by Alan Duff
Lena and I were never going to claim back our marriage, not how it used to be. Pride on my part, no denying. I am a proud man, always had a stronger sense of pride than most. From a little kid I couldn't stand anyone trying to take away or deny me my pride. At school if a teacher talked down to me I'd fly off the handle. When bigger, older boys bullied me I attacked, my own safety be damned, with fists and curses even if I lost a lot of the fights. I did win the wars though. Bullies left me alone after a while. And as I grew I picked off every boy who had bullied me and never let up till I beat each one. Everyone knew, never mess with Henry Takahe. I was never one to look for it though.
Pride, I know, is both good and bad. Maybe I was guilty of being unable — or unwilling — to forgive and forget. But the same confident streak gained me captain's rank in that drawn-out war. Pride in being a Maori with intelligence and leadership qualities who resented his European inferiors getting promoted in other battalions, awarded medals, and damned if I was going to be left behind. Took my complaint to our commanding general himself.
I asked him respectfully, why are Maoris not considered good enough for officer material, sir?
Taken quite by surprise the general said he didn't know such inequality existed, hadn't given it a thought. But since I had confronted him with it, he'd recommend me for instant promotion to lieutenant, just as long as my commanding officer agreed.
But I said, sir, that's half the trouble. The man you're asking to recommend me is the man who won't.
In that case, Sergeant Takahe, I shall make the recommendation myself. But God help you if you prove to be all complaint and no delivery.
I delivered. Ask my men. In every battle and skirmish I led from the front. Good enough for my men, good enough for me. Won their respect, same time I realised we couldn't be the same mates as before: there had to be a separation. Out of which I learned heightened responsibility, as if I owed far more than just the unit under my command.
Pride in being Maori meant we Maori soldiers didn't stand for being called niggers by a bunch of Southern Yank GIs in a bar in Italy when we had a couple of days' leave. We hoed into them and gave the racist bastards a hell of a hiding. Maoris are no Negro slaves, we're slaves to no one. Pride is what you show every person and in your own village it sets an example, indeed a standard, for young people to follow. Pride is what pushed me to cleaning up our community, hounding the town council to install full electricity and sewerage services, so we the village in turn could lift our living standards and with it our dignity.
In that war I learned to appreciate liberty, understand the layers of democracy and how it is worth defending to the death. I went from an ignorant young man just wanting adventure and a fight, to understanding that our German enemy must be defeated at all costs or they would rule the world with an iron fist. We saw their acts of retribution, executing every second male in a Greek village to avenge the deaths of a mere few of their own. Admittedly, we came to respect them as a worthy foe that could fight almost like Maoris, with ferocity and cunning and guile. But to want to rule the world is just madness. And when we found out after the war what they did to the Jews, naturally we felt proud at having done our bit to defeat Hitler and his Nazi henchmen. The Japs, they were more the Americans' and Australians' to deal with.
As for an unfaithful wife, a soldier would rather be dead than come home to what I did. That the guy was American seemed to make it more hurtful. They were our allies, same side. I'd never do that to another man's wife, especially not a soldier on the same side. Never.
Of the kid, all right I didn't know much about him. Didn't feel guilty either. Heard him sing, though, and he was pitch perfect. Normally that shared musical ability might have been enough to get on with the boy. But in the circumstances, it wasn't possible and nor was I inclined. He was in his own world; his mother spoiled him but I was indifferent to what they did. He was not my son.
The kid was inseparable from Chud, whose father Ted was a big-time regular at my bar: a real low character I'd banned more than once for fighting, hated by everyone except the company he kept, same ilk, men not from here. I could see plain as day what the parents were making of Chud, felt sorry for him even if he was Yank's best pal. He didn't stand a chance with those hidings his father and mother dished out to him, all the Kohu kids, poor little blighters. They'd grow up and do the same.
But I couldn't go and bash Ted stupid or next I'd be minding everyone's business. Fix the village problems first, I thought, then I'd start cleaning out the handful of undesirables, as well those shameless women who'd get drunk opposite the pub, Shirl Kohu one of them.
The war taught me a higher sense of duty. I wanted to look after my family and serve my community. Perhaps one day at a political level. Not saying I'm perfect — I have flaws like every person. But in my essence I'm a good man. I trust myself. And the boy was not my blood.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
POOR NAIVE VILLAGE MAORI BOYS. High school robbed us of our innocence. We cut it physically, sure, but physical didn't count for much in the eyes of our white peers. Or not in the B class I was streamed to. Even though I was no rugby player, I came from the robust outdoor world of the river, our baths, the mountain; everything of life a physical adventure and experience, a world I'd expected to continue on much the same — till high school.
The streaming system tore friends apart from starting day. Not one Waiwera boy got into the A class, only me and one other in B. Most of the rest were in the dunce H category, including Chud. Low levels ceased talking to higher levels. It was like we suddenly spoke different languages. High school shook us rudely awake to find ourselves lost, confronted by sons of fathers with jobs we'd never heard of. Surveyor. Accountant. Doctor. Lawyer. Banker. Chemist. Landlord. Pilot. Scientist. Sheep, cattle and dairy farmers. Businessmen of description endless. Engineers in different fields. Sellers of every imaginable service and product.
