Homer, today, April 30, happens to be the day on which, over seventy years ago in 1942, my father and his family lost their freedom upon entry to Tanforan Racetrack, a designated Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, for the wartime removal of Japanese. Arriving by bus, heavily encumbered with what they could carry, they were housed in a series of empty horse stalls named Barrack 14. This was just the first stop; from Tanforan they would be transported by train into the Utah desert to live in a concentration camp named Topaz. That year my father turned thirty, the fourth of seven siblings, the three elder married with children.

Five days later, my father’s issei mother, Tomi, and youngest sister, Kay, were given permission to leave Tanforan. Despite their registered labels—Tomi as enemy alien and Kay as non-alien citizen—Tomi and Kay were granted passage across the continent to Washington, D.C.—Kay to testify in a federal court case regarding treason and Tomi as her companion and chaperone. A map of their cross-country trek reads like a tourist pamphlet: Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Washington D.C., New York, Boston. On May 9, Kay and Tomi were traveling on the Scenic Limited of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway between Salt Lake City and Denver. Tomi snored into her nap, but a nauseated Kay documented this passage:

Just went past a place where there seemed to be feverish building of barrack-like houses. The porter whispered in my ears that it’s to be used for a concentration camp—beautiful country but God how terribly lonely and cold with real communion with nature and not a speck of civilization in sight.

Reading this, I don’t know whether to cry or to laugh. I think Kay has taken the train to see her future, that the Negro porter has quietly suggested, when you get to your destination, not to come back. Keep going. But Kay is only twenty-four years old, just graduated from Cal Berkeley. Her observations are not clairvoyant but innocent. Gee, she says, Mom and I are living the life of O’Reilly, complete with private Pullman and porter. It occurs to me that this might be because the other passengers object to sharing space with Japanese, not to mention Tomi’s thunderous snoring. Only a good looking real young matron on her way to New York, mentions Kay, shares the car with them. Could be an FBI escort with cotton in her ears. In those years, who is O’Reilly and what does real mean?

I read and reread the letter, the jumping pulse of Kay’s characteristic and enthusiastic pen flitting across the pages. I study the map. Colorado River. Iron and zinc mining. Snow. Continental Divide. Tennessee Pass, elevation = 10,240 feet. The concentration camp under construction that spring of 1942 must have been Camp Hale in Pando, built to house German prisoners of war and sixteen thousand soldiers, mostly of the Tenth Mountain Division, trained in skiing and winter warfare. In my first reading, I assumed the camp to be the Amache or Granada Japanese internment camp, but Amache was located on the eastern end of Colorado, not along the tracks of the Scenic Limited on its approach to Denver. I’m amused by my desire for irony, but the facts don’t add up. Well, the porter was mistaken, though only about the location.

But there is something entirely screwball about Kay’s letter, read in the context of her siblings’ replies and descriptions of their shameful, stinky, muddy, hungry, bleak imprisonment. There’s a shiny, foolish airhead optimism and an uncomfortable patronage of the porter, his refined face black as night. The Pullman porter is guide and geographer. Holy Cats! says Kay. Snow! An Oakland girl who’d never seen snow. There, on the Continental Divide, the train pauses, and the porter rushes into frozen air to scoop the white filigree into a ball, Kay marvels, like a snow cone.

I could choose another passage in this archive of saved stuff. Well, you choose. Kay’s sister-in-law Kiyo inscribes in her diary: Today (April 30) was one of the worst, if not the worst day I have ever experienced in my life. Or sister Iyo writes back, Someone we know “cracked up” one nite . . . Many a Nisei go around muttering the preamble of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, etc. But for me, this tableau in the Colorado Rockies sticks: civil society in anxious, tentative peace, cast on a shield against the roil of war.

We will never know the porter’s name or his story, except that he had a friend named Tanaka back in L.A. But I extend a story for this gentle man that connects him to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and to its founder and president, A. Philip Randolph.

In 1941, as the United States beat its drums for war, Randolph threatened a march on Washington. He promised to rally a hundred thousand Negroes to protest job discrimination and segregation in the armed forces. To defuse this possibility, FDR quickly signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting discrimination in defense jobs or government. Jim Crow segregation of the military would have to wait. As the Japanese were evacuated from the West Coast, African Americans moved into their now-empty neighborhoods to take lucrative jobs in the war industry. In the few weeks that Kay traveled outside, she witnessed this influx of workers in search of jobs. The engine of war cranked into high gear to build the ships, planes, tanks, guns, bombs, parachutes, uniforms, medical supplies—all hauled off with young soldiers to theaters of battle across the Atlantic or the Pacific. Nihonmachi became the Harlem of the West.

Yet, you the historian might ask, what of significant dates? Did the war begin on December 7, 1941, on a Day of Infamy? Or perhaps on September 5, 1905, upon the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth and Japan’s defeat of Russia? Can it begin on April 30 as barbed wire fenced in one family among hundreds at Tanforan? Your scholarship teaches me that the war began centuries before. But for the short three generations of a family narrative and the story that puzzles me, there is May 9, 1942, on the Continental Divide when a ball of snow was exchanged with unspoken recognition and mistaken geography, paths crossing toward hope and sorrow.