Authors: Kimi Cunningham Grant
Uncle Kisho, his wife, and his two stepdaughters registered separately, and went to find their own assigned place, a few blocks away. Papa carried both his and Mama’s bags, while Obaachan helped her mother up the front steps. The rickety porch creaked as they climbed the stairs and walked toward the entrance of their room. Papa opened the wooden door, and the three of them stepped into their new home.
Inside, it was sparse and dark. The floors were made of long, rough-cut boards, and there was no insulation whatsoever. In fact, no interior walls had been built, so the studs and plywood were visible. A small black coal stove stood in one corner, and three cots with thin pinstriped mattresses were the only furniture. A plain light hung from the ceiling, tossing a faint yellow glow upon the room. On one side, a small window let in the last red rays of the setting sun.
Each 20-foot-by-120-foot housing barrack consisted of six apartments. Generally, the two on either end were reserved for couples. They were smaller and offered a little more privacy. The next two apartments were slightly larger and often housed six people or so. Sometimes large families lived in these, but in many cases, groups of single people who had come to Heart Mountain without any family members would stay in them. Ojichan lived in such a room. My grandmother and her parents were assigned to live in one of the two middle apartments, in a 320-square-foot space.
Obaachan and I continue along I-95, in the slower traffic of the right lane because I am unaccustomed to the seventy-miles-per-hour speed limits of Central Florida. Even though I’ve set the cruise control to this speed, it seems I’m moving way too slowly for the rest of the drivers: SUVs with tinted windows and shiny convertibles race past us. Obaachan slides her index finger along the handle of her purse. She turns to face me.
“The apartment was small, but remember, Kimi, things weren’t like they are now. Our standard of living was much different. Now, people have so many belongings, so much space. I’d grown up in the Great Depression.” She shrugs. “Sure, there was no paint on the walls, no furniture besides the cots. But it was not that disappointing. You probably don’t understand.”
My own apartment, back in Pennsylvania, was renovated just before my roommate and I signed the lease, so we moved into a place with all brand-new appliances, new windows, fresh paint, and shiny wooden floors. There’s a bathroom, living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and a giant attic spanning the length of the house for storage—all for just two of us. At this point in my life, I can’t imagine leaving this spacious apartment and moving into a small room with my mother and father. We get along well, but three of us in such a small space would be pretty awful.
Obaachan continues. “That first night, we could hear people settling in all around us.” She frowns. “That was the thing about those apartments. You had absolutely no privacy. You could hear
everything
.” The walls that divided one apartment from the next did not reach the ceiling, so there was a foot of open space at the top of each divider. On one side, Obaachan heard a din of male voices, men introducing themselves to one another. She later learned that her family lived next to one of Heart Mountain’s bachelor quarters. On the other side, a mother hushed the questions of a child, who asked why the floor was so rough, and whether it was going to get warmer in their room, and when they were allowed to eat dinner. Somewhere, not right next door but maybe a few apartments away, a baby was crying.
“We had the bachelors to the left, and then on the other side, we had a family of four,” Obaachan says as we pass another exit. “A younger couple with two small children. They were maybe in their late twenties or early thirties. It was sort of strange with them, though, because the husband would go away on the work crews to pick beets in Montana, and whenever he was gone, and the children were at school, this other man would come to the apartment, and spend all afternoon in there with the wife.” Obaachan wrinkles her face in disapproval.
“Maybe he was her tutor,” I say, half teasing, half testing to see how she will react. “Maybe she was trying to learn English, or math or something.”
“Well, maybe, but he never came by when the husband was around,” she says sharply. “So it was a little suspicious.”
I ask her if she or anyone else ever said anything about it to the husband, and she shakes her head. “It wasn’t our business. Japanese don’t get involved with other people’s personal affairs. That’s not the way we do things.” She points to the next exit, and I flip on the turn signal. “This is where you get off,” she says. “Turn left off the ramp, and it’s the brown building on your right. See, there’s the sign.”
