Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  He suspected his shortcomings were genetic; a special chemical was missing from his blood, his children would end up no better than he, merchants, saloon-keepers. The damage of these interior dialogues, bitter self-accusations, was soon visible in the haggardness of his face. Watching his stately wife arrange wood roses in a koa calabash, he thought of the Russian captain’s ease and worldliness. Whereas, I have never been to university, or Canton, or Africa. I speak only English and Pidgin Hawaiian. My world is narrow and ignorant.

  In Kelonikoa’s arms, he wept. “How poor a part I’ve played in your life. How little I’ve given you!”

  She spoke softly, as if to a child. “You have given me constancy, devotion. We have buried our children, survived, and borne others. All else is novelty.”

  If, on solitary evenings, she brooded over a tiny jade book with faint Empress fingerprints, and if she thought of its companion volume lying in another’s hand, and the warmth of that hand, it was only in the way one remembers a met glance, someone glimpsed who ghosts through our lives forever.

  ’Ai Pōhaku

  * * *

  The Stone Eaters

  IN 1872 THE DEATH OF KING KAMEHAMEHA V ended the direct bloodline descent of kings from the Great Kamehameha I, who had united the Hawaiian Islands in 1810. William Lunalilo, first king voted in by the Hawaiian legislature, reigned only two years, racked by drink and tuberculosis. In 1874 David Kalākaua was elected to the throne, a man of enormous ego, a lover of his people, dedicated to reviving Hawai‘i’s sacred customs and traditions.

  Firing white cabinet members and ministers who challenged him, he filled the House of Representatives with native Hawaiians. Wanting to reinstate “royalty” into the kingdom, Kalakaua built Iolani Palace, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, installing electricity before Buckingham Palace in London, and running water before the U.S. White House in Washington. In 1883 he staged a coronation, wearing the feather cloak of Kamehameha I, and a sacred whale-tooth lei, “officially” crowning himself, then crowning his wife Queen Kapiolani. Ceremonies went on for weeks, full-dress balls, harbor regattas, a lū‘au for five thousand.

  His enemies denounced the “Merry Monarch’s” profligate drinking and spending, and his blatant distrust of Americans. Kalakaua ignored them, a hero to his people. Rekindling national pride in Hawaiians, he resurrected family lines of old ruling chiefs, collected and preserved bones and feather cloaks of ancient warriors. Genealogies from all the islands were collected into eight books, and over 130 old Hawaiian songs and chants were gathered and published, along with folklore and knowledge of the sea.

  He passed legislation allowing Hawaiian kāhuna to publicly practice chanting and herbal healing, and had the Hawaiian creation chant, the KUMULIPO, recorded in writing for the first time. He even revived the Hale Nauā, a secret society for Hawaiian men, a “. . . Temple of Ancient Sciences of Hawai‘i in combination with the promotion and advancement of Art, Literature, and Philanthropy.”

  A gifted musician and writer, Kalākaua built a music hall and theater where Shakespeare, Molière, and Italian operas were performed. He encouraged his people to learn to read, and soon the downtown Library and Reading Room Association boasted over five thousand books and fifty leading newspapers and periodicals. By 1886, among forty-eight attorneys licensed to practice law, twenty-one were Hawaiians; juries were now composed of at least fifty percent Hawaiians.

  Feeling the islands had regressed fifty years, Honolulu’s white elite were horrified. Employing spies in Kalākaua’s cabinet, they uncovered his gross abuse of royal privilege—illegal leasing of lands, illegal dispersal of monies meant for public roads and waterways, bribery, fraud, purchasing of votes and selling of favors inside the palace. Ignoring the fact that Kalākaua was the first king in the world to visit the United States, addressing the U.S. House of Representatives in 1874, and that he increased Hawai‘i’s diplomatic and counselor posts to almost one hundred throughout the world, haole publicized only his extravagance—his love of marathon parties and balls, of gin and hula dancing, and his leniency toward opium use.

  In 1860 licenses to sell opium had been auctioned by the government; in the mid-1870s, it was made illegal altogether. But great quantities were regularly smuggled into Hawai‘i; illegal possession and sales were common. In 1886, Kalākaua approved an act allowing opium traffic under license again. Attempting to purchase a license, a merchant, fronting for Mathys Coenradtsen, courted the king with $30,000. The king accepted the money, then hesitated, and so another $30,000 “gift” was sent from Mathys.

