Inside Manzanar

Chapter 2 of THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY, a multicultural tale of motherhood, metaphysics (maybe), and what it means to love

Art by Julia Ogden

Cari amici,

On to chapter 2! If you liked chapter 1, I hope you’ll keep reading. If you missed it, you can find it here.

Thanks again to Regal House Publishing for allowing me to excerpt The Wild Impossibility.

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THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY

Chapter 2

June 16, 1945

Maddalena squeezed Regina’s hand as they walked past the Manzanar guardhouse. The day was blistering, hotter than usual for spring, but she didn’t care about the sweat and stink. She was here, finally, in this mysterious place she’d seen only from the back of her father’s car on the road to Independence, or from the back of her horse, riding on Foothill Road. From either direction Manzanar looked the same—flat, repetitive rows of colorless, dismal-looking buildings and dry streets, giving off an air of despair she could smell from a distance.

The camp had been off limits since the day construction began more than three years ago. Her mother’s orders. It was dangerous, Mama said; who knew what the enemy might do? Maddalena had thought about arguing—she’d heard that the camp was going to be home to families, and how dangerous could grandmothers and children be?—but it would have been pointless. Once Mama made up her mind, that was that.

Maddalena had kept her word and ventured no farther east than Foothill Road, but that didn’t stop her from wondering what went on in the camp, what those people, supposedly so different from anyone else in Owens Valley, were like. So when Mrs. Henderson poked her head into Regina’s room, where the girls were sitting on the bed playing Hearts that blistering day, and said she was going to an art show at the Manzanar community center and did the girls want to join her, Maddalena jumped up.

“Yes! I mean no,” she said. “I can’t. My mother won’t let me anywhere near Manzanar. She thinks it’s dangerous. She’s afraid of the Japanese.”

“She’s entitled to her opinion, dear, but I think they’re lovely folk.”

“You’ve been there before?”

This was astonishing. Not only was Mrs. Henderson, who wrote poetry and painted with oils, a mellow, indulgent mother—the opposite of fearful, overprotective Mama—she was daring! Brave! Or, if she was wrong about the Japanese and Mama was right, perhaps foolish.

“I go several times a year,” Mrs. Henderson said. “Their gardens and art shows put the rest of the county to shame. But we must keep peace with your mother. Oh, don’t look so down in the dumps. You’re going, and we’ll make it our little secret.”

Maddalena bounded out of the bedroom and down the stairs before Mrs. Henderson could change her mind.

“Wait up!” Regina called.

In the front hall, Mrs. Henderson tied back her hair and put on a pair of dark glasses. Then she summoned the girls outside and settled authoritatively into the driver’s seat of her husband’s dark-green Chevrolet pickup. Shaking off her surprise, Maddalena climbed into the truck bed after Regina. It seemed there was nothing Mrs. Henderson couldn’t do.

As they bumped along the desert road, Maddalena gripped the edge of the truck bed, stealing glances at the camp through spumes of dust. Such an adventure, made all the more delicious by being forbidden. Little by little Manzanar filled the horizon, creating a rush of anticipation so thrilling that Maddalena wished the trip would take longer.

Once through the gate, Mrs. Henderson parked with a jerk of the brake and Regina leaped out. Maddalena stood in the truck bed trying to absorb everything at once.

Manzanar buzzed with activity. Men and women who had stopped to chat knotted the streets, while others breezed along, all business. Boys in short pants raced by on important missions, laughing and shouting and tussling with their friends, while teenage girls sauntered in groups or sat on barracks steps, heads together, giggling and gossiping like girls did everywhere. The breeze carried evidence of a baseball game—the distant crack-smack of hide against wood, the hoarse cry of a referee, a smoketrail of cheers. Manzanar seemed vibrant, as full of main street activity as any town in Owens Valley—perfectly normal, Maddalena thought with a shiver, if you ignored the guard towers. Eight of them, where men with guns surveyed the camp.

The girls followed Mrs. Henderson to the auditorium, a cavernous building with a stage at one end and an open space dotted with easels and bulletin boards. The only breath of air came from people moving about; the building sucked in the heat and held onto it, suffocating itself. After twenty minutes of studying watercolor paintings and ink drawings of mountains and flowers, Maddalena thought she’d melt.

“Let’s go outside,” she said to Regina. The paintings were pretty, but it was the camp itself that Maddalena wanted to see. After all, she might never get another chance.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Tell your mother we’ll meet her back here in a little while.” Outside, the breeze carried whirls of dust and little relief.

“It’s so hot,” Regina said, fanning herself with a flyer from the art show.

“Hotter than Hades.”

“Maddalena Moretti, you watch your tongue! That’s almost swearing.”

“Hotter than hell,” Maddalena said, and laughed when Regina shrieked. “Let’s follow those girls.” She pointed to a trio heading north.

