We Are Not Free: Chapters 7–9

From a distance, I watch them join up with Shig, Frankie, Twitchy, and Stan Katsumoto, and they head into the furor, breaking up fights and stopping acts of vandalism.

More and more, the camp separates. We’re being wedged apart by the Caucasians and their questionnaires, by guys like “Old Issei,” who wrote that editorial saying all the No-Nos should be shunned, and guys like my dad, who say the Yes-Yeses are sniveling cowards.

I can hardly believe he lets me tag along, but when I say I want to come, he just winks at me and ruffles my hair. “Delinquent in the making, huh? Don’t tell your brother.”

They stack the beds against the walls and set out chairs for the wallflowers.

People are laughing and talking and dancing, and when someone complains how hot it is, I get up to wrestle open the windows while Twitchy sidles over to the punch bowl with a flask in his hands.

“—thinking of applying for resettlement,” Shig is saying on the other side of the room. “It’s time to get outta here. Maybe I’ll go to Chicago, the City of Light!”

She’s corralling the guys off to one side so she can take a photo with the camera she ordered back in February.

It takes some wheedling, but I convince everybody to meet on the Block 15 baseball diamond.

He stops abruptly at a commotion behind him in the barracks. Someone’s shrieking.
It’s a man, I realize, as a figure comes scrabbling out from behind the recreation building. He’s off-balance, clawing at the dust.

The next day, we get the news. We know for sure. Segregation’s going to start in September, and all the No-Nos are going to be shipped off to Tule Lake in California.

We don’t have Tommy’s phonograph or his record collection.

Since they’re basically our neighbors, the Delta Rabbits are our de facto rivals, but the Topaz teams love playing any Caucasians.

We clamber onto the bus, laughing and gabbing, and our bus driver, Mr. Gregson, nods at each of us as we board.

He has a ruddy face and a few wisps of brownish-gray hair sticking out from under his paper soda-jerk hat, with blue eyes like Mr. Gregson’s.

Overhead, the bell jingles dissonantly in my ears.

The sky has been drained of all color now, and in the darkness, the only sign that we’re nearing camp is the sour miasma of livestock.

The guards may be gone, but the towers and the cattle fences haven’t been torn down. The camp hasn’t been dismantled.

Tule Lake doesn’t even have proper buses to take us from the train depot to the Segregation Center. Instead, we’re prodded onto army trucks, where we shiver under the canvas canopies as armed soldiers slam the tailgates behind us, slapping the siding to let the drivers know we’re ready for shipment.

It starts to drizzle, and in the subdued pat-pat-pat of the rain, I realize it’s eerily quiet.

When we arrived at Topaz, the Boy Scouts were playing marching tunes, but here, the only sounds are of slamming doors and strained voices. If you were a cheerful person like Yuki, you could appreciate Tule Lake’s total lack of pretense.

Dad’s mustache is in need of trimming, I notice. Over the past couple days on the train, it’s grown over the edge of his upper lip, making him appear unkempt and wild.

It’s got the same...coal-burning stove, I guess they couldn’t be bothered to install any Sheetrock, because the floors are bare wood and the walls don’t reach the rafters, so we can hear every sound in the whole barrack.

With a sullen look, I grab a rag from where Mom’s folded them in the corner.

We finish cleaning the floor in silence, under Dad’s baleful stare.

The WRA has canceled school while the loyal Tuleans move out and the No-Nos move in, but Dad enrolls me in one of the ad hoc schools the Japanese cultural organizations have set up in the rec centers.

The kids sitting by the dingy windows peer outside.

A bunch of boys have built a bonfire between the newly constructed gymnasium and the Induction Center, where new No-Nos are processed every day.

“—if you don't change your attitude—” Dad’s still shouting. He slams his fist on the table. Something something. “—intolerable—” Something something. “—ungrateful—"

Surreptitiously, our neighbors peer through their windows.

Her parents haven’t requested repatriation back to Japan, but we both know they don’t want to be Americans anymore.

At the concession stand, he buys a bag of peanuts, carefully counting each coin the way I’ve seen Mom do at the co-op because, without any income, all we’ve got is our dwindling savings.

You can hear the wistfulness in Tommy’s voice when he talks about his old records, the ones he had to sell when we left San Francisco.

I don’t know what I would’ve said to the questionnaire if I’d been old enough to answer it, but I know that if I’d brought us here, if I’d done this to us, I wouldn’t be sitting there pretending everything was hunky-dory.

Well, I’m here, and I hate it, and I make sure they know it. For a week, I throw my books down when I get back from school. I whack the doorframe with the coal bucket when I refill it. I am the seething, sullen presence they wish they could forget, only I won’t let them.

I’m turning to glare at him when I notice his voice. It’s not loud, like it usually is when he’s pissed off. Instead, it’s even, almost placid, like he’s afraid of his own volume.

People are being turned away from the mess hall and the latrines, forced to walk with the others by young guys with truncheons.

This is a statement from some camp faction to the WRA, and I’m caught in the middle of it.

Maybe they’re trying to calm down the mass of people who have started grumbling and shifting their feet. Maybe they’re trying to rile everyone up.

Maybe they’re trying to calm down the mass of people who have started grumbling and shifting their feet. Maybe they’re trying to rile everyone up. In the crowd, there’s an undercurrent of something hot and dense, like pressure building in the dark.

While Best and Myer met with project officials, a mob of disloyal Japanese surrounded their offices in a blatant display of force, compelling administrators to meet with a Jap committee.