  Kalākaua duped him by selling the license to another merchant for $70,000. Mathys and his friend swore out affidavits, releasing their documents to newspapers, but the king had already spent their money on “royal debts.” It was the beginning of the end of Kalakaua’s credibility. Even loyal Hawaiians had wearied of his morbid excesses, his pleasure trips round the world while his subjects went hungry. Riots broke out in Honolulu.

  In June 1887, the Honolulu Rifles, two hundred armed soldiers in the service of the king, switched allegiance, joining the Hawaiian League, a group of powerful white merchants conspiring to strip the king of his powers. Confronting Kalākaua in the barricaded palace, they told him he had lost the faith of his people, now chanting insults outside the palace gates.

  Without his soldiers, Kalākaua was lost; the haole forced his hand. He retained his throne by abolishing the power structure of purely Hawaiian control, by throwing out bribers and forgers. Opium licensing was repealed (which further fed the smuggling trade). A new constitution was framed. Powerless, the king agreed to “Reign, not Rule.” And what came to be known as the “Bayonet Constitution” was forced on Kalakaua, a bloodless revolution that changed the king forever from ruler to a figurehead, effectively disenfranchising the Hawaiian population. Most natives couldn’t meet the new, stiff qualifications needed to vote, much less run for office.

  By the time Kalakaua died in 1891, many would have forgotten he was truly Hawai‘i’s Renaissance Man. For all his political shortcomings, he was cultivated, gracious, and had commanded the respect of world leaders when he traveled abroad. Most importantly, he saw his islands and people as fragile, in danger of total extinction. For a time, he had rekindled in them a sense of pride in history, their kingdom, their king.

  By now, sugar was the real king in Hawai‘i. A reciprocity treaty—which would later give the United States control of Pearl Harbor—allowed duty-free access of Hawaiian sugar into the mainland. New steamships and railroads moved sugar swiftly from isolated plantations to the docks. But large amounts of capital were needed to finance the plantations. Sugar stock trading boomed, and Mathys invested heavily.

  Tourism grew alongside commerce, and he added to his carriage business an omnibus line. He and friends formed a small consortium and built a hotel in Waikīkī, chief destination for tourists arriving on steamships. Mathys’s wealth grew considerably. While he sat in his clubs in hand-tailored suits, toasting his prosperity with champagne, enterprising locals made their own brews from fermented ‘awa root, coconut, pineapple, anything that intoxicated. Alcohol and disease, disease and alcohol—the mortality rate of Hawaiians steadily escalated.

  Most devastating disease of all was leprosy, ma‘i Pākē, which afflicted natives especially. Rumored to have been brought by immigrant laborers from Canton in the 1850s, leprosy had, in fact, been spreading through the islands as early as Captain Cook, transmitted by filthy seamen immune to the bacteria, spreading it along with syphilis.

  Trained by Dr. Goddard, Kelonikoa and vigilante women of the Bustle Club roamed tenement sections of Honolulu and Chinatown, instructing locals to boil water before drinking, to bathe frequently, since leprosy seemed to flourish in poverty and filth. They taught them to look for symptoms in the glassiness of the eye, in itchy patches of skin surrounded by white flesh, in running sores that didn’t heal.

  By now a leper settlement, Kalaupapa, was established on a remote peni
nsula of a neighboring island, Moloka‘i. It was called Place of the Living Dead, for there was no cure for the disease. Kelonikoa held screaming children, as afflicted parents were torn from their arms, dragged onto ships, never seen again. She comforted mothers whose children were taken, skin on their faces bloated with the “lion look.” As the ship neared Kalaupapa, lepers were pushed into the sea with long paddles. Some weren’t swimmers, clinging together as they drowned. Others swam for the open sea, preferring pau manō.

  Her children were now grown and married, except for the two youngest girls, and every night, Kelonikoa made Eliza Mapuana, twenty-one, and the youngest, Emma Puanani, seventeen, stand before her naked. Slowly, with lapidary attention, she examined them, every inch, for sores, white spots, signs of itchiness. She examined herself, and while Mathys slept, she examined him. And one day she found a ring-shaped patch on Emma’s arm. Assuring her it was an allergy, she bathed the arm, covered it with tiny suctioned feet of two freshly killed geckos soaked in Kuawe, a poisonous plant, wrapped the arm and gecko feet in hapu‘u fern, and put the girl to bed.

