There was no sea there to search for pearls for a California girl, a coastal creature used to the magnificent Pacific at her feet. Instead, she had been railed into a swamp along the Mississippi Delta. Despite the barbed wire and chigger-infested woods, Tat carved with her penknife pearls out of hard walnut: miniature heads of horses and flying squirrels.
Tat (center) on her way from California to Jerome Internment Camp, Arkansas in 1942. Jerome eventually housed some 16,000 Japanese Americans forcibly removed from the West Coast during World War II.
She had been sent to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas in 1942, a native Californian designated for her Japanese heritage. As those bombs dropped, she, too, lost everything: her home and her newly created floral shop opened just two days before, on December 6, 1941. They tried to take away her identity as well. It didn’t work. Tat had been the high-school class president and baseball star, the daughter un-colleged so that her brothers might succeed. From that wounding culture and devastating war, the artist carved her purposeful path, sliver by sliver.
The
scrape and huff of locomotives and boxcars carrying troops and weapons screeched daily by the camp, a cruel reminder of her coming. If Tat winced, she carried on to the woods. Escaping the desolation in faces and deprivation of the unplumbed, unheated compound, she gathered scraps of walnut or southern pine to carve. Out of that unwanted swampland along the Mississippi floodplain, foreign in the middle of her own country, Tat created a profile of courage.
She whittled her way out with dignity and grace—through her art. From her carvings and her post-war return to floral design, Tat evolved into a painter, a watercolorist: a water-collaborator with nature. Her paintings open spaces. She gives us pearls through her eye. “The past is never dead. It is not even past” (William Faulkner).
0 Comments