They walked past row after dismal row of meanspirited matchstick construction, squat buildings that looked as if a windstorm would send them skyward. No one had designed them, as far as Maddalena could tell; they were too ugly, too cruel, to have been built with anything but disregard and haste. The only beauty came from things the Japanese had created themselves—colorful curtains, flowerpots on the narrow stoops.

“Look,” Regina said, pointing toward a baseball field. “Boys. Lots of them.” She poked Maddalena in the ribs and ran to the bleachers. Maddalena followed, and the girls found seats in the front row, across from left field. Shielding their eyes, they took inventory.

“The pitcher is cute,” Regina said. “And look at his muscles!”

Maddalena shrugged. “You can have him.”

“Well, who do you like?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

A few of the boys wore baseball caps, but most of them didn’t. How strange to see an entire field of dark-haired boys, when the Lone Pine boys had red hair, or blond, or a million shades of dirt brown. Most of the Japanese boys wore crew cuts. One boy in left field, with glasses, had hair that was short on the sides but long on top, and he kept tossing a forelock out of his eyes. He should have worn a cap, Maddalena thought.

A boy built like a bulldog blasted a line drive and the stands erupted. Regina and Maddalena jumped up, screaming with the crowd, then groaned when the boy got tagged out at second.

“This is almost perfect,” Regina said. “All we need is some Coca-Cola and cotton candy.”

“I wish,” Maddalena said. Still, it was a perfect day. No chores, no mother fretting over her, no obnoxious brother making her wish she were an only child. Here she was, on her own with her best friend in this exciting new place. She felt like a tourist in the valley she’d grown up in, seeing things kept hidden from her. And all of it ordinary yet startling.

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

She walked along the edge of the field, taking in the city around her. That’s what it was, a city of more than ten thousand, according to her father, bigger than any other in Owens Valley, built for people who didn’t belong there and didn’t want to be there. Looking up at a guard tower, the rounded eye of its searchlight puncturing the brilliant sky, Maddalena shuddered. It was easy to forget what those towers meant when you were outside the barbed wire, doing whatever you pleased. At first, when the plans were being made, then when it was built and the first Japanese came, the camp was all that anyone in Lone Pine and Independence had talked about. No one wanted it, and plenty of people were like her mother, afraid of the strangers who didn’t look like them. Now, three years later, most of the valley residents had lost their fear, and some, like Mrs. Henderson, considered the Japanese people part of their community. Eventually Manzanar blended into the desert valley’s landscape, no more remarkable than the sagebrush and fruit trees born there.

Fifty yards past the ballfield, Maddalena stopped, gazing west. These transplanted people had made Manzanar their home, with art shows, baseball games, and victory gardens. Not the kind of things you’d expect to find in a prison, yet Manzanar was a prison.

From here, inside the fence, Manzanar felt wrong in a way it never had before.

A wild cheer rose from the bleachers, but Maddalena couldn’t pull her gaze from the the city sprawled before her. It was seconds before she turned. Then, in a flash, everything snapped into place—the game, the ball hurtling toward her, a boy chasing it, hollering, “Get out of the way!” In another flash he pushed her aside, then flung himself on the ball and threw it with his entire body, landing on his shoulder and hip in a whirlwind of dust. The crowd kept on cheering as the ball bounced into center field and rolled to a stop. The batter was home safe.

The boy stood, slapping away dust. “Sorry to scare you. I thought you were a goner.” He wiped his face with the hem of his T-shirt.

“What?” Maddalena tried not to stare at the boy’s flat, tanned belly.

“I didn’t mean to shove you, but I thought you were going to get hit.”

“It was my fault. I wasn’t...” Maddalena forced her gaze upward. He was a few inches taller than she was, with glasses, hair that fell forward—the boy she’d thought should be wearing a hat. Up close, she could see the fine hairs of his eyebrows, the veins lining his thin forearms. “I wasn’t paying attention, I meant to say.”

“I know.” He smiled, and the delight in his eyes made him look ten years old.

The strangest feeling percolated beneath Maddalena’s skin, like warm rain drenching her insides.

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” the boy said. “See you.”

It might have been her imagination, but when he was twenty feet away Maddalena thought he slowed his trot as if he might turn around and run back to her, ask her name, put his arms around her, kiss her. Then he broke into a run, headed for the players rushing the field shouting of victory or defeat, and dissolved into the throng.

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© Cheryl A. Ossola 2019/2023

Reprinted with permission.

For more information, or to order the book, visit Regal House Publishing or my website. If you do read it and like it and you want to be my hero, a positive rating/review on Goodreads and/or Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble would do wonders, as would recommending it to the readers in your life, asking your library to stock it, and so on. You’d definitely make my day!

Alla prossima,

Cheryl