Hawaii

by James Michener

  Hale thought: "In Hawaii, from the same number of Japanese we could have got fifteen thousand volunteers . . . even to fight Japan. But here the Indians won't offer to fight an enemy with whom they have no ties of emotion whatever." And again he felt superior.

  But when Sir Ratu Salaka finished his brandy, like the crusty English squire he was, he observed: "In Fiji, I assure you, we are not proud of the way in which we have failed to assimilate our Indian sugar workers. Some day we shall have to pay a terrible price for our neglect--civil disturbance, perhaps even bloodshed--and I as a Fijian leader am particularly aware of this tragedy. But when I visit Hawaii, and see how dismally the Polynesians have been treated there, how their lands have been stolen from them, how Japanese fill all the good governmental jobs, and how the total culture of a great people has been destroyed, I have got to say that even though our Indians are not so well situated as your Japanese, we Fijians are infinitely better off than your Hawaiians. We own our own land. I suppose that nine-tenths of the farm land you saw today belongs to Fijians. We also control the part of the government not held by Englishmen. Today our old patterns of life are stronger than they were fifty years ago. In all things we prosper, and I can think of no self-respecting Fijian who, aware of the paradise we enjoy here, would consent to trade places with a pitiful Hawaiian who had nothing left of his own. You Americans have treated the Hawaiians horribly."

  A silence fell over the group, and finally Hoxworth said, "You may be surprised, Sir Ratu, and I suppose these officers will be too, but I am part-Hawaiian, and I do not feel as you suggest."

  Sir Ratu was a tough old parliamentarian who rarely retreated, so he studied his guest carefully and said bluntly, "From appearances I should judge that the American half of you had prospered a good deal more than the Hawaiian half." Then he laughed gallantly and offered another round of brandy, saying to Hale, "We are talking of rather serious things, Mr. Hale, but I do think this question is sometimes worth considering: For whom do invaders hold an island in trust? Here the British have said, 'We hold these islands in trust for the 'Fijians,' and in doing so, they have done a great disservice, if not actual injustice, to the Indians whom they imported to work the sugar fields. But in Hawaii your missionaries apparently said, 'We hold these islands in trust for whomever we import to work our sugar fields,' and in saving them for the Chinese, they did a grave injustice to all Hawaiians. I suppose if our ancestors had been all-wise, they would have devised a midway solution that would have pleased everybody. But you gentlemen are heading east to Tahiti. Study the problem there. You'll find the French did not do one damn bit better than the English here or the Americans in Hawaii."

  To this Hale added, "At least, in Hawaii, we will never have civil war. We will never have bloodshed."

  Sir Ratu, a giant of a man, in all ways, could not let this pass, so he added, "And in a few years you'll have no bloody Hawaiians, either." And the party broke up.

  It was with badly mixed emotions that Hoxworth Hale left Fiji, but when his PBY deposited the inspecting team in American Samoa he was propelled into an even more perplexing speculation. He arrived at Pago Pago the day before the islanders were scheduled to celebrate their annexation to America, which had occurred in 1900, and he was told that since a Japanese submarine had recently bombarded Samoa, the islanders this year wished to demonstrate in special ceremonies their loyalty to America. But when Hale rose next morning he saw that the forbidding peaks which surrounded Pago Pago had trapped a convoy of rain clouds, which were in the process of drenching the islands, and he assumed that the ceremonies would be cancelled.

  But he did not know Samoans! At dawn the native marines stood in the rain and fired salutes. At eight the Fita Fita band, in splendid uniforms, marched to the "Stars and Stripes Forever," and by ten all citizens who could walk lined the soggy parade ground while Samoan troops executed festive maneuvers. Then a huge, golden-brown chief with a face like a rising sun and enough flesh for two men, moved to the foot of the flag pole and made an impassioned speech in Samoan, proclaiming his devotion to America. Others followed, and as they spoke, Hoxworth Hale began to catch words and finally whole phrases which he understood, and with these Polynesian tones reverberating in his memory he experienced a profound mental confusion, so that when the Fita Fita band played the "Star-Spangled Banner" and the cannon roared, he did not hear the wild cheering of the crowd.

