Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Long-limbed, muscled, they strode Waikiki sands like laughing, bronzed gods. Beachboys in the daytime—teaching swimming, surfing, paddling—serenaders at night, the “golden men” had even been immortalized in Hollywood films, so that rich white women came seeking them out. At dawn they left women slumbering in their Royal suites and drove home, exhausted, in rusty pickups. In working-class Kalihi, Palama, and Iwilei, they sat in tiny kitchens, counting their tips.

  Keo stood apart from his friends. White women scared him. He imagined beneath that pale sensuality lay ravening appetite. As if they’d come to collect scalps. He had no desire for them. Lately he had no thoughts of women at all. His blood accumulated in the wrong places. All he wanted was the piano, his fingers on the keys.

  One day while he sat at the Baldwin, a USO volunteer entered the room. Blond and pale, she stood behind him listening. Next time, she brought a Victrola and records. “Avalon.” “When We’re Alone.” Keo copied each song almost note for note. Sometimes she hummed songs while he followed, stalking melody and tempo. Then he would play each composition start to finish.

  One day he found the piano tuned and polished. He sat down, bewildered. While he played, the woman locked the door, spread something on the floor, and asked him to make love to her. She said she had never “done it” with a native. She was thirty and divorced. He was nineteen. She said once, just once, for the experience.

  He watched his dark, swollen penis enter her, like entering a pale flute-edged conch, blue veins spidering her thighs. When he came, he thought his brain had burst, his skull detached and sizzling. He would die insane, stuck inside a haole.* He screamed, struggled to pull out of her, but she did something with her hand and he was hard again. They were there five hours, moaning and bleating. He didn’t even know her name. He never went back. By then it didn’t matter; he played soundless chords on any surface, kitchen tables, his busing tray, sideways on his bedroom wall. His fingers drummed incessantly.

  MOONLIGHT ON WET FANGS. DOBERMANS FLINGING THEMSELVES against a fence trying to get at him. Keo snarled, sending them into spasms. Inside the fence, dew turned lawns an orient of pearls. A tin heiress’s Indo-Persian fortress on the sea past Diamond Head. To build the house more than two hundred men had labored a year laying the foundation, excavating five acres of lava.

  It had been like watching the construction of the pyramids—hovering dust clouds, hammering sun, age-old calligraphy of heaving dark men. The actual house had taken several years, and during that time the heiress refused to build toilets for local laborers. They were forced to relieve themselves in the wreckage where they worked, wearing urine-soaked kerchiefs on their faces so they wouldn’t choke on dust. She named her fortress Wahi Pana, legendary place. Locals called it Wahi Kkae, place for excreting.

  Keo watched limos slide through her gates. Lights igniting the main house, several bands. All he had to do was give the guards his name: she was expecting her “golden men” from the Royal. He looked down at his toe-pinch leather shoes, knife-pleated trousers. He looked across the lawns. He had no business here. What he needed wasn’t here. He turned away, remembering his mother, earlier, ironing his pants.

  “Why you going dere? Dat rich wahine eat you boys alive, toss you out when she get bored.”

  His sister, Malia, had argued in her studied, drawing-room English. “Mama, that’s how it is with haole. The trick is, while they’re using us, to use them.”

  Malia, becoming so chic she no longer fit. She had begun to sound like someone not local but not quite white. Someone stuck in between.

  Their mother, Leilani, stopped ironing and stared at her.

  “Girlie, you talk to me like dat again, I put dis iron smack on yo’ behind. You coming too high maka-maka.”

  Malia leaned back as if struck. “But you’re the one said pau Pidgin in this house. No more talking like knaka. You said learn ‘proper’ English.”

  Leilani shook her head. “True. But bumbye you coming too good fo’ us.”

  Malia’s voice turned soft and weary. She held out scabby arms. “Mama, look at this. Rash from cheap-starch uniforms. Chambermaid all day at the Moana. At night, dancing hapa-haole tourist hula for the same folks whose toilets I scrub at noon. Why shouldn’t I have airs? I earned them.”

  Malia, golden-skinned, verging on voluptuous. Polynesian features gathered into something just short of beautiful. Only daughter, born between the first two sons, she was “cursed” with drive and cunning. Her drawers full of French perfumes thieved from hotel guests. Designer labels snipped from hats and dresses, resewn into hers. She was a fraud, but Keo loved her deeply. Something in his sister calmed him down.

