Weedflower (16 page)

It was Mr. Moto. “I thought you might want to come outside,” he said.

She walked slowly to the door, then stopped and blurted out, “I entered us in the contest!”

She thought he might be angry, but instead he laughed. “Well, I entered us also!”

They took down the cheesecloth so the judges
could get an unfettered view of the garden. Sumiko cleaned up all the spent weedflowers, since there was nothing uglier than a spent weedflower. She got ice water in case the judges were hot. And she and Mr. Moto moved the crickets and snakes away, in case any of the judges didn’t like such things. They brought out a few chairs for the judges to sit on under a cheesecloth tent Mr. Moto had erected.

And then they waited. Sumiko didn’t tell anyone, but she even wrote out a little speech in case they won first prize and someone asked them to say a few words.

Sumiko looked at the garden. Mr. Moto had built two long ledges on one side and let some kind of vine fall over the ledges. That way their garden looked almost tropical—here in the desert! And Sumiko had gone through her flower forest and cut off a flower here and there, so that the stalks were different heights in some places. She felt this gave the impression that the flowers were wild and not cultivated. And the topper for the whole garden were the long pieces of wood that Mr. Moto had carved into perfect facsimiles of bamboo.

When the judges came around, a number of people from the block stood around to watch. There were seven judges. Some of them knelt down and looked closely at the plants, while others stood far back to get more perspective. They all took notes on pads of paper.
Nobody drank any ice water, and nobody sat under the cheesecloth tent. And nobody asked a single question. After a few minutes the judges smiled stiffly and left.

Mr. Moto and Sumiko looked at each other. “Well, anyway, I think it’s a beautiful garden!” he said. Then he hung his head sadly. “Too bad we have no trees.” His face grew even sadder. “Sakagami-san has miniature sailboats in his pond.” Sumiko felt pretty disappointed and even jealous of Mr. Sakagami.

That day the paper carried an item about an Indian basketball team from the local high school coming to camp after dinner to play against the Camp Three allstar basketball team. The all-stars had never played together before; still, it was a big event. The Indians had played in Camps One and Two before, but this was their first trip to Sumiko’s camp. The paper said that the Indians had been told to “stay away from the Camp Three girls.”

When Sumiko read the article, she suspected it was written just for her by someone who somehow knew that she knew Frank. She realized her suspicion was ridiculous, but she couldn’t stop herself from feeling that way.

The basketball court was dirt that had been sprayed with water to create a hard pack. Everybody in camp was curious to see the Indian team. In the early evening there was a silence when the Indians
stepped off their bus. The Indians and the Japanese looked at each other curiously. Sumiko followed in a crowd of kids as the Indians walked to the court. The Indians were taller than most of the Japanese players, except for the Japanese center, a boy who actually had to duck when he entered doorways. But on a good day he was about as fast as a turtle.

Though the Indians and the Japanese seemed curious about each other, Sumiko didn’t know if they liked each other. They seemed to want to stay separate. She could tell by how they stood at a distance when they looked at each other.

The Indians all wore their hair short, not long like in pictures Sumiko had seen, and their names were either Anglo or Spanish. Sumiko had thought Frank and his friends might have been unusual, since they all wore their hair short. But so did these older boys.

The Japanese were fast and pesky, and the game stayed close. The crowd cheered wildly for the allstars. But the Indians won by three points.

After the game a Japanese girl was talking to one of the Indian players when all of a sudden a Japanese boy stepped between them and said warningly, “You stay away from our girls.” Sumiko recognized the boy—he lived on the same block as her. She worried what would happen if he found out she knew Frank.

Before the player could reply, the center for the
Indian team came over and said, “He’s not interested in
your
girls.”

“What’s wrong with our girls?” said the Japanese boy. He tried to push the Indian center, but the Japanese center held him back.

Members of both teams had been shaking hands with each other. Now there was a silence like the silence at the party when Sumiko had walked into the living room. It rolled across the crowd in the same way. A moment ago everybody had seemed happy to have played a great game, but now both teams were glaring at each other. Then Bull was there, slapping the boy on the shoulder and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with our girls.” He reached out to shake hands with the Indian center. “Great game—we’ll get you next time!” The center hesitated but nodded, and people started to disperse.

Later Sumiko saw a couple of boys about TakTak’s age, following the girl who’d talked to the Indian. The boys were saying, “Indian lover” and pulling at her skirt as she walked with her head high. Ichiro always said that holding your head high was a sign of dignity.

Seeing the boys taunt the girl shook Sumiko up, because she was starting to think Frank wasn’t so bad. In fact, she almost liked him. If people pulled at her skirt and called her names, she wondered if she would have the courage to hold her head high like that girl. Whenever she’d thought of having friends, she’d
thought about how they would act toward her. Now she saw that if she and Frank were friends, she had responsibilities.

When she got home, she found something hanging on her door: a yellow ribbon. Third place! She grabbed the ribbon and ran into Mr. Moto’s barrack, forgetting for the moment about the day’s events.

“Congratulations!” he said. He slapped her on the back. “I cooked you up some snake!”

23

A
FTER THE BASKETBALL GAME
S
UMIKO MADE EXTRA SURE
that nobody saw her when she went to the fields. But the next few times she went, Frank wasn’t there anyway.

By late October the camp had managed to find enough teachers to start a school, which was to be held in empty barracks. One day Sumiko and Sachi walked by the barracks where some teachers had just moved in. “One of the teachers is Negro,” Sachi said. “I saw her. Another one is German. Her father is a Nazi. I saw her, too.”

Sumiko never knew what ratio of lies to truth Sachi told, and even if she knew the ratio, she wouldn’t have
known which was the truth percentage and which was not.

