Garden of Stones. Sophie Littlefield

Lucy pleaded. She was afraid that she couldn’t control herself much longer, that she might urinate right here outside for everyone to see.

      “All right.” Miyako’s voice was thin and worried. They went inside, Miyako never letting go of her hand.

      Inside, the stench was overwhelming, and Lucy’s stomach roiled. On the floor, dark runnels of murky liquid and sewage flowed freely from the toilets, all but one of which had overflowed. The line to use the remaining toilet was a dozen women deep, all of them trying to avoid the waste that seeped across the floor and through the cracks. They stood with their backs to the last working toilet, giving the only privacy they could.

      Sitting on the toilet, an elderly woman was crying, tears running down her cheeks while she tried to shield her face. Her shame was palpable, her misery absolute. Next to Lucy, Miyako gasped.

      Lucy would never forget what her mother did next. Miyako, who couldn’t bring herself to speak to a stranger, who walked past the greeters at church without a word, who never attended a tea or a card game or a club meeting, took the folded cloth and handed Lucy the toiletry box. She walked across the foul-smelling room, ignoring the row of curious strangers, and handed the cloth to the old woman, not meeting her eyes, unable to avoid stepping in the waste. The woman murmured a few words and took the cloth, unfolding it and draping it over her head, obscuring her face completely.

      After that, Lucy and her mother waited their turn with the others. No one spoke; everyone bore the shame of the lack of privacy in silence. When it was their turn, Miyako allowed Lucy to go first. Her relief was immense. Afterward, she washed her hands and waited with her back to her mother. She had never seen Miyako unclothed—even last night her mother had waited until Lucy was in bed to undress. It was dawning on Lucy that all their privacy and modesty was to be taken from them in this place, but she was determined to give her mother all the dignity she could.

      * * *

      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. Instead of walls, raw wood dividers that didn’t reach the ceiling. Curtains instead of doors. Tar paper, 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 searchlights projected at night, crisscrossing the bare dirt streets in dizzying patterns.