“Place your bets,” Silvio cried, as men from the camp followed him and the hooded, rasping Generalito down the dirt road to the cockpit tent.
It filled up fast with wagering plantation workers, tiered wooden benches round a circle of packed earth. Small cocks fought first, lethal steel spurs attached to their natural spurs with rice paste and plaster. After a while their corpses were piled in a corner. Then Generalito and his opponent were thrown into the ring, circling, flirting, in a deadly pas de deux.
Pono sat outside, seeing the whole fight in her mind. She gasped as Generalito leapt, hacking and pecking, a cloud of dust and flesh. There was blood, men cheered, waved fists, and dollars. The opponent took the second skirmish. But in the third, Generalito demolished him, whirling with his spurs, kicking out backward like a skater. After a dozen such skirmishes, his opponent tottered round the ring begging to be dispatched. Generalito, bleeding but still game, eyed him disdainfully, and walked away, refusing to give the coup de grace.
It happened time and again, and now men attacked Silvio, accusing him of being homosexual, of emasculating his fighting cock, accusing him of sadism, refusing them the thrill of the coup. Opponents were beaten and down, but Generalito would not deliver, he would not even crow. He staggered across the ring, victorious, letting his opponents live. Bookies paid off bets, but even men who won were furious, hungry for slaughter. Silvio rapidly lost face.
“No good,” Ben said. “Better Generalito die. Make one stew of him.”
At night Pono watched the small Filipino weeping in his undershorts, pleading with the bird. In those moments she saw his future, saw that this delicate man—illiterate, given the worst plantation jobs because he was a “Flip,” the group other immigrants spat upon—would never again see his family, his barrio in Ilocos Sur. Perhaps Silvio saw it too, saw his future in the sordid barracks of single Filipino men in Honolulu, men who never made enough, or saved enough, to go home. In his abysmal loneliness, his fighting cock, that cretinous stalk of feather, ligaments and drive, was all he had left of dreams and pride.
One night at the beginning of a new fight season, Pono tiptoed cautiously through the camp, past the Chinese couple clicking mah-jongg tiles, their children studying books by candlelight.
“Silvio.” She knocked on his door.
“What wrong?” he asked, cowering behind his rusty screen. She thrust a jar at him. “For Generalito.” He stared down at the jar. “What is?”
She was eight now, easily impatient. She stomped her foot. “Mimi! Give him mana . . . make him want to kill.”
The next night, the cock pecked his opponent’s lungs out, then ripped off his head. Silvo wept like a woman as cheering crowds carried him and his bird on their shoulders. Every night that fight season, and the next, camp workers placed big bets on Generalito, and every night neighbors followed the random iridescence of moonlight on Pono’s jar of urine as she carried it across the camp to Silvio.
Workers grew prosperous from Generalito’s victories, the plantation owner leased more land. By the time the cock died ripping out his own bowels, insane from the urine of young kahuna, Lili and Ben had saved enough to send their sons to college.
Ka Wahine Nele ‘Ohana
* * *
Woman Without a Clan
SUNBAKED YEARS. Machete chorus of workers hacking in unison, sickly sweet smell of pineapple clogging their pores. Years later, the smoke of cigars would float a remembrance of old wāhine in baggy pants, goggles and rubber boots, harvesting by hand, then squatting over cold tea, puffing cigars. During round-the-clock harvesting, seeing yellowed eyes of crones caught in the gleam of kerosene lamps, Pono would run, afraid that life was her future.
Some nights she woke to find her father on the floor, asleep in the act of scraping red dirt from his boots. And her mother, so exhausted she slept in a chair, still dressed in work clothes, lunchbox in her lap. While they slept, Pono would salve their palms, dense with calluses, each callus a pink orb bearded with gray shreds where skin had worn. Still, she loved that life of swirling red dust, it marked her like a stigma, settling into hair roots, into bowels and lungs. Even freshly washed brown skin had a pink underglow, like refractions from a conch, and years later, as an old woman, Pono would still sneeze red.
Growing taller, wiry and strong, she helped lift bales of fertilizer, helped layer around each pineapple plant stretches of tarred mulch paper which controlled weeds, held soil moisture, and retained warmth. At harvest time, fields became terraced rows of spiky green clumps from which golden globes of “pines” floated above shining black seas. In spite of punishing labor, the fields were magical for her.
