Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

Beloved Enemies

(Rohwer Internment Camp, Arkansas, 1942-45)

Child, you don’t know what you are asking!
To tell about the camps? Why would I smudge your smile
with my stories, sully your home here in Virginia
with the great oak shouldering your swing that lifts you up,
up, and down to earth again. Your pony, Wind, grazing
in the sun-dappled field of bluestem and butterflies.
You are my happiness!

Should I relive that prison of sorrow and privation,
I who am old with a foot already in heaven?
But write this on your heart: we were strong and patient.
We were gaman, facing our suffering with dignity.
And you will be gaman too, little bird, when someday
you fly into a storm.

You beg and beg! Your dark eyes ask to understand,
and I think maybe you are older than your small years.
So, I will tell you a thing or two.

Once I lived in a world like yours, but our trees dripped lemons
not acorns, and the air was cool with spray from the sea
where your Uncle Haruto and I swam and were children at play
under the sun’s watchful eye. So many pretty shells we gathered!
We always wondered what creatures had lived inside.

When the Order came, they made Papa sell his orange groves, his store,
our house on Adalaide Street, and all for a song. That means for cheap!
“Get up! Hurry, no time to explain,” he said, shaking us awake.
Don’t cry!” he commanded. “Get only what fits in your suitcase.”
“Go without Mei Mei? No, Papa!” But he opened the door
and out my cat fled into the night, and with it, our lives:
We would not come again.

And where, you ask, did we go? Thousands of us, to a race track!
A horse stall for a house that stank of manure! A cot apiece in each little box.
“Kimi has fever!” Mother said to Papa, her eyebrows worried, her hand cool
on my forehead. (I liked when she called me Kimi, not Helen, my school name.)
The fever raged, forced open the gate of an underworld. I saw the ocean
rising like a tower, Mei Mei crying for food, a rifle pointing at Papa.

On a day when the California sky spread sunshine like honey,
we were rounded up by the hundreds and put on trains—infants
and elders, youngsters afoot, parents clutching what they could.
Oh, the tears that mingled with ours in the stuffed car, tears
silently shed by neighbors and strangers, but none by the aunties
shrunken with years, their faces frozen as death. In that darkness
Mother shone the warmth of her smile. “See, I brought a book
to read you,” and as if pulling a rabbit from a hat, she opened
a surprise sack with a story and lollipops for the journey.
Day and night the train raced and screamed, thrusting us toward
a great unknown. “Will it be a pretty place?” I asked Papa.

Mother stepped first off the train that gray, muggy morning,
her shoulders squared proudly, suitcase in hand, and we followed—
Papa, Haruto, and I, the heat bearing down like a heavy cloak.
A brisk blonde soldier waved us to our barrack, Block 9, Unit 3.
“Welcome to Rohwer, Arkansas. You’re lucky. Only four of you.
We got families of six, seven, eight fitting into these swank hotel rooms.”
Papa’s face burned from an inner fire but he said nothing.
Our new home was no more than a prison cell, all of twenty square feet.
The whole camp was a prison dressed in fancy words like “Relocation Center,”
everything bound by barbed wire and guarded with guns.

“Mother, I have to pee,” I said,
but our room had no toilet or running water.
Those were outside, shared by all the beloved enemies among us.

That night Mother unscrewed the single lightbulb in our room
and in the dark, unfolded from her suitcase the red kimono
of family weddings, and slipped into its silk her funeral song.

“I have no more words for you now, little bird, Katori.”

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is the Arkansas Poet Laureate and the author of five poetry collections, including Flying Yellow, a semifinalist in the North American Book Award, and two books of lyrical prose. She has recent poems in Bracken, Dappled Things, Slant, and Bellevue Literary Review. She teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, and is an adjunct instructor of English at John Brown University.