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."