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RootSpring 2016

History of a POW camp in Southern Oregon

Creative resistance duringthe Vancouver Olympics

 A reluctant landlord’s

nightmare

 A Cowlitz son’s weightof remembering

$8

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editor 

Kathleen Holt

 a rt di r ector 

Jen Wick

 a s sis ta n t edit or s

Eloise Holland

Ben Waterhouse

copy editor 

Allison Dubinsky

communications/

publications intern

Julia Withers

Oregon Humanities  (ISSN

2333-5513) is published trian-

nually by Oregon Humanities,

921 SW Washington St., Suite

150, Portland, Oregon 97205.

 We welcome letters fromreaders. If you would like to

submit a letter for consider-

ation, please send it to the

editor at k.holt@oregon-

humanities.org or to the

address listed above. Letters

may be edited for space or

clarity.

Oregon Humanities is

provided free to Oregonians.

To join our mailing list, email

o.hm@oregonhumanities.

org, visit oregonhumanities.

org/magazine, or call our

office at (503) 241-0543 or

(800) 735-0543.

Oregon Humanities2

editorial a dvisoryb o a r d

Debra Gwartney

Julia Heydon

Guy Maynard

Win McCormack

Greg Netzer

Camela Raymond

Kate Sage

Rich Wandschneider

Dave Weich

Matt Yurdana

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12

Just People Like Us

by g u y ma y na rdIn 1940s Southern Oregon,

prisoners of war were more

 welcome than US milita ry of

color.

17

A Tremendous Force of Will

 A conversation about the

Great Migration between

fourth-generation Oregonian

Rukaiyah Adams and Pulitzer

Prize–winning writer Isabel

 Wilkerson.

22

Housekeeping

by mery l wi l l i a ms

In the face of loss, cleaning

hotel rooms and a lifelong

friendship offer solace.

Departments

4

Editor’s Note

6

Field Work

 Veterans reading and discu ssion

group ✢ Vote, Talk, Lead ✢ 

Talking about Dy ing facilitator

Bob Daley ✢ OH News ✢  OH

Public Program Grants ✢ Grants

for Responsive Programs ✢

11

From the Director

40

PostsReaders write about “Root”

44

Read. Talk. Think.

Violation: Collected Essays

by Sallie Tisdale ✢  Bunch

of Animals by Henry Hughes ✢  Every Anxious Waveby Mo

Daviau ✢  From the Heart: The

 Photographs of Brian Lanker ✢ 

 Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen

 I Told My Mormon Parents I

Was Gay, and That’s When My

 Nightmare Began by Alex Cooperand Joanna Brooks ✢ Between

You and Me by Scott Nadelson

46

Croppings

 Sediments, Sequences, and

 Solitude, a traveling exhibit

of works from Playa artists

residency, in Bend and

Portland

3 Spring 2016

26

Not Built for Ghosts

by  helen patti hill A woman faces consequences

after leaving a beloved home

in the hands of others.

31

Stolen Land and Borrowed

Dollars

by  jules boykoff

Creative resistance bloomed

in the lead up to the

 Vancouver Olympics.

36

Between Ribbon and Rootby  c h ri st i ne du p res

Hope and a history of tragedy

live in a Cowlitz woman’s son.

   P   H   O   T   O   B   Y   D   E   B   S   T   O   N   E   R ,   O   R   E   G   O   N   N   A   T   I   V   E   R   O   O   T   S

Features: Root

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Oregon Humanities4

This issue’s cover, ECO #10 , is a tree

fragment and light box sculpture by Rafael

Villares. The piece was created as part of

Intersecciones , an exhibition featuring six

young Cuban artists that ran earlier this year

at Lewis & Clark College’s Ronna and Eric

Hoffman Gallery in Portland. Dan Kvitka took

the photo for our cover.

If you’re an artist and have work that we

might consider for the Summer 2016 issue,

on the theme “Edge,” we’d love to know

about it. Please familiarize yourself with our

publication (back issues viewable online at

oregonhumanities.org), then send us the

following by June 20, 2016:

• A high-resolution digital image (300 dpi at

8” x 10”; scans or photographs, JPEG or

TIFF)

• Your name, the title of the work, the type

of media, as well as contact information

(email and phone number)

• Description of the relationship of the image

to the theme

Please consider the constraints of a

magazine cover (e.g., vertical orientation,

nameplate, and cover lines). We are most

interested in works by Oregon-based artists.

Submissions can be sent to

art@oregonhumanities.org or by post

to Oregon Humanities  magazine,

921 SW Washington St., Suite 150,

Portland, OR 97205.

The Gift of a Known World

 W HEN I WAS A CHI LD, MY FAMI LY MOVED A LOT. FOR

a few months after my parents divorced, we lived in the

basement of my grandmother’s house. For a few days between

homes, we lived in a cabana at the hotel where my sister worked

as a maid. For a few years, we lived in a cement-floored duplex

in a low-income housing project while my mother finished her

nursing degree. I think of my childhood as bookended by two

houses—the first was on a quiet cul-de-sac in Kaneohe where we lived for several years when my parents were still married,

the second was a drafty place near the ocean that my mother

bought with the help of her brother but was only able to hold on

to for a few years.

It’s tempting to gild those times and say that, though we

couldn’t always be sure where we’d live next, my mom and sis-

ters and I were together and togetherness was all we needed to

thrive. But we didn’t thrive; we struggled for the reasons many

people struggle: not enough money and not enough opportunity,

 which meant a lack of stability and security, and an overwhelm-

ing sense of dread about what challenge we’d have to face next.

Being pushed and pulled from place to place because of circum-stance became both the result and source of the instability and

anxiety that defined my youth.

 When I see how my children are beginning to venture inde-

pendently throughout the neighborhood where they’ve spent

nearly their whole lives, mastering the routes from school to

store to friends’ houses, they always return with some relief to

our unremarkable yellow house on our little plot of land on our

dense urban street—the center of their known world, solid and

substantive, destined to be larger than life when they look back

on it as adults.

That’s when I wonder about the power to root oneself to

places, to resist being pushed and pulled, to choose whether to

stay or go—for minutes or years, to travel six blocks to school

and back, or six thousand miles to the unknown and back.

That power seems invaluable in shaping our identities and our

futures, in developing our sense of belonging somewhere, any-

 where, in this vast and inscrutable world.

This year at Oregon Humanities, many of our programs will

be exploring the intricate connections between place, belonging,and power. You’ll see it in the conversations we’re convening

across the state through our This Place program. You’ll see it in

the words and ideas of our Think & Drink guests. You’ll see it in

the pages of this magazine. In this issue, we explore these con-

nections through a history of a small town in Southern Oregon,

the protests of the Olympic Games in Vancouver, a conversation

about the Great Migration, a story of a woman who sees in her

troubled son both the tragic history of her community and its

hopeful future.

On Beach Drive, the last place I lived with my family, when

feeling sulky, I was able to walk to the jagged coastline and get

lost in the pounding of waves against rock and gaze across thePacific Ocean, wondering what the rest of my life would be like.

 What I imagined then at the end of the long tether of childhood

 was both terrify ing and exhilarating. Maybe I was only able

to push into those imaginary places because home—that slim

sliver of a house on that weed-covered dry parcel of land—was

 just a few blocks away.

kathleen holt,  Editor 

  k.holt@oregonhumanities.org

Editor’s Note

Cover Art Ideas for “Edge”

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Oregon Humanities6

HUMA NITIES ACROSS OREGON

Field Work

Sean Davis leads a group of veterans

and community members in a

monthly meeting to read, write, andtalk about the experience of war.

War StoriesVeterans and civilians explore the experience

of war.

S A L LY K . L E H M A N , A W R I T E R W HOgrew up in Eastern Oregon and moved toPortland as a teenager, first became involved

 with A merican Legion Post 134 on Northeast

 Alberta Street in Portland through the literary

readings hosted there. Over the years, she says,

the post has become a home to her and others

in the community.

On the first Tuesday of the month, Lehman

 joins veterans and nonveterans alike for WarStories, a six-month reading, writing, and

discussion group presented in partnership

between Post 134 and Oregon Humanities,

 which has also partnered with the Portland VA

Medical Center and Salem Vet Center for simi-

lar programs.

 As one of the nonvetera n part icipants ,

Lehman insists on the importance of including

civilians in discussions about war. “We need

to give combat veterans more understanding,”

she says. “We need to take the time to listen.”

