Southland (13 page)
A table opened up behind them, and Jackie and Rebecca sat down. After the brief moment of discomfort at the bar, they smoothed down to normal again, gossiping about the students they knew, complaining about school, checking out the women who passed by. Jackie contemplated telling Rebecca about Curtis Martindale and Lanier, then decided against it, for now. Things were easy between them. Rebecca had come with a couple who didn’t leave the dance floor all night, and she seemed as happy as Jackie to have found someone to talk to. They had a few more drinks and watched the happenings in the bar. Rebecca kept up a running commentary on this woman’s hairdo, on that woman’s jeans, on the other woman’s girlfriend flirting too eagerly with the DJ, and had Jackie laughing as she hadn’t laughed in weeks. Jackie felt the difficulties of the evening receding, the memories of Laura’s misery lifting off of her. She wondered, for a moment, what it would be like if she could do this all the time—go out, not while leaving her girlfriend at home, but not having a girlfriend at all. She liked the feeling of sitting at a table, with good beer and good company, having nobody’s tears to go home to.
D
URING THE last week of April, 1942, the Japanese of Los Angeles awoke to find that evacuation orders had sprouted, overnight, from trees and poles all over the city. They had a week, the orders said, to prepare for their departure; they were being moved inland, away from the coast. All over L.A.—all over the coast—Issei and Nissei rushed frantically around their homes and neighborhoods. They didn’t know if they were coming back, so they had to get rid of everything. Houses and farms were sold to white men wearing soft felt hats and hard smirks. Furniture, and boxes of books, dishes, plants, clothing, were dragged out to front lawns for emergency sales. Some neighborhoods were so choked with beds and tables and clothes that it looked like Japanese America was simply moving outside. Old photographs and letters from Japan, paintings, records,
kimonos
—anything with a whiff of Japanese about it—were burned or buried, so no arrogant young soldier who’d just started to shave could come and claim they were in league with the enemy.
Frank’s father wasn’t there to see his family depart. The night after Pearl Harbor, as the Sakais were burning pictures in a trash bin near the shed, three large
hakujin
in dark suits appeared at their door. Frank was never sure whether they were from the police, or the state, or the FBI. They led Kazuo into the kitchen and asked him many questions—none of which made any sense to Frank, who was listening from outside the door. Do you know so and so, what were you doing on such and such a night, isn’t your gambling group really a cover for strategic war meetings? Then they took him away—largely, it seemed, because two of the men he gambled with were Junichi Murau, the head of a Japanese-language school, and Minoru Kanazawa, vice president of the Vegetable Growers Association. Frank stayed up all night, sitting with his dumbstruck mother. The next morning, she made a round of phone calls and discovered that Steve Yamamoto’s father and David Hara’s father had also been arrested. No one knew where they’d been taken. Over the next several months, the remaining Sakais received two letters from Kazuo—one from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the other from Camp Livingston, Louisiana. They were written in English, which Frank found strange, but then he realized his father had been forced to write in English, for the censors. Even so, the letters had large sections blacked out of them, or cut out all together. Frank gleaned only that his father missed them, and that he didn’t like the food he was served.
The Sakais spent the winter and spring of ’42 in a strange, suspended limbo, mother working, children going to school, thinking of their father every day. Frank had been going out that summer and fall with Victor, frequenting the jazz clubs over on Central, but they stopped now, for Frank’s safety, and because of the blackouts. Every evening, Frank and Kumiko did their homework by candlelight while their mother cracked open the curtains and looked out at the street. When they awoke on New Year’s Day to find the city covered with snow—enough for Frank and Victor to make wet, sloppy snowballs and slip and slide on the white-slick sidewalks—Masako mumbled and prayed, certain that the first snowfall she’d seen in America did not bode well for her family. The
L.A Times
and the radio newsmen warned that the Japs were going to parachute into the streets and engage in face-to-face combat; Mayor Bowron snarled that each of the little so-called American Japs in the city would know his part in the coming invasions; the Chinese and Koreans took to wearing red, white, and blue buttons to distinguish themselves from the enemy. The Sakais caught people’s glances in the hallways and on the streets. It seemed to them that this fear and hatred was like a huge, invisible cobra that was slowly encircling them, poised over them, waiting to strike. When the rumor, and then the order, of evacuation came, Frank felt beneath his anger some parcel of relief. At least now there was an answer, a conclusion.
