by Janet Mock
—RALPH ELLISON, THE INVISIBLE MAN
Chapter Seven
My head rested in my mother’s lap. She laid a hand on my hair, frizzy from the humidity of Hawaii. It had been more than five years since she had sent me away, since I had felt her. Now I was finally home. She smelled of plumeria blossoms in the sunshine. Her soft, steady breathing matched the lightness of her touch. My warm face rested on her bare olive-skinned thighs. She wore black high-waist denim Bongo shorts, the ones with large red-and-white letters blazoned on the back label, the kind I noticed all the girls wearing in Honolulu in 1995. Her hair was wavy except for her straight blown-out bangs, and lifted at the roots a bit, strategically covering her large ears, handed down from Papa, who was out on the lanai drinking beer with my uncles.
We lounged in the living room at Grandma’s that first day in Ka’ahumanu Housing, where I had spent my early grade-school years on Oahu. Like Grandma Shellie’s house, Grandma Pearl’s was packed with family, elated to welcome Chad and me back. Mom and I sat on a twin daybed covered in a soft aloha-print quilt, perched above Chad and Jeff, who sat in reluctant brotherhood on the wicker love seat. They were feeling each other out. It would take a couple of months for them to find their groove, both battling for the role of baby in our family.
Mom was no longer a dream. She and Hawaii were real, beyond anything my twelve-year-old mind could imagine.
What’s difficult about being from Hawaii is that everyone has a postcard view of your home. Hawaii lives vividly in people’s minds, like the orange and purple hues of the bird-of-paradise flower. It’s a fantasy place of sunshine and rainbows, of high surf and golden boys with golden hair, of pigs on a spit and hula dancers’ swaying hips, of Braddah Iz’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the North Shore, of hapa goddesses with coconut bras and Don Ho’s ukulele.
Like the chalky, sweet taste of poi, Hawaii can be appreciated only from the locals’ perspective. It’s a special place, a melted and cooled lava rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the anchor of Polynesia, once ruled by kings and queens before religious, military, and tourist occupation, a place where the people, those from the land and others, adopted and migrated, harvested sugarcane for little profit and created their own collective language (pidgin) and food (mixed plates) that became their portal to home, belonging, and fellowship.
Ages before Hawaii’s sugar boom, voyagers from Tahiti left their home to see what was beyond the horizon. Navigating the seas in handcrafted canoes with the mere guidance of the stars, they arrived in Hawaii and created new lives. Centuries later, I landed in 1995, and it was here, on the island of Oahu, that I would mirror my ancestors on my own voyage, one guided through a system of whispers, to reveal the person I was meant to be. I will forever be indebted to Hawaii for being the home I needed. There is no me without Hawaii.
Our first home was on Owawa Street in Kalihi, where the sound of our neighbor’s finicky rooster woke me every morning. With his full black tail and flaming reddish-gold feather mane, he’d call out to the world, his cock-a-doodle-doo met with the collective cackling of neighboring cocks. Their chorus shook our block awake, making it impossible to sleep past seven A.M. in our home, a shabby mustard-colored house that Mom rented from an elderly Filipino couple who lived on the ground floor.
I woke every day with red, itchy eyes and a runny nose, unknowingly allergic to the fragrant plants that surrounded us. Our neighborhood was not rural or rustic. It was urban, a heavily trafficked Likelike Highway away from Kamehameha Shopping Center on School Street, where I’d get formula or diapers for Cori at Long’s Drugs, the place where I would later get busted for slipping clear nail polish and a bottle of remover in my pants in the eighth grade.
Many of the roosters on Owawa Street and other Filipino neighborhoods like ours were in training, living in makeshift wood and steel pens expertly hidden in backyards. The rooster behind our house had long since retired his spiked boxing mittens. He was cranky and omnipresent, clucking near us as we played or fought. He was there when I punched his owner in the face after hearing him call Chad and Jeff “niggers” while shooting hoops in his driveway. I was fiercely protective of my brothers in the seventh grade, adopting a persona that aligned with my goal to be the perfect son for Mom.
Many of our neighbors’ houses were two-story McMansions, and there were always a few under construction. They were palatial pads, symbols of success for first-generation emigrants from the Philippines holding tight to the American dream. The blocks were overrun with columns and balconies and etchings in marble and gurgling fountains where mongooses would splash around and large driveways that could hold a hundred-plus people on first-birthday or graduation celebrations.
