Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky (8 page)

1943 | CHAPTER NINE

NEW NEIGHBORS

WHEN
Tomi returned from school one afternoon, Roy told her a new family had moved into one of the apartments in their barracks. The old family had left the camp because the man had gotten a job working on a sugar beet farm.

Despite the barbed-wire fences and the guard towers, Tallgrass wasn’t really a prison camp. The government moved the Japanese to Tallgrass and the other camps because it didn’t want them living on the West Coast, where they might contact the enemy in Japan. But the evacuees weren’t supposed to be permanent residents of the camps. The men were expected to get jobs, taking the places of those who had been drafted to fight in the war. In Colorado, the Japanese men were offered work on farms.
The women, too, could get jobs in cities at defense plants or as office workers. Once they found work, the evacuees would move out of the camps, and some at Tallgrass had already done so. Others found work in the sugar beet farms around Ellis and still lived at Tallgrass.

“Are there any kids?” Tomi asked, after Roy told her about the new family.

“Yeah, I think there’s a boy Hiro’s age.”

“Yippee!” Hiro said, because his friends lived in other barracks. “Let’s go meet them, Tomi.”

The two went down the hall and knocked on the door of the new family’s apartment. A girl about Roy’s age opened the door. She was pretty, with long hair turned under, and she wore thick socks rolled down to her ankles, called bobby sox. Girls who wore them were called “bobby-soxers.” She held the hand of a small boy about four years old, while a larger boy peered out from behind her.

“Hi,” Tomi said, introducing the two of them. “We came to welcome you.”

“Welcome?” the girl replied in an angry voice. “Why would anybody
welcome
us to this place?”

“I guess it’s not so great, is it?” Tomi said.

“It’s horrid. I hate being here. We were living in another barracks, but the roof leaked, so they sent us here. This is almost as bad. Look at the dirt.”

“You have to dust every day, but it doesn’t take long,” Tomi said, trying to be cheerful.

The girl swept the dust off a chair and sat down, putting her hands over her face. “Dirt inside, dirt outside, everywhere you look there’s dirt. And I haven’t seen a single tree in the whole camp.”

“No,” Tomi admitted. “But some of the men are going to put in Japanese gardens, and my mom says she’ll plant vegetables. It will be better.”

“I don’t care. I hate Tallgrass, and I hate the government for sending us here.”

Just then, Hiro turned to the older boy and asked if he wanted to go outside and play. “When spring comes, we’re starting a baseball team. Do you want to join?”

“Do I!” the boy replied. “I was the best catcher in my whole grade. My name’s Wilson. Can I go outside, Helen?” he asked his sister.

“Might as well. There’s nothing to do here,” she told him.

As the two boys left, Tomi heard Wilson say, “Somebody
told me you can hit a ball like Joe DiMaggio.”

“Jeepers!” was all Hiro could say. Being compared to the great Yankee baseball player was the finest compliment anybody could give a little boy. Tomi knew Hiro had made a good friend.

“At least one of us is happy,” Helen said bitterly. “What’s here for me? It’s not like I play baseball.”

“Aren’t you in school, or do you work?” Tomi asked.

“How can I do anything? I have to take care of Carl.” She glanced at her little brother.

“What about your folks?”

“They’re dead. Dad was killed in a fishing boat accident. Mom died of pneumonia just before we got sent to Colorado.”

“At Santa Anita?” Tomi asked.

“A place like that, a fairground. There wasn’t any hospital.”

“I’m sorry. That must be hard.”

“I hate America,” Helen said.

Tomi glanced down at Carl. “You mean it’s just you and your brothers? You’re taking care of them all by yourself?”

Helen nodded.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Don’t you have any relatives who can help?”

Helen shook her head. “They’re all in Japan. I wish I was there, too.”

Tomi’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “But Japan’s our enemy. We’re at war with Japan. We’re Americans.”

“I used to think that, too. I’m
Nisei
. That means I was born here. But look at the way this country treats us. If the government hadn’t rounded us up and sent us to the fairground, my mother wouldn’t have gotten sick. I’d be back in San Francisco going to school. Now I have to sit in this dirty room and take care of my brothers.”

“I’m sorry,” Tomi said, thinking “I’m sorry” didn’t solve anything.

1943 | CHAPTER TEN

BUYING
a
TANK

RUTH
was slumped in the doorway of her barracks when Tomi stopped on the way to the dining hall.

“I heard there’s a cook on the other side of the camp who makes Japanese food for breakfast. We ought to go there sometime,” Ruth said. “I’d give a quarter for just one bite of real Japanese food—that is, if I had a quarter.”

