Hawaii

by James Michener

  "We've got to have somebody heading up our enterprises who is clever enough to anticipate the future and bold enough to fight what's wrong. I've given a good deal of thought as to who that should be, and I've come up with only one solid conclusion. Don't ever, under any conceivable circumstances, allow either of my sons, Jesus Duarte or John, to meddle in this business. Pay them well, pay them regularly, and keep them to hell out of Hawaii. If my other son, Janders, had lived . . . well, that might have been a different story.

  "Naturally I've thought a great deal about Mark Whipple. He has his father's brains and would have been my first choice, except that being a West Point man, he thinks he ought to stay with the army, and maybe he's right. But if he ever decides to resign his commission, get him back into the company quick.

  "I've also given a good deal of consideration to Hewie Janders," and here the big, rugged, florid man who had starred as guard at Yale blushed, but Wild Whip continued, "and I fear that Hewie's attributes do not include intellectual force, which is what we need now.

  "I've passed over, as you can see, all the older fellows, because we need somebody who's going to give our firms a long, continued and strong leadership. So I've chosen as my executor, and the man to vote my shares as long as he remains intellectually and morally capable, this fellow." And he reached out and took the hand of Hoxworth Hale, then twenty-nine years old and aching for authority. The other directors could not protest the decision, nor had they any cause to do so, for Hale was obviously the man to take over at this juncture.

  "Three rules, Hoxworth, and the rest of you listen. Don't ever sell sugar short. I went into pineapple, that's true, but only when I had a solid, secure base in sugar. You do the same. Protect sugar by research, protect your quotas by legislation, protect the plantations, protect your labor supply. Stay with sugar. It's better than money, more dependable than blood.

  "Second, never allow labor to rear its head an inch. Study what's happened on the mainland. If a labor leader tries to get onto these islands, throw him back into the ocean and tell him to swim, but don't even show him which way California is. Be careful of the Japanese. They're making sounds like they wanted a union. Trust only the Filipinos, because nobody else can be trusted. But if the bole-boys attempt any foolishness, bat them down.

  "Third, you've got to keep mainland firms from forcing their way into our economy. Don't let the chain stores in. Don't let outfits like Gregory's and California Fruit onto these shores. We have a good system here, one that we've worked damned hard to perfect, and we don't want a lot of radical new ideas polluting it. If such gangsters try to invade, sell them no land, refuse to handle their shipping, tie them up on credit, strangle the bastards."

  He had spoken rather forcefully and now fell back on his pillow, aching in the cancered prostate, in his failing kidneys and in each of his four broken bones. The nurses dragooned a passing doctor, who cried, "Good God, gentlemen, you're most inconsiderate! Now you get out of here!"

  Whip fell into a little sleep, and when in the late afternoon he woke, it was with considerable elation of spirit, for he was reviewing in imagination a series of pictures he had first invented with his wonderful old grandmother, Noelani, the Alii Nui from Lahaina. On her last trip to the Orient, Noelani had acquired a set of Japanese color prints snowing what were called the eight loveliest scenes on earth. It contained a mountain in snow, boats returning to shore, wild geese descending, and sunset. "It is things like these," gracious old Noelani had told her grandchildren, "that are the real beauty of life." They had played a game: "Let's decide what the eight loveliest scenes of Hawaii are." And now Wild Whip, himself older than Noelani when she had umpired the contest, reviewed the permanent grandeurs of his islands.

  For the mountain in the snow, they had chosen the great volcanoes of the big island, mysteriously clothed in white, yet standing within the tropics. Geologists considered them the highest single mountains in the world--19,000 feet below the ocean, almost 14,000 above. Nowhere in the world could boats returning to shore be lovelier than at Lahaina, where the roads were caught between islands. The wild geese descending were, of course, the single most glorious sight in Hawaii: the myriad waterfalls at the leper settlement of Kalawao. "How beautiful they were," Whip thought. "How beautiful."

