Becoming Us: Travelers on the Jimmy Come Lately Road

By Judy Bordeaux

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Wally Akahoshi, a Seattle resident and US citizen, and his Caucasian wife Doris face the possibility of internment by the US government. Judy Bordeaux's memoir of four generations of an American family tells of the pioneer great-grandmother who crossed the Plains, deprivation and hunger in the Pacific Northwest during the Depression, the family decision to hide their ethnicity during World War II, and the experiences and life-changing events that shaped her own growth as a parent, teacher, librarian and storyteller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543972443

Book preview

2019

One

Judy

It was 1954. I hadn’t been in school or in Mrs. Harris’s class long enough to understand how the world worked. She was reading our second-grade class a book about our little friends around the world, and when she read the page about children in Japan, I raised my hand and enthusiastically offered, My grandpa is Japanese! Looking at my white skin and light brown, almost blond hair, Mrs. Harris scolded me for lying. I was not used to being scolded.

All of the kids in our class looked white, like me. While there were many Native American families living in Okanogan County, there was only one family in our little town, Tonasket, that claimed Native heritage, and no children of that family were in my grade.

Riding home on the school bus, I stared out the window at the leafless apple trees and nursed my sense of unfairness at being accused of lying by a teacher. It was late winter and the orchards were stark and quiet. As I walked up the driveway, I kicked angrily at the gravel, adding to the scuff marks on my saddle shoes. I fussed and stewed as I practiced my piano lesson.

By dinnertime, I was about to explode. I couldn’t hold her accusation inside me anymore, and while we sat around the table eating, I told my family about this embarrassing injustice. The woman had accused me of lying! The response of my mom and dad? I got in trouble for telling. Nobody at school was supposed to know. My older sister rolled her eyes as if to say don’t you know anything?

Why all the secrecy? It was the 1950s, and as I was finding out, we weren’t supposed to talk about our family history. It was the big family secret. We were trying to pass as a white family. The thing is, as far I could tell, we WERE a white family! I had a lot to learn.

I have always loved juxtapositions. Now, so many years later, I think lining up parts of my parents’ and grandparents’ lives next to mine puts the story of who we are in sharper outline. It gives shape to my family’s story. So, as much as some people love chronological stories and family stories that follow a timeline, I prefer to tell our particular family story with all the parts from different decades interwoven. People don’t think about their lives and tell their stories in only a linear fashion.

The great American story of immigration in the twentieth century is larger and more interesting than a timeline. Maybe someone notices that the young great-grandson looks or acts just like the great-grandfather he never met. An old sepia photograph shows a great-aunt as a young woman posing in the same way one’s own daughter might pose, although 100 years set the two apart.

That said, I’ll begin with a pivotal moment of time in my own life, and then move backwards and forwards in time. I’m telling four generations of our family story and suggesting that while some members of my family have passed across an ocean, a mountain range, or a prairie, others have passed racially or felt the need to. Some have needed passage, and some have gotten it, either literally or metaphorically. While some have benefitted from passing, not all have. I am trying to suggest a resonance and dissonance between generations in my family. While the details are specific to my family in the Northwestern United States, perhaps some of the threads are broader American threads, weaving together a bigger picture of how many of us became us.

Judy Bordeaux at age 5.

Two

Judy

In the 1970s when I was in my mid-twenties, my husband and I and our good friends Cheri and Dennis decided to move to the country, taking our cue, it seems, from the lyrics of singer Taj Mahal: Gonna’ move up to the country, paint my mailbox blue. Cheri and I were friends from our years at Whitman College. Dennis and my husband, Bob, had worked together as engineers in California before relocating to the Northwest. The two men shared a love of photography.

In looking for a place to build our lives away from the city, we were all amazingly naïve about good schools, frost dates, growing seasons, and county building codes. We had decent jobs and the money for a down payment. Joni Mitchell sang to us that we were stardust and that we had to get ourselves back to the garden.

One Sunday we cheerfully walked into a small real estate office in Duvall, a quiet little town about an hour east of Seattle. The two older balding agents took one look at our long hippie hair, scruffy jeans and overalls (our weekend apparel when we weren’t being teachers, or engineers) and promptly ignored us. Taking a cue from their silence, the novice agent-in-training nervously stood up from his desk and greeted us. Much to the young man’s surprise, later that afternoon we agreed to purchase the land he showed us: one ranch house on a twenty-acre parcel of field and forest. It was located in the last range of foothills above the Snoqualmie Valley leading to the Cascade Mountains.

We would split the property. Cheri and Dennis would pay for and live in the house. We would temporarily live with them and build our own house. It was the anxious young agent’s first sale and the agency’s biggest sale in years. We were confident beyond logic. What were we thinking about? Growing vegetables, looking at the stars at night, raising chickens and maybe goats? Giving Cheri and Dennis’s towheaded toddler room to run? Knowledge of nettles, thistles, blackberry vines, winter mud, and an expensive commute to the city would come later.

