Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  “The gold.”

  “The flame. What causes it? Simple flints. They do not perish, and are now much sought after. Weight for weight, flints bring a higher price than gold. Ma mère hoarded them, a hedge against inflation. She now has a monopoly in Shanghai. Japs are mad for cigarette lighters. So they must have their flints, no?”

  “But, why me? There were so many others needing help. . . .”

  Oogh stamped his little foot. “Always questions. Your life out in the world is over, don’t you see? Take your knowledge home, use what you have learned.”

  He appeared to be in uniform, a miniature soldier in GI fatigues.

  “Yes. I, too, am evacuating. Ma mère exhausts me, still mercantile as a pharaoh. I never forgave her for Shanghai-ing me from Honolulu when I was a boy. She ran back to China saying my papa was too molo, lazy. She wanted to make me ‘pure Chinese,’ bleed Hawai‘ian out of me. Now I’m going home to my kanaka papa!”

  “You’ll break your mother’s heart.”

  Oogh threw back his head and laughed. “She has Tsih-Tsih! Scram-Scram! That boring little pachyderm. A perfect son, who does clever tricks, and weeps on command.”

  “But, how can you . . .”

  Oogh pushed him back into his hammock, breaking into island Pidgin. “No mattah! Now time fo’ moe moe. Maybe when we wake, da war be pau.”

  For the first time in months, he slept. Such a long, deep sleep, he would only half remember the harbor in Tokyo, Red Cross nurses leading them up a gangplank to a huge converted troopship. A band playing maudlin songs.

  His hammock slung across an open deck, Keo swayed in moonlight, calm seas turning nights into balmy fiction. With minesweepers testing the waters ahead, each day was a spiraling infinity of meals, endless conversations. He was already tired of people.

  He thanked God for night when he was alone, blood recombining in his veins, his veins paralleling the ocean’s tides. The ocean that had carried him out into the world was bringing him home. He was coming home without her.

  PART II

  E HULIHULI HO‘I MAI

  Turn and Come Back

  HO‘OWAHINE

  To Grow into Womanhood

  HONOLULU, SPRING 1943

  A TOWN OF WAR NERVES. THE NIGHTLY WHIP OF SIRENS. EVERYTHING rationed, beyond their means. Reduced to Chinatown’s Hotel Street, Malia swayed her cellophaned hips, dancing for enlisted men. Off-hours, she helped a woman three fields and five lanes over in Kalihi, sewing cheongsams for street girls and haole prostitutes at brothels like the Bronx Rooms, the Senator, the Beach Hotel.

  When she discovered Malia was low-class dancing for servicemen, the seamstress, a stately Hawai‘ian named Pono, scolded her, said she could smell haole on her. It tainted her fabrics, even her thread. She lifted her ancient sewing machine, its underside orange and scabrous. She pointed her finger at Malia.

  “Your haole smell even rusting my Singer. Shame!”

  Malia threw her eyes at her. “Don’t speak to me of shame. I feed my mama and papa. I pay the mortgage on their house.”

  “With bar-girl money? Same as eating dirty rice.”

  “No choice.” Her shoulders stooped. “Papa lost his job. Brothers overseas, at war.”

  Pono sighed, glanced at two of her four daughters hanging laundry in the yard. She handed Malia seven folded dollar bills.

  “Go. Come back when you finished smearing yourself with sailors’ breath. I’ll teach you secrets of design. You’re plenty akamai at sewing.”

  Malia pocketed the bills. “Meanwhile, how am I supposed to live?”

  “Like all knaka. The cannery.” Pono pointed at her girls. “For them I work twelve-hour shifts. Come home, cook, iron, sew.”

  “Where’s their father? Overseas?”

  Pono’s body seemed to retract. She closed her face like a door.

  She was a beautiful woman with the stature and grace that harkened back to Polynesian ancestors, fearless Vikings of the Pacific. Over six feet tall, black hair cascading down her back, there was something forbidding about her, the strength of a woman who had suffered, who had committed every conceivable act, for the father of her daughters, a man cursed with ma‘i pk. Leprosy.

  Years back, they had hidden in rain forests, running from bounty hunters rounding up lepers. After a year, Pono’s lover had been caught, banished to an island where lepers were left to suffer and die. Pono continued running, his seed flowering in her womb while bounty hunters pursued her. Medical doctors wanted to quarantine and study her, see if she would erupt with sores from her lover. Immune to the disease, alone in the jungle Pono had birthed a healthy daughter, then found laundry work on a sugar plantation.

