Deep Purple (41 page)

CHAPTER 53

A
ghast at her own behavior, Amanda apologized to her father, throwing her arms about his emaciated body. He seemed smaller to her, or was it that she had only imagined him so much larger in her childhood—a giant with muscles like the rocks he shattered.

As the weeks passed in tense despair she realized her father was slowly wasting away. True, he coughed little more than before, but it was as if their argument had driven him to a point of apathy.

Two days before the May 2 deadline for registration for evacuation, her father came down ill with a cold that made simple breathing a labor for him. At any other time she would have gone for a doctor. But now not only did they not have the money but there were, of course, no doctors inside the
Barrio
, and she was reluctant to seek a doctor outside for fear he would report them to authorities if her father required treatment past the deadline for evacuation.

The only consolation for her father
’s illness was the fact he was not able to register as the head of the family when May 2 dawned. As a
nisei
—a first-generation Japanese born as an American citizen—she could be considered the head of their family. Yet she knew she would never register. She would never willingly submit to being interned like livestock.

Her father required her constant attention those next few days, but she made plans as she sat with him or worked on his customers
’ laundry. She would change her name (why had she been so stubborn with pride before?) and move them to the East, where there was no mass Japanese internment. Maybe New York, where a large colony of Japanese lived. She would worry about money for the move and her father’s acquiescence to the move when the time came. At the moment she was only concerned with getting him well again.

Trouble's agitated barking warned her they had a visitor even before the knock came at the door. It was late, past nine, and she knew the visitor would not be a laundry customer. It briefly crossed her mind that it
might be Nick, and she suddenly had as much difficulty breathing as her father did. Realizing what she must look like—the curl she so painstakingly put in her hair wilted by the iron’s steam; her hands chapped and reddened from the laundry lye—she reluctantly made her way to the front door.

It was not Nick but a man of the same solid, muscular build. He was dressed in a business suit. “
Miss Shima?” he asked. She nodded.

He held out his hand, palm up, and she almost shook it when she noticed the black leathe
r wallet. “FBI, ma’am," he said as politely as if he were one of their laundry customers.

She was Lot
’s wife turned to a pillar of salt. When she was unable to reply, he continued, "I’m sorry, but I will have to talk with you and your father. May I come in?”

She blinked, finding the situation akin to some horror tale of the Gestapo suddenly appearing at the doors of Jewish homes across Europe. “
I don’t have any choice, do I?”

He shook his head wordlessly. For a moment she thought she detected embarrassment
in his nice-looking countenance. "It’s either here or at headquarters.”

She led him through the curtained doorway to the back of the house. His eyes assessed the small partitioned room in a professional manner. If he was surprised or appalled by what he sa
w—the bareness of the room, her father lying weakly on the mat, her dressed in a kimono—he gave no indication.

He introduced himself to her father
—John somebody, she couldn’t remember later—and proceeded to inform her father that he was with the FBI and was there to inquire why they had failed to register for evacuation.

"Because it violates the Fourteenth Amendment,”
she snapped behind him. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” she recited bitterly, “shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor be denied the equal protection of—”

“
Amanda!” her father thundered. “I'm sorry,” he told the agent. “Please continue."

The man shifted to the other foot but made no effort to defend her accusation. “
It will be necessary for you—or your daughter, if you are unable—to come down to the Civil Control Center to register for evacuation first thing tomorrow morning. If you don’t, I’m afraid things could become much worse than they are.”

It was not a threat but a simple
statement.

“
My father’s a sick man!” she protested.

“
There’ll be doctors at the assembly centers and the camps who’ll give him excellent attention—most likely Japanese doctors,” the agent assured her.

“
I will be there,” she said shortly and showed the agent to the door.

At eight-thirty she reported to the First Methodist Church, which was designated as a Civil Control Station. Soldiers were standing guard at the entrance. There were several staffed desks inside. With no registrants, the clerks were buffing
their nails or reading the funnies.

The woman who interviewed her told her she would be appointed the head of the family unit of two. Their family name, Shima, was reduced to No. 24553. She was given several tags bearing their family number. At another de
sk she made the necessary arrangements to have their household property stored by the government. She was instructed that she and her father could bring with them only what they could carry in two hands. They were to bring bedding and linens for each member of the family, toilet articles, extra clothing, sufficient eating utensils including plates, bowls and cups, and work clothes suitable to pioneer life (boots and dungarees). Lastly she was told no pets of any kind would be permitted.

On the way back to the
Barrio
she stopped off at the university. She was supposed to graduate with her Bachelor of Law degree in three weeks. When she asked the counselor if she could get her diploma early, he looked at her regretfully. “I’m sorry, Miss Shima. Really, I am. But it would be breaking the rules. You might petition your local congressman.”

