Densho Digital Archive - Sumiko Yamauchi Interview (denshovh-ysumiko

<Begin Segment 21>

WP: What was your first impression of Seabrook Farms when you got there?

SY: Horrible, horrible. I didn't know poor people. I thought I was the poor people. I couldn't believe the poor people. And people live that way, and it was really hard to understand that. Because I didn't realize that the South were as bad as it was, and I thought to myself we were poor, but we always had food on the table, we always were able to take a bath, we were able to get educated. We had our Sunday clothes, we had our school clothes. It just... we were flabbergasted. They had no manners, some of those people. There were... first, I think what I had to get used to was that if you were, in my days we called it Negro, and those, nowadays you call it African American. So if I say Negro, and I always get corrected by my family, it isn't Negro anymore. But the Negroes were treated so badly because I thought I was being treated bad because I was Japanese in Los Angeles. But when you have to live that way during the... where they had to go through the back door, they couldn't use the certain restaurant, you couldn't do this, you couldn't do that, okay, that was the Negroes. And then you get the white people from the mountains, and they had lived up there in the mountains, they had no sanitation, no education, no manners. It was, and they worked, and Seabrook hired them because he couldn't hire the good workers, because they had already gone to Chicago. And they had to hire these people to get work to pick the crops, to process the food. And to have to work with them, it was very hard. And they were not educated, they couldn't read, they couldn't write. They wrote X when they paid, got their paycheck, they would write an X instead of name. It was eye-opening, I guess you could say. And that's how all of a sudden I felt rich. It's hard. I don't think it's that way anymore, but in those days, that's how it was.

WP: What did Seabrook Farms do?

SY: They grew their own vegetables, they grew their, they packed it and they froze it, and they packed it for big companies like Birds Eye, Pickwick, and they also made the vegetables for, packed vegetables for Campbell's soup. It was a big, in New Jersey in the south, I swear, he owned more property there. And so the closest store you could go to once you were in Seabrook, you had to take a bus for forty-five minutes to an hour to go into town. So therefore, when you're stuck in New Jersey in the Seabrook Farm, you're stuck. Because you're working six days a week, and the only time you had a day off was Sunday, and that was if you got off work at... you worked eleven hours a day. And when you got off at night, you were dead tired. You were dirty, anyway, because you were working with food constantly. And you couldn't go into town because the bus didn't run at night. So you were really stuck in New Jersey. So when they said you could eat at the cafeteria and they have a dry goods store, and you could buy all your dry goods store, and you didn't have to pay for it because we would take it out of your paycheck. So when your paycheck came, if you had anything left, you learn not to eat dessert at the cafeteria because it cost you too much. And you didn't order two entrees, you ordered one entree. You know, when you're walking down all you can eat place, okay, a little of this. Well, when you're in Seabrook and you do that, it cost you a lot of money. So you learn how not to eat, and conserve. And you try not to buy things at the dry goods because it's twice, cost you twice as much.

And they have you coming and going in Seabrook, until he started losing... and then the war ended. And he had to send all these Southern, the people who lived up in the mountains, and all the Negroes who came from Jamaica, they had to ship 'em back. And so they were left with the Japanese, and they wanted to hold on to the Japanese because they were workers and they lived there, and they were always on time. And not only that, but Seabrook depended on the Japanese people to take over the office. The office was completely run by Japanese staff, because they could read, they could write. And not only that, but they became foremen and they became supervisors. But Seabrook found out that they were moving away to Philadelphia, things like that. And he found out that the reason why was he had us in prison there because everything was sky high. And so he decided he had to do something, so he started building homes and saying you could rent these homes. And he kept it fairly reasonable, because he didn't want to lose the Japanese. And so as of today, Seabrook Farm has a community of Japanese in Seabrook that did stay. And I guess they stayed with the farm 'til they closed. I hear it's not a farm anymore. But yeah, that's why my mother says, "You've got to get out of here, this is not where you're supposed to be."

So after I graduated in June, I worked when I first got there. And then in the wintertime, nothing is growing, and so you're laid off, and you're on unemployment and my mother says, "I have to stay here because I can't speak English very well. I can't go to Philadelphia and find a job." And so I went to Philly and I went to school, and later on I went to New York. And my mother stayed until 1950 when my oldest, my oldest brother graduated high school and then they moved back here.

WP: What was your housing like at Seabrook Farms?

SY: Terrible, terrible. Even a pig should live there, it was so horrible. The floor was, when it rained, there would be a crack, and the water would run down the hill, see, and it goes. And where you have a crack, the water would seep out. It was terrible, it was terrible.

WP: How would you compare it to the barracks in Manzanar?

SY: Oh, the barrack in Manzanar was like the Hilton hotel compared to... it was horrible.