This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

“Yeah, took him all the way to Independence.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago.”

Frank swings his legs onto the floor, shoves his feet into boots. “They can’t just throw him into prison for nothing.”

“They’re saying he was involved in a gang assault earlier tonight.”

Frank shakes his head in angry disbelief. “Like hell he was. There’s no way he’d get himself arrested. Not when he was just about to prove Campbell stole food rations.”

“Well, they did, on trumped-up charges.”

Frank throws on his jacket. “He has paperwork to prove everything. He’s about to blow the whole thing wide open.”

“Daisuke, where’re you going?” Mother’s frail voice is irr

elevant in the dark.

“Go back to sleep, Mother.” He slips a scarf around his neck. “And don’t come out. Things are going to get dicey.”

“Daisuke!”

They tromp across the floor, fling the door wide open. A sharp gust of cold wind whistles in as they slip out into the night.

* * *

News travels fast in Manzanar. The lines outside mess halls, latrines, showers become grapevines through which rumors spread like wildfire. By early morning, reports of Ueno’s arrest have reached everyone.

There is anger. Ueno is popular: the outspoken man who made rice snacks for children; who labored under the hot July sun to build a rock pond for others; who is fighting for their babies, standing up to the corrupt camp administration. Finger-pointing ensues. Not only at Ned Campbell and Joseph Winchester. But also at the internees in bed with the camp administration. They are accused of being sellouts, stool pigeons, and, most derogatory of all, inus (dogs): informers for the camp administration who out of a misguided patriotism dished dirt on other internees for their perceived loyalty to Japan. It doesn’t help these informants’ cause that their barrack apartments are often decorated with the best furniture, and that they almost always seem to be in possession of jars of sugar and jugs of milk.

The camp administration can douse this growing fire. They can come forward with explanations. They can apologize. They can come clean about the stolen rations, they can fire Campbell. They can release Ueno.

Instead they double down.

A convoy of buses of MPs arrives in the late morning. Each bus is a droplet of kerosene flicked into the fire, packed with newly recruited MPs, some only a little older than Alex. They are bushy-tailed and eager to protect the homeland.

For many it’s their first time seeing a Nisei or an Issei, and they don’t know the difference between the two, they’re all only Nips and Japs to them. They see the teeming masses and project onto their faces every stereotype they know: slant-eyed, bucktoothed, bandy-legged fifth columnists all too eager to send TNT dynamite into the heartland. Most of these MPs have been rejected from what they really want to do: fight Nazis and Japs overseas. But now the war has come to them. They lick their chops. This is their shot for glory, their chance to put notches on their belt, to have a barroom story to tell.

Hours later, Alex sees another two buses pull in. A crowd has gathered to watch this arrival, and Alex sees the anger on the internees’ tense faces. A tipping point is about to be reached. Everything is coming to a head quickly. When the MPs move into the camp, the first inkling that something awful might happen—perhaps even tragic—flits into his head.

A meeting is called by the de facto leaders for 1 P.M. in a mess hall in Block 22. Alex hurries over. Instead of the expected few dozen, hundreds show up. The meeting is moved outdoors to the firebreak.

A microphone and loudspeakers are quickly cobbled together into a public address system. A large oil tank serves as a makeshift stage. Five leaders take turns venting their outrage. “Every time Ned Campbell speaks he thinks he talks to a slave!” yells one of them, a Hawaiian-born First World War veteran who’d fought for the U.S. army in France.

The youngest of the group takes the mike. “Enough of this crap,” the man cries out. The loudspeakers squeal with feedback. “We’ve lost everything! And now to rub salt into the wound, they’re taking our food for their own profit. We’re being jerked around while our children go sick, our parents topple over, and our babies die.”

The crowd roars with approval and anger. Alex, standing in their very midst, feels their collective fury thrum through his bones. He pushes his way through the crowd to the very front.

“They think we’re going to take this lying down. They think we’re powerless. They think they can get away with anything. Because who’s watching them? The locals in Lone Pine and Independence? They hate our guts, too! But enough, I say! Enough! This is America gone wrong! And we need to call them out on it!”

The applause is thundering. The crowd is electrified. At last someone is giving voice to pent-up emotions that have festered within, that have rendered them powerless and full of self-hatred.

The crowd swells. The crowd moves. Sensing a new muscularity in its mass, it heads down the road toward the camp entrance. Alex walks with them near the front, his voice joining theirs, his arm raised in solidarity with the crowd.

At the gate, the MPs are waiting for them, lined up in formation and reinforced by troops from a local military base. Mounted machine guns are revved and ready. Director Ralph Merritt scurries over. He is newly appointed—the fourth director in only nine months—and nobody ever told him that the Japs could be so unruly. They’re supposed to be compliant and polite, these people who are told what to do and unquestioningly do it. So what is this? What is this uproar?