Post Commander Sean Davis, a Purple

Heart Iraq War veteran who leads the group,

agrees. “If we really want to have veterans

transition back into civilian life, then that

conversation has to happen or else veteransare just going to be talk ing to each other all the

time.”

   T   I   M    L

   A   B   A   R   G   E

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7 Spring 2016

Claire Barrera and a group of Latino

millennials discuss poetry and

politics during a recent Vote, Talk,

Lead workshop.

7

Since coming home from war, Davis—who

 wrote about his experience in his memoir The

Wax Bullet War —has devoted his energy to

making life better for fellow veterans.

“When you go to war you push everything

else down. The only thing that can exist is the

manly man who wants to shoot guns and lead

men in combat, and all the artist stuff is just

going to slow you down,” he says. “When youget hurt, you can’t be that guy anymore. You

lose your whole sense of identity. But it was

the art that saved me. It pulled me out of that

self-destructive rut. I’ve a lways helped other

 veterans write about their experience because

it helped me out, and I want to help them.”

 Accord ing to statist ics, help is needed. A

recent study that looked at Oregon’s population

between 2008 and 2012 found that veterans

accounted for 23 percent of the state’s suicides

but only about 8 percent of the entire popula-

tion. Nationally, veterans are more likely to beunemployed and homeless than the general

population. Black veterans, who make up 11

percent of the total veteran population, repre-

sent 39 percent of the total homeless veteran

population.

 At Post 134, help looks like many things—a

 writing exercise, a community food bank, and

friendships that transcend the isolation that

combat veterans experience. “It’s a matter of

having a conversation,” Lehman says. “We sit

in a circle. We look at each other. We have a con-

 versation. We listen.”

ELOISE HOLLAN D

Vote, Talk, Lead Promoting Oregon’s next generation of Latino

leaders

A CCORDING TO A 2011 PEW RESEA RCH

Center survey, Latinos are one of the most

politically underrepresented groups in Oregon:

12 percent of Oregonians are Latino, yet only2 percent of the state’s elected officials in the

Senate and House of Representatives identify

as Latino. Roberto Franco, director of the

Latino Partnership Program at the Oregon

Community Foundation, aims to change that.

Franco created Vote, Talk, Lead, a four-

part workshop series, to open more pathways

to political engagement among young Latinos

in their late teens to their early thirties. Since

October 2015, the series has hosted workshops

in the Willamette Valley and Southern Ore-

gon; it will conclude in May 2016. Forty-five

Become a new donor by July,

and your gift will be matched.

Make your first gift today at 

oregonhumanities.org

“The magazine makes me feel

more Oregonian, makes me

feel more connected.” – Jo, Oregon Humanities magazine reader

   F   R   A   N   K   M   I   L   L   E   R

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Oregon Humanities8

THINK & DRINK 2016 

Oregon Humanities’ 2016 Think &

Drink series featuring Pulitzer Prize

 winners and finalists continues on July

20 in Portland and July 21 in Astoria

 with journalist and historian Isabel

 Wilkerson, author of  The Warmth of

Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s

Great Migration. Later this year, 

investigative journalist Katherine Boo,

author of  Behind the Beautiful Forev-

ers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai

Undercity, will be the Think and Drink

guest on October 19 in Portland. More

information about these events is avail-

able at oregonhumanities.org.

CONVERS ATION PROJECT 

Oregon Humanities will present fifty-sixprograms in thirty-nine communi-

ties around the state this spring. This

season’s programs address topics such as

the ethics of our food choices, surveil-

lance in America, and the future of racial

diversity in Oregon. Visit our calendar at

oregonhumanities.org to find a discus-

sion near you. Want to host a conversa-

tion in your community? Through May

31, 2016, nonprofits and community

groups may apply to host conversations

to be held in July and August 2016.

THAN K YOU, NEH 

Oregon Humanities has been awarded a

$125,000 gra nt by the National Endow-

ment for the Humanities to support

“This Place,” a series of statewide

programs that will explore the ideas of

place, belonging, and power. The grant

is funded under a new NEH initiative,The Common Good: The Humanities in

the Public Square, which seeks to bring

humanities into the public square and

foster innovative ways to make scholar-

ship relevant to contemporary life. Pro-

grams will take place between August

and November 2016.

PLAYA FELLOWSHIP

In March 2016, Oregon Humanities

awarded the first Barry Lopez Fellowship

at Playa to Portland writer Walidah Imar-

isha. The fellowship is awarded annually

to a writer with strong interest in issues of

 justice and equity in Oregon whose work

resonates in spirit with that of writer

Barry Lopez. Imarisha, educator, writer,

organizer, and spoken word artist whose

 work explores topics of race, power, jus-

tice, and mass incarceration, will receive

a four-week residency at Playa, a non-profit retreat for creative individuals on

Summer Lake in south central Oregon.

Oregon Humanities News

millennials have attended the past three

sessions.  Vote, Tal k, Lead is an import ant

opportunity, Franco says, for Latinos who are

“looking for ways to be involved and to have a

space to have a conversation about their role

in politics.”

Oregon Humanities provides nonpartisan

facilitation for discussions during the Vote,

Talk, Lead workshops, which cover topics

such as public policy, civic health, advocacy,

and public office campaign strategy. In the

last workshop, Oregon Humanities discussion

leader Claire Barrera used literature to spark

conversation about how leaders can be advo-

cates for others. Poetry might seem like anunusual choice for a politically minded group,

but Barrera explains that it actually makes

the conversations work better: “With facili-

tation and a positive community, any person

can engage with a piece of art or literature

and contribute something valuable to those

conversations.”

Barrera also asked questions about how

participants could represent Latino citizens

in public policy. What issues are especially

important to Oregon’s Latino communities?

Insurance, Retirement,Investments and Advice.

standard.com

Having been a part of this community for more than 100 years, we’ve

learned just how important it is to be involved. Whether it’s planting a tree,

reading to a child or proudly supporting Oregon Humanities, we’re working

to strengthen our community.

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9 Spring 2016

 What factors are needed to create change?

 What is needed for a law to be considered suc-

cessful? Barrera encouraged participants to

think about how policies affect them in their

own lives and challenged them to consider the

motivations behind the policies that we make.

 Vote, Talk, Lead works to spark a political

consciousness and a desire to get involved in

politics among millennial Latinos. Franco

says that it’s only a matter of time before young

Latinos become leaders in their communities.

“If we can create a space for them to be impor-

tant, to network, to learn, and to share,” he says,

“we will have educated leaders.”

JULIA WITHERS

Significant Conversations A hospice coordinator inds his niche talking

about dificult topics.

S IX Y E ARS AG O , B O B DAL E Y WAS F IN -ishing up a master’s degree in teaching andlooking forward to a career working with fifth

graders. Instead, he ended up working with

people at a very different point in life. As a hospice transitions and caregiver sup-

port coordinator in Corvallis, Daley does a lot

of one-on-one work with people and their fami-

lies, but one of the things that drew him to the

 job was the opportunity to facilitate peer sup-

port groups for caregivers.

Over the years, he’s found that he has a

knack for helping people talk about topics that

often remain unvoiced in our culture, such as

mental illness and dying. “I provide the struc-

ture without guiding the conversation,” he says.

“I make it okay to share.”

This talent led him to become a facilitator

for Talking about Dying, a statewide partner-

ship between Oregon Humanities and Cambia

Health Foundation that brought thirt y-eight

conversations about death and dying to com-

munities across the state last year.

Despite the fact t hat Daley has been facili-

tating groups of different kinds for more than

a decade, he was surprised at how deep, broad,

and meaningful the ninety-minute conver-

sations were. “These were significant con-

 versations,” he says. “I saw how they planted

the seeds of a cultural change that needs to

happen.”Now Daley thinks about facilitation, in its

many forms, all the time. “Anywhere people

Want to keepup with thehumanities inOregon?

• Visit oregonhumanities.org

to sign up for our monthly

enewsletter

• Like us on Facebook

• Follow us on Twitter

 

Talking about Dying facilitator Bob Daley

“These were significant

conversations. I saw how

they planted the seeds of

a cultural change that

needs to happen.” 

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Oregon Humanities10

2016 PublicProgram Grants

This February, the Oregon

Humanities board of direc-tors awarded $70,000

in grants to eighteen

nonprofit organizations

from around the state.

