Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  A shrewd businessman, Daniel Punahele had nonetheless acquired a taste for Chinese half-castes, keeping mistresses in different parts of town. James Kahiki, an inveterate gambler, was so far in debt he constantly cashed in their sugar profits, and took large loans from banks. As more troopships piled into Honolulu’s harbors, the brothers acquired a seaman’s hotel on Fort Street, even a pharmacy where sailors purchased medicinals for venereal disease.

  In those waning years of the nineteenth century, Chinatown, bordering on the warehouses and businesses of Hotel and Fort Street, was still a seething mass of humanity. Over eight thousand Asian immigrants and Hawaiians were packed into less than forty acres near Honolulu’s waterfront, charged outrageous rents by white landowners. In 1899, a corpse was found with the telltale signs of bubonic plague. Board of Health inspectors overran the area, uncovering a nightmare of filthy restaurants, brothels, tenements, and privies that were simple holes in floors under which cesspools ran. Children, fouled with lice and fleas, played near gutters of raw sewage. Rats lined the alleys, lolling about like pets.

  A dozen more cases of the plague threw officials into a panic. Trying to head off an epidemic, they burned down parts of Chinatown, leaving thousands of people dazed in quarantine camps—barbed-wire prisons where doctors monitored them for further outbreaks. For the next year, fires raged as “plague spots” were systematically torched. Islanders, rich and poor, lived with the stench of burning corpses and wooden hovels. Even as Emma labored in the camps, tending the homeless, infected rats were found in the Coenradsten livery stables next to the seaman’s hotel. The brothers watched helplessly as their properties were razed to the ground.

  In December a “purging fire” went wild, leveling most of Chinatown and nearby establishments, including the Coenradtsens’ remaining businesses. Quarantine camps swelled to over seven thousand. Bubonic plague had even spread to white neighborhoods, but a true epidemic was aborted by the fire. Now, the city was left with a huge homeless population.

  Returning to their modest house in working-class Kalihi, exhausted from hours in the camps, Emma sometimes fell asleep at dinner. At such times, her husband studied her—a beautiful girl, reduced to a gray-faced woman. A year in prison, her queen deposed, her people disappearing. Emma. What have they done to us? He gazed at their child, their only hope; she seemed prescient and wise, black eyes sad, her gaze piercing, as if she could read her father’s mind.

  Vera Lili was bright, head of her class at Punahou. “Teacher says we’re lucky to be annexed by America, if France or Russia owned us, Hawaiians would be slaves.”

  Adam listened, disgusted.

  “Teacher says I’m smart. But I shouldn’t think of university . . . only of finding a husband and raising a family.”

  “Of course,” he said. “They think you have no brains for higher education. Your father’s kanaka, your mother’s hapa. In a year they’ll be grooming you for employment as a maid.”

  Emma roused herself. “Adam, dear, you’ll fill her head with hate.”

  “I want to prepare her,” he said, “for a life of heartbreak.”

  That night in bed, Emma’s eyes were eerily bright. She seemed feverish and restless.

  “Why do you push yourself?” He asked. “Why give so much to strangers?”

  “Many of them are Hawaiian, your people and mine. Oh! Adam, I have seen how they were living. Today I tended a haole full of running sores, so feverish she couldn’t see I was half-caste. She clutched my arm screaming, ‘Don’t let them bury me with niggers!’ “Emma dropped her face in her hands. “I looked her in the eye and cursed her, even as she died.”

  That night her sheets were soaking wet. She woke vomitting. Adam bundled Lili, half asleep, and ran to neighbors. Each night the child stole back to her house, watching through the screen: the Chinese doctor, her weeping father, her mother’s flesh tinted green, exploding sores in her armpits and groin, her face ferocious like a witch. Hour after hour, Emma screamed, her thirst extraordinary.

  Her brothers arrived, Daniel Punahele cursing, James Kahiki weeping on his knees. After two nights, a haole doctor came, in black tie, an opera cape, his coachman outside impatiently whipping the horses.

  The doctor looked at Emma, shook his head. “Too late. This house must be burned immediately!” He flung his cape over his shoulders in a grand exit.

