Men loaded and unloaded supplies from ships that flew American flags. Coal was stacked in giant piles and ash rose from the smoky chimneys of the factories. Standing on the pier under the hot sun, Vicente swatted away flies and mosquitoes as he waited with his family and all the other Puerto Ricans, their possessions piled by their feet. He didn’t realize that the crowd on the Pacific Mall Wharf had come for a glimpse of the barefoot natives from Porto Rico, the new American possession. Vicente didn’t know that the Hawaiian newspapers had written about them for months and had announced the date of their arrival.
Lourdes said she was hungry and thirsty. The Puerto Ricans had been provided with food twice daily since their departure; it hadn’t been the tastiest, but it had sat heavy in their bellies and helped them to believe that they had made the right decision. As he looked for Minvielle to remind him that they hadn’t eaten since the day before, Vicente was pushed into a row of men—Puerto Rican, black, and Chinese. A handful of white men walked down the row, inspecting and selecting laborers.
Minvielle and other plantation agents called out from a manifest the names of los puertorriqueños. Sánchez. Serrano. López. Cruz. Soto. Ruiz. Velázquez. Miranda. Castro. Villanueva. Vega. They hung numbered metal disks—four-digit bangos beginning with the number 9 for Puerto Ricans—around their necks like leis and then rushed them toward the interisland ferry.
“Another boat? But this is Hawaii.” Vicente eyed the boat with suspicion.
“Some of you will remain here with me on this island called Oahu,” Minvielle said. “The Ke Au Hou will take the rest of you to the Big Island of Hawaii.”
They had not been on the Ke Au Hou for more than a few minutes when they heard shouting. Someone said there was a revolú! One of the Puerto Ricans had a knife, the sheriff was coming, and everyone would soon be in jail! Raulito! Where was Raulito? Valentina, have you seen Raulito? Vicente searched for his brother in the frenzied crowd. He pushed his way to the front of the boat. Why hadn’t he kept an eye on his brother? But Raulito was twenty years old, a man. He could take care of himself, couldn’t he? Vicente stepped on pieces of bread. “What the hell, Baltazar?”
A Puerto Rican who was not Raulito held a knife to a sailor’s throat.
Vicente had come to know Baltazar Fortuno in the first days of the voyage, when Javiercito’s feverish shakes began. Baltazar Fortuno had gotten the steward to bring hot soup to stop the boy’s escalofríos.
“Compai, do you see how they treat us? That bread—that’s our breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Baltazar Fortuno pointed to the bread with his free hand. “All day they don’t feed us, and then they throw bread at us like we’re cattle!”
”¡Malditos yanquis cabrones!” Vicente kicked a piece of bread. “We’re not cattle!”
“We’re men!” Baltazar’s hand on the knife was steady.
“But why the knife, compai?” Vicente hoped that Baltazar was a reasonable man.
“This boat stays here until we’re treated like men.” Baltazar Fortuno nodded to the captain, standing with some of his men. “I had him send for the sheriff.”
Vicente thought that, yes, sometimes it was necessary to hold a knife to a man’s throat, even an American’s, or maybe especially an American’s. Baltazar was right that these americanos should know right here right now that they weren’t cattle, and coño carajo they wouldn’t put up with their disrespect!
Minvielle arrived in a tugboat with the sheriff and his men, who had drawn their guns.
“Señores, this is madness,” Minvielle said.
“Don’t take another step.” Baltazar Fortuno’s knife flashed silver.
“This is Sheriff Brown.” Minvielle pointed to the sheriff.
“What seems to be the problem?” Sheriff Brown put his hand on his revolver.
“¿Qué es el problema?” Minvielle took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.
“You see that bread? On the ground? That’s our breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Baltazar Fortuno moved the knife down an inch. “We are men, not cattle.”
“Nothing good can come of this,” Minvielle said.
“Es un falta de respeto, Minvielle,” Baltazar Fortuno said.
“What kind of place have we come to, Minvielle? Where human beings are treated like cattle?” Vicente saw the ship’s captain and the sheriff talking, possibly hatching a plan to subdue Baltazar Fortuno, who had stood up for what was right. He couldn’t let him act alone.