These grants will support

programs that get people

together to think and talk

about challenging issues

and ideas. To learn more

abut the organizations

listed below (sorted alpha-

betically by city) and their

grant-funded projects, visit

oregonhumanities.org.

Chautauqua Poets and

Writers/Friends of the

Ashland Public Library

(Ashland); $6,000

Pacific Wild Horse Club

(Burns); $6,996

Wallowa Land Trust (Enter-

prise); $5,000

Eugene/Springfield NAACP

(Eugene); $3,750Asian Pacific American

Network of Oregon

(Portland); $3,000

Living Stages Theater

(Portland); $4,000

Media Project (Portland);

$3,000

MediaRites Productions

(Portland); $3,650

Miracle Theatre Group

(Portland); $2,625

NAACP Portland Chapter

1120B (Portland); $3,000

Oregon Nikkei Endowment

(Portland); $3,600

Sisters of the Road (Port-

land); $7,600

Vanport Mosaic (Portland);

$6,579

YWCA of Greater Portland

(Portland); $5,000

Umpqua Valley Arts Asso-

ciation/Douglas County

Museum Foundation

(Roseburg); $4,700

Oregon Black Pioneers

(Salem); $1,500

gather and spend time together,” he says, “I

think: How is the experience facilitated? Is

the type of facilitation serving the group? Is

the facilitation aligned with the hoped-for

outcome?”

This awareness, he believes, is part of what

has allowed him to become better at leading

reflective conversations and why he appreci-

ates being part of a community of facilitators

 who meet regularly at Oregon Humanities to

discuss their experiences. “Facilitation is like

music. Musicians play into their eighties if

they’re able to. It’s because there’s always theopportunity for evolution. No one stops learn-

ing how to be a good group facilitator.”

ELOISE HOLLAN D

Funding Opportunities forResponsive Programming

B E G I N N I N G I N A P R I L 2 0 1 6 , O R E G O NHumanities is offering small grants tosupport public programming by Oregon non-

profit organizations in response to timelyissues or events.

“We want these Responsive Program Grants

to be a quick, accessible way for people to get

their communities talking about what matters

to them,” says Adam Davis, executive director

of Oregon Humanities.

Grants up to $1,000 will be awarded on a

rolling basis to complement Oregon Humani-

ties’ annual grant program (see box, left).

Grants will be awarded within four weeks of a

submitted proposal. Proposals will be accepted

for in-person or online programming taking

place before the end of Oregon Humanities’ fis-

cal year, October 31, 2016. Awards will be made

until funding runs out.“We are in a privileged position at Oregon

Humanities to be able to fund public work

about important issues, and it is our responsi-

bility to respond with comparable nimbleness

and flexibility to local and national events,”

says program officer Annie Kaffen. “There is a

need and desire for people to come together to

think and talk together about the world around

us. We want not only to work quickly but also to

make it easy for others to work quickly.”

To learn more about Oregon Humanities’

Responsive Program Grants and submit a pro-posal, visit oregonhumanities.org.

BEN WATERHOUSE

In March, Governor Kate Brown named

Elizabeth Woody of Warm Springs and Portland

to a two-year appointment as Oregon Poet

Laureate. Woody, author of the collections

Hand into Stone, Luminaries of the Humble ,

and Seven Hands, Seven Hearts , will succeed

Peter Sears, who has held the post since 2014,

at the end of April. The Oregon Poet Laureate

fosters the art of poetry, encourages literacy and

learning, addresses central issues relating to

humanities and heritage, and reflects on public

life in Oregon. Oregon Humanities administers

the Poet Laureate program on behalf of the

Oregon Cultural Trust. For more information,

visit oregonhumanities.org.

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11 Spring 2016 FROM THE DIRECTOR 

AF E W M O N THS AG O A G RO U P O F PE O PL E C AM E TO

Harney County to address what they perceived to be gross

injustice. They had concerns about land ownership, the proper

scope of federal government, and the elevation of some ways of

life over others. Unfortunately, whatever legitimate questions

they hoped to raise were overshadowed by the weapons they

wore a nd t he threats they posed. And they were, as we hea rd

throughout the standoff, not from there. They were outsiders.

 While t his loaded episode was playing out in eastern Ore-

gon, OH’s Humanity in Perspective class in Portland was read-

ing Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham

Jail.” King begins the letter by defending himself against the

anticipated objection that he is a n outsider in Birmingham. He

says that he was invited in, that he has organizational ties there.

But he also says, more boldly and provocatively, that he “cannotsit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens

in Birmingham.”

“Never again,” he continues, “can we afford to live with the

narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives

inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.”

The core of King’s argument is that no matter where we come

from or whom we are perceived to represent, we are all entitled

and perhaps even required to speak out when we see injustice. In

 writing “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,

tied in a single garment of destiny,” King seems to be saying that

our commitments matter more than our origins and affiliations.

It’s tempting to compare these two instances and to wonder

if, in principle, it doesn’t matter that King came from Atlanta

rather than Birmingham, or that the Bundy brothers came from

Nevada rather than Eastern Oregon. Criticize the Bundy broth-ers’ efforts for a number of reasons, but, King’s argument seems

to suggest, don’t condemn them for being outsiders speaking up

on behalf of others—even others to whom they do not immedi-

ately belong.

But it would be difficult and perhaps misguided to ignore the

circumstances surrounding these instances—the burgeoning

civil rights movement in the South, the increase of anti-govern-

ment unrest in rural communities. These circumstances and

our own feelings about them affect how we hear the arg uments

that emerge. And the perceived identities and affinities of the

speakers affect us, too: that King was an African American man

in a dark suit, that A mmon Bundy is a white man in quilted flan-nel and a cowboy hat.

Set alongside each other, King’s “Letter” and the Malheur

occupation raise the complicated question of how much the

identity of a speaker should affect how we respond to the argu-

ment they are making. How much—when it comes specifically

to representation—does our “single garment of destiny” tie us

together? Is it really the case, as King seems to suggest, that any-

one—of any race, gender, or location—can speak for anyone else?

Speaking just for myself (which is how many of us—for lots

of good reasons—have been taught to speak), I often find it dif-

ficult to separate the force of an arg ument I am hearing from my

perception of the person delivering the argument—who they are

and who I imagine they “belong to.” The very same argument

that feels just right coming from one person might feel presump-

tuous, offensive, or dismissive from another.

It is simply the case that, for me, King’s argument about there

being no more outsiders in the United States is strengthened

by his making the argument from jail and by his having been

treated, over and over again, as an outsider.

It probably makes sense to look hard at anyone who claims to

speak for others, to think carefully about how we come to hear

their voices and about what we’re responding to in what they say.

 And it certainly makes sense to take seriously and to treat withcare all those who have to struggle simply to speak for them-

selves and be heard.

Outsiders A DA M DAV IS

   K   I   M    N

   G   U   Y   E   N

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Oregon Humanities12

In 1940s Southern Oregon,

prisoners of war were more

 welcome than US military of color.

O N FEBRUARY 2, 1911, THE  ME DF OR D M A IL TR IB U NE  reported that all but 173 of Jackson County’s 25,756 people were white, listing the others as “56 negroes, 5 Indians, 84 Chi-

nese, and 28 Japanese.” Noting that this demography reflected

that of the state as a whole, the story concluded, “Hence Ore-

gon leads the states and is politically, as well as racially, a white

man’s country.”

That regional racial identity was reinforced in the years lead-

ing up to World War II. The Ku Klux Klan was active in Jackson

County, and Medford, Ashland, and Grants Pass were widely

known as “sundown towns,” communities where unofficial poli-

cies and even signs on telephone poles made it clear that non-

 whites, especia lly African A mericans, should be out of town

before sunset or face dire consequences. Mentions of African

 Americans (often called “coloreds”) in the Medford newspapers

in the 1920s and ’30s usually referenced entertainers, shoe shin-

ers, chauffeurs, porters, poker sharks, and dice players—peopleon the margins of the community.

In 1940, when city leaders were lobbying for a military

training camp to be built in the area, only five black people lived

in Medford. Not everyone in the community supported bring-

ing such a massive facility to the area, especially the orchard-

ists and ranchers who occupied the land where the camp was

to be built and would be forced to sell their land. According to

George Kramer’s definitive history, Camp White: City in the

 Agate Deser t , some suspected those opposing the camp of ini-

tiating rumors that “the proposed camp would be occupied by

Negroes” to boost opposition. A spokesman for camp propo-

nents dismissed those rumors as a joke but still felt the need to

officially deny them.

