We Are Not Free
Page 19
But Lieutenant Swinson isn’t done with us. He paces up and down in the yard, sneering like he’s won a contest. Then he stops. “You.” He jabs a gloved finger at Mr. Morimoto. “To the bullpen.”
For a second, Mr. Morimoto does nothing, but he is not frozen the way I freeze sometimes. He is thinking. You can see it in his slow breaths, his steady gaze, the opportunity he gives Swinson to reconsider his stance, to change his mind, to stop this senselessness. This not-moving, this small space of disobedience, is not out of fear but out of defiance.
Then, with a sigh, Mr. Morimoto leaves his place in line.
People start muttering.
“What about the rest of us?” Stan’s hoarse voice rises above the others. “I could use a change of scenery!”
“Yeah!” someone shouts.
Before, I might have wanted Stan to be quiet. I might have thought that would keep him safe.
But that only works in a world that makes sense, and the world of Tule Lake does not make sense. In the world of Tule Lake, you are a citizen and you are an enemy; you are an alien and you are a traitor. You have rights; you have no rights. You have a knife; you have a jar of pickles; you have contraband. In the world of Tule Lake, you are fed and you are starved; you are arrested for rioting, for seeing a movie, for curfew violation; you are guilty until you’re proven innocent, and you’re never proven innocent because you never get charged; you are guilty, and you have committed no crime . . .
“Enough!” Lieutenant Swinson barks. He jerks his thumb at Mr. Morimoto. “If anyone else wants to join him, you can step right up.”
Everyone shuts up.
The air strains under the weight of our silence. A green leaf. A nest of feathers. A groaning branch.
All it takes is one move, and Lieutenant Swinson will snap. He’ll have someone hauled off by their ankles. He’ll beat someone into the ground. He’ll loose his MPs on us like dogs.
In the world of Tule Lake, they want you to obey, they want you to be a troublemaker, they want you to admit to things you haven’t done and allegiances you never held, they want you to accept these injustices with a smile. In the world of Tule Lake, you are shot at the gates for trying to get to work on time, for moving too fast, for scaring the Caucasians.
You move, or you do not move; you freeze, or you act; it doesn’t matter. You are too dangerous anyway, too yellow, too slow, too stupid, too weak anyway. You are arrested anyway. You are beaten anyway.
So I move.
The frost crunches as I take a step, a single step, one step forward.
In the silent yard, the sound is like an avalanche.
Or a breaking branch.
Or an eggshell.
It takes a second for Lieutenant Swinson to notice, but when he sees me in the fifth row, his eyes bulge. His cheeks inflate. A vein in his temple pops, blue as a fragment of sky.
But before he can say anything, before he can shout and rail and thunder, before he can have me dragged away, the other prisoners, every one of them, all around me, step forward. The earth trembles under our weight, the weight of all of us, more than two hundred Japs, moving and immovable.
But it doesn’t break.
And neither do I.
Saturday, January 8, 1944
Dear Mas,
I bet you thought you’d heard the last of me, huh? Sorry to break it to you, but you can’t get rid of me that easily. You know Tule Lake’s been under martial law since November? Well, I guess the MPs thought I was mixed up in some kind of trouble, because they picked me up one night like a sack of potatoes and dumped me in the stockade to rot.
That’s why I haven’t written all these months. It wasn’t you. It was me!
Well, it was the army, anyway.
It’s been kind of a rough time, but everything changed about a week ago when the guy in charge of the stockade, this blond-wolf type named Swinson, lines everybody up and starts picking people out at random for extra punishment. “You! You! You! I’m an insecure asshole who needs to subjugate others so I can feel better about myself! Wah!” And when we kick up a fuss about it, he says anybody who doesn’t like it can step right up and try him.
So this new friend of mine, Yosh, he does. And then we all do! You would’ve gotten a kick out of it, Mas. All the little guys standing up for what’s right.
Of course, Swinson had no idea what to do. I guess he didn’t know how to punish all two hundred of us, so he just kind of left us there, standing in the snow for three hours, while he went to get orders from his superior or something. When he finally came back, he said we’d all be on bread and water for the next twenty-four hours.
