Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Three months later, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing the military to designate exclusion zones, places from which both citizens and non-citizens could be excluded. As a result, over 110,000 people—the majority of them American citizens—were evacuated and incarcerated in internment camps after the entire Pacific coastal area was designated an exclusion zone for people of Japanese descent. These men, women and children who were imprisoned experienced considerable financial loss and other hardships. Though the order allowing citizens to be detained was rescinded in January 1945, resulting in the closure of some camps, several camps lasted the duration of the war.
Marnie Mueller was born in Tule Lake Japanese American Internment Camp in 1942, the daughter of white activists who were horrified by the moral and political implications of the camps. Her parents both worked as political advocates for the people of Japanese descent who were imprisoned there. Marnie’s essay begins even before she was born as she shares her Jewish mother’s recollections of being pregnant and giving birth in the dusty location. She remembers the unstated but palpable tension that existed between her parents because her father fought for the rights of Japanese Americans but was a conscientious objector for military service despite what was happening to Jews as the war progressed in Europe.
WHERE I WAS BORN no longer exists except in the hearts and minds of those who lived there during World War II. All that stands today are a few buildings and deteriorating barracks set on a windswept dried lakebed of black volcanic sand. There’s a plaque on the side of the road that identifies it as the site of the Tule Lake Japanese American Internment Camp. This high desert locale in Northern California is where my life began on a hot summer day in 1942.
Whenever I tell people that I was born in the Tule Lake camp their response is invariably, “But you’re not Japanese.” Once in a while someone will look closely and inquiringly at my Caucasian face and ask, “Is one of your parents Japanese?” Or, “Was your father a guard?” And then I launch into a long explanation of how my father, a declared conscientious objector who hadn’t yet been called up for service, went to work in the camp to try to make an intolerable situation tolerable for those incarcerated there. And how, as a labor economist who was active in establishing the early consumer and farmer co-operatives in the United States, he was hired to organize the co-operative store system in Tule Lake. When people remain skeptical, I explain that a good number of Quakers and other young progressives were employed in the camps as social workers, anthropologists and teachers. My mother was one of those who had signed on to teach.
My parents reported for work at Tule Lake camp in May of 1942. They were assigned a barracks unit containing a kitchen with (as yet) no stove, a tiny living room furnished with secondhand Sears and Roebuck furniture, a bedroom with no closet, and a primitive bathroom. My mother set to work making it habitable, cleaning and putting out the few personal objects they’d brought along: some pieces of Fiestaware, a couple of tablecloths and a Mexican rug they’d purchased on a trip to Tijuana. She soon discovered that she had to sweep and dust at least three times daily to keep the place free of the black grit stirred up off the dried lakebed by the omnipresent wind. It sifted in through the cracks in the walls and windows, coating every surface and eating into fabrics. After a few days, she put the rug back into a trunk and settled for the linoleum that covered the floors.
As she worked, she heard hammering and sawing coming across a vast firebreak from the prisoner side. Lines of tarpaper-covered barracks were still being thrown up even as the evacuees arrived. They were hundred-foot-long buildings, each divided into five twenty-foot by twenty-foot rooms, each room to house a family of up to six people. The buildings were organized around a square, which was called a block. There was a mess hall for every three blocks. And within each block were communal lavatories, shower rooms and laundry rooms. The internees had to traipse through dust or mud and, later, freezing winter slush to take care of their personal hygiene. The women’s stalls didn’t have doors; the women were forced to sit on the toilet in full sight of other women and children. Many women held everything in all day, only venturing out to the latrine late at night when they could be alone. Constipation and urinary tract infections were rampant.
My mother boiled the mineral-hardened water. Her pots and pans were coated white with crystallized magnesium, her linens turned gray, her hair became stiff and her skin raw. But my mother had never let adversity and sacrifice dampen her determination. Prior to this, she and my father had spent the first year of their marriage working in the Farm Security Camp for displaced Dust Bowl farmers, a camp which was featured at the end of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Seated in their stifling dirt-floored pup tent, she had penned proper thank-you notes for wedding gifts of china and linen stored away back in San Francisco. During that year, she’d witnessed the farmwomen’s grief when their babies were stillborn or died within days because of insufficient prenatal nutrition and the trauma of their months of dislocation.
