Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  “Immanuel Quigley and his wife Jeptha, brig Thetis, 1822,” called the clerk, and with a heart bursting with passion and history and the confused love of God, Elinor Henderson rose, the first Quigley ever to have done so in that society. Her rising must have inflamed bitter memories in the hearts of the Hales and the Hewletts and the Whipples, for although intractable Immanuel Quigley had suppressed his secret memoirs, which Elinor had found so damning, he had allowed enough of his ideas to escape so that his name was not a happy one among the mission families. Defiantly, his great-great-great-granddaughter stared ahead, and then she heard from the assembly a hammering of palms and wild applause. Continuing to stare ahead, for she was no more forgiving than her difficult ancestor had been, she resumed her seat as the clerk cried mournfully, “Abraham and Urania Hewlett, brig Thetis, 1822.” Again there was a loud scraping of chairs, with many Hawaiians standing, for Abraham’s offspring by Malia, his second wife, were numerous. Many of the missionary descendants considered it inappropriate for such people to rise as if they were the true descendants of blessed Urania Hewlett, but the Hawaiians got up anyway and nothing could be done about it.

  That night Elinor Henderson told Kelly, “A visitor touches Hawaii at great risk. He never knows when the passions of the islands will engulf him.”

  “You think you know enough now to write the biography?” Kelly asked idly.

  “Yes.”

  “You determined to call it The Dispossessed?”

  “More than ever.”

  “Who do you think the dispossessed are?” Kelly taunted.

  “You. Who else?”

  “I thought maybe at the mission society you discovered that they were the real dispossessed,” he argued.

  “How do you mean?”

  “They came here to bring Congregationalism, but we despised their brand of Christianity. Now most of us are Catholics or Mormons. Today we have nearly as many Buddhists in the islands as Congregationalists. Likewise, they came with a God they believed in. How many of them still have that God? And they had big ideas. Now all they have is money.”

  “You sound very bitter, Kelly. And in a way I’m glad.”

  “Do you know why the Mormons had so much success in these islands? They admit frankly. ‘In heaven there are only white people.’ I suppose you know that a nigger can’t get a place to sleep in Salt Lake. So they tell us that if we are real good on earth and we love God, when we die God’s going to make us white, and then we’ll go to heaven and all will be hunky-dory.”

  “I don’t believe Mormons think that, Kelly,” she protested.

  “It squares with the facts,” he said carefully, but his anger was rising furiously and he was afraid of what he might say next. He tried to halt his words, but in spite of himself they rushed out: “Of course, the other Christians tell us that God loves all men, but we know that’s bullshit.”

  “Kelly!”

  “We know it! We know it!” he stormed. “It’s as clear as the mountains at dawn. God loves first white men, then Chinese, then Japanese, and after a long pause He accepts Hawaiians.”

  “Kelly, my darling boy, please!”

  “But do you know the one consolation we got? Can you guess? We know for goddamn certain that He loves us better than He loves niggers. God, I’d hate to be a nigger.”

  Since Elinor Henderson had greater capacity for emotion than for logical control she was, of course, unable to write her book; in fact, she was prevented from even trying by one of those strange, wild occurrences that mark the tropics. At six-eighteen on the morning following her visit to the mission society she was still asleep, but in the deep waters of the Pacific, nearly three thousand miles to the north, an event of tremendous magnitude was taking place. The great shelf that lies off the Aleutian Chain was racked by a massive submarine earthquake, which in the space of a few minutes tumbled millions of tons of submerged ocean cliff down hidden mountainsides to a new resting place on the ocean floor. It was a titanic redisposal of the earth’s crust, and the ocean in whose depths it occurred was shaken so violently that a mighty rhythmic wave was launched southward at an incomprehensible speed; but even though something like seven per cent of the entire ocean was affected, the resulting wave was physically inconspicuous, never more than four or five inches high.

