Tule Lake, California * May 20, 1942
The Army truck that picked up the Yamadas on the morning of May 6 brought them first to the Sacramento Assembly Center, a place otherwise known as Camp Kohler. There was little there; it had been used for years as a camp for migrant workers, outfitted—as nearly all migrant workers’ camps are—with the most Spartan of accommodations. Japanese families were packed into a series of shacks with others. Toilets were outhouses. Showers were nonexistent. They heard there were worse assembly centers: in the Bay Area and down near Los Angeles, for instance, Japanese families had been gathered at racetracks whose operations had been temporarily suspended. Rumor had it that the families in those facilities were sleeping in actual horse stalls.
At the assembly center just outside Sacramento, days passed as the Yamadas were asked to fill out more paperwork, until it was decided that they would be sent from the Roseville rail station up to the Tule Lake Relocation Center, where, supposedly, resources had been set aside for the internees, and more permanent lodging was waiting for them. This same decision was made about the majority of Japanese Americans who passed through Camp Kohler, but some were sent down to Manzanar in Southern California, and still others were rumored to have been sent as far away as Arkansas. All things considered, the Yamadas felt grateful to stay in California, assuming it was best not to be sent so far away from home that they might never return to Newcastle. They had pinned all their hopes on Louis Thorn, and they wanted very much to return.
A train took them north to Tule Lake, then a bus brought them from the station to the camp. Everyone held their breath, hoping this new, presumably more permanent camp would be a significant improvement over the poor facilities at the assembly centers they’d had to endure. Mae pressed her nose against the glass of the bus window, her eyes searching for anything familiar, but the land was strange to her. Its wide, flat, dry landscape was punctuated by several faraway buttes, giving the impression of an alien planet. There wasn’t much out there in the way of towns, of civilization. Perhaps that was the point: to keep them away from anything important, anything they might spy on or sabotage or think to bomb. Mae let out a grunt and a chuckle—not a chuckle of joy but a small, sarcastic, precociously bitter chuckle—to think of herself, a young girl, being so powerful as to merit being quarantined from her town, her school, her home. It was ridiculous, and would be funny if it didn’t also make her sick to her stomach.
“What’s tickling you, Chicken Legs?” Harry asked, elbowing her gently in the ribs.
Mae shrugged, rolling her lips into a tight line.
“C’mon,” Harry urged, smiling. “You can tell me. It’s okay to laugh. We don’t have to pretend this is all some big funeral. We have to laugh sometime.”
Mae shook her head, but after a moment she gave in.
“It’s only that I didn’t understand until now.”
“Understand what?”
“They’re afraid of us.”
The easy smile vanished from Harry’s face. He sometimes forgot how old Mae was now.
“Yes,” he said. “They’re afraid of us.”
He winced as the words left his lips. It looked like something sharp pierced his chest as he said it.
“But Ava’s not afraid of us.”
“No,” Harry replied. “She’s too smart.” He paused, and a glimmer of his previous smile returned. “And too mean. She knows better than to be afraid of us.”
“And Louis,” Mae went on, insisting. “Louis isn’t afraid of us.”
Harry’s face went blank for the slenderest of seconds, then he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think Louis is afraid of us. I think he means to help us.”
“So if our neighbors aren’t afraid of us, why must we be sent away, all the way out here?”
“I suppose it’s the neighbors of our neighbors . . . and their neighbors, too, who don’t know us and don’t trust us,” Harry said.
They fell silent, both somberly entranced by the scenery outside the window as the bus drove onto the property that was to be their new home. It was a dry, flat, dusty patch of earth. Wooden barracks had been erected—hastily, from the looks of them—and stood in rows in eerily generic likeness.
Harry noticed there was no fence around the camp, no gate, and, noting this, he felt a sense of relief. Of course, he could not know: The fences, gates, and barbed wire would be added soon enough.
A heavy haze of dust swirled around the bus long after it had rolled to a stop. The Yamadas followed the shuffling mass of people off the bus and were herded over to a series of tables, where the contents of their luggage were rifled yet again, and they were assigned a block number, a figure that was scribbled onto the end of the family number they’d already been given.
“Where do we go?” Harry’s mother, who was confused by the camp’s numbering system and layout, kept repeating to his father.
“Follow Haruto,” he replied, resigning himself to his own confusion. Harry could see it in his father’s eyes: For the first time in his eighty-one years, his father felt truly old. It broke Harry’s heart to see such a young spirit show its first splinters.