Sure, the ranch house had aqua plastic drapes at the moment, and the site where we thought a second house would fit perfectly was the location of the former owners’ private trash heap, but the cedars and maples were majestic. There was a large stand of alder for firewood. One edge of the property sloped down and dropped into a small wooded ravine. The property line was in the middle of a stream that wound through the bottom of a small ravine past lush ferns growing on both sides. If you looked south from the hill behind the house or while you were walking up the long driveway, you could see Mount Rainier in the distance. A red-tailed hawk soared in circles above us that first afternoon. We were smitten.

That summer in preparation for the move we bought a used red Ford pickup. One morning Cheri and I were driving out to our new place with cleaning and painting supplies, toys, a bed for her son for napping, and a couple of chairs so we’d have a place to sit down to eat our lunch. Coming down the steep winding road from Novelty Hill into the Snoqualmie Valley, the brakes on the truck failed. Fortunately, this was before the explosion of traffic that would come to these valley roads in later decades. With the assistance of the hand brake, Cheri steered us down to the flat valley highway, where we flew through the stop sign and the sharp left turn, and then eventually came to a gradual stop.

Our momentary terror soon turned to laughter. Cheri hugged her toddler son, who, inappropriate as it seems in retrospect, had been sitting between us on the front seat. ‘’The day the pickup lost its brakes’’ became part of the lore of our families. It isn’t really remembered as near tragedy but as one of the exciting episodes in the move to the country.

Three

Doris

Conversely, my mother Doris’s move from Seattle to a small town almost forty years earlier carried little optimistic excitement. It was 1942 and the United States was at war with Japan. With a rare traveling pass, my parents, Doris and her husband Wally Akahoshi, who often called themselves Doris and Wally Bordeaux, both in their mid-twenties, had been given permission by the US Army to travel away from Seattle to Tonasket. The tiny town in Eastern Washington satisfied the government because it sat on the east side of the Okanogan River. It was, therefore, outside the Western Sector, a portion of the West Coast that was to be free of all Japanese immigrants and American-born Japanese. Part of the requirement for the permission to leave? A new job awaited Wally’s arrival.

My parents’ move was proactive, occurring after the government’s announcement of Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942, ten weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The order called for the removal of Japanese individuals and families living on the West Coast later that spring, when they would be lined up with only what they could carry and transported to be locked up inland in what were euphemistically called internment camps for the duration of the war. It included anyone, even those born in America, who were even part Japanese and living on the West Coast.

Wally and Doris, July 4, 1934. Riverside, Washington.

The good news was that with this traveling pass, my father, the son of a Japanese immigrant father and a Swedish immigrant mother, was avoiding incarceration behind barbed wire in the hastily-assembled prisons, or camps. A letter dated April 30th from Captain Rivosto, Acting Provost Marshall of the Headquarters, NSW and IX Army Corps, which accompanied the necessary pass, stipulated that the trip needed to be completed by May 3rd. It meant they needed to leave immediately.

The bad news was that right then Doris had the flu. The trip would take at minimum one very long day, and moreover, she needed to drive the car. Wally needed to drive their small truck, the one that had provided his livelihood as an independent hauler around Seattle. Now it carried most of their belongings. A job driving a logging truck for the Douglass brothers waited for this city boy in rural eastern Washington.

Over the course of the thirteen- or fourteen-hour trip, Doris occasionally stopped to throw up. Her memories of the trip were rarely discussed and never with a sense that it was an exciting episode in their lives.

What was she thinking about as they headed north from their house in North Seattle to Everett and then east into the Cascade Mountains? Worries, I believe, not dreams. They had just started making payments on a house, their very own home. She no doubt had the payment book in her purse. They had made just nine payments on the $2050 mortgage, but they had paid regularly, and some months made payments well beyond the required $14.75 principal and $10.25 interest. What if no one bought the house? How could they make the payments in Seattle and pay rent in Tonasket? What if they lost the house? And speaking of a house, where were they going to live? Maybe in a motor hotel (as motels were called then) until they found a place to rent. Would Tonasket even have a motor hotel or a house to rent?

I try to imagine what was going on inside her head as she drove out of Seattle and through the green farmlands and forested foothills. The jagged Cascades Mountain range loomed ahead of her above the forests. Against the spring light blue sky, the angular dark blue peaks still partially covered in snow formed a wall in front of her. The pass wasn’t visible, but she knew this rural highway would thread through the mountains. She had seen the mountains from a distance for years. They had never looked so formidable. Surely on the other side of this wall of mountains, away from the war and from the army that could so easily lock Wally up, they’d be safe. Or would they? These words for her come out of my head…..Time for gumption. She perhaps chuckled to herself when she found herself humming Glenn Miller’s In the Mood, thinking how she was definitely not in the mood for