Silver Like Dust (12 page)

My grandmother and I last talked about her imprisonment the previous fall, six months earlier, and I’m anxious to find out more about her relationship with my grandfather, along with what things were like for her at the permanent camp. So far, we haven’t talked about the place where my grandparents spent over two years of their lives. But I’m nervous to ask about those years, because I still feel as though I’m prying information from her that she prefers to keep to herself, especially now that we are getting to the details about her life at Heart Mountain. That childhood conversation with my mother, when she whispered, with a hint of shame in her voice, that my grandparents had been in prison during World War II, still comes to mind sometimes. All of my questions feel like an intrusion, a ripping open of memories and years that have been sealed for a long time.

“Obaachan,” I begin, peering out the window, trying to sound casual, as though we’re simply continuing a conversation from an hour earlier, “Ojichan left California early, with the work crew, right? And then how long was it until you met up with him again?” I hope that returning to a detail we’ve already discussed—the final weeks at Pomona—might make things less awkward.

She frowns, twisting her mouth to the side, trying to remember. “Well, he left before the camp was officially open, so that was maybe in early August, maybe late July. And I think my family followed three weeks later. I don’t know how long exactly, but probably fifteen or twenty days after he did. Something like that. The days really blended into each other there. It’s hard to remember.”

Those final weeks at Pomona were restless for Obaachan. She had been passing the long hours in between her shifts at the mess hall with my grandfather. With him gone, there were no evening strolls down to the racetrack, no thrilling stories about Ojichan’s early life in the village of Iwakuni with its lovely arched stone bridges, no dashing tales of adventures in San Francisco. For Obaachan, the hot summer days in that barbed-wire enclosure seemed endless. She wondered where my grandfather was and where she was going. There were so many questions, and in spite of her father’s insistence on keeping a positive attitude, the uncertainty was beginning to bother her. Perhaps for the first time since she had met my grandfather, Obaachan felt like the prisoner she had been all along.

When her family’s turn to leave Pomona finally arrived, for the second time in five months, they packed up their belongings in their five leather suitcases and the three canvas bags she and her cousins had sewn. Before they left their fairground room, her father checked to make sure each piece of luggage was labeled with their family name, and, more importantly, that their identification numbers were displayed on the white tags that hung from the handles. He stood in the doorway of that room, hands tucked into his khakis, looking at the spare walls and rough wooden floor, just as he had done before leaving the house on Pico Street earlier that year. The only things remaining in the room were the seven flimsy gray mattresses the family had dragged there on their first day. What would things be like in this new place? Would they manage to stay together, or would they be separated? And what of Mama? The future was so uncertain.

Papa turned away from the room and picked up his and Mama’s belongings. By this point, the packing, unpacking, and repacking—the labeling and double-checking—had become exhausting to my grandmother and her family. The whole process of uprooting, settling, and uprooting once again seemed such an inefficient use of energy. Such a waste of life.

The two-mile march to the railroad tracks was more than Obaachan’s mother was able to handle. She was ordered, along with the other handicapped and elderly passengers, to board a large Army pickup truck that would haul her to the train station. As Obaachan watched Mama pull away in that truck loaded with weary and sick passengers, she raised her hand to wave, and, for a moment, a menacing fear gripped her. What if the authorities were taking Mama to another camp? What if they sent her far away, in another direction, where no one could take care of her? Obaachan stood still, debating over whether to run after her mother. But then she remembered her father’s warning about following the rules and not showing any sign of resistance. She did not dare disobey. She’d heard about what had happened to those two men at Lourdsburg, who’d been shot, and about the gardener at Fort Sill, who’d also been killed. She forced herself to look away, focusing instead on her feet, and continued marching.

After walking for over an hour, slowly, with their luggage in tow, the long column of prisoners arrived at the train station. Obaachan searched the swarm of people for her mother. Ahead, Mama was still sitting in the back of the truck with the other sick and elderly, hunched over, her hands wrapped tightly around the handle of her small suitcase. The truck was parked right next to the train tracks. Papa ran over and helped his wife to the ground, holding her at the waist.

