Read Online When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka - Free Book Online Page A

bird’s egg. Or a perfect blue eye. “When you come back,” she said, “we’ll go to the beach.”
    He had slipped the blue stone into his pocket and taken it with him to the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack. Every night, in the horse stalls, he had slept with it under his pillow. At the end of the summer, when they were ordered to move inland, he had brought it with him on the train to Utah. He had promised to write her a letter the minute he got off the train.
    THEY HAD BEEN off the train for a while now, but he had not written her a word. Still, her letters continued to arrive in the mail. She was the only one of his friends from before who had remembered to write. She told him about the blackouts in Berkeley, and the shortages of meat and butter. She said that her father was now an Air Raid Warden, and that her mother no longer wore silk stockings. She said that Greg Myer’s brother had been shot down in the Battle of the Coral Sea and there was now a gleaming gold star in the Myers’ front window. She told him she’d seen some Okies from the shipyard downtown, standing in line at the movies. They really did wear cowboy boots, she said. And she sent him things. A picture of a prancing stallion she’d seen at the Navy Relief Horse Show. A book of riddles. A tulip bulb, which he had named Gloria and planted inside of an old rusty peach can he had found behind the mess hall.
    He wondered if Gloria was still alive, down there, beneath all that dirt—“Tamp it down, hard,” his sister had said—and if she was, would she be able to make it to spring?
    A MEMORY FROM BEFORE: his sister arriving home from school with her new jump rope trailing behind her on the sidewalk. “They let me turn the handle,” she said, “but they wouldn’t let me jump.” She had cut the rope up into tiny pieces and tossed them into the ivy and sworn she would never jump rope again.
    EVERY WEEK they heard new rumors.
    The men and women would be put into separate camps. They would be sterilized. They would be stripped of their citizenship. They would be taken out onto the high seas and then shot. They would be sent to a desert island and left there to die. They would all be deported to Japan. They would never be allowed to leave America. They would be held hostage until every last American POW got home safely. They would be turned over to the Chinese for safekeeping right after the war.
    You’ve been brought here for your own protection, they were told.
    It was all in the interest of national security.
    It was a matter of military necessity.
    It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty.
    THE SCHOOL WAS OPENED in mid-October. Classes were held in an unheated barrack at the far end of Block 8 and in the morning it was sometimes so cold the boy could not feel his fingers or toes and his breath came out in small white puffs. Textbooks had to be shared, and paper and pencils were often in short supply.
    Every morning, at Mountain View Elementary, he placed his hand over his heart and recited the pledge of allegiance. He sang “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies” and “My country, ’tis of thee” and he shouted out “Here!” at the sound of his name. His teacher was Mrs. Delaney. She had short brown hair and smooth creamy skin and a husband named Hank who was a sergeant in the Marines. Every week he sent her a letter from the front lines in the Pacific. Once, he even sent her a grass skirt. “Now when am I ever going to wear a grass skirt?” she asked the class.
    â€œHow about tomorrow?”
    â€œOr after recess.”
    â€œPut it on right now!”
    The first week of school they learned all about the
Nina
and the
Pinta
and the
Santa Maria,
and Squanto and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. They wrote down the names of the states in neat cursive letters across lined sheets of paper. They played hangman and twenty questions. In