Opening the final stage of her memoir with an original seventeen-syllable haiku, Jeanne indicates that much anguish will precede her acceptance of the past. Unlike Woody, who made the coming-of-age passage in 1946, Jeanne will require another two decades "to accumulate the confidence to deal with what the equivalent experience would have to be for me." Following a partial thawing of frozen feelings in 1966, she and Jim drive their eleven-year-old daughter and five-year-old twin boy and girl to Manzanar in April 1972. The family passes through the Sierras amid Mojave dust and arrives at two gatehouses and other familiar buildings. The Manzanar high school is being used as a city maintenance depot; not much else remains, but Jeanne reconstructs memories from the rocky debris that lies along the camp's fading outlines.
After her family has seen all there is to see and turned toward the car, Jeanne remains alone, eyeing the dark-haired beauty of her eldest child, who is about the age that Jeanne was when Manzanar closed. Able at last to let go of the twenty-five-year phantasm, Jeanne bids farewell to Manzanar, but acknowledges the lingering presence, which "would always live in my nervous system, a needle with Mama's voice." Searching deeper into the tangled, semi-submerged melange of feelings, Jeanne locates a handhold — Papa's defiance, an image that becomes "the rest of my inheritance." In his madcap ranting, he had put value where it belonged — a determination to spend money for a flashy new (even if used) car to avoid the shame of returning like animals in a stinking, crowded bus. He would reclaim his family's freedom in style.
