The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (19 page)

Even though her family was Zen Buddhist, Sumi did not practice meditation. The traditional Japanese customs were part of her life, but they did not feel as if they belonged to her. She was a part of
the nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans. They lived between two worlds—Japan and America—and during the internment many, like Sumi, felt betrayed by their government and uncertain of their American identity. Sumi could not imagine what her own
gaman
might look like, but she decided to befriend others her age who shared her predicament.

“I promised Mama that if I got a chance to go to another place—even if it was another camp—instead of being the toughest, most unfriendly girl in camp,” said Sumi, “I’d become the friendliest.”

On the train to Crystal City, Sumi surveyed the faces of the teenagers on board. In particular, she noticed Yae and her two younger brothers, fourteen-year-old Shoji and thirteen-year-old Reo. One afternoon, Sumi watched Yae and her brothers playing cards on a wooden box they’d found somewhere on board.

No one on the car had any suitcases. Their luggage had previously been stowed on the
Gripsholm
, now steaming its way to India. Everyone had only the clothes on his or her back. They were segregated from the other passengers, and at mealtimes, guards escorted them to the dining car and kept them under surveillance while they ate. “I felt like a refugee,” Sumi said. She slept in her seat, next to her mother, as the train made its way south. Yae dozed nestled close to her father.

Somewhere in Mississippi, the train stopped, and O’Rourke left. Both Sumi and Yae remembered that when he returned, he was laden with sacks of ice cream bars. He walked through the train car and distributed the ice cream to the children and teenagers on board. The teenagers unwrapped the cold bars and quickly ate them. Yoji J. Matshushima, another teenager on the train, later wrote about the trip: “It seemed like a lifetime from the time we left New York to Texas. I remember the flooding along the Mississippi River and the corn growing along the track. Mr. O’Rourke bought the kids ice cream on a stop because it was so hot. He felt sorry for us kids. I remember washing out clothes because we had no change. The train was so hot. We would open the windows, but
the smoke from the engine would come into the car, so we had to keep them closed.”

The train trip took several days. For much of the way, the shades remained down. The guards told the English-speaking children that it was for their own protection. On previous trips, trains carrying prisoners of war had been pelted with rocks.

When the train stopped at a small station in Texas, Yae’s younger brothers left the train to use the restroom in the station house. Two white men barred them from the first bathroom they tried, pointing to the
WHITES ONLY
sign over the door. In Seattle, where they were born, Jim Crow laws did not exist. They did know that in the American South, schools, swimming pools, water fountains, buses, and trains were segregated by race. The men directed them to the “Negro” bathroom. As Japanese, they didn’t understand where they fit into the racial equation, but they did as instructed. “It was strange. I figured a bathroom was a bathroom and a water faucet a water faucet, but that day in Texas, I learned differently,” Shoji said.

On September 7, the travelers arrived at the small railway station in Crystal City. On the short drive to the camp, Sumi saw the statue of Popeye on Main Street. She remembered the lyrics to the Popeye song from the cartoons: “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man. . . .” How odd, she thought, a town that raised a statue to Popeye.

Once the new arrivals were safely inside the fence, officers from the surveillance division examined what few papers and personal effects each person carried. O’Rourke explained the rules of roll: Every day at 5:30 p.m., roll call would be taken in the Japanese area of the camp. Three blasts on the air horn in the center of camp would signify the beginning of the count. All of the internees, including children, were instructed to stand in front of their residences and show their faces. When the daily count was finished, the air horn would sound twice.

Finally, the families of Sumi and Yae were escorted to their assigned quarters. As they walked to the northeast quadrant of the
camp, they were surprised to see so many Germans. While no physical barriers separated the German and Japanese sections, each group generally kept to its own area.

That first night, Sumi and her family were taken by truck down Airport Drive to what was known as the T section. The housing here was much different from Heart Mountain, where Sumi had stayed in a crowded dormitory. The
T
section stood for “triplex”—720 feet of floor space divided into three small apartments. Each had a kitchen with running water and a toilet, with a community shower. The prospect of living with only two other families brightened Sumi’s outlook. Nobu would be able to shop for food in the Japanese store, pay for it with camp money—which Sumi called “funny money”—and prepare all of their meals. Even though they still lived behind a fence, without liberty, an important part of their family structure was restored: eating together.

