Silver Like Dust (20 page)

“Another belt,” she said. She was referring to a Belt of a Thousand Stitches, or
senninbari
, an old Japanese tradition. Whenever a man went off to war, someone from home—a wife, mother, or sister—would cut a sash of cloth, and pass it around to various women. Each person was to sew a single stitch in the fabric, so that, in total, there were a thousand stitches by a thousand different people. The soldier would then wear the belt at all times, and the belief was that it would protect him from harm and guarantee safe return. These belts circulated frequently, my grandmother remembers, from friends and friends of friends, and over her years at Heart Mountain, Obaachan ended up sewing her single stitch into a number of them.

“I never asked which side they were fighting for,” Obaachan tells me, her voice low and secretive, as though realizing maybe she did something wrong all those years ago. She shrugs, still standing in the courtyard, her Transitions lenses growing dark in the bright light. “Maybe I was sewing stitches in a belt that would end up being for someone fighting for Japan. It was not the kind of thing I could ask, really. It would’ve been inappropriate. If a woman asked me to do my part, I stitched and passed it on to the next person. I didn’t ask questions.”

It’s very unlikely—impossible, rather—that my grandmother was stitching belts for someone fighting for Japan. Instead, she was likely stitching for one of the twenty-five thousand Japanese Americans who participated in the US war effort. All of them, whether volunteers or draftees, fought in their own segregated unit, one comprised only of
Nisei
. The all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team had to work hard to earn the respect—and trust—of their fellow
hakujin
soldiers during the war. However, after liberating the town of Bruyères in Northeastern France and rescuing the “Lost Battalion,” they did gain that respect, at least within the military. Overall, eighteen thousand total awards were bestowed upon the 442nd, including ninety-five hundred Purple Hearts, fifty-two Distinguished Service Crosses, and seven Distinguished Unit Citations. To this day, the 442nd remains the most decorated military unit in American history. Over nine hundred men and women from the Heart Mountain camp served on America’s behalf in the war, so many of the belts my grandmother stitched would have been sent to a friend’s nephew or son, maybe even someone she’d seen in the mess hall or movie theatre.

Besides, prisoners were not permitted to send any mail to Japan, which is why so many families lost touch with their Japanese friends and relatives during the forties. And all mail, incoming and outgoing, was read by the authorities and checked for signs of espionage or language that appeared suspicious. When my grandmother received letters from her sister, the seal was broken and taped shut. When the African American minister’s mail arrived, it, too, had clearly been read. Everything my grandparents sent from Heart Mountain would have been checked as well. The authorities weren’t willing to take any chances with their prisoners—no “Jap” could be trusted.

Despite the fact that the Axis was facing major losses on all three fronts through the summer of 1943—the Allies were targeting mainland Greece and Italy, and the Soviets defeated the Germans in the Battle of Kursk—and despite the fact that the tide of the war had clearly turned in favor of the Allies, the American view of the Japanese was not growing any less harsh. After all, the war against the Japanese in the Pacific had by this point become known as “A War without Mercy.” An example of the American attitude toward the Japanese could be summarized by the words of the controversial but ever-popular Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who explained that his formula in the war was to “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs.”

In her room at Heart Mountain, Obaachan slipped from her skirt, folded it, and placed it neatly on her cot while my grandfather waited by the door. She eased her feet into a pair of thick wool socks, grabbed a pair of pants from her shelf, and selected a pair of shoes to wear for the hike. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, too, to protect her skin from the intense Wyoming sun.

There are photographs of this day in the sparse album of my grandparents’ early years as a married couple. Obaachan, lipsticked and pretty, her hair shoulder length and wavy from the pin curls she slept in each night, sitting on a boulder, her legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles, her head tilted back, her chin high, like the pictures of movie stars from that era. Ojichan, standing, one foot resting on a rock, the tall leather boots dark against his light clothing, his collared shirt unbuttoned at the top, his face young and serious, but happy. High up on the mountain, there is no barbed wire in sight.