Frank’s mother didn’t know how long they were going, or if they’d return, but she refused to sell the piece of land that she and Kazuo had struggled for so many years to buy. Even after they’d had enough money (pieced together from their harvesting earnings, plus money lent by the pooled fund from their
kenjinkai
), they’d had to wait until Frank was born—because of laws barring Issei from owning property—so they could place the new land in his name. And it was Frank, finally, who arranged for someone to watch over it while they were away—his best friend from school, Victor Conway. The day before they were supposed to leave, the Sakais arrived home from buying underwear and socks to find several of Frank’s friends and their parents assembled on the lawn.
“What are you doing here?” Frank asked Victor, who came down the walkway to greet them.
“We figured you could use some stuff out there in the desert.”
Frank looked around at his friends, noticing for the first time that they’d all come bearing something. Victor and his mother brought two heavy coats that their father still had from World War I. Barry Hughes and his family, who were originally from Cleveland, brought heavy sweaters for everyone, including Kazuo. Old Man Larabie brought some canned fruit and the wool socks his wife had knitted. Andy Riley, the white boy from Boston, brought three pairs of long underwear. The Conways also brought a basket of fried chicken for the next day’s journey, and Victor presented Frank with a football. Finally, Old Man Larabie’s wife unwrapped a huge chocolate cake, which everyone ate inside off paper plates from Larabie’s store, since the dishes had all been packed away or sold. Masako, who didn’t know her son’s friends very well, was completely overwhelmed by their kindness. Although she had not shed a tear in front of her children through the imprisonment of her husband; through the rumors of internment; through the selling of their car and possessions, now she sat crying in the one remaining chair and refused to take her hands from her eyes. Kumiko, whose own friends had quietly been supplying her with magazines and make-up (no stockings, though, since nylon was needed for parachutes), tried in vain to comfort her. After an hour or so, people started to leave, hugging Frank and his family and wishing them luck, and Frank tried not to wonder if he’d ever see them again. When everyone else had left and Victor got up to go, he and Frank faced each other, lower lips trembling.
“You watch your back now,” Victor instructed. For the next three and a half years, he would remove the trash that was dumped on the Sakais’ wilted lawn; board up the holes left by bricks and rocks that people heaved through the windows; check the house every month, even after he’d moved to Watts, to make sure no one had taken up residence inside.
“I’ll try,” Frank said. “And you watch yours, my brother.”
The Sakais spent six weeks at the Santa Anita racetrack, living in the stalls that had been emptied of horses to make room for this different brand of livestock. Then they were taken to Manzanar in the height of the summer, on a day so choked with dust that when the guard pointed toward what he said were their quarters, Frank thought he was directing them into the desert. They shared their room with a family of five, the space divided by a string of blankets, but they knew they were luckier than most. Their room was on an end, and when Frank went to sleep on his cot near the wall, hay in his mattress rustling as he turned, he heard not voices on the other side of the thin tar paper, but the wind—whistling between the barracks, rattling the trees, weaving and howling through the mountains. The wind slipped under the barracks too, and up through wide gaps in the floorboards he could thrust his hands into. Frank didn’t think about this, though; he simply tried to get through his days. His sister, who was enjoying the freedom and proximity of so many young people, made a new set of friends in the camp high school and spent most of her time away from their room.
Masako worked in the camp mess hall, and at seven she returned with left-over eggs and stale bread, sometimes only slightly spoiled fruit, so that her family would not have to eat the runny piles of gray, limp slabs of brown she prepared for everyone else. This saved Frank and Kumiko from having to stand in line at the mess hall, although there were still lines for everything else—the bathroom, the shower, their mail. The food—the bologna, the canned spinach, the bug-seasoned oatmeal—would get worse, and the portions smaller, the longer they stayed.
The heat Frank could handle; it was a dry heat, unoppressive. But the wind and dust he couldn’t get away from. The wind pressed the dust into every crack of skin, every fold of his clothing; he nailed soup can lids against the holes in the wall in order to keep it out. When the winter came, sudden and harsh as judgment, everything got worse. The wind relinquished its dust in the winter, and instead blew snow and pieces of ice against the side of the barracks. The ice hit hard, a freezing assault, and when Frank opened the door, the cold air slapped his face; the wind sucked the water from his eyes. Frank’s mother stuffed rolled paper into the door frame to shut out the air, but the cold still rose from the ground. At night, Frank lay huddled and shivering under his green army blanket, while the voices of the young ones on the other side of the room all rose in a chorus of complaint.
