Work boots and chairs scraped in the kitchen, so I knew that Baachan and Jiichan, Grandma and Grandpa, were already up. Then Mom got up from the sagging metal cot we shared in the front room. I nestled into the warm hollow she’d left behind until my bursting bladder forced me upright into the frigid air. I forced sockless feet into shoes, threw my jacket over my pajamas, and raced out to the outhouse.
Later in the day, the benjo would be warmer, but the thick ammonia stench would be so strong I had to breathe through my mouth and great big horse flies would rise from the turds below to buzz around my face. At five, I was so short that when I sat down, my feet lost contact with the floor and I had a flash of fear that I’d fall backwards into the stinky black hole.
By the time I got back in the house, the blue-enamel kerosene heater was warming up the kitchen. Mom had tied her hair in a kerchief with a “We can do it!” knot in front and applied her cherry-red lipstick. She served last night’s leftover rice with fried eggs and Spam.
Baachan Aki yelled at my seventeen-year old uncle, Ray. “Raymond, okiri na sai! Osoku natta yo! Get up! It’s getting late.”
“Yeah, Mama,” Ray buried his head under his pillow.
“Uso bakkari! Liar! Basu o nogori masu, yo! You’re going to miss the school bus!” Baachan grabbed the broom and whacked Ray’s backside with the flat of the bristles.
“OK Mama, take it easy.” Ray gasped as his bare feet hit the cold linoleum.
After breakfast, my step-grandfather Ichiro drained his coffee cup with a smack of satisfaction, shrugged on his denim work jacket and clapped on his sweat-stained fedora. Baachan Aki tied on the deep-brimmed sunbonnet she always wore to keep her skin from browning.
As they headed out the door, I called, “Jiichan, wait for me!”
“It’s freezing out there; why don’t you stay home with me,” Mom said.
“Oh, please, Mom. Pu-lee-ease!”
“Okay, okay. But after lunch, stay and help me around the house.”
To me, Jiichan felt like a real grandpa; to Mom, he was just the old man we had to live with—the foreman the FBI arrested after Pearl Harbor, the man Baachan wanted Mom to marry to show the family’s gratitude. But Mom had left camp and eloped with Dad instead. She thought marrying an army officer would get her away from family. But Army was always sending Dad someplace we couldn’t go. Because of the Korean War, Mom and I were staying with Baachan and Jiichan in 1951.
Baachan had lost the lease on her big ranch in Pismo Beach when she was incarcerated in 1942. She and Jiichan stayed at Poston concentration camp until it closed because they had no place to go. “Don’t come back to San Luis Obispo,” a neighbor wrote. “They’re shooting out our windows at night. Nobody will sell us gas or fertilizer.”
So they went north to the Santa Clara Valley and this sharecroppers’ camp, a ring of tarpaper shacks on the edge of the strawberry fields, all occupied by Japanese American families struggling to get back on their feet. Mom hated farm life, but I thought it was interesting.
“Wait for me, Jiichan!” I struggled into my coat as Jiichan hoisted a shovel and a hoe on his shoulder. He handed me a short-handled hoe—just the right size for me because I was only five. Decades later, short hoes would be banned for giving grownups backaches from bending over to chop out weeds all day.
Baachan headed toward the nursery shed to help propagate strawberry seedings. By next year, the field would be filled with bright Driscoll’s berries for America’s breakfast tables.
Jiichan and I headed towards the irrigation pumps, savoring the crunch of dried adobe mud beneath our feet. Jiichan rolled himself a smoke out of a Bull Durham pouch, and I pretend-puffed clouds of steam from an imaginary cigarette. Morning mist rose off the fields. Jiichan and I gloried in the stillness until birds roosting in the sycamores beside the creek began their early-morning chatter. Soon they rose in a great cloud and circled overhead before beginning their daily hunt for bugs and worms.
Jiichan chuckled. “Mite! Minna shigoto ni iku, tori mo. Look at that! Everybody’s going to work, even the birds.”
