One day, over a hundred members of the Bustle Club, led by Kelonikoa and three elderwomen, marched silently down the streets toward Iolani Palace. Quickly chaining themselves to the palace fence, they began chanting in Hawaiian a song composed by a woman loyal to the queen, Ellen Keho’ohiwaokalani Prendergast, a song that would be sung twenty-five years, fifty years, and a hundred years hence at all Hawaiian political gatherings, “Mele Aloha ‘Aina, Song of the Land We Love”:
We, the loyal sons and daughters of Hawai‘i
Will exist by eating stones,
The mystic wondrous food of our beloved land.
This we will do rather than swear allegiance
To the traitors who have ravished our land.
Ae, we are the Stone Eaters,
Loyal forever to our Land.
We stand together: People of O‘ahu,
Of Maui, of Kaua’i, of Hawai‘i, of Moloka‘i.
We will not sell our birthright,
Steadfast we stand in support of our Queen.
All honor to those loyal to our Beloved Hawai‘i.
As the women sang out, crowds of locals gathered, taking up the song. It spread from street to street, town to town. It spread across the sea, until all the people of all the islands were chanting their allegiance with “Mele Aloha ‘Aina.” Wealthy natives stood arm-in-arm with those in rags, and sang without ceasing, hour after hour. They sang for themselves, and for the queen, for their ‘aumākua, and for their children’s memories. They sang until government troops burst through, swinging rifle butts, fixed bayonets, Forcing the faces of old men, women, children to the ground, crushing their mouths against glass and rock and soil. As troops rushed forward to the fence, the women rattled their chains, singing louder, turning their heads against the blows. Inside the palace, Lili‘uokalani wept.
Hours later, when skeleton keys had unlocked the chains, the women sank to their knees still singing, “. . . Ae, we are the Stone Eaters / Loyal forever to our Land. . .” until their faces were pushed to the soil, until their mouths were full. Exhausted, bruised and bleeding, they were marched in rows to jail, troops taunting them in Pidgin.
“Eh, wahine! Your queen pau! Hawaiians pau! You good for nuttin’!”
In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison had assured white annexationists in Hawai‘i that they had his support. His successor, Grover Cleveland, now adamantly condemned the annexationists, calling Queen Lili’uoka-lani’s overthrow “. . . illegal, immoral . . . an act of war,” and promising return of her monarchy. Congress supported him. The House of Representatives endorsed the principle of non-interference and declared the annexation of the islands unconstitutional and illegal. Hawai‘i’s provisional government, the “Missionary Monarchy,” refused to recognize the power of President Cleveland to settle island affairs. They appeased Hawaiians only by releasing the women of the Bustle Club from jail.
On the day of their release, Mathys and Adam Kimo were waiting to take Kelonikoa and Emma home. Mortified by catcalling haole crowds, Mathys helped Kelonikoa into their carriage, fighting for control.
“Woman. You have shamed me for all time.”
She stared at him. “You have no idea.”
President Cleveland did not enforce his decisions on the coup. Until the return of a Republican administration under McKinley, the new Republic of Hawai‘i, led by a few hundred rich haole, remained a provisional government for five years.
Now, Royalists went underground, arming themselves for counterrevolution. Contraband guns were shipped from San Francisco and China, transferred ashore at night. Crates of ammunition were buried in people’s yards. Kelonikoa sold all of her jewelry, and the last but two of her black pearls, and with the connections of her frail Royalist son, George Iwa, she and members of the Bustle Club financed the purchase of more contraband guns, ammunition and explosives. Caches were discovered, people arrested, but Royalists continued stockpiling arms.
While Emma’s husband, Adam Kimo Pauhana, counseled the deposed Queen Lili‘uokalani, Mathys’s house began to resemble an ammunition depot. At night he snored peacefully in his four-poster bed, under which were stored muskets, rifles, cartridge belts, hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Bombs were hidden in cupboards, and inside koa calabashes. Muskets stood upright in the skirts of silk holokū. He and his eldest, Daniel Punahele, and their friends, puffed cigars over brandy, beaming at the success of the new government, while Royalists hatched plots in his bathroom, used his cologne, flushed maps down his toilet.
