<Begin Segment 51>

PB: So then right away, we started, I started looking for another job, and then I went into this corrugated box-making. And all the girls, the Japanese girls all went with me. But the Japanese are very competitive people. [Laughs] It got so they want to beat you out. They're always trying to get ahead; they're ambitious, and you get too many Japanese together and there's bound to be trouble because they're all trying to do, outdo each other, and pretty soon, we had a quota to make, and when we meet a certain quota, then they want to go higher. They say, "Well, you can do better." It just got so we couldn't meet that quota anymore because there were white girls, too, and they said, "Why do you work so hard and make it harder for us? Because the more you do, the more they expect of you." And we couldn't do the work that the big white girls could do, we couldn't fold the boxes.

AI: Tell me, describe what the box-folding entailed. When you were saying that you were too small to fold some of those boxes...

PB: Well, these huge corrugated boxes, they got creases in 'em, and you have to bend 'em so that the creases are such so that we could put 'em in the machine and stitch them. But we had to fold 'em on the crease, and like the big Caucasian women, the heavy-set Caucasian women, they could take maybe six or seven or maybe ten and just lean down on 'em and fold 'em. But the Japanese are short and they're not heavy enough. They can't fold that many at one time; maybe they could fold three or four at a time. So we couldn't ever make the quota that the white girls made. So then the boss brought in the girl to show how she did it, well, we could see right away they're so much bigger and heavier that bang, and they'd fold a whole bunch of 'em. [Laughs] So it just got so that they couldn't keep up with it. And then some of us were on the machines stitching the boxes. But then every once in a while, when the machine would, the wire in the machine would bend, then it would jam up the machine and we'd have to call in a man to rewire. Well, the machine was identical to the boxes that we used to sew at home, the strawberry boxes, except that it was electrically operated, so we step on it, it just keeps going. Well, the one we had at home, we had to step each time. So I watched 'em and I said, "Well, I can do that," and I did it. So then they said, "Well, then from now on, you..." more or less was, well, I kind of watched the machines and watched the output of the folding and everything, so I was kind of in charge of that department. But it was getting so that, so competitive with the Japanese, that the white girls didn't like it.

And there was one girl that liked to smoke, and she'd go in restroom all the time, so the boss wanted to fire her, and he called her into the office and oh, she just turned around and told him off. So he rang for me -- if the buzzer rang, that was for me to go to the office, and she was just telling him off something terrible. And he was backing up; he was afraid of her. All he could say was, "Get her out of here." [Laughs] He says, "You're fired," and she, she yelled at him and she told him, "Well, you can take your blinkety-blank job and give it to your niece." She says, "I quit. You can't fire me." She was... then later when I took her last paycheck over to her, she said, "I'm a gangster's moll." She lived in a very luxurious apartment, and I thought, "Oh, gosh, I'm glad I didn't tangle with her," because she, she wasn't gonna take no guff from anybody. But we soon quit after that, because, well, I couldn't take it anymore, because the girls kept trying to work it up, trying to work it up, and you can't be always trying to get ahead of the next guy. Especially like when I was in charge of the department, I just felt that I couldn't push myself anymore, because I was having trouble that I had in camp, and I knew that I would have to have surgery sooner or later. So I quit and then the girls quit, all the other girls quit, too, at the same time, and then they hired black people. So that's the way it was; white people and then Japanese and then the blacks.

AI: Well, you know, it sounds like... and I've heard this from other people also who had grown up in Seattle or on the West Coast and then gone to Chicago, and had never seen this kind of racial situation before. But I had heard that in some cases, Japanese Americans were treated somewhat as if they were black, and in other cases treated somewhat as if they were white. And you were telling me about the street where one side was white and one side was black. When you were faced with that, what did you think? How did you think of yourself in this black/white situation?

PB: Well, we were considered white. But still, we weren't exactly white, either, because we got kicked out of the white area. But like when I went into the store, I got out of there because I was kind of afraid, you know. I'm the only light-skinned person in the whole store and everybody's black, and I thought, "Gosh, what kind of situation is this?" I just decided I bought what I needed and I got out of there in a hurry. And I said, "What is this, anyhow?" And then they told me that that was a line, that the black people were on one side and the white people were on the other side. But then you never knew. Now, when I was doing photo work, I was coloring pictures, and I found out that here there was a white girl that was married to a black person. And I didn't realize that, and I made some remark about, something about black people, and she said, "Oh, my husband is black." Then I thought, "Oh, my God, I made a terrible error saying what I did." So I had to make some excuse that I didn't mean to offend in any way, it's just that I had just come from camp and I didn't realize how things were. But you had to be very careful because you could step on somebody's toes very easily.

<End Segment 51> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.