On the first morning after arriving in Crystal City, Sumi looked outside and saw the strange sight of mounted guards on horseback, something that did not exist in Heart Mountain or other camps. Then she saw a Japanese woman pulling a creaking wooden cart, which stopped at the bungalow and delivered bottled milk. A little while later, two men in a truck delivered ice for the cooler. At breakfast, her mother and father were seated together, no longer worried about each other’s whereabouts. “The countryside was bleak and the weather was hot and humid,” recalled Sumi, “but that first morning in Crystal City, we were together again. I was happy.”

On the morning of September 20, 1943, Sumi left her triplex, numbered T-37-B, located near the citrus orchard on the southernmost edge of the camp. She walked a short distance to the Federal High School, also known as the American School, where she would start ninth grade.

Everything about this first day of school felt different. The student body at Sumi’s new school numbered about 150, a group made up mostly of Japanese Americans from the continental United States. Here, unlike on any first day of school in Los Angeles, Sumi knew
none of her classmates. All of the students were strangers to each other, every student in the room a transfer from some other camp.

It often took months for new students’ transcripts to arrive from different camps. The wait did not stall the steady pace of the school year. A Hawaiian girl who was a senior that year received her transcript just one week before graduation. Every student, including Sumi, was placed in a grade on the strength of his or her word. As a measure of how honest the Japanese American students were despite the humiliation of internment, camp records show that once transcripts finally arrived, less than 1 percent of students were demoted for misrepresentation.

As the students in Sumi’s class filed into the prefabricated building that housed the Federal High School, all were headed into the unknown with no choice but to quietly take their hard seats in the used school desks. The first class was English. Sumi stared at the tall, willowy woman with the soft brown hair who stood in front of the blackboard. The woman had a straight spine and a confident air, as if she was used to getting her way. In clear, graceful cursive, she wrote her name in chalk on the blackboard: Miss Goldsmith.

By the time she stood before Sumi’s class, Kathryn Goldsmith, a graduate of North Texas Teachers College in Denton, Texas, had been a classroom teacher for twelve years. On the first day of class, Miss Goldsmith read several long assignments aloud. Like all of the other students, Sumi understood English, but Miss Goldsmith’s thick Texas drawl was unfamiliar. Her rolled
r
’s and dropped
g
’s were confusing. A phrase like
taking a bath
on the printed page sounded like
takin’ a bath
in Miss Goldsmith’s mouth.
Fixing
was chopped to
fixin’.
She said
y’all
instead of
you guys.
The cadence and rhythm of Miss Goldsmith’s voice struck Sumi as comical. “Her Texas accent sounded so funny,” recalled Sumi, “the whole class laughed.”

Miss Goldsmith’s English class was Sumi’s favorite: “She was strict, but she was fair and went out of her way to make us feel like normal kids in a normal school.” To capture their interest, she
directed the students in plays—
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Night Owl
, and
The Wizard of Oz
.

R. C. (Robert Clyde) Tate, a former high school principal in Crystal City and the supervisor of education at the internment camp, had recruited Miss Goldsmith. A native Texan, Tate had a storied record as a football and baseball coach in a number of rural South Texas schools. Even in midlife he was built like a quarterback, with strong, blocky shoulders and long, springy legs. A Christian man, Tate read his Bible through wire-rimmed glasses. He was early to rise and late to rest. His players called Tate by his nickname: Old Warhorse. As supervisor of education at an internment camp, Tate had a multifaceted job, overseeing both the German and the Japanese schools, which had their own internee-elected school boards and hired their own teachers from within the ranks of internees. But the structures of the Federal High School and Federal Elementary School were different. None of the teachers or administrators in those schools answered to the parents or to a school board. From his office in Philadelphia, Harrison held ultimate responsibility for the American schools. In the camp records, O’Rourke was listed as “president” of the school board and Tate as “superintendent.”

Tate’s most challenging job was recruiting teachers, given the nationwide teacher shortage during World War II. He had to find public-school teachers, most of whom had relatives fighting on the fronts in Europe and Asia, who were willing to educate the children of prisoners of war in sweltering South Texas. Unlike other school districts, Tate could not offer potential internment-camp teachers firm contracts. As employees of the INS, teachers might be transferred with little notice.