Slowly, stoop work and hand labor were somewhat relieved by horse-drawn machinery used for cultivation. Following horse teams through the fields, like giant sea horses charioting black waves, Pono would spin down the rows like a dust devil, sometimes stopping before a spiky “pine,” giving it maka loko‘ino, the evil eye. Weeks later, a can containing that same pineapple would explode on a grocer’s shelf in California. Sometimes she mesmerized large pineapple rats so they lay down and died, paws outstretched across their hearts like operatic tenors.
One day when she was thirteen, four haole cradling rifles rode toward the plantation. Workers ran for their pistols while the horses were still trotting specks. Shots were exchanged, a horse reared. The riders shot up a row of “pines” and galloped off.
The Irishman cursed. “Bloody Sugar Association . . . they’re moving for a pineapple monopoly. My lease is up soon, the bastards want my land.”
The next time horses appeared, it was a sheriff’s posse. Barrels of ōkolehao, Hawai‘i’s answer to Prohibition, had been planted on the Irishman’s land. He was accused of running a distillery, selling bootleg liquor. Hearing the accusation, workers in the camp milled round, defending him.
Pono’s father pointed his rifle at the sheriff. “I t’ink maybe you workin’ for da haole, neh?”
A man leaned down from his horse, whacking Ben with his rifle butt. Lili ran forward, swinging a machete, planting the blade in his forearm. Rifles exploded, soil shot up in their faces. Outnumbered, workers dropped their guns, were bound by rope in a circle. Wagons arrived to take them down the mountain then on to jail in Honolulu. Watching their tin-roofed shacks recede, fearing for their lives, Lili gripped Pono’s arm, pushed her to the edge of a wagon.
Then she lifted the rope. “Jump, child. Jump!”
Pono clung to her, feeling the thrust of Lili’s hand between her shoulder blades. She landed face down in red dirt, hoofs pawing the air above her. Then she was running down aisles of pungent ripeness, men galloping in figure eights, trying to head her off, stirring up too much dust to find her.
Finally, they reined in. “It’s only a kanaka kid.”
That’s how Pono would remember it, her family floating away, diminishing on the horizon, someone sobbing out her name. When it was dark she crept back to their shack, holding to her heart what they had cherished: a Bible, snapshots of Lili’s family, the tiny diary and black pearls. Then she lay down sobbing, beating her face and chest. Why didn’t I see it coming? Why didn’t I dream? At dawn, she crept away before whites came to claim the confiscated land.
For weeks she lived like an animal, sleeping in ditches, crawling on her stomach into workers’ camps, crawling out with food stored in her cheeks. One night, she heard grunting sounds and froze, inches from a man lying in tall grass with a nanny goat, stroking its neck like a woman’s. She began to survive on the goodness of natives and immigrants who took her in.
People became like victims when Pono focused on them, leached out of themselves by the tremor of her will. In return for meals, she would dream-see for them, trying not to lie. Someone would ask a question, after which she would drink a tiny glass of pine wine, or smoke two puffs of Dragon Seed, and then lie down and dream. Some nights there were no dreams, other nights there were awful visions she kept to herself. But sometimes good visions came.
“Your daughter is ugly, true. Odor is her weapon. Blessed with the strong smell of female, she will lure a husband, give you many grandsons!”
Sometimes people who had died stepped forth from her tongue in singsong. “Mama-san, I will come to you reborn through steel and water.” Ten months later, a Japanese soldier, dead in Flanders, would return to his parents in the form of his newborn son, sailing a ship across the Pacific in the arms of his Belgian wife.
One day a Hawaiian-Filipino pounded Pono’s head until she told her dream: “It is not ringworm. Your wife will die a leper at Kalaupapa.” He dropped to his knees, wailing, praying her dream was someone else’s dream. After two nights, Pono dreamed again and woke up smiling, pointing to a dead white spot on his leg. “You will grow old together, live for many years. You have ma‘i Pākē, too!”