Just to find out how it felt to tell a whopper, Sumiko said, “One of the teachers is from the circus. She used to be a trapeze artist.” Sachi looked wonderingly at Sumiko, which made Sumiko feel kind of good. Lying certainly offered satisfactions, but the problem was it left a bad aftertaste.

On the first day of school Sumiko braided her hair and put on her mint green dress. It was tight under the arms and shorter than it used to be. At first she thought it had shrunk, but then she realized she’d grown. But it was still the best dress she owned. She and Tak-Tak each took a chair from their home and stepped outside. As they walked they saw dozens of other kids also carrying their chairs in the dust.

Sumiko dropped Tak-Tak off at his classroom and saw that his teacher
was
Negro. She wondered whether her own teacher would be the daughter of a Nazi!

Inside her classroom there were no tables; in fact, there was nothing at all except a young, sweaty white woman standing at the front of the room. She held up a sign that read
I AM MISS KELLY
. Miss Kelly asked the kids to set their chairs along the walls.

“I am Miss Kelly,” said Miss Kelly. “This is my first teaching assignment, and I’m very excited to be here.” A drop of sweat fell into her eye, and she wiped it away. Sumiko noticed dust on Miss Kelly’s skirt. “I’d
like everybody to go around the room and tell us your name and what your parents did before the war.”

The kids mostly obeyed glumly though some of the bad boys slouched in their chairs and openly chewed gum. Miss Kelly seemed nervous. When Sumiko’s turn came, she stood up and said, “Sumiko Matsuda. We were flower farmers.”

When everyone had finished, Miss Kelly made them sing patriotic songs for an hour. Then Miss Kelly asked whether anybody had any questions.

Someone raised his hand. “Miss Kelly!”

“Yes.”

“Why aren’t you married?”

Everyone giggled. Miss Kelly’s mouth fell open, and then she smiled and said, “That’s personal.”

The boy raised his hand again, but she ignored him. Nobody else raised a hand. For a second Miss Kelly looked like she might cry. Sumiko felt sorry for her.

A boy called out, “Will you marry me?” Everybody laughed. Then Miss Kelly passed around a novel called
The King of the Island
. It was an old beat-up book that nobody had ever heard of. Miss Kelly said each teacher had been given exactly one book for class. Miss Kelly made everybody in class read a page out loud and then pass it on to the next person.

After that it was lunchtime, and after lunch Miss Kelly let them leave early, partly because it was the
first day and partly because none of the boys had returned from lunch.

In Camp Three there were Caucasian teachers,
Nisei
teachers, and one Negro teacher.
Nisei
were the second generation of
Nikkei,
but the first generation born in America. For most of the
Nisei
teachers, this was their first teaching job. Though they’d graduated college with teaching degrees, before camp they hadn’t been able to find jobs because of their race.

At one time Sumiko had been looking forward to school, but now that she had her garden, school seemed kind of useless. The only people who seemed to take it seriously were the teachers.

One of the Caucasian teachers didn’t last long. Turnover was high from the start, but this woman suffered an actual nervous breakdown and had to leave. Sumiko thought maybe it was the dust that drove teachers away. You couldn’t escape it. Sometimes you could ignore it, but when you had nothing to do, you were aware of dirt grains on your scalp and up your nose and in your eyes, and no matter if you closed your door, you found it all over your sheets and your floors. Some of the Christians in camp said God was testing them with this dust. TakTak said, “What happens if you fail the dust test?” Sumiko didn’t know.

Though she knew it was wrong, Sumiko couldn’t help feeling kind of satisfied when the teachers left.
White people had put them in this camp, and yet they couldn’t take it. She remembered how a few months ago one of the planes that buzzed camp just to harass them had crashed. And several
Nikkei
had applauded. “It serves them right!” people had said.

Sumiko figured that
hakujin
thought they were better than the Japanese and the Indians; the Indians didn’t seem to particularly like whites
or
Japanese; and Japanese didn’t want to socialize with the Indians and resented the whites. So nobody liked anybody much. She told this to Ichiro; and he said, “That’s why we have laws.” She told this to Bull, and he said, “Well, remember the Quakers.” Sumiko had forgotten all about them and about the woman who’d taken care of Mrs. Ono’s dog, and she had even forgotten about Miss Kelly, who was nice enough to work here teaching them when she could have gotten a job outside instead.

Ichiro and his friends liked to argue about laws, race, and camp. One night a friend of Ichiro’s who was visiting exclaimed that he was sick of camp and was going to look into finding work outside. He was one of Ichiro’s most outspoken friends. Before Pearl Harbor they used to double-date in their fancy clothes.

“Camp is jail,” he told them. He and Ichiro were leaning against a wall smoking. Sumiko watched the smoke wind through the dim barrack.

“We were put here to be safe,” Auntie said.

“Mother, that is not why they put us in here,” Ichiro said.

Ichiro’s friend muttered, “Your mother talks like an
inu
.” Sumiko stayed very still so nobody would notice her and make her leave.

Ichiro said, “My mother is not an
inu
. She just doesn’t understand.”

Auntie said, “I understand all I need to.”

Then everybody started yelling about exactly why they were in camp. Tak-Tak ran to his bed and pulled the covers over his head.

“We’re in camp because of prejudice, pure and simple,” shouted Ichiro’s friend.

“We were put here for our own protection,” Auntie insisted again. “To protect us from all the people who hate us.”

Ichiro said, “That’s ridiculous. If I hate someone, should the person I hate be put in jail to protect him? And now there are rumors that they’re going to start drafting us right out of this jail.”

Bull was sitting at the table reading the day’s
Chronicle
and acting as if he couldn’t hear a thing.