Slowly, one by one, the group of five hundred got on the train. The old steps groaned as each person boarded. “We still didn’t know where we were going,” Obaachan reminds me. She shrugs. “I guess they figured we had no need to know. I mean by that point, where we were going was sort of irrelevant.”

Had my grandmother and the rest of her fellow inmates known about Hitler’s camps, and the long train rides hauling unsuspecting prisoners to those camps—had they seen the eerie parallels between these early phases of their own internment and that of the European Jews—they might not have boarded that train with such composure. Might they have resisted, hollered and kicked, pushed at the armed men in their drab olive uniforms, or attempted some unified revolt? Would someone have put up a fight? When I picture myself in this situation, I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t have led such a revolt myself. Just like my grandmother, I would have been too scared. The stories about the men who’d been shot, and those stern-looking soldiers watching nearby, and their gleaming weapons—I would have obeyed and tried to blend in, too.

When I ask my grandmother about whether she was aware, at the time of her own imprisonment, what happened to European Jews, she shakes her head. “We were ignorant,” she says. By the time my grandmother was leaving Pomona, Hitler had been shipping prisoners to concentration camps since 1941, and he’d been gassing them for months, but the Allies did not discover those camps until months later, in December of 1942. Obaachan sighs. “In a strange sense, I guess our ignorance protected us.”

As Obaachan and her family settled into their seats, armed guards arrived to pace the aisles. The air in that train, crammed with its five hundred passengers, quickly grew thick and stifling. Outside, the August temperatures were unrelenting, and the odor of five hundred people who’d just walked two miles in those temperatures became nauseating. Finally, with a tired sigh, the train began to ease forward.

In those initial hours on the train, the excitement of leaving behind the crowded room at Pomona gave Obaachan a renewed sense of hope. She tried to guess where they were headed, and what the new apartment would be like. Maybe this permanent camp wouldn’t be so bad, she told herself. Maybe Papa would have a garden again, a small one, with irises and tulips, and maybe there would be a front porch where Mama could sit in the afternoons.

“At first, the trip was sort of a thrill,” Obaachan says. “Aside from my trip to Japan as a little girl, I’d basically never left Los Angeles. So this was almost like going to another country for me. We went through parts of the United States that I’d never seen before, parts I thought I’d never see.”

My grandmother watched as the Arizona desert raced by, its sand and rocks a blur at the window. She saw the landscape slowly shifting to where outcroppings of rock jutted up from the ground, sharp and red, imposing and towerlike. “I didn’t see as much of those states as you might think. Through some of the towns, they made us close the blinds,” Obaachan explains. On previous train trips, the residents of these towns, provoked by the sight of so many Japanese, had hurled rocks at the windows of the train and hollered insults. The officials decided it was best to avoid such outbursts by hiding the prisoners from the angry crowds outside.

After several hours, the sun, now sinking behind them, grew orange and began to cast long shadows, and those passengers who were riding backward squinted and shaded their eyes. At last, night began to overtake them. Obaachan watched as the desert’s rocky hills formed into outlines at the window, and then faded into complete darkness. Some passengers were able to sleep, exhausted from the packing, marching, and sitting, but many remained wide awake. Obaachan’s back was badly cramped from sitting for so many hours without moving, and she struggled to get comfortable. These days, as a woman in her eighties, she seems able to fall asleep just about anywhere, and she often nods off on long car rides, or even as she sits at her desk reading, but when she was young, she had trouble sleeping in an upright position. To her left, in the aisle seat, her mother slept, leaning against her side. Obaachan wanted to stretch her back and legs, but since she didn’t want to wake Mama, she tried not to think about the pinching pain in her back and forced herself to be as still as possible.

She thought instead about that young man she’d said goodbye to three weeks earlier: his wavy black hair, parted and combed carefully to the side; his clean, starched button-downs; and his wide, easy smile. She imagined him waiting for her at the train station. Even though my grandmother had not made up her mind about him just yet, she hoped that he hadn’t lost interest in her. After three weeks without contact, Obaachan feared that with his sociable nature and his dislike of being alone, he might have moved on to someone prettier or more interesting. She shifted her thoughts from my grandfather to other things. The feel of Papa’s fresh bamboo shoots in her palm. Sunday afternoons at the beach where the sand was so hot it stung her feet. Sitting around a campfire and roasting hot dogs on sticks. Eating fresh watermelon on the front porch with Jack and Papa, the sweet, pink juice trickling down her chin. Eventually, late into the night, she drifted off.