  “I’m proud of you,” he told her. “You going be somebody.”

  “You.” She pushed him away. “One day you talk Pidgin, next day ‘proper’ English. Cunfunnit, make up your mind!”

  He smiled. In his youth he’d pushed himself, learning “proper” English. Even without university degrees, Leilani vowed, her kids would sound educated, look educated, wear real leather shoes instead of flapping, rubber slippers. Still, Keo always slid back to Pidgin; it kept him in touch with himself.

  Now he turned off Kalakaua Avenue, strolling the sands past the Royal. Farther down stood the U.S. Army installation, Fort DeRussy. He moved up near the open dance floor of the officers’ club, watching couples move in circles. The Negro military band played moony renditions of “Body and Soul,” “You Are Too Beautiful,” their eyes tragic with boredom. One of the Negroes suddenly stood and pointed his horn at the ceiling, making it sob. Couples stopped dancing and listened.

  The song was still recognizable, but he played it like someone shaking his skin loose, he was so tired of the world. He didn’t bob or sway, just stood apart in ancient grooves. Then at some crucial point the horn turned on the player, the song and his wild talent grappled. He blew it slow, then fast, blew it so it screamed, then crooned. It cursed, then turned docile and familiar. He must have felt too naked. The song eventually won out, flowed into easy rhythms so couples moved round the floor again.

  Band taking a break, the man strolled out on the sand, sweat pouring down his face.

  Keo approached. “Say. You were great.”

  “Naw. Great don’t reach this far. Not on this fuckin’ rock.” He turned, peered close, saw Keo was local. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. Thought you was one of the boys from the base.”

  Keo laughed softly. “I don’t mind. Is that a clarinet?”

  The soldier looked him up and down. “You sure don’t know nothing. That’s a tenor sax.”

  He walked back to the bandstand, returning with the horn, the thing shimmering and furtive like a weapon. Keo touched its big primordial mouth.

  “That part don’t mean much,” the Negro said. “Up here”—he danced the valves with his fingers—“is where you make it happen.”

  He saw the reverence with which Keo stroked the thing, the way he listened. “You like music? You play?”

  “Uke, guitar . . . piano.”

  “What you play on piano?”

  “Anything. All I gotta do is hear it once.”

  “Read music?”

  “I don’t need to,” Keo said.

  “Hey! You pretty hip for a cat can’t tell clarinet from sax. This I gotta see.”

  He went back to the bandstand, leaned down to the drummer, and motioned for Keo to wait in the shadows. An hour later they packed up their instruments.

  “We’re jamming back of Pony’s Billiards, off Hotel Street. Just ‘dark’ boys. Want to sit in?”

  Keo stepped back. “I’m not a pro. I’ve never played with strangers.”

  They laughed good-naturedly. “Let’s see how good you listen. I’m Dew. This here’s Handyman.”

  In that way he became a camp rat, following Dew’s band from base to base on weekends—Fort DeRussy, Schofield Barracks, Tripler Air Base—and afterwards, all-night jam sessions in back rooms of billiard parlors and bars. Still, he couldn
’t screw up the nerve to play with them, awed by their dark, obverse nobility, the ferocious investitures of their sounds.

  “So this is jazz.”

  “Jazz, ragtime—it’s all just torching,” Dew explained.

  He grew to love their slang, their names, even their coloring—a wash of blacks, mahoganies, tans, jaunty yellows, not unlike Hawai‘ians. He studied the massed residue of sweat caught in smoky lamplight, washing down dark faces like wet jewels, as one man stood and blew his horn in the softest, most elegant way. Telling of lost dreams, lost realms, misguided innocence and honor. Another took the drums apart, took songs apart with deafening crashes and wallops sliding into tom-tom rhythms, crazy cymbal flourishes, then put them together again with brushes, gentle splishes and splashes.

  Keo pounded tables, wanting to scream, wanting to tell them what it meant being there, being with them, forever freed from silence. They teased him, wanting him to play. He wasn’t ready, knew he wasn’t good enough. Still, his love of rhythm and tempo, and syncopation, his inability to express it, endeared him to them. They adopted him, took him to taxi dance halls where Filipino bands mixed Latin rhythms with big-band sounds. He still couldn’t read music, had no way to practise or improvise. He slept with the radio to his ear, absorbing all he could get, even in dreams.

