“How . . . how did you find me?”
“Sharon told me about your parents’ shop. She told me where it was. I’ve been standing outside, across the street, wanting to ask about you. But I was afraid your family wouldn’t let me see you. Then I saw you come into the shop. And I saw you leave it by the back door.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been in school,” Mariko said, unable to think of anything else to say.
“I know. I know what’s happening. It’s all over the newspapers and radio. I know you’re going to be leaving. I want you to know I’ll write to you. And you can write to me.”
His tone was so full of hope and determination. But Mariko didn’t see how she’d be allowed to write to and receive letters from a non-Japanese boy.
“I don’t know if my parents will let me write to you,” she said, choking back a little sob.
“I don’t know if mine will let me write to you, either.” He laughed lightly. But then his tone turned earnest again. “Sharon promised she will get my letters to you. She always gets to her family’s mailbox first. And you can send yours that you write to me to her. She’ll make sure I get them. I can be Charlotte in the letters, all right? Just write to Charlotte. That way if somehow you get caught, you’re just writing letters to a girl classmate. No one will know the truth. Okay?”
Hot tears, the first happy tears she’d felt in what seemed like a long time, burned at her eyes and she nodded, not trusting her voice to speak.
“It’s going to be all right,” Charles said, extending his fingers toward her and sounding so much older than newly thirteen.
She reached with her own hand to curl her fingers around his, the metal of the fencing between them feeling like an animal’s cage.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, and she could tell he didn’t want to leave. He’d probably sneaked away like she had just days before.
He pulled his hand away from hers, but his gaze stayed locked on her eyes.
“I’ll be back. I promise,” she said. “We’ll come back.”
And he nodded. “I know you will.”
He turned and walked away, staying to the alley, where there were fewer people to wonder why a white boy was walking alone in Little Tokyo in the middle of evacuation preparations. Charles turned once to wave to her. Mariko held up a hand in farewell and watched until he was gone from view.
Four days later, on the morning Mariko and her family left Los Angeles, Kenji Inoue was declared a threat to national security because of his role in Little Tokyo as a translator and civic leader. He was sent to a detention camp at Fort Missoula, Montana, much like my father had been sent to Fort Lincoln, North Dakota: under armed guard and seated on a prison bus. Mariko’s mother would not learn of his whereabouts until many weeks later, long after everything about her cozy home above the vegetable and herb shop on Central Avenue seemed a gauzy memory of another life.
12
By the time Mariko had finished telling me how she and her family had been taken from their home in Los Angeles, the sun was resting low on the horizon. Tendrils of waning daylight were filtering through the branches of the citrus trees like curls of flame. The evening roll call would be sounding soon. I needed to be at the triplex with the rest of my family when the counters came to make sure every detainee was still detained.
Mariko also realized it was time to go. “We should probably head back,” she said.
But I wanted to know how long she had been at Crystal City, and how long she and the rest of her family had been separated from her father. I wanted to know where they went when they were driven out of the only home she’d ever known.
“Where did you go when you left Little Tokyo?” I asked, as we both stood and brushed dead leaves and dirt off our skirts.
“The government was still building the internment camp in Manzanar, where we were going to be sent, and it wasn’t ready. So we were told at the train station that we were going to be housed for the interim at what they were calling the Santa Anita Assembly Center.” Mariko laughed. “It was the Santa Anita racetrack; that’s what it was. Guards took us from the train station to horse barns. You should have seen us, Elise. We were all wearing our best clothes. Women in fine dresses, men in suits, children in the clothes they might have worn to church or a wedding. And they dropped us off at horse barns.”
“Horse barns?” I echoed, scarcely able to believe her.
“The stalls were empty,” Mariko said, as we walked through the grove toward the housing units. “There wasn’t a horse to be seen. But oh, how we still smelled them. Mommy was incensed and embarrassed, but I actually didn’t mind. You could catch whiffs of hay and leather and horsehair in every corner, even though the stalls had been scrubbed clean. I liked it. There was no fragrance like that in Little Tokyo. I could close my eyes and pretend I was on a farm with chickens and piglets and a red barn and that my dad was out on a tractor plowing fields.”
I could picture it, too, the way Mariko described it.
“I don’t know how many of us there were at the racetrack. Thousands and thousands. They eventually put up temporary barracks covered in tar paper in the parking lot, and Mommy asked for one of those, because she wanted us out of the horse stall. But others wanted out of the stalls, too, so she didn’t get one. The twins didn’t seem to mind the stall, either, because for them it was just a place to sleep. All of their friends from their high school were at the racetrack, too, so they were never at the stall except to sleep.”
Mariko told me the racetrack was much like Crystal City in that there was a post office, school classrooms, makeshift chapels in the grandstand, mess halls, a hospital. The adults found work to do, some in the professions they’d had before as doctors, teachers, cooks, and typists. Others, like her mother, worked in the track infield, which had been turned into a huge vegetable garden.
“We played a lot of softball,” Mariko said, “A lot. I don’t know how many teams there were. Dozens upon dozens. There were concerts. Movies. It was like a little pretend city. Real, but not real.”
We were nearing the houses now and I didn’t want the day to end.
“I wrote my first letters to Charlotte at Santa Anita,” Mariko said with a sly grin.
I smiled back at her, wondering if she was going to tell me what Charles had said to those letters in return.
“He wanted to come see me at the racetrack. We were allowed visitors and it was only twenty miles away from where he lived. But our little romance was a secret and he would’ve needed help getting there. But he wrote to me. He’s still writing to me. Sometimes I think maybe it’s better that he’s never seen me caged like this.”
She told me she and her mother and siblings were shipped off to a permanent internment camp in March of 1942, after four months at the Santa Anita Assembly Center. Manzanar, a word that is Spanish for apple orchard, had been built in the middle of the high desert on a lonely stretch of open highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The camp, which Mariko viewed from a bus window as they drove in past the guard shack, was a tableau of rows upon rows of barracks set against the backdrop of the snow-swept peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Nothing green had been planted yet; there was only high-desert flatland, colorless watchtowers, gray barbed wire. Even so, Mariko had thought the mountains, the biggest she’d ever seen, were beautiful in an imposing, majestic kind of way. She had never seen snow before, only in pictures.
Upon arrival at Manzanar, the internees were given large cotton bags to fill with straw to sleep upon; manufactured mattresses would arrive in the weeks to come. They had gone to bed that night in long dormitories, made private only by hanging sheets in between the family units. Bathhouses and toilets were in centrally located latrines. There were openings in the roofs of their hastily completed dormitories, and as Mariko lay on her cot that first night, she could see a vast, violet sea of stars shimmering down on her, far more stars than she had ever seen in the Los Angeles night sky. A singing wind was dancing around the corner of the long buildings, coaxing her to sleep with its strange lullaby.