If Nick won the senatorial election the coming November, she would be petitioning him
—something she knew she would never do. She had to grit her teeth to keep from screaming at what seemed the injustice of it all. “No, thank you, Mr. Browne,” she managed to say pleasantly.

The bespectacled man looked almost as unhappy as she felt, and as she reached the door, he said suddenly, “
Miss Shima, I can possibly arrange for you to finish the term through a correspondence course. Would you be interested?”

She turned, blinking back her tears. Not everyone was as prejudiced as she believed. “
Yes, yes I would.”

Enthused by the possibility now, he continued, “
And maybe, with a lot of luck, I can get you admitted to the bar when you finish—'on motion.’ That’s without examination. It’s not often done, but all I can do is promise you I'll look into it.”

She crossed to his desk and bent over to plant a kiss on his shiny forehead
. “Thank you, thank you very much, Mr. Browne.” She told herself that with a lot of luck, as the counselor had put it, she would be the only practicing lawyer in a concentration camp.

After she left the blushing counselor, she found Larry at the cantina. “
It must be bad,” he said when she sat down opposite him.

She nodded. “
I registered for evacuation today.”

“
Ohhh. It is bad then.” He reached out to cover her trembling hands. “If it’ll help any, the Casablanca’s business is off now that you’re not there singing.”

She tried to smile. “
Thanks, but it doesn’t help any. In addition to all the other inflictions, we’re not allowed to bring our dog with us.”

It seemed as if everything she was experiencing was nothing compared with the simple act of giving up Troub
le. She supposed the relinquishing of the dog represented the culmination of all the traumatic events in the past weeks. “Would you keep him for me, Larry? Until I return?”

He smiled. “
I now consider myself the proprietor of one mongrel dog.”

She worked fe
verishly the rest of the day, buying work boots and jeans, trying to find duffel bags—which the stores had long since sold out.

Her father seemed better when she returned home. While she sorted out the things they would take with them into two different pi
les on spread sheets, her father delivered the last of the cleaned laundry to his customers. The remainder of the night the two of them finished packing what would be stored in government warehouses.

Her father worked alongside her, though more slowly, say
ing little. She knew he would never complain, but it must have been difficult leaving. Yet he had voluntarily left his home in Japan as a boy of seventeen—so perhaps she had underrated her father.

Throughout the night, even as late as two in the morning, n
eighbors would drop in to say goodbye as word spread that the Shimas were leaving. Each time her father would halt his work and graciously offer hot tea. She did not think any of the Hispanics had ever acquired a taste for the green tea, but they just as graciously accepted a cup and drank the bitter brew without betraying their distaste.

The next day, before Amanda and her father presented themselves at the church
’s Civil Control Center, they stopped outside the university’s Student Union Building, as she had arranged with Larry. Within minutes he appeared, greeting her father awkwardly. Then he bent down to scratch Trouble’s ears. “So this is to be my roommate for the next—” He broke off clumsily, realizing that none of them really knew how long the Japanese would be interned.

Amanda knelt and rubbed her cheek against Trouble
’s soft muzzle. “Goodbye, boy.” Her voice broke.

Together, she and her father trudged away with Trouble
’s lonely, confused yelping filling their ears and hearts. At the Civil Control Center she and her father were handed two train tickets. Only then did she discover their destination—the Santa Anita Race Track.

CHAPTER 54

S
anta Anita Race Track. Incredible! Impossible!

Amanda and her father
were processed in the same large room (now known as the Intake Room) from which she and Nick had watched the race the year before. After they were processed, along with two thousand more weary Japanese who came in that day, they were assigned to Barrack 15, Stall 5.

She stood before the empty stall, not really wanting to accept the fact this was happening. Although two army cots had been installed, horse manure still covered the floor. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. “
There is a lot we must do,” her father said phlegmatically at her side, “and not much time before the ten-o’clock curfew.”

She had not thought to bring a broom, but her father had packed a whisk brush. Tediously she swept the board floor while he packed the two mattress tickings they had b
een given with the hay provided in one comer. When the stall was as clean as could be hoped for and their beds made with the sheets and blankets they had brought with them, they collapsed on the cots, their backs against the low wooden partitions. In the glare of the naked light they looked at each other—Amanda’s face stunned, her father’s sorrowful.

“
Shall we hit the hay?” she asked in a woeful attempt at humor.

From all around came the crackling of the straw as others settled in their stalls. On either si
de of them was the murmur of conversations. The entire stables seemed to echo with rumbling snores, babies' crying, and the grinding of teeth. As she lay in the darkness, listening to the sounds of human habitation, she thought nothing could be worse.