The camp proponents won out. Camp White sprawled across

seventy-seven square miles of scrub desert, orchards, and pas-

turelands north of Medford, from the shadow of Table Rock

almost to Shady Cove. Named after General George A. White, a

commander in the Oregon National Guard who died two weeks

before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the camp trainedsoldiers of the Ninety-First and Ninety-Sixth Army Infan-

try Divisions. At its center was a cluster of more than 1,300

GU Y MA Y N A RD

LIKE  US

PEOPLE 

JUST 

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13 Spring 2016 Root

buildings. In the early 1940s, it was the second largest “city” in

Oregon, with a peak population of almost forty thousand. At the

time, Medford’s population was about eleven thousand, and only

about thirty-six thousand people lived in all of Jackson County.

In urging the army to locate the camp—referred to as a “can-

tonment” in those days—near their city, local leaders hoped it

 would help the area recover from the Depression and

spur future growth. It did.

 African A mericans were among the soldiers who

came to Camp White, though the exact number is

hard to find. At the end of July 1942, before the camp

 was officially dedicated and soldiers were just begin-

ning to fill the barracks, the Medford News reported a

total of 208 black soldiers at Camp White, members of

a “housekeeping detachment” transferred from Fort Lewis in

 Washington. Even that number caused problems in the commu-

nity. That News story was headlined “Colored Soldier Entertain-ment Is Knotty Problem,” and said, “Most Medford soft drink

places, beer parlors, and restaurants have refused to serve the

negro soldiers.”

“There was quite a group of colored fellas,” recalled Ann

Corum in Common Land , a history of Jackson County published

by the Southern Oregon Historical Society (SOHS). “It was

really quite a thing to see so many blacks because Medford was

known as the town where the sun didn’t set on blacks.”

Both military officials and community members

tried to address this problem. A separate—segregated—

recreation hall was established for African Americans,

and the United Service Organization developed a list

of establishments that would serve them. General

Charles H. Gerhardt, the commander of the army’s

Ninety-First Infantry Division, the first troops to be

trained at Camp White, issued an ultimatum to Med-

ford merchants stating that if they did not serve black troops, he

 would declare the entire city off-limits to all his troops.

 Alf red and Helen Carpenter, a prominent local family, heldentertainment and swimming parties for African American

soldiers at their country home, the  Medford News   reported,

German POW

George R.

Sorg, with

painting at

Camp White

   C   O   U   R   T   E   S   Y   S   O   U   T   H   E   R   N   O   R   E   G   O   N   H   I   S   T   O   R   I   C   A   L   S   O   C   I   E   T   Y

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and “[n]umerous groups of townspeople helped with the

entertainment.”

“There were lots of blacks that were stationed at Camp White

and they were welcome at our house,” says Virginia Westerfield,

a Medford resident and teacher, in an oral history recorded for

SOHS. “My neighbor next door was from Alabama and she said

she had no objections against blacks, but she couldn’t be seen

 with one.”

The Camp White Museum—located in the Veterans Affairs

Domiciliary in what used to be the camp’s hospital, the lastremaining facility from the camp—has no record of how many

black soldiers served at the camp and not one testimonial from

any black soldiers about their experiences at the camp. In a

footnote in his history of the camp, George Kramer notes that

in about half the interviews he conducted, former soldiers sta-

tioned at the camp were surprised to hear that any black soldiers

had served at Camp White. In all the interviews he did, no one

remembered even one African American soldier’s name. It was

like they were never there.

 And little changed in Medford. In 1946, the Southernaires, an

 African American singing group, had to plead with their audience,

 which had just given a rousing response to its performance, for a

place to stay. Private accommodations were arranged. Even as

late as 1963, the statewide branch of the National Association for

the Advancement of Colored People sought assurances from the

Medford City Council that blacks were indeed welcome in the city.

 A FT ER THE N IN ET Y- SI XTH D I V IS IO N, TH E L A ST TRO OP S

to be trained at Camp White, left in April 1944, some of the

 vacated space was filled by German soldiers who had been cap-

tured in North Africa. Camp White was one of at least three POW

camps in Oregon (the others were in Benton and Umatilla Coun-

ties). According to Kramer, the prisoners’ quarters were “spar-tan but comfortable.” Two rows of barbed wire and sentry posts

 with specially trained military police surrounded the converted

barracks. Locals had concerns about security, especially when

prisoners went off-base for work details, but authorities reas-

sured them that POWs would be clearly identified by their cloth-

ing and would always work under “adequate military guard.”

The Germans, whose numbers would grow to almost two

thousand, were definitely prisoners. They were subjected to a

controversial secret reeducation program to make them more

open to American values in the hope that they would spread

those values when they returned home to postwar Germany.

 A few tried to escape but were quickly recaptured. Guard dogs

patrolled between the rows of barbed wire. But according to

John Fahey, who led the reeducation effort at Camp White, “the

Germans cut holes in the inner wire and made pets” of these

ferocious beasts.

Some of the POWs came to find life at the camp somewhat

enjoyable, according to Kramer. Prisoners augmented the diet

of typical army food by baking “fresh hot bread and other good-ies” that even some of their American captors enjoyed. A group

of Germans tended a twenty-five-acre vegetable garden in fertile

soil on the banks of the Rogue River. They published a weekly

 journal called Heimat (“Homeland”).

POWs also worked in local orchards and farms. The Rogue

 Valley had experienced severe labor shortages since the out-

break of the war because so many young men had gone off to

fight. When Camp White was a training facility, American sol-

diers helped bring in the harvests. When they left, the POWs

become the next source of labor, picking pears, peaches, and

tomatoes in Jackson County, hops in Grants Pass, and later,

potatoes, onions, and cotton around Klamath Falls and inNorthern California.

Many of the prisoners welcomed the work. It was like “a vaca-

tion from the war,” one former POW told Kramer. And members

of the local community began to accept and even build friend-

ships with the captured enemy soldiers. Local churches and ser-

 vice organizations donated musical instruments and sporting

equipment for the prisoners and supplies for building a crèche

in the POW compound during Advent of 1944. The prisoners

put on an art show for Christmas, showing approximately four

hundred paintings and pencil sketches. Invitations were sent

out to the general public. When Ashland historian Joe Peterson

gave talks about the Camp White POWs in 2015 for SOHS, a half

dozen or so people brought paintings by prisoners that had been

kept by their families for seventy years.

The last POWs left Camp White in May 1946, shipped back

to Europe via Seattle and New York. A fter the war, according

to Kramer, many Rogue Valley residents maintained contact

 with former POWs. At least three former prisoners eventu-

ally returned to live in the United States, including one, Heinz

Bertram, who returned to Medford and opened an upholstery

store—in a building that had been moved from Camp White.

In the early 1990s, Kramer had the opportunity to interv iew

three of the former POWs who’d come back to America. Ger-hard Wagner settled in California; when asked to summarize

his experience at Camp White, he said, “ We had a lot of fun.”

In all theinterviews

[Kramer] did, noone rememberedeven one AfricanAmerican soldier’sname. It was likethey were never

there.

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In a 2015 interview for an Oregon Public Broadcasting story

about the POW camp, ninety-year-old Zee Minear talked about

 working with the G ermans on her family orchard, which had

hundreds of acres of pear trees. She said the Germans were hard

 workers and her family became close enough to them that they

cried together when the POWs told stories of the hardships of

the war on themselves and their families. They grew so comfort-

able that the American soldiers guarding the Germans didn’t

even load their guns.

“I always say,” Minear explains, “they were just people like us.”

O N J U N E 1 , 1 94 2, AS C O N S TRU C TIO N AT C AM P WHITE

 was nearing completion and soldiers were beginning to arrive,

thirty-eight people of Japanese ancestry from Jackson County—

thirteen families from Medford and one from Eagle Point—

boarded buses with the belongings they were able to carry, to

be transported under military guard to a detention center inTulelake, California. Twenty were native-born American citi-

zens; eighteen were “aliens.”

Though their numbers were small, Japanese people had

a long history in Jackson County. Unlike the marginalized

and ostracized A frican A mericans, they seemed to have been

accepted to some extent by the community.

