Journal Day 3: My 71st Year
My First Two Novels: A Personal Explanation
On the novel, LITTLE TEXAS –
My eldest daughter and I were on a short road trip one Spring, taking in an early fiesta at Silver City and visiting several of southwest New Mexico’s ghost towns. She took photographs, and I did as I learned from my father – I listened and watched. My senses are my muse. They teach me what I’d otherwise miss. Before heading back home to Albuquerque, we drove to Fort Stanton. We spent hours walking the grounds and talking about the generations who knew Fort Stanton, knew it well because they had been held there as prisoners or hospitalized there as tuberculosis patients. They were native Americans who rebelled against capture and confinement to reservations, German prisoners captured during both world wars, American soldiers who guarded prisoners and tended the grounds, medical staff, military officers, and people who came weakened by TB, who hoped that the dry climate and clean air would renew their strength. At one time, the grounds also housed young women whose criminal behavior required isolation from society. But, more important to me, having known most of Fort Stanton’s history already, was that Japanese and Japanese American prisoners were also interned there in 1942. This was news to me.
In one section of the museum, there is a story. After the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, the Japanese colony in Clovis, New Mexico lost their jobs in the railyards. For at least three decades, the railyards had employed Japanese as mechanics. They were housed in apartments on the railyard site, near the old icehouse, on the other side of the tracks from all other Clovis residents. During their years in Clovis, New Mexico, the Japanese had married, birthed children, kept a shop that offered oriental objects, worked, participated, gone to public school, and traveled back and forth between New Mexico and Japan or Hawaii. By January of 1942, there were thirty-two Japanese and citizens of Japanese ancestry living in the apartments. But they were suddenly shunned and threatened. There are no newspaper accounts of criminal behaviors or rumors of criminal behaviors. They were shunned because the US of A was at war with Japan.
On the last Friday night of January 1942, only weeks since the attack on Pearl Harbor, all thirty-two inhabitants of the Japanese colony were forced from their home and taken to an internment camp at Fort Stanton. It happened during the night and within a few hours’ time. Clovis woke on Saturday to the realization that the colony was gone. The Sunday newspaper gave two paragraphs to the story. It was obviously a story written by government officials. It said that authorities came for a few Japanese men but that the other men, women, and children volunteered to go along. Two paragraphs.
Men, women, and children of all ages were forced into internment during winter at an Army camp that held German prisoners of war. I cannot imagine, and it still breaks my heart to think about it, how humiliated those people must have felt. The terrible conditions of cold weather, loss of personal possessions and employment and school, deprivation, prisoner status, discomfort, isolation – it is hardly imaginable. The cruelty is hard to believe except that the story is fact. These also are facts that add to the cruelty: they were held in temporary, miserable conditions in Fort Stanton until late the next Fall when new internment camps in Utah and other states were completed. They were shipped to the Fort Stanton internment several months before Japanese on the West Coast were removed from their homes. Within two months of their removal from the railyards in Clovis, the US Army began building an army camp on the site.
The reason I chose to write a fictional story around the historical event is that part of my childhood was spent in Clovis, New Mexico. I was never told the story. I learned the story because I visited a museum. I know Clovis, New Mexico, very well. I know its people, their mindsets, its cultures, and its history. It was easy to understand how the cruelty happened. After all these decades, I remain a skeptic of Little Texas’ brand of conservatism.
We can never again stand by to see the criminal internment of peaceful human beings.
On the novel, PEASE RIVER REVIVAL: MERLINA’S STORY -- I had a character in mind before I had the full story. She would be among the outsiders of a rural West Texas community. She would be loved by her strong family but alternately needed, used, adored, and shunned by others. When she felt glorious in her faith and hope, she was adored. When she experienced the deviousness, selfishness, and cruelty of others, she felt shameful. Merlina would grasp passionate religious faith early in life and let go of it as the passionate (dis)beliefs and unreasonable biases of dear friends and new friends created a burden too heavy for her youthful understanding.
The setting is familiar to readers because it is a rural, post-war Texas community. Men and women were returning from war and years-long devastation to begin new lives. Their new lives were often in new places as the rural farms and small towns of their lost youth closed. Opportunities opened elsewhere. But many small towns struggled valiantly at first to rebuild after fifteen years of combined economic depression, droughts, and wars. The struggles were greater than whether veterans would be willing to take over family farms. Underneath the growing prosperity in peace time, there loomed another war, civil unrest caused by clashes between the haves and have nots which were often labelled as racial violence, and substantial changes among the power brokers of religion and finance.
It was a time of change that few white Americans wanted to see, much less to understand or give in to. They wanted the old-time religions, daddy’s rules, mamma’s passivity, and strong men who would obstruct resistance. Although peace among warring nations was realized for several years after 1945, peace among races, ethnicities, religions, economic and political blocs would explode into new wars, revolutions, and civil unrest. I see the time between 1945 and 1953 as one in which people began to make up their minds. Between 1929 and 1945, most Americans were in survival mode. After 1945, they wanted to write new chapters for their families, bond more substantially with their communities and nation. So, until the Korean conflict, the 1950’s youth and music revolution, and the 1960’s civil rights’ revolution interrupted the post-WWII era of prosperity and ease, rural folks felt isolated from the looming changes and greater problems into which urbanites were thrown. But the emerging influence of radio and television gave Americans ideas that they’d never considered before. Rural Texas watched and listened and thought that they’d protect themselves from the influence of urban elitists. Unfortunately, much change was thrust upon them; much was brought about by their own inflexibility.
It was a place of change into which Merlina was born and raised. I wanted to explore how one year in Merlina’s life could change everything. The novel’s story unfolds in one year’s time from one Fall church revival to the next.