Authors: Mariko Nagai
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,