However, excursions like the one in the photograph were rare for my grandparents. As each month of 1943 passed, they continued to settle into the monotony of life at Heart Mountain, which over time began to function much like a small city. (With a population of 10,800, it was, in fact, the third largest “city” in Wyoming from 1942 to 1945.) Work helped distract them and provided structure. My grandfather tended to grow tired of the tedious jobs available at Heart Mountain rather quickly, and switched positions often. He worked as a block manager for awhile, served as a clerk in the electricity department, and eventually traveled on the work crews that occasionally left Heart Mountain. Obaachan continued to work the same job she’d had at Pomona, in the mess hall, through the entirety of the war.

Neither of them would have made much money in their jobs. The War Relocation Authority made a rule that no Japanese could earn more than a private in the army, whose salary was $21 a month. This rule applied to everyone, including teachers, nurses, and even medical doctors. Most of the prisoners were paid between $12 and $19 per month. Obaachan and Ojichan, both of whom would have been considered unskilled laborers, would have been in the $12 category. Generally, prisoners at Heart Mountain were expected to work forty-eight hours a week. In Obaachan’s case, that meant three short shifts a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, seven days a week. Many prisoners, like my grandmother’s family, who never would have complained about inequity, accepted their meager wages without protest. However, the discrepancy was obvious. For instance, while internee doctors were paid $19 a month at Heart Mountain, Caucasian nurses working at the same hospital earned $150 per month. At the Heart Mountain schools, Japanese American teachers faced similar discrimination, earning $228 a year, while Caucasian instructors were paid between $2,000 and $2,600 annually.

My grandmother had never had a real job before becoming a prisoner, since she took care of her mother full-time after finishing high school, so she tells me she remembers being somewhat excited about having a source of income, rather than annoyed by the low wages. Her housing, food, and medical needs were paid for, so with her $12 a month, she was able to purchase things like clothing, snack food, toiletries, and other items. Plus, she had been raised without many luxuries, so limited money was not much of an issue for her.

Each morning, Obaachan got up and headed to the Block 17 mess hall to measure out and then distribute to each prisoner the rationed one teaspoon of sugar. Her supervisor there was a young woman named Yoshi, and she was a few years older than the rest of the workers, probably around age twenty-four or twenty-five. Although Yoshi was not pretty, she was thin, had noticeably good posture, and moved with grace and confidence. While most of the workers had very little experience in food service, Yoshi had worked as a waitress back in California, prior to coming to Heart Mountain. She was very professional, and she was the type of person who would have embraced any job earnestly, whether it was in a prison mess hall or a fancy restaurant.

“If jelly is served, you must wipe the rim of the jar before putting the lid back on,” Yoshi explained during orientation, efficiently wiping all the spilled jam from a jar, then replacing the lid. “Make sure the lid is on tight, too. We don’t want to create more of a mess for ourselves, and we certainly don’t have food to waste.

“Waitresses,” she said, looking at her staff of young women, “as you know, during the meal you’ll be serving drinks. Politely ask people what they would like. Pay special attention to the elderly. Make sure you always ask them if they are in need of anything. It is our duty to be helpful and courteous to every single person who steps into this room, even those who are not always courteous to us in return. Does everyone understand this?” At that point, Obaachan and the rest of the crew nodded, half nervous, half mesmerized by the young woman’s poise and her comfort in commanding an audience. As a Japanese woman in the 1940s, Yoshi would have been unusual. Even the young men who served as busboys did not dare cross her or question her orders.

“I would not say that we all liked her—or disliked her, for that matter—but we did respect her,” Obaachan explains. “If a waitress had a difficult person at one of her tables, Yoshi would step in to help mediate. If someone was getting behind, she would help the person catch up. So I guess she was a good boss.”

The mess halls at Heart Mountain received their food supply from a number of sources. Milk came from a creamery in nearby Powell, and the camp did rely on canned goods for many of its meals. However, the camp also produced a good bit of its own food. For political reasons, the War Relocation Authority wanted to make the camp as self-sufficient as possible. If they purchased the food locally, the locals would resent losing their own sources. If they purchased it from outside the area, the locals would be angry that the local economy was not being supported. The best option, politically, was for Heart Mountain to produce at least some of its own food.