  Daniel intercepted him, pointed a pistol at his chest. Through the hours of Emma’s feverish hallucinations, the awful smell of drooling nodules emanating from her body, the doctor wiped her face and neck, and washed his hands repeatedly. At dawn, Lili’s father and uncles set to howling. Their wives arrived, and Emma’s sisters. The doctor shifted his cape, picked up his bag, as if to leave again. With the butt of his pistol, Daniel struck him full across the face.

  “Bastard! You could have saved her! You were called two days ago . . .”

  The man swayed backwards, carefully tapped his bleeding cheek. “No one told me it was your sister. I don’t make house calls in the slums . . .”

  Adam rose and hit him with his fist. Daniel’s haole wife struck Adam with her parasol. One of Emma’s sisters, married to a Japanese, struck out at Daniel’s wife.

  “Kanaka!” someone cried. And someone swung again.

  Through the screen, Lili saw her mother’s head turn, eyes grow wide, watching the crowd of violent waltzers, spinning bodies, swinging limbs. Her face drained of everything. The room of people turned, hearing her breath, like water sucking down a drain.

  Adam moved with Lili to his sister’s house, and Lili watched her own dear house go up in flames. She turned her back on the old century, taking with her a memory of dueling in-laws, her mother’s astonished, dying gaze. And striding along beside that memory, the image of a doctor coming late, too late, because they lived in what whites now called slums.

  People said that year was the final decline of the Coenradstens. Daniel Punahele deserted his haole wife for a Hawaiian-Chinese mistress, producing a flock of “mix-blood mongrels.” His wife stripped the house of valuables and sailed for the mainland, leaving the place a shell. James Kahiki admitted to cashing in insurance policies for their businesses, and gambling away all their sugar profits. Still deep in debt, he hanged himself with the belt of his tussore-silk dressing gown.

  In 1901 sugar planters, wanting to keep their workers sober, backed formation of the Hawai‘i Chapter of the Anti-Saloon League. Defeated, Daniel Punahele sold the Bay Horse Saloon to Adam, and went into pork-butchering with his mistress’s family. Adam resurrected the bar as the Bay Horse Card Club and Reading Room. For a quarter a month, common workers could sit and read papers, periodicals, dime and half-dime novels. Those that couldn’t read played sober games of Pedro and pinochle, fan-tan and mah-jongg, while Adam offered free legal counsel.

  Plantation workers were still demanding better wages, medical care, decent food. Imported as indentured servants, their contracts could be bought and sold. Laboring twelve to fifteen hours for as little as forty cents a day, they had no running water or sewage systems in the camps, were subjected to floggings or shootings by sadistic Portuguese and Scotch luna. Sitting in the back room of the Bay Horse, Adam listed their complaints.

  In those days, there was little mechanization in the sugarcane and pineapple fields. Plowing, irrigating, planting, fertilizing, were done by hand, mostly with a hoe. Then the killing part, burning and stripping of razor-tooth-edged leaves from cane stalks, cutting, and loading. In merciless sun and airless jungles of ten-foot-high cane, workers ripped casings of dead leaves from every stalk, allowing air to penetrate so they could breathe. Fine dust crept into the eyes and nose. Prickly cane-hairs scratched and burned, causing terrible infections. Most men had hideous scars on legs and arms, fingers missing from years of hacking. Some went blind.

  Aided by informers, Adam began securing signatures on petitions of grievance. In paneled boardrooms of the Hawai‘i Sugar Planters Association, his name was thrown up as a labor agitator,
constantly linked with subversives. News reporters dug up his Royalist past and imprisonment for trying to overthrow the provisional government, and reinstate the queen. A kanaka, related to the degenerate Coenradstens, descendants of . . . a cannibal!

  Lili spent evenings with her father at the Bay Horse, reading Poe’s “The Raven,” and Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” to Asians and Hawaiians struggling to learn English. Soon she was helping him draw up petitions, running them off on a printing press. Punahou classmates shunned her, calling her troublemaker, a firebrand, just like her Royalist mother and grandmother.

  “Nānā i ka‘ili! Look at the skin!” she cried, pointing to her arms. “We will not be haolefied!”

  At her graduation, first in her class, her father shook with pride, then, desperate, he went to her namesake, Queen Lili‘uokalani, asking her to help him send the girl to university.