“You know what I miss?” Tomi asked. “Strawberry ice cream. We used to make our own with fresh strawberries and cream from Mr. Lawrence’s cows. We’d take turns turning the crank on the freezer. In the summer, we’d sit in the dark watching fireflies and eating ice cream.”

“There’s an ice cream parlor in Ellis. One of the Boy Scouts told me. Maybe in the summer, we can get passes to go there every day.”

“That would be wonderful.” Then Tomi remembered she had to hurry and grabbed Ruth’s hand. “Come on. I promised Mom I’d come back and take her to that class. If I don’t go with her, she might stay home. Mom doesn’t like standing up in front of people. At home, she never spoke out when she was with white ladies. But I told her that here, everybody’s Japanese.”

Ruth nodded. “Ditto. My mom’s shy, too. But she needs to get out. All she does is sit in the room and hold Ben’s toys. Do you think this will work?”

“We have to try.”

A couple of weeks before, when one of the women who taught at the camp saw the quilt Mrs. Hayashi was making with Mom’s help, she’d asked Mom if she would teach a class in quilting. Mom said no, thank you, she wasn’t good enough. That wasn’t the real reason, however. Mom could sew anything. She turned down the request because she didn’t want to get up in front of a group of women.

“You should, Mom. It’s so cold in the winter at Tallgrass that people need quilts. And you can teach them just the way you did Mrs. Hayashi,” Tomi told her.

“I couldn’t,” Mom said.

“That’s selfish,” Roy spoke up. He had been listening
in. “What if we needed warm quilts and somebody refused to teach you how to make them?”

Mom frowned. She said she wouldn’t know any of the women in the class.

“You’ll know Mrs. Hayashi,” Tomi told her. “And me.”

“You would go?”

Tomi thought that over. She’d spoken too quickly. She didn’t want to sew with a bunch of women, but she’d go if it were necessary. She could always sneak out after Mom got started.

Now, the two girls ran down the street to the dining hall and joined the line waiting to get in. A girl from school motioned for the two girls to join her at the head of the line—“spacing” it was called. But Tomi knew that crowding in line was rude, so she shook her head, and she and Ruth waited their turn. It wasn’t long, and they gobbled their lunch of canned spaghetti and raced back to the barracks.

When Tomi reached the room, she found Mom sitting on one of the rough chairs that Roy had made, her back very straight. Her hands were at the sides of her face, however, and she looked as if something was wrong.

“Come on, Mom, we’re late. We’re picking up Mrs.
Hayashi and Ruth. Mrs. Hayashi is scared to go. Can you imagine?” Tomi wondered if Ruth was telling Mrs. Hayashi that Mom was scared. “You know everybody,” Tomi said to reassure her mother.

“That doesn’t mean I can be a teacher.”

“Sure you can.”

Tomi wasn’t so sure, however. Mom had come a long way since leaving the farm, but she was a woman who disliked being the center of attention. Mom forced herself to complain to the officials about things in the camp that were wrong. But that was because she was concerned about Tomi and Hiro and Roy. She’d never before agreed to stand up before other women as a teacher.

“You said you’d do it. So
shikata ga nai
. It can’t be helped now.” Tomi took Mom’s hand. “Besides, you have to be there for Mrs. Hayashi. She won’t go if you don’t.”

Mom nodded, and Tomi smiled to herself, because she knew Mom would not let down a friend.

Mrs. Hayashi was even more ill at ease than Mom when she left her apartment. Both women looked their best, with hats, and Mrs. Hayashi wore high-heeled shoes and even gloves. Still, they reluctantly followed their daughters down the street to one of the barracks buildings
that had been turned into classrooms. “Maybe no one will come,” Mom whispered to Mrs. Hayashi.

But the room was full of Japanese women who stood around a table talking. They were dressed up, too, as if this were an important occasion. When they saw Mom, they bowed and greeted her, some in English, some in Japanese. One woman had brought her daughter with her and said the girl could thread the needles.

Mom bowed back and said, “Hello. I am Mrs. Itano.” Then, her hands shaking a little, she opened her paper sack and took out her scissors, needle, thread, and bits of fabric. “Welcome to our first quilting class. I am your teacher.”

Tomi grinned at her. Mom was going to be all right.

Tomi watched as Mom told the ladies to take out the scraps of fabric they had brought. When Mom was busy examining the pieces, Tomi nodded at Ruth. They would slip away and play. But as she started for the door, she heard Mom’s voice. “Tomi, stay please. Take a seat. You are going to be my star pupil.”

Tomi sighed. She did not care about sewing, and she especially did not care about making quilts.

“We will each make a pieced quilt,” Mom said. The ladies leaned forward to hear her. “Piecing is mostly squares
and triangles.” Mom held up a square of fabric and cut it on the diagonal, from upper right to lower left.

The ladies nodded their understanding.