Dust of Eden (3 page)

sure where we were going. We were all

brothers and sisters, cousins and more,

our hair black, our skin yellow. No

one ever told me that there are so many

shades of yellow, that some of us aren’t

even yellow and slant-eyed

like the newspapers show.

We got on the bus this morning.

We packed our bags last night.

Jamie came with her Mom, like she promised,

and I smiled, though I wanted to cry,

my smile hard on my face like

a cracking plate. Soldiers yelled at us

angrily,
Get on the bus, quickly,

pushing an old man into a bus with the butt

of their rifles;
Japs go home
, a redneck yelled, his voice

piercing the crowd.

Outside the bus, the sea of heads,

black, blond, brown, red, straight, wavy,

curly, all waving, yelling, smiling, hiding tears.

I leaned out the window and yelled,
Jamie, take

care of Basho, Basho likes to be

rubbed on his belly, but be careful of his claws.

Jamie nodded and held out the broken heart,

I promise I will, I promise!

Grandpa sat quietly next to Mother, looking ahead,

his potted rose on his lap. Nick sat next to me,

his eyes as hard as his fists.
Americans don’t

keep promises, you remember that, Mina,
he hisses.

I waved goodbye, and Jamie waved and didn’t stop,

yelling promises that she’d write.

I remember Jamie’s dad with his jolly made-up face,

Jamie’s mom pressing a handkerchief to her eyes,

Jamie next to them, waving her arm

in a circle, mouthing something.

Then the first bus started to move, and

everyone became quiet. People outside.

People inside. All of us quiet,

so very quiet that it seemed we were watching an ancient

movie from the 1920s, where people cried without sound.

We were all sad, but put on smiling faces, like we did not

care, like our hearts were not breaking, though if you

listened hard, if you ignored the engines, you could hear

thousands of hearts breaking, shattering, into pieces.

They open

our bags,

one by one,

those soldiers

with rifles

and hard eyes,

taking out this

and that,

holding up

Mother’s underwear

and mine, too.

Mother looks

away, her face

bright red;

mine is so hot

I think I’ll burst.

They probe

me from head

to toe,

searching my

head for lice,

listening

to my lungs

for whistling,

for
tuberculosis

they say,

examining

my hands

for dirt

or warts.

They pry open

Grandpa’s mouth

and ask him

to remove

his dentures,

which Grandpa

does without

a word,

his face collapsing

like a withering rose

as soon as

his teeth lie

on the palm

of the soldier’s hand.

Nick is next

but he just

stands there

stubbornly,

not taking off

his shirt,

not taking

off his hat,

just standing

there stoically

like a rock,

like a stubborn

stone that cannot

be moved,

no matter how hard

they try.

They have taken away Mother’s well-thumbed bible.

They have taken away her diaries written in Japanese.

They have taken away Grandpa’s scrapbooks of flowers.

They have taken away his Japanese-English dictionary.

They have taken away our books,
Manyoshu, Tales of Genji,

They have taken away Nick’s laughter and jokes.

They have taken away Father and black-lined his letters.

They have taken away our homes, our words, my father.

A stall that smells of a horse

that isn’t here. Hay everywhere,

scattered by long gone hooves.

They call it Camp Harmony, a former

fair site flattened down by horses’ hooves.

They give us big sacks and tell us to gather

as much hay as we can

so we can stuff them and sleep on them.

It’s only temporary,
that’s what they say.

We’ll be home before Christmas.

Kids laugh and eat ice cream outside

the store across the barbed wire fence.

Guards look down on us with rifles

pointing at us, yelling for us to “stay away

or we’ll shoot.” Horses are gone.

We’re the new cattle.

Dear Jamie,

Thank you, thank you, thank you

for coming to see me last Sunday!

When I got your letter saying that

you and your parents would come to visit,

I was so happy I couldn’t sleep

the entire week. And the night before

you came, I cleaned as much as I could

(though our new home is so small,

and Mother being the way she is,

there wasn’t much to clean),

made sure we had enough coffee

and tea (we don’t have orange juice

here at the camp). Oh, when I saw

you and your family standing outside

the fence, my heart jumped!

Even Nick seemed to remember his Seattle

self (he’s been angry, you know, with

the move and all). We thought you’d all

be allowed in, so it was awkward when

we had to stand inside the fence

and you all out; Mom was really embarrassed.

Tell your dad how happy Grandpa was

to hear that some of his roses are thriving

under his care; please tell your mom

how much we’re still enjoying all the cakes

and cookies she baked for us. (Too bad

that the guards broke most of the cookies

when they ripped open the box. Did they think

you were bringing us guns or something?) Anyway,

I hope your dad’s not upset anymore; I’ve never

seen him so angry. It’s not as bad as he thinks,

once you get used to it. Even the smell, I’m beginning to like.

I miss you already, I do.

Your best friend, Mina

Today, rumor has it,

a Japanese man was shot

to death as he tried

to escape from a camp

in Oklahoma, or was it Montana?

His name was Ichiro Shimoda.

Ichiro, the first son.

Somewhere

his parents must be crying.