By early morning, the children were growing restless on that train. They squirmed in their mothers’ laps and kicked at the backs of the seats in front of them. Obaachan felt sorry for them, for their cramped muscles, hunger, boredom, and exasperation. The sensation of being trapped with nowhere to go. Some children cried or whimpered, and when one would begin, often another child would hear it and begin crying as well. It reminded her of how sometimes the dogs in her neighborhood back in Los Angeles would join each other in barking, how a cacophony of howls would start from a single yelp.

“I remember stopping once, in Albuquerque,” Obaachan says. “I think that was the only time.” It seems likely that the family switched trains there, since the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line came to an end in Albuquerque. For about fifteen minutes, all the prisoners were permitted to exit the train and walk around the platform of the station. Obaachan’s father helped Mama step from the train, and he looped elbows with her to help her walk. Huddled together, with Mama resting against Papa’s shoulder, the two of them took tiny steps along the tracks. The guards, intimidating in their stiff uniforms and shiny, knee-high boots, eyed the prisoners warily, gripping their machine guns and circling around.

On the fourth day of the trip, Obaachan finally heard the brakes and felt the train begin to slow. The passengers whispered and stretched to see out the windows.

“Remain in your seats,” warned the guards. “Stay seated.”

A few rebels, unable to resist the urge to get a look at their new home, lifted the blinds to see out.

“What’s out there? Tell us what you see!” a young man shouted.

Those who had lifted the blinds offered descriptions: There’s a high barbed-wire fence, and towers, just like Pomona.

I see one mountain, not too far away.

No trees! I see no trees at all! And it’s very rocky, like a desert.

The train groaned and then lurched to a stop.

“Attention!”

Eager for details and instructions, the crowd grew quiet.

A uniformed
hakujin
man stood outside the train, holding a megaphone.

“He said that we should consider the place our home until the War Authority told us otherwise,” Obaachan says. The prisoners were ordered to stay together with their families, and to exit the train in an orderly fashion. The registration, which would go by number and not family name, would take some time, and they would need to be patient.

“Excuse me, sir,” an older gentleman said to a guard who stood beside him. “Where are we?”

The guard refused to look at the man and seemed annoyed with the question. “Wyoming,” he said, stepping off the train, and then he called over his shoulder, “Heart Mountain.”

Heart Mountain earned its name from a nearby rocky hill jutting up from the stark Wyoming plain that, from an aerial view, formed the shape of a heart. It was located on a forty-six-thousand-acre reserve, but the barbed-wire enclosure where my grandparents and their fellow prisoners actually lived was only a square mile in size. The prison site had been selected because it met three specifications. First, the camp had to be far enough away from any towns to avoid conflict with the local
hakujin
, who were wary about the arrival of thousands of dangerous “Japs” in their territory. Located thirteen miles from Cody and twelve miles from Powell, in the northwest corner of Wyoming, Heart Mountain was surrounded by enough desert to be considered safe. Secondly, a water source capable of sustaining ten thousand people had to be available: the nearby Shoshone River met this requirement. And lastly, an economical means of getting supplies in and out of the camp was necessary. To meet this demand, the Vocation Railroad guaranteed cheap transportation of supplies.

Back in April, when the government was still in its early stages of planning for permanent relocation centers, the governor, Nels Smith, who knew there was talk of building a camp in Wyoming, had announced that if the Japanese were permitted in
his
state, they would “be hanging from every tree.” While some other Wyoming politicians voiced similar concerns, for the most part, residents were not opposed to the construction of the Heart Mountain camp. Their area, like the rest of the country, had suffered through the hardships of the Great Depression, and many of the locals saw the camp as a potential reprieve, a source of employment and an opportunity to boost the dragging economy. Still, even if people realized the economic benefits, interactions between Japanese prisoners and
hakujin
locals would have been tense.