But we’d had enough.
They’d imprisoned us, isolated us, made us sick with poor quarters and treatment. Now they were going to starve us too? You’ve got to be kidding me.
So we did the only thing we could. If all they were going to give us was bread and water, then we weren’t going to eat at all. Not until they told us why we were there. Not until they gave us fair trials. Not until they stopped treating us like we were less than human.
I’m telling you, Mas. They were torturing us. We were goddamn Americans on goddamn American soil, and they were torturing us. I know you’re an army guy now and everything, but you wouldn’t have stood for it, either. No one in their right mind could.
We were on hunger strike for a week, and surprise, surprise! At the end of it, nothing had really changed, although they did let me, Yosh, and some other guys go yesterday. Why? Who knows? Who can fathom the perverse inner thoughts of a guy like Swinson?
There are 187 prisoners still in the stockade, and I don’t know when they’re getting out, but I hear the army is going to give control of the camp back to the W.R.A. any day now, so maybe things will change.
Or maybe they won’t. Who knows? It’ll be another surprise!
I know you said you were joining the combat team to show them what the Nisei are made of, to show them we’re as American as any blond-haired, blue-eyed keto.
Now I just hope you can make them see us as human.
Fight hard and come home safe, Mas. We’re counting on you.
Sincerely,
Stan
XI
TWICE AS PERFECT
MAS, 22
JANUARY–MARCH 1944
MONDAY, JANUARY 10, 1944, 2145 HOURS
CAMP SHELBY, MISS.
Dear Dad, I try to be the kind of guy other people go to for help. A rock, a support, a foundation. In Japantown, I bailed Frankie out of fistfights. I taught Shig to drive. I fixed Twitchy’s bicycle when he banged it up jumping over those trash cans. I sat with Minnow at the kitchen table, doing math problems long into the night while the rest of the house dreamed—nothing but the scratching of the pencil and the dogged certainty of algebra. Steadfast, reliable. That’s the kind of guy you taught me to be.
But I couldn’t help Stan.
November: I went to my sergeant as soon as Tommy told me what was going on at Tule Lake. Knew it was a long shot. They don’t like you doing stuff like that in the army. They want you focused, soldier! They want your head in the game! Know what happens if you’re not paying attention? You and the guy next to you—dead. Forget what’s happening on the other side of the country.
But everything we’re fighting for is on the other side of the country, you know? Shig, Minnow, Ma . . . behind the barbed wire. And it was Stan, Dad. I had to do something.
I’ve told you about my sergeant before, haven’t I? Caucasian guy? Short as some of the Nisei boys, but with a Napoleon complex like you wouldn’t believe? Around the barracks, we call him Little Emperor, and if he ever finds out, we’ll never hear the end of it. He said: Get your head out of your ass, soldier. You’ve got a war to fight, and it’s not in fucking Tule Lake.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1944, 0630 HOURS
CAMP SHELBY, MISS.
4x4x4s, punishments, holes. The motion: dig and heave. The earth rattling from the spade. The memory: you, comi
ng home with dirt in the lines of your palms. You, and the smell of loam. I think of the times you brought Shig and me to work with you, of us pulling weeds from the hedges. Those damp clods of soil and roots and earthworms. Did you know I once dared him to eat one? He slurped it right down like the last of a milkshake. Laughed until we piled into the Chevy.
Next time, I went over the Little Emperor’s head. (Get it?) Boy, did I catch hell for that one. Two weeks of extra detail, two weeks restricted to post. They learned my name, my face. I wasn’t just another Jap anymore. I was Mas Ito, and every time they needed someone for kitchen patrol, for latrine duty, for any of the unsavory jobs they give to army grunts, it was me. My fingers stinking of cleaner. My palms blistered from shoveling. Times like these, I try to remember what you taught me. Chin up. Back straight. Turn the other cheek. One day, they’re going to see they were wrong.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23, 1944, 1000 HOURS
CAMP SHELBY, MISS.