  “Far away, where she can fulfill her potential as a gifted human.” He offered the queen all he had left of value, his wife’s pearls and tiny diary.

  “Put them away,” she said softly. “And let us plan a marvelous future for Lili.”

  A close friend of Susan Tolman Mills, founder of Mills Seminary College for women in Oakland, California, the queen arranged for Lili’s entry there on partial scholarship, supplemented with an allowance from the queen’s own modest income. In 1906, Lili tearfully sailed for California, and at her departure, her father gave her her mother’s pouch with the diary and black pearls.

  “Kowtow to no one,” he said. “Be extraordinary!”

  She wept as the ship sailed into the Pacific, wondering how she could live up to his expectations. Lili was smart, but suspected she was not extraordinary. One night near the end of her freshman year, Lili woke trembling violently, and knew before she knew. The Bay Horse had burned down with her father trapped inside. A week later, she stood in front of the charred remains beside a young policeman who discovered the blaze. Before fire engulfed the building, he had broken through a window.

  “I seen yoah fat’er on da floor,” he said. “Look like already dead. Two big Portagee run right past me. Hana make. Work for plantation owners. My boss say if I tell dis, maybe I come dead, too.”

  His name was Benjamin Huhu Meahuna. He held her while she cried.

  “I no good for much,” he said. “But damned if let haole get away wit’ murdah!”

  Next day he and Lili stood in the offices of Honolulu’s largest newspaper. That evening, their pictures appeared on the front page with Benjamin’s testimony, identifying the killers, one tall, with ginger hair. One slender, with a limp. Under Lili’s picture, the caption read “SUGAR PLANTERS MURDERED MY FATHER.” Benjamin was instantly fired from the police department, and shot at in the street. Lili’s aunty’s house was firebombed.

  Terrified, she and Benjamin fled to a neighborhood priest. First, he married them, then he sent them to the farm of a decent Irishman with a small pineapple plantation in the mountains on Honolulu’s north shore.

  “Your father was murdered,” the Irishman said, “as a warning to plantation strikers. A Flip was lynched three weeks ago, after protesting how they’re forced to live twenty to a room, no toilets. The planters hunted down a Jap, shot his head off while he was organizing in a Buddhist temple. Now the sugar monopoly wants my land. You folks know how to handle firearms?”

  And so, in the space of a week, Lili saw her father dead, married a stranger, and felt a man’s body inside her for the first time. She learned to survive the burn of centipedes, the bite of scorpion, how to swallow spoonsful of nutmeg that kept her numb and high during back-breaking pineapple picking, and how to fire a rifle and handgun. In that week, she also learned not all whites were evil, some were generous like Hawaiians; struggling with nature and the elements engendered in them deep human capacity.

  In 1907, with the help of the Irishman’s wife and the Chinese cook, Lili gave birth to her first daughter, Emma Kelonikoa. A year later she gave birth to a boy, then another boy, and in 1910, another girl. This child was huge, came out of her silent, wide-eyed, memorizing everything around her. She was unwrinkled, big as a four-month-old.

  After three days, she sat up and pointed to herself, “Pono.”

  The Chinese cook ran screaming from the room. The Irish wife crossed herself. Benjamin sat down, took his daughter’s hand, and spoke carefully, as if to an adult.

  “Dat da name you want? Okay! Pono my tūtū’s name. She plenny smart, tell future.”

  “Then the child is mana pālua,” Lili said. “My mother, Emma, was psychic, too, she had prophetic dreams.”

  The newborn stared at them, her gaze so piercing Ben felt hairs stiffen on his neck. “Lili, dis child be one kahuna.”

  She was afraid to touch her child, to give her her breast. As if reading her mind, the infant popped the nipple into her mouth, eyes roving and alert. Her brothers and sisters loved her instantly, but workers kept their distance, afraid the newborn could read their minds.

  One day when she was two, Pono rolled across the floor, screaming, gurgling like a drowning thing. Four hours later, a towering tsunami originating somewhere off Petropavlovsk, hit the islands, killing dozens. In May 1914, her fourth birthday, Pono suddenly rocked back and forth, clapping her hands, and laughing.

  “PA . . . NA . . . MA . . . PA! NA! MA!”

