A Farewell to Jim Houston (Rebel Girl)

Every August, Rebel Girl and her family always stop off at Manzanar, just off Highway 395, as they leave summer in the high sierra and return to Orange County. During the last couple decades, they've watched the site develop from near ruin status to national historical site, complete with maps, guided tours and an interpretive center. Rebel Girl still remembers her shock at discovering the Manzanar graveyard. She realized that while she knew her history, she hadn't really fully contemplated the fact that while thousands were incarcerated, of course, some must have ended their lives there as well. At the interpretive center, Rebel Girl and Red Emma always point out one name engraved on the wall of internees: Jeanne Watkatsuki. "You know her," they tell the little guy. "When she was a little girl about your age, she lived here with her family." Once a ranger at the site heard them talking about Jeanne and inquired. "We've tried to get her to come back, for the anniversaries, but she never has," the woman said, disappointed. Together with her husband, James D. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote what is perhaps the most acclaimed chronicle of the Japanese internment experience, Farewell to Manzanar, now in its 65th printing. At the end of the book, Jeanne recounts her first and, Rebel Girl believes, only visit back to the camp where her family spent years. Reb understands perhaps why Jeanne has chosen to not to return even though others have. On and off throughout the years, Rebel Girl has taught Farewell to Manzanar as a text in her California-themed composition class. She's also taught James D. Houston's collection of essays, The Men in My Life, a book that seems to reach even the guys in the back row. This year, she's just finished teaching another of his essays, "The Light Takes its Color from the Sea." Every summer since 1992, she has spent part of it in the warm company of one Houston or both in Squaw Valley. The couple seems to represent a kind of quintessential California experience: Jeanne, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, Jim the son of poor migrants from West Texas, together becoming a kind of symbol of possibility and reconcilation. Last Thursday Jim Houston passed away at his home in Santa Cruz at age 75, in the house that he and Jeanne lived in since 1962, the same house where a survivor of the Donner Party, Patty Reed, had lived out the rest of her life. Patty Reed appeared as a character in his novel Snow Mountain Passage. Writing in The Washington Post, Carolyn See noted, "The novel takes one of the most ghoulish, garish parts of our national myth and transforms it into a dignified, powerful narrative of our shared American destiny." According to an appreciation released by his publisher, Knopf:

"Houston worked in the grand tradition of place-sensitive California writers such as Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, and Wallace Stegner, authors he once applauded for "manag[ing] to dig through the surface and plumb a region's deeper implications, tapping into the profound matter of how a place or a piece of territory...can shape character, bear upon the sense of history, the sense of self." These words perfectly capture what Houston himself achieved in the sixteen books he published, half of them novels..."I think of the [California] Coast Range as my home base and habitat," Houston once wrote. "I have come to see Hawaii as a heart-land, some form of older spirit-home." For Houston, California and Hawaii were connected, and he invited readers to see California as he did: “not at the outer edge of European expansion or rather, not only there---but also on a great wheel of peoples who surround a basin, an ocean whose shores touch the south Pacific, Asia, and Latin America."

Rebel Girl has met many writers and what she admired most about Jim Houston was that the heart and intellect she found on the page was also present in his person. It isn't always like that. We writers are often at our very best on the page - and in real life, without the opportunity to revise, well... Jim was one of the good guys.