It hurt to see the different thinking that rubs off on the sons, what they talk about, how much they know, how they apply themselves to study while we, the Waiwera boys, feel like dunderheads straight out of the backblocks who can't apply ourselves to anything of the mind. Alien beings of limited ability from planet Waiwera in outer space just a thirty-minute bus ride from high school.
Just a few of us woke up, Chud not one of them. He and the others latched on to a term picked up to blame: the system. Being white man superiority, anti-Maori. I'm not sure it was any of that. Three Waiwera boys were expelled for fighting. Throughout the year Maoris dominated in detentions and canings, academically but a few of us and then not at the top level. We'd just arrived like at a rugby match to find better-prepared opponents, fitter and smarter, and in a different game. I might be Waiwera through and through, but I wasn't blind and deaf.
I looked at these people and reminded myself I was a chunk of white on Mum's side and white with maybe a bit of Spanish, given the coppery complexion, on my father's side. If I was going to play this game then I better know the rules. There must be some advantages us Waiwera boys had through our unique growing up.
The very time I needed a father who could help steer me through this. I looked at my Waiwera mates and peers reeling, saw how more and more resorted to fists to even things out. I knew if Henry was on talking terms with me he'd advise me to take the Pakeha boys on with my fists. But he wasn't and I was not a person like that.
If I just focused on my music, got to know my father through letters, I might be all right.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SITTING IN THE MUSIC ROOM. Our music teacher informs we're about to hear one of our classmates, Nigel Blake, play electric guitar. We assume he's rich because his parents have bought the guitar, just as I assume being Maori our race is musical and rarely does a white person have the talent.
In an amphitheatre school classroom Nigel has a full set-up for us to peer down on his performance, like cruel judges who have already made up their minds. Nigel Blake is a scruff who pushes the hair leng
th and style rules to the limit, can somehow make his school uniform look like a fashion statement, but doesn't say much and he's hardly noticed.
Well, I don't know how long he played for, only that my own ambition to be a lead guitarist in a band was over. I could never be so good. Never. So was my attitude about Maori musical superiority changed. Music is just music.
I suggested to Nigel he and I join forces to form a band, fearing he might have a better voice than me too. We were inseparable after that performance. At school and neutral places, though, not our homes. Even if I was the more self-confident and probably more dominant personality, his race ruled and my race were the darkies of the country, a minority too. Their right to issue invite, our privilege to receive.
His father was average, musically, Nigel's talent from his mother's side, she of a family of gifted musicians, though Nigel said she was more a frustrated performer and confided he often heard his mother and father arguing over what they had done with their lives.
Nigel's influence on me was big. As I couldn't afford to buy equipment, we messed around after school in the music room sharing Nigel's guitar, and I sometimes got to borrow an acoustic guitar from Toby Taita, who lived up the road from us and could play anything. We used the school microphones and so I got to learn when to be close, to move away, which sounds reverberated, which notes were vulnerable to being easily lost. We'd go for hours till the caretaker told us time to go home.
We went for long aimless walks, maybe into town, or wherever, talking music artists, different styles, our own ambitions. Often after being with Nigel several hours I walked the three miles home as there was no bus scheduled. Would sing the whole way. First year of high school soon became the second.
I ran into jealousy from Chud; he accused me of switching sides and forgetting who his real mate was. Not mates — mate. And why didn't I invite him to the music sessions? Because knowing someone most of your life you know if he's musical or not. And Chud wasn't. Just as I couldn't play rugby. We were in different streams at any rate, so we mainly saw each other on the bus to and from school; post-Nigel only to school.
Out of the blue I got a late reply letter from my father, but with an astonishing surprise: money.
Fifty pounds in the form of a money order, a fortune.
Who better than Mrs Mac to arrange a savings account with the post office? She warned of the dangers of temptation and that I must resist at all costs or the money would be squandered.
Naturally I wrote back to Jess and sent it with hugest thanks and hoped it hadn't made him short. Discovered a selfish, greedy side too when thought of telling my mother was too much in case there came expectation to share it. Told myself, if my father had meant it to be shared he would have asked.
This was my fast ticket to becoming a musician. I withdrew ten pounds and put down a deposit on an electric rhythm guitar. Could have paid in full and still had money left, but seemed this was rare chance indeed to get ahead, young though I was at understanding life.
I would make monthly payments of two pounds for eighteen months, then both instrument and amplification equipment were mine. Now Nigel and I needed a drummer and a bass guitar player. We were on our way, me thanks to the man magnificent in America. Especially when he wrote less than six months later sending another fifty pounds.
To have such money enough to send me I figured he must work in the oil industry, or have a good business. I'd write and ask. Though for some reason distractions kept putting my reply off. And I got this sense of awkwardness, as if our relationship was being forced, by his money and the expectation I be thankful. Wrote him a half-hearted response and it took several months to get around to.
