camps so hastily thrown together, nothing was completed when we got there, and almost nothing worked.
I was sick continually, with stomach cramps and diarrhea. At first it was from
the shots they gave us for typhoid, in very heavy doses and in assembly-line fashion: swab, jab, swab, Move along now, swab, jab, swab, Keep it moving.
That knocked all of us younger kids down at once, with fevers and vomiting.
Later, it was the food that made us sick, young and old alike. The kitchens were too small and badly ventilated. Food would spoil from being left out too long.
That summer, when the heat got fierce, it would spoil faster. The refrigeration kept breaking down. The cooks, in many cases, had never cooked before. Each block had to provide its own volunteers. Some were lucky and had a professional or two in their midst. But the first chef in our block had been a gardener all his life and suddenly found himself preparing three meals a day for 250 people.
“The Manzanar runs” became a condition of life, and you only hoped that
when you rushed to the latrine, one would be in working order.
That first morning, on our way to the chow line, Mama and I tried to use the
women’s latrine in our block. The smell of it spoiled what little appetite we had.
Outside, men were working in an open trench, up to their knees in muck—a common sight in the months to come. Inside, the floor was covered with excrement, and all twelve bowls were erupting like a row of tiny volcanoes.
Mama stopped a kimono-wrapped woman stepping past us with her sleeve
pushed up against her nose and asked, “What do you do?”
“Try Block Twelve,” the woman said, grimacing. “They have just finished
repairing the pipes.”
It was about two city blocks away. We followed her over there and found a
line of women waiting in the wind outside the latrine. We had no choice but to join the line and wait with them.
Inside it was like all the other latrines. Each block was built to the same
design, just as each of the ten camps, from California to Arkansas, was built to a common master plan. It was an open room, over a concrete slab. The sink was a long metal trough against one wall, with a row of spigots for hot and cold water.
Down the center of the room twelve toilet bowls were arranged in six pairs, back to back, with no partitions. My mother was a very modest person, and this was going to be agony for her, sitting down in public, among strangers.
One old woman had already solved the problem for herself by dragging in a
large cardboard carton. She set it up around one of the bowls, like a three-sided screen. OXYDOL was printed in large black letters down the front. I remember this well, because that was the soap we were issued for laundry; later on, the smell of it would permeate these rooms. The upended carton was about four feet