The
reality of the next day was. Roll call was held at 6:45 A.M. and again at 6:45 P.M. by the house captain of each barracks. And always there existed the “queue-ups”—for mail, checks, showers, meals, laundry tubs, toilets, clinic service, everything. And in between there existed only the boredom.

To pass the time until they could be transferred to the more permanent settlements now under construction, people made victory gardens, knitted, read, or played cards. But as Amanda ambled aimlessly about the track t
hat first day, she noticed that many people, mostly the
issei
from the old country, sat idly, even sleeping in the open beneath the grandstands. Detained in a camp, life held no promise. Daily existence was desultory, monotonous, and worse, self-defeating.

She was determined she would not let this apathy happen to her father. The next week she organized
goh
and
shogi
tournaments—Japanese games somewhat similar to the American chess and checkers. Her father and a lot of the other
issei
men particularly enjoyed these matches and showed up every night in the mess hall after dinner. By the end of the second week the supply of game boards was exhausted, and she had to appeal to the camp director to order more boards from the Sears catalog—this time the American chess and checkers.

About that same time, to her delight, her correspondence courses began to arrive. With something to keep her busy, she did not find herself with empty time on her hands as did many of the other women. Day in and day out she plowed throug
h the law journals until her eyes hurt with the strain.

Her father sometimes drilled her through the course
’s questions, but she noticed that he looked as tired as she those days. She compelled him to visit the camp clinic. There were no facilities for testing for tuberculosis, but one doctor, an overworked young Japanese, agreed with her opinion that her father had the disease.

“
Almost all the war relocation camps are located in the desert areas,” he told them while his fingers massaged his bloodshot eyes. “There—on the desert—I feel your condition will not deteriorate, Mr. Shima, and may even improve as it did when you lived in Tucson.”

The doctor offered hope. More than that, he offered romance, or Amanda supposed she would call it that. He began to stop
by and visit with her and her father once or twice a week, ostensibly to check on her father. But more often than not the doctor talked with her.

Bob Niiyama was of medium height and slender; and attractive. Like herself, he spoke Japanese fairly well but
could not read or write it. His manner was gentle and courteous, and, as they talked of different things—philosophy, religion, education (but never the war)—she found that Bob reminded her of a younger Paul Godwin.

Sometimes she and Bob would attend the mo
tion pictures which were shown weekly in the grandstand, elbowing for a place on the floor alongside the other patrons who brought blankets and pillows. At other times they would play a game of
shogi
, and she won almost as often as he did, which did not seem to bother his Oriental’s masculine pride.

All her life it seemed she had known but one man, that like a homing pigeon she knew only one direction
—Nick's. She thought of it as a hate/lust relationship. Thus when Bob’s fingers sought and curled about her own in the darkness of the makeshift movie theater, she let herself take another man seriously for the first time.

That was the way it should be, she told herself. She had been trying to fit in a world where she did not belong. She was not of her father
’s old world, nor did she belong in Nick’s Anglo world. Bob, a
nisei
like herself, understood that netherworld.

She alone joked with him. "The least the war relocation authorities could have done was to run the horses once a week. It would relieve the tedium
and”—she smiled at him—"add some money to my pockets. I was getting to be a pro at betting on the horses.”

"You
’ve been here before?” They were walking along the infield at sunset, holding hands. Bob stopped and looked at her, really looked at her, his warm brown eyes moving slowly over her face. "There is so much about you I do not know, that you do not say. I want to know all about you—what you were like as a child and how you grew into such a beautiful person.”

“
I was a tomboy,” she replied curtly and changed the subject.

It was bad enough that the thought of Nick tended to crop up without her summoning him, but worse was the occasional sight of his name in the newspapers to nag at her the rest of the day like an unrelenting fly.

In addition to the political notes the newspapers carried about Arizona’s most colorful politician, there appeared innuendoes in the gossip columns. "What roguish mayor from the Grand Canyon State was seen in Hollywood escorting a very lovely (and quite married) actress to the Brown Derby?” asked Hedda Hopper. Walter Winchell said, "The old-world custom of dueling may soon return to Hollywood if a certain rakish politician out of Arizona continues his ‘love em and leave em’ courtship of Hollywood’s top film stars.”

When Amanda and
her father had been at Santa Anita a little over two months, she received a letter from Mr. Browne. Inside was her Bachelor of Law certificate and a congratulatory note confirming that the State Bar Association had confirmed his "on motion” in her behalf.

Bob showed up that evening with a jar of real oolong tea. “
All you lack is the swearing-in,” he told her, "and you are a full-fledged lawyer.”

While she poured the black tea into tin cups, Bob talked to her father. "I have come not only to celebrate your d
aughter’s achievement, Mr. Shima,” he said, bowing low, “but also to request your permission to marry her.”