  He was comparing what he had seen in Samoa with what he remembered of the way Hawaii celebrated its Annexation Day, and he was struck by the difference. In Samoa guns boomed; in Hawaii decent people maintained silence. In Samoa people cheered; in Hawaii many wept. In Samoa not even storms could daunt the islanders who wanted to watch once more their beloved new flag rising to the symbolic tip of the island; but in Hawaii the new flag was not even raised, for Hawaiians remembered that when their islands were joined to America, the act had been accomplished by trickery and injustice. In the inevitable triumph of progress, a people had been raped, a lesser society had been crushed into oblivion. It was understandable that in Samoa, Polynesians cheered Annexation Day, but in Hawaii they did not.

  To Hoxworth Hale these reflections were particularly gloomy, for it had been his great-grandfather Micah who had engineered the annexation of Hawaii, and Hoxworth was always reminded by his family that the event had coincided with his own birth, so that friends said, "Hawaii is the same age as Hoxworth," thus making a family joke of what many considered a crime. But he could also remember his great-grandmother, the Hawaiian lady Malama, as she told him before she died: "My husband made me attend the ceremonies when the Hawaiian flag was torn down, and do you know what the haoles did with that flag, Hoxy? They cut it into little pieces and passed them around the crowd."

  "What for?" he had asked.

  "So they could remember the day," the old lady had replied. "But why they would want to remember it I never understood."

  There were many Hawaiians, even in 1942, who preferred not to speak with a Hale and who refused to eat at the same table with one. But others remembered not stern Micah who had stolen their islands but his mother Jerusha who had loved the Hawaiians, and those who remembered her would eat with the Hales while the others would not. Now, in Samoa where the rains fell, Hoxworth Hale, the descendant of both Micah and Jerusha, felt their two natures warring in his sympathies, and he wished that something could be done to rectify the injustices of Hawaiian annexation so that his Polynesians would take as much pride in their new flag as the Samoans did in theirs; but he knew that this was not possible, and the old sorrow that had attacked him at Yale when he contemplated the stolen Jarves paintings returned and he thought: "Who can assess the results of an action?" And he found no joy in Samoa.

  But when he reached Tahiti, that Mecca of the South Seas, and his seaplane landed in the small bay that lies off Papeete, between the island of Moorea and the Diadem of Tahiti, making it surely the loveliest seaplane base in the world, his spirits were again excited, for these were the islands from which his people had come. This was the storied capital of the seas, and it was more beautiful than he had imagined. He felt proud to be of a blood that had started from Tahiti. He was disappointed in the legendary girls of the island, however, for few of them had teeth. Australian canned foods and a departure from the traditional fish diet had conspired to rob girls in their teens of their teeth, but, as one of the air corps majors said, "If a man goes for beautiful gums, he can have a hell of a time in Tahiti."

  What interested Hoxworth most, however, was not the girls but the Chinese. The French governor pointed out that the Americans would find a secure base in Tahiti, because the Chinese were well in hand. They were allowed to own no land, were forbidden to enter many kinds of business, were severely spied on by currency control, and were in general so held down that the Americans could rest assured there would be no problems. Hoxworth started to say, "In Hawaii our island wealth is multiplied several times each year by the Chinese, who do own land and who do go into bus
iness. The only currency control we have is that all our banks would like to get hold of what the Chinese keep in their own banks." But as a visitor he kept his mouth shut and looked.

  It seemed to him that Tahiti would be approximately ten times better off in all respects if the Chinese were not only allowed but encouraged to prosper. "You hear so much about Tahiti," he said in some disappointment to the general leading his party, "but compare their roads to Hawaii's."

  "Shocking," the general agreed.

  "Or their health services, or their stores, or their churches."

  "Pretty grubby in comparison with what you fellows have done in Hawaii," the general agreed.

  "Where are the Tahiti schools? Where is the university? Or the airport or the clean hospitals? You know, General, the more I see of the rest of Polynesia, the more impressed I am with Hawaii."