Dear Dad, Sunday KP isn’t so bad. It’s two meals instead of three, and a break between them if you finish up after breakfast quickly enough, which, of course, we did. I’ve gotten KP duty so many times now, I can scrub a pan spotless in two seconds flat. Boy, I think of all those times Ma made Shig and me wash the dishes again because we’d left grease on the pots. If only she could see me now.
Maneuvers start Friday. The whole unit will be in the field, all four thousand of us. We’ve done smaller problems before: a squad of five or six guys, then a platoon of three or four squads, the units getting bigger every time, a company with all its platoons, and finally a battalion of eight hundred soldiers. But this will be the first time the entire 442nd Regimental Combat Team (three infantry battalions, the field artillery battalion, all our supporting companies) will be fighting together. I gotta tell you, Dad, I’m looking forward to showing everyone what a bunch of Nisei boys can do.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 1944, 2100 HOURS
CAMP SHELBY, MISS.
A letter from Tommy: The army has started drafting Japanese-Americans. That means Shig can be drafted. Can you imagine? Shig, in the army? Or Stan, or Tommy, or any of the No-No boys at Tule Lake? Boys who said they wouldn’t fight? Boys who were beaten? Imprisoned? I volunteered. I wanted to serve. They didn’t—don’t.
I think a lot about your flag, the one you flew every morning before you left for work. Those red and white stripes rippling over our steps. When I think about home, I think about that flag as much as I think about the building, or the street, or the city. The way you folded it every night before sundown, that starred triangle in your arms. I think of you when I carry the flag, when I put on my uniform. Not a thread out of place.
I heard that it was our performance at Shelby that convinced the army to open the draft to the Nisei. In rifle qualifications last year, we had sixty experts and ninety sharpshooters in my company. It was a Camp Shelby record. But it wasn’t enough, not for us. We wanted to be perfect. We had to be perfect. No, we had to be twice as perfect to be considered half as good.
Looks like all we proved was that the Japanese-Americans still in camps could be useful to the war effort.
Maneuvers start tomorrow, and if all goes well, we might be deployed soon after. Maybe if we fight hard enough, we’ll end this war before any of the draftees see action.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1944, 1930 HOURS
DESOTO NATIONAL FOREST, MISS.
Dear Dad, we wrapped up the last of our first three problems today. Out here, umpires run around with flags to simulate fire. A mortar, a red ribbon. You, you, and you, KIA. But there aren’t enough umpires, and the ones we have are overworked, so the guys keep picking fights about who won which engagement. Frankie said his company (Item Company over in 3rd Battalion) started a fistfight yesterday because the enemy wouldn’t admit their position was lost. Can you imagine? Good old Frankie, throwing down his rifle to sock a guy in the face. If only all our problems could be solved so easily, huh?
Sometimes, I think about how we used to play at war. It was Buchanan Street, and it was No Man’s Land. Remember Frankie leading banzai charges up the sidewalk? Remember Tommy hiding behind Mr. Hidekawa’s steps? Shig and Twitchy manning the cannons, their cheeks inflated with the sounds of imaginary explosions. Ka-pow! Stan coordinating operations from the fire escape. And you, waiting on our steps with apricots from Katsumoto Co. and the American flag waving overhead. It feels the same, and it feels different. We were soldiers, and we were children. I mean, we are.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1944, 2345 HOURS
DESOTO NATIONAL FOREST, MISS.
A guy got killed on maneuvers today. We were crawling under machine-gun fire, the bullets loud above us, loud as a storm in the desert: the thunder crashing, the hail falling on the sand, the barbed wire twitching and jumping in the wind. Except in this case, you didn’t look up to watch for lightning. Except in this case, the bullets were hot. You keep your head down, you keep moving forward, and whatever you do, you don’t look up.
He was in my platoon. Johnny Tsujimura from Seattle. Good kid. Always got chocolates from his sweetheart in Detroit. Always shared them with anybody who was around. He wanted to study radio engineering after the war. You’d have liked him, I think. Good kid, but not all there. Here’s what I want to know: Where did he think he was? Not in the middle of the Mississippi wilderness, but back home? Back in Minidoka? I wonder if he heard someone call his name, and he looked up to see if it would be his mother or his brother or his sweetheart standing there, with the storm thrashing overhead?