  That night Kelonikoa knelt by the sea, chanting, calling on gods of her birth sands. Emma was her favorite, a precocious child with the run-away wildness, staunch perverseness and beauty of the women of Kelonikoa’s tribe, a last gift, born to her when she was forty-seven. At four, Emma had begun to sleepwalk; at seven she was forecasting hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, with eerie accuracy, so energetic, so full of curiosity and passion, Kelonikoa suspected the child was meant for something extraordinary.

  She chanted all night until the sea answered, and she knew what she must do. With a sharpened abalone shell, Kelonikoa severed one of her small fingers, grinding away at the bone. Fainting, coming to, she crawled into the ocean, hand wrapped in seaweed to stem the bleeding. Dragging herself out to the reef, she flung the finger-offering beyond the coral wall, down, down into the ocean’s throat.

  She would sacrifice one finger, one toe, a part of her body, for each sore she found on Emma. She would do this until the gods decided to spare her child, or until there was nothing left of Kelonikoa. If she was still alive when they banished Emma to Kalaupapa, she would accompany her as kōkua, serving her child until she died. The gods were kind. In two weeks, she found no other sore on Emma. Dr. Goddard diagnosed the patch as ringworm.

  When Mathys finally noticed his wife’s bandaged hand, she told him a gardening tool had slipped. He scolded her, rode off to Kapiolani Park to gamble on kinipōpō. She consumed copious amounts of shark-fin soup, so the hand would regain its strength, soaked the awful wound with juice of hau leaves for healing, and drank pua kala for killing pain.

  Nursing the hand, Kelonikoa thought how prepared she had been to die, to hack herself to pieces for her child. Was it just for Emma? Perhaps death is better than wearing away, day by day, my marriage backing up in my throat. Remembering how they had found each other in the jungle, how she had nursed Mathys back to life, taught him fishing, hunting, how to gauge the force of a wild boar’s leap for deeper penetration of an arrow. How to play his passion, keep it at bay, until she rose up to him.

  Now, in the sixty-fifth year of her life, she was a woman trying to remember when her husband had last touched her, brushed her hair, or just been a companion. Dreamily, Kelonikoa crossed the room, opened a drawer, stroked the small gold-and-jade diary of an Empress. Twenty years. And I am standing in St. Peter’s Square, and he strides toward me, gray at the temples. Offering a peach. Or. We’re on a porch on the Black Sea in the warm air of the Crimea, a sanatorium with tall mullioned windows. He is tubercular, and has come there to die. After all these years I find him, the companion volume resting in his open palm.

  She had come to depend on such fantasy, journeys that transported without exhausting, that loosened the mesh without fraying. It gave her a breathless vigilance, never sure what fiction would rise within her. And afterward, when they finished the peach and walked hand-in-hand across St. Peter’s Square, afterward, there was always a sweet languor. For a while she didn’t need anything more.

  In the next few months, she watched the Bustle Club founder as native and haole women rose against each other over the question of Hawai‘i’s annexation by the United States. In her home, the same debate took place, Mathys arguing for annexation against his wife and daughters. In 1887, the sugar Reciprocity Treaty was renewed, conceding full use of Pearl Harbor to the United States Navy. Military ships began to glut Honolulu’s harbor.

  In 1888, Emma’s older sister, Eliza, eloped with a Frenchman and sailed for Cherbourg. Six months later, Emma soothed her mother’s broken heart by marrying in the Catholic church, a big, proper wedding. Her husband was Adam Kimo Pauhana, a full-blooded Hawaiian, Punahou and Yale graduate. A lawyer and Royalist, he was virulently against annexation of Hawai‘i. Within a year a daughter was born, Vera Lili‘uoka-lani, named after the sister of the ailing King Kalākaua.

