Silver Like Dust (27 page)

In school I’d learned about the Civil War, Lincoln, slavery, Jim Crow, cross burnings, lynchings. (In my Pennsylvania school district, the social studies teachers made sure that we understood that we northerners, benevolent and free of prejudice, were the heroes in that narrative of racism and injustice.) So even though my mother couldn’t quite—or perhaps chose not to—articulate her fears that day, I understood what she was getting at.

In New Jersey, at last my mother and I pull into the parking lot of the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center, and a man, gray-haired and leaning on a cane, stands at the top of a staircase and watches as I quiet the engine. He runs his hand through his hair and shifts his weight. He’s expecting us—my mother made an appointment earlier in the week—and appears to have been waiting.

“Hi,” my mother says, stepping out of the car. “Hope we didn’t keep you waiting. The traffic was bad through Lancaster.”

My mother has already decided that she likes this man’s attitude. On the phone, when he introduced himself, he explained that his wife was from the area, but that he was from out of state. He described himself as a “transplant” and not an “outsider.” And my mother, having spent most of her adult life as an “outsider” in my father’s small town of
hakujin
who never leave the area, likes the distinct difference. “Even after living there for thirty years,” she tells me, with a shake of her head, “I’m still not considered a local …” She has picked up the habits of the area—hunts whitetail and wild turkey, can cook the Pennsylvania Dutch meals my father’s mother has taught her, and even sometimes, accidentally, speaks with that unusual accent that only central Pennsylvanians have—but she is not one of them, and she knows it.

The Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center is located in the basement of the Upper Deerfield Township building. Our guide is giving us a walking tour of the place, pointing to the photographs of workers in assembly lines and the bright boxes of Seabrook Farms frozen green beans, peas, winter squash, and spinach. He seems frustrated that my mother, having broken off to explore the museum on her own, is not paying attention. He did, after all, extend his Friday hours after much prodding on her part, and he clearly enjoys giving the tours. But all the photographs—the children my mother might have known and places she played and classrooms she studied in—they’re too much of a distraction. She examines the pictures of male workers, most of whom are Japanese, looking for images of her father, and she finds one. My Ojichan, then straight backed, wearing a pair of glasses and a white labcoat, is holding a beaker and looks like a scientist. For a few years at Seabrook, he worked in a department that did product research, a position he felt proud of. After showing me the photograph of Ojichan, my mother moves on to studying the class photographs, squinting, reading the dates etched in the corners, hoping to see her brother or sister among the faces.

Seabrook Farms, founded by Charles F. Seabrook (or C. F., as friends and family knew him), opened in 1911. Seabrook, an engineer, devoted a lot of energy to developing irrigation systems and power plants, and before long, Seabrook Farms became a large-scale operation. The company faced a labor shortage even before the war. When it began supplying the American military with vegetables during the war, however, that shortage became a real concern. The son of C. F., Jack, who was in charge of labor issues at the time, approached the War Relocation Authority and requested the release of Japanese Americans who were willing to move to New Jersey in January of 1944. Within a year of Jack Seabrook’s request, Obaachan and Ojichan arrived at Seabrook Farms, ready to work.

“Now, which camps were your grandparents at?” the guide asks me, glancing at my mother with a look of disapproval as she continues to lag farther and farther behind. I tell him they lived at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, but that both were originally from California.

“So they would’ve gotten here fall of ’44?” he asks, his brows furrowed, his mind shuffling through the dates. I tell him that’s correct. “There were a few from Heart Mountain, around twenty-five hundred. But we had people all the way from South America,” he continues. “A woman who volunteers here, a Japanese woman, she came all the way from Peru.”

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States began pressuring other countries in the West to round up their Japanese. Canada, already at war with Germany and Italy, declared war on Japan within hours of the attack on December 7, 1941, and after learning of the United States’ plans to relocate its Japanese in the early months of 1942, it quickly followed suit. Over twenty-one thousand Japanese Canadians, most of whom resided in British Columbia, were sent to the nation’s interior, where they lived out the duration of the war in abandoned mining towns, sugar-beet farms, lumber camps, and road-construction camps. They were not permitted to return to British Columbia until 1949, long after the war was over.