Had my reply to Jess been the following year, just a few months closer to enlightenment via countless hours spent analysing with Nigel Blake, I would have written to him about music.
Of the social revolution born of modern music. Of not knowing who started it, just taking my place in the line for my turn to be swept along by a universal force. From Nigel I was filled with this sense that we owed people. We, the whole listening, changing world, owed musical artists for helping shift evolution itself.
Little Richard, Nigel said we owed him big-time. He set his own standard that other artists followed. A crazily outfitted and behaved Negro who, Nigel somehow had discerned, dressed and acted like an effeminate clown so white Americans couldn't put a label on him and therefore would let him be. Way ahead of me, Nigel was one of those types with bits of seemingly inside knowledge on all manner of subjects.
Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others must have got the ball rolling too. You just picked up on whoever was the dominant figure of your time. So we thanked Elvis Presley; he influenced the world. Every big city and small town in his home country, every country on the planet even Africa, he had an effect. He could have been Jesus Christ he was so important. But with quite a different message.
Seemed impossible that an American singer could change a society so distant and so irrelevant and totally unconnected to his. But that was what Elvis Presley did: changed tiny, obscure Waiwera; changed Two Lakes; changed our entire tiny nation of two point something million, stuck way down in the lower Pacific — three, four years after the rest of the world had been transformed. Changed Yank Takahe: make that Yank Hines.
Elvis liberated our dancing limbs; pulled away the masks so we could openly express what had previously been vague, sometimes troubling, emotions and thoughts. He said it was okay to show off, good to strut your stuff.
He gave girls permission to be overtly sexual, in dance and in the tone of his sultry voice that said he was coming after them. His photographic images transformed bedroom walls and festooned shop windows and picture theatre billboards.
He informed, enlightened us we'd been hoodwinked about life and social conventions and it didn't have to be this way. Not any longer. We could be whatever we chose to be. His musical phrasing sent us into raptures, me in particular. I could mimic his every note and tone, his unique phrasing. We wore his cowlicks, his confident half-smile; made our eyes project a melting quality just like his to the girls; stood around with legs astride a symbolic world, ready to turn our crooked smiles into sneers of contempt for the older generation, at any peer who would dare mess with us. The man made us cry — and not ashamed in secret, but openly.
He came like a letter from America, addressed Dear Young World . . . I, Elvis Presley, give you permission to be whatever you want.
He could have written: Dear Yank, I, Elvis Presley, give you permission to rise far above Henry's ignoring of you and become a big star like me. Just go out and do it, son. Get yourself all shook up, turn yourself loose. Then watch big Henry reduce to a tiny little man of no consequence. Drive past him in your big limo, park it right outside his hotel, picture his face when he sees who's riding in back.
The cult of Elvis was on every radio wave, he played himself in movies that seemed to come out monthly, we packed every seat and sat gob-smacked in every aisle unable to get enough of the King, unable to believe such a person existed and yet he was ours, we could purchase him for the price of a theatre ticket, price of his long-player or single records, if we owned a record player, play him for a few pennies on the milk bar juke-box, hear him free on the radio waves.
Single-handedly, Elvis Presley rocked society yet brought something breathtakingly exciting, of true meaning. It felt unbelievable.
Nightly we sat with ears glued to radio speakers waiting to hear his voice, to become what we had no idea we'd been craving deep inside. Yes, even kids. Every growing one of us cheered and proclaimed Elvis's latest number-one hit song on the Hit Parade and had the lyrics off by heart days after hearing it, with numbered hand-written charts on every bedroom and living room wall confirming Elvis's supremacy.
In one fell swoop Elvis unlocked every cell on the listening planet Earth and set the hearing world free.
The magazines told his fans he came from the South, a town called
Tupelo in Mississippi. My father came from that same state, could well have similar qualities. Imagine: Jess and Mark Hines, unique father and son combo performing to adoring audiences throughout America. Imagine.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A BIG SENIOR MEN'S RUGBY match is on, against our traditional arch rivals, Tanepatu. It's tribal warfare: fights break out in the grandstand, on the sidelines between spectators. Rival supporters break out in the haka throughout the game, itself a mighty spectacle of raw Maori power and skill in ferocious competition. They're actually the same main tribe but it's more like civil war for ninety minutes.
Chud will be at the game. He wants to be a senior men's team member more than anything except get out of his horrible home. Waiwera is not the same with the heart of its population absent; the tourists more or less have it to themselves, just the elderly and our cheerful chatty women guides along with a few penny-diver kids, too young to care how important rugby is to our culture. Rugby is a game even girls and women are mad on. Our men elders become young again, boys' eyes are on fire, retired players want to play again. If I was a good player I'd share the village passion for the game too.
Instead I think about this latest letter from America. Wonder who to share it with — Merita? Decide she's too old for drama and maybe me showing emotion. For Jess has sent yet another money order, this time a hundred pounds. He's set me free. I can buy a car — a car! Pay off my music equipment. Buy my mother something special, or give her the cash. Who to share this excitement with in a locals-deserted village?