Farewell to Manzanar: Part 3–Afterword

By the age of seventeen I knew that making it, in the terms I had tried to adopt, was not only unlikely, but false and empty, no more authentic for me than trying to emulate my Great-aunt Toyo.

It was simply her validation that all those things had taken place.

The black Japanese script cut into the white face of the obelisk read simply, “A Memorial to the Dead.”

Then, as if rising from the ground around us on the valley floor, I began to hear the first whispers, nearly inaudible, from all those thousands who once had lived out here, a wide, windy sound of the ghost of that life.

The obelisk — built in 1943 — and the gatehouses are all that have survived intact from internment days.

For a moment I was strolling again, finding childish comfort in its incongruous design.

I knew that the man who inscribed it had foreseen these ruins and did not want his masonry identified with the wrong era.

The times I thought I had dreamed it were one way of getting rid of it, part of wanting to lose it, part of what you might call a whole Manzanar mentality I had lived with for twenty-five years.

This visit, this pilgrimage, made comprehensible, finally, the traces that remained and would always remain, like a needle.

But for the first time I saw it clearly, as clearly as the gathered desert stones, and when I left today for good I would carry that image with me again, as the rest of my inheritance.

Mama had been packing, and that brought the uncertainty of our future to such a sharp point, her back went into spasms.

He wouldn’t listen and told us to hold on, while he swung into the street, careening past emptying barracks where suitcases and duffel bags sat stacked.

The original goal was a short recollection for the immediate relatives and for our thirty-six nieces and nephews, some of whom were born at Manzanar yet knew almost nothing about the experience.

In recent years, Jeanne has visited many dozens of schools, from California and Oregon to Texas and Washington, D.C., and she has discovered that, for readers of many backgrounds, the story of a young girl who finds herself separated from the larger society for reasons she does not yet understand can have a strong contemporary resonance.

In 2001, the widely scattered threats and acts of reprisal against Muslim and Arab Americans had no encouragement from national or local media.