We pull into the parking lot of the radiation center and climb out of the car. As we walk through the front door of the building, Obaachan transforms into her more businesslike, private self—into that guarded, mysterious woman I knew as a child. “You have to wait here,” she says, ushering me into a small room with stacks of magazines and a game of Scrabble on the center table. A middle-aged man sits in the corner, reading
Sports Illustrated
. Obaachan informs me she’ll come out when she’s finished. She doesn’t want me going beyond that waiting room, and into the small changing stall where she will slip out of her clothes and drape a thin hospital gown over her shoulders.
She walks away, down the dark hallway, and leaves me standing alone in the center of the room. I pick up a copy of
The Atlantic
and settle into a red stiff-backed chair in the corner. But as I leaf through the color spreads I worry about her. Her prognosis is encouraging—the doctors think that she’s now clear—and from what I can tell she seems to be feeling well. And yet I know enough about cancer to understand that it is resilient and deceptive, and that having surgery and radiation or even chemotherapy doesn’t guarantee you’ll survive. In this moment, in the cool, dark waiting room of that office, I wish I could summon that
shikataganai
way of thinking—that ability to surrender to whatever fate lies ahead—but I can’t. I worry about what will happen to her, worry about something I cannot control.
Twenty minutes later, Obaachan emerges from her radiation appointment, her white cardigan wrapped around her shoulders, her purse tucked beneath her arm. She stands in the doorway, more relaxed now, smiling. “All done,” she says. “It’s pretty fast, right? In and out.”
I grab my handbag and check the page I’m on in the story in
The Atlantic
, so that I can pick up there the following morning, when we return for another round of radiation. Obaachan glances at my magazine and asks me if I read any of the book reviews. She’s always looking for her next book. She rarely buys books these days—aside from the annual used-book sale the Friends of the Library hosts, where she usually picks up a handful of one-dollar paperbacks—and she only reads what she can borrow from the library, which requires planning ahead. If the book she wants isn’t there, she orders it through interlibrary loan, but in the meantime, she has to find something else to read. I tell her I was reading a short story, but that I’ll check the reviews tomorrow.
The two of us walk outside into the bright Florida morning and climb back into Obaachan’s car. Less than an hour has passed since we left the house, but the day has warmed significantly. I push the buttons to open the windows and let the car cool. Even in March, the seventy-degree weather can feel hot, especially when you’re visiting from the Northeast and accustomed to temperatures in the thirties. I shield my eyes and tell Obaachan how nice it is to escape the Pennsylvania winter. We pull out of the parking lot and head back to the highway.
“You get used to certain climates,” Obaachan says. “Your body settles into a place, I think. Like for us, when we got to Heart Mountain, it was already cold. We’d just come from Southern California. I didn’t even own a winter coat.” Very few of the prisoners did. After a few months, the War Authority realized this was a problem and distributed navy peacoats, identical ones, to each person. Mama and Aunt Maki had the nice coats with fur collars their husbands had purchased just before leaving Los Angeles, but they were among a select few. Most of the prisoners had no choice but to wear the peacoats they were given. In the harsh Wyoming winters, they would not have been sufficient.
In fact, for my grandmother, the weather was one of the most difficult adjustments. She was used to sunshine and warmth, the sounds of crying seagulls and the crashing of the ocean; the salty, pungent scent of the beach. In Wyoming, there was nothing but dirt and sagebrush, which tumbled aimlessly along the streets. Long, melancholy plains that ached with sadness. There, the snow arrived in September, and once it began, storm after storm followed, and the snow never had the chance to melt. It piled higher as the winter progressed, and the heaps workers shoveled to the sides of the paths and along the buildings only grew larger.
At night, the wind whistled through the long rows of barracks and thrashed against the thin tar-paper walls. “The sound was awful,” Obaachan says, wrinkling her nose. “It was like a woman screaming. And the wind, it kicked up the sand and pelted your face.” Papa stuffed rags under the door to block out the dirt because it would blow beneath the wide crack and spread itself all over their belongings. These rags helped to a degree, but it seemed that no matter how many of them were used or how often the family swept, a thin layer of dust covered the floors. They’d find grains of sand in their bed sheets and in the folds of their clothing, too.