She was now six months pregnant herself. More immediate, though, were the preparations for teaching the incoming children. It was important to get them down to work as quickly as possible, to lessen their distress, and to bring them up to date with state education requirements since they’d missed months of schooling during their dislocation. The high school was housed in a converted army barracks that had been roughly partitioned into three classrooms. As my mother told it, “There were no desks or chairs, not even a clock in the room. I corralled some of the construction workers to make picnic tables and benches. But there were no school books to teach from and no notebooks for the children to write in. There wasn’t a blackboard or a piece of chalk to be found and no mechanism for putting in a purchase order. I stole sheets of newsprint from the newspaper office and tacked them to the wall and wrote the lessons on them with crayons.”
My father was assigned to meet the trains. Five hundred evacuees were arriving daily from the Santa Anita Assembly Center in California and Puyallup Center in Washington, where they’d been living for four months in dehumanizing rudimentary housing, some in horse stables still soiled with manure. The first sight of Tule Lake to greet the passengers, exhausted after thirty-six hours of travel on filthy third-class trains, were high chain-link fences with barbed wire strung across the top and, at intervals along the fence, watchtowers with armed soldiers standing guard. My father helped people down from the cars—fragile old men and women, mothers with infants and small children, strapping young men who in a better world would have been arriving at a university.
The evacuees wore tags affixed to their coats, like packages sent long distance, only instead of addresses they displayed family ID numbers. Once the new arrivals were fingerprinted and had their pictures taken, my father accompanied families to their new living quarters—“those crappy little rooms, constructed with raw, splintering wood, walls that didn’t even reach the ceilings so you could hear everything going on from their neighbors on both sides and nothing more than iron cots with rolled mattresses on top and coal-burning potbellied stoves smack in the middle of the place.” After the first few times he opened the doors into the rooms, he learned to stay outside, waiting to see if anyone needed him. “It was too painful to witness the look on the women’s faces, especially the Issei women, as they tried not to let me see their shame.”
By the end of July, there were 18,000 residents living on a thousand acres of land, in housing planned for a prison population of 11,000.
My mother gave birth to me in the early morning hours of August 6, 1942, in a tarpaper-covered building that served as the camp hospital. On the mimeographed list of births, the baby born before me was Number 22, Donald Takeshi Hashimoto, Male, and the baby after me, Sumiko Tanaka, Female, Number 24; I was Number 23. It was announced in the camp newspaper, the daily Tulean Dispatch: “The first Caucasian baby was born today in Tule Lake, Margaret Grace Elberson, seven-pound daughter, to Donald Elberson and Ruth Seigel Elberson.” The delivery doctor was Japanese American and so too were the nurses. My father brought a huge bouquet of gladiolas for my mother; all the nurses were enthralled since they hadn’t seen fresh flowers in half a year. My father also brought gifts of chocolate for the hospital staff, another treat they hadn’t had since they’d left their homes.
My mother, still traumatized by the infant deaths at the Farm Security Camp, had decided not to look into my eyes for a week so she wouldn’t fall in love with me before she was sure I would live. As was my mother’s wont, she stuck to her resolve, but she did ask the doctor, “Is the baby intact?” When he told her I was perfect, with all my fingers and toes, she asked what she really needed to know, “Do her ears stick out?” She was much relieved to hear that they were snug to my head, as she was afraid I would be burdened with what she considered a Jewish trait—protruding ears—a stigma that would have been inherited from her and would make her daughter a target in a dangerous world. When eventually she did gaze upon me, she was disappointed. “I looked at all the Japanese babies in the nursery with their round faces and thick black hair and smooth skin and thought how beautiful they were, while you were scrawny and red-faced and bald.” I had no Jewish traits that would identify me with her, but she had still given birth to an imperfect child.
My father was working long hours during the day and into the evenings organizing the co-operative, camp-wide enterprise system that was to comprise a grocery, fish store, notions store, shoe repair, barber shop and furniture store, as well as various services, including help in the staff homes. The co-op philosophy was based on participatory democracy, profit-sharing among the membership and nondiscrimination principles. The irony, of course, was that he was organizing it behind barbed wire with prisoners who were incarcerated for the crime of their race and their ethnic identification. My father believed fervently in the principles of the Co-operative Movement; he was convinced that it was the answer to the little guy winning against the corporate state. He worked tirelessly to convince people of the efficacy of learning skills that would lead to possibilities for gaining political and economic power once they were back out in the world. Gradually, the owner-operated board of directors coalesced, but not without a lot of wrangling; the participant internees were particularly suspicious of the War Relocation Authority’s motives in wanting to develop co-ops within the camps. And not without repercussions within our own small family unit; my father was out most nights at meetings and going from barracks to barracks, addressing people’s concerns. He was consumed with making the project work, rarely even coming home for dinner with his wife and new baby.
