<Begin Segment 12>

PW: So you were describing to me that you were finally given the permit to leave and join your husband in Ohio.

YW: Yes. We lived in this so-called apartment for a few weeks, and then the War Relocation Authorities, (found a) mansion that the person had converted into apartments, and she tried to get people with children into this place. (...) There was four apartments downstairs, four apartments upstairs. And I think we all had children. And the apartment that she gave to me was one that used to be a ballroom, so we had a beautiful hardwood floor ballroom, and a small narrow kitchen, a small little bedroom (...). But she did find this nice place for us, and I stayed there. I'm trying to figure out how many years, it was five years altogether, and I had my second baby in Cleveland.

PW: What were your days like? So I'm imagining you in this ballroom place, in this mansion, and you've got a young child, and your husband would go to work, what would you do during the day in Cleveland?

YW: Not too much. And actually, we were scared to go outside, I was, because I thought people were going to throw rocks at us, and I didn't want them to hit the baby. (...) I lived on the borderline of the white and the black area. And the people that stayed at my apartment, my husband and myself had some friends that had no place to live. And these were young kids, and I didn't know them particularly, but you can't watch young kids out in the street. And I said, well, if you can get a... what do you call these beds that you roll up? If you can get one of those, you could sleep on the floor in this dining room. Because it was big, the floor was clean, and so if you had one of those bedrolls, because we couldn't afford to buy beds, we said they were welcome to come. And they couldn't find jobs, but the way they got out of camp was to say that their friend has a place, and they said, "We could stay." And then they ended up at my place, first just to meet with other friends, and when I found out that they had no place to sleep that night, then we invited them to stay. So I had kids that stayed at my place and they just came with a bedroll. And they were young boys, and the way they paid their share of the rent was they would go someplace and they would buy, like, two carrots or one onion, one or two potatoes, that was all they could afford to give me. That's why we had stew every other night. At least it was fresh vegetables.

And then there was, because, as I said, we were on the borderline of the blacks and the whites, there was a meat market that was on the black side. I went there, and when we were in camp, I didn't know that there was such a thing as food stamps. It's not free, it just limits you to how much, things like meat, if you want to buy meat, you're only allowed to buy, I think it was not more than a pound and a half at the most. Everything was limited. If you wanted to buy sugar, you can't buy more than, it was something like three pounds. Anyway, they had coupons that limit you to how much sugar you can buy. But you still had to pay for it, of course. So I went to this black meat market. And when I went there, there was a row of men that were sitting against the wall, they all stopped talking. They were friends, they were all talking, and they all stopped talking and stared at me. They had never seen a Japanese before. And I went up to this meat market place, and this man was obviously the owner there. And I told him I just came out of camp, and I said, "Somebody gave me this food stamp, and I have only a limited amount of money, and I don't know how to use the stamp," because I had limited amount of money, and I had six people at that time that I had to feed. "Can you show me how to use it?" And he showed me how to use the food stamps, he's the one that taught me, (why it would be a good idea to) buy hamburger. Because you can do so much with it, do more like make hamburger, make spaghetti, make meatloaf, and do a lot with hamburger if you learned how to cook, and that was the cheapest meat, but it was still good meat. So he helped me, he was real patient, and he's the one that helped me.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.