Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky (5 page)

Over the next few weeks and months, Tomi grew used to the horse-stall hotel. She and Mom shared a mattress tick filled with straw, sleeping under a rough blanket. Roy and Hiro shared one, too. Mom had brought sheets, but there was no place to wash them or hang them up to dry. Besides, the days and nights were so hot that after a while, they slept without any covering. Tomi missed the farm, the fresh strawberries and lettuce and corn. Most of all, she missed Pop. She remembered standing next to him when he raised the flag.

They spent only their nights in the horse stall, because
with the heat, the stable smelled even worse. Besides, there was nothing to do in the stall. Tomi became friends with some of the girls her age. They made toys for the younger children—dolls from worn-out socks and sticks or puzzles from magazine pictures, which they cut into shapes. She wondered if they could form a Girl Scout troop. After all, they were all Japanese, so none of them would be asked to leave because they weren’t Americans. But they would all be moving on soon, to different relocation camps.

One day, one of the guards told Roy some friends had come to see him—the other members of the Jivin’ Five. Roy was surprised, because gas was being rationed. Each family was allowed only a few gallons of gasoline each month. Roy said he liked it that his friends used some of their gasoline to drive to the racetrack to visit him.

“Can I come with you?” Tomi asked.

“Nah, this is just for guys,” he said.

She watched him hurry away, then was surprised when he returned not more than thirty minutes later. He looked angry, and Tomi thought his eyes glistened with tears. “What’s wrong? How come your friends didn’t stay longer?” she asked.

“I told them to go on home. I don’t want them to visit
anymore.”

“Why? Is it because you’re Japanese?”

Roy shook his head.

“Were they mean?”

“No, they were all right. They brought me some sheet music.”

“Then what happened?”

Roy took his sister’s hand. “It was awful. I had to talk to them through a
barbed-wire fence
!”

1942 | CHAPTER FIVE

TALLGRASS

FINALLY
, in August, after four months of living in the racetrack, the Itanos received an order to move again. Mom didn’t want to go. She wondered how Pop would ever find them.

Tomi was glad, however, because she was tired of living in a smelly horse stall and playing in the dirt of the racetrack.

“Where’s our camp going to be?” she asked Roy, who only shrugged and said nobody knew. The guards would tell them when they got there, he said, as they boarded the train with other evacuees. Tomi had never ridden a train before and was excited. But the train was as hot as the stable at Santa Anita. People weren’t allowed to get off when the train stopped at stations or even go out onto the
observation platforms. And they couldn’t open the windows. In fact, they were told they must keep the shades pulled down for the entire trip.

“Are they afraid people will see us or we’ll see people?” Roy asked a guard. Just like Santa Anita, the train was filled with guards carrying guns. The soldier only shook his head. He didn’t know. After Roy talked with another guard, he came back to his seat and whispered to Tomi, “He thinks we’re going to Tallgrass. That’s the camp in Colorado.”

“I’ve read about Colorado,” Tomi said. “They have mountains and rivers and big pine trees, and it snows there.” None of the Itanos had ever seen snow. “I wouldn’t mind Colorado,” she added. Her spirits lifted, and for the first time since she left her house in California, Tomi thought the relocation might be an adventure.

After days, the train stopped and the evacuees were told to gather their belongings. They were at their destination. Tomi was so excited that she pushed to the front of the car so that she could be one of the first ones off. She jumped down onto the platform and looked around, then stopped. The station was in a dusty town set in the middle of the prairie. Dirt blew across the streets, and everything
was brown. Where were the mountains? The snow? The tall pines? “This can’t be Colorado,” she told Hiro when he caught up with her. She squinted in the harsh sunlight.

“What is this place?” a man called to a crowd of people who had gathered to see the evacuees arrive. Like Tomi, the other Japanese stared at the land around them, blinking in the bright sun.

“Ellis, Colorado,” came the reply.

Ellis, Colorado, wasn’t anything like California. There were no strawberry beds or lettuce fields. Tomi looked over at the crowd of people who had gathered at the station. Some of them stared curiously, but others were angry and called out mean things. “We don’t want you Japs here,” one man yelled.

“Go on back where you came from,” called another.

Mom, who stood next to Tomi, whispered, “Don’t they understand? We want to go back, but we can’t. We don’t want to be here.”

Tomi saw a girl looking at her brown-and-white saddle shoes, and Tomi stared back at her. The two of them might have gone to the same school and been friends, she thought. But maybe the girl hated her for being Japanese. Maybe if Tomi was her classmate, the girl wouldn’t allow
her to be a Girl Scout. Dirt blew into her face, and Tomi took out her pink silk scarf and put it over her long black hair, tying it at the back of her neck. Then she joined Mom, Hiro, and Roy as they climbed onto one of the buses waiting near the train—buses that would take them to their new home.

They rode a mile down a dirt road, past fields of what a man said were sugar beets. Then they turned in at a gate. Tomi could tell from the barbed-wire fences and the guard towers that this was a prison camp, even though it was
called
a relocation camp. There was a sign over the gatehouse: “Tallgrass.”