  The evening glow, which the men who designated the eight supreme views liked especially, could be seen nowhere with finer effect than at the deep red canyon of Kauai, an incredible gash through fifty million years of scintillating rock; at dusk it seemed filled with demonic force. And as for night rain, much loved by the Japanese, where could it be seen to more poetic effect than on the gloomy lava beds of the big island, those convoluted and tormented beds which had overrun the first settlers from Bora Bora?

  The next two scenes were from Oahu, queen of the islands. Once Wild Whip had seen an autumn moon, gray and silver in radiance, shining on the plains that lay at the foot of the Pali, and he had been captivated by the subtle interplay of dark forms and moonlit shadows. The evening bell, which Chinese loved for its memories of home, Whip and his grandmother had assigned to Honolulu, for it was indeed memorable to sit on some broad lanai on a Honolulu hillside, listening to the evening bells of the churches and watching the lights of the city come on.

  There was an eighth view, the sunset sky, the end of the day, the last glimpse of earth, and Whip could never recall where Noelani had placed this concluding view; but for himself, as he thought of his islands now, he could place it only at Hanakai. He saw the Norfolk pines and the royal palms, the trees and flowers he had brought in from all over the world. He saw the wild cliffs and the storms of winter leaping upon them, but most of all he saw beyond the grassy polo field the light green of sugar and higher up the dark blue-green of pineapple. How beautiful Hawaii was, how cherished by the ancient deities.

  He died a Hawaiian, leaving his wild spirit to haunt the places he had loved. He was attended only by a pretty little Filipino girl he had picked up on Kauai. In his last minutes he tried to dictate a note to his seductive, brown-skinned playmate, but to his distress found she could not write, so he bellowed for a nurse, for he wanted to warn his successor: "Hoxworth, best way to keep labor controlled is to keep hand in legislature at all times." But when the nurse arrived to take this message, Wild Whip was dead, the builder of the islands who had been unable to build his own life, and the authorities spirited his little Filipino girl back to Kauai. The glowing sums of money old Whip had promised her she never got.

  At twenty-nine Hoxworth Hale assumed control of the vast holdings, and when he first took the chair that Wild Whip had occupied for fifteen years, he realized that he must seem like a boy presuming to do a man's work, but at least he was dressed correctly for his new role: a dark-blue four-button suit with tight vest, an Egyptian-cotton shirt with detachable stiff collar and a heavy blue and red tie. His cuff links were of gold and pearl, and his hair was parted severely on the right-hand side. He was clean-shaven and steady of mind, and he was determined to send forward the fortunes of the family.

  He was not unaccustomed to command, for quick upon the heels of his impulsive enlistment in the American Expeditionary Force in 1917, he had become a sergeant, and in France had won a battlefield commission, demobilizing as a captain. His troops had great regard for him; he tried to be a brave, self-contained young leader, willing to assault any objective. His men also found him fun to be with, for he posed as having the insouciance that all young men in uniform like to think they have, and his company was one of the best.

  After the war he completed his education at Yale, a quiet young man of twenty-two whose early radicalism had been abandoned somewhere in France, and he never once wandered back to see the notorious Jarves paintings. When he graduated he was already a conservative businessman, eager to make his contribution to Hoxworth & Hale, but in California on his way back to Hawaii he met a lovely girl whose father was a rancher with large land holdings. For a while it looked as if they were going to marry, bu
t one night she spoke disparagingly of Honolulu and suggested that Hoxworth remain in California: "Hoxy! You could have your father assign you to the San Francisco office!”

  His reply had been both cold and distant: "We send only nephews who aren't too bright to California." The courtship ended and after that no one ever again called him Hoxy.

  When he had been at work for some time in the head office in Honolulu he married his third cousin, Malama Janders, who was Hewie Janders' sister, and within a year he had a son Bromley, whom he prudently registered for both Punahou and Yale. It was true that whenever business took him to San Francisco, he experienced a sense of deep excitement when he first saw the California coastline, and he often wondered what had become of the pretty rancher's daughter; but that was about as errant a thought as he ever had.