  Actually, one shipload of sailors passed right over it without knowing, for at seven-eighteen that morning a slight swell lifted a Japanese tanker some three inches higher than it had been a moment before, but no one noticed the event and it was not recorded in the log. But if the captain had been alert, and if he had known where the wave had originated only an hour before, he could have written: “Tsunami caused by an Alaskan submarine earthquake passed under our ship. Speed southward, 512 miles an hour.” And if he had thought to flash a radio warning throughout the Pacific many lives would have been saved, but he neither saw nor thought, so the epic tsunami sped on unheralded at a speed approaching that of sound. If it encountered no stationary objects like islands, it would ultimately dissipate itself in the far Antarctic, but if it did come upon an island, its kinetic energy might pile waters more than seventy feet deep upon the land and then suck them back out to sea with demonic force. The coming in of the waters would destroy little, but their awful retreat would carry away all things.

  While the tsunami was passing unnoticed under the Japanese tanker, Elinor Henderson was just rising to enjoy the last effects of dawn over the Pacific, and at nine she went down to the beach to watch the beachboys playing sakura. She was amused to hear them swearing in pidgin when the run of the black cards went against them, but this morning had a special attraction in that Florsheim appeared among the boys dressed in store clothes: polished tan shoes, a suit that was not quite big enough for his huge frame, a shirt that bound a little at the collar, a knitted tie that hung awry and a tropical straw hat. Beside him stood the rich girl from Kansas City, hardly able to keep her hands off him and crying to one group after another, “God, ain’t he a hunk of man? We’re gettin’ married in St. Louis.”

  Florsheim grinned and handed his Chevvy keys to Elinor: “You, seestah, tell blalah Kelly take care my jalopy.” She said she would, and when she saw Kelly she asked, “How long do you think Florsheim’ll stay married this time?”

  “Seem like blalah Florsheim gonna look funny Kansas City da kine. So bimeby dis wahine gonna find he doan’ talk so good and she gonna gi’e him lotta wahine pilikia. So come late October you gonna see blalah Florsheim back on de beach wid a Buick convertible.”

  “This time it’ll be a Cadillac! Want to bet?” She laughed and then an idea came to her: “Kelly! As long as we have the car, why don’t we go on a picnic?” She insisted upon buying all the food, and at ten o’clock, when the tsunami was less than six hundred miles from Oahu, she pointed to a snug little valley on the north shore of the island and cried, “They saved this sandy beach for us!” And Kelly spread their blankets under a palm tree.

  They went swimming, and when they were drying in the sun, Elinor said, “I’m going to leave Hawaii, Kelly. Don’t speak. I’m falling in love with you, and I’m not the kind of woman who goes around robbing cradles.”

  “I’m old enough to teach you a lot,” Kelly protested.

  “I would never marry you, Kelly … eight years younger than I am. And I will not contribute to your delinquency.”

  “We could have a wonderful time,” he insisted, pulling her toward him.

  “I think it’s immoral when a girl gets involved with a man she has no possibility of marrying. It’s disgraceful, the way girls use you, Kelly.”

  He fell silent, then started pitching pebbles at a nearby rock. Finally he said, “If you ever go to another island, Mrs. Henderson, don’t ask so many deep questions. Take it as it is.”

  “I’ll stay away from islands,” she promised. “I wanted to see why my ancestors couldn’t stomach this one.”

  “Did you find out?” he asked.

  “Yes, and I can’t stand it e
ither.”

  “Why not?” he asked drowsily.

  “I always side with the dispossessed. You know, Immanuel Quigley got into great trouble in Ohio, aiding the Indians.”

  “I’m sorry I wrecked your book about Quigley. Will they be angry … at Smith?”

  “The biography of one man is the biography of all men,” she said. “In the passage of time, Kelly, we all become one person.”

  “Do you honestly think a kanaka like me is as good as a haole like you?” he asked.

  “I was once taught that if a pebble falls in the Arabian desert, it affects me in Massachusetts. I believe that, Kelly. We are forever interlocked with the rest of the world.”

  She saw that he was sleepy, so she cradled his sun-browned shoulders in her lap, and he asked for his guitar so that he might play a little slack-key, and he picked out melodies that spoke of the sun-swept seashores that he loved. After a while the guitar fell from his hands, and he dozed.

