Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky (14 page)

“Then why do you have a radio?” he was asked.

“You can’t send messages with a radio. I listen to the baseball games. I like the New York Yankees.” When the men didn’t smile, Pop added, “Maybe you are not Yankees fans. Maybe you don’t even like baseball. Are you un-American?” He smiled, thinking he had made a great joke.

“I ask the questions,” one of the men replied.

Then he asked Pop why he had bought so much gasoline and fertilizer. Did he plan to use it to make bombs? The man put his face close to Pop’s face.

Pop looked at the man as if he were crazy. “I’m a farmer. I use it on the land. I raise the best strawberries you ever tasted. Come to my house when we are finished here, and my wife will make you a strawberry shortcake. I will give you a nickel if it’s not the best strawberry cake you ever ate.”

“I’ve been to your house, and it wasn’t for cake.”

Pop looked from one man to another. He realized he had better stop joking. This was serious. Mom would be worried if he was late getting home. He wanted the questions to end. Not until that evening did he realize he wasn’t going home. He was spending the night in jail.

“Mr. Lawrence got a lawyer for you,” Roy said.

Pop shook his head. The FBI men wouldn’t let him talk to a lawyer. He never talked to anybody who was on his side.

He was held in jail in California for a few days, not allowed to see anyone. Then he was sent to prison in New Mexico with half a dozen other Japanese men. “They said
we were working for the Japanese government, that we were spies. I asked them for proof, and they said they had plenty, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was,” he said. “I told them I was one-hundred-percent American. They said I wasn’t American at all. I wasn’t even a citizen.”

“But you couldn’t be,” Roy said. “The law doesn’t let Japanese immigrants become citizens. Germans and Italians can, but not Japanese. Only
Nisei
—second-generation Japanese like Hiro and Tomi and me—can be U.S. citizens. How can they blame you for what the law doesn’t let you do?”

Pop only shrugged his shoulders.

“They must have believed you finally, because they let you come here,” Tomi said.

“They didn’t believe me ever. Maybe it’s a trick. I think they are watching me all the time, watching you, too.”

He shivered again, and Mom put her hand to Pop’s forehead to see if he had a fever. “Tell me what is wrong with you. You are not well,” she said.

“The camp was very cold, and there were only thin blankets. I didn’t have a warm coat. We had to stay outside in the bad weather. I got pneumonia.”

Mom gasped. People at Tallgrass got pneumonia from
the cold and the coal smoke that hung over the camp. Some had even died. She said Pop must get into bed. She turned down the blankets on Tomi’s cot. Tomi realized that it was Pop’s bed now. Mom then told Roy he must find a cot and a blanket for Tomi.

“We will get you well, Sam. You must be well when we go home,” Mom told Pop. “The war will be over one day, and we will go back to California and start again. I’ve been thinking we should raise celery and melons with the strawberries.” She smiled at him.

“You tell me what to do? Are you head of the family now?” Pop was angry.

Roy and Tomi exchanged glances. Mom had done everything she could to keep the family together. If Mom hadn’t taken charge, who knew what would have happened to them. Pop should be proud of her, not angry.

“It will be your farm,” Mom said. “And it won’t be long before you are raising the flag over it.”

“Bah!” Pop said. “I will never raise the red, white, and blue flag again.”

“But you have to, Pop.” Tomi didn’t like what Pop was saying. “We’re Americans. You taught us that.”

Pop scowled. “I am not an American.”

“You’re not Japanese anymore,” Mom told him. “The Japanese are our enemy.”

“No, I am not Japanese either.” Pop stood up and went to the window and looked out over the camp. “What am I? I am nothing.”

1944 | CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A SECOND-CLASS AMERICAN

THE
wind whipped at Tomi’s legs as she hurried from her barracks to Ruth’s apartment. When she’d first seen snow two winters before, she’d rushed outside and stuck out her tongue to catch the flakes. There had been only snow flurries that day, and Tomi had complained that there’d never be enough snow to make snowballs.

But by now, well into her third winter at Tallgrass, Tomi had seen enough snow to last for a long time—and enough cold. She didn’t care if she never saw another snowball. The winter wind whipped across the prairie that day with nothing but barbed-wire fences to stop it. Tumbleweeds pushed by the wind caught on the wire or rolled into the camp and piled up against the buildings. The wind brushed one against Tomi and scratched her hand.

Mom had ordered boots for her from the Montgomery Ward catalogue, and they kept Tomi’s feet dry in the slush and mud. But there were the places between the tops of her boots and the bottom of her coat where the wind blew grit from the street onto her bare skin and made it sting with cold. She missed the sunny days in California.

Tomi forgot about California now, as she ran down the street. She thought about what she would tell her friend about Pop. Tomi always went with Ruth to supper. Today, however, she would have to say she couldn’t join her friend. Pop had insisted they eat together as a family.

“But it’s different here. Families don’t sit together in the dining hall,” Tomi had protested.

