.”

  When I had contemplated this assignment, I’d mulled over what to produce for days. Home. What was home to me? I took the image of my foot one morning on a whim and realized its significance as I developed it. During all of my sixty-two years, I had never photographed my foot, never even thought about it. So, what changed?

  I was tired of hiding it.

  Chapter 45

  May 1964

  The National Archives

  Washington, D.C.

  Dan and I sit at a table in a small room with a large, dusty file box in front of us.

  “It’s amazing this is still here. When I was in the army, I remember hearing about you going to Manzanar, but I’m not sure I really believed it,” he says, shaking his head with a sadness that surprises me. He starts to remove the lid, but I place my hand on his forearm to stop him.