“We’re men, not cattle!” Vicente yanked off his bango and tossed it overboard.
Los puertorriqueños followed Vicente’s example and yanked off their tags and threw them into the ocean. They shouted, “We’re men, not cattle! We’re men, not cattle!”
“¡Señores! Your bangos! Don’t take off your bangos!” Minvielle put out his hands to stop them.
Vicente felt a little sorry for Minvielle, who had been as decent as could be expected of somebody working for the planters.
Sheriff Brown pointed to the bread strewn on the deck. “Why dump the bread in the hatch in the first place?”
“They’re not lords and ladies,” the captain said. “Besides, didn’t they eat on the City of Peking?”
“Captain, I authorized a barrel of salmon, another of pork, and some rice,” Minvielle said. “Why didn’t you serve them that?”
“Captain, if you had provided them with decent food in the first place, that knife wouldn’t be pointed at your man’s jugular,” Sheriff Brown said.
“The Puerto Ricans have been brought to work on the sugar plantations,” Minvielle said. “It’s important to the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association that we treat them well.”
“They’re just a bunch of immigrants—” the captain said.
“The planters hired you to convey their laborers,” Minvielle said to the captain. “You’ll have a lot of explaining to do if they’re not in good condition.”
The captain sent to shore for food.
“This isn’t going to look good if it gets in the papers,” Minvielle said.
“No sirree, it won’t look good in the papers,” Sheriff Brown said. “Best pretend it didn’t happen.”
Before Minvielle left the ship, he told the Puerto Ricans that they shouldn’t have tossed the bangos overboard; it was sure to cause a big headache for the plantations. Soon afterward, Vicente realized that Raulito wasn’t on the boat.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
RICE
The Puerto Ricans slept in montones, piles of people, squeezed together on the deck of the Ke Au Hou. They wrapped themselves against the night breeze in the blankets from los indios. The sun beat down on them during the day, and there wasn’t enough water for everyone. During the four-day voyage, there was only bread to eat: they hadn’t eaten a full meal since the one after the uprising. Like many of the passengers, Valentina suffered from seasickness. Sometimes she lay with her head on her husband’s lap and he waved her Spanish fan over her face.
Three times the vessel had to round the southern point of the Big Island. The captain of the Ke Au Hou unloaded the Puerto Ricans fifty at a time onto small boats to take them ashore at various stops along the coast. They called out to each other, “¡Adiós! ¡Adiós! ¡Nos veremos! ¡Hasta pronto!”
Valentina didn’t expect the mountain that came out of hiding along the Hamakua Coast, or the turquoise blue water that was almost as beautiful as the Caribbean Sea. Somebody helped Vicente carry the trunk ashore. Valentina was so tired; she would need a month of Sundays to recover from the journey.
Plantation men carrying rifles were waiting with horse-drawn wagons on the wharf. They didn’t speak Spanish and the Puerto Ricans didn’t speak English. One of the men pantomimed swinging a machete. Los puertorriqueños protested that surely they weren’t expected to cut cane the very day they arrived. They were exhausted, every single one of them. Thirsty. They hadn’t eaten a full meal for four days! Mañana, they could work mañana. They needed to make a home, eat a plate of food. Rest. The
men corralled the Puerto Ricans into wagons, gesturing with their rifles.
Vicente called to Valentina to be brave. She wanted to cry out that for once she didn't want to be brave! Lourdes sat on the trunk gripping the bedding, eyes wide open, past crying. As the men were driven away, waving to their families, Valentina remembered that Raulito had the bundle with the mosquito netting. Pobre Raulito, she hoped that he would be all right, that he’d turn up soon, once the plantation realized that he was meant to be with his brother.
One of the plantation men gestured to the women and children to get into wagons. At first, the women objected to going away with strange men, but the man insisted. They climbed into the wagons, complaining about the terrible way they’d been treated since they’d left San Francisco. Valentina pleaded for the wagon driver to help her with her trunk, putting her hands together in prayer, and although he didn’t understand Spanish, he called over to somebody to help load it. Wagons took the women and children down a dirt road through fields of cane twenty feet high. All they could see were waves of green cane and red hills. They fanned themselves and rolled up their sleeves to try to cool off a little. One of the women sobbed.