  Elinor, watching the panorama of sandy beach and palm trees, studied with interest what she thought was the changing of the tide, for the ocean waters seemed to be leaving the shore, until at last they stood far out to sea disclosing an emptier reef than any she had seen before, and she watched certain prominent puddles in which large fish, suddenly stranded, were whipping their tails in an attempt to escape. She began to laugh, and Kelly, forgetting where he was, asked drowsily, “Whassamatta you laff?” And she explained, “There’s a fish trapped in a pool?” And he asked, “How da heck he stuck in dis …”

  In horror he leaped up, saw the barren reef and the withdrawn waters. “Oh, Christ!” he cried in terror. “This is a big one!” He grabbed her in his strong arms and started dashing across the sand, past the useless Chevvy convertible and on toward higher land, but his effort was useless, for from the tormented sea the great tsunami that had sucked away the waters to feed its insatiable wave, now rushed forward at more than five hundred miles an hour.

  It was not a towering wave but its oncoming force was incredible. It filled the reef. It kept coming relentlessly, across the sand, across the roads, across the fields. In low areas it submerged whole villages, but if it was not constricted and could spread out evenly, its destruction was moderate. However, when it was compressed into a narrowing wedge, as at the mouth of a valley, it roared in with accumulating fury until at last it stood more than seventy feet higher than along its accustomed shore.

  In its first tremendous surge inward it trapped Kelly Kanakoa and Mrs. Henderson in their snug valley. It did not whip them about, like an ordinary breaker, for it was not that kind of wave; it merely came on and on and on, bearing them swiftly inland until Kelly, who knew how awful the outgoing rush would be, shouted, “Elinor! Grab hold of something!”

  Vainly she grabbed at bushes, at trees, at corners of houses, but the implacable wave swept her along, and she could hold nothing. “Grab something!” he pleaded. “When the wave sucks back out …”

  He was struck in the neck by a piece of wood and started to sink, but she caught him and kept his head above the rushing waters. How terrifying they were, as they came on with endless force. She was swept past the last house in the village and on up into the valley’s tight confines, the most dangerous spot in the entire island from which to fight a retreating tsunami, for now the waters began to recede, slowly at first, then with speed and finally with uncontrollable fury.

  She last saw Kelly almost unconscious, hanging instinctively to a kou tree upon whose branches she had placed his hands. She had tried to catch something for herself, too, but the waters were too powerful. At increasing speed she was sucked back over the route she had come, past the broken houses and the crushed Chevvy and the reef she had seen so strangely bare. As the last stones whipped past she thought: “This cursed island!” And she thought no more.

  Now the drowsy life of the beachboy drifted from day to day, from week into week, and then into sleepy sun-swept months; the years of sand and sea crept on. In late November, when Florsheim drove his new Pontiac convertible off the Moana Loa and up to his old stand at the Lagoon, Kelly thought: “I wish I could tell Mrs. Henderson that it was neither a Buick nor a Cadillac,” and the old hurt returned.

  At the Swamp his mother Malama sang in the late afternoons with her Hawaiian friends: Mrs. Choy, Mrs. Fukuda, Mrs. Mendonca and Mrs. Rodriques, and they were never again bothered by Kelolo and his haole girls. For the most part he kept strictly to the Lagoon, where he sang a little, played some slack-key, and got a lot of cables. In time he found great consolation in Johnny Pupali’s summary of sex: “It’s the greatest thing in the world. You never get enough until you’ve just had some.”

  Once Florsheim remarked: “Kelly blalah, I t’ink dis one t’ing berry punny.”

  “Wha’ dat?” Kelly asked.

  “Allatime New York dey got pitchas wid’ colors ‘Come to Hawaii!’ An’ dey show dis rock wid wahines, grass skirts, flowahs in de hair, wigglin’ de hips like to speak, ‘You come to Hawaii, mister, we gonna screw till you dizzy.’ ”

  “Ain’ nuttin’ wrong wid dat,” Kelly reflected.

  “But de punny t’ing, Kelly blalah, it ain’ so easy to ketch a wahine on dis rock. It ain’ dem mainland kanakas has de good time ovah heah, it’s de wahines. You know what I t’ink, blalah?”

  “You speak.”

  “I t’ink mo bettah dey get you ’n’ me on de pitchas.” And he fell into an exaggerated pose, his muscles flexed, his dark eyes staring out to sea past Diamond Head, and he made an ideal travel poster. Relaxing with laughter he yelled, “Kelly blalah, we de real attraction.”

  Later when Kelly was locked in a room with a red-hot divorcee from Los Angeles her father arrived unexpectedly and banged on the door, shouting, “Betty! I don’t want you wrecking your life with any beachboy bum.” But Kelly slipped out through a side hallway, so no real damage was done.

