<Begin Segment 23>

TI: So, with the ending of the war, what happened next?

SY: Well, what happened was everybody will pack up and go to the train station. Not everybody, but every week we would, there'd be I don't know how many trainloads of people, and we would all go there and wave goodbye, wish them luck, and those people on the train, with all smiles and laughter and joy, waving us, farewell to us. And they would depart. We had no idea where they were gonna end up, whether they were going to the East Coast, Midwest, Denver, West Coast or what. Now, each week we would go, not to the train station, we had no train station, but the railroad tracks. Again, the same scenario. Group of trains leaving with all happiness, with the exception of those that had to stay. And we were those that stayed. And as each week went by, we noticed, the schools did not start, they consolidated mess hall, we had all the privacy we wanted in the, at the latrines, bathrooms, showers. Next thing you know, my friends are gone, so my communication, my entertainment was Maggie. And we would talk about, "What are we gonna do when we get to San Francisco?" I would talk to Maggie, and I said, "Well, I don't know what the rules, you know, you can't make this kind of noise like you did in Heart Mountain. I'm just wondering if it might be the wisest thing to do to donate you to the San Francisco Zoo." We used to call it Fleishhacker Zoo, "where you could entertain thousands and thousands of people." Plus that my incentive was to see, each weekend to visit Maggie, with the hopes that she would still remember me. And so we would converse and talk and so forth, I don't know whether Maggie understood. But, as I mentioned before, Heart Mountain actually became a ghost town. In our block we had the Ishigos. They were determined they were never going to leave, and, finally, they set the date. "November fifteenth, we are going to close down for good." And LaDonna Zall and Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation, her father said, "Okay, LaDonna," and her sister, "we're going to go the train station, or train tracks, and see history. This is the last load of Japanese leaving Heart Mountain." And now LaDonna is on Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation. She still talks about that day.

Now, we did not leave on November the 15th. We left the week before. But in October, mid-October, for the first time, I found Maggie on the bottom of the cage, with eyes flickering, and I carried Maggie on my chest, and I could hear my mother sobbing in the back of me, not saying a word. But I had great hopes that, tonight Maggie is going to sleep in the barrack, under my bed, and in the morning she's going to be well, and she's going to be the happy Maggie that I knew all the time that she was in Heart Mountain, and, again, another internee like all the rest of us. Well, I went to bed, I got up early in the morning, and she was stiff as a cardboard box. It was a sad moment, so my only thought was to bury Maggie, place some of my, some of her toys, and my T-shirt, some marbles, some of the things that she enjoyed, and I made a homemade cross and placed it. And even now I have people come up to me and says, "Do you know the exact spot where you buried that magpie?" No, I can't, I don't really know. Everybody has different opinions, but I wish I remembered, but I honestly don't remember. I was probably too sad to remember that day. But my stepfather left about two or three weeks earlier, looking for a place to live, looking for a job, so he went to San Mateo, because we knew a family there, the Ikedas, not you, but another Ikeda.

TI: Right.

SY: So all the way back from Heart Mountain, we got on the train...

TI: Well, going back to Maggie, do you think, what, how did she, why did she die?

SY: We had no idea, but this is a author's opinion. Peter Duchow, he's with, he does Hallmark, a good friend of mine, and he felt that Maggie was an internee, Maggie served the Heart Mountain internees by entertaining, being one of the internees, and all of a sudden, when people started to depart, felt that her mission, her job is completed, she no longer was needed. And she did not want to leave Heart Mountain, she did not want to leave the Shoshone River area, and did not want to leave Wyoming, and the fact that we talked about San Francisco, the San Francisco Zoo, that was not her life, and this was Peter Duchow's remark was. And the more I think about it, the more I have to agree with that, because here, when you don't see the internees going in front of the cages, you're no longer needed.

TI: Okay, good. And, yeah, so that must have been really difficult for you to lose Maggie, and especially all your friends. It must have been a hard time for you.

SY: It was, but, you know what's ironic about it, all throughout my adult time I lived, my mother, father always talked about Maggie. According to my brother, he's fifteen younger, fifteen years younger, he was born after we came back from camp. He said two weeks prior to her death, she yelled out, "Shigeru, Shigeru," in her dream, and right after that, she yelled out, "Maggie, Maggie," twice, and two weeks later she died. So she was a lot closer to Maggie than I realized, so when I wrote Hello Maggie! book, I learned more about my mother, her feelings and her hardship. And one of the days I visited San Francisco, and just as I was leaving, she came up, when I was in the car, and she said, "I'm sorry I was not a good mother." And I thought that was a terrible thing to say to your own son, and I thought to myself, well, maybe she felt bad because I was in a babysitter, and whatever the reason she never explained, and I was too embarrassed to ask her. And most families will talk, and I guess I was too hard-headed to discuss this kind of situation.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.