  The general was concerned with other matters, and on the third day he announced to his team: "It's incredible, but there simply isn't any place here in Tahiti to put an airstrip. But there seems to be an island farther north where we could probably flatten out one of the reefs and find ourselves with a pretty fine landing strip."

  "What island?" Hale asked.

  "It's called Bora Bora," the general said, and early next morning he flew the PBY up there, and Hoxworth Hale thus became the first part-Hawaiian ever to see his ancestral island of Bora Bora from the air. He saw it on a bright sunny day, when a running sea was breaking on the outer reef, while the lagoon was a placid blue surrounding the dark island from which rose the tall mountains and the solid, brutal block of basalt in the middle. He gasped at the sheer physical delight of this fabled island, its deep-cut bays, its thundering surf, its outrigger canoes converging near the landing area, and he thought: "No wonder we still remember poems about this island," and he began to chant fragments of a passage his great-great-grandfather Abner Hale had transcribed about Bora Bora:

  "Under the bright red stars hides the land,

  Cut by the perfect bays, marked by the mountains,

  Rimmed by the reef of flying spume,

  Bora Bora of the muffled paddles!

  Bora Bora of the great navigators."

  The other occupants of the PBY were equally impressed by the island, but for other reasons. It possessed an enormous anchorage, and if necessary an entire invasion fleet could find refuge within the lagoon; but more important, the little islands along the outer reef were long, smooth and flat. "Throw a couple of bulldozers there for three days, and a plane could land right now," an engineer volunteered.

  "We'll fly around once more," the general announced, "and see if we can agree on which of the outer islands looks best." So while the military people looked outward, to study the fringing reef, Hoxworth Hale looked inward, to see the spires of rock and the scintillating bays that cut far inland, so that every home on Bora Bora that he could spot lay near the sea. How marvelous that island was, how like a sacred home in a turbulent sea.

  Now the PBY leveled off and started descending toward the lagoon, and Hoxworth thought how exciting it was to be within an airplane that had the capacity to land on water, for this must have been the characteristic of the first great beasts on earth who mastered flight. They must have risen from the sea and landed on it, as the PBY now prepared to do. When it was near the water, speeding along at more than a hundred miles an hour, Hoxworth realized for the first time how swiftly this bird was flying, and as it reached down with its underbelly step to find the waves, he caught himself straining with his buttocks, adjusting them to insure level flight, and then seeking to let them down into the waves, and he flew his bottom so well that soon the plane was rushing along the tiptop particles of the sea, half bird, half fish, and then it lost its flight and subsided into the primordial element, a plane that had conquered the Pacific and come at last to rest upon it.

  "Halloo, Joe!" a native cried at the door, and in a moment the plane was surrounded by Bora Borans in their swift, small canoes.

  Among the first to go ashore was Hale, because he knew a few words of Polynesian and many of French, and as he sat precariously on the thwarts of one of the canoes, and felt himself speeding across the limpid waters of the lagoon toward a sprawling, coconut-fringed village whose roofs were made of grass, he thought: "Hawaii has nothing to compare with this."

  In a way he was right, for after the general and his staff had been fed with good sweet fish from the lagoon and red wine from Paris, the headman of the village approached with some embarrassment and said in French, which Hale had to interpret: "General, we people of Bora Bora know that you have come here to save us. God himself knows the French would do nothing to rescue us, because they hate Bora Borans, and do you know why? Because in all history we have never been conquered, not even by the French, and officially we are a voluntary part of their empire. They have never forgiven us for not surrendering peacefully like the others, but we say to hell with the French."

  "Shut him up!” the general commanded. "The French have been damned good to us, Hale, and I want to hear no more of this sedition."

  But the headman was already past his preamble and into more serious business: "So we Bora Borans want to help you in every way we can. You say you want to build an airstrip. Good! We'll help. You say you'll need water and food. Good! We'll help there too. But there is one matter you seem not to have thought about, and on this we will help too.

  "While your flying boat sleeps in the lagoon, you will have to have some place to sleep on shore. We will put aside seven houses for you."