Indeed, Old Warhorse was worried about job security himself. Tate had three boys. One was in junior high, and the other two attended Crystal City High School, where they were mainstays on the football team. “The job uncertainty was a concern,” he said in an oral history. “Who knew when I might be transferred from Texas
to the Canadian border. The INS network was large. My job was uncertain.”

What did help, however, was that the INS was willing to pay higher salaries than other Texas schools. In 1942–43, the average yearly pay for a teacher with a four-year degree at an accredited school was $877.50. The INS offered internment-camp teachers in Crystal City more than twice that. The higher wages attracted good teachers, such as Miss Goldsmith. Tate was paid $3,200 a year, equivalent to approximately $45,000 today, a salary sufficient to make the risk of transfer worth his while.

Over time, Sumi and the others settled into a familiar pattern. School began at 8:00 a.m., Monday through Friday and Saturday mornings. The Federal School required two years of math for graduation. As ninth-graders, Sumi and the others studied algebra. Later, Sumi took plane geometry. Basic science was taught, but physics and chemistry were not offered. As superintendent, O’Rourke had decided that a fully equipped chemistry laboratory in an internment camp was too great a security risk. He didn’t want to take the chance of malcontents blowing up the lab. That first year, Tate offered home economics for girls and agricultural training for boys, but few signed up. When Tate learned that the issei Japanese fathers suspected he was attempting to make domestic laborers out of their daughters and farm laborers out of their sons, the vocational classes were canceled. This decision was another example of caution against inciting complaints from Japanese fathers that might result in reprisals against Americans held in Japan.

Unlike in the German section, where many of the fathers were laborers and craftsmen, the fathers in the Japanese section were, as Tate described it, “the cream of the crop”—Buddhist priests, wealthy businessmen, accomplished farmers, and well-educated teachers. The majority of their children were straight-A students. Sumi struggled to keep up with the others; she was happy with Bs.

The parents of the Japanese American students pushed them to study, to follow the rules of the school, and to show respect for the
American teachers. Like Sumi, most strived to be accepted as Americans and to be normal.
“Yet the attitude of most of the people in town was that all Japanese were damn Japs,” recalled Tate in his oral history. “And they ought to all be hung.” The aftermath of Pearl Harbor still hung thick in the air.

Some Japanese American students approached their internment with a kind of gallows humor. For instance, Tai Uyeshima, who was from Los Angeles, like Sumi, and who played football for Tate at the camp high school, often gathered his buddies in the evening for “razzle-dazzle” football drills, more commonly known as “out of sight” plays. When they were tired from exercise, Tai and the other players serenaded the guards in their towers along the barbed-wire fencing. Night after night, they crooned many choruses of one of the top tunes on the hit parade, “Don’t Fence Me In.” That song became the most popular tune in camp.

Sumi spoke and heard from her classmates American slang, the words of marginalized Japanese Americans striving to be more American than Japanese.
The September 1943 issue of
Jiho
, the English-language version of the school newspaper, printed expressions commonly heard in school. Sid Okazaki’s favorite expression was “No! It can’t be!” Rose Taniguchi’s signature was “Watcha know.” Hollywood Sawamura greeted everyone with “Check, check.” And then there was “Lover” Yasuda, whose signature phrase was “Hello, sweetheart.”

Every day at 4:00 p.m., Sumi left the Federal High School and studied Japanese at the Japanese School, where the atmosphere was old-world Japan. Her instructor—
sensei
in Japanese—was the Reverend Kenko Yamashita, a Buddhist priest from Hawaii. The short walk between the two schools represented the mammoth divide between two worlds. The full-time students enrolled at the Japanese School were mostly from Hawaii, Peru, or other Latin American countries. The structure of the Japanese School was rigid; no small talk about sweethearts or American movies was allowed. After morning calisthenics, students were required to stand at attention alongside
their desks. When the teacher entered the room, they bowed deeply. All of the full-time students took
sushin
, a class on ethics that emphasized respect for elders, especially fathers and teachers.