Many Latin American countries also complied with the United States, which cited the safety of the Panama Canal as its reason for requesting the deportation of Japanese. Peru, although not involved in the war, turned over around a thousand people of Japanese ancestry to American authorities. Cuba incarcerated all adult male Japanese. Although Brazil, Chile, and Argentina did not get involved in the roundup, overall, 2,264 Japanese were sent to the United States from Latin America and the Caribbean. In April of 1942, the transfers began, with many Japanese being sent to Crystal City, Texas. But not all of the Latin American Japanese were so lucky as to spend the war in a family facility in Texas. Nearly three thousand boarded the Swedish ship
Gripsholm
and were exchanged for American citizens who’d been captured in the Pacific. In fact, almost half of the Japanese prisoners exchanged during the war were from Latin America, not the United States.

At Seabrook Farms, it was not only evacuees of Japanese descent like my grandparents who put down roots and tried to raise families. Although they made up the majority of the population, other workers were also recruited by Seabrook Farms. With the war raging on, the prospect of employment and housing appealed to many, regardless of their race. Latvians, Italians, Germans, African Americans, and many others came to work at Seabrook Farms, all of them trying to start a new life, all of them starting from scratch. Some were war refugees; some came from the deep South. There were even German POWs who worked there. Although many of the employees barely spoke English, they managed to be friendly to each other, despite all their differences.

My mother remembers loving the ethnic diversity of this place. “My friend’s German mother always made the most wonderful chocolate cake,” she recalls. “And my classes, they were full of people from all over. It was a wonderful place to grow up.”

Her fond memories of Seabrook, however, were preceded by difficult years for my grandparents. Like the other workers at Seabrook Farms, Ojichan worked twelve-hour days, with one day off every two weeks, and he earned between thirty-five and fifty cents an hour. The fact that my grandparents had a toddler at the time wouldn’t have helped matters either, I’m sure. But the three of them had a brand-new apartment, and all the utilities were paid.

Obaachan, having never cooked on a brand-new stove or lived in a place with such sparkling white walls, even in the house on Pico Street back in Los Angeles, viewed their apartment with some excitement. Although it was a simple concrete-block building that was not any more luxurious than their home at Heart Mountain, she took great care in keeping it clean and tidy. My grandfather wouldn’t have had it otherwise. She relished the space and savored the meals at a normal kitchen table, rather than at a mess hall.

“We were so poor,” Obaachan told me once, shaking her head, wrinkling her nose. “I think we ate baked beans and carrot sticks almost every meal. A little protein, plus a vegetable. Those were the cheapest things I could get.” The truth was, they had eaten better food at Heart Mountain—at least there, sometimes they had meat—but my grandmother still insists they had no regrets about leaving, despite struggling to piece together these meager meals.

For the first time since they’d met, my grandparents were free to come and go as they pleased. No armed guards eyed them suspiciously, no chaperones had to accompany them if they needed to go somewhere, and no identification passes had to be carried. In contrast to their life in camp, it seemed that every day brought with it a fresh hope of what the future might hold. The spring after their arrival, my grandmother bought a stroller for Charles. They saved up and were finally able to afford one. In the afternoons, she would take my young uncle for a walk around Seabrook, showing him the children playing in their yards, pausing to admire the daffodils.

It was nine months after my grandparents left Wyoming when a telegram from Obaachan’s Papa arrived, on a sultry day in August 1945. According to the newspapers, which my grandparents tried to read regularly, the war was very close to ending. Germany had surrendered that spring, on May 7. The Allies had dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima on August 6, and on Nagasaki on August 9. Peace, it seemed, might finally be within reach.