In a document dated a week after my birth, a Nisei man wrote that my father had lost his cool in a meeting, distressed that people were dragging their feet at a critical point in setting up the co-op. “Elberson is shaking with emotion. He’s been trying to get the floor. Finally he stands to say, ‘You give Fumi [my father’s female Japanese American assistant] and me the power to make decisions and then you crab. Fumi and I have been working our butts off on this. I’ve been doing it to the detriment of my family life. Do this for me. Do it for Fumi.” And later another Nisei correspondent writes of a conversation over dinner at our barracks where they were talking about how hard my father had been working. He states: “Mrs. Elberson smiled sweetly and said, ‘Yes, Baby plays with rattle, while Daddy plays with co-op.’” The writer finds nothing untoward about her comment, but anyone who knew her well would have recognized her barely suppressed rage beneath the joke.
Eventually her anger did erupt. A few months after my birth they took me to a photographer’s studio just over the state line in the town of Klamath Falls, Oregon. The sepia-toned pictures were a symbol for my mother—like the wedding thank-you notes—of holding onto some semblance of a normal life, of maintaining a certain ceremonial propriety despite difficult circumstances. She wanted to send the formal photo back home to her parents, proof that she made the right decision in marrying my iconoclastic Gentile father. My father was to pick up the pictures on one of his regular trips to Klamath Falls, where he went to buy provisions for various internees, special items they couldn’t get in camp or through catalogues. Twice he returned home empty-handed, having forgotten to stop by the studio. When he finally did bring the photos back, my mother opened the folder to find that the photographer hadn’t properly cropped the picture, leaving exposed the ragged, ripped edges of my blanket. “You didn’t even look at your daughter’s picture,” she screamed in a merciless fury. “You care more about your damned work than your own family. Everybody else’s needs come before ours.” She never let go of her grievance about that incident and would repeat the story many times over the years.
Her rage could have been triggered by postpartum vulnerability or by her ambivalence about motherhood. She was a brilliant woman with an IQ in the high genius range, who had her own ambitions regarding work. An early feminist, she had insisted that the words “to obey” be stricken from her wedding vows, and here she was left alone in a barracks with an infant while her husband was out doing the work he loved. Or maybe it was her growing concern about the news she was receiving from her mother about the plight of Jews in Europe, while her own husband wasn’t fighting in the war. My parents had married in a civil ceremony in 1938, at a time when it was a radical act for a Jew and Gentile to come together in what was considered a mixed marriage. They gave up their respective religions so they would have no conflict, a seemingly logical solution, but they hadn’t anticipated the Holocaust. My grandmother had been charmed by my father and liked that he had a PhD, as did my grandmother herself, but she was an active Zionist and a committed secular Jew, and by 1942 she knew what was happening to Jews under the laws of the Third Reich.
And then, because of the shortage of teachers in the camp, my mother returned to work. An Issei woman came to care for me during the day. At first it felt to my mother like exploitation to employ this woman “at practically slave wages.” The internees were allowed to earn only twenty dollars a month at their jobs, but in the end the woman was as grateful for the work and the income as my mother was to be relieved of childcare and to be able to go back into the classroom.
I’ve been told that I loved this Issei woman whose name I’ve never learned. My first words were spoken to her and they were in Japanese. From what I’ve heard, she doted on me, spoiling me, at least in my mother’s eyes. When my parents had to be away from the camp for a week, she and her husband moved into our barracks. My mother asked our neighbor in the adjoining apartment to keep an eye on us. In what became an iconic story in our household, the neighbor reported that each morning around nine, the husband stepped outside with a broom. He swept a path to an area a few feet from our front door. He went back inside, to emerge minutes later with my folded playpen, which he opened out and placed at the end of the path. He returned to the barracks and came out again with the broom and swept a trail around the playpen, after which he got a pan of water and sprinkled the paths, wetting down the fine black lava dust. Only then did his wife appear in the doorway holding me—the princess—dressed in a fresh bonnet and playsuit and waiting for her husband to give the signal. She ceremoniously carried me high in her arms over to the playpen, gave me a kiss and settled me gently down for the morning. Several times before lunch, the husband would return to re-sprinkle the paths.