  For months she had suffered the nightly abuse of the haole luna, the foreman, who threatened to turn her in to the bounty hunters. One night, rage-full, she plunged a sharpened chopstick straight through his heart while he lay on her. Then she picked up her daughter and ran. She ran for years, island to island.

  But each month she left her child behind, making her way to the island of Moloka‘i to be with her beloved, Duke Kealoha, at the leper colony, the Place of the Living Dead. Through the years a second daughter was born, a third, and then a fourth. Each month when the interisland supply steamer sailed for Moloka‘i, Pono left her girls with neighbors, strangers, anyone, piling them up like sacrifices offered to the world.

  When they grew old enough to ask about their father, she told them he worked the gold mines of Alaska. When the oldest asked if he would ever come home, Pono answered, “By and by.” She let them grow up fatherless rather than admit to them he was ma‘i pk. It was Duke’s wish, for he could not face the shame of their knowing what he was. Pono was not by nature maternal, her senses seemed tuned to something more distant. Yet she endured, sacrificing youth and beauty to nourish, protect, educate the daughters of this man. Loving her girls, she cursed them, too. But for them, she could join him in his banishment.

  Duke Kealoha was a man who loved music, books, and conversation. He came from educated people, all wiped out by the leprosy that had devastated Hawai‘ians in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even into the present, it was still killing off whole families. Until he had found her—a wild thing living alone—Pono had not known who she was, how much she could be.

  As a child she had had such strange visions, she was rumored to be kahuna, a seer. As she grew into young womanhood, it was said she could transfer pain from one human to another, that she was endowed with double mana. She could look someone to death. There were even rumors she was part man, shark. Nights when she swam in the sea, folks swore they saw her skin turn gray, her jaw deform into a snout. Terrified, her family had cast her out forever.

  Honoring her double mana, Duke had patiently nourished her, drawing the best of her to the surface. Through the years he had taught her the verities of living, of the heart—pity and pride, compassion, sacrifice—lacking which a human life was doomed. No matter how terribly ma‘i pk ravaged him, how badly it mutilated his face and limbs, Pono would love him. He had rebirthed her, he was still the heart of her.

  Now, often in her solitude she wept. Love had made her impotent. Her kahuna powers did not extend to Duke. She was not able to cure him of ma‘i pk. Year into year, she watched his face slowly collapse, his limbs turn to artifacts.

  MALIA LASTED FIVE DAYS AT THE CANNERY. CLOYING STENCH of pineapple. Rashes growing down her arms. The forelady behind her screaming, “Pick up your pine! Pick up your pine!” The click and slash of knife blades. The whispered history of chopped-off fingers, chopped-off hands. After that, she found work mopping floors at the downtown police station. Until they handed her a rag and bucket, pointing to the toilets.

  She spent a month at Pearl Harbor, training for welding work, before the crude remarks began. Shipyard and salvage workers, electrical and mechanic crews, had come from the mainland in thousands. Decent ones seemed outnumbered by the brutes. A mechanic with a yellow beard called her Java. Java Hips. Sa
id he’d like to stir her coffee with his dick. Malia turned, approached him almost languidly, and opened his nose from bridge to tip with the claw end of a hammer.

  How to live? How to make a living? One night, staring at their rationed meals, her jobless father, Malia pulled a cheongsam on, insinuating herself into the slots and fissures of Hotel Street, calling herself Colette. With a soft, sibilant sway, she glided along, pulling the eyes of servicemen. Army khakis, navy whites. The colors of boy scouts and virgins. God, they make my blood laugh. Skim the cream, white skin off haole, and underneath was male, ordinary male. No different from knaka, pk, Flips, all grinding with the same old rhythms: fainting in a woman’s hips, leaving seed and hoofprints.

  Yet even with soldiers and sailors who she charged too much so they would think she was worth something—even in cheap hotels making hit-and-run love—she thought of Krash Kapakahi, remembering the first time they had made love. The night before Pearl Harbor.

  They were lovers for only five weeks when he enlisted. But in that time, she and this man had entered each other, sculpted each other’s bones. They had worn each other to near transparency until all they were was held breath. They never made promises, always approached each other with a Sunday-slow deliberation, with the covertness of nocturnal animals. She began to understand that this love was not passing, it was spine-deep, intractable.