She could see that the camp wasn’t ready for the evacuees. The barracks weren’t finished. Many were missing doors and windows, and the ground was littered with lumber and wire. Nothing had been painted. There were no gardens or sidewalks, only dirt. Tomi listened to the sounds of the carpenters, the talk of the people as they got off the buses. She looked at the long rows of barracks and the dirt streets. The camp wasn’t pretty.

But it would be, Tomi thought suddenly. The Japanese she knew in California had been good gardeners. They would plant trees and flowers and vegetable
gardens. Some would create rock gardens. The women would hang curtains in the windows. There would be schools and shops. Before long, Tallgrass would be a regular town, and each person in it would be like her, an American whose ancestors were Japanese. Tallgrass really was going to be an adventure, she thought. She turned to Hiro and said, “It looks like we’re home.”

If Mom was upset by their living space, she didn’t show it. Their “apartment,” as it was called, was just one room, sixteen by twenty feet. That was only a little larger than their living room in California. The unpainted walls were so thin that Tomi could hear people talking in the apartment next door. There was just one window, and a single lightbulb hung from the ceiling. A coal-burning stove stood in the center of the room. Except for cots with thin mattresses, there was no furniture.

Roy bit his lip as he dropped two suitcases on the floor. “They expect us to live here, all four of us?”

“Better than the horse place,” Mom said.

“But this is permanent, Mom. We might be here a long
time,” Roy argued.

“I like it,” Mom said, although she didn’t sound so sure.

Shikata ga nai
, it can’t be helped, Tomi thought. Mom smiled at Tomi and took a deep breath. “A small place, not so much cleaning to do.”

“Plenty of dusting,” Roy told her, rubbing his hand across the window sill, then examining it. Dust was already blowing in through a crack in the wall onto the suitcases. Roy slapped his hands together, then grabbed Hiro’s arm. “Come on, let’s get out of here and find out where the mess hall is.” The two of them left, Roy slamming the door so hard that the walls shook.

Mom stared at the door, then straightened her back. “Good. They won’t be in the way. Let’s set up our new home, Tomi. First thing, find a broom. Too much dust and sawdust on the floor.”

They hadn’t brought a broom with them, of course, and Tomi didn’t know where to look for one. She went outside and searched until she spotted a pile of lumber—with a broom on top. One of the workmen must have thrown it away, because the top half of the broomstick had broken off. Still, Tomi was as excited as if she’d found a silver dollar lying on the ground. She snatched it up and returned to
the apartment.

“Such good luck!” Mom said when Tomi showed her the broom. “With the stick broken, the broom is just the right size for you. You sweep, I’ll dust, and then we will unpack.” So while Mom dusted the walls and the cots with a dish towel she had brought with her, Tomi swept the floor. She wet a newspaper she’d taken from the trash pile, then dropped clumps of it onto the floor so that the dirt would stick to the paper as she pushed it around with the broom. Then the two shoved the suitcases against a wall and opened them. Mom took out a sheet and held it up. “If they don’t give us a wall for a bedroom, we’ll make our own,” she said. “Roy can figure out how to hang the sheet. Our cots will be on one side, theirs on the other.”

Tomi went to her suitcase and took out a pretty yellow-flowered skirt. Mom had made it for her, using three yards of material. “This would make curtains,” Tomi said. “I could tear out the hem and open up the waistband. We brought needles and thread. I could sew the curtains by hand.” Mom’s sewing machine had been sold for a dollar.

“A good idea,” Mom told her. “First we make up a table.”

“But we don’t have a table,” Tomi said.

“We will use the stove. Who needs a stove to heat the room in August?”

Tomi hummed as she and Mom took out the tablecloth, folded it, and placed it on top of the stove. Mom had never before asked her to help arrange a room. They unpacked the teapot and cups and Tomi placed them on the tablecloth. Mom stood back and admired the arrangement. “All we need is a vase of flowers.”

“I’ll go pick them,” Tomi said, and they both laughed. There were no flowers growing in this dry dirt!

By the time Hiro and Roy returned, Tomi and Mom had unpacked the suitcases. Tomi had picked up a handful of bent nails from the pile of discarded lumber and used the heel of her shoe to pound them into the wall. And now the four of them hung the clothes on the nails. “You see, we don’t have to go through a closet to choose our clothes. They are right there on the wall where we can see them,” Mom said.

“But I only have two shirts, and I’m wearing one,” Hiro pointed out.

“Even easier,” Mom said. She turned to Roy. “There are knotholes in the wall. You can see sunlight through them. That’s why there’s so much dust. You find a cook and tell
him we want tin can lids to nail over the holes.”

Tomi didn’t know why Mom seemed so happy. Maybe it was that they were finally away from the racetrack, or perhaps it was that she was settling into a “home.” She couldn’t stop the family from being evacuated, but she and Tomi could arrange the room any way they wanted.

It struck Tomi then that Mom had changed a little just in the months since Pop was arrested. She had always done what everyone else wanted. Now for the first time in her life, she was in charge. Maybe something good had come from the evacuation. It wasn’t much. Were there other good changes? Tomi would look for them.