Somewhere, his second and third

brothers—Jiro and Saburo—must

be crying. Today it rained in Camp

Puyallup. Today, in Oklahoma,

or somewhere far away, it

rained one man, who fell

to the ground and turned

the ground red.

A dandelion

pokes out

from the floor

board, pushing

into our room

as someone

next door

snores.

Today, it’s raining

outside as well

as inside,

and no matter

how many times we

place the cups

and bowls

and plates under

the drips,

they become full

as soon as

we empty them

out. The floor

is muddy, so muddy

that we wear

shoes inside.

Why are we here, what did we do

that they had to send us to a

place fit for horses? There is no hot water,

and there’s no real toilet except for a hole

in the ground. Everyone smells bad, the toilets smell

worse, every room smells like horses and horse dung.

We have become like cows—the guards even talk to us

as if we’re cows: slowly, with each word exaggerated.

There are bugs everywhere, inside the mattresses, around

the toilets, and my body itches so much I can’t keep from

scratching and scratching, my body covered with scabs.

And food. Free. But I don’t want to smell any more

canned corn, wieners and pork. I want rice.

I want miso soup. I want Basho.

I want to sleep in my own bed.

I want to be called Jap,

I would endure it if that would take me home.

Standing in the line

in the rain to eat

at the canteen, only to find

overcooked vegetables

and canned sausages.

Food all slopped onto

one plate, sauces mixing

and mashed, only to find

no seat next to Mom

or Nick, and I have to eat

with a strange family,

all by myself, like an orphan.

Grandpa pushing

away the dishes, sighing,

getting skinnier and skinnier

each day because he cannot eat the food.

Nick does not come

home all day, and when he does,

he brings with him dark clouds

so thick that the room itself

becomes one dark room

where no on speaks, and no one smiles.

Why should we celebrate

Independence
Day when we don’t have it?

When they said we were to move,

we traveled for a day and half on the cattle train,

in darkness, scared, because someone said

that once we get to Idaho, they’d line us up

and shoot us, one by one. We got off in the middle

of the never-ending dry field with our luggage

piled up high with tags flapping in the wind.

Our bodies creaked and we were bone tired; we looked

around and saw nothing, lots and lots of nothing.

When we got on the bus, we were not expecting

the land to be so flat the horizon went on and on

from east to west. We were not expecting a land so dry,

so parched, that our steps kicked up dust,

swallowing our feet like a hungry animal.

We passed people who welcomed us,

huddling by the gate like winter pigeons in the sun.

Grandpa held my hand tight but he did not

talk. Mother’s mouth opened once, then closed,

her words lost somewhere between sadness and shock.

She did not open it until we signed ourselves

into Minidoka Relocation Camp, not until we saw

our room so small, with four army cots and a pot-belly stove.

Grandpa held on to his pot of roses and sat

down on a suitcase as weathered and cracked

as his own face. Nick looked down at his shoes, following

the pattern of uneven boards with his toes.

Mother finally opened her mouth, and said, “This is

our new home,” in a voice hard, hard as granite, hard as the ground.

I stood there, next to Mother, and saw her face trembling,

contorting, and echoed her words, this time as a question.

“This is our new home?” We were not expecting heaven.

We were not expecting anything like our real home in Seattle,

but we were hoping for something more than this.

Grandpa whispered,

Korekara koko ga ie da

This is our home from now on.

Here in Minidoka, everything changes in front of our eyes:

the earth that is dry and yellow

turns into barb-wired sky and the guards staring

down at us with rifles in their hands.

A life that was simple, going to school, coming

back home, a warm home and a flushing

toilet turned into a darker, night-like place,

where there are more shadows than light.

The dry land that greeted us when we first arrived

has turned into moist land,

and instead of tumbleweeds roaming the streets

men and women stroll hand in hand, laughing.

And the room, when we first entered, with wind blowing

hard between the cracks, turned into

something bearable, a home, but not quite,

but home nevertheless.

And the city by the sea, our home on Sycamore Street,

my friends at Garfield, my teachers’ names,

the walk on the paved streets, the downtown,

all that, seems like a wonderful dream. But only a dream.

Dear Jamie,

Thank you for the books you sent me,

and please thank your mom for the cookies

and your dad for the seeds.

School hasn’t started yet; there aren’t any teachers

or even any rooms to teach in. I guess if you live in

the middle of nowhere, you can’t get teachers to

apply, and even worse, you can’t get anyone to teach

us. Remember how we wished that we didn’t have to go

to school? Well, I got my wish but now, I wish that I

could go to class instead. Everything is so basic,

you’d think we lived somewhere in Africa, not

America. It’s so dusty here we all walk around

covering our mouths and noses. The toilets are still

just holes in the ground; they tell us to make

as much sound as we can before using them, since it’s

not unusual to see a black widow spider or a rattlesnake.

All we do is stand in line: to use the

bathroom, to take a shower (if we can), to get our

meals. The other day, Grandpa and I stood by the

fence, and the guards all started screaming,
Get away

from the fence, stay the damn away from the fence

or we’ll shoot.
Something just snapped, and I don’t

know what happened, but I screamed back,
What are you

going to do, shoot us?
Grandpa kept bowing and bowing,