In a 1994 letter to SOHS, Judy Takahira tells of the issei  (first-

generation Japanese Americans) who came to the Medford area

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, calling

them “our pioneers.” Her mother and father, whose work on

the railroad brought him to Medford, opened a restaurant, the

Jewel Cafe, in the early 1900s. Takahira tells of other Japanesefamilies—the Kamikawas, Fujimotos, Nakagiris, and Saitos—

opening laundries, boardinghouses, and other restaurants and

 working in local hotels. During the Depression, Takahira writes,

her father “never turned a hungry person away—if they could not

pay he would … say—when you have it … you can pay.”

 Virg inia Westerfield, i n her oral history, says of the early

1940s, “I went to school with some Japanese kids and they were

 very A merican.” She tells of a neighbor, Nata lie Parker, in her

early teens, whose best friend was Japanese. “They were the

cutest couple. Natalie was red-haired and pale and this gal was

typical Japanese, and they were almost inseparable.”

On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked

Pearl Harbor—“a shock and traumatic event,” Takahira w rites—

a Mail Tribune story was headlined, “Local Japanese Stunned

by War; Pledge Support.” Kazu R. Maruyama, the twenty-three-

year-old son of the recently deceased “leader of the [Japanese]

colony,” was waiting in line when the US army recruiting station

opened that morning, the story reported. His colleagues from

his work at American Fruit Growers sent a message of congratu-

lations and a pledge of complete support.

Two days later, the  Mail Tribune  urged all citizens to be

calm. “The hot-headed, so-called 120% patriot, who directly

or indirectly urges any sort of illegal punitive actions, againstany law-abiding citizens in this community, whether his skin be

 white, red, yellow or black, represents a very real danger to this

community and to any effective defense effort.”

But the US government decided that it could not distinguish

Japanese aliens from American-born Japanese and ordered

112,000 civilians of Japanese ancestry living in Western states

to report for evacuation to detention centers. The government

incarcerated relatively few people with blood connections to

Germany (about 11,000) or Italy (less than 2,000), the other

enemies of the United States in World War II, and almost a ll of

these individuals were foreign-born.

Natalie’s best friend was among those evacuated. “It was

such a tragedy when their family was shipped off, too,” West-

erfield says. “It was just kind of senseless, but I suppose … there

may have been Japanese that were, you know, underground, so

everybody had to suffer.”

Judy Takahira was also on those buses. “There were no ‘hate’

incidents, on the contrary most of our neighbors and friends

 were very supportive,” she writes. “I remember at the time ofevacuation, some of them coming up and telling me they wished

 we didn’t have to go. Also that year, as a history project, I copied

the whole Constitution by hand. To this day some of my class-

mates remember that.”

Takahira, Natalie’s friend, and the other thirty-six Japanese

residents from Jackson County, including families of young men

 who had joined the US army, were sent to the Tule Lake Relo-

cation Center, a label considered euphemistic by more recent

historians. The  Mail Tribune’s story about the evacuation did

not mention any of the names or report any reactions from

the evacuees. It did say, “Friends were present to witness their

departure,” but like the African American soldiers at Camp White, Japanese Americans had lost their identity and their

 voice—because they “looked like our enemy,” in the words of

Congressman Mark Takano in a speech to Congress last year.

In Tule Lake Revisited: A Brief History and Guide to the Tule

 Lake Concentration Camp Site, authors Barbara Takei and Judy

Tachibana say the camp prisoners did their best to be self-

sufficient, improving their barracks, organizing school and

church activities, and carrying on customs around events like

 weddings and births and deaths.

“But underneath the superficial appearances of normal-

ity,” they write, “inmates struggled with anger, despair, fear

and anxiety. Camp life was monotonous, rife with exasperating

and petty discomforts. There was drinking and gambling and

prostitution and occasional physical altercations when tempers

flared. A former inmate, Toko Fujii, recalled the desperation and

anger in seeing people ‘fight like dogs over the … scrap lumber

that lay scattered in piles by the authorities. I couldn’t believe

it, that we were reduced to fighting amongst ourselves for lousy

pieces of wood.’”

The despair within the camp at Tu lelake was also apparent

to other observers. Toward the end of the war, German POWs

from Camp White were bused to Northern Ca lifornia to work

in the potato and onion harvests. Many of them were droppedoff at the farms without guards, ate lunch with their employ-

ers, and often returned with new clothes or fresh-baked pies

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to their relatively comfortable quarters at a former Civilian

Conservation Corps Camp not far from the “austere black-tar-

paper barracks that imprisoned Japanese civilians,” according

to John Fahey, the reeducation leader from Camp White who

accompanied the POWs.

“Several of t he former POWs I interv iewed thought it was

another POW camp when they drove by [the Tule Lake Concen-

tration Camp],” says George Kramer in a recent interview. “They

 were stunned when they found out that those guys behind those

bars were American citizens.”

“C AM P WHIT E HU RL E D TH E RO G U E VAL L E Y IN TO TH E

modern era,” Kramer writes in his history of the camp. After

the war, most of its buildings were sold off and cleared away, and

the infrastructure the camp left behind served as the under-

pinnings for an industrial development that came to be known

as White City, whose motto is “Proud Past, Promising Future.” White City helped drive postwar industrial g rowth, powering

an economic boom for Medford and Jackson County. Medford’s

population grew by more than 50 percent between 1940 and

1950. A new energy and optimism flourished. But despite all the

change and turbulence and unmista kable progress, the racial

character of the region hadn’t changed. Today, 92.6 percent of

Jackson County residents identify as white, and only 0.8 percent

identify as African American.

“None of the black people who the war brought to the Rogue

 Valley stayed. They all left and never came back,” Kramer says.

“Medford could slip back into its prewar comfort zone.”

Judy Takahira, who had been sent to Tule Lake and later to acamp in Topaz, Utah, returned to Medford after the war to fin-

ish high school with the class of 1946. She was the only Japanese

 American in the school that year. She describes those who were

incarcerated with her as “model American citizens even though

they were denied the legal right until after World War II.” Even-

tually she moved to Southern California.

The stark contrast between the treatment of enemy soldiers

 who were white and European and the treatment of American

citizens who were black or Japanese—who were “friends, neigh-

bors, colleagues, partners, patients, customers, students, teach-

ers,” as Lawson Inada says in his poem “Legends from Camp,”

but who were nevertheless called “coloreds” or “Japs”—is ines-

capable. The World War II experience around Jackson County

and the coincidentally appropriate naming of the community

that grew from the remnants of Camp White make easy targets.

But similar stories played out and continue in other parts of

Oregon and across the United States.

The State of Black Oregon 2015 , a publication of the Urban

League of Portland, includes the story of Julie Grey, a self-

described “little, small black woman,” who runs a construc-

tion company in Jacksonville, about five miles west of Medford.

She says her company has succeeded despite “a good old boys

atmosphere” in the local business community, but it’s difficultfor most black-owned businesses. Local initiatives to support

minority- and women-owned businesses may have lofty goals,

she says, but there is no political mandate to meet them. She

came under attack from white supremacists when she and other

concerned citizens stood up to them at a local rally. She says that

 was an isolated incident and most of the community is support-

ive and friendly. Still, she is considering moving to someplace

like Portland with a larger black community. “Interactions with

other blacks is something you can’t replace,” Grey says.

Like Grey’s neighbors who stood up with her against the

 white supremacists, people in Jack son County in t he days of

Camp White—people like the Carters and Virginia Wester-

field—demonstrated acts of courageous kindness in the face of

community-wide racism and government persecution. Even the

openness of the community toward the German POWs showed

the sort of kindness that we proudly claim as part of the charac-

ter of Oregon. Kindness is a profoundly powerful virtue.

But that kindness didn’t give an identity to the black soldiers

at Camp White or protect Japanese citizens from being impris-oned. Kindness alone didn’t build the kind of community that

felt welcoming to people who were not  just like the white major-

ity, a place they might want to call home.

“Acknowledging that legacy and finding ways to bring it into

the daylight and into open conversation is an important first

step,” says Alex Budd, an organizer in the Rogue Valley office

of Oregon Action, an intercultural movement for justice. “That

doesn’t fix the problem. But it’s a bit of a prerequisite for more

fundamental changes that need to happen.”

 We know what happens to those who don’t learn from his-

tory. In November 2015, Donald Trump, the leading candi-

date for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, ca lledfor the creation of a national database of Muslim Americans.

Senator Ted Cruz, Trump’s chief rival, recently called for law

enforcement to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods.”