Tensions were growing within the camp. In early 1943, the government imposed a loyalty oath on all incarcerated Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals under threat of twenty years in prison if they didn’t sign. There were two questions that gave rise to great unrest. Question #27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States in combat duty wherever ordered? And Question #28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States…and forswear any allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor? This meant that the Issei (immigrants, like my caretakers, who had not been allowed to become citizens of the United States under the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924) were being asked to deny their allegiance to the emperor, who was literally god to them. If they signed “yes,” they would in essence be people without a country and a god. And if they signed “no” but their children signed “yes” to the questions, there was the possibility that the children would be separated from their parents. Also, because the purpose of the oaths was to enable the government to recruit men for the war directly out of the camps, many outraged Nisei (children of the immigrant Issei) answered in a “disloyal manner”: they answered “no” to take a political stand.
Those who signed “no” to the questions were dubbed No-No’s and rounded up from the other nine internment camps and sent to Tule Lake, turning it into a high-security camp, a prison within a prison, replete with stockades and steel solitary confinement cages for the most rebellious. The two populations—“loyals” and “disloyals”—lived side by side in the barracks. In the ensuing months, the factions attacked one another, causing both psychological and physical harm. The turmoil culminated in the murder of the co-op president by a radical group in the camp. My father was deeply shaken by the episode.
At the same time, the long-standing racism toward Japanese Americans of certain conservative staff members was turning virulent. After witnessing incidents that included these staff members calling the internees “yellow monkeys” to their faces, my father found himself consumed by feelings of rage. He could no longer deny a violent streak within himself and realized that he could and would under certain circumstances consider taking up arms to fight injustices perpetrated against friends and family. He couldn’t in good conscience say he was a pacifist, so he traveled down to San Francisco to change his status and sign up to fight. When the officials, who knew he worked up in the Tule Lake Camp, asked him his position on the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans, he told them he considered it an egregious injustice. They called him a “Jap Lover” and refused to take him into the Army, re-categorizing him as “unfit to fight.”
Well into adulthood, I realized that when he told this story there was never a mention of his having chosen to fight because of what was happening overseas to Jews, nor what it must have meant to my mother that he wasn’t fighting for her people—or my people for that matter. On a visit home, in the presence of my mother, for the first time I asked him how he had felt about being a conscientious objector given that Jews were being slaughtered in Europe. I could feel the silent tension coming off my mother as I waited for his response. Finally he said, “We didn’t know the gruesome details back then.” I didn’t dare press further. A little later we were talking of the time when we lived in a farm community in southwestern Ohio and how difficult that had been for my mother. It had been toward the end of the war, and the farmers my father had worked with were mostly German American and complained vociferously that it was the Jews who were at fault for the war. My mother said quietly, “I don’t think it was helpful to Don to have me as his wife.” And my father responded, “That’s the problem with being a community organizer. You have to subsume your own opinions and often your beliefs in order to get the job done.”
We left the Tule Lake camp sometime in 1944. My father went down south to help disband the internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas. My mother and I drove to Chicago to wait for him. She got a job in a welfare camp; because she was assigned to sleep in the bunk room with the teenaged girls, I was left to sleep in a large room where families with small children were housed. Traumatized, I would wake before dawn each morning, screaming until my mother was sent for and, as she told it, “I had to row you around the lake until you calmed down.” I long wondered what had engendered my distress: was it being separated from my father, or did it have to do with leaving the loving comfort of my caretakers or was it simply leaving familiar surroundings? The question I never asked myself until writing this essay was this: was I terrified that my mother had left me as well? Perhaps there’s a clue in a recurring nightmare I’ve had throughout my life. In it, I am standing outside a prison trying to enter. I reach in though a high chain-link fence to a beautiful dark-haired woman in a long scarlet dress. I cry out desperately, begging to be let in because only there will I find comfort and relief, only there will I belong. But the question remains: Is the woman my mother or my Issei caretaker?
From as far back as I can remember, I have kept secrets and told lies about myself and my family. After we left the camp we moved east, following my father from one small farm community to the next as he worked in locales (like the one in Ohio) that were openly anti-Semitic. I caught on quickly, never telling anyone that my mother was Jewish, concealing this piece of personal identity behind my father’s surname—Elberson—and passing for Gentile. Nor did I want the other children to know that my father was a socialist, an organizer with the left-wing Cooperative Movement, and that he’d been a pacifist and hadn’t fought in the war as the other fathers had. By the time I reached high school, I had created an all-American persona, the darker tale camouflaged by bleached blond hair and bobby socks. I was like a frightened, paranoid refugee who had expunged her past when she’d passed over into America. As with 120,000 people of Japanese heritage, I too had gone from one America into another, a displaced person in my own land.