  Now, in 1927, Hoxworth Hale was these things, and in each he was an almost perfect exemplification of the archetype: he was a Hale, a Punahou graduate, a Yale man, the head of a great island firm, and a man married to his cousin. Therefore, when he spoke at his first meeting of the H & H board, his colleagues listened: "There is an unfortunate spirit of agitation in the world today, and I believe our first concern must be the protection of our position by exercising some kind of logical control over the legislature."

  He outlined a sensible plan whereby his impressive cousin, big Hewie Janders, got himself elected president of the senate, while half a dozen assorted lawyers, treasurers and accountants who worked for the big firms ran for lesser seats. For speaker of the house Hoxworth shrewdly selected the jovial, relaxed Chinese politician Kangaroo Kee, to whom he offered several lucrative contracts; and so carefully did the new young leader plan that before long Hawaii passed into that secure and reasonable period when most of its legislation was decided upon first at quiet meetings held in the board room of H & H, whence it was sent to trusted representatives who could be depended upon to enact laws pretty much as proposed by Hoxworth Hale and his close associates.

  The board room of H & H was on the second floor of a large, fortlike building that stood at the comer of Fort and Merchant, and from this combination of facts the powerful clique that ran Hawaii came to be known simply as The Fort. It included, of course, H & H and also J & W. The Hewletts were members, as were some of the lesser planters from the big island. Banks, railways, trust companies and large estate owners were represented, but exactly what The Fort consisted of no man could properly say; it was simply the group who by common consent were entitled to meet on the second floor of H & H, a close-knit, cohesive body of men who were determined to give Hawaii a responsible form of government.

  The Fort rarely abused its power. If some crackpot legislator not subservient to it wanted to curry favor with his constituents shouting, "I promised you I'd get a playground for Kakaako, and I'll get you a playground for Kakaako," they let him yell, and at one of their meetings Hoxworth Hale would ask, "Is there any reason why there shouldn't be a playground at Kakaako?" and if such a project did not imperil any fundamental interest of The Fort--and if its cost could be passed on to the general public without raising real estate taxes--the playground was allowed to go through. But if the same legislator subsequently shouted, "Last year plantation trains running without lights killed four people, so I insist upon lights where plantation trains cross public roads," then The Fort moved quietly but massively into action. "We've looked into costs of such lights," Hoxworth Hale would tell his directors, "and they would cut our sugar profits to the bone." Somehow such bills were iceboxed in committee, and no amount of yelling by infuriated legislators could get them unfrozen.

  Any major bill affecting either sugar, pineapple or land had to be actually drafted by The Fort itself; such bills were too important to be left to the whims of a legislature. But it was to Hoxworth Kale's credit that he did not allow grossly abusive bills to be proposed: "My interpretation of democracy is that business must never intrude into ordinary legislative processes, except where matters of vital importance are at stake and then never for selfish motives." At some sessions of the legislature forty-nine out of fifty bills were not interfered with in any way; but this was partly because the legislators had learned to ask, before proposing a bill, "Will The Fort go for this?" It was common prudence not to propose something that The Fort would automatically have to fight.

  A fine example of Hoxworth Hale's statesmanship came one January when his wife, a Janders girl with a warm concern for human rights, said at breakfast, "Hoxworth, have you seen the casualty lists that resulted from the New Year's fireworks?"

  "Were they bad, Malama?" he asked. One of the annual highlights in Hawaii was the Chinese New Year, when the Chinese practically blew the city apart with detonations of the most spectacular sort.

  "This year one boy was killed and fourteen were seriously maimed," Malama reported. Really, these fireworks must be outlawed."

  Hoxworth, who agreed that the practice of blowing off arms and legs was ridiculous, told his wife, "If you can outlaw them by legal means, go ahead."

