The Pink Dress
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The Pink Dress
In her play The Pink Dress, Sally Suto talked about the hardships and heart breaking experiences of leaving home and what the camps were like. The first issue she touched on was leaving home. Sally’s family owned a shoe repair shop, that they had to leave behind. The FBI started to raid Japanese American’s houses, looking for anything that would lead them to suspicions of their involvement with the bombing. The Japanese Americans were getting scared, so they had big bon fires to get rid of anything that tied them to Japan. Their bank accounts were frozen, so they couldn’t get to any of their money for their needs of moving. When the Executive Order 9066 came out on Feb. 19, 1942m they had to pack their belongings and move out. The government said that if they moved inland they wouldn’t go to the camps. So that’s what they did. As some families tried to move inland, the state patrol of surrounding states would turn the cars back so they couldn’t move inland. They ended up road on a train with the shades down, having no idea that they would end up in Washington.
The Suto family stayed at the Washington fair grounds from April to August 1942. They lived in a stable on the fair grounds, along with all of the other families that had been on the train. The stable housed a lot of different families, and the worst part was they had no privacy. The walls were so thin that the people next to you could hear everything! The stable had a bad stench to it, being summer, all of the feces that was in and around the stable started to heat up.
From the time the Suto family left the fair grounds they got shipped to Minidoka in Idaho. Putting the camps in the middle of nowhere increased the likelihood that nobody would try to escape. To ensure that nobody would attempt to escape, they had fences with barbed wire on the top, search towers with big spotlights, and guards standing with guns. It looked just like a prison. The housing there was also very bad, but better than the stables. There were four rooms which meant one family each got a room. If the family was too big to put in one room, they got too. This was the case for the Suto family. The only way to go from room to room was to go outside and go in through the entrance. There were walls put up to separate the rooms that they stayed in. The oldest stayed in one room, and the parents and the youngsters stayed in the room next to them. They got three meals a day, it was a lot like cafeteria style. They would stand in really long lines to get their food rain or shine. If you had to use the bathroom, you had to wait in line for that too. There was only one outhouse for sixteen families or even more.