<Begin Segment 5>

TI: And so for your family -- we'll talk later about your numbers, but you had lots of kids. How much, how many rooms...

RE: There were only two bedrooms in our house. And at that time, surviving, there were eight of us kids surviving lived in there.

TI: And like the Kimura family with seventeen kids, how large was their, their place?

RE: I can't remember, but I'm sure they packed 'em in there like sardines in those bedrooms. They always maintained a little, little shop, that he sold trinkets, Japanese trinkets. We, it was only through Mr. Kimura, Tom Kimura, that he would, we would have these bamboo (tubs) we used to call taru, and we would get miso, soy sauce and rice, they all were imported from Japan, they would come in these great big pine crates. That's how we got our Japanese foods.

TI: And can you remember how frequently those came?

RE: They would come about once every, every month. And so the townsfolks would come in on a Saturday to buy these little Japanese trinkets.

TI: Oh, interesting. So he would sell these trinkets.

RE: Of course, the other families raised vegetables around the compound. My dad built an irrigation system, so we sold a lot of vegetables on Saturdays.

TI: Oh, so it was like a little market that you had, and the townspeople would come, and produce and these trinkets.

RE: Uh-huh.

TI: And again, talking about, sort of, the segregation, so in town whites, outside non-whites, and so did they have other enclosures for different races?

RE: Yeah. The black families lived right near the livestock, it smelled to high heaven. Some of those families raised pigs as well as other things. I remember going back years later and there's still the same kind of existence. I don't think Clovis ever changed, horrible.

TI: And so you had blacks...

RE: Hispanics, Hispanics lived on the same street as, where the railroad was. But they couldn't go beyond that point. It was that one main street that ran by the railroad station, and that was the area allocated for Hispanic people.

TI: And so you mentioned earlier, so you ended up playing, not only with the Japanese kids, but also the other...

RE: And the only real access into town was a tunnel that ran about a hundred yards under the railroad track. It ran from near the coal chutes, I remember there was a huge coal chute. And you went about fifty yards past that, and the entrance to the tunnel led us in through these tunnels, this tunnel, and it came out about two hundred yards, just immediately past the railroad station, train station.

TI: So when, when people said, "living on the other side of the tracks," that really meant living on the other side of the tracks.

RE: Oh, absolutely.

TI: And that was, it was like a segregation line, or a line where the non-whites would live, on the other side.

RE: Correct.

TI: So growing up, how did that feel? I mean, did you ever think about that in terms of...

RE: No, you know, what does an eight-year-old kid know? I mean, feel, even my brothers and sisters, you don't think about racial discrimination. You live within whatever you're given. I remember the railroad station, I was puzzled by the fact it said "whites" and "colored," "white" and "colored." So I just knew that was the only sign of segregation that I could ever imagine as a kid.

TI: And when they had that designation, "white" and "colored," which, where would you go?

RE: I never thought about that. We never were allowed to use it anyhow, because we were not --

TI: So, "white," "colored," and then the others where you would just go in.

RE: We had outhouses over where we lived, yes.

TI: That's interesting.

RE: There were no flush toilets that you would know of, remember that you had the closet up there, and pull the chain. It was only at the railroad station, it was quite a fascination for us to see this. You pull the chain and the thing swirls around.

TI: So you would go in there and just see this.

RE: Yeah, and then the train people, porters, and they had to come in, they would kick us out of there.

TI: Okay, so it was like these town kids, and, "we have to get 'em out." Now, in, sort of, Clovis, was there kind of a hierarchy in terms of, I'm guessing, so the whites were kind of on top of the, in terms of the hierarchy. With the other races, did the whites treat the other races differently, like the Japanese from the blacks from the Hispanics?

RE: Well, yeah, when you talk about church and school, we were relegated to, since our family was the only family were Christians, and 'course, we lived outside of this little enclave because of my mother and father's choosing. But we were Christianized back in the early '30s, and I can get into that later, why we did that, why my parents choose to become Christians. But the fact is that, that allowed us the opportunity to go to public school. So our family, if I'm recollecting correctly, our family was a token integration into the public school in Curry County.

TI: And the, and the other Japanese went to...

RE: Went to a one-room school, one-room schoolhouse, which was about, probably about a half a mile from where we lived. And the Hispanic kids went to a Catholic school, grades one through eight. So it was for the other Japanese families, grade one through eight.

TI: And then what about the, the African American kids, the black kids, where did they go?

RE: I really don't remember. They certainly were in the, they were not in the public school, we were the only non-whites, I think, if I recollect.

TI: And that's interesting. And the designation was because your family was Christian, they were allowed to go to this --

RE: Most likely through the Baptist church.

TI: Let's talk about your family becoming Christians. How did that happen?

RE: The circumstances, I would imagine... in part, in 1932, my sister Yaeko, Yaeko passed away. In 1936, my brother Rokuo passed away. And, of course, the economy, what do you call it...

TI: The Depression?

RE: The Depression was on. I guess my mom and dad felt that that there was something to do with religion, that the gods didn't favor them or whatever. So they sought out other religions that would probably favor them better.

TI: And prior to that, were they religious -- like Buddhist or something like that?

RE: Shinto.

TI: Shinto, okay.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.