From Hawaiian kāhiko, she learned naming chants and healing chants. Eventually when telling her dreams, her voice took on omniscience, seeming to come from the earth, the plants, the sea. Slowly, she moved across the countryside toward Honolulu, and it was like gliding across an old, old tapestry—farmers guiding ox teams through emerald rice paddies, duck ponds rich with floating life, silver-feathered cane, and brooding jungles of ironwood, monkeypod, koa. And great pinnacled lava mountains, and prehistoric waterfalls like ragged stitches. The searing beauty and wealth of her birth-sands, that whites were stealing away.
Closer to the city, Pono saw the land begin to change, become impoverished. In 1920, the U.S. Congress had directed the territorial government to give back some of the land stolen from Hawaiian natives in the Great Mahele of 1848. The congressional move was called the Hawaiian Homes Commission. Act. Between 1917 and 1921 thousands of acres of forested government land which had been leased had now expired. Over 26,000 acres of developed sugar land became available. But this was not what was returned to Hawaiians.
Instead of verdant little acres where people could plant small gardens and live on a fish-and-poi economy, what Pono saw were sad little homestead plots on barren land, no irrigation, no forests, or running water. Some homesteads were near springs that, within months, turned salty, or near swamps breeding mosquitoes. Some stood on land so rocky and mountainous, nothing grew, not even weeds, land so steep people could not build or even haul up drinking water. Some natives would wait for thirty years, well into the twentieth century, for a single homestead plot. They would prematurely age, half starve, trying to survive on barren soil, or finally succumb to Honolulu’s growing slums.
“How we fight dese haole?” Hawaiians asked. “When we gonna get revenge?”
Pono couldn’t tell them what she saw in dreams. The slums would grow into ghettos, sub-cities of Honolulu. The future would kill them. By now, white monopolies controlled every aspect of the sugar and pineapple business. Banking. Insurance. Utilities. Merchandising. Transportation. Shipping. Labor. Some people went back to slave work on plantations. Some gave up altogether, never worked again.
It was 1924, and entering Honolulu for the first time, Pono was speechless. Here was a real twentieth-century city, bustling and modern as cities she had heard of on the U.S. mainland. Paved streets were lit with electricity. People rode on electric railway lines, and steam-powered fire engines. They spoke on telephones, and undersea telegraph cables carrying messages from San Francisco. Trains chugged into the city, hauling sugarcane and freight. Ports were suckled by great ships, and fancy pleasure boats.
The first great leisure hotels in the islands, the Moana and the Halekūlani, presided over Waikiki Beach. A fantastic, pink, Moorish castle, the Royal Hawaiian, was under construction, and would soon host kings and worldwide celebrities. Moving carefully through well-dressed crowds, people even speaking foreign languages, Pono stared at latest fashions in Liberty House windows. And hat shops, and lace and feather shops. Specialty shops for just gloves, and those just for shoes. There were men’s shops featuring snakeskin boots, silk undersuits, and satin coats called robes du nuit.
She turned down a side street, breathless and trembling; for she had entered a world that had never entered her dreams. Things she saw she didn’t even have a name for, and she was terrified, not wanting to attract attention. In her faded dress and cheap sandals, she did not see, could not imagine, how men gazed after her. Endowed with the classic beauty of Polynesian women, at fourteen, Pono carried her height of almost six feet with a natural arrogance. Though she was strong of limb, breasts and hips full, and possessed the big hands and feet of a native, she moved with a fluid grace that drew glances.
Summoning up her nerve, she stepped inside the walls of the women’s jail. It was a joke for a prison, inmates lounging outside in the shade in colorful mu‘umu‘u, strumming ‘ukulele. There were no bars, no fences, so they seemed like women on holiday. Big husky guards in striped mu‘umu‘u were tough-voiced, but gentle in their manner.
A guard instructed an inmate strolling into town on errands. “Bring me one spool black t’read. One pair large rubbah t’ongs. And no flirt wit sailahs!”
Another inmate was dressed in lei and satin holokū for a wedding. It seemed they only inhabited their cells at night.
Pono stepped into an office, asking for Lili Meahuna.
“Who you?” a guard asked.
“Her daughter, Pono.”
“What kine crime she do?”
Pono’s eyes filled. “She cut one deputy wit’ knife.”
The guard looked through a window at women reclining against banyans. “I see t’ree Lili’s wit’ my right eye.” Then she slapped her forehead. “Yoah mama . . . she da pink one!” She pointed to a figure sitting alone with her head down.
