Karen Tei Yamashita on Seeking Stories in the Soil

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In the Peace and Justice Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama, we witness an immense wall shelved with over 800 one-gallon glass jars, each filled with soil from a site of an American lynching. The soil in these jars, variegated in color—jet black to gray, volcanic red to mustard yellow—is drenched in the blood and ash of racial violence. Each jar is inscribed with a name, date, and place. On many, the site is known; names unknown.

In 1912, sociologist Monroe Work began to publish a series of 66 lynching reports, creating the extensive archive of over 4,800 lynchings that continues as the Monroe and Florence Work, Today project. These recorded deaths are memorialized at the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, initiated by the Equal Justice Initiative under the dedicated leadership of Bryan Stevenson.

In May of 2019, my sister and I traveled to Montgomery to visit this memorial. On the one hand, the memorial’s elegant architecture commemorates the memory of desecrated lives, an unflinching representation of the dark horror of human hanging. On the other hand, the many shelves of bottled soil complement that bold design with earth tones, soil dug with simple tools, dark soil cradled in bare hands, each life remembered.

It was in the same year that I began my investigation of the local, where I live in Santa Cruz, California. I had lived and taught in this town for over two decades, but ensconced up there on university hill, I assumed our local history was basically a white liberal entrenchment of the summer of love, and this could not be. I began searching for the memories of people of color—migrant, immigrant, enslaved, and native people buried and forgotten. I knew that here and there in cemeteries, museums, under arches, and on plaques, memories are conserved as having happened. Events happened. People happened. In some cases, the stories are told for fourth graders, mandated to study California history; thus, narratives are simplified and censored as age appropriate. It’s not that these stories aren’t true, they are made easier to tell, but our history is hardly easy. Moreover, history is an accounting based on evidence, but depending on the subject, so much of that evidence has been destroyed or erased.

I read that, in 1812, Andrés Quintana, then priest of the Santa Cruz Mission, died, and the first autopsy in California was performed on the dead padre to determine the cause of death. The written report states that during the autopsy, the father’s compañeros were found to be missing; therefore, he was quickly sewn up, the matter quietly settled and his body buried. Compañeros?

In 1860, London Nelson died of tuberculosis and left his land and possessions to the Santa Cruz public schools. Nelson followed his master Matthew Nelson from a Tennessee plantation to the California gold rush, somehow obtained his freedom, and bought the land that is now the site of the US post office on Front Street. Nelson, a formerly enslaved man, is the godfather of our local public school system.

In 1877, two Californios were lynched on the Water Street bridge in Santa Cruz. There is a photograph taken by John Elijah Davis Baldwin to prove it, but very little is known about the two lynched men, Francisco Arias and José Chamales. I could not find their graves.

In 1898, thirteen workers at the California Powder Works, situated upstream on the San Lorenzo River in what is known as Paradise Park, were blown to bits. In the day, gunpowder and dynamite produced by the DuPont family was a lucrative but dangerous business. Twelve of the men seem to be accounted for and properly buried; although what remained of some of them, they say, could fit in a hat. The thirteenth man seems to have evaporated entirely in name and body. Into our thin air.

In 1930, a riot broke out over Filipino migrant workers said to be dancing with white women. A carload of vigilantes shot into a Filipino bunkhouse on Murphy Ranch and killed Fermin Tobera, causing an international incident, possibly forcing the tide of independence in the Philippines. Tobera’s body was shipped on the Empress of Canada from Vancouver to Manila, ceremonially received as a martyr and hero of the state. Perhaps he was finally buried in his home village of Sinait.

In 1949, the Rio Theater on Soquel Avenue was inaugurated with the film, Song of India, starring Sabu, known in his childhood roles as the Elephant Boy and Jungle Book’s Mowgli. With the exception of the handsome Sabu, every other Indian character in this film is in brown-face.

In 1955, a storm sent water rushing down the San Lorenzo, flooding and destroying the fourth and last Chinatown in Santa Cruz—its houses, gambling joints, brothel, and temple. All that remains today are the photographs of old Chinese men, documented by George Lee. These Chinese men are buried in Evergreen Cemetery. London Nelson’s grave is nearby.

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock made the film Psycho, imagining an old Victorian house overlooking the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, Hotel McCray, as his Bates Motel. Today, that Victorian, an extension of the Sunshine Villa, houses Alzheimer patients. From Hitchcock on, horror films set in our retro amusement park, the Boardwalk, have named our town “the murder capital of the world.” In 1987, Joel Schumacher directed The Lost Boys; in 2018, Jordon Peele began filming Us; in 2020, Alex Garland premiered the mini-television series, Devs.

In 1970, a John Linley Frazier, espousing prophetic revelations and denouncing materialist crimes against the environment, entered a house designed by Aaron Green, protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright. This splendid residence was commissioned by a prominent Japanese American ophthalmologist, Victor Ohta. Frazier killed the family within and set the house on fire.

What I began to wonder about were the gaps in the scant evidence. What might we know about life from the point of view of neophytes, a freed slave, two Californios, the photographers, the Filipino migrant, surviving children, or the vanished dynamite worker—possibly Chinese—blown to molecular bits? What is missing in these stories? This would be the speculative work of fiction. I decided to call it nori fiction, my scramble of noir.

And my nori involved walking to the real and imagined places, to stand on the soil where blood is buried, over which the stories hover. It became important to be there at the very site of erasure and haunting. It’s not a very original idea; just what writers of fiction have always done. Walk to the sites, today ordinary. Just an avocado tree or a bridge or a post office or a boarded-up bunkhouse. There, damp with morning fog or glittering in afternoon sunshine, contemplate the noir that is absent of color. Somebody’s paradise, but not mine. Undo the shame of forgetting. Dig and sift through dark soil. Feel its texture. Smell and taste it. Make it give back its moisture and sustenance. Unearth the bones. Discover the complexity of microscopic life forms, the molecular living residue of buried lives. Make the soil speak. Simple tools. Cradling hands. That’s all.

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Dark Soil, an anthology edited by Angie Sijun Lou with stories by Karen Tei Yamashita is available now via Coffee House Press.