Still, Kalihi was all potholes and pansit s, plumerias and paifala s. Walking up and down Gulick Avenue, I’d smell gardenias, lychees, and mango trees, and then I’d pass a house with pungent fish being fried by nanas at dinnertime. Our house wasn’t as impressive as our neighbors’, but it was packed as if it were just as spacious. Cori and her boyfriend—the one she ran away with at thirteen, returning pregnant with Britney a year later—lived in the room in the back. They had their own entrance and a sliding rattan door that separated it from the living room. I can still hear baby Rissa, Cori’s second daughter, crying from her room while lying in mine. Rissa was the first baby I’d ever held and watched grow to become a young woman.
Chad, Jeff, and I shared the bedroom near Cori’s, with a queen-size bed and a six-drawer chest that we split evenly, packed with polo shirts and denim shorts that Mom bought for us from JCPenney long before I started picking out my own clothes. Chad and I slept at the head of the bed, sharing a long body pillow, with Jeff in between us, his dirty feet occasionally kicking our faces. We had two jalousie windows framed by translucent white curtains that blew as the trade winds burst our way. I often looked through those jalousies as I ironed Mom’s work outfits, a chore I took pride in completing every week. We got into a routine where she’d lay the silk shirts and print jersey dresses and polyester skirt suits she’d want for the week on the ironing board, which I always kept unfolded, and I’d display the freshly starched garments on her bed.
Mom’s room had wood paneling that gave off a stagnant, just-opened-for-the-season cabin-like smell, which was apt, as she spent most of her nights at her boyfriend’s house in Hawaii Kai, fifteen miles away on the eastern end of the island. This was a rude awakening to me. In my twelve-year-old brain, I thought that if I ironed her clothes, cut my hair, kissed a girl, threw a football, and made honor roll, then she’d come home more often.
Cori, barely twenty, was our stand-in mother, babysitter, and ringleader. With her teased bangs and ponytail (her hairstyle resembled that of a groomed shih tzu), my big sister was loving and loud, attentive and demanding. Despite the years of distance, the closeness I felt to Cori never faded; she was in all of the childhood photos from when Mom, Chad, Dad, and I were a family.
Cheraine was raised by Grandma Pearl and spent most of her time in Kaneohe, which was connected to Kalihi by the Likelike Highway. She was seventeen, independent, and guarded. She created a life of her own on the windward side of the island with her boyfriend’s family, coming to town only if there was a birthday party or some other family gathering at Grandma Pearl’s.
Chad, Jeff, Cori, the girls, and I would sit around as Cori’s boyfriend smoked weed, and we’d watch every talk show that aired in the mid-nineties. The Ricki Lake Show, The Jenny Jones Show, Sally Jessy Raphael, and The Montel Williams Show were Cori’s favorites. When I got home from school, Ricki would be on, and I’d giggle watching three-year-old Britney chanting, “Go Ricki, go Ricki, go Ricki!” bouncing her chunky legs in front of the TV as if she were singing the Barney “I Love You” song. The only time I had control over the TV was in the mornings, when Chad, Jeff, and I would watch Sailor Moon. We also watched Poetic Justice, What’s Love Got to Do with It, and especially Friday, with Ice Cube and Chris Tucker, on repeat; ever
yone in the house rewatched the movie as if it were the very first time, gamely repeating lines (“You ain’t got to lie, Craig. You ain’t got to lie.” “Puff, puff, give.”).
When Cori was bored with the TV, she’d make Chad and Jeff wrestle, using their irritation with each other as fuel for entertainment. “You can lick him or what?” Cori would ask Jeff.
“Yeah, I not scared of him!” Jeff would say, all bones and bronze and bravado, though he was half a foot shorter than Chad. Jeff had Mom’s sharp features and her crooked front teeth; one sported a green cavity right in the center. No other six-year-old could be as cute with a decaying grille.
“You all mouth, Jeff,” Cori would cackle from the couch, her feet tucked under her butt. “You tink you so bad, ah?”
