THE LAST WORD
Mueller, Mamie
THE LAST WORD Mamie Mueller Interned Iwas twelve years old, proudly wearing my first pair of nylon stockings, riding down in a hotel elevator to meet my parents for dinner, when I overheard two...
...But closer to the truth, I suspect, is that I wept for relief that my own history had been confirmed at last...
...I had never before heard anyone outside my family mention the camps...
...They were finely dressed, the men in midnight-blue suits, the women in black silk with pearls...
...The latrines were outside and were communal...
...After Pearl Harbor, my father had declared himself a conscientious objector and had volunteered to work in the camps...
...Manzanar, the first of ten such concentration camps, was bounded by barbed wire and guard towers, confining 10,000 persons, the majority being American citizens...
...I opened the book to photographs of Tule Lake—windswept black expanses, barbed-wire fences, watchtowers...
...Because of that conviction, he was rejected as a Japanese sympathizer...
...In the distance, beyond the fences, was a mountain with distinctive jagged peaks...
...Among many of the Nisei and Issei, the shame was too great to allow for even that release of pain...
...As I was growing up, whenever friends or teachers asked me where I was born, I simply said, "In California...
...Their withheld pain was too excruciating to witness...
...The floors were of raw wood that babies couldn't be put down on because their bottoms would be filled with splinters...
...My father worked there...
...They broke their silence only when their children and grandchildren, the Sansei—those born, as I was, in the camps or afterwards—began to ask questions...
...When the elevator doors opened at the lobby level, the couples turned and walked out without a word...
...Eventually, I suppose, there will be many analyses of the harm inflicted on people who were incarcerated in this country primarily because of their race...
...But after two years' work organizing co-op stores at Tule Lake, he withdrew his request for CO...
...Nothing more...
...I give you his words: "The room was fifteen by thirty feet...
...The only book available was Michi Weglyn's Year of Infamy, which had just been published in 1976...
...I was too humiliated for that...
...The smiles disappeared...
...I was born in Tule Lake Center...
...When I went to the New York Public Library to look up Japanese-American Relocation Camps, I found only four entries in the entire catalog—a novel by Jerome Charyn and three nonfiction works...
...I give myself that much...
...In my thirties, when I began writing fiction, I thought of setting some stories in the camps...
...I came to feel that if I talked about Marnie Mueller, a poet, short-story writer, and novelist in New York City, is working on a series of poems about life in the Tule Lake camp...
...His aim, he said, was "to do something to make an intolerable situation tolerable...
...Excuse me," I said, my heart beating wildly...
...There was a potbellied coal stove in the middle, and four to six cots with rolled mattresses on top...
...I learned not to enter the room with the family...
...What I have in common with the interned Japanese-Americans is our silence in the face of the nation's silence, though at least the camps were spoken of inside my home...
...My father told me of their expressions of disbelief when the internees saw the barbed wire, the towers, the barren land...
...They smiled at me...
...I lingered behind...
...I rarely mentioned Tule Lake, and when I did no one knew what I was talking about...
...It was years before I came to understand why they hadn't welcomed the news about my infancy at Tule Lake: I am Caucasian, and that meant my father had been there to guard them, perhaps with a machine gun...
...9066, issued on February 19, 1942...
...He walked them through processing—being fingerprinted, having mug shots taken—and then he led them across the wide expanse of black sand to the tar-papered barracks that were to be their new homes...
...That was twelve years ago, but I still feel confused about my identity in relation to the camps...
...When he was eventually interviewed for induction into the armed forces, he said a grievous injustice had been done to the interned Japanese-Americans...
...The walls didn't reach the ceiling, and even in those first days cries could be heard from the family next door...
...But I knew only my mother's accounts of me as a baby at Tule Lake, and my parents were now living in South America, too far away for me to question them in detail...
...Sitting at the long table in the library's main room, I began to weep—perhaps for the tragedy of the camps and the suffering people had experienced...
...When I finally went to visit him in South America, he told me his initial assignment at the camp had been to meet the trains and buses that brought in the internees, and to help the old people, small children, and mothers with babies...
...The same mountain beyond the same fences appeared in my baby pictures...
...Do I feel more like one of the jailed or one of the jailers...
...status...
...The captions said Tule Lake had been a high-security segregation center...
...the camp, I'd be telling a tale about a place that existed only in my imagination...
...The worst, he said, was to see the Issei women's faces when he escorted each of them into the single room where she and her family would live indefinitely...
...I didn't tell my mother what I had overheard, or that I had told these people about living in the camp...
...the virulent racism he perceived among many camp administrators and guards persuaded him that there were certain circumstances in which he would take up arms...
...Each adult carried two suitcases—all the belongings they were allowed to bring...
...I was the first Caucasian born in the Tule Lake Japanese Relocation Center...
...THE LAST WORD Mamie Mueller Interned Iwas twelve years old, proudly wearing my first pair of nylon stockings, riding down in a hotel elevator to meet my parents for dinner, when I overheard two Japanese-American couples talking about the internment camps...
...The cover read, "In the early part of World War II, 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were interned in relocation centers by Executive Order No...
...For now, my father's description of his first days at Tule Lake should suffice...
...In sixteen years of formal schooling, I never saw in a book or heard in a classroom any reference to Tule Lake or the other ten camps to which Japanese-Americans were consigned...
Vol. 52 • June 1988 • No. 6