  That week a ship from Hawai‘i carrying a load of Hawaiian sugar was the first cargo ship to officially pass through the just completed Panama Canal. It was a boon to Pacific shipping, and people celebrated in the streets.

  When they had lived on the plantation several years, Lili came across her mother’s talismans tied up in a rag. She showed them to her husband. “Sentimental things, I guess.”

  Benjamin stared at the tiny gold-and-jade diary, the large, black South Seas pearls, then looked at his wife a little scared. “Lili, dis not junk. I t’ink plenny valuable, foah shoah!”

  “Enough to rent a place of our own? Maybe the sugar planters have forgotten us by now.”

  He studied the black, glittering orbs, rolling them across his palms. Pono saw light reflecting, grabbed both pearls, and swallowed several times. Lili screamed and turned her upside down.

  “No worry,” Ben said. “Dey come out by and by.” He leaned down to his daughter. “What you t’ink, Pono, too soon foah show our face? Moah bettah we stay here, be safe.”

  Eventually, the rare black pearls washed out, but Lili and Ben remained in hiding. Their shack was simple but clean, food was plain, but nourishing, fish, rice, poi. Wages were decent, hours humane, there was fresh water to bathe the children. They had their camp friends, and some nights the Irishman sat with the workers playing cards and drinking pineapple wine. And nearby was a public school.

  At five Pono was big and robust, eyes dark, electric, skin a perfect golden cast. She was going to be a beauty. Even Lili felt her power, an almost scorn for a world in which there were events she could so easily foresee. Ben was not a deeply pensive man; when he thought of existence, he saw it as the slow flow of human clusters. But in that flow, he saw his daughter walking alone.

  “Pono need find one strong man,” he said. “Or one simpleminded one.

  Sometimes she sat eerily still, as if listening to her inner organs, hearing her anatomy change. At seven Lili sent her off to school but she terrified teachers, reading their minds.

  Lili took her out of school. “If she is meant to read and write, nature will see to it.”

  In truth, the child seemed to have no need for books, intuiting the world from stories told by workers who sat in her father’s house—Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese. They had grown used to her, and called her their little kahuna. She grew wise as a navigator, eyes shrewd as old men who had seen the continents, the great oceans. She remembered their stories as if each were her own. Some nights, playing with toys carved of dried banana stalks, Pono sat listening to her parents talk about their dreams.

  “Our sons will go to college,” Lili said. “Wo
n’t they, Pono?”

  She was silent, then one night she woke up from a dream, pointing at her older brother. “Honorary boredom!” And they knew he would be a scholar. Pono didn’t tell about her other brother, the one she dreamed had spotted lungs. She was already growing kind.

  One day when she was seven, her skin suddenly shriveled, her hair turned an awful gray. “Queen Lili‘uokalani dead,” she whispered.

  And it was so. And all the islands were in mourning. Pono lay comatose for twelve hours, and when she woke, she woke smiling, a golden child again. Their monarch had at last found peace.

  A Filipino in the camp named Silvio often sat with Ben and Lili talking longingly of Ilocos Sur where he had left his wife and children. One day he would go home rich, and help his starving family. A tiny man, slender as a girl, wide copper-colored cheeks, big coffee-colored eyes, some nights he sat inside his shack making awful noises. Pono understood he was lonely.

  “Generalito getting soft. He one coward cock,” her father said.

  Silvio’s fighting cock, Generalito, was his only vanity. He pampered the thing, spent his paycheck on its diet, so it stayed muscular and mean, three pounds of feathered moodiness. But lately in the ring, Generalito would not dispatch his opponents, not deliver the coup de grace. For this, Silvio wept. He improved its diet of cornseed, poi and shaved coral for protein and strength. As the fight season neared, Silvio added beaten egg yolk, brandy, molasses. Even expensive shark fin and shark eye. The night before his fights, Silvio clipped Generalito’s wings, spines of his wing feathers sharpened to stilettos.

  Fight nights, after working in the fields, Silvio bathed, and in clean underwear, lay down with Generalito. Whispering, he took the cock’s head in his mouth, as if swallowing it whole. Pono spied on him as Silvio prayed, his pact with God, or the Devil, the trusting bird lying docilely between his teeth. Afterwards, it seemed extremely high, attacking its own mirror image viciously.