Half of Madrone’s strawberry beds had been shaped and planted. For months, Jiichan and the other Nikkei men had used tractors to harrow and disk the hard adobe soil, supplement it with chemical fertilizers, and corrugate it into ditches and raised beds. Since iron pipe was more expensive than immigrant labor, the men built the irrigation system by hand. They hammered together irrigation flumes from 1 x 12-inch redwood planks and caulked them with tar. They dug straight-sided channels a foot deep and a hundred yards long, perpendicular to the planting beds and ditches. They laid the flumes in the channels, adjusted them to a barely perceptible downhill slope and tarred the seams. When the first irrigation water made it to the far end of the field, they cheered, “Yatta! we did it!” They clapped each other on the back and mopped their sweaty brows.
Jiichan was in charge of irrigation. At each rectangular wooden reservoir, he flipped a switch to start the irrigation pump tick-tick-ticking before starting up with a roar. I leaned over the edge and let the rush of water ripple and flow over my hand. Jiichan lifted the floodgates that directed the water into a different flume each day. As the water begun to flow out to the fields, we walked alongside the wooden channels, using the crooks of our hoes to knock out wooden plugs so the water could flow into each ditch.
Meanwhile, Baachan and the other women nursed seedlings in the greenhouses. After the last winter frosts, we all knelt in the ditches between the planting beds to place widely spaced seedlings. Then began back-breaking weeding, a constant battle of short-handled hoe against mustard weed and grasses. Meanwhile, in the big workshed, the din of hammers never stopped. After the carpenters finished building flumes for the rest of the acreage, they crafted dozens of little wheeled carts big enough to hold flats of strawberry baskets.
In those days, I loved everything about strawberries—the parallel veins and scalloped edges of the leaves, the mother plants sending out runners to establish a whole tribe of babies, the delicate white blossoms peeking out like shy spring harbingers, with bright yellow centers as warm as the sun. I loved watching the pale baby berries growing bigger and blushing brighter each day until their glossy red skins dimpled around golden seeds, and the irresistible fragrance of ripe fruit meant that summer was on its way.
Today, I can hardly bear to eat strawberries. They are mostly flavorless and tart, and most are labeled “Driscoll’s,” now the largest berry distributor in the world. It’s rare to find berries from family-run farms anymore, and even pricey organic berries rarely come close to the intoxicating aroma and sunny sweetness I remember.
I earned my first dollar at age six, picking strawberries at Madrone camp. At harvest time, everyone, even little kids like me, pushed the carts ahead of us as we walked on our knees down row after row. We plucked the shiny, ripe berries by carefully cutting the stems with our thumbnails and leaving the pretty green hulls intact for market. We pulled off the over-ripe fruit and tossed it on the ground so it wouldn’t drain nutrients from the plants. By the end of the day, the lower legs of our jeans were stiff with rotten-strawberry mud.
Most nights, we took sponge baths in the kitchen out of a chipped enamel basin filled with hot water from the kettle, but once a week, we could look forward to a thorough wash in the communal bathhouse. Jiichan would start the water heating after work. I loved to watch him open the creaky cast-iron door to the boiler, stack kindling in a pyramid over wood shavings and crumpled paper, set a match to it, and nurse the brief flare into a roaring fire by blowing on it and adding bigger pieces of wood at just the right time.
While the bath water heated, the boys played hide-and-seek and kick the can, and the girls served each other leaves and twigs at tea parties served on fruit-crate tables.
Bath time was after dinner on Friday nights. The men went first. By the time the women and children got to the ofuro, it was pitch dark and chilly. In a drafty room lit by a single kerosene lamp, we dipped a basin of hot water out of the communal soaking tub and stood outside the tub to soap, scrub and rinse ourselves clean before slipping into hot, inviting waters. The Issei were unselfconscious about bodies. No one judged—fat legs or skinny ones; firm, pert breasts or deflated sausages. We were all humans, enjoying a luxury at the end of a long week.
Sharecropping was hard and dirty work. It took Baachan and Jiichan ten years to earn enough money to buy ten acres of their own. But what I remember best about sharecropping was how deeply connected we were with each other and with the land, the seasons and the other families struggling to re-establish themselves after incarceration.
© 2025 Shizue Seigel
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