Authors: Kimi Cunningham Grant
She pulls her hand back and slides it into her pocket again. “So after I received my ring, I had other things to do to get ready. For the ceremony, I ordered a beige herringbone suit from the Montgomery Ward catalog. We had no shops besides the dry-goods store, but we had access to catalogs and could order things. The outfit wasn’t very dressy, just a regular tailored suit that I could wear for other occasions afterward.” She frowns and wrinkles her nose. “Buying or sewing a fancy wedding dress seemed so frivolous considering our situation. What would I do with some extravagant white dress after my wedding day? Hang it in our dusty apartment? You know I’m too practical for that, Kimi.”
The man who had been Obaachan’s minister at her church in Los Angeles was at Heart Mountain, and even though my grandfather was indifferent about the details of the wedding—he was not the religious type—Obaachan insisted on a formal Christian ceremony, with her minister officiating. “Before the ceremony, though, we needed to obtain a marriage license. To get this, we had to travel in a military vehicle to Cody, Wyoming, maybe twenty minutes away. A military policeman and a camp administrator had to drive us. No prisoner could ever leave Heart Mountain without a chaperone.”
Their trip to Cody was the first time Obaachan had stepped foot outside of the barbed-wire confines since her arrival, four months earlier. It was also the first time she’d ridden in an automobile in what seemed like ages. As she and my grandfather climbed into the military vehicle, she felt a tiny surge of excitement. There was something exhilarating about driving out of the camp, even though she knew it was only for a short while, and even though it was with armed chaperones. Outside of their square-mile city, she knew nothing of Wyoming. Beyond the barbed wire, what was this rugged state like? Were there mountains? Forests? Streams? She wondered if just a few miles away, the scenery might be different, with rugged, snowy mountains speckled with evergreens, like she’d seen in her schoolbooks. But her anticipation only led to disappointment. What she saw was just as dreary from outside the barbed wire as it was from within: a wide stretch of gray sky, an endless expanse of snow, and not a tree, building, or farm in sight. As they drove through the white fields, Obaachan looked back at her prison. Hundreds of long, dark buildings. A few people trudging through the snow, their navy blue peacoats wrapped tightly around them. The mountain, just beyond the camp, dark, brooding, looming like a god.
While the camp administrator, a friendly
hakujin
woman, tried to make conversation, the military policeman did not say a word during the entire trip. He sat stoically in the front seat, never taking his eyes off the road, never looking at the four Japanese prisoners in the back. Another couple was traveling to Cody as well, only they planned to pick up their license and get married that same day at the courthouse. Even though these people were complete strangers to my grandparents, they asked Obaachan and Ojichan to serve as witnesses. In the courtroom in Cody, the two of them stood a few feet behind their new acquaintances and listened as the couple exchanged vows.
On their way home, the administrator asked the military policeman to pull into the parking lot at a small liquor store. Perhaps someone had asked her if a stop would be permissible. Or maybe it was standard procedure to allow the newlyweds an opportunity to purchase a celebratory bottle of cheap champagne. My grandfather bought a bottle of whiskey for John Tamura, as a thank-you gift for helping to arrange the marriage. The other couple did not buy anything. The man at the counter, a tall, burly guy with a thick tangle of a beard, watched the four Japanese suspiciously. Obaachan avoided eye contact and stood far away from the register, her hands hidden in the deep pockets of her coat.
December 12, 1942, arrived, a bitter-cold day with sharp gales shaking the window of their small room in Block 17. Obaachan lay on her cot, tucked beneath a mound of Army-issued gray blankets. She watched as her father shoveled a heap of coal into the pot-bellied stove. Outside, fresh snow whitened the rooftops and the paths, covering the ugliness of the tar paper and rough wood, and the gloomy brown fields. On this morning, despite the low, dreary sky and the mounting snow, Obaachan was hopeful. A new chapter, one promising excitement and possibilities, lay ahead, and she felt as though she were about to embark on a great adventure. She allowed herself to believe that maybe—perhaps within a year, or even less—she and her new husband would be elsewhere, far away from Heart Mountain.
