Jack Balas, 2014 HALF SCHOFIELD
(#2650),
India ink on paper, 12x16 inches
from the TATTOO DETOUR 2024 series FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
Text (by James Jones)
Violet was like all the other second and third-generation
Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Portagee, Filipino girls with their
first names after English flowers, and their last names coming
across alien centuries, girls whose parents had been shipped in
like cattle to work the cane and pineapple for the Big Five, girls
whose sons were often among the numberless hordes of little boys
shining your shoes on the sidewalk outside a bar, repeating the
antique legend "Me half Japanese, half Schofield," or,
grinning obliquely, "Me half Chinee, half Schofield."
A crop fathered by soldiers who had served their hitch and mysteriously
vanished into that mythical "mainland" that was the
United States."