Lucile Nickerson Colyer — Thy Neighbor

Lucile Colyer turned a voyage to Japan, the sudden death of her husband, and the friendship that carried her through grief into a book-length protest against wartime racial hatred. Written in plain, direct verse, Thy Neighbor follows Japanese and Japanese American friends from shipboard companionship through war, forced removal, incarceration, military service, and resettlement. Colyer writes as a Los Angeles woman struggling to hold onto the people she actually knows while newspapers, government orders, and wartime fear reduce them to an enemy image. The poem is earnest and deliberately repetitive: grief becomes a daily practice of attention, recurring phrases gather moral pressure, and the word “neighbor” is tested against what the country was willing to do. Its six-part structure makes an intimate bereavement widen into a record of national betrayal, sustained by one writer’s stubborn refusal to let friendship yield to propaganda.

Lucile Nickerson Colyer was a Los Angeles poet and the author of one verified book, ...Thy Neighbor..., published by the Willing Publishing Company in 1946. HathiTrust’s authority record gives her birth year as 1890. Her death date and fuller family chronology remain unverified; similarly named genealogy entries have not been treated as evidence. The book supplies the clearest surviving outline of her life. Colyer and her husband sailed for Japan aboard the Asama Maru. After he died suddenly during the voyage, Japanese members of the ship’s company and other acquaintances supported her. These friendships continued after her return to the United States and shaped her response to the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

A December 1946 review in the Pacific Citizen identifies Colyer as a Los Angeles resident and reports that she devoted much of the war to helping Japanese American friends. The review describes the poem’s movement from the voyage and bereavement through war, evacuation, and resettlement. A letter reproduced in the book is addressed to her at 202 North Kingsley Drive, Los Angeles. Colyer’s decision to write a book-length blank-verse narrative placed private memory in a public form. The volume was sold in soft green velour and hardbound editions and advertised directly to readers. Its prefatory endorsements, illustrations, and testimonial structure suggest that she understood the book as an intervention as much as a literary object.

No second book or dependable body of periodical poems by Colyer has been verified. The chief research needs are a reliable death record, the civil identity and chronology of her husband Bob, documentary identification of Nanjo San and Shizue, and the possible survival of Colyer’s correspondence or Willing Publishing Company records.