The four of them successfully located their new home. It was not an encouraging discovery. The barrack they were assigned had been carelessly slapped together and bore the marks of shoddy craftsmanship: Irregular gaps showed between the pine planks, and no effort had been made to weatherproof this most basic of bungalows.
There was also another family already inside. Harry introduced himself and learned they were to share the single rectangular room with this family, the Akimotos, from Los Angeles. A mother, two teenage daughters, and an adult son. They had lived on the coast and owned a fishing boat until it had been confiscated by the government. They would have been in Manzanar, they said, if not for the fishing boat, for the trouble it had brought them. Tule Lake, they told Harry, was a more serious place to be; Manzanar was better somehow. The father was not with them; after some vague, embarrassed discussion, Harry came to understand that Mr. Akimoto had been detained somehow at another camp somewhere in North Dakota.
Everyone moved politely around the barrack, their footsteps echoing terribly on the plank floor, revealing the hollow space just beneath. The two families worked together to string up a sheet to divide the room and to create a sense of dignity and privacy. It was hardly enough to reclaim either, but it helped.
Somewhere in the distance, a bell clanged.
“What’s that?” Harry asked his new roommates.
“The dinner bell,” Bill Akimoto replied. “You can follow us to the mess hall, if you want. It’s a little bit of a walk.”
Harry thanked him, and the four Yamadas followed the Akimotos to the other side of the camp. Along the way, Harry and Mae took in the scene. The landscape was dismal. The camp was built on a dry lake bed, and the earth beneath their feet looked hard and parched, riddled with cracks. Dust got everywhere. Mae rubbed at her eyes where a tiny boulder of hard sand had already accumulated and solidified. There was a constant hum of commotion and chatter, a whole village of people trying to get a toehold in their new environment. It reminded Mae of the time she kicked over an anthill, and—wondering if that was how the Caucasian authorities saw her and her family—she suddenly felt disgusted, but also very small and ashamed.
The barracks were nearly all identical; the public toilets—which none of the Yamadas had set eyes on yet—were located at the end of each row and gave off an odor so foul, to breathe it in made one’s eyes cross slightly. Later, when Mae and Shizue went to use the facilities, they were horrified to discover the toilets themselves were unpartitioned, with those who used them on display for all to see. As a little girl, Mae had had bad dreams like that; she never thought such unpleasant dreams would—or could—come true.
They arrived at the mess hall. It was loud and crowded, with a long line that stretched out the main door.
“You’ll have to be issued a mess kit first,” Bill Akimoto said, continuing to be helpful and pointing to a second line full of new arrivals. “It’s your job to clean it and keep track of it.” Bill appeared to be close to Harry’s own age. The Yamadas did as instructed and waited to be handed an Army regulation mess kit, which included a shallow tin bowl and a flimsy fork and knife. (The latter, Mae was soon to discover, made everything taste a little like pennies and nickels.) Then they rejoined the first line to retrieve some food.
It was, to be frank, rather wretched fare. Everything came from a can—Spam and Vienna sausage, canned beans, canned corn, canned fruit. The only thing not from a can was an enormous vat of rice that had been so overcooked it had turned to mush; the rice scooped up from the bottom was burned. This, then, explained the hideously offensive aroma emanating from the latrines.
Harry caught the look on his kid sister’s face. She looked tired. He thought maybe she would feel better if she sat down.
“We can play a game,” he said, nudging her.
She looked at him. She knew he was trying to sound casual and upbeat. Harry glanced around, then thought of something and reached into his back pocket for his handkerchief. It was a white handkerchief and he draped it over his arm like a dapper waiter. He bowed deeply at the waist.
“We can play restaurant,” he said. “You sit, and I’ll bring your food to you.” He did a funny little shuffle and pretended to twirl an imaginary Frenchman’s moustache.
Mae glared at him, annoyed he might presume she would be so easily placated with a child’s game. She was not a child anymore.
“That won’t make it taste any better,” she replied flatly.
Harry glanced at the food that was being scooped up and distributed in ugly, gelatinous mounds. He sighed.
“Hmm, you’re right.” He held up his mess kit and draped the handkerchief temporarily over the top, performing a sleight of hand. The mess kit magically vanished.
Mae arched an eyebrow.
“Just like my appetite,” she said.
Harry laughed.
“Fair enough, kid. Me, too.”