A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  “Don’t forget ‘halt,’ Doctor,” Satomi adds.

  They are told that they will be moving on. This place that even the guards seem ashamed of is only temporary.

  “Where you are going will be better,” they say. “Of a much higher standard.”

  In a welcome turn of events, Tamura, in caring for Mrs. Inada, has recovered the mother in herself. She fusses around the old woman, collecting her food from the mess hall so that she won’t have to stand in line, washing her gently, brushing her hair, and spoon-feeding her the unpleasant soup that tastes of stale potatoes.

  “How can we complain at our situation, Satomi? This old mother is blind, her husband and her only child are dead. She is ill—tuberculosis, I think. We at least have our health.”

  “Mrs. Inada is lucky to have you,” Satomi says, feeling sorry for herself. “You are like a mother to her.”

  “I am sorry to have neglected you, Satomi,” Tamura apologizes. “But I have found myself again, so you are not to worry about me. I will take care of you now.”

  “We will take care of each other, Mama.”

  Four weeks in, and things are going downhill fast for Mrs. Inada.

  “It’s worse than bad,” Tamura tells Satomi on their walk to the mess hall. “She needs more than I can give her in this dirty place.”

  Her efforts, she knows, are merely a plaster on the deep wound of the old woman’s disease. Mrs. Inada needs stronger medicine than kindness and thin soup.

  “The old lady is very ill,” she reports to the most sympathetic of the guards. “She coughs blood and cannot get up from her mattress. You must get her to a hospital or she will die.”

  And they do, taking Mrs. Inada off on a stretcher, telling Tamura not to worry. “She’ll be taken good care of, nursed in an American hospital,” they say, as though there were another, less desirable, kind.

  “Her home is lost to her forever now,” Tamura says, thinking Mrs. Inada close to death. “I wish that I could have done more for her.”

  “You did your best. It was more than anyone else did for her, Mama.”

  The few days that they had expected to be here roll through the weeks into the summer months. New inmates arrive daily, bewildered, unbelieving. People begin to get ill, diarrhea, vomiting, and a strange, never-before-seen rash.

  “It’s most likely the germs from the animal feces we smell about the place,” Dr. Chiba hazards. “Couldn’t be bothered to disinfect, I suppose. We are only Japanese, after all.”

  Tamura thinks it might be scabies. She saw an outbreak of it once among the sugarcane cutters in Hawaii.

  “It’s a disease of poor sanitation,” she says. “We must keep ourselves clean, no matter how long we have to stand in line for the showers.”

  Among those without the rash, Satomi hardly has the space to feel sympathy. Her emotions are personal, her distress reserved for her own and Tamura’s condition. Ashamed of their situation as she is, she feels herself an alien among the Japanese. Her mother may be Japanese, but these people are not her people. There are moments when she is all infant again, all gooseflesh fear, so that if she could find a place to be alone she would howl to the moon. There are other times, though, when her anger consumes her so that she shouts her feelings to whoever will listen, usually Dr. Chiba.

  A couple of the men, brought low by their wives’ longing for home, had challenged the guards, insisting on being set free. It comes as a shock to everyone when they are instantly put into solitary confinement until their cases can come to court.

  Some consider making a break for it, but there is no way to get past the armed guards or over the barbed-wire fences. No way to make a run for home without risking life.

  “They can call it what they like. They can call it impoundment, or enclosure, they can call it relocation as if it was our choice, but it is what it is,” Satomi rages. “However they try to clean it up with crafty words, we are prisoners.”

  “Shush, Satomi,” Tamura advises. “It’s your rages that put people off you, not your white blood, as you would have it. We have hope, at least. The next place will be better, I’m sure.”

  “I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t put it past them to herd us in even tighter, to build the fences even higher.”

  “I wasn’t talking of fences. I was thinking that perhaps it will be warmer and maybe we will have more space. I would like it to have trees.”

  Dr. Chiba tells them that he has heard of some Japanese who refused to attend what is now being called with black humor “the roundup.”

  “They left the coast as soon as the notices to quit their homes arrived,” he says. “They headed to the interior towns to seek work.”

