We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

As we settle in for the ride, I quarrel with Yuki over who gets the window seat, but I lose our game of Jon-Ken-Po and have to make do with the aisle . . . However, I feel particularly mollified when the captain of our train car announces that the shades must be drawn until we reach the Sierra Nevada mountains, which means that Yuki will have no view at all, while I, at least, can content myself with spying on the other people in our car.

  Then the whistle blows, a long, mournful sound like you might hear if you were a lost princess aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, the train lurches forward, and I sit up eagerly as my first railroad adventure begins.

  * * *

  An hour later, Bachan is using Mother’s knitting bag as a cushion, while Mother dozes on Father’s shoulder as he attempts to read the newspaper under the flickering gaslights. Yuki halfheartedly tosses a softball into the air and catches it in her dirty leather mitt, tosses it and catches it, again and again.

  As the train hits a particularly rough section of track, someone stumbles against the back of our seat. “Sumimasen,” he murmurs.

  Looking up, I lock gazes with a tall boy with slicked-back hair and sparkling wide-set eyes.

  How is it possible that I’ve never seen him before? I know Tanforan housed almost eight thousand people, but how outrageous to have missed a boy this handsome!

  He grins. “Nice hair.”

  Blushing, I run my hands over my blond wig. “You think so? My sister says it’s dumb.”

  Yuki rolls her eyes and thwacks the ball deep into her mitt. I don’t think I’ll ever understand her—she’s fifteen! You’d think she’d recognize a handsome boy when she saw one, but her disinterest is palpable.

  “Nah.” The boy smiles wider, revealing a crooked front tooth. “You look like a Japanese Lana Turner.”

  I beam at him.

  “Your name’s Hiromi, right? I’m Joe. Tanaka.” He says it just like that. Joe—pause—Tanaka. Like Clark—pause—Gable.

  I extend my hand. “Actually,” I say in my best Vivien Leigh impression, “I go by my middle name, Bette, now.”

  Yuki scoffs. “Since when?”

  I shoot her a look. “Since now.”

  To tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking about changing my name for some time. “Hiromi” is so old-fashioned and so hard to pronounce—I can’t count the number of times I’ve been called “Hye-romi” or “Her-omee”—and “Bette” is so much more appropriate for a modern American girl like me.

  “Like Bette Davis.” Of course, Joe pronounces it correctly, like “Bet-tee,” and takes my hand, grinning.

  “Exactly!”

  The rest of the train ride is like something out of a dream. Other people complain about the heat, or the stuffiness, or the water running out, but Joe and I are in a world of our own. He’s from San Leandro, across the bay. His favorite song is “Harbor Lights” by Frances Langford, and when he sings a few bars under his breath, I think I might die of happiness.

  The first night, coal dust drifts through the cracks as we rattle through the mountain tunnels, and hardly anyone gets any sleep, but in the morning, during our single stop in Nevada, Joe and I stroll past the armed soldiers like we’re in a park instead of a desert depot.

  After two days in Joe’s company, I’m in such high spirits when we leave the train in the charming town of Delta, Utah, that I don’t even fight Yuki for a window seat on the bus that will take us the rest of the way to Topaz City.

  Gradually, the picket fences and carefully tended flower beds of Delta give way to a broad, flat desert where the earth is so dry, it’s crackled and fragmented like a mosaic.

  Where are we going? There’s absolutely nothing but gnarled greasewood bushes for miles and miles. Taking a steadying breath, I close my eyes, imagining how I’ll describe Joe to Yum-yum and Keiko when I see them next.

  So funny! So kind! With such long eyelashes!

  When the bus halts, I open my eyes again, hoping for an oasis fit for an out-of-the-way romance like in Morocco or Casablanca.

  Topaz is nothing like that, however. Here, there are no exotic gardens or pavilions where lovers can meet. There isn’t even a tree in sight.

  A barbed-wire fence stretches around an enormous compound—the fence is short, made of three strands, as if it were for cattle. Inside, row after row of long, tarpaper barracks stretches into the distance, each one looking squat and grim and the same as the last. With all the buildings lined up so neatly, I bet Topaz could hold eight thousand people or even more, all in a single square mile!

