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Untitled
by Tory Amorello
A few months after September eleventh, I went to New York City. It's not far from home for me, and I wanted to see it firsthand. I wanted to hear the pain I was certain would resound in those city streets, float from the high rise apartments and waft up at me from sidewalks. I took the subway to midtown and walked to the site where the twin towers formerly stood. There were temporary fences that prevented me from seeing the site itself, while just beyond I could hear the churn of engines and the mutter and clatter of progress as workers sifted and sorted and separated the pieces of building from the pieces of airplane from the pieces of someone you and I loved. Someone has taken a can of spray paint and emblazoned the words that so many have chanted to gather strength in the past months; We Shall Not Forget - 9/11/01. Our Heroes. God Bless America. There are several American flags stapled to the fence and all along the buildings as I walked back toward the train. On the way, I passed a small church surrounded by a wrought iron fence about four feet tall. Small paper cranes cascaded from the fences, descending in chains and waves to the ground. All shades and patterns, the cranes covered almost all of the decorative fence, linking iron and paper, color and sky. Around one of the gates, there was a letter with English type on one half and Japanese characters on the other. Someone had laminated it, but the ink still bled through, in Rorschach-type blobs and smears. The letter informs me that the cranes have been carefully crafted by Japanese schoolchildren as a show of solidarity and support for New Yorkers in the days and months following the World Trade Center Attacks. Some of the bleeding ink looks like teardrops.
"God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with the light from above."
After the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, mandating that all Japanese and Japanese-American residents of the Pacific coast states be forcibly relocated to internment camps around the West. Manzanar War Relocation Camp in the Owens Valley, California was the first and largest of these camps.
Eleven thousand people were imprisoned at Manzanar between the years of 1942 and 1945. One hundred and fifty Japanese-Americans died while interned in Manzanar War Relocation Center during World War II. Two were killed in a riot, and the rest died of natural causes. Most internees chose to be cremated, but fifteen were buried in the Manzanar Cemetery. After the war ended, all but six burials were removed. All but one of those remaining six are buried in anonymous graves, without inscription or engraving. The one mound that has a marker with symbols is written only in Japanese characters; there are no English words to be carried with him after his death. I don't even know if it's a him. Two graves down, there is a burial mound with a wooden post standing sentinel at its head. In the wood of the post, someone has stuck a tiny American flag pin. The cruelest irony.
"She's a grand old flag, she's a high flying flag and forever in peace may she wave. She's the emblem of the land I love."
The Manzanar Cemetery is ringed by a uniformly constructed wooden fence, with shiny new silver screws holding the crossbeams together. The fence is draped with small paper crane chains, strung together on red and yellow yarn and twine.
Last weekend, we drove down into Lone Pine, California for what promised to be an evening of authentic western entertainment; David John and the Comstock Cowboys, a real-live-in-the-flesh country western band was playing at the Lone Pine Film Festival. We watched, we laughed, we learned the ten-step and we danced among the locals. I wore a cowboy hat and Carhartts and pretended the leather in my Birkenstock clogs was no different than the leather in Justin boots and I danced and I laughed until I got a cramp in my side and there were tears in my eyes. At the end of the concert, David John silenced the Comstock Cowboys and brought out the American flag. As he saluted the flag, I glanced around nervously. As the Comstock Cowboys began to sound the first notes of the national anthem, I dutifully removed my cowboy hat, but stood uncertain, suddenly all-too aware that Carhartts and a hat would never be enough for me to blend in, and equally uncertain why I needed a costume in my own country.
"Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave, o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave"
While at Manzanar, we watch a twenty-two minute video about the camp. Images of beautiful, smiling Japanese children dressed in Native American costumes circling a miniature teepee, or proudly carrying a Betsy Ross style American flag and eighteenth century dresses and powdered wigs flash on the screen, larger than life. I look over and see tears on Debbie's face and there is Laura on her other side, blinking back the moistness around her lashes. The movie closes with a former prisoner saying, fifty years removed, "I still think this is the best country in the world, hands down. It's just up to everybody to see that it stays that way" I wipe at my own watery eyes with the back of my clenched fist.
"And to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible with liberty and justice for all."
Lately, my father has been driving a bright red pickup. In the right rear window, there is a small American flag sticker. Last time I was at home, I found a matching sticker on the rear window of my car. I peeled it off carefully one day while he was at work, trying hard not to tear it, feeling that it was somehow important that when I threw it in the trash, it still needed to be whole.
In the children's room at the Manzanar Interpretive Center, there is a question posted on the wall. "Who were these people like?" Below the question, there is a mirror. I have to stoop to see in the child size mirror, but I look at my own reflection for a long time.
"This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me"
Two thirds of the internees at Manzanar were American citizens. Not one was ever convicted of espionage, sabotage or treason.
"And crown their good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea"
In elementary school, one fifth grader each day was selected to read the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker for the whole school. I still remember standing in the office, waiting for Ms. Bock to hand me the microphone, looking at the copy of the Pledge on the counter in front of the office window, stained with coffee and aged, fraying around the edges of the thick paper. That year was the last time I was ever required to swear allegiance to the stars and stripes.
"I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all"
One mile long by one mile wide, Manzanar enclosed ten thousand people. We can't imagine what that must have looked like as we drive around the wide open sagebrush desert today. There was a newspaper (the Manzanar Free Press, a great irony in itself) and a high school (Manzanar High), a squadron of volunteer fire fighters, a town hall, several community gardens, a hospital, one church, three temples and an orphanage.
Judy Blunt is a third generation cattle rancher in northeastern Montana. She was born, raised, married and "bore the fourth generation of a cattle dynasty" in a rural township thousands of miles wider and longer than Manzanar, with not even a tenth of the population and none of the amenities I just listed. Even without a town hall, a high school, a community garden, a hospital or a newspaper, her identity has been inseparable from the land she calls home for most of her life. What makes a homeland?
The Manzanar High School yearbook is on display in the Interpretive Center. The yearbook is titled "Our Town". Thumbing through the pages, I am struck by the absence of what I expect. It is an American high school, any American high school. There is cheerleading and baton twirling, Honor Society and baseball teams, theater productions and class officers. Yearbook editors thank their staff, their teachers and peers. The only evidence that this is not exactly Everytown, America are the photographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, professionals granted government permission to document the sights from behind the barbed wire that surrounds Manzanar. What part of this brings us to tears? Is it the forced relocation, the imprisonment, the primitive housing situation or the loss of liberty - or is it simply imagining the resilience that runs beneath the skin of these ordinary American citizens.
People rising together to ensure the safety and security of their own no matter the circumstances. Americans, independent to a fault, strong and resilient, rising up together to tackle any threat to their community. Together we can get through anything. This too shall pass.
"May the injustices and humiliation suffered here as a result of hysteria, racism and economic exploitation never emerge again."
We shall not forget. We will never forget.