  One day six husky Hawai‘ians staggered up Kalihi Lane, a lidless upright Steinway missing keys balanced between them. His father, Timoteo, had found it in the dump behind Shirashi Mortuary, where he was head janitor and coffin repairman. That night after work, Keo stood gaping. Warped hammers hung with leis, sprung wires taped haphazardly, its dark, squat front reminiscent of a bull-dog with missing teeth.

  He bought manuals and tools, repairing it one key, one felt hammer at a time. His hands took on the smell of glue and lacquer. Neighbors heard the nightly whine of planing, wood shavings curling in air like flimsy locks. His mother sat frowning at the black mass uglifying her garage.

  “Why you need dis? Why you no just listen radio? Good kine music on ‘Hawai‘i Calls.’ ”

  He was patient. “Mama. I’m going to be a serious musician. Not some joker playing ‘Hukilau’ for tourists.”

  Sawdust settled on her cheeks. “Then why you no play music of khiko, ancestors? Real Hawai‘ian kine, wit’ gourds, skin drums.”

  “I’m going to play jazz.”

  “What kine music dat?”

  He wanted to say it was like confession, and doing penance, a way of playing that exhausted each man’s genius and dementia. He wanted to say that after jazz, all other music would be dead.

  Some nights, brother Jonah passing him pliers, a wire cutter, he worked on the Steinway till dawn. Then he walked down to the ocean. And he drank the sea he swam in, nourished and submerged. For that quiet time, nothing mattered. He had his dream. He had the sea. Wet peaks that soothed him, time untying him with salty hands.

  RABAUL

  NEW BRITAIN, 1943

  RAIN. INCESSANT RAIN. NETS ROTTING, WALLS BECOMING MOLD. A girl is shot for trying to signal Allied planes. Doors are bolted, windows painted over; there is little oxygen.

  Mustering at dawn, lining up for morning “bow” outside each Quonset, only half the girls are strong enough to stand. Hands held at their sides, feet exactly side by side, each girl inclines from the waist, remaining thus to the slow count of five. Others half squat or lean on sticks, fainting while guards yell “BANGO.”

  They count off in Japanese, “Ichi, nee, san, she, go, roku,” the strongest calling out for their weaker neighbors.

  Caught bangoing for others, they are whipped, made to kneel on bamboo poles for hours. Nearly eight hundred girls had been shipped to Rabaul—military bastion of more than a hundred thousand men, major supply base for Japan in its drive to take New Zealand and Australia. Now, barely five hundred girls survive.

  Those strong enough spend hours over washboards, scrubbing soldiers’ uniforms. Noses run from chloride of lime poured into latrines. Some guards take pity, slipping into laundry rooms with potato tops, carrot skins, a moldy slice of bread. One guard brings butts of cigarettes, forbidden matches.

  “We not all mean,” they whisper. “We good, and bad, like everywhere.”

  “Set us free,” girls beg. “Help us dig under the fences.”

  One day, half crazed with hunger, Sunny challenges a guard. “You’ve made us slaves. You starve us. You will hang.”

  The man steps closer. “You stupid girl. Soon all peoples everywhere Japanese subjects.” He kicks her backside, knocking her down, kicks her stomach and her face until he tires. “You very big mouth! Next time, I cut off your tongue.”

  Girls kneel and tend her, some so thin rags hang from them as if from nails. Still there is the daily grind: Six o’clock mustering, lining up for “BANGO.” Gray rice morning meal. The emptying of slop buckets, cleaning out of Quonsets. Waiting in long lines for latrines. For those still able, there is “weekly exercise,” mindless trudging in circles round the compound, swinging of arms, bending of backs to start up circulation. At dusk, the evening “bow” to guards, to inspecting officers. Then again the shouting out for “BANGO.”

  “Ichi, nee, san, she, go, roku . . .”

  Up and down the lines, women whisper news. Another Allied bombing of Tokyo, defeat of Japan’s navy in the Coral Sea. Defeat at Corregidor, Midway. An Aussie in the men’s POW camp keeps a homemade wireless packed in dirt beneath his cot. Once a week men gather, listen to broadcasts from Australia. Weeks, months later, news reaches the girls in the compound half a mile across the base. Now a Chinese girl, three months pregnant, knowing she will soon be shot, whispers news from the men’s camp.