  From the nearby buildings rises a steel smokestack that dwarfs the rest of camp, even the guard towers that line the perimeter. Those are only a couple of stories tall, but there’s no mistaking them or the Caucasian soldiers surveying the Main Gate area from their observation decks.

  I sigh. Okay, so it’s a mite bleak.

  But with no tall buildings or forests, one can see clear to the Prussian blue mountains ascending in the distance, and I can just picture Joe kissing me for the first time with those majestic ridges behind us.

  Frankie Fujita, one of the Japantown boys, is behind me with his uncle, who seems bewildered in his rumpled overcoat and fedora. Tugging a stray thread on his father’s old WWI jacket, Frankie makes a disgusted sound as we approach the door. “What a dump.”

  “I think it’s marvelous!” Tossing my hair, I step from the bus in what I hope is a dignified maneuver, but as soon as I touch the ground, my shoe sinks two inches into the dust, and I pitch forward gracelessly.

  Frankie catches my elbow, steadying me with his hard grip. “Yeah?” he says. “You oughta get your eyes checked, Nakano.”

  I don’t bother telling him I prefer “Bette” now. Frankie calls everyone by their last name.

  Straightening my skirt, I take another unsteady step as the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps begins to play a lively marching tune, giving our arrival a festive air.

  This is where it will happen, I think, memorizing the pale sand, the unvarying barracks, and the barbed wire that hems my new city. This is where Joe and I will fall in love.

  OCTOBER

  I’m so excited for the school year to finally begin that even the unfinished classrooms and dearth of supplies can’t dampen my spirits. My senior year! Even though we’re not in San Francisco anymore, there will still be clubs, sports (I hear Joe Tanaka is a star basketball player, and I can’t wait to cheer him on, although we don’t have a gymnasium yet), and, best of all, dances! There’s already a “Halloween Spook-tacular” planned for this Saturday in Dining Hall 1, provided the administration can engage a band for the evening, and although Joe hasn’t asked me for a dance yet, I’m saving room on my dance card just for him.

  On Monday morning, Yum-yum, Keiko, and I cram into our classroom, which, if I had to guess, is even colder than it is outside . . . and it’s freezing outside! The hospital is the only area with central heating—that’s what the steel smokestack is for—so most of the buildings will rely on stoves for warmth and Sheetrock for insulation. Unfortunately, construction of the camp still hasn’t finished, so there’s a hole in the roof of the classroom where the stove and chimney will eventually be. For now, we huddle at our desks in our military-issue coats, blowing on our hands to warm them.

  I already know a lot of the other students from Japantown, like Shig and Tommy, who are drawing stick figures on the condensation-fogged windows, but there’s one Caucasian girl among us too.

  You wouldn’t have guessed it, but there are a lot of Caucasians in camp, and not just guards, although we have those, too, on the watchtowers and at the gates. They work as doctors, administrative staff, teachers, and the chiefs of the different sectors, overseeing nihonjin workers. Some of them live in Delta, the nearest town, or a special section of Caucasian housing that’s separate from the rest of the camp, although it’s still inside the fence.

  The girl’s name, I find out, is Gail Johnson, the blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the Agricultural Division Chief, and she’
s the only one of us in a Sears, Roebuck polo coat of beautiful novelty tweed instead of the navy wool the rest of us have to wear.

  “She’s so pretty,” I whisper to Yum-yum and Keiko. “I wish I was as pretty as her.”

  Yum-yum glances at Gail. “I guess she’s all right.”

  “For a hakujin girl,” Keiko adds with a smirk.

  Quickly, I run my hands over my wig. For a moment, I entertain the idea of purchasing another, but with even the doctors and teachers earning less than a private in the army, no one in camp has the money for something like that. Even if I could scrape together some odd jobs, it would take me over a year to save up enough to look like Gail Johnson.

  I’m pinching the bridge of my nose to see if I can make it appear less flat when, to my surprise, our teacher announces that we’re dismissed. The high desert mornings are so cold that until the high school rooms are winterized, classes will take place only in the afternoons. Shig leaps up from his chair with a whoop and leads the charge from the classroom, followed by Tommy and the others.