  Consequently, Mrs. Hale enlisted a committee of fifty public-spirited ladies--all of them haole, unfortunately--who descended upon the legislature with a bill to halt the crippling of children. The first legislators approached thought: "Mrs. Hale! Probably got The Fort behind her. Better pass this bill." So the famous anti-fireworks bill was introduced.

  And then all hell broke loose! By comparison, the New Year's pyrotechnic display was a subdued affair, for Chinese legislators shouted on the floor, "This is discrimination! We have always blown up fireworks on New Year's."

  To everyone's surprise, the Chinese quickly gained support from the Hawaiians. "We love fireworks!" they protested.

  A bombastic Portuguese legislator gave an impassioned plea for the right of little people to have their fun just one night a year, and a huge lobby of storekeepers, who made more than seventy per cent profit selling firecrackers, began to disrupt all customary legislative procedures.

  At this point jovial Kangaroo Kee, speaker of the house and supposed to be a creature of The Fort, displayed leadership of an unexpected sort. Handing the gavel over to a friend, he descended to the floor of the house and delivered one of the most impassioned bits of oratory heard in Hawaii for many years. He shouted: "This evil bill is an attempt to deprive the Chinese of Hawaii of an inalienable right! It is religious persecution of the most abominable sort! Do the haole women who brought in this bill need fireworks for their religious ceremonies? No! But do Chinese need them for their ceremonies?"

  He paused, and from the entire Chinese-Portuguese-Hawaiian contingent of the house went up a great, throbbing cry in defense of religious freedom. So Kangaroo Kee continued: "I warn the people who have dared to bring this bill onto the floor of this house that if it is voted into law, I will instantly resign! I can stand political domination. I can stand economic retaliation. But I cannot stand religious persecution!" Men wept and the hall echoed with cheers.

  That afternoon Hoxworth Hale summoned The Fort and asked glumly, "What in hell has happened around here? Why do we suddenly wind up as religious persecutors?"

  "Your wife started it all by wanting to save children from fireworks," big Hewie Janders reminded him. "And my wife, damn her bleeding heart, gave your wife support."

  "All I know," Hoxworth growled, "is that the Chinese are threatening to start a new political party. The Hawaiians are charging religious persecution. The Portuguese have enlisted both of them behind that grade-crossing bill. And Kangaroo Kee submitted his resignation this morning. Says he'll suffer no more dictation from tyrants. Gentlemen, we better do something."

  Hewie Janders suggested: "Could you make a formal statement? In defense of religious freedom and firecrackers?"

  "Get a secretary," Hoxworth snapped, and when the young man arrived, the head of The Fort dictated his memorable announcement beginning: "The Islands of Hawaii have always known religious freedom, and among those who have defended this basic concern of all men none have excel
led the Chinese. To think that unfeeling persons should have seen fit to trample upon one of the most cherished rituals of Chinese religion, namely, the explosion of fireworks at festive seasons, is repugnant."

  At this point Hewie Janders pointed out: "But it was your wife and mine who did it, Hoxworth! If you release such a statement, they're going to boil."

  To this Hale replied, "When the structure of society is endangered, I don't care whose feelings get hurt."

  The upshot of his retreat was that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Janders considered their husbands contemptible cowards, and said so; Kangaroo Kee, breaking down into a copious flow of tears, announced to the house that he had reconsidered his resignation because the leaders of Hawaii had magnanimously reaffirmed their belief in religious freedom; the dangerous Chinese-Hawaiian-Portuguese coalition was broken up; and merchants sold more fireworks than ever before. On the next Chinese New Year two children were blinded, a girl had three fingers blown off and there were sixteen cases of disfiguring burns; but the islands were happy. The Honolulu Mail, summarizing the wild night, called it a splendid manifestation of island charm. But Hoxworth Hale, whose wife pointed out that the blindings and maimings were exactly what her bill had been intended to prevent, remarked glumly to The Fort: "We must never again outrage the firecracker vote."