Now, Budd says, Southern Oregon’s small Muslim community

“seems to be pretty wary of being put in the spotlight or hav-

ing any unnecessary attention drawn to themselves for fear of

threats and intimidation from the community.” In the face of

these dangers, Oregonians of goodwill must go beyond personal

kindness, beyond awareness and learning, and actively fight the

racist legacies in the state’s history. No one should be the quiet

friend who stands by and watches as people are excluded by a

fearful community or a demagogue who’s decided that “they”

are not sufficiently like “us.”

Guy Maynard is a Eugene writer who first visited Medford

in the early ’70s with fellow members of a Southern Oregon

commune to indulge in the 99-cent buffet at Cubby’s

restaurant. He is the former editor of Oregon Quarterly  and

serves on the Oregon Humanities  editorial advisory board.

Thanks to Fair Housing Council of Oregon for sharing this

story with Oregon Humanities.

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IS A B E L W I L K E R S O N ’ S B E S T - S E L L I N G B O O K THE

Warmth of Other Suns tells the stories of a few of the nearlysix million African A mericans who, between 1915 and 1970, fled

the South for northern and western cities in search of a better

life. This spring, she spoke by phone with Rukaiyah Adams,

a fourth-generation Oregonian whose family was part of this

decades-long exodus known as the Great Migration. The two

discussed the staggering scale of the Great Migration and its role

in the civil rights movement. The following is an excerpt from

their conversation.

 ADAMS:   The fascinating thing about your book and your sto-

rytelling is that it involves places. I wonder, in thinking about

rootedness and the ambitions of the great migrators, how im-

portant was place? What parts of their communities that they

left did they replicate when they moved to Chicago or Cleveland

or Los Angeles?

WILKERSON : To uproot a tree takes a tremendous amount of

energy—force usually, hurricanes or strong winds and thun-

derstorms, is required to uproot a tree. So you think about what

it’s like for them to uproot themselves from the only place that

they’d ever known to someplace far away that they’d never

known, taking a huge leap of faith into the unknown and just

hoping that they and their family and their children would betreated better.

So for African Americans at the time the Great Migration

A conversa tionwith P ulitzerPrize–winningwriter Is abelWilkerson

A Tremendous

Force of Will

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Oregon Humanities18

began, 90 percent were living in the South, and

by the time it was over, nearly half were living

out in the rest of the country. That means that to

uproot themselves from the only place that they

had been—the primary, the ancestral homeland

for African Americans in this country for as long

as African Americans had been on this soil—

took a tremendous force of will. And I think

that that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do

this book: to remind people of the fortitude and

the will that it took to just uproot themselves.

I’m fascinated by and so enamored of the term

you’re using: root. So that’s part of it.

Once they finally got out and then estab-

lished themselves in these places, they hada tremendous sense of hopefulness, even

though they didn’t know how well they would

be received, and their expectations were mod-

est. This was their one chance at having the

 American dream in their lifetime. And so they

... were more forgiving of these new places than

their children and grandchildren ultimately

 would become. Because they were using their

agency—they were making the decision for

themselves as to where they were going to be,

for [the] first time in the country’s history,

they were making the decision on their own as

to where they would live out their lives. That

didn’t mean that they didn’t experience tre-

mendous disappointment. They found that

they were all corralled—really, quarantined—

into overcrowded spaces that became highly

segregated upon arrival. But at least they had

made the decision for themselves. I wanted to

 just get to the rootedness of the people who

 were part of migration themselves.

Then, when they got to these new places, they sought to

replicate those aspects of the culture that they were able torecreate for themselves. So they sought out the food that they

recalled from home that was basically their cuisine. Some of

them would plant collard greens; some of them even had chick-

ens in the backyard if they had a yard. They made the cornbread

and looked for the ham hocks and the kinds of things that they

had recalled from home. And that was one way to establish new

roots in the place where they had relocated.

They also would search out like-minded people, and it was

not difficult to do, actually, because there were so many people

 who were migrating that they could settle into colonies, you

might say, of people as a way of survival. And as I have relived

this in working on this book, I have come to recognize that it wasthe strength of those ties and connections that allowed them to

persevere in the way that they did. There were state clubs in

ADAMS: Now I know afterreading her journal that

her ambitions were a form

of protest that took years

to be realized.

Rukaiyah Adams

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most of these receiving stations, the cities of the North. So in

Chicago, there were Mississippi clubs and Arkansas clubs, and

in New York, as big as New York City is, there was the South Car-olina club and churches where everybody was from some par-

ticular part of North Carolina. So they found ways to replicate

that, to create and plant new groups in this new place that they

had chosen for themselves.

 ADAMS: I’m a descendant of the migrators. … My great-grand-

mother, when she left Louisiana, moved our family farther

north than California. So your story in the book tells the story

of the migration west to California, but

there’s a whole other group of folks who

moved north beyond California from Lou-

isiana. But you mentioned something that was really interesting about the migrators

exercising agency. That’s such an interest-

ing topic. I’ve seen a few posts that have

been reposted of yours on Facebook about

the great migrators basically seeking asy-

lum—that they were escaping the violence

of the Jim Crow South.

But my great-grandmother, when she

got older, shared her Bible with me. She

carried it around her whole life, and I al-

 ways thought that it was kind of sanctimo-

nious, her way of expressing her Christian

faith. It turns out when she was young she

didn’t have a journal, so over the course of

her life she just wrote on top of the pages

in her Bible with a pen.

WILKERSON : Oh, that’s so beautiful.

 ADAMS: My heart was just full in reading

it. And she treated it like a journal. And

so in the journal entries around the time

that my family left Shreveport en route toOregon—she was really one of the lead-

ers of the group to make the decision to

come to Portland—one of the things she

said on the page was she just hoped that

 what she’s doing would enable somebody

in her family to have fresh air, to feel safe,

to have a good education and meaningful

 work. Those were the four things that she

imagined would happen in the future.

My family left the South right as the

traditional view of civil rights was just

starting to pick up. And I’ve always wres-

tled with my identity as someone who

WILKERSON: Every migration

is a referendum on the placethat people are leaving. There’s

something seriously wrong

that would force people to

uproot themselves.

Isabel Wilkerson

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grew up in the North and didn’t understand

 why they would leave. Now that I have the ben-

efit of hindsight, we know how important that

time in the American South was, but I thought,

“Why would she ever leave the South knowing

that her people were gearing up for one of the

most important collective protests in human

history?” And now I know after reading her

 journal that her ambitions were a form of pro-

test that took years to be realized.

WILKERSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. Everymigration is a referendum on the place that

[people are] leaving. There’s something wrong.

There’s something seriously wrong that would

force people to uproot themselves. ... In some

 ways they were uprooting the entire family

tree, because sometimes with whole families

there’d be one person—such as your great-

grandmother—who would get it started, who

 would set out first, almost like there were

many Harriet Tubmans of the Great Migration

 who would go and try to bring back everybody.

So you go to some of these small towns in theSouth, and there’s hardly anyone from a par-

ticular family there anymore. It was a complete

uprooting of entire family trees for some people.

 We look at the civil rights movement as a singular momentin time that some people will date, say, to the time of Emmett

Till and the Montgomery bus boycott and Rosa Parks, segueing

into Brown v. Board of Education and the Little Rock Nine and

Martin Luther King—that era from the mid-1950s until the late

1960s, a ten- or twelve-year period of time that we might iden-

tify as the civil rights movement. But actually, when you think

about the long arm of history, you realize that there have been

protests all along. There have been people protesting from the

time of enslavement. There are people who have been seeking

to escape at great risk to themselves and their families. Obvi-

ously the penalties, the punishment, for trying to escape if you

 were an enslaved person were barbaric and hard to even imag-

ine that another human being would do this to another human

being. We have been exposed to the barbarity of the punish-

ment against enslaved people when they sought to be free. That

is also a part of the civil rights movement, you might say. And,

of course, Plessy v. Ferguson, in which a man in Louisiana—your

family’s originating state—boarded a train in order to integrate,

to challenge the growing move toward segregation through-

out the South after Reconstruction. That was part of the civil

rights movement, too. There had been civil rights legislation in

the 1860s, not just the 1960s. The first … was after the Civil War

had ended and it was clear that the Republicans—interestinglyenough, it was the Republicans—who felt that there was a need

to codify and to formalize the rights of the newly freed people.