In the spring of 1943, a few months after my grandparents’ wedding, farming efforts began. First, the prisoners completed the Heart Mountain Division of the Shoshone Irrigation Project, helping with sixteen hundred feet of a five thousand-foot canal. This project, still in use today, allows barley to grow where the barracks of the prison once were. The prisoners’ next task was to clear several thousand acres of sagebrush so that cabbage, peas, beans, carrots, cantaloupe, watermelon, and other fruits and vegetables could be grown. Although the locals believed that crops could not grow in that part of Wyoming and actually laughed at the idea, the prisoners embraced the challenge and were able to transform the dry ground into fertile soil. That first autumn harvest yielded 1,065 tons of produce; the next year was even better, with twenty-five hundred tons harvested. Heart Mountain also raised cattle, pigs, and chicken for its own use, all on land that had been semidesert prior to the irrigation project.

Late in the afternoon, in Florida, Obaachan calls me into her bedroom. She has recently purchased a new bedspread and wants to show me. “I’m going green,” she says with a sly grin, pointing to her bed, with its light and dark green squares. I run my hand along the stitching and tell her I like it very much. She shrugs. “It was time for a change.” My uncle Charles’s wife, who loves to decorate and shop, helped her pick it out. “We looked all over for the perfect one, went to so many places, and I finally found it.”

Obaachan is funny this way. She is often flexible about details—she isn’t a person who fusses about colors or brands, and most of the time, her main priority is functionality. But on occasion, when she decides she wants or needs something, she knows precisely what she wants, and nothing else will do. She will keep looking until she finds that specific item, that specific shade of blue or gray, that particular material.

I climb onto the corner of the bed and sit down, hanging my legs over the side. There’s a large mirror on top of the dresser, right across from the bed, and I see myself in the reflection. I look around the room: another dresser that matches the larger one, stained the same strange, yellowy shade. A nightstand beside the bed. A small bookshelf in the corner of the room, with a few of Obaachan’s favorites:
Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility
, and a handful of others. Despite her vast reading repertoire, she doesn’t own many books. On the opposite side of the room, Obaachan sits at her desk, gazing out the window at the golf course.

“I don’t know much about golf,” Obaachan says, “but sometimes these old men look so funny when they swing.” We watch as a pair of golfers whirl past on their cart. The sun is high in the sky, and the golfers are wearing visors. Obaachan straightens a stack of papers and turns to look at me. “You have more questions for me?” she asks with a look of expectancy. She is all business today.

“Yes,” I say with a smile, adjusting my position on the bed. “I always have questions. Are you getting tired of all the interviews?”

“No,” she says emphatically, and I believe her.

“Well,” I pause to figure out the best way to put it. “I guess I still don’t have a sense of how you spent your free time.” I realize the irony of the terminology—free time in prison—but don’t know how else to say it. “You know, what you did when you weren’t working at the mess hall, or taking care of chores. I mean, did you have free time?”

Obaachan frowns, twists her mouth to the side, and says nothing for a moment. What did she do during those years at Heart Mountain—besides work at the mess hall, sweep the apartment, wash and iron clothes? How were those thousands of hours spent? Where were they spent? With whom? Oddly, the memories of everyday life are the most elusive. While she struggles to recall how she spent her time each day, and the names of the neighbors and coworkers she interacted with on a daily basis, my grandmother does remember, often with vivid clarity, special events and specific people who made an impression.

The first winter at Heart Mountain, sometime around when my grandparents married, the authorities had a local fire company come to the camp and flood a concave area to create an ice-skating rink. With the harsh temperatures, the water froze quickly. “I’d never ice-skated before,” Obaachan says, remembering, smiling a little. She adjusts her position on the chair. “But I ordered a pair of skates from the Montgomery Ward catalog.” In the end, she only skated a handful of times—the temperatures and wind made being outdoors too uncomfortable for her. But for many Heart Mountain prisoners, ice-skating was a popular means of entertainment during the long winters. “And then there was the Heart Mountain craft show,” she says. “Women, farm women who probably all of a sudden had time to do things they were very skilled at, made the most beautiful things.” Quilts with perfect patterns of calico prints. Embroidered pillows with intricate designs. Blankets crocheted with brilliant colors of yarn.