  Sometimes when her children and grandchildren were gathered round, Kelonikoa found it a miracle that so many had survived, that she and Mathys had created this small dynasty. At thirty-three, Daniel Punahele, the eldest, was a father of four, married to a haole missionary descendant. A swaggering giant, always bursting through doors wearing his pistols, he ran his father’s businesses while Mathys held court at the Bay Horse Saloon. Sophie Leihulu, thirty-two, and Olivia Malama, twenty-eight, the two middle girls, led quiet lives married to Hawaiian-Japanese brothers, partners in a prosperous grocery store. Between them, their five children looked identical, little golden, almond-eyed plums, eating raw fish with chopsticks.

  Something broke in her each time Kelonikoa saw her second son, George Iwa, thirty. Though tall and broad-boned like Daniel, he was emaciated, addicted to the pipe. Of all the children, he was the one who loved poetry, Chopin and Telemann, the son closest to Kelonikoa. The others never shunned him, knowing part of their father’s wealth had been based on opium smuggling, and in those days, every family kept a bowl of opium for the more reclusive and infirm.

  Even Mathys tolerated George. “There’s one in every family . . . religious fanatic . . . misfit. Thank God it wasn’t the eldest boy!”

  James Kahiki, twenty-six, the last son, a graduate of Harvard and still a bachelor, ran with rich haole plantation daughters, and smoked cigars with sugar tycoons at the Pacific Club, the Hawaiian Racing and Polo Club. Denying his native blood, he was constantly at odds with Emma who spent her days politicking and speech-making, baby Lil bouncing on her hip. Kelonikoa gazed upon them, wondering what would become of them? Of their islands? What would their future be?

  In 1891, traveling in San Francisco, King Kalākaua died mysteriously. Hawaiians believed he was poisoned. His sister, Lili‘uokalani, ascended the throne, and even as she mourned her brother, haole sugar tycoons actively campaigned for Hawai‘i’s annexation to better benefit from new laws offering bounties on American sugar. Native Hawaiian groups violently against annexation mushroomed everywhere. Pro-annexation women seceded from the Bustle Club and it became a force for Royalist Hawaiian women, sister-club to Native Sons of Hawai‘i, who advocated return of all governing powers to the monarch.

  A lover of books and music like her brother—composer of “Aloha Oe,” one of the most beautiful of Hawaiian-language songs—the queen was also a tough, headstrong woman. Ascending the throne, she vowed to make her sovereign power unshakable and to abolish all talk of annexation. Haole began talking of retiring her, of assassination. Natives talked of gutting, or strangling, haole in their sleep. People armed themselves with loaded guns, and knives, and catgut for strangulation.

  Compounding the tension in Honolulu were the diverse ethnic groups imported for “slave work” on plantations. Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese. Each week groups of them went on strike for decent wages, humane living conditions, the constant threat of rebellion and revolution frightening away international trade, throwing the islands into chaos.

  In the Hawai‘i legislative session of 1892 onl
y nine members were in favor of annexation and over thirty against it. Emboldened, Queen Lili‘uokalani tried to introduce a new constitution whereby only true Hawaiians could vote. They would not have to be rich to run for office or cast a ballot. They would elect their own representatives. The queen would no longer need the sanction of the cabinet, and ministers would serve at her discretion.

  This is what the white elite had been waiting for, justification for a military coup. In January 1893, before Lili‘uokalani could legalize her constitution, the same men who had forced the Bayonet Constitution on King Kalākaua overthrew the queen with four boatloads of armed U.S. Marines and a warship, the U.S.S. Boston, with its guns trained on ‘Iolani Palace. Parading light cannons through the streets, the military seized government buildings, while haole demanded the queen’s abdication, and declared martial law.

  On January 17, Lili‘uokalani surrendered under protest. The military troops had been sent in by the ambassador from the United States without knowledge, or sanction, of the U.S. government. By the time word of the coup reached the White House, the United States was changing presidents, and while the world looked the other way, Hawai‘i was stolen from its people.

  A great wailing went up throughout the islands, lasting for weeks, a cry of impenetrable grief as natives mourned. Old people watered their gardens, prayed to their ‘aumākua, lay down and died of heartbreak. Inside the palace, a haole guard stole the Palace Crown, smashed it, and gambled the diamonds away.

  With the queen deposed, in July 1894, Hawai‘i became a republic under a provisional white government. Fearing uprisings, the government forbade locals to assemble in groups of more than three. Furthermore, the haole junta threatened that natives failing to take the oath of allegiance to the new government would be forced to kneel and eat stones.