A Caucasian female would more than likely have been surprised, and perhaps chagrined, that her suitor had not consulted her first, but Amanda, like
Bob, had part of the Far East in her blood. The three of them sat on the two cots—her father and she on one and Bob opposite them.

Bob continued to speak, earnestly but in a low voice, for there were always ears to hear. “
Mr. Shima, your daughter is everything I have ever hoped for in a wife. Beauty, intelligence, warmth. She is good for me; she makes me forget for a few hours the conditions here—the people and the burdens they carry. She is what my soul has been waiting for. I would like to take her as my wife.”

“
Assuming that Amanda feels the same,” Taro said, "I would deem it an honor to have you for my son-in-law.”

Bob held out his hand to her, smiling tenderly. She swallowed the lump that was lodged in her throat. She put out her f
ingers to touch his, but her hand fell limply on the mattress. “I—I’m sorry,” she incredulously heard herself say. "But . . .”

“
But what?” Bob asked patiently.

She could not speak for fear of crying. Her father said, “
I believe, Dr. Niiyama, that as your soul has been waiting, so has my daughter’s . . . and it has not yet found what it is it waits for.”

Bob looked down at the cup of tea he held in his interlaced hands. “
Love, honor, justice,” he said slowly. "They are only abstractions. They can be dealt with. But the searching of the soul . . .” he let his voice trail off.

Setting aside the cup, he rose and bowed low once again before her father, then took her hands, which lay lifelessly now in her lap. "Amanda, I will not easily forget you. I hope we will
continue to be friends.”

For a few more weeks they were friends. She even began to assist Bob in the clinic with the other nurses, but at the end of the day she left the clinic on shaky legs and with a queasy stomach. The gashes, the diarrhea, the vomiting
—apparently nursing was not in her blood.

Bob was always grateful for her assistance and politely attentive, and every so often she caught those intelligent eyes watching her wistfully. Yet their friendship did not and could not return to the same easy one
it had been before he declared to her father his desire for her to be his wife.

Thus it was almost with relief that she received the news that she and her father would be among the first of five hundred shipped out to one of the newly completed war reloca
tion camps.

She knew that Bob must have been aware that they were among those leaving, but he never mentioned it. When the day arrived for their departure, he was conspicuously absent from the clinic. She thought about searching for him. Instead she picked
up her duffel bags and made her way toward the line of gleaming luxury buses waiting to take away the five hundred evacuees and the fifty military policemen. Bob knew what he was doing . . . a goodbye among friends was sometimes better left unsaid.

Her la
st glimpse of the Santa Anita Assembly Center made her smile. Some of the evacuees had climbed to the stable roof and were holding up large bon voyage signs while others waved. She saw Bob among them, waving. “He is a good man,’’ her father said.

Quickly s
he blinked and turned her face back to the window as she blindly waved goodbye.

The trip by train was miserable. The aged engine creaked rather than chugged. Inside, dust covered everything. And the gaslights did not work most of the time, leaving the pass
engers in total darkness because of the rule that all shades were to be drawn and no one was allowed to look out of the windows.

Some of the Japanese became trainsick and vomited. These were people who had never traveled farther than the walk required thro
ugh the Japanese ghettoes of San Francisco or Los Angeles. On the aisle across from Amanda a woman nursed her five-day-old baby. The infants cried incessantly, and the older children were restless.

At last, after a day and a half, the train halted. More bu
ses waited to transport the evacuees through nineteen miles of grease wood-covered desert. The last half of the distance was over rough, newly constructed dirt roads. Straining to see through the alkaline dirt that the line of buses kicked up, Amanda gradually realized that the relocation project—their home indefinitely—looked, if possible, worse than their temporary assembly center had.

Desolation stretched out before them with only the hundreds of tar-paper black barracks marching row upon row to relieve
the landscape. Barbed wire, about which soldiers could be seen patrolling the area, encircled these barracks. Every quarter mile or so were formidable watchtowers. A few telephone poles stood like sentinels to remind her that a type of civilization did exist out there.

There, according to the large sign over the guarded gate, was the Poston, Arizona, War Relocation Camp. The buses halted one by one to disgorge the evacuees into the mess hall, which served as the induction room. It was a scene of confusion a
s clerks (both men and women), stenographers, interviewers, guides, and baggage carriers wove their way among the tables.

Amanda looked about her, feeling a great sorrow for the sweating people who clutched at their children
’s hands and held onto bundles as they tried to assimilate what was next happening to them. While they waited to be assigned barracks a dust devil rotated through the camp, spraying clouds of alkaline dust into the mess hall and sending papers flying in all directions.

Her father began t
o cough violently, and one young Caucasian lady was nice enough to point out the row of cots in the rear of the room. There another young girl gave him ice water, a salt tablet, and wet towels. “I’m all right,” he reassured Amanda. “Return to your place in the line.”