  When he went off to war, she knew by a tightening—a small blithe crepitation—that she was carrying his child. As it grew and stirred inside her, his absence became so powerful Malia wondered how, if Krash survived, she could bear his actual presence again. Now she bore his presence every day, in the face of the child, in the way folks looked sly-eyed when she said the child was hnai. Adopted. She bore it in dread of the future.

  For months she kept her “Colette” life outside her, nothing to do with her. Each night after leaving Hotel Street, she removed the cheongsam before turning up Kalihi Lane. In her father’s tiny garage, she showered with the rubber hose, watching the sweat of strangers guttering the yard. Still, she couldn’t bear herself until she bathed a second time—scouring her skin with detergent soap and scrub brush in the tub where one night Rosie Perez gave fictional birth during blackout, only Malia and Leilani in attendance.

  Some nights she sat in the dark, remembering. Nine months sliding through a tunnel of unbleeding. Then birth, unhinging, orchidings of blood. She recalled biting down on a bar of soap to muffle her screams. Her body sizzling, suddenly deflated. Skin the soft beige-white of eggshell, eyes the faltering blue of plums. The tiny face, Krash’s features in duplicate. A quiet infant, dangling beside Malia’s life, hardly noticed, her story untold. But something in her watch-fulness began reaching out to Malia, her infant’s look almost a begging. One night she removed her cheongsam, turned her back on “Colette” forever.

  She went back to hapa-haole hula dancing in Hotel Street dives. But no man touched her, there was something in her eyes, and no man dared. Some nights she stood beside the infant in her crib in Jonah’s room. She gazed down at the sleeping face, wondering if her brothers would believe this child was hnai from Rosie Perez who already had a yardful of kids. Rosie and her husband, both Hawai‘ian-Portuguese, had spawned all-kine colored children, one golden-skinned, one pale as tofu, a redhead with freckles, and one real kanaka dark.

  Even Timoteo believed the child was Rosie’s. Dear woman. She had smeared Malia’s birth-blood on her thighs and crawled into the tub, onto the bloody towel, swaddling the infant just as Timoteo came home from warden duty in the lane. Now Malia touched the lashes of the sleeping child, smelling talcum, diaper soak. A smell that made her gag. It had less to do with the infant than with motherhood, what it represented.

  I won’t be slowed down. A mistake must not become an obstacle.

  Some nights she surveyed her own small room, dresses hung like soldiers, shoes petrified in rows. She remembered Keo telling her to grab life, be clever and daring. In five years what had she become? How could she face him, he who had been out in the world, seen and done everything? While she could fit her whole life in a spoon.

  Now late at night, after hosing, showering and scrubbing, she picked up her face where she had left it in the mirror. She lay down, remembering him. A trajectory through her consciousness, raising her temperature, adding to her secretions like sugar and insulin. In such moments she felt every nerve in her body focused and erect. Krash had given her dignity. With him she felt she had a future beyond dancing for tourists, beyond maid work—changing sheets, staring into strangers’ suitcases wondering, What can I steal? What won’t be missed?

  At first she had wanted to love his child, to nurture it. Then, discovering the infinite, witless patience motherhood required, Malia decided it was not Krash’s child. That way, she could put it aside and get on with her life. Still, he haunted her; in sleep he kept touching the small of her back. Waking thoughts of him slowed her down, as if the gods understood she needed traction.

  Well, let him come home, let them all come home. Let the war be over.

  Then she would show them ambition.

  EARLIER IT HAD RAINED, THEN RAIN HAD TURNED TO LIQUID sun, the Ko‘olaus diademed in triple rainbows. Good news in Kalihi Lane. Dodie Manlapit’s boy had been transferred to Iceland, far from the fighting in Europe. He wrote home asking for twenty cans of Spam. And Walter Palama’s boy, Noah, had been assigned to teaching judo stateside. The army didn’t trust him in combat with six fingers on each hand.

  Walter shook his head. “Noah feel real hilahila, fo’ no can fight wit’ oddah boys.”

  Timoteo nodded sympathetically. “You folks evah see Noah wit’ rifle? All dem fingahs! He dis-semble, re-semble dat damn t’ing fastah dan you blink one eye. U.S. Army plenny hp!”