  “Good for them,” Satomi says.

  “Yes, but it didn’t work out. They were turned back by local peace officers, or herded out of town by armed posses.”

  “We might as well live in the Wild West, Doctor.”

  “I agree. It makes you feel for the Indians, doesn’t it?”

  “You spend too much time with that old man,” Tamura says. “He is fixed in the past, you can’t expect him to be optimistic.”

  “I like the doctor’s company. No matter what they do to us, his spirit will never be broken. He is old, but he is not weak.”

  When the evacuation notices are finally posted around the camp, Satomi reads them with mixed feelings. She wants to go but resents being told where she must live. And then there is the unspoken fear shared by all the inmates since the shooting-dead of the old man who in his dotage walked beyond the barbed wire and failed to halt at the guards’ command. Perhaps they are simply being rounded up to be shot.

  “We are being sent to Manzanar, Mama. Wherever that is.”

  “I like the name, Satomi. It has a pleasant sound to it.”

  “It’s Spanish for orchard,” Dr. Chiba tells them. “It’s mountain country, the Sierra Nevada.”

  “How lovely,” Tamura says with a sigh, flashing Satomi a smile.

  Having discovered in herself the ability not to think too much of home and all she has lost, Tamura departs the temporary camp with her heart lifted. Surely nothing could be worse than the terrible place they are leaving. Perhaps in this Manzanar they will have finer lodgings, a place to make tea, a table to sit around.

  They might be free of the disgusting black beetles that thrive in their present quarters. “Stinky bugs,” the children call them, making a game of stamping on them, their faces gleeful at the gratifying crunch, at the prize of the occasional ooze of eggs that squirm from the broken bodies like toothpaste from the tube.

  Dr. Chiba and his stoic daughter are being sent to the Tule Lake camp, which he thinks might be of more geological interest than their present confinement.

  “Your daughter is a girl with backbone, Mrs. Baker,” he tells Tamura as they part. “You should be proud of her. She is of this century, not cast in the old mold.”

  “She came wrapped in her father’s caul, Dr. Chiba. I cannot claim credit.”

  “Half her blood is yours, Mrs. Baker.”

  “Yes, more than one drop.”

  The old man spits on the ground. “Ah, yes, the one-drop profile. How they love that old southern standby.”

  “Don’t tell me to make the best of it,” Satomi says when Tamura advises as much. “If we make the best of it, we accept it. I will never accept it.”

  “Oh, Satomi, you are under the same sky as at home wherever you go. It is the same sun that sets and rises wherever you are.”

  Manzanar

  The man-made geography of Manzanar seems at first to place it firmly among the more ugly sights on earth. Tamura, reaching for optimism, points out to Satomi the beauty of the mountains in the distance, the sound of the water from the stream that margins the perimeter of the camp.

  “Keep looking to the east,” she says. “It is beautiful in the distance.”

  But even as she encourages Satomi, her own heart drops at the sight of the dusty acreage, at the ranks of
squalid quarters, narrow and dark as coffins. Her disappointment is almost unbearable.

  “We’ve been sent to hell!” Satomi exclaims. “Some orchard, huh?”

  As they stand getting their bearings, the children of the camp are already at their favorite play.

  “Kill the Nazis.”

  “Kill the Japs.”

  Their tinny shrieks shred what’s left of Satomi’s courage. How can they play in this desperate place, how can they be happy? All she wants to do is sleep a dreamless sleep until the devil has had his day, until he has grown tired of tormenting them.

  “Damn it, we can’t live here.” she drops Tamura’s case to the ground and covers her face with her hands. They are both shivering with the cold, their thin jackets little protection against the glacial mountain air.

  “We have no choice,” Tamura says. She picks up her case and heads toward the lines to be allocated a barrack number.

  Situated between Independence and Lone Pine in Inyo County, Manzanar’s ground had been a fruit orchard once, pretty then, perhaps, but rutty now, dirty-looking, with clumps of sagebrush hogging the land. A few gnarled half-dead pear trees are dotted about, black as witches’ hats, their branches twisted as though in torture.

