“Do you know how mortifying it is to have your father standing up making speeches in front of the whole school?” Wendy covered her reddening face with her hands and dropped her head. “I could die, for God’s sake!”
This girl was so funny, so self-effacing, so all-in-all appealing I wasn’t even jealous of her hair. Well—I was, but I didn’t hate her for it. Chin length and lush, it behaved exactly the way I wanted mine to, curving under in back, slanting slightly forward at the jaw line, and swaying like the fringe on a flapper’s hemline when she shook her head.
I decided on the spot I wanted her for a friend. No, not just a friend, a comrade. I envisioned a chummy triad—Wendy, Val, and me—spinning records in each other’s bedrooms and laughing ourselves silly over everyday events. Would we grow as close as I felt to my dearest friends at home? And if we did, what would happen to those longstanding friendships? Was a heart like a hotel, with a no-vacancy sign that switched on when all the rooms were full, or could it expand to hold everyone I invited inside?
On the walk back to school, my lunch guests and I passed “The Turtle,” and the sight of it reminded me I wasn’t the only one trying to decide how much to cling to the past, the familiar, the constant, and how much to embrace the new, the exotic, the ever-changing. Samoan society was wrestling with the same issues, and the building nicknamed The Turtle (because its rounded roof resembled an oversized tortoise shell more than the thatched fale canopy it was modeled after) symbolized the ambivalence. Though the building was new and modern, its nickname signified deep connections to the past.
In Samoan legend, Turtle and her sidekick Shark are the animal forms of a human mother and daughter who long ago fled famine and cold-hearted relatives on another island and sought refuge in the seaside village of Vaitogi, on the island of Tutuila. Turtle and Shark swam up onto the beach, changed back into human form, and sought out the village chief, who welcomed them like kinfolk and made sure the villagers doled out the best food and nicest clothes they had to offer. In gratitude, Turtle and Shark told the chief they would return to the sea and live just below the Vaitogi cliff, coming to the surface to entertain spectators whenever the villagers chanted a particular incantation. For centuries, Turtle and Shark have kept their promise, performing as reliably as Yellowstone’s geyser, but only in response to the age-old chant, never seduced by new-fangled music.
If you stood on Vaitogi’s lava outcrops and listened to the ancestral chants—as my parents and I had done on a recent visit—you could easily imagine yourself in the same Samoa that Europeans first encountered in the 1700s, a Samoa where people passed unhurried days collecting coconuts, angling for neon-bright fish, weaving palm baskets, and dozing through the heat of mid-day. Vaitogi’s Turtle was indeed the Turtle of the ancients: steadfast, unchanging, steeped in tradition, mystery, and magic.
But Utulei’s Turtle—the one we passed on our way back to school—called to mind a very different Samoa. Officially known as Lee Auditorium, the building bore the name of the present governor, H. Rex Lee, an American with a penchant for bow ties and a mandate to upgrade Tutuila, the territory’s main island. The auditorium was just one of many monuments to change, all fashioned in the same, pseudo-Samoan architectural style. Just down the road, directly opposite the bluff from which the governor’s imposing, white house looked down its nose, a luxury hotel was being built on a spit of land that jutted into the harbor. The hotel’s main building and guest cottages looked like traditional fales from the outside, but the resemblance ended there. Unlike real fales, with their crushed coral floors and nonexistent walls, the hotel would have indoor plumbing, air conditioning, telephones, and even a swimming pool and poolside snack bar where—it was rumored—real American hamburgers, hot dogs, and milkshakes would be served. Hungry for a taste of home, we American kids couldn’t wait for it to open. Neither could the islanders, hopeful that tourists now would flock to American Samoa, which never had been as popular as nearby Tahiti and Fiji. All of us attached individual dreams to each silvery shingle nailed in place and every grain of sand trucked in to create the swimming beach.
We were all just as enthralled with the Turtle, where crowds of Samoan and American kids gathered for dances, swaying, dipping, and gliding to live bands that played surf music and rock standards in the same fa’a Samoa style as the Vampires. The boys with whom I twisted and frugged at those dances were as paradoxical as the music. Fibber and friends spoke Samoan among themselves and preferred palusami to hamburgers, but wouldn’t be caught dead in lavalavas and flip-flops. They wore tight pants and Beatle boots with pointed toes.
The changes all around us pulled me in different directions, too. While I’d come to Samoa hoping to experience something utterly unlike what I’d left behind, the island was becoming a microcosm of stateside life. I was drawn to both Samoas—the one of age-old customs and chants and magical beings, and the one with rock bands and sharp-dressing boys who sped around the island on motorbikes—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that merely by being here, all of us outsiders were tipping the scale toward Americanization and away from a culture that had developed over millennia and might vanish in a generation.