 And so the idea of civil rights and the civil rights movement

is a very, very long story. And I think that history, or the way

that we have commercialized history, has done a disservice to

the long-running human rights struggle that African Americans

have been in the midst of and in the forefront of from the time

of enslavement. We tend to be a country with short memories.

So if you think about the history of African Americans in

this country, 246  years  of enslavement—246 years of enslave-

ment—followed by nearly 100 years of the Jim Crow caste sys-

tem, which was the follow-up—the mutation, you might say, of

 what enslavement had been, there was this very short window

of time—of Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War—the

time of so-called “freedom” was so short that African Americans

had been hurled back to the kind of Jim Crow caste system I’m

describing. And it was at that point when [for] African Ameri-

cans the question that they—and a vast, vast majority of them

 were essentially being held hostage in the South—had to figure

out was, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” So

 what did they decide to do? Sometimes the one thing you can do

is to protest with your body. These people were protesting with

the only thing that they had, which was their body. ...

The Great Migration was a seminal, significant, integral part

of this freedom movement, and it took everything to make it

ADAMS: This protestdidn’t end with herfeet and her arrival inOregon. What is the

role that I play in thisconversation?

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21 Spring 2016 Root

happen. And I don’t know that the civil rights movement as we

know it would have happened; it would have happened eventual-ly, but we cannot say that it would have happened when it did had

there been no Great Migration—had there been no advance guard

to in some ways put so much pressure on the rest of the country

to pay attention to protests that had been going on all along.

 ADAMS: The other thing I’m wrestling with now is being the de-

scendent of those people who were so brave in facing such un-

certainty and uprooting. I’m in the generation that my great-

grandmother envisioned a life for. I’ve had more equal access to

education, I have clean air, I have meaningful work. So in the

long arc of what is seeking the freedom of our people, I keep re-

turning to her experience and her notes in her Bible, thinkingthis protest didn’t end with her feet and her arrival in Oregon.

 What is the role that I play in this conversation? I watch what’s

happening in Flint and Ferguson and Baltimore. And there’s

protest in the streets, and at this point I think that the next wave

of power is in owning and having the authority to set the agen-

da and to direct resources instead of petitioning morals or the

law. That’s something I’m wrestling with, that the protest didn’t

end with their arrival. That each one of us, in living out a fully,

 joyfully, powerfully black life, is the continuation of the state-

Rukaiyah Adams is chief investment officer of Meyer

Memorial Trust. Isabel Wilkerson is a professor of

journalism and director of narrative nonction at Boston

University. Wilkerson will be Oregon Humanities’ Think &

Drink guest in July 2016 in Portland and Astoria. For more

information, visit oregonhumanities.org.

WILKERSON: They wereable to make it a betterplace for their childrenand grandchildren, onlyto see the country flipback in the current erathat we’re in.

ment that she was making. That I actually need

to live the life that she imagined would be sogreat, and it turns out it’s better than she imag-

ined. My great joy that I’m the recipient of that

amazing risk that she took—it stuns me.

WILKERSON: We all owe a great debt to those

brave people who took that leap of faith into

the unknown. Not only you as a direct benefi-

ciary, but the country owes a debt to them be-

cause they suffered so much under the brutal

regime of Jim Crow. They—without the help

of outsiders, without depending upon anyone

else—took the step on their own to exercise theirown agency. They went into often unexpectedly

hostile environments. They were often misun-

derstood, they were often dismissed and faced

rejection in these places that they had so much

hope in, and still they persevered and hoped

that life might be better—if not for themselves,

then for their children and grandchildren and

further down the line. Despite the odds, they

 were able to make it a better place for their chil-

dren and grandchildren to the degree that they

could, only to see the country flip back in the

current era that we’re in. So it’s a very complex

interweaving of forces that leads us to where we

happen to be right now.

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Oregon Humanities22

T HE S U M M E R AF TE R M Y F RE S HM AN Y E AR O F C O L -lege, I got a job as a hotel maid in a neighboring town insoutheastern Ohio. I learned early on that the preferred indus-

try term is “housekeeper,” and I also learned that while house-

keepers make minimum wage, they sometimes get tips. I saved

up all of my tips that summer and used them to buy an iPod. It

 was 2005, and I was tired of listening to library books on cas-

sette tape while I cleaned rooms.

 Af ter that summer, I told ever yone who would listen that

they should always tip their housekeeper, because cleaning

is backbreaking work. I didn’t go back to housekeeping again

until 2007, the summer before my final semester of college. It

 was only two years later, but almost everything was different.

Instead of starting my college career, I was nearing the end of it.

I was about to graduate without a plan, and my mom was dying.

There were some silver linings: the second hotel I worked at

 was a tier above the first, so I made better tips. It also served a

better hot continental breakfast that we got to eat for free, after

the guests had had their fill. But by far, the best part was that I

got to spend the summer working with my best friend.

B RITTAN Y AN D I HAD B E E N F RIE N DS S IN C E WE WE REsix, when we met in the first grade. She knew all of my secrets but

never lorded them over me. The summer we worked together, we

 were both twenty and going to school. On my recommendation,

she got hired as a housekeeper shortly after I did. Our manager

liked us and even let us team up.

On a slow day, each housekeeper would be given eight to ten

rooms to clean; together, Brittany and I would clean sixteen to

twenty. We usually took turns doing bedrooms and bathrooms,

alternating room by room. Stripping beds where strangers have

slept is almost as gross as scrubbing a toilet, so no one wants to

get stuck doing either for long. We split the tips in each room,

 which were usual ly between $1 and $5, if anything at all. Only

about half of the g uests tipped, and I’ve since realized a lot of

people are unaware that housekeepers get tips.

The other housekeepers were baffled by the fact that we

 wanted to work together. “Don’t you ever wonder if she’s pick-

ing up tips you’re not seeing?” they sometimes asked one or the

other of us.

 We never did wonder. You don’t go through high school clean-

ing up each other’s puke at parties you weren’t supposed to be at

 without bonding for life.

BRITT KEP T ME FROM THINKING TOO MUCH ABOUT M Y MOM.

 At fif ty-three, she was diag nosed with a mal igna nt braintumor. The diagnosis came in February. When I started at the

hotel that summer, we still thought it was possible that she

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might get better. By the time I quit, she was a lmost gone.

Brittany got me through the summer, and, in some ways,

so did that job. It was the first work environment I genu-

inely enjoyed. I liked our boss and I got along with everyone

I worked with.

I had a swollen shoulder at some point, probably from all the

heavy lifting we did. I spent weeks inside my own head, convinc-

ing myself it was cancer. I finally blurted it out to Brittany in a

blind panic. “I think I have back cancer,” I said. She didn’t laugh,

but she did calmly tell me she was pretty sure back cancer wasn’t

a real thing.

 W E L IK E D HO US E K EE PI NG . IT US UA L LY WA SN ’ T H A R D

 work, and we got to talk to each other all day. To me it was an odd

relief to be able to share such a specific, small work experience or

complaint with her and know that she would know exactly what

I was tal king about.

The principles of being a good housekeeper are simple. First

off, don’t steal. W hatever you covet will never be worth it.

Second, take pride in your work. I was once told that every-

one wants to stay at a hotel and feel as if they were the first

person ever to stay in that room. Nobody wants to think aboutprevious guests, just like nobody wants to think about their

significant other’s exes.

Third, be kind to each other. We were all cleaning up other

people’s crap, and we didn’t need any more of it piled on.

The questions I got about this job were always the same:

Do the blankets really get washed every day? Yes. Do you get

to keep what you find in the rooms after people check out? It

depends. At our hotel, we brought stuff to lost and found. If

it went unclaimed after a certain amount of time, sometimes

 we had the opportunity to keep it. Were the guests assholes?

 We rarely interacted with t hem, to everyone’s relief. Clean-

ing up after someone is a lot easier when you never see them.

There were few things worse than cleaning a particularly nast y

shower drain and then seeing the culprit walk in, having for-

gotten his wallet.

 We got to know a few of the regular guests—or, at least, their

rooms. We liked the doctor. He was a visiting physician who

stayed Monday through Friday in the hotel’s rural town. We

never saw him, so we didn’t mind cleaning his shower, and he

left big tips every Friday. I imagined he looked like Santa Claus.

 W E T O OK T U R N S DR I V I N G T O T H E HO T E L , M A K I N G

that job the only one for which I’ve ever had a regular carpool

schedule. Brittany and I didn’t always work the same five dayseach week, but all the housekeepers had to work weekends. We

 worked together enough of the time to make it worth saving gas.