  “Not the sort of trees you dreamed of, Mama.”

  It’s almost autumn in Angelina, but winter comes early and hard in mountain country. The day is colder than any they have ever experienced, the sky dark, almost black. Satomi looks around for a splash of color in the camp but finds none.

  “I’m sorry, my girl,” Tamura says softly, as though she is to blame for their troubles. “You don’t deserve this.”

  “You less than me, Mama.”

  Retreating to the horizon, the airless rows of barracks stretch beyond their vision. They have been constructed from planks harvested from old stables in such haste that no pride could be taken in the work. Wasted with age, the wood has splintered where it has been nailed unevenly to the studs that are already working themselves free. All sixteen of the barracks in the Bakers’ allotted row are green with mold and warped where the tarpaper has rotted and peeled away.

  “At least we have a stove,” Tamura falters, almost in tears.

  “But I don’t see any wood, Mama.”

  “The beds are better here.” Tamura pokes the hard Army cotton mattress. “They won’t be so prickly.”

  At the end of each barracks block, three low buildings hunker down. The first, a laundry room, echoes with the dismal sound of dripping water. There are four deep sinks and some worn scrub boards. Cockroaches cling to the damp walls in the twilight gloom. The second building houses the foul-smelling latrines, where, with only an inch or two of space between the cracked pans, Manzanar’s inmates must squat cheek by jowl with their neighbors, looking straight ahead so as not to offend. Only the last stall has a partition, a partition but no door, giving rise to the view that the intention was there but foiled, they suppose, by a dearth of wood.

  “That will be the worst one to have, I should think,” Tamura says as they inspect the facilities.

  “Why, Mother? It looks like the best to me.”

  “Well, I imagine that people will check it first to see if it is empty. Whoever sits on that throne will be facing a receiving line.”

  The smell from the latrines makes Satomi wretch. She doesn’t believe Tamura when she says they will get used to it. She never wants to get used to it.

  Completing the squalid triad, a bleak shower house with a rough cement floor, its walls gloopy with soap scum, seems to Satomi to have been designed more for animals than for humans.

  It isn’t only the old who look at those buildings with horror. The young too feel the shame of having to share with the opposite sex, of being thought so little of. Of all that is hateful at Manzanar, the latrines are the things that seem to Satomi to diminish humanity the most. Never mind that fate has chosen them to be unlucky, or that they have lost their names and become government numbers: those terrible latrines speak more potently of their lost future as Americans than any of the other humiliations that are heaped on them.

  Tamura and Satomi’s barrack, indistinguishable from their neighbors,’ is placed two from the end of their row. The door doesn’t fit, so that it has to be kicked shut, and there is a crack in the back wall as wide as a man’s arm.

  “Look, I can put my fist through this. Your chicken coop was a palace compared to this place, Mama.”

  “Oh, my sweet chickens,” Tamura says in a shaky voice.

  With her head up, glaring at the guards, Satomi goes about the camp collecting cardboard from the empty food boxes behind the mess halls. She ducks under the barracks, gathering up splinters of wood and rusting nails from the rubbish-strewn ground.

  A guard passing her turns as she goes by and gives a low appreciative whistle. She stifles the urge to catch up with him, to spit in his face. She wants him to challenge her, to tell her collecting wood is against the rules. She wants a reason to kick his shins, to scream at him. She wants to scream herself hoarse, have a showdown.

  “You will always have that problem,” Tamura says pragmatically when Satomi tells her about the guard. “It’s about men, nothing to do with being in Manzanar.”

  Stuffing the hole as tight as she can, Satomi spends hours compressing the cardboard, fixing the wood in a rough patchwork to the thin wall with bent and rusty nails, a rock for a hammer.

  Tamura can’t help thinking how useful Aaron’s tools would be here. It had hurt to leave them with the pale-eyed man at the bus station. Perhaps he is using them himself; Aaron’s big pliers, his pack of assorted screwdrivers, the little tool that she has forgotten the name of that he said he wouldn’t want to be without, it was so useful.

