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EB: So you did, your family did relocate, can you tell me about relocation and where you went and why?

GS: Well, we relocated to Berlin, Maryland. And being so young, I had no say in this. My father says we're going, we went. But I learned from my parents years later, yes, we went there because this was, quote, where the "opportunity" was supposed to be. And as you're probably aware, people in camp were told you can go here or there or there's a job here for this or a job there and such and that. And my father had never done any farming, but because my grandfather did farming before the war, my dad thought, well, okay, I'll go and I'll try, learn some of this and do it, that we have to get some, we've got to do something. And also I think another important factor was that he really wanted to stay together with my mother's family.

So we did go to Berlin, Maryland, to a little community, a little farming, excuse me, a little farming community in southern Maryland just off the bay. And there was supposed to be sharecropping, but once my father and grandfather arrived there, they learned that was not to be; they were jut common laborers working this huge farm. The owner was a gentleman, really a gentleman farmer who did business in Washington, D.C.. He had a big hardware business in Washington, D.C., and so this was his weekend home. He had acreage amounting to several hundred acres, must have been like seven hundred acres as such. And basically it was tomato and potato growing, and some, there was a chicken farm and a little bit cattle. So my father ended up planting and harvesting tomatoes and potatoes, and it was not sharecropping, and so they soon realized we can't stay here very long.

And it was this small rural community that had never seen Japanese before, and they associated us with the Japanese of Japan, with which the United States was at war. So here we are coming into this community where the people knew nothing about it except that they associated us with the enemy. And we had never experienced integration. That was our first experience with integration. We didn't know if we were supposed to go to the "black" school or the "white" school. And ultimately we were placed in the "white" school. So we went there, and here, even in school, with both the teachers and the students, we were accepted by some and not accepted by others. But the other thing is I think I was really too young to really fully understand discrimination at that point. If somebody didn't play with me on the school grounds, well, so she didn't play with me.

But there... I really didn't think about this until years later, but there was a boy who was sitting in the seat in front of me in class, and back then we used to actually have to have penmanship. It's not like today, we actually had a penmanship class, with a pen, not like ballpoint. But he used to turn around, stick his pen into the inkwell, and then squirt it at me and on my clothes. And so I told the teacher about it and the teacher just ignored it; she wouldn't do anything about it. And I really sensed, as young as I was, I could sense she didn't like me. She probably didn't even want me in her classroom, but she was stuck with me. And no matter how hard I tried to do my lessons, and I felt on certain things I was pretty good in the subjects, I never received good grades from her. But what can you do? I mean, you had to go to school. So it was really a hurtful experience for me. And I used to tell my parents, but there was not much that could be done.

But anyway, my father and my grandfather decided financially there's no way that we could survive there. So we left after about ten, we must have been there about ten months, that we lived there. And because I was so young, there were other experiences that were really enjoyable to me. I mean, I liked the fact that we had the... I really enjoyed the four seasons that we had, which we didn't have in California. The first time I had experienced snow was in Manzanar. But then we did have snow in Maryland, so much snow that there were days that we couldn't go to school. But our life in Maryland was hard, too, because we had no electricity in the house, no running water. We had to use the outhouse outdoors, and we had no bath facilities. We used to take a bath in a galvanized tub for several months until my grandfather built a Japanese bath, ofuro. And we had, even though as young as we were, we had to help my mother and grandmother start a vegetable garden. But in order to do that, we had to do a lot of digging of the soil, which had a lot of clamshells. So we had to clean all that out. But it was kind of an adventure for us, 'cause we'd never done it before. But there were other things about life there that were difficult, and we had no support from the community. We didn't really have friends. My dad wanted to get his driver's license and perhaps buy a car, because we were located way out of town. We couldn't even go into town, there was no bus service out to our place. So it was really basically my mother who went into town once a week with the farm foreman, who took her on the truck, and she did the marketing and post office business and banking and any other things that had to be done. None of us ever went to a movie in town. I mean, we had no means of transportation to go there. It was difficult.

EB: Yeah.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2006 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.