Valentina wished she would stop crying. She was tempted to say, Señora, save your tears. You might need them later.
Lourdes moved closer and Valentina put her arm around her. She kissed the top of the little girl’s head. Pobrecita, she’d been through so much.
The wagons stopped at the plantation store—a small wood building crammed with shelves of tinned meat and sardines. Lard and shortening. Rice in fifty-pound bags. Sacks of flour and sugar. Barrels of beans and salt.
Lourdes tugged at her mother’s sleeve.
“What is it, Lourdes?” Valentina stared at the sacks of rice.
Valentina wanted rice. She could make arroz blanco to eat with habichuelas guisadas. Arroz con pollo, if she could get chicken. Arroz con dulce, if she could get raisins and sugar. Arroz con coco, if she could get ginger and cloves and azucar morena, and surely, on an island, there must be plenty of coconuts—Lourdes tugged again on her sleeve.
“I’m trying to think—” Valentina looked down at her daughter.
Lourdes pointed.
“It’s not polite to point.” Valentina gently lowered her finger.
A man behind the counter crooked his finger at them.
“Or to wag your finger at someone,” Valentina told her daughter before walking up to the counter as if she were still an ama de casa with a proper home.
“Your husband’s name and bango number?” His pen was poised over a ledger.
She stared at him.
“Bango! Bango!” He pointed to his neck, to her neck.
Valentina touched her neck. Ah, he wanted to know Vicente’s number. Well, the bango was somewhere in the ocean. The man kept shouting. She stared at him in the same haughty manner the fashionable ladies in San Francisco had looked at her.
“Will you write down your husband’s name here?” The man at the counter pushed the ledger toward her. Now he spoke to her in a normal tone and she deigned to look down at the ledger. He handed her a pen and she wrote Vicente’s name on the ledger. He sighed, so relieved that Valentina smiled. Las puertorriqueñas who couldn’t write asked her to hacer el favor and put down their husbands’ names, then each woman marked an X.
Buy now, pay later. They were to choose whatever they needed for their new homes. Anything. Everything. Canned goods, candles, pots. Food was sold in bulk, like the twenty-pound sack of flour. Everything was sold at a minimum of ten cents’ worth, whether it was salt or onions or garlic or candles or tobacco. The store didn’t sell batatas and yautías. It didn’t stock gandules or cornmeal. Valentina gasped aloud when she saw bacalao at twenty cents a pound! Ten cents a pound for rice! In Puerto Rico, after the Americans invaded and devalued the peso to half its worth, rice was still four cents a pound. Now, here in Hawaii, they wanted ten cents! Ten cents! Vicente was to earn fifteen dollars a month the first year. Valentina tried to decline the purchase of cloth sacks, but the clerk insisted that she take two and he put it on Vicente’s account. Later they learned that these sacks were sleeping pallets to fill with straw.
“I’m going to get everything I want,” one woman said.
Valentina tapped her arm. “Con permiso, but did you notice that everything costs so much more than in Puerto Rico? You’ll be in debt to the plantation store forever.”
“That’s my husband’s business,” the woman said.
“What does it matter what we buy today?” another woman said. “We might all be dead tomorrow.”
“Claro, tiene razón.” Valentina was determined to never again give unsolicited advice.
One woman who had been on the wagon with them bought rice that was sold only in fifty-pound sacks. Valentina made a mental note of which women bought what. Valentina bought beans, powdered milk, dried codfish, and oil. Beef jerky. Hard bread. Matches. A galvanized pail. Salt and coffee. She decided against sugar, because it came in twenty-pound sacks. Some women bought cookery items like pots and pans, but Valentina had packed hers in the trunk. They bought salt pork, rice, plantains, and flour. Eggs. A clerk was kept busy wrapping bacalao in brown paper. It was as if the women had gone mad. They laughed and called out, “Dios mío,” and “Carajo, que sueño,” as they bought up staples that they hadn’t been able to buy for years; to some it seemed but a dream. Some of the children sucked on sticks of peppermint candy. At first, Valentina ignored her daughter’s pained look. Then she remembered Javiercito. Just this once, she told Lourdes, who flung her arms around her mother’s waist.