I wonder if my secrets and my terror of being known and my determined creation of another “self” had anything to do with the silence and disbelief I met when I first tried to tell the story of my origin in a Japanese American internment camp. My teachers would contradict my version, saying such camps had never existed, and I soon learned to say, simply, that I was born in California. And since all through high school and college, the history of the camps was never mentioned, never taught in any civics class, I came to believe that family stories of our years in Tule Lake were a figment of my parents’ imagination or a way of embellishing their already eventful life. As a result, just as my nation maintained a silence about this shameful historic episode, and the Issei and Nisei didn’t talk about their suffering until pressed by their children—the Sansei generation—so did I not reveal the circumstances of my birth.
My mother often told a story about how, as we were preparing to leave the camp, the Issei woman made it clear that she didn’t think my mother was capable of caring for me properly. It was a highly unusual cultural breech for her to tell or even imply such a thing to a Caucasian. All I can conclude was that she had picked up on my mother’s inability to trust her own maternal impulses and her insecurity about the worthiness of the child she had borne. What the woman couldn’t possibly have known, and what I didn’t understand until recently, was that my mother’s ambivalence toward me had to do with her own conflicts about being Jewish. Too, her unfavorable comparison of her infant to Japanese American babies was a symptom of her internalized self-hatred and shame during a war when people like her were perishing for the crime of being Jews. What a bitter twist that those same babies were born in a prison camp for the crime of their parents’ ethnicity.
In the late 1970s, I decided I needed to know more about the camps. I went to the New York Public Library, but even with the help of the librarian I found only two references—one, a novel by Jerome Charyn, and the other, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps, the still-seminal treatise by Michi Weglyn. I opened Weglyn’s book to photos of Tule Lake, of black sand, chain-link fences and watch towers. In full view of others in the reading room, I began to weep inconsolably. I don’t know why I cried, but it was probably relief at finding confirmation that the camp where I was born did exist. It was documented in a book. Also, the pictures looked like the backgrounds in my baby snapshots, like the photo of me in my playpen, set out on the wasteland of the dried lakebed by the couple who had so lovingly watched over me.
To celebrate my fiftieth birthday, I set off on a pilgrimage to my birthplace. My husband and I flew to Seattle, where my parents had met at the University of Washington. We rented a car and began the drive through Washington State into Oregon, where we spent the night in Klamath Falls. The next morning—a sunny August 6—we made our way across the border into California. We drove through farmland and the wetlands of the Klamath Basin, finally arriving in the small town of Tule Lake. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t properly done my research; I didn’t know where the camp was located. We hadn’t passed anything that corresponded to the black-and-white photos I’d pored over. We found an open 7-11 store. Inside, some men were buying their take-out breakfasts. When I said that we were looking for the site of the Tule Lake Internment Camp, one of the men turned to the others and said, “Wasn’t that the place they put the Japs?”
They directed us to a location a few miles out of town. We almost passed by; it was practically indistinguishable from the other flatlands we’d been traveling through. My husband was the first to see the plaque identifying it as the Tule Lake Japanese American Internment Camp. But I felt nothing, even when I finally recognized the distinguishing craggy profiles of the surrounding mountains that had figured in my photographs. There were a few buildings in disrepair. But the vast expanse of land was covered with high, golden grass, and the sky above was bright blue. There were no watch towers, no black tarpapered barracks. This was the technicolor version of a more peaceful time rather than the black and white of war. I’d been a fool to come. My husband walked off a bit to watch birds, taking advantage of the fact that the Klamath Basin had become famous as a major flyway. Left alone I kept trying to bring forth some emotion. Just as I was about to give up and join my husband where he stood by a canal, a hot wind arose, so strong I had to turn my back against it. When it died down, I wiped my face and then my neck. Both were coated with grit, the very black lava sand my mother had swept three times a day from our barracks. In that instant I could imagine her, a beautiful, raven-haired Jewish woman, giving birth to me in a baking hot tarpaper-covered hospital on a blazingly sunny August day like this one, with my father nervously waiting in the room where fathers waited in those times for the news of my arrival.