  But in their darkened bedrooms, each parent had got down on their knees in thanks. To celebrate, folks gathered in Timoteo’s garage with folding chairs, guitars, and ‘ukuleles. Behind hanging blackout sheets, they broke out jugs of ‘kolehao, ti-root wine, and beer. Then four men with ti leaves hanging from their shorts danced mele kahiko, ancient chants, for their sons overseas. Fierce slapping of arms, chests, thighs, heels kicking up dirt and gravel. Such vibrant singing, such soul-depth chanting, neighboring streets fell silent as people stopped and listened.

  Hours later, Malia trudged slowly up the lane, a full moon making her forget long, punishing hours. Kicking off her sandals, she felt the stickiness of liliko‘i webbing her toes. Stars blanketed the sky, turning the lane into an Oriental wash-drawing, so everything looked blue, the blue of ice, of shadows, just-remembered dreams. The blue of rotting hoses in deep grass, of footprints, old tattoos. Up ahead she heard voices singing old-time songs—“E Ku‘u Morning Dew” and “Nani Ho‘omana‘o” and “Pua Sadinia.”

  In that moment it seemed the moon fired a million silver drops into prismatic lights that showered her, showered this narrow lane foaming with human rhythms. A lane so narrow that, when someone sliced a Maui onion, across the road someone cried. It seemed suddenly a mythic place, known only to a favored few, a tiny kingdom whose people were given to dreaming, fabulating, where white trumpet flowers hung like choruses of upside-down angels blowing jasmine and ginger across their lives.

  Folks drifted in and out of yards, recalling ancient tribes going forth to borrow fire. Geckos, like little green consumptives, skittered and coughed. Malia leaned against a fence, watching young lovers dart through shadows like reef fish. She smiled, thinking how walking up the lane each day was like strolling through a bazaar.

  Each yard, each garage was a merchant’s stall wherein something was offered, someone performed. Elders with teeth like yellow tusks sat scraping scales from aku. Sororities of porcelain wives—delicate-boned Chinese and Filipinas—bent scrubbing at washboards. A child held up a rabbit. Warriors with tattooed shoulders polished golden carapaces of upturned canoes. And darting in and out of bushes, caravans of kids with green/purple Kool-Aid tongues, playing “ting a ling” or fl
ying homemade Kleenex-tissue kites. There a rat-whiskered dog named God who only ran backwards, here a rooster who only crowed at midnight.

  Until Pearl Harbor, until she saw their world in flames, Malia had never understood that this narrow lane, so precious and ephemeral, could disappear in a minute. Now she saw how each night was a homecoming, like touching the roots of feeling. Here at dusk, folks stepped from the working world into a kind of genesis. They who had seldom heard of unions, Sundays off, or equal wages, put down lunch pails, took off slippers and shoes, and stretched bare feet against soil that was regenerative and giving. Something existed here so primordial, all that was human in Malia now responded.

  Songs drifted from her father’s garage, and somewhere among the neighbors she heard Kiko Shirashi’s birdlike voice joining in the singing. Timoteo had defended her husband, now interned, and so he could not find a job. Each week the woman brought Leilani sacks of rice, kegs of shoyu, half a pig, her big black car shining up the lane. She always wore a tiny American flag and her Red Cross volunteer pin, and always asked after Timoteo‘s boys. Some neighbors gave her the stink-eye, wondering how she got past gas rationing. Most folks were kind.

  Malia stepped into the garage, behind blackout sheets, feeling shy as Kiko waved and made room for her. The woman was always dressed exquisitely, black with touches of gold, or jade, bringing to mind an elegant small spider. They sat watching Aunty Moa Kalani dance hula to “Hanohano Hanalei,” except that where the dance called for ‘ul ‘ul, seeded rattle gourds, and bamboos, she used empty beer cans. Then she broke into naughty hula with Uncle Pahu.

  Aunty was well past seventy, with big, luscious arms and thighs. Uncle Pahu, a handsome part-Filipino, was slim as a reed, bald as a drum. When they danced “Princess Pupule,” Aunty Moa swung her behind wildly, going “round de island in a lewd-kine way.” Convulsed with laughter, folks wiped their faces with towels, reaching for more homemade wine. Half drunk, Timoteo leaned sideways and blew his nose on the orchids from whose petals he emerged with perfect self-possession.