Well-bred young women were seen in the streets, flirting with American sailors, strolling the beach beside them, learning all they could about military surveillance. A government spy was found floating in the Ala Wai Canal. Frustrated with “genteel errands” members of the Bustle Club complained, wanting to learn how to load and shoot muskets and rifles, how to make saltpeter for gunpowder, and bullets from pew-terware in case the Royalists ran out. They bought a printing press, circulating underground pamphlets, urging Hawaiian women to take up arms for the queen. Women lined up at the door. Kelonikoa found a leathery old seaman, a mercenary from the Opium Wars of the 1840s who had even plundered the South China Sea with pirates.
“Name your price,” she said. “Turn us into soldiers.”
They clashed by candlelight, Victorian skirts done up between their legs like giant diapers. In moonlight, and starlight, they learned to load and lock, to fix bayonets, to leap and thrust at signals from the seaman. Exposing golden arms and golden necks, they bent and arched like dancers, hearts pounding through starched linen, hair spilling down like tar. After a few weeks they began to get the hang of it, swung life-size dummies from ropes, shredded them with bayonets. They aimed their rifles, squinted and shot spinning cans into fragments. The atmosphere turned febrile, wives and sisters and daughters cocked, ready to fire, willing to die.
One night, through the tangle of limbs jousting round him—wom-answeat and womangrunt, angry, and noble, and womanready—the seaman looked beyond them through a window at the stars, his cheeks suddenly wet with tears. Women were still, holding their weapons before them.
“Don’t you see?” he whispered. “It’s bloody hopeless! You’ve already lost your lands.”
They carried on. Night after night, with dignified countenance, Kelonikoa and Emma rode their carriage through the streets carrying food to families who had lost their jobs refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the new government. Rude, bellicose Marines stopped their carriage, beating their horses and driver, examining their baskets of food. They stared straight ahead, then continued on their way, bundles of gunpowder and octagonal barrels of dismantled rifles under their skirts between their legs.
Encouraged by President Cleveland’s withdrawal of the U.S. warship from the harbor, Lili‘uokalani gave her consent and the date of the counterrevolution was set, January 7, 1895. But on the night of January 6, police arrived as Royalists were digging up a cache of arms near Ala Wai Canal. Shots were exchanged, and in the skirmish, several whites were killed. Government troops and police turned into madmen, invading homes all over Honolulu. Innocents were pulled from their beds and slaughtered. Finding Royalist pamphlets in his mistress’s robes, a man pulled a gun yelling “Traitor!”
She pulled her own gun. “You’re on the wrong side.” And shot him dead.
Mathys woke to find soldiers ransacking his house, pulling weapons from under his bed. He and Kelonikoa were handcuffed, taken to jail. Their daughters and sons-in-law followed.
Mathys stared at his wife in utter shock. “You . . . are . . . a . . . madwoman!”
In the dark cell, she approached him. “That I once loved you is my shame. My utter shame.”
They sat with their backs against damp walls, listening to a woman’s screams. The dull thud of clubs on human bones. Suspects flung bloody into cells. The piercing, diminishing cry of someone thrown from a roof. At dawn, Daniel Punahele arrived, paid off officials, swearing his parents were duped by Royalist servants, th
at they had no knowledge of weapons in their home. Kelonikoa refused to leave. She and Emma clung together, backing farther into the cell, friends crowding round them protectively.
“Yes, we are Royalists, all!” Emma shouted. “Father, I denounce you.”
Daniel dragged his father away. “. . . hysterical women, loyal to an hysterical queen.”
When Kelonikoa and Emma were accused of treason, Mathys wept so hard his eye patch slipped. He pulled it off, wandered the streets mindless, until a servant brought him home.
On January 16, one of the largest ammunition caches was found in the queen’s own gardens—-bombs, pistols, swords. She was taken into custody, and imprisoned at ‘Iolani Palace. Standing trial for treason before a military commission, Lili‘uokalani endured the abject humiliation of having her personal diaries made public. They revealed the enormous, but healthy, ego of a woman who believed females made better monarchs than men. They revealed she had had secret lovers.
