I’M RIDING in Richard Yada’s big white truck, heading southeast from Little Rock on the interstate. We’ve already gone through the town of Pine Bluff and past the neighboring paper mill. As we pass Cummins, a huge maximum-security prison, Richard gestures toward an area near the gate. “People line up when there’s an execution,” he tells me.
“I’m trying to imagine what the land would have looked like before the war,” I say.
“Swamp,” Richard says. “It was all trees and swampland.”
It looks similar to where I mostly grew up in the Midwest, except for the murky marshes tucked off to the sides of the road. Around here, the Arkansas, White, St. Francis, and other rivers flow into the Mississippi, carrying mineral-rich sediments—from the Rocky Mountains to the west and the Appalachian Mountains to the east—and depositing them into the floodplain. The alluvial (or stream-deposited) soil has made the Delta into one of the most lucrative regions in the U.S. for farming—largely on the backs of enslaved people and, later, repressive systems of sharecropping and tenant farming. After more than a century of draining swamps, clearing forests, and engineering the surrounding waterways to support large-scale agriculture, more than 70 percent of the wetlands that used to cover this part of the Mississippi River Valley has been lost.
“The inmates cleared a lot of the land,” Richard continues. He’s referring not to those incarcerated at Cummins, but rather to the Japanese Americans who were forcibly relocated here after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
When you think of the so-called internment camps—a euphemism for the facilities where Japanese Americans were incarcerated—you might picture the barren desert landscapes of the American West. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, the newly created War Relocation Authority (WRA) was tasked with setting up a network of camps where 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry, mostly from the Pacific coast, were detained between 1942 and 1945. Dorothea Lange, hired by the U.S. government to document life in the camps, famously immortalized the starkness of Manzanar, located in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, in her photographs. But more than 10 percent of the evacuees found themselves confined in the humid, muddy Delta a few miles west of the Mississippi River, deep in the Jim Crow South.
This is the place I’ve come to see.
THE ENTRANCE to the former Rohwer Relocation Center is easy to miss, but Richard knows the area well. He turns into a small opening in the trees and crosses an elevated pathway where the railroad used to run. That railway carried Japanese Americans from the temporary assembly centers where they were first held for five months in California—sometimes in horse stables—before being loaded onto packed trains and transported to southeastern Arkansas. Just past the line of trees, the vista opens up on a narrow gravel road that splits down huge fields lined with puddles from last night’s storm.
Near the