  "Tell him we need only two," the general interrupted. "We don't want to disrupt native life."

  The proud headman, dressed in a brown lava-lava and flowered wreath about his temples, did not allow the interruption to divert him: "The biggest house will be for the general, and the rest are about the same size. Now because it is not comfortable for a man to sleep alone in such a house, we have asked seven of our young girls if they will take care of everything."

  It was here that Hoxworth Hale, son of missionaries, began to blush, and when the maidens were brought forth, clean, shapely, dark-haired, barefoot girls in sarongs and flowers, he began to protest, but when the headman actually started apportioning the girls, the tallest and prettiest to the general, and a shy, slim creature of fifteen to him, Hale quite broke up and the translation stopped.

  "What the hell is this?" the general asked, but then the tall, beautiful girl of seventeen who had been assigned to him, took him gently by the hand and started leading him toward his appointed house.

  "My God!" the irreverent major cried. "In Bora Bora they got teeth!" And one of the girls must have known some English, for she laughed happily, and because these islanders were more primitive and ate more fish, their teeth were strong and white, and the major accepted his girl's hand and without even so much as looking at the general, disappeared.

  "We can't allow this!” the general protested. "Tell them so." But when Hale explained this decision the headman said, "We are not afraid of white babies. The island likes them." And after a while only Hoxworth Hale stood in the meeting shed, looking at his long-tressed, fifteen-year-old Polynesian guide. She was a year older than his own daughter, not quite so tall, but equally beautiful, and he was a totally confused man, and then she took his hand and said in French, "Monsieur le Colonel, your house is waiting. We had better go.”

  She led him along dark-graveled paths beneath breadfruit trees whose wide leaves hid the hot sun. They went along a row of coconut palms bending toward the lagoon as they had done a thousand years before, and in time she came to a small house withdrawn from the others, and here she stopped at the trivial lintel that kept out the wandering pigs and chickens, and said, "This house is mine." She waited until he had entered, and then she joined him and untied a length of sennit that held up the woven door, and when it fell they were alone.

  He stood rigid in acute embarrassment, holding onto a bundle of papers, as if he were a schoolboy, and these she took from h
im and then pushed him backwards slowly, until he sat on a bed with a wooden frame and a woven rope mattress, and he was as frightened as he had ever been in his life. But when she had thrown the papers into a comer she said, "My name is Tehani. And this is the house my father built me when I became fifteen. I plaited the roof of pandanus, but he built the rest."

  Hoxworth Hale, then forty-four, was ashamed to be with a girl fifteen, but once when she passed where he was sitting on the bed, her long black hair moved past his face, and he smelled the fragrance of that sweetest of all flowers, the taire Tahiti, and he had never encountered that odor before, and automatically he reached up and caught at her hand, but she was moving rather swiftly, and he missed, but he did catch her right leg above the knee, and he felt her whole body stop at this command, and start to move willingly toward him. He kept hold of her leg and pulled her onto the bed, and she fell back happily and smiled up at him, with the taire flowers about her temples, and he took away the sarong and when she was naked she whispered, "I asked my father for you, for you were quieter than the others."

  When the inspecting team convened late that afternoon around an improvised table under the breadfruit trees, by common but unspoken agreement, no one mentioned what had happened, and they proceeded to discuss where the airstrip should be, just as if nothing unusual had occurred, but as night fell and girls appeared with an evening meal, each officer instinctively brought his girl to the table beside him, and there was unprecedented tenderness in the way the older men saw to it that their young companions got a fair division of the food.

  They had not finished eating when a group of young men with long hair in their eyes and pareus about their hips, appeared with guitars and drums, and soon the Bora Bora night was filled with echoes. The audience waited until the general's tall, slim beauty leaped into the dancing ring and executed the wild, passionate dance of that island. This was a signal which permitted the other girls to do the same, and soon one had the cocky major in the ring with her, attempting a version of the dance, and he was followed by a colonel and then by the general himself. It became a wild, frenzied, delightful dance under the stars, and all the older people who were watching applauded.