  “Allies have captured Guadalcanal. . . . Admiral Yamamoto killed at Bougainville! Japs defeated at Lae and Buna . . . Jap soldiers starving, eating their shoes . . . rumors of cannibalism.”

  Jubilant, girls cover their mouths and laugh. They laugh at the slightest provocation, sometimes exploding with mirth, so guards point bayonets. Words have become too difficult, tears too expected. Laughter is their only outlet. Without it, they might kill themselves or each other. Laughter expresses everything—grief, pain, love, hate. Sunny even laughs when she sees her face reflected in a piece of glass. Then quickly she turns away. It has been a year since she looked into a mirror.

  And, because they are humans struggling to survive, even outlive each other, girls study one another—Chinese, Indonesians, Malays, Koreans, Filipinas, Eurasians, even white women kidnapped from fallen cities—Singapore, Hong Kong. There is enmity, snobbery among them. And in the total lack of privacy—public nudity of the bathhouse, open latrines of planks set over concrete blocks that overflow—there is even hate.

  The whites—British, American, Dutch—are thought of as slavers, imperialists, stupid and spoiled. Mix-blood Eurasians are considered lazy whores. Indonesians, Malays, Filipinas are conniving thieves, sometimes spying for guards. Koreans are sneaky, greedy, ruthless. Chinese, on the low rung, are considered squalid. The few Japanese girls, former prostitutes, are the lowest of all.

  “I wish them all dead,” Kim cries. “Everyone is so selfish. Charo, the Manila girl, hoards potatoes in her mattress. At night I hear her fighting off rats. Su-Su won’t share a cigarette, not one puff. Maria stole an egg. She ate it raw, even the shell, while we drooled. An egg! It has been years. . . .”

  Sunny holds her like a child. At twenty-four, she understands this is her motherhood. This is all there will be.

  “Don’t you see,” she whispers. “They want us to hate each other, it keeps us weak. Keeps us from being human.”

  Yet in the crisis of each Quonset, women nurse each other, hold each other. Sunny has, in fact, witnessed acts of such unalloyed tenderness, she had to look away. Sometimes she thinks she has never loved human beings so devotedly as in these years imprisoned in this hut. She tries to memorize every detail, devour unique things about each girl. She gives them what love and humanity she has in thanks for the miracle o
f their existing here with her, suffering as she does.

  “What would it be if I were forced to endure this all alone?”

  Tonight, tomorrow, they might die, but today they gaze at each other, promising to always remember. Girls in each Quonset are kept apart, controlled by separate groups of guards. But at morning and evening muster, and at chores throughout the day, they signal with shrugs, they whisper through walls. Some connection, some coincidence: the same country, same city, same name! Even just the same shape eyes. Sometimes a note is passed, a promise scribbled on a rag.

  “Endure. Endure. If I escape, I’ll find your family, I’ll tell them you are brave, and well.”

  Their voices drone on in the dark. Many are children, girls kidnapped so young—eleven, twelve—they’ve never menstruated. This is all they know. For others, some nights grief rinses into remembrance. The beauty of mountains overlooking mirror lakes. Beauty of bare feet on warm roads, running through grass with good, rough dogs. Planting in a father’s field beside the father. Weeping in haystacks with lovers. The beauty of grace before a meal. The luxury of thought. Symphonies. And reading verse. They talk of dreamed-of clothes, scented hair. Taste of fresh fruit, coffee. They weep for the lost touch of a husband, a betrothed.

  Sunny listens, talking less, giving less away as, more and more, she retreats.

  “. . . Up the road I race on my old Schwinn. Metallic blue and yellow. There on the left, Mr. Tashiro’s house, wide front yard, smart new Ford. There on the right, the Nanakoas, handsome, husky folks. The son is tall and flirts, though I am only thirteen. Up and up to purpling heights! Homes hidden by coco palms, ironwoods. The hour stands still. If I hold my breath I hear blooming, fruiting things. And clattering mynahs full of evening, making banyans burst with song . . .”

  “Up, up toward Alewa Heights, slower as road steepens, legs aching, blood pumping in my head. Far above, mountains, rain forests, far below, green valleys, and the sea. Dr. Hong checking his porch for termites. He works with Father at the clinic, doesn’t invite him home because he’s Korean. Never smiles at me. There ahead, Mama! Standing on the lawn. So graceful-Hawai‘ian, so beautiful. Sweet-smelling, like pakalana, Chinese violet. She turns and floats to me. . . .”