“What king has not?” she demanded.
The diaries also revealed a deeply sensitive, intelligent woman, one who had hoped to start a college for Hawaiian women, affording them the “same education as men.” She had planned to open a bank for women, enabling them to handle their own financial affairs. She recognized the need for more female lawyers and physicians, the need for women’s rights over their bodies, their destinies. And lastly, though she had a fondness for men, she felt women “basically didn’t need them.”
She was sentenced to five years of house arrest in ‘Iolani Palace. Of the two hundred prisoners placed on trial, five chief leaders of the Royalist forces, including Emma’s husband, were sentenced to death. Kelonikoa, Emma, Dr. Goddard and seven women of the Bustle Club were sentenced to twenty years in prison. It was blackmail. Haole were using her rebel supporters to force the queen from her throne.
And so, to save the lives of those loyal to her, Lili‘uokalani officially relinquished all claims to the throne forever. Swearing allegiance to the new Republic, she recognized the end of her monarchy, promising not to aid attempts to restore it. Death sentences were commuted. All prisoners would be pardoned within a year. The Royalists survived; the monarchy was dead.
By now Kelonikoa was seventy-four years old, still lovely, commanding in presence, but in physical decline. Within weeks she was moved from prison, confined in her bed to house arrest. Emma would remain in prison for almost a year, until her husband and all women were released. In that year, Kelonikoa was silent, not a word, communicating only through notes to her servants.
Sometimes Mathys came and stood beside her in the dark, thinking how they had lost the center of everything, now even the edges were gone. He was almost eighty, the age when a man looks forward by looking back. He had thought providing for his wife was the greatest expression of devotion. Somehow it hadn’t sufficed. How could I have loved her more? I never touched another woman. He didn’t care that she had duped him, made him a public fool. His sorrow was this: There was something she had needed, something she had tried to call forth from within him, that he did not possess.
By the end of the year, all prisoners freed, Iolani Palace was converted into a government building. Lili‘uokalani retired to her private residence, was made a citizen and finally freed. One day Kelonikoa arrived by carriage at Lili‘uokalani’s house on Washington Place. They sat whispering and weeping.
“I have heard you will go to Washington, Your Majesty, to plead the case of the monarchy . . .”
“That is so.”
“Then I have come to say Imua! Aloha nui loa! For I shan’t be here when you return.”
The queen patted her wrinkled hand. “Milimili Kelonikoa, I am fourteen years your junior. But you are pū’ali. You will outlive me.”
She shook her head. “The bones begin to moan. In sleep I dream of sleeping.”
The next day Kelonikoa called Emma to her house, and placed in her hand the last two precious black pearls, telling her their story, softly, with humor. The monkey-man. And running. A whaler, one-eyed cannibal. And love. Then she placed in her hand another thing, the miniature jade-and-gold diary. And she tried to explain the Russian captain, never seen again.
“Did you love him?” Emma asked.
“Can one love in a moment? No. I loved . . . imagining. All the lives we might have lived. A tapestry, a never-ending thread.” She touched the diary one last time. “The night he gave me this, I asked what he supposed the Empress had written, what these tiny figures meant. He said perhaps she wrote that life is really lived through dreams and intuitions, not fate and circumstance.”
Emma frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Take it, dear. One day you might want to hold it in your hand . . . follow the thread in the tapestry.”
She would remember her mother’s words, how she spoke in riddles. She would remember her eyes, brighter and clearer than they should have been, a fixedness in their dazzle.
That night Kelonikoa sat beside Mathys, watching his jaw hang slack in dreams. The years. The years. She leaned close, and in his old man smell, there was a smell of moldering soil, humid earth. The jungle. Happy fugitives in rags. And then we came to this, not wealth, not gain, only compensation. They had left the mountains and entered the world, and he became a predator. She had survived by playing dead.
She stood, dropped her clothes round her feet and stepped away. Covering her nakedness with a sarong, slowly she undid her hair, a shimmering, gray shawl. She drifted through rooms, decades, children born, and buried. She fondled things, left her prints on photographs. And in the night she ran, keeping to the shadows, huffing and pausing, hearing her wheezing rice-paper lungs, then running on, down boulevards and streets, down unpaved roads until she reached the cove of healing dolphins.