  WHEN Shig Sakagawa landed at Yokohama in early 1946, he studied his ancestral homeland with care, and when he saw the starving people, the bombed-out cities and the pathetic material base from which the Japanese had aspired to conquer the world, he thought: “Maybe Pop’s right, and this is the greatest country on earth, but it sure don’t look it.” In his first letter home he tried to report faithfully what he was seeing, but when Kamejiro heard it read, he sent his son a stern reply which said: “Remember that you are a good Japanese, Shigeo, and do not say such things about your homeland.” After that Shig wrote mostly generalities.

  His first days in Japan were tremendously exciting, for the bustle of Tokyo was reviving, and hordes of little workmen, each of whom looked like his father, scrambled over the bombed ruins, cleaning up as they went. Shig had never before seen such national vitality, and in time he became impressed with Japan’s unconquerable resilience. Along the streets he saw innumerable elderly women like his own mother, wearing baggy canvas pants, and they worked harder than the men, lugging away big baskets of rubble. Almost while he watched, Tokyo was cleaned up and prepared for a new cycle of life. “I have to admire such people,” he wrote to his father, and old Kamejiro liked this letter better than the disloyal one that had reflected upon Japan’s defeat.

  Shig took great interest in his work as translator for the Harvard professor whom General MacArthur had brought over to advise the Occupation on land reform. Dr. Abernethy was a curious, lanky man of most acute insights, and although he had to depend upon Captain Sakagawa for actual translations of what the Japanese farmers told him, he relied ultimately upon his own perceptions, and for the first time in his life Shig was able to study at close hand a refined human mind at work. A rice farmer would tell Shig, “I have two hundred and forty tsubo for paddy,” and Shig would translate this for Dr. Abernethy, but the latter seemed hardly to be listening, for he was surveying the land himself and judging its productive quotient; so that almost before either Shig or the farmer spoke, Dr. Abernethy knew what the land was worth, and if Shig’s translated evidence contradicted his, Shig had to rec
oncile the facts, and usually Abernethy was right.

  On long jeep trips through the countryside, while Shig drove, Abernethy expounded his theories of land reform. “What General Mac-Arthur’s up against here, Shig, is a classic medieval concept of land ownership. In each area half a dozen wealthy men control the land and parcel out portions of it according to their own economic interests. That’s not a bad system, really. Certainly it’s a lot better than communism. But where the trouble comes is when personal economic interests, usually of an arbitrary nature, override national survival interest.”

  “Like what?” Shig asked, finding deep pleasure in Abernethy’s willingness to talk to him on a mature, adult level. It was hell when well-meaning colonels insisted upon speaking pidgin.

  “Well, like when a landowner in an area that needs more food holds back his land for other speculation, or doesn’t use it at all.”

  “Does this happen?”

  “Look around you! It’s obvious that even during Japan’s war for survival this landowner held his lands back. When such a thing occurs, to save your nation you ought to have a revolution. Throughout history that’s been the inevitable concomitant of abusive land ownership. Fortunately, a land revolution can develop in either of two ways. In France the land was held so irrationally that the French Revolution was required before the whole rotten system could be swept away … with great loss of life. That’s the poorest kind of revolution. In England, the same result was accomplished by taxation. In time the huge landholders simply couldn’t hang onto their land any longer. Taxes were too high. So they were forced to sell, and so far as I know not a single human life was lost. That’s the logical way to accomplish land reform.”

  “You think Japan faces the same problem as France and England?”

  “All nations do,” Abernethy said as they bounced along a rocky road in Shiba Prefecture. “The relationship of man to his land is simple and universal. Every nation began with land evenly distributed among producers. As a result of superior mentality or manipulative skill, able landlords begin to acquire large holdings, in which society confirms them. As long as there is no great pressure of population, these great holders are allowed to do pretty much as they wish. But when families multiply, their marriageable sons begin to look longingly at the expanse of idle land. For the moment all the conventions of society, religion, politics and custom support the large landholders, and in most nations those peasants who make the first protests are hanged. Here in Japan, when the first agitators asked for land, they were crucified, upside down. Later the pressures become greater, and you have a bloody revolution … unless you’re smart, like the English, and then you accomplish the same end by adroitly applied taxes.”