Just beyond the Turtle lay the main campus of Samoana High School: a compound of mint green, two-story structures that faced a ball field. The school was as up-to-date as any my American classmates and I had left behind in the States, and like many of the newly-built schools dotting the island, it wasn’t just a bunch of pretty buildings—it was part of a radical educational experiment. Distressed at the state of education in American Samoa when he took office, Governor Lee had made overhauling the school system his top priority. In the past, classes had been held when teachers felt like it, in one-room fales with no desks, blackboards, books, pencils, or paper. Instruction was supposed to be in English, yet most teachers hadn’t been schooled past fifth grade, so their language skills were lacking.
Governor Lee came up with the idea of beaming top-notch, televised instruction to outlying villages, in addition to building new schools and hiring stateside teachers. In short order, the island had a transmitter atop Mt. Alava and a three-channel television system. Now, Samoan students spent several hours a day watching TV.
Watching TV in school—now that was something I could get into, even if the programs were educational instead of my daytime favorites Password and American Bandstand. But not a chance. Such new-fangled stuff was not for my lunch mates and me. We American kids—and some Samoans who’d passed the stringent entrance exam—attended conventional classes in a Navy-era building at the edge of the school yard, whose featureless façade hinted at the drudgery inside. Standard Academic Program was the official name. We called it SAP school.
The school’s battleship gray stairway led up to double doors that opened into a small vestibule where a single row of lockers stood against the rear wall. As my companions and I entered, I saw Dick standing with his back to the door, fiddling with a lock. Val gave me one of her raised-eyebrow looks and headed down the hallway. I walked over and touched Dick’s arm.
“Hey,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you. Hold out your hand—I’ve got something to give you.”
I caught a glimpse of something golden and metallic.
A ring? Already?
Not that I didn’t know Dick was trying to lay claim to me. Since that night at the tennis court two weeks earlier, he’d been calling at least once a day, hanging out at our apartment, or showing up wherever I went, even at the most unexpected times and places—like over the past weekend, when my father took Val and me to the airport at 2 a.m. to pick up Val’s dad, who was returning from a conference in Australia. There, in the throng of Samoans who entertained themselves with every arriving and departing flight, as if take-offs and landings were a spectator sport, was Dick.
The attention—and the fervor of it—sharpened my every sensation: every bite of ripe mango a flaming sunset in my mouth, every guitar chord a strumming in some deep an
d jittery recess, every waft of frangipani-scented air, instant intoxication. But another boy was vying just as ardently for my affection. In the canvas bag of mail my father picked up at the post office every Sunday, I could count on finding five or six letters from Danny mixed in with the magazines and flower-imprinted envelopes from my girlfriends. There was every bit as much passion on those ruled pages as in Dick’s persistence, and my affections ping-ponged like crazy. Whose court they landed in depended on little more than who had my attention at the moment; choosing between my two admirers seemed impossible.
But did I really have to? Couldn’t I, like the Samoans, hold onto the past while embracing the new, at least for a while?
No no no. How could I even consider such a thing? Danny was my real boyfriend. Loyal, unwavering Danny.
Six-thousand-miles-away Danny.
On second thought, maybe I could consider such a thing. Dick was right here, right now, and a helluva a good kisser.
I quickly rehearsed in my mind what I’d say when Dick dropped the ring into my hand. Does this mean what I think it means? Then, yes, of course, I’ll go steady with you!
Would we kiss right there in the vestibule or wait until after school when we found some privacy?
I held out my hand. Steady, Nancy, steady.
“Close your eyes.”
A skitter crossed my chest as a small object fell onto my palm. I wrapped my fingers around the thing. The skittering stopped short. Something wasn’t right. The object in my hand felt cool, like metal, but sharp-edged, not smooth. I opened my hand and eyes at the same time. On my palm lay a small, brass key, the kind that opens a padlock.
“Neat, eh?” Dick said. “We’re locker mates. I signed us up.”
“Yeah. Neat.” I hoped my eyes didn’t betray my expectation.
“Lemme see your schedule.” Dick grabbed the folded paper I’d taken from my purse and scanned the list of classes. “We’ve got art and typing together. I’ll save you a seat.”
He turned and made for the staircase, leaving me staring at my hands, the paper, the key. Through the open double doors came a blast of rock music from a passing car; from a nearby classroom in the school’s Samoan section, the drone of a televised lesson. As I absorbed the sounds of Samoa in transition, I thought about change and its consequences: how very easy it is to let the allure of the new destroy something precious.