  Gathering her things, Gail follows, her hair flashing like gold in the chilly sunlight.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, much to my disappointment, an announcement in the Topaz Times, the camp newspaper, declares that the “Halloween Spook-tacular” has been canceled due to lack of a band. I’m complaining about it to Frankie as we leave the mess hall for the high school, where he’s kind enough to accompany me every weekday afternoon.

  Dining hall, I think belatedly, remembering to use the correct expression from the booklets we received on Topaz terminology. Frankie hates it, but I think using words like “dining hall” instead of “mess hall” makes everything seem a little more civilized.

  “Bet the ketos didn’t want to play for a bunch of enemy Japs,” Frankie grumbles.

  Every block has a dining hall and an H-shaped latrines-and-laundry, with six barracks arranged on each side and an extra building for things like churches, libraries, and recreation centers. There are forty-two blocks in all, but not all of them are for housing—two have baseball diamonds, and the four in the center of camp are still waiting for construction.

  This means that the Japantown boys and girls are spread out over a mile, which is farther apart than we’ve ever been before, but Frankie and I are on the same block, so we often see each other at meals, and despite his penchant for cynicism, I have to admit I quite enjoy his company. Even the sourest of his moods reminds me of being back in San Francisco.

  “It’s more likely they couldn’t afford the travel expense,” I say delicately. “Topaz City isn’t exactly a hot spot for nightlife, you know.”

  “You’re tellin’ me, Nakano. They couldn’t’ve exiled us any farther from civilization if they’d sent us to Alaska.” Disgusted, Frankie kicks at the frozen ground. Although it’s past noon, the entire camp is still covered in a glittering veil of frost the likes of which I could have only dreamed when I still lived in San Francisco. Lifting my chin, I pretend I am not a Nisei girl picking her way along a dusty lane but a Russian empress floating over a floor of crystal.

  “I was so hoping for a dance with Joe, though!” I say.

  “But the guy hadn’t even asked for a dance yet.”

  “Yet!” I say. Frankie has always been kind of a dolt when it comes to romance, so I’m in the middle of explaining the many rules of courtship, including the game of cat-and-mouse Joe and I are currently playing, when the horizon darkens in a sinister, familiar way.

  My eyes water as a cold wind rises, screaming over the barracks.

  “Shit!” Frankie grabs my hand as a dust storm explodes down the street. “C’mon, Nakano, move your ass!”

  Hand in hand, we race to the shelter of the nearest building. Tempests like this have been plaguing us since our arrival, but this one is bigger than any I’ve yet seen. It’s like something out of the vast Sahara, sending a child’s wagon careening into the barracks and scattering coal from the coal piles. Coughing, we run through the storm as the winds buffet us this way and that, the sand stinging our eyes and cheeks.

  Throwing open the laundry, Frankie shoves me inside and leaps in after, slamming the door as a gust of air reaches us, rattling the walls. Plunking down on the edge of the laundry tub, I shudder. Outside, it sounds as if the world is going to shake apart.

  Frankie kicks the door, cracking it. A thin stream of sand pours across the floor. “Goddamn it!”

  Frowning, I brush dust from my wig. It wafts from between my fingers, pale as clouds and fine as powder. “Cool it, Frankie. That door never did anything to you.”

  He begins pacing the laundry room as dust accumulates under the door and windows in soft piles. He reminds me of a wild horse I once saw at the San Francisco Zoo. “How can you stand it, Nakano?” he asks. “Don’t you hate it here?”

  I try to sniff, but the dust is so thick that it makes me sneeze instead. “We have food, shelter, jobs . . . We have each other,” I say. “What’s there to hate?”

  He stops by the door, staring at me with those eyes that Minnow says look like embers. “What are you, stupid, Nakano? Can’t you see shit when your face is rubbed in it?”

  My retort dies on my tongue. Frankie’s always been distrustful and angry, but he’s never been cruel. Not to us.