She swam lazily for there was time, and there were distances to go. Deep, deep in the Pacific, far below the Equator, past the mysterious Marquesas, the Tuamotus. Waves lapped her gently, hair floating round her a phosphorescent net. She swam slowly, thoughtfully, befitting the pace of an old woman. She swam through Circadian troughs of night and into a purple hour, and looking back she saw, like points of pure yearning, the volcanic tips of Hawai‘i. Then she turned, stroking for her birth sands.
Emma sat up from a dream, leapt from her bed and ran. She ran down boulevards and roads, and she ran toward the ocean screaming.
In April 1898, the start of the Spanish-American War in the Philippines sealed the fate of Hawai‘i, recognizing it as a crucial Naval base. On July 7, 1898, President McKinley signed into law the resolution to annex the Hawaiian Islands. At the Ceremony of Annexation on August 12, armed troops marched in formation, U.S. officials stood on grandstands, warships’ cannons boomed. The Royal Hawaiian Band began playing, for the last time, “Hawai‘i Pono‘i,” the official Hawaiian anthem. The song was never finished. As the Hawaiian flag slowly descended, members of the band lowered their horns, dropped their heads and sobbed.
And the wailing began. And the winds, incredible winds. From island to island, Hawaiians made their “appointment with death,” and threw themselves from cliffs. Others walked into the ocean. And Pele, Goddess of Fires and Volcanos, shrieked. And mountains opened, burping blood. Giant squid large as ships rose from the sea and stalked the beaches, screaming like old theologians. And whole forests lay down on their side. And in that most beautiful archipelago, great contexts were broken forever.
Pono
* * *
Goodness, Morality
BONES OF HER BONES. All he had left of her. He slept with them beside him in a sheet.
Daniel Punahele called his sister. “He’s gone mad. Dug up those . . . things, and taken them to bed with him!”
Emma came to the house and stared at the pile of tiny, yellow trinkets. “Father, I understand.”
Assisting him, in the mornings she covered the bones of her brothers and sister; leaving them exposed to sunlight was believed disrespectful by Hawaiians. At night she reverently l
ay the rattling shroud beside him. Holding it, he crooned, lacking the consolation of his wife’s corpse.
Mathys was over eighty now, liver-spotted, wild Mephistophelian eyebrows, his one eye cataracted. Some days he forgot his eye patch, and servants came upon him groping through halls with that awful, weeping socket. Daniel Punahele avoided him, as if his father had moved outside the human species.
One night he gripped Emma’s hand, full of urgent chronicles. “I thought one could live without conscience. That’s what killed her. What I lacked.”
He gave up habits, those concrete forms of rhythm that keep one alive. He lost his sense of smell, and seemed to give up eating. Mooning over grandchildren, he examined their little veins, Kelonikoa’s blood pulsing within. One night, Emma sat up in her sleep, knowing he was dead. They found him lying in the shallows of Kelonikoa’s cove, an arm outstretched, as if trying to overtake her in the depths. A canoe rocked above him with his children’s wrapped-up bones. He had told a servant he was sailing to Tahiti. Weighed down by gold coins in his pockets, he must have slipped and drowned while struggling into the canoe. Coins had floated out around him, one of them settling on his face, his empty socket.
With George Iwa now a hopeless addict, Daniel Punahele and James Kahiki ran the family businesses, enlarging the Bay Horse Saloon, purchasing another bar. Troopships carrying American soldiers now filled the streets to bursting, and Daniel foresaw a time when America’s military presence would be permanent. They doubled the size of their livery stables, accommodating seventy-five horses.
Emma’s husband, Adam Kimo, started his legal practice over from scratch, most of his clients poor Hawaiians and Orientals. Loving their youngest sister inordinately, with a sense of family allegiance the brothers invited Adam to take part in their investments. Politely, he declined, for there was about the two men an unhealthiness, having inherited from their father a certain lack of conscience, a moral depth.
Shark Dialogues Page 9