“In the winter, you avoided being outdoors whenever possible. But you could only stay in that room for so long. I mean, we had to eat and use the restrooms, wash our clothes, bathe.” While the mess hall was not too far away, the bathroom was almost a block from their room. Obaachan fiddles with the handle of her purse. “My mother—it was tough on her. She couldn’t walk that far, not in that kind of weather, with all the snow and cold.” Instead, Obaachan’s mother used a small metal chamber pot in the room. Each morning Papa would haul it to the men’s restroom and clean it out for her.
The lack of privacy—in Obaachan’s mother having to use the chamber pot with her husband and daughter there in the room, and her father having to take it to a public place and wash it—was a source of
haji
for all three. “We Japanese are very private people,” Obaachan explains. Even growing up, she and her sister, who shared a bedroom on Pico Street, would avert their eyes to avoid seeing each other as they dressed or undressed. And Obaachan understood that she was not allowed to snoop and meddle in her siblings’ affairs, or play with their toys without permission. I am sure that in recent months, all the undressing and exposing herself to strange doctors and nurses has been quite jarring to her, no matter how many times she has done it.
Pausing for a moment, Obaachan points to the entrance ramp I need to take to get back on the interstate. “When we were at Heart Mountain, though, our privacy was taken from us.”
The public restrooms were set up in such a way that privacy was impossible. Partitions separated one toilet from the next, but there were no doors. The showers were public as well, with no curtains or individual stalls. “We undressed and then had to walk what seemed like an endless distance to the shower, naked. Down a long hallway. Many women tried holding a washcloth over—you know, to cover themselves, and try to hold on to some sense of dignity.” Obaachan shivers a bit, still disgusted by the experience, still a little ashamed of having been forced to parade herself in front of so many strangers during those years at Heart Mountain.
“Once, I was in the shower at the same time as another young woman. There were always eight or ten of us in at a time. The girl was probably close to me in age, and her back was covered with a blanket of dark hair.” (Most Japanese people lack visible body hair, even men, so this sight would have been shocking for my grandmother.) “I’d never seen anything like it, and something about it made me want to stare, but I forced myself to look away instead.” She frowns. She was ashamed of looking at the young woman. She was ashamed for her. For everyone.
Using the toilet was even more humiliating than showering. Obaachan hated sitting on that cold porcelain rim, trying not to be nervous as other women passed by, their shampoo and towels in hand, or stood gossiping at the sinks. Whenever possible, she would try to get the toilet farthest from the sinks and showers, where the distance made things feel a little more private. With the starchy diet of bread, white rice, hot dogs, and canned beans, many of the prisoners suffered from diarrhea, which made the whole matter of using the toilet even more unpleasant. Eventually, because so many people complained, the officials added doors to the toilet stalls. I can’t help wondering, though, why no doors were installed in the first place. Was there not enough time? Or was the dehumanizing element of having no privacy intentional—to drive home the point that the prisoners were, in the eyes of the law, now second-class citizens?
During the winter, the long walk outside from the bathroom to her apartment was an agonizing trek after a shower. Although the water was always decently hot, Obaachan knew that the trip home would be painful. Stepping out into the frigid, gusty weather promptly turned her hair into clumps of icicles. She traveled as swiftly as possible, clutching her bottle of shampoo, tucking her chin into her coat. “You had to walk carefully, though,” she says. “The shoveled paths could be icy.” That first winter at Heart Mountain, one of the coldest on record in the state of Wyoming, temperatures dipped to thirty degrees below zero.
Obaachan and I drive in silence for a few moments, through a rare undeveloped patch of central Florida, where the side of the road is covered in thick, brushy undergrowth, and a herd of brawny black cattle graze, their hides nappy and caked with mud. I sense that my grandmother is through with talking about the shameful elements of the restrooms at Heart Mountain for now, so I attempt to give her something else to talk about. “What did you and Ojichan do? I mean for fun. I know at Pomona, you mostly walked around the fairgrounds, but what about at Heart Mountain? With the weather, I’m guessing you had to find other things to do.”