Frank wore a long-sleeve shirt, an old army jacket, and the same pair of gray work pants every day. Frank’s mother, who was always cold, had to dress in men’s clothes—the sweaters and long underwear she’d received from her son’s friends, khaki trousers and peacoats and green earmuffs left over from the first World War, black boots and knit caps the officials handed out after three people died of exposure; huge ugly clothing everyone had to take because they had nothing else; because they had only been allowed to bring what they could carry. In the mornings and evenings, Frank went with his mother to the bathroom, helping carry the folding cardboard refrigerator box he had given her to bring. There they waited half an hour to catch a glimpse of the overflowing toilets, and Frank waited another ten minutes while Masako sat in silence, the cardboard box her only means of privacy.
When spring came, after they had been there for nearly a year, Frank’s mother made a small clearing in front of the barracks, three tufts of bush next to the stairs, the whole space bound by rough white stones. There she sat and wondered about her husband. They were both from farming families in Nagano Prefecture, and in America he’d become a
buranke katsugi
, a shoulderer of blankets, a man who followed the crops through Northern and Central California. Masako had married him sixteen years later, on the evening she arrived in America; she was twenty on their wedding day and he was thirty-seven. She traveled with him, cooking for the roaming gangs of workers, until—because they could, and because of their son—they bought the house in Angeles Mesa and found jobs in Little Tokyo. Their original intention of saving money and returning to Japan had changed as soon as their daughter was born. Both children seemed so happy here in the Land of Rice, less cramped than
they’d
been as children, in a larger world with more opportunity. But now, in the camp, Masako wondered if she and Kazuo had been foolish. Look at them—jailed like criminals, like animals, and the children now lacking their father. Many of the Issei men who’d been whisked away the night after Pearl Harbor had been spirited back to their families after five months, eight months, looking gaunt and sad and exhausted. But a few men, like Kazuo, the government still required. The people inside the camp heard rumors of them, along with whispered accounts of how the war was progressing; of the legal cases of the reckless few who’d challenged the evacuation; of the Negro soldiers in Arizona protesting the internment—because of principle, and because they knew it could happen to them.
Frank would stay and talk to his mother sometimes, but other times, to get away from her sadness, he would go walking by himself. He walked around and around the barracks, past the hundreds of families boxed inside, past the leafless skeletons of trees that reached out with their spindly, skinny fingers, through the shadow of the guard tower that stood a few hundred feet away from the barracks. He walked past the Buddhist church, a tar paper-covered building like every other except for the sign on the top and the white doors flung open like the arms of a loved one. Beyond the church he reached the edge of camp, the barbed wire, the long strings of metal with teeth. He looked out at the brown land and the mountains; saw the endlessness of California, ground and sky opening into each other.
Since they had come to camp, they’d received two more letters from Kazuo. The first time he’d written from a prison in North Dakota, and the second time from another prison, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Frank kept talking and writing to the camp officials, who said there was a good chance that his father would be allowed to join them. But then, in April, almost a year after they’d been evacuated, they received a telegram one night after dinner. It said that Kazuo Sakai had died that morning, and instructed the family to advise the officials in Santa Fe by eight the next morning about what they should do with the remains. Kumiko sat on her cot and wept quietly. Frank stared at the words. Masako lowered her head for several minutes, and then looked at her son, eyes lit with anger and pain. She told him to tell the camp officials that she wanted her husband sent there, so she could look at him again, so they could bury him.
Frank took this message to the Administration Office, and by eight the next night, after almost a year, his father was finally brought into Manzanar. Frank got word that he should go identify the body. Without telling his mother, he went to a room beside the jail. A body lay on a table under a dark gray blanket. The shape seemed odd, and when the official pulled the blanket back, Frank saw why. His father was lying on his side, his arms pulled behind him. When Frank walked around the table, he saw that his father’s wrists were swollen and red from whatever had been used to bind them. On the side of his head, just behind his ear, was a fresh wound, the huge bump discolored and caked with blood. Walking around to the front again, Frank looked into his father’s face for the first time in sixteen months. The lower lip was cut and swollen. There were lacerations all over the cheeks and forehead. And near the hairline, a thumb-sized dent. Frank reached forward, touching the place where the skull had been crushed. It felt like ice-cold clay. He stood back and felt no tears, just a slow, rumbling anger, a fast- sinking sorrow, a hard pride that his father’s face showed no signs of fear or pain; that he’d been strong and impassive to the end.