Obaachan styled her hair, powdered her face, and applied some lipstick. She put on her new beige suit and slipped her feet into a pair of brown heels. She used her small handheld mirror to check herself, moving it at various angles to piece together her overall appearance. As Obaachan knew, my grandfather valued neatly combed hair, tidy clothing, and an effort to look nice. She didn’t want to disappoint him on his wedding day. Mama watched from her cot, her head resting against the white pillow, a pile of blankets heaped over her small frame.
That afternoon, the ceremony was simple: no organ or piano, no white aisle runner, no fancy veil. It was held in the big community room, the size of which made their small band of forty people seem even smaller. Chairs were set up toward the front of the room, where the minister and my grandparents stood. In the first row, Obaachan’s mother, dressed in the gray tweed outfit she had worn on the day they left Los Angeles, seemed weary. Her shoulders sagged, and her clothing was now too big on her small body. Next to her, Papa looked fine in his black suit, with his hair parted and combed carefully to the side. A few silver flecks were beginning to show. Uncle Kisho, Aunt Maki, and the cousins sat behind them. Some friends came as well, young women who worked at the mess hall with Obaachan, and a handful of my grandfather’s friends who’d lived with him in the bachelors’ quarters. Everyone listened as the minister read from 1 Corinthians and then led my grandparents in their vows. At the back of the room, Obaachan had arranged a table with some refreshments. She had purchased some cookies from the Heart Mountain dry-goods store, as well as some fancy napkins. “It was nothing like the weddings you see today,” Obaachan tells me. “Just drinks and a little bite to eat, that’s it.” Later that evening, all of the guests would have headed to their assigned mess halls for dinner.
After the newlyweds had greeted everyone and thanked them for coming, they left for their honeymoon—in the tiny room that used to belong to Obaachan and her parents. A few days earlier, Papa and Mama had given up that room and moved into a vacant one right across the street, in the same block. My grandparents slid the two cots together to make one big bed, but the metal edges of each were so uncomfortable that it prevented them from really being close together. As they settled into their “wedding bed,” Ojichan turned out the light.
Had my grandmother known on that cold December evening just how difficult the first few years of her marriage would be, trapped in that tiny room, in a Wyoming concentration camp, she might not have felt as hopeful about what lay ahead. The war would continue for nearly three more years, and as the months stretched on, an end to the fighting and to their imprisonment felt less and less likely. In such tense conditions, despair was inevitable, listlessness was unavoidable, and tempers were bound to flare. Before long, Obaachan would see a side of my grandfather that he had managed to keep hidden throughout their brief courtship.
Chapter 9
O
N THE FOURTH MORNING OF MY VISIT TO
F
LORIDA,
Obaachan wakes up thinking of
Adam Bede
. “Only I couldn’t remember part of the story,” she says, shaking her head from side to side, mildly frustrated. “That’s what happens when you get old. Some days, I just can’t remember certain things.” She smiles, shrugs her shoulders. “So I decided it was time to read it again. I do that, you know. If I forget part of a book, I’ll just take it off the shelf and read it another time through.” Sometimes, even if she does remember a book, she’ll read it again, a second or third time, if she really likes it.
Pride and Prejudice
and
Jane Eyre
have earned multiple readings. “I’ve always been a reader. When we were young, my mother would take us to the public library in LA. We didn’t own any books. We didn’t have the money for that,” she says. “And then at camp, having the library so close was one of the few good things about being there.” She pauses for a moment, mulling over this statement, looking down, pulling at a snag in her sweater. “Well, that’s not quite right. It was”—she nods, more certain of this revision—“the one thing that kept me going, in the end. Reading was what got me through.”
The statement strikes me as strange. What about my grandfather? Wouldn’t the comfort of having someone close by who loved her and understood her be what got her through? I imagine my young grandparents, both twenty-two years old at the time: their hair is black, not gray, as it has always been in my memories of them, and their faces are bright, unwrinkled, and hopeful. I see them huddled in the stark room with its rough-cut pine walls and its sputtering pot-bellied stove. There’s something romantic about this imagined version because the room’s warm and it’s more a cabin than a prison, and they’re leaning into each other, seated on the low cots, my grandmother’s head resting on Ojichan’s shoulder.