Chapter 8—Between Sea and Sky
O ‘oe ole Penina ole Pasefika
(You are the Pearl of the Pacific)
—Line from “Amerika Samoa,” American Samoa Territorial Anthem
The morning’s rain had left puddles on the crushed coral path; my flip-flops sucked the ground with each step, flinging shrapnel of wet stones and pale mud against my calves, prickling and leaving splashes of white on my bare legs. The path paralleled the main road—arteriole and artery pulsing from the heart of Fagatogo’s business district—and a perpetual parade of cars and trucks rolled by. Rusted-out Chevys, Fords, and Toyotas shipped over by American contract workers (like my dad) and left behind to decay in the salt air. I winced at the sight of all those junk heaps. Typical American indifference. Signs of it were everywhere on Tutuila, in spite of the current modernization campaign.
The Samoans crammed inside the passing vehicles whooped and giggled like they were on a carnival ride, and once in a while one leaned out the window and yelled, “Palagi!”
Palagi. Spoken softly, the word has a mellifluous lilt: pah-LAHNG-ee. Charming origins, too, I’d learned. The first Europeans to visit the islands arrived by ship, and when Samoans saw their sails on the horizon, they thought the ships had popped through the slit that separated sea and sky, so they called the white-skinned visitors papalagi: sky bursters. Over time, papalagi became palagi, a word that loses a lot of its magic when shouted from a car window.
Each time someone called out, “Palagi!”, I dropped my head and stared at the ground, as if ducking could deflect the taunt. I wished I could unzip my incriminating skin and step out of it right there on the path, leaving a heap like dirty laundry and continuing on my way to Val’s house wearing no trace of my ethnicity.
In a rhythm steady as my pulse, guitars and ukuleles strummed; voices twined over and under each other and looped around like patterns in the basketry on sale at the tourist fale. High above the harbor, suspended from cables that stretched from Solo Hill on one side of the bay to Mt. Alava’s peak on the other, a school bus-yellow tram swayed and showered hibiscus blossoms onto the cruise ship dock below. The flowers floated in the air like the tops of tiny red umbrellas and landed gentle as breath. Val and I, on our way to the wharf in search of amusement to take my mind off the Dick-vs-Daddy dilemma, soaked up the enchantment, even if it wasn’t meant for us.
It was meant for the pale-skinned strangers streaming past us on the sidewalk, wearing Bermuda shorts and puzzled expressions. American tourists from the cruise ship Mariposa searching for exotic mementos to display in their family rooms.
“Get a load of that one.” Val jerked a thumb toward a man whose paunch spilled over white shorts that stopped a few inches above his black knee socks.
We looked at each other and snickered. We might be undeniably palagi, but we, more than these day-trippers, belonged here.
At the dock, a dozen Samoan women in matching red-and-white floral print puletasis sat cross-legged on pandanus mats before a large, hand-lettered sign that read “TALOFA—WELCOME” and was decorated with drawings of a kava bowl and Samoan and American flags. The women wore their hair twisted into tall buns that sat atop their heads like pineapples. Some had flowers tucked behind their ears, some wore necklaces of shells or seeds; all had taken care to look their best for the American visitors. Even more care had gone into practicing the songs and dances they would perform, not just on this day, but every day a cruise ship slid into port with a grace that seemed improbable for its heft.
The women, as robustly graceful as those ships, sang and clapped their hands in rhythm as tourists streamed by, some pausing to listen, most hurrying on to explore the island in the short time their itineraries allowed. I slowed down, but Val tugged at my arm. We had our own itinerary.
The Mariposa’s towering, golden stack, emblazoned with an enormous navy blue letter M, beckoned. The rest of the ship was white and crisp as a sailor’s hat, dazzling in the heat that softened the asphalt beneath our flip-flops and wafted the scent of drying copra through the air, a smothering blanket of sweetness and musk. Clutching passes that allowed us all-day access, Val and I headed straight for the ship’s gangplank.
“Want to have some fun?” The tilt of Val’s eyes was playful, and the curl above her eyebrow, bobbing in the breeze, looked alive. In the background, musicians drummed on old biscuit tins—tat-tat-tatta-tat-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat—and a young woman in a long grass skirt shook her hips so furiously they blurred. Val raised her voice to compete with the din. “When we get on the boat, pretend we’re Samoan. If anyone talks to us in English, act like you don’t understand, and speak Samoan.”
“But I don’t know that much Samoan,” I protested.
The clatter gave way to a soft melody, sung in harmony with ukulele accompaniment. Val adjusted her volume to match the music’s.
“No one’s gonna know what we’re saying. Just recite the Samoan anthem—you know, that song that comes on just before TV goes off for the night.”
A sunburned couple shuffled down the gangplank, stopped beside us, and held out a map. Overhead, the cable car dumped another load of floral parachutes. The couple paid no attention.
“Which way to Fagatogo?” the man asked, butchering the pronunciation.
Val squinted at the map, then wrinkled the space between her eyebrows, looking first at the couple, then at me. I shrugged.
“Amerika Samoa,” I said. “Lo’u atunu’u pele oe!”
Val picked up the anthem’s second line: “Oute tiu i lou igoa, o