<Begin Segment 7>

MA: So tell me about your time in Jerome, a little bit about your living conditions there, what you did every day.

JH: That'll be fun. [Laughs] Well, when we first arrived, we were given this barrack room that's about the size of this room, and the length. So my three sisters -- I mean, my two sisters, myself, and my mother were in there. And she had to get to know the area. During that time, I'm not too clear what we did after we got into that room, 'cause I know that we were supposed to go to school. Somehow or other I landed up in Miss Avery's first grade class. So we would walk to school, and then I remember we would go over these planks, because there were ditches, when the water runs off from the snow, it collects in there. So we would go through that, cut through the barracks. I remember when I was in school they taught us how to hold a baton. And one of the people from Hawaii made all these majorette hats, you know, those tall hats out of oatmeal boxes. So it was really neat. Somebody has a picture of that, I don't have it, though.

MA: And what was the relationship like between the people from Hawaii and the mainland? Because there was a large contingency from Hawaii.

JH: Uh-huh. In 38, 39 and 40 blocks. We stuck together more because we spoke the same language, but after a while we got to speak "good English," as they called it. In Hawaii they say "(haolefied)." So when I first met somebody, of course, I used my pidgin, and they didn't know what the heck I was saying. But I learned fast how to say, "What is your name? Where are you from?" Because those are the things that we usually used to ask each other in Hawaii when we first met other students, yeah.

MA: Do you think there was a difference even between people from Hilo, for example, and people from Honolulu?

JH: Oh, yes, great difference. If you go to Honolulu now, I mean, even my niece who was born in Honolulu has a distinct accent. It's not pidgin, but when they speak it's very different. It's not like how the kotonks speak either, but they speak "good English," but they have this funny accent. So I know when they're from Honolulu. Now, when we were in camp, though, most of us communicated with pidgin English. The reason they needed pidgin English was the diverse population in the islands, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, the Hawaiians, Portuguese. So in order to communicate, they had to make this pidgin English. And it's called creolized English, but it's a definite language, it's recognized as that. So that's what we did, we used to speak that. And then the kids started speaking "good English," so eventually the mothers would pick it up the same way.

For recreation, there was a forest there next to my block. And there were four barns, I remember, erected. All the time, I thought there were three, 'cause I think we never went in the fourth barn. But they were one after the other, and there was a drainage ditch. I remember when the Mississippi overflowed, they had swimming races in it, yeah. My one thought was, "What if they get bitten by the water moccasin? Because that's the first thing they told us. I'd never seen a snake before, I've heard about it, and I remember my mother bought me these boots that we wore when the place got flooded. And the people who had lived there long enough told us, "If you see bubbles in the water, stop." So whenever we went, we would look for the bubbles. [Laughs] So I never got bitten, thank goodness.

Then they also had to cut their own fuel for the blocks, so they would go out into the forest, cut the wood, and stack it. I think, I'm not sure, east, west, north or what. But anyways, on the back side of the laundry and the bathroom, so it was a huge building. So what we did, as kids, was we would go up on the woodpile and empty the middle. And of course we would play Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers and Hide and Seek or whatever you want. But we used that.

MA: Did you ever go into town?

JH: We were allowed to go to this town that I don't even remember the name of. I asked Big John Ellington, "Was there a town near here before?" I said I remember that they were all black people there, and they had a boardwalk. You know, the sidewalks were made out of boards. So the first thing when I went there with my mother, I said to my mother, "How come got Hawaiians here?" Because I had never seen a black person before that. That was the first time.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.