But this is how I want to see them, not how they were. This is a version I’ve concocted in my imagination after too many Hollywood films and Victorian novels. I wish I could press Obaachan for an explanation—some details of this life in the winter months of 1943, some hint of why she calls reading the one thing that got her through—but I don’t. I sense that she is in some way protecting my grandfather, that she doesn’t want me to think poorly of him, that perhaps her unwillingness to go into details about his shortcomings is a way of showing her love for him. I understand now, too, that this game of ours, of going through and reconstructing the particulars, is one of give and take. If I try to take too much, if I push in the wrong places, she’ll shut down; she won’t give. And I’ll never learn the rest of what happened to her.
Obaachan had known for some time that the Heart Mountain library was scheduled to open because she’d read an announcement on the community bulletin board, and on the day of its opening, she was there, standing in the cold, her feet shifting anxiously on the packed snow. To her surprise, the library was not stocked with only used books that had been discarded or donated; many of them were new. Tall, simple shelves stretched the length of the small room, and books of all genres filled the spaces.
Obaachan would almost always go for the fiction; her favorites were novels with love stories and strong women characters who stood up for what they believed in and who, by the book’s end, married someone they adored. I find my grandmother’s literary preferences a little surprising, since she herself claims to have been too practical for romance and too weak to stand up to anyone. But I choose not to point this out. She’s aware, I think, of the discrepancy between her own life and the lives of her heroines.
At Heart Mountain, Obaachan continued her work at the mess hall, in the same position she had at the Pomona Fairground, which included distributing each prisoner’s rationed amount of sugar, as well as helping with cleanup duties. Her days revolved around three two-hour shifts, but in between meals, she had to find ways to keep busy. Chores—sweeping the dust that slipped beneath the door and into the room, washing their clothes, and ironing—took up a handful of hours each week, but she still had a good deal of free time.
Had it not been for the library, my grandmother might have picked up a hobby like crocheting or the Japanese art of flower arrangement,
ikebana
, as many of her fellow prisoners did, but books proved to be too tempting a diversion from the tedium of life. Although she had taken an embroidery class at Pomona, she did not enroll in any courses at Heart Mountain. Whereas many women at Heart Mountain loved the opportunity to attend a class and catch up on the latest camp gossip, my grandmother preferred reading to such communal activities precisely because it did not require socializing. Even today she admits that she prefers the solitude of a book to social gatherings. More importantly, though, she loved the experience of opening a brand-new book, the feel of the spine cracking just a little, the smell of crisp paper. She loved placing my grandfather’s pillow on top of her own, and settling onto her cot for an afternoon of reading. As the wind raged outside her room, she burrowed herself under her heavy wool blankets, escaping, if only in twenty-minute stints, her life in Wyoming.
“The book I remember having the biggest impact on me was
The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand,” Obaachan says. “Have you read it?”
“No,” I tell her.
“You haven’t?” she says, both surprised and disappointed. She seems to assume, like many people, that because I majored in English, I’ve read everything. “Well, you should, Kimi. You would like it. You see, the hero—he refused to be persuaded by the pressures of those around him. He was so unlike me,” Obaachan says, folding her hands. “He was so strong, so committed to being himself, no matter the cost.” She shakes her head. “I was just the opposite. I went with the flow. I did everything I could to follow other people’s rules and demands.” She frowns and looks at me, and although she doesn’t say it, I sense that she wants to tell me to be the architect in that novel, to be true to myself. To make sure I am not like her.
Obaachan, I perceive in this moment, is failing to figure into this harsh self-judgment just how bleak her situation was, not only as a Japanese American growing up in a blatantly racist California, but as a woman. Even before Pearl Harbor, her choices were limited in terms of career and lifestyle, and when the war broke out, those options became even more limited. She was told where and how to live; when, where, and what to eat; where to shower; what to do. And just as Obaachan was beginning to settle into the rules and expectations at Heart Mountain—about five months into her stay—she had to adjust to the demands of her new husband.