Chad would just shake his head. It was hard to get a rise out of him: I’d never seen him get aggressive over anything that didn’t involve a ball and a goal. But there was something about the combativeness between them that got a rise out of Chad. No one could get him as pissed as Jeff. They were like that well into adulthood.
Jeff would sit next to Chad at this point, nudging him to fight. “Chad, you should just crack him already,” Cori would instigate.
“Nah, I don’t want to hurt him,” Chad would say under his breath.
Then, boom, Jeff would smack Chad right in the face and they’d be on the floor wrestling, with Chad obviously dominating Jeff and Jeff fighting dirty, going for blood. All you’d hear would be Cori’s cackles, high-pitched and piercing, as she stood up in her short denim overalls.
Like everyone else on the islands, we ate every meal with sticky steamed white rice, which we took turns cooking. I learned from Cori that you measured the water by placing your index finger on top of the uncooked rice and filling the pot with water until it touched the first line on your finger. She made us crispy Spam and Vienna sausages for breakfast, and pork chops, chicken long rice, and ahi poke for dinner, and bought us Jack in the Box burgers when we craved them. She was the best sister you could ask for, always wanting us around. Even when Mom decided to spend a Saturday or Sunday night at home with us, Cori was still the woman of the house. Though neither will admit it, Mom’s longest-lasting, most functional relationship is the one she has with Cori.
When I think back on Owawa Street, my favorite memories are the sound of Cori’s laugh and those viewings of Friday and the lazy afternoons when I’d lie in the family room, the oscillating fan humming on the floor and Rissa, just a baby then, lying on my flat chest. Her whimpering little breaths tickled my chin, and the newness of her existence overshadowed the newness I felt for Mom. My dreams of her yielded to a reality that proved I had gained much more than a mother.
Saturday mornings were a treat. Mom would pick Chad, Jeff, and me up at eleven in her silver Honda, and we’d drive to McDonald’s, Burger King, or the Original Pancake House, where we’d get Portuguese sausage and eggs over rice drenched in soy sauce. Mom wasn’t a big talker, but three kids craving a single parent’s attention easily shattered silence. We’d argue over who got to ride shotgun, what movie we’d see at the Restaurant Row matinee, who’d hold the popcorn, and which two would flank Mom in the dark.
After breakfast and a matinee (I can recall the twisted nightmares I had after watching the gritty thriller Se7en one afternoon), we’d shop for bargains at JCPenney or Ross. Mom loved a good deal and was one of those people who could browse sale racks for hours; this was a pastime I inherited. I glowed as her assistant, perusing racks and showing her shirts or dresses I thought she’d like for their price. She’d let me hold what she found as Chad and Jeff made up games while finding a seat by the dressing rooms.
As we drove home in the late afternoon with new clothes, I’d be filled with angst. I would cross my fingers, hoping that she’d turn off the engine when we arrived in our driveway. The parked car meant we’d see her in the morning and she’d drive us to school, a rare treat. If she left the ignition running, we wouldn’t see her until midweek, when she’d come home to give us Manapua Truck money and grab the change of clothes I left on her always-made bed.
What stays with me about that first year in Hawaii is that Mom did everything “right” despite her absence. She enrolled Jeff in his school’s A-Plus after-school program and Chad in Little League and basketball at the recreation center. She ensured that we had new clothes and ordered us stacks of school photos that we’d sign and give to Grandma and Papa and all our aunts and uncles. One of my brightest memories at the beginning of our life together was visiting the library with Mom, where she helped the three of us complete our library card applications. Though Chad and Jeff weren’t into reading, I spent a lot of my free time in the stacks at the Kalihi-Palama library, just a few blocks from our house. I remember the exhilaration I felt in using that glossy red card and checking out all the Goosebumps serials I wanted, reading The Giver and To Kill a Mockingbird, and sneaking Waiting to Exhale into my bedroom. Mom got pleasure from seeing that I’d inherited her love of books.
Books were majestic to me—precious, even. I wanted shelves of them in my house when I grew up, just like Mom’s. Now I see her stacks of books, like our movie dates, as an escape. Even when she was home, she’d lie in bed reading, indulging in other people’s journeys and imaginings. Mom once told me she wanted to study English and be a writer when she was younger. She was a promising student near the top of her class (her shyness kept her from asserting herself), but her childhood was cut short, and so were her dreams, when she found out she was pregnant at sixteen by the troublemaker from the special ed classes—the one boy who asked her out.
