Introduction

In the dark days of war, a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice

Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up—along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans—and taken to the Manzanar prison camp.

Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp. Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever…and spur her to sins of her own.

Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield weaves a powerful tale of stolen innocence and survival that echoes through generations, reverberating between mothers and daughters. It is a moving chronicle of injustice, triumph and the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of love.

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Excerpt

The wave of evacuees that swept Lucy and her mother into Manzanar was among the first, but within days, the earliest to arrive felt as though they had been there forever. Each day brought busloads of dazed families. Lucy learned to read in their faces the cycle of emotions as they came to understand what their new life entailed. Astonishment, dismay, horror, desperation… and slowly, slowly, the deadening of the features that signaled acceptance.

Six families to a barrack, each in a room that measured twenty by twelve feet. Surplus cots and scratchy blankets from the first war. Raw wood dividers that didn’t reach the ceiling instead of walls. Curtains instead of doors. Tarpaper, unfinished wood, gaps and cracks in walls, floors, roofs. Freezing desert nights, impossible blowing sandstorms. Plumbers were recruited from within the ranks of the interned to work on the latrines, but problems persisted, and soon there was a grapevine among the women about which blocks’ latrines were working.

There were toilet paper shortages. Food shortages. Staff shortages. Still, as the days wore on, bits of scrap started turning up from the construction going on all over the camp. Boards were turned into shelves. Packing crates were turned into dressers and tables and even chairs; curtains were fashioned from bedsheets; men whittled and women knitted, anything to pass the time.

In Manzanar, words took on new meanings. Lucy learned to use the word “doorway” when what she was describing was the curtain that separated each family’s room from the hallway that ran the length of the drafty barrack building. In short order they developed the habit of stamping on the floor to announce a visit, since there was no door to knock on, but they still called it “knocking.” Even “building” did not mean what it did back on Clement Street. At first the evacuees thought the barracks were unfinished, with their tar-paper walls and unpainted window casings and plywood floors, but it turned out that these humble edifices were what the government meant for the internees to live in for as long as the war raged on.

The dirt avenues filled with people, the crowds extending all the way to the razor-wire-topped fence that encircled them. Already Lucy had lost her way to her barrack several times, finally learning to orient herself by the mountain in the distance and the guard towers, entirely too close, in which soldiers peered down at them all day long, and from which spotlights projected at night, crisscrossing the bare dirt streets in dizzying patterns.

Slowly, people began to absorb the fact that Manzanar was their home for the foreseeable future. Signs of life began to appear: bright garments hanging from clotheslines, children’s toys left on stoops, and all kinds of makeshift innovations meant to turn the tiny cells into homes. Women sewed curtains from sheets and adorned walls with pictures torn from magazines. Men scavenged bits of cast-off trash to create everything from decorative fences to wooden doormats to aid in the never-ending struggle to keep the dust out.

After two weeks, Lucy’s paper name tag still hung from a nail above her cot. She saw the way her mother looked at it, in the afternoons when they waited for dinner. Miyako’s mouth got small, her lipstick lips disappearing in a trick where she rolled them inside, and her eyebrows went up until they met the faint line in her forehead.

Lucy had learned to read her mother’s thoughts through her facial expressions. Manzanar seemed to have turned Miyako even further inward, until she barely spoke at all, spending her time sitting on the edge of her cot, her hands resting lightly on the embroidered coverlet she had brought from home.

Miyako asked Lucy why she kept the tag, and Lucy said she liked seeing their name, TAKEDA, written out in big black letters on the strip of cardboard.

After her father’s business was sold, the sign that read TAKEDA PACKING in bold black letters was removed from the building by the new owner. The next time Lucy and her mother passed the building, in a busy industrial area of the city several miles from their house, Lucy cried when she saw that it was missing. Now she wondered if her mother believed she kept the tag because it reminded her of him, but the truth was that, as the weeks and months passed, Lucy’s memory of him was becoming like a drawing, all mustache and spectacles.

Anyway, this was not why she kept the tag. The real reason was much simpler.

Before they came to Manzanar, Miyako often reminded Lucy that other children had far less than she did. That she should not talk about her Madame Alexander doll with her patent-leather shoes, or her View-Master or her paints and easel or the jewelry box on the tall dresser in her room, because the other children at her school did not have as many nice things and it would make them feel sad if she talked about them.

But here, in Manzanar, they had only the things they carried with them. Lucy had her paint box. She had The Mystery at Lilac Inn, because her mother had made her choose only one of her Nancy Drew mysteries and it was her favorite. On Lucy’s bed was the spread that her mother had embroidered with daisies. She had a box of colorful hair ribbons. Four things that belonged to Lucy alone.

The tag made five.

Copyright © 2013 by Sophie Littlefield

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1) After Pearl Harbor, many Americans worried that citizens of Japanese descent, especially those living on the West coast, might be acting as spies and traitors. Are such fears understandable? Can you think of similar events in recent history? How can we avoid reacting as we have in the past, with suspicion and intolerance?

2) The Takeda family was wealthier than many who were interned. Do you think that made the transition to camp life harder or easier? In what ways?

3) There are several starkly different portrayals of motherhood in the novel. In what ways, if any, could each of these characters be considered good mothers?

4) Why do you think Lucy continues to keep a few secrets, even after telling Patty nearly everything about her past?

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»	Author Sophie Littlefield's web site
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