They followed the clerk who was carrying the bag of rice for one of las puertorriqueñas. She and Lourdes carried their bundles and purchases from the plantation store. It took all her effort to lift one foot after the other. But she couldn’t pass out in a faint, not when she had to care for Lourdes, not when Vicente was cutting cane on an empty stomach.
She helped Lourdes climb into the wagon.
“I bought everything I could so I can cook a proper meal for my husband for the first time in years.” A woman propped her feet on the sack of rice.
“Did you buy sugar, too?” Valentina wanted sugar.
“Of course I bought sugar!” the woman said. “What is coffee without sugar?”
Valentina decided right then to become the woman’s best friend.
She held out her hand. “I’m Valentina Sánchez and this is my daughter Lourdes. My husband is Vicente Vega.”
The woman shook it. “My name is Dolores Cruz and I’m married to Eugenio. This is my Tomás.”
“Encantada.” Valentina avoided looking at the son. He was close in age to Javier.
“You’re the woman who lost her boy,” Dolores said. “I don’t know how you can be so calm. Some people said it was unnatural how calm you were. I would still be screaming if I lost my Tomás.”
Shut your big mouth, mujer, Valentina wanted to tell her, but then she remembered the rice. And sugar.
Valentina pointed to the sack. “Fifty pounds! I don’t think there was that much rice left in all of Puerto Rico.”
“I know you’re right!” Dolores said. “I see that you didn’t buy any.”
“What with everything—” Valentina didn’t have to pretend to be sad.
“Pobrecita.” Dolores touched her arm.
“My poor daughter will just have to make do without rice.” Valentina pinched Lourdes’s arm. She cried out.
“Poor things,” Dolores said.
The wagons stopped at a row of trees. The wagon driver pointed down a dirt road. He shoved Valentina’s trunk onto the grass. The women struggled with all their parcels. They stared at a great house in the distance. Pretty houses dotted the red hills, and Valentina was foolish enough to hope that the little houses might be for them.
The women planned how they would fix up the little houses they’d been promised. They would plant vegetables, because it would be wonderful to have f
resh vegetables again. Maybe there would be a mango or lemon tree as there had been in Puerto Rico before the hurricane. Weren’t those pretty houses?
“There’s no plaza, no church,” one woman said.
If only not having a plaza or church were the worst of it. Valentina dared to hope that the houses they’d been promised had stoves, that she could find kindling, that there would be a freshwater stream, and that she could set about cooking a decent meal before she dropped off to sleep in a real bed.
If only.
Valentina looked up the hill at the grand house, and then down at the pretty little houses below it.
The women turned toward the pretty little houses, but one of the wagon drivers shouted at them, pointing down the hill.
Valentina looked in the direction he pointed, and her gaze followed a cement ditch alongside the dirt road. It couldn’t be!
“It stinks.” Lourdes pressed her nose into the bedding that she was carrying.
Valentina whispered for her to hush, better to let the others figure it out themselves. She left the trunk where the driver had dropped it. She wouldn’t be able to carry it; Vicente would have to bring it whenever he came. She left her parcels also so she could offer to help Dolores carry her fifty-pound sack. The women walked on with their heavy bundles, speculating about the source of the faint odor.
Lourdes had run up ahead with the other children and called out to her mother, “I think they had a hurricane, too!”
Surely Lourdes was right; a hurricane must have swept through. It had picked up the crude shacks and thrown them on the ground in splintered and broken pieces. Misshapen steps led up to shanties cobbled together to form a communal roof and floor separated only by walls of wattle.
Some of the women cried. For this, they’d journeyed thousands of miles over sea and land and sea, yet again? Valentina and Dolores dropped the sack of rice on the ground. Valentina made her way to the first shanty. She stood outside the door, afraid of what was on the other side. Lourdes held onto her mother’s sleeve. Valentina took a deep breath and was immediately sorry. She buried her nose in her shirtsleeve.
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