“Stay in formation,” he says to the armed MPs. “This will all be over soon.”

The crowd of thousands draws nearer.

32

DECEMBER 6, 1942, EVENING

A tense standoff ensues. Minutes pass, the two groups glaring at one another. Ralph Merritt, escorted by two MPs and second-in-command Campbell, steps forward. From the other side, a small contingent of internee representatives steps forward. They meet Merritt’s group in the middle.

The conversation between the two groups is long. There is back and forth. Demands made, demands refused, insults exchanged, tempers almost lost. The crowd grows, becomes more restless. Merritt finally capitulates: Harry Ueno will be released from Inyo County Jail six miles away and brought back to a Manzanar camp jail that afternoon.

Except it is not enough.

Later in the evening, the crowd—which had mostly dispersed after Merritt’s promise of returning Ueno to Manzanar—regroups. Only it is even larger now. Four thousand strong. Virtually every able-bodied young man. Even after they are told that Ueno is indeed back in a Manzanar camp jail, it is not enough.

As long as Ueno is still behind bars, it will never be enough.

Alex feels the raw visceral energy of the crowd more than ever. He hears their grumbles, their chants, the slogans they shout in unison and the pains they share quietly with the people around.

They speak of the wrongness of this imprisonment. How they feel this wrongness every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every month. They feel it every time the wind blows and throws foreign grit and alien dust into their eyelids. They feel it every time the searchlights blind them. They feel it every time they piss and crap in the filthy latrine in full view of strangers and, worse yet, of family, their parents, their children. Their dignity stripped, their self-respect wiped away. They feel it every time they see barbed-wire fences, which is all the time, which is in every direction they look. They feel it every time they line up in the freezing winter or under the baking sun, which is all the time, only to line up again, and again, and again, and again. They feel it every time another uncle commits suicide. They feel it every time they hear someone sobbing in the middle of the night. They feel it in every damned breath they take: the utter wrongness of being confined somewhere they shouldn’t be, of living a cheap cardboard imitation of life.

For the first time in almost a year, the anger is not self-directed. For the first time it propels and energizes. It has a target now.

They move toward the jail. They will free Ueno. And as they walk, they walk with focus. But not with weapons. Not with violence. No hammers or hatchets or knives are carried despite what an erroneous self-serving WRA report will later claim. They chant. They shout. They even sing. But no windows are broken. No staff vehicles are smashed. No camp stores or mess halls are looted.

Yet the tension is palpable. Again Alex searches for Frank. But he’s nowhere to be seen in this massive crowd. He’s not at the front or the back, or anywhere in the middle as far as Alex can see. It is a large, shifting crowd, four thousand strong, and Frank could be anywhere.

The crowd arrives at the police station. They meet

very little resistance. Only a single MP in the main sentry post cowers with fear. He fires his pistol into the air three times, not so much a warning shot as a call for reinforcements. The crowd ignores the baby-faced MP. They move into the police station.

Inside, there’s even less resistance. The few Internal Security officers practically hand over the keys to Ueno’s cell. It doesn’t take a math genius to know they’re seriously outnumbered. In mere moments, Ueno is freed from his cell. Easy. Too easy. Almost anticlimactic.

But Ueno refuses to leave. “This ain’t right,” he says. “If I’m to be free, it’s because Ralph Merritt sets me free.” Ueno walks back into the cell, waits there for Merritt to arrive. His rescuers are bewildered; they look at each other, uncertain what to do next. The “rescue” has turned out to be a dud, truth be told. They’re ready to walk out, tell the crowd to disperse. It’s over.

But then, Director Merritt.

At that very moment he’s watching the scene from afar, behind the slightly parted curtains of his staff home. He’s petrified. He picks up the phone and orders 135 MPs to head to the jail immediately. He orders martial law to be declared. He pauses, pressing the phone against his whitened ear. And then he calls in the troops, too. The boys with the big guns.

The MPs and troops haul ass for the main jail, eager for action. Earlier that afternoon, when Director Merritt capitulated to the internees’ demands, they’d thought that was weak. That wasn’t strong leadership. Show some backbone for God’s sake, a few had muttered while cooped up in a barrack all afternoon. Show them Japs who’s boss. Put them in their place. Remind them who they’re up against, the goddam U.S. of A.

Now the MPs have energy to burn. They sprint into position, their boots thudding the ground. Their hearts pounding, their adrenaline racing. Booyah.

But the jailhouse is a disappointment. The internees—the dozen or so inside the jailhouse—are a disappointment. They don’t put up a fight. They leave when ordered. And Ueno, he just sits in the cell. Inexplicable. His cell door unlocked and wide open when they burst in, he could’ve walked away.