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be five months pregnant, scared, and only sixteen; to walk up to your mother as she cleaned the dishes from dinner and tell her, your heart beating, that you were having a baby with a boy whom you knew was unworthy of you, the daughter your parents thought would do “big things.” Mom said she thought Grandma would yell at her, call her a dumb-ass, and kick her out. She imagined the worst, so she was surprised when Grandma told her, “We need to go doctor, yeah. Make sure you’re healthy.” Mom said that loving reaction from Grandma was pivotal, a moment she looked back on with love decades later when her firstborn daughter, pregnant at just fifteen, reached out to her. I believe Mom used that same moment with me when I reached out to her in my own moment of revelation at our kitchen table.
Grandma Pearl grew up on the windward side of Oahu, where the island curves before it meets the oft-photographed North Shore. She was the baby girl in a family of thirteen kids. She eventually moved to town and married Papa Arthur, a rambunctious, resourceful, big-eared boy who had grown up with an absent, party-girl mother in downtown Honolulu. In May 1959, they had my mother, Elizabeth, who grew up in public housing with her five younger siblings. Mom said the eldest three had a different experience with my grandparents than the younger ones, citing Papa’s youthful bravado and taste for alcohol as the main reasons for those turbulent years. Papa, a former marine turned unionized city employee who drove a street sweeper along the curbs of Honolulu, worked hard and played hard.
Papa could be jovial one moment and brooding the next. You just never knew what you were going to get. Mom would tell us, “Stay out of Papa’s way.” Beyond his mood swings, he had a raunchy sense of humor. He relentlessly tried to get Grandma (or, as he lovingly called her, “The Hawaiian”) into bed. He used to stick his right index finger into a hole he created with his other hand and wink at me, trying to get Grandma’s attention. He was inappropriate but happy and horny, and Grandma would just roll her eyes, telling him, “Shut up, baboose!” He rarely called Jeff by his name, instead referring to him as “Chimp,” which pissed Mom off.
“That motherfucker was so racist. How offensive is that?” Mom said to me in reflection. I could feel the rage she’d held in all those years. She had a strained relationship with Papa, one that would mirror itself in her messy lineup of love interests, including my father, whose blackness definit
ely widened the wedge between her and her father.
Though we came from our native Hawaiian mother, Chad and I were perceived and therefore raised as black, which widely cast us as outsiders, nonlocals—and being seen as local in Hawaii was currency. When we first returned to Oahu, we spoke with a Texas twang that also got us teased. Chad has strong emotions surrounding those first few months; he was traumatized by his apparent blackness, which was a nonevent in Dallas and Oakland, where we were among many black kids. In Hawaii, we were some of the few mixed black kids around. And both our parents taught us that because the world would perceive us as black, we were black.
That didn’t erase the unease I felt when the kids in the housing complex took notice of our darkness and kinky hair. Skin color wasn’t necessarily the target as much as our blackness was the target for teasing. I say this because the kids who teased us were as brown as us, but we were black. There was a racial order that existed even in this group of tweens. They teased that Chad and I were popolo, Hawaiian slang for black people. Popolo are shiny berries that grow in clusters in the islands and are so black that they shine purple on branches. Hearing popolo on that playground didn’t sound as regal as its namesake berries. It sounded dirty, like something that stuck on our bodies, like the red dirt of the playground. I craved belonging, especially to be reflected in my mother and her family, local-bred Hawaiian people, and spent my earlier years trying to separate from my blackness. I’ve since learned that I can be both black and native Hawaiian despite others’ perceptions and their assertion that I must choose one over the other.
Ethnicity is a common part of conversations in Hawaii. Two questions locals ask are: “What high school you went?” and “What you?” Your high school places you on the island, shedding light on your character and where you are from. “What you?” refers to your people, whom you come from, what random mixture has made you. Jeff, whose father was also black, was perceived as Hawaiian, taking after Mom’s side, looking like those bronze-skinned local boys who surfed and threw shaka signs at Sandy Beach. Jeff later told me that he didn’t even know he was black until he was about eight because he didn’t look it and barely knew his father beyond the two-hundred-dollar monthly checks Mom received throughout his childhood.