  Standing, I draw myself up to my full height, even though the top of my head only reaches Frankie’s shoulder. “You shut your mouth, Francis Fujita,” I say, advancing on him. “I see a lot more than you give me credit for. In fact, I see you, and if you let your anger continue to fester like that, it’s going to destroy you and anyone who gets too close, and you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

  His jaw drops. I’ve surprised him. Good. Let him think twice before insulting me again. Before he can collect himself, I draw my scarf over my wig, fling open the door, and step out into the raging winds.

  * * *

  The next day, I’m still fuming as I walk to school, alone. I do see where we are. I see the sewer pipes breaking every week. I see the dust coming in through the cracks in the barracks. I see the armed soldiers in their guard towers. But unlike that oaf Frankie, I choose to see the good where he chooses to see only the bad.

  Being an optimist does not make me stupid.

  When the first snowflakes begin to fall, however, all thoughts of Frankie fly right out of my mind. Perfect six-branched stars drift silently over the camp, alighting on my hair and shoulders as I dash into the dirt lane, throwing my arms wide.

  What a wonder!

  Snow fills the air, dense as the Milky Way on the darkest of nights. I twirl, my skirts flying out around my knees, like I’m a ballerina in a glass globe. All around me, children and adults fling themselves to the ground, creating dusty white angels.

  In the road, Mas is being dogpiled in the slush by his students from the junior high school. Since he has a little college education and there weren’t enough Caucasian teachers, he was hired to teach the seventh-graders, who shriek and laugh as he heaves himself upright, one or two of them hanging off his biceps.

  I’m a little surprised to see Keiko giggling with Yum-yum, their heads thrown back to catch the cold flakes on their tongues. Keiko always seems a little cooler, a little more detached, a little more grown-up; it’s easy to forget that she’s just a kid like the rest of us, even if, like Yum-yum, she had to grow up faster because her parents were taken by the FBI after Pearl Harbor.

  “Bette! Can you believe it?” someone cries, startling me. “Snow!” Joe races up behind me, grabbing my mittened hands and swinging me around, laughing. We spin in the snow as the barracks flash past us, blending in with the powdery sky, until he is the only thing in focus: his slick hair, his smile, his fingers on mine.

  We’re surrounded by kids on their way to school and adults without jobs stumbling from games of Go, but I truly believe at this moment that Joe and I are the only two people in the entire desert, the entire universe, even, whirling at the center while all of creati
on revolves around us.

  Gradually, we slow, but the world continues to turn dizzily. He chuckles, steadying me in his arms as I lean against him, breathless.

  “Too bad the ‘Halloween Spook-tacular’ is canceled,” he says. “We could’ve done this properly, on the dance floor.”

  Looking up at him, I bat my eyelashes. “You’ll have to ask me properly next time, Joe. Without your name on my dance card, I couldn’t guarantee that we’d even speak to each other the whole night.”

  “Well, I can’t let that happen, can I?” He smiles. “Next ti—”

  Splat! Something wet and cold smacks right into my bottom, utterly ruining my moment with Joe. Aghast, I turn, feeling my skirt, which is now covered in dirty, dripping sleet.

  Across the road, Shig, Twitchy, and Keiko—How could she?—are laughing and pointing, balling up new handfuls of snow.

  My eyes narrow.

  I could be disappointed.

  I could be angry, like Frankie.

  But I am Bette Nakano, and Bette Nakano doesn’t get disappointed. She doesn’t get angry. She takes matters into her own hands.

  I lean down, scooping up a pile of slush, and run at them. Yelping, Shig and Twitchy scatter, but they’re too late. My first snowball hits Shig in the neck. My second strikes Twitchy in the back.

  “Nice arm, Bette!” Joe races up beside me, flinging snowballs of his own. We’re all laughing, shoveling dust and snow at one another with both hands, shrieking as it runs down our necks into our collars.

  In the midst of it all, I glance over at Joe, who grins at me through a shower of white sparkles. It’s our first snow in Topaz—the first snow of our lives—and we get to share it together.

  NOVEMBER

  After the disappointing cancellation of the “Halloween Spook-tacular,” it takes almost a month for the Community Activities Section to accumulate a campwide record collection so we’ll no longer have to rely on a band for dance music, and by the time Thanksgiving—and the Thanksgiving Dance—arrives, I am more than ready to swing and jive.