Sometimes I think I hear you. I know you aren’t here, but sometimes when I’m down at the Service Club or walking across the parade grounds, I think I hear you calling my name. Four years since you died, and it’s getting hard to remember your voice, but I’d know it if I heard it. I mean, you. And, just for a second, I think if I look up, I’ll see you standing on our steps in Japantown, holding a bowl of apricots, glowing like a sun in your hands. Only I don’t. Look up, I mean.
I don’t remember a lot about your funeral, but I remember this. The smells: flowers, incense, something chemical and strange. The unbalanced equation: your body in a pine box, and then your body was gone. I know you were cremated, but how could an urn really hold you, I mean, all of you? Your dreams, your loyalties, the future you should have had with us? Or were you somewhere else, somewhere like an ocean current, or a wind, unseen, billowing in the fabric of an American flag?
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1944, 1245 HOURS
DESOTO NATIONAL FOREST, MISS.
Dear Dad, we’ve got less than a week of maneuvers to go, but it’s gotten colder, wetter, and everyone is counting down the days until we head back to Shelby. Last night, falling asleep to the sound of the rain on the pines, I dreamed of that trip to Big Sur when Minnow was six. The smell of the redwoods. The salt in the air. I dared Shig to lick a banana slug, which made his tongue go numb. Ma scolded me; you laughed, wide. On the hike back to the car, you stopped to look at something: a fungus, a leaf, or the rain falling through the canopy like applause in a cathedral. We didn’t know. We kept going. And when we looked back, we couldn’t find you. Dad? Dad! For a minute, five minutes, you were gone. That deep drop of panic, like a fall from a great height. A world where you were missing, where you were not with us? Shig’s legs pumping as he ran back along the trail, his shriek of joy, of relief, and anger, when he found you. Don’t scare us like that!
I was there when they took off Johnny’s helmet. Brains everywhere. The only good thing I can think about it is that there was no fear, no pain, no time for his mind to signal the rest of the body, You’re going to die, before the bullet turned everything off, like lightning striking a power line.
I started writing to you the day after your funeral. I wanted to believe that if I wrote to you, I wouldn’t lose you. You weren’t gone. You were here, reading, your eyes crinkling at the corners, or your smile appearing or disappearing, as if you were at the kitchen table looking over my report card. A in Mathe
matics. A in Civics. A– in English. S in Citizenship. This morning, I woke up looking for you in the rain, in the water coursing out of the branches, as if you were stooping to examine a footprint, a downed branch, a drowned beetle, and if only I turned this bend, if only I climbed out of this dell, I’d find you.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1944, 2015 HOURS
CAMP SHELBY, MISS.
I remember the day we found out I was going to UC Berkeley. I got the letter in the afternoon, but I waited to open it until you came home. I remember you, in the doorway, with your flag behind you. I remember you, smelling of grass cuttings. I remember you, telling me, for the first time, for the only time, that you were proud of me. You told me I was your American dream.
The dream: a gardener’s son, a college graduate, an engineer, a doctor, a boy, a man who builds things or fixes them. The promise: five times what you can make in Japan. Opportunity, equality, freedom, prosperity. You know you’ll be discriminated against. You know you won’t be accepted as one of them. Your name is too foreign. Your skin is too yellow. Your tongue skips too lightly over their language. You still go. You won’t have citizenship. You won’t have property. You might not even have safety. But you still hope. This is the dream. A better life for your children and your children’s children and their children. For Shig, and Minnow, and me.
Maneuvers ended this afternoon. Now we’re resting our feet. We’re cleaning our rifles. Soon we’ll be reviewed, and if we’re good enough, if we’ve proven ourselves, we’ll be going to war.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1944, 2200 HOURS
CAMP SHELBY, MISS.
By some miracle, I held on to my weekend pass this week, so today I went into town, where the theater was playing Blood on the Sun with James Cagney. I don’t know what I was expecting. I knew it was a propaganda film, but I guess after everything, I’d dared to hope.