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Oregon Humanities24

The commute was thirty-five miles round trip, which was nor-

mal for most people who lived in our town. There weren’t a lot of

 job opportunities in the town where we lived, but two similarly

sized cities north and south of us gave those with reliable cars

an edge.

One afternoon that summer a group of us were in the break

room talking about car troubles. At some point I said out loud,

“I’ve never locked my keys in my car.” When Brittany and I left

to leave after our shift was over, we were locked out of my fam-ily’s station wagon.

She just laughed and laughed, while I called my brother to see

if he was in the area with the spare set of keys.

“DO Y O U THIN K Y O U R B RO THE R AN D S IS TE R- IN - L AW

 will have a baby?” Brittany asked me one day as we piled a fresh

duvet cover onto a king-size snow-white comforter.

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking for a second. It was hard to

imagine a new life in my family at a time when we were all so

acutely focused on the life we were about to lose.

Brittany looked at me in a way that let me know she knew

exactly what I was thinking.

“Let’s take a coffee break,” she said, just as content to change

the subject as she was to let me talk.

I D I D N O T S A V E M Y T I P S T H A T S U M M E R . I N S T E A D , I

spent more than I made. I had a credit card for the first time,

and found that what I cheerful ly called “retail therapy” made

me feel temporarily less bleak. I’d like to say I learned the error

of my ways that summer, but it took a couple more years and a

couple grand in senseless debt before I started actively paying

attention to my finances. In fact, it was Britta ny who taught me

how to balance a checkbook that summer.

 We spent money on cigarettes. We al l did; almost every

housekeeper smoked. We took smoke breaks when we got tired

of cleaning after a few hours. We took smoke breaks when the

hotel was slow but we needed to wait out the clock. We took

smoke breaks because we liked taking a few minutes to talk to

someone else for a while. Not everyone had a Brittany.

The other housekeepers were happy to let us join them on

breaks, teasing me for claiming I didn’t smoke while I stood next

to them smoking. In return, Brittany and I listened to women

a decade older than us or more talk about deadbeat dads and

delinquent child support. We cheered on new boyfriends and

cursed their names if things went south. We wanted good things

for each other.

 We could leave early if we finished our rooms, but that meant we didn’t get paid for that time. On Saturdays in the summer we

 were al l in a rush to get out to be w ith friends and family, but

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those were also our busiest days.

Our time was measured, documented. We

clocked in, we clocked out. We took thirty minutes

for lunch, sitting in a break room with a micro-

 wave and a TV showing country music videos.

Taylor Swift was still country then.

I WAS PL AN N IN G TO Q U IT THE J O B WHE N

my last semester of college started, but my boss

convinced me to stay and work weekends. Since

all the housekeepers were on duty for weekends

unless they requested them off, I knew I’d get to

 work with Britt. So I ag reed, to my parents’ dis-

may. They wanted me to focus on school, but also

on not being unreasonably stressed out, consider-ing what was going on with our family. I still saw

the hotel as a big distraction from what was going

on at home. But I couldn’t ignore it forever.

One Saturday that fall, my dad was called

away on business. My brother was working, our

hospice care worker wasn’t scheduled for another

few hours, and no one was around to stay with my

mom. My dad never explicitly asked me to call in

sick, but he was in a bind. He stood and watched

me as I called the hotel. With my throat closing, I

unexpectedly heard myself quit—something I’d

never done before, on the spot or over the phone. I was sick to mystomach, leaving a job without giving notice, but everyone could

see my mom was getting worse. I knew this was not the last time

my family was going to need me.

My dad looked at me with such gratitude, and I saw in

that moment how much had been ta ken out of him in t he last

several months.

 A F E W DA Y S L AT E R , M Y B O S S C A L L E D. S H E S A I D S H E

knew about my mom and knew why I’d quit, and she asked if we

could forget it had happened. I knew I couldn’t. I agreed to work

a handful more days, but gave her a set quit date. To this day, I

don’t know if the hotel was severely understaffed or if she liked

me that much. It doesn’t really matter, but at the time it felt like

a kindness.

She and the rest of the girls signed a card for me when my

mom died, three weeks before I graduated that December.

N O W , E I G H T Y E A R S L A T E R , B R I T T A N Y H A S E A R N E D

two associate’s degrees, a bachelor’s, and a CPA license. She

 works at a ban k and has been mar ried since 2006. She and

her husband have a daughter who attends the grade school we

both attended. I remain in awe of her ability to tackle full-time

school, work, marriage, and motherhood simultaneously.I took a dif ferent path. Af ter I got my journalism degree, I

moved to Columbus to work at a newspaper. A few years later I

moved to Chicago to write, and I recently moved to Portland, where I work in marketi ng. We’ve found ourselves i n very dif-

ferent places as we enter our respective thirtieth years (and

our twenty-fourth year of friendship), but I think about our

summer working together a lot. I love what I do, but no job will

ever be like that.

I won’t likely clean up after travelers again, but I also won’t

know the thrill of walking into a room and scanning it, looking

for and finding a crisp bill. I won’t get to take a few minutes to sit

and notice how toned my arms have gotten from heavy lifting.

 And I won’t get to hang out with my best friend on a slow Tues-

day afternoon, catching up on each other’s week over the smell

of clean laundry.

≠≠

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 NOT   A woman faces consequences after leaving

Oregon Humanities26

TH E C L A N K O F T H E P I C K A X S T R I K I N G B A S A L T

rocks embedded in packed pit run gravel continues all

morning. A break in the main waterline to the log farmhouse

spewed over a hundred thousand gallons in the past week, send-

ing the meter in the box at the street spinning like a top.

The hole deepens slowly as I trade the pickax for a shovel and

toss the heavy pit runoff to one side. The layers of soil reveal rel-

ics of my family’s years together: a plastic Stegosaurus, spikes

dulled from time and trauma; a bent spoon; a ginger-ale bottle

cap. The roots of a nearby elderberry appear, as big around as

my wrist and tough as iron cable. I slash at them with the blade

of the shovel, sever them, then step down inside the hole. Up to

my knees now.

I marvel at how overgrown the pastures have become in less

than one year’s time. The open meadows once cropped close by

my flock of Shetland sheep are now clogged with young alder

and blackberry snarls taller than antlers on an elk, denser than

the Gordian knots of kelp that wash up in winter storms on the

beach just down the street. A sur-sur song of the sea fills the air

as I work, a sound settled deep in my memory from decades of

sleeping and waking in the upstairs bedroom. The pickax clangs

against another rock, sparks flash, and the slightest burst of ac-rid smoke hits my nose.

The bright nibs of new spring buds are just popping out on

HELEN PATTI HILL

the old rosebush. How rare is the deep-red rose that is imper-

 vious to neglect! Soaked all winter by salt gales and still it has

no black spots, no disease or rot. But this was always, always

that kind of place, a land of small miracles if you knew what

to look for. Maybe every piece of land a person spends enough

time living on becomes a museum of small but extraordinary

happenstance. I remember the brief lover who photographed

a tensile spider web caught between the rose thorns, dragged

 with dew that sparkled in the morning light. Memories like

that float up when I am here; I feel my youthful strength re-

turn, my competency.

I rented my farmhouse and land on the north coast of Ore-

gon early the summer before on a year’s lease, uneasily but with

resolve, to five earnest young members of the Dancing Fox An-

cestral Arts School. They were led by a charismatic young man

 who wore buckskins and ferried hand-stretched skin kayaks on

top of his brand-new black Prius like a broken travel paradigm.

John advertised his newly formed school on the Internet and

easily attracted a group of hopeful young people with promises

to teach them how to kill wild rabbits with homemade arrows,

harvest roadkill, build field shelters, and gather mushrooms.

John was an acquaintance of my son, and I thought he’d be agood fit for the place. He wanted to grow food, live by the ocean,

and learn how to work hard. I hoped he and his Dancing Foxes

 BUILT 

 FORGHOSTSher beloved home in the hands of others.

   A   I   M   E   E   F   L   O   M

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   J   E   N   W   I   C   K   S   T   U   D   I   O

 would love this place and care for it like I had. It was the per-

fect solution: a group of eager, hardworking young people to

keep the blackberries down and the fires lit against the damp.

I would be free to go be with my man who lived about an hour

down the coast. I could get away from the ghosts and stop

 waiting for my children to come