Obaachan was scrubbing the kitchen floor, her hands submerged in a bucket of steaming water and ammonia, wringing out a rag from an old shirt. Ojichan was at work, and little Charles was napping. When she heard the knock on the door and looked out to see the deliveryman in his starched blue uniform standing on the step, she felt a sharp tug at her chest, and she could barely cough out a thank you when she took the piece of paper into her hand. Without opening it, she knew what it said, and feared it. And despite the years of warnings from the doctors, the fact that she herself had witnessed the deterioration, the pain of the news was still piercing: her mother was dead.

One of the more famous photographs from World War II is that of an American sailor in Time Square, kissing a young woman, her back arched, the soldier holding her tight. In the background, intense celebration occurs. Taken on August 14, 1945, and originally published in
Life
magazine, the photograph was taken on V-J Day, the day the American people learned of Japan’s surrender. At last, nearly four years after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, the war was over.

During those years, over 16 million Americans had served in the armed forces. Of those, 671,000 had been wounded, and 405,399 had given their lives. For a country that had, like the rest of the world, witnessed terrible atrocities, experienced devastating and abundant losses during the war, and learned, firsthand, just how cruel human beings could be to one another, news of Japan’s surrender was more than just news that the war had ended. It signaled possibilities—that people could begin resurrecting their families, homes, and lives from the rubble. Of course, my grandparents, and the 120,000 other Japanese Americans who’d spent the war in prison, would have welcomed this news just as much as other Americans. For them, it meant that they would not have to spend the rest of their lives behind barbed wire.

In a strange twist of fate, though—or maybe just a stroke of bad luck—it was on this day of great celebration in the United States that my grandmother had to begin the long trip back to Heart Mountain to bury her mother. She and Ojichan could barely scrape up enough money to purchase one train ticket, to say nothing of two, so they’d decided that Obaachan would go alone, while my grandfather stayed in Seabrook and looked after Charles. Although Obaachan hated to part with Charles, toting an infant all the way to Wyoming and then having him there at the funeral would have made an already-difficult trip more difficult, especially since Ojichan would not be along to help.

“I’ll see you in a week,” Ojichan whispered to my grandmother, holding her close. In that intimate moment, my grandfather must have remembered losing his father, who died of
gan
, or cancer, shortly after Ojichan had left Japan. My grandfather had never really had a chance to say goodbye. Obaachan knelt and pulled Charles from his stroller, holding him to her chest. Unable to clear the knot in her throat, she struggled to speak. She nodded, turned away, and boarded the train. Before her was a long, frightening journey.

“This was the only time I was really, really afraid,” Obaachan has admitted, her eyes wide and eyebrows raised. Of all the upsetting moments she had experienced—the hysteria that pervaded the West Coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the bus ride to Pomona through swarms of angry people, the long train ride from California to Heart Mountain—that trip from Seabrook Farms to Wyoming was the worst. My grandmother, always easily intimidated, was the only nonwhite on the train that day. Most of the passengers were sailors, who walked up and down the aisles of the train shaking people’s hands, congratulating each other, and enjoying the momentous occasion.

Obaachan watched out the window, sinking low in her seat, hoping to remain inconspicuous, with her tiny frame and very small suitcase. Out of respect for her mother, she wore black. As the train heaved its way across Pennsylvania, and then Ohio, and all those other states that separated her new life in New Jersey from that existence in Wyoming, she simply looked out the window, watching the landscape drift past, praying.

I can’t help wondering if perhaps on that August day, my grandmother regretted her decision to leave Heart Mountain to move to New Jersey. Did her fear cause her to doubt herself? Did she feel that she should have been there for her mother in those final months? Obaachan’s emotions were no doubt complicated by the mood of the train on that August afternoon, and by the fact that she had left her husband and son behind. But returning to Heart Mountain must have been difficult as well. To this day my grandmother has no desire to go back. Once, I asked her if she would ever want to return, just to see things, and she turned to me with a blended look of disbelief and disgust. I was crazy to ask such a question, she seemed to say. “No, of course not,” she told me firmly. “I will never go back. Never.”