“Our family will sit together,” Pop had said in a firm voice. “Our family has broken down since I’ve been away. I am head of the family now. I say we eat together.” He looked at Mom when he said that, and she stared down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Tomi wondered why Pop blamed Mom for the changes he didn’t like.

Tomi realized now that things with the Itanos had changed in many ways since they’d arrived in the camp without Pop. Mom made the decisions, and sometimes she asked Roy and Hiro and Tomi for advice. Before, Pop
had made all the decisions and never consulted anybody except Mr. Lawrence. Mom, who rarely left the farm in California, now spent her time working in the camp. She taught the quilting class. She worked with other women making bandages for the war effort and clothes for war orphans. She was even vice president of the Tallgrass Red Cross. She was no longer the shy woman she had once been. Tomi and her brothers had their own lives, too. Without the strawberry fields to work, the three of them had developed new interests. Tomi was proud of them, but Pop wasn’t. He wanted everything to go back to the way it was before he was sent to prison.

Well, Tomi was angry, too. She didn’t think much of a government that would put her father in jail and make him old and bitter. Maybe America wasn’t the country she had believed in. She was confused as she ran down the street to Ruth’s barracks.

“Pop’s home,” she told her friend.

“That’s great! You’ve always said he was fun. I can hardly wait to meet him,” Ruth replied.

“He’s not so much fun now. He’s different. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but I don’t like it.”

“You’ll have to find a way to make him happy.”

“How can I do that?”

Ruth laughed. “I don’t know. You’ll figure it out. Come on. Let’s go eat.”

“That’s just it. I can’t. Pop says we have to eat together. He wants us to be a family, the way we were in California.”

“The fathers were all like that when we came to Tallgrass. But they changed. Mine did. Your father will, too,” Ruth told her.

Tomi shook her head. “I don’t know. He’s pretty stubborn. I’m glad he’s here, of course. But I think things will be different from now on.”

They already were. They’d changed in the few hours that Pop had been back, Tomi thought as she returned to the Itanos’ apartment. She was different, too. Pop’s treatment had made her think about things she had always taken for granted. She glanced up at the American flag that was whipping back and forth in the wind. The flag always made her proud. Pop had taught her to put her hand over heart when she passed it. Sometimes, she even saluted it. But now, she walked on past it, her hands at her sides. After the way Pop had been treated, maybe that flag didn’t mean so much.

Pop frowned at Tomi when she returned. He was not
pleased she had taken so much time. “You must not keep me waiting,” he said.

“But I had to tell Ruth I couldn’t eat with her. That would have been rude,” Tomi protested.

“She should understand your family is more important.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Sumiko.” Pop turned to Mom. “I don’t like you wearing pants. You must put on a dress.” Like many of the women at the camp, Mom wore slacks almost every day. They were not only more comfortable than dresses, but they protected her legs from the wind and dirt.

Tomi exchanged glances with Roy and Hiro as they followed Mom and Pop out of the apartment. “He’ll be okay,” Roy whispered. “He just has to make sure we know he’s the boss. Once Pop finds a job here, Mom can stop working, and that’ll make him happy.”

“Maybe she likes to work. Why should she have to stop?” Tomi asked.

“Yeah, there’s nothing for her to do in the apartment except stare out the window,” Hiro said.

“She’s a Japanese woman. She should do what her husband says. That’s what Pop thinks.” Roy told them.

“I thought she was an American.” Hiro seemed confused.

“Maybe not,” Tomi said. “Maybe we’re not Americans either.”

The dining room was crowded, and the Itanos had to wait until people finished eating to find five places together. Pop complained about the food. It was no better than what he had eaten in the prison camp. He scowled at the noise and the children running around. There were no manners at Tallgrass, he said.

“But we are together, Sam,” Mom told him. “Everything will be all right now.”

Pop patted her hand and smiled. He hadn’t smiled much since he’d arrived.

As they finished eating, Mrs. Glessner, Tomi’s teacher, stopped at the table and held out her hand. “Are you Mr. Itano? I know Tomi must be very happy you are here.”

Pop only frowned at her hand and didn’t take it. “She would be happier if we were at home in California,” he said.

“Sam!” Mom exclaimed at Pop’s rudeness.

Mrs. Glessner wasn’t offended. “We would all be happier if there were no relocation camps,” she said. She smiled at Pop. “Tomi is one of our best students. You should be proud of her. She wrote a beautiful essay about the flag in the camp. It was the best in the class.”

“Bah,” Pop said. “I know what that flag means for us. It means living behind a barbed-wire fence.”

Mrs. Glessner nodded. “You are very angry. You have a right to be. But I hope you will not turn your children against their country. And I hope you will read Tomi’s essay.”

Tomi looked down at her plate. She did not want Pop to read the essay. She didn’t feel so great about what she’d written. When she got back to the apartment, she would put it into the stove. Maybe she didn’t believe what she had written anymore.