Pono approached her slowly, the sunbaked arms glowing pink beneath a flowered mu‘umu‘u. Her black hair had a pinkish cast, and up close, even the whites of her eyes looked pink.
“Mama.”
Looking up, Lili sobbed, reaching out for her. “My baby! I thought they shot you, that you were dead! Hele mai. Hele mai.” Come here, come here.
Pono fell to her knees, crying like a child. “Where’s Papa? What happened to him?”
Lili pulled her closer. “They have put him in the men’s prison.”
Pono opened the cloth she had carried for months, and gave it to her mother. Touching each thing, staring at sepia pictures of her parents and grandparents, Lili wept again.
“Sit down, child. I have much to say.”
As shadows grew long, she talked and talked, pointing to a picture of a one-eyed man and his wife, Kelonikoa.
“I never mentioned them. It made your father sad that I came from such a background and ended up so poor with him. This man, Mathys, was your great-grandfather. She was a high-born Tahitian. He owned many businesses, and built her a house so large and fine, ambassadors, even our king, and Queen Lili, came to dine. You must go and see the house, so you will know what you came from. But tell no one who you are, that you’re descended from Coenradstens.”
Pono looked puzzled. “Why?”
“There’s an old Tahitian curse on the famiily. Kelonikoa rebelled against her father, a powerful chief, and married this haole. People say he had been a cannibal. Kelonikoa finally threw herself into the sea, and Mathys died insane from the weight of his wealth. My own mama died horribly of plague. My father was murdered. The curse has carried down to us. Your oldest brother, Ben Napala, goes about at university in shame, because his parents are in prison. He will not see us. Your second brother, Kenneth Makika . . .” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Tubercular!”
Pono clasped her mother’s hands. “Mama, let me go to him. I’ve learned healing chants and herbs . . .”
“No, child. You will look at him and see what I don’t want to know.”
“But, what will happen to us now?”
Lili continued, as if she were alone. “When Papa sent me to America to university, he told me two things: To never kowtow. And to be extraordinary. Pono, child, I am not extraordinary. I only want to live in peace, grow
old with your father. They have charged him with threatening the sheriff with a gun, and me with trying to kill a deputy. If we swear we were crazed, overworked and starved by the Irishman, they will drop all charges. They want his land. And what I want . . . I want a quiet life. Taro planting, fishing, growing old.”
Pono sat up alarmed. “What about me?”
Her mother sighed, and took her hands. “You are extraordinary, gifted with vision. You must leave Honolulu.” She lay the pouch of black pearls in her palm. “Sell them. Go and start a life.”
Pono shook her head, not comprehending. “I’m your girl! I want to stay with you and Papa.”
“When whites hear you are kahuna, they’ll label you a witch. They’ll dig up your Coenradtsen past. Cannibalism, suicide, addiction. You will be lepolepo on this island.”
“You fear me,” Pono cried, “because I see too much.”
Lili nodded thoughtfully. “You saw your brother’s lungs in dreams. You didn’t tell me. You have that power. To give. Or not.”
“Oh, Mama, I was trying to spare you.”
“I could have saved him, special herbs, secret roots. You should have told me, child.”
Pono rose, her voice like an old woman. “The weight of things. To see so much, so young. Now you want to banish me . . .”
“You see the future. How could we control you? We want a simple life, a quiet life . . .”
She was still talking softly as Pono walked away, dropping the twisted pouch of pearls behind her. But it stuck to her hand, as if it had grown to her flesh. Stumbling blindly through the streets, she wept. Kin, blood, history, snatched from her grasp in a breath. In milling, foreign crowds, she was an atom lost in ether, a woman without a clan. Heart racked with grief, Pono wandered down to Chinatown, slept hunched in alleys, waiting to die.
It was still an over-crowded ghetto of snaky warrens, hidden chimes, alleys smelling of salt fish, ginger, jook. But since the great tum-of-century fire, the area had been rebuilt, rot had not yet settled in. For weeks Pono prowled streets where opium addicts clung to tenement walls like starfish. At night, she watched them siphon by. And watched with fascination tiny, wizened, Chinese women, great pendant ears swinging as they tottered on bound feet, chattering in high, nasal singsong. They became the yeast of her imagination. She was certain baskets on their arms contained human heads and dim sum made of children’s livers.
Shark Dialogues Page 11