  “You have made a good job of it,” she says, admiring Satomi’s work. “Nothing will get through that.”

  But when their first dust storm comes, dirt and grit explode through the wall, sending the cardboard flying, crumpling the wood as though it is no more than paper. The force of the storm shocks them. It’s like nothing Angelina had ever thrown at them.

  “Like the winds of Neptune,” Tamura says in amazement. They gasp and draw in their breath, laughing with relief when it’s over.

  “Oh, Mama.” Satomi hugs Tamura. “You are the bravest person I know,” and suddenly she is crying along with the laughter.

  America is punishing them, the weather is punishing them. There is no forgiveness here, nothing gentle, only Tamura to hold on to.

  She comes to know that flattened-out tin cans would have worked better on the hole. They are patched on most of the barracks, tacked around with nails that have bent in the gales but somehow managed to hold on.

  “I expect your father would have known that,” Tamura says.

  The same unspoken rules of the inmates that had applied in the relocation center apply in Manzanar. Manners are all, and everyone must feign deafness, learn to look the other way, attempt politeness.

  “Best not to comment on our neighbors’ conversations,” Tamura advises. “Not to be too loud in our own.”

  The partition walls are so thin that it is impossible to have a private conversation without being overheard. The sounds and smells that the human body is subject to come rudely through their walls, sighs and groans, spitting and farting.

  But whatever the difficulties, the semblance of privacy must be maintained or neighbor could not look neighbor in the face. The children of the camp are beaten if they are caught spying through the knotholes of the barrack walls. They can’t stop, though, as all the barracks look the same to them. It’s easy to get lost, to think that they will never find their way home.

  “I was looking for my mother,” they wail when caught out.

  “It would have been better to have arrived in summer,” Tamura says, stating the obvious as she attempts to light a few sticks of wood in their stove. “It takes time to become accustomed to the mountain weather.”

  They are not prepared for the icy
air, for the ground set hard as a hammer. The cold thickens the blood, makes movement sluggish. Even the birds hardly sing in Manzanar. They perch rather than fly, in case their wings should freeze and they should fall frozen to the ground.

  “We don’t have the clothes for it,” Satomi despairs. “You must use my blanket as a shawl, Mama. Stay inside, your cough is getting worse.”

  As the relentless storms rock them, a leftover hoard of Navy World War I peacoats arrive and are issued to every household.

  “One for everyone,” they are told. “You see, America cares for you, we have your interest at heart.”

  The coats are large, all one size. They are too big for the children, and on the women they trail to the floor and hang over their hands. Made of felt, they sop up the rain, making them too heavy to wear on wet days. It takes a week to dry them out, and the scent of mold never leaves them.

  “They’re better used as blankets, I suppose,” Tamura says. “They’re so heavy in the wearing they make my shoulders ache anyway.”

  If they didn’t know it already, Manzanar during their first winter confirms to them that nature is boss. The wind howls at them, sucking its breath in, shrieking it out furiously, a mad creature intent on blowing them to kingdom come. It slams at the electricity poles so that the light goes and they have to take to their beds as soon as darkness falls.

  It’s bad enough faced straight-on, but they prefer it that way, even when it blows hard enough to move stones as if they are nothing but bits of cinder. When it charges them from behind, the barracks shake and tilt alarmingly.

  “It’s about to go,” is the shout, setting neighbors to help knock in the loose nails, hammer the wood back together. On such occasions something of the atmosphere of a barn-build overtakes the detainees, a barn-build where your fingers freeze and your eyes burn in the whipping wind. A barn-build with no picnic to look forward to.

  Satomi, bundled up in her peacoat, which flaps unpleasantly against her calves, wanders the camp, not knowing what to do with herself. People hardly acknowledge her, they are shy to speak to the tall, angry-looking white girl. They have heard that her father died at Pearl Harbor, an American hero, it’s said. So why is she incarcerated here with them? Surely she must hate the very look of them, her father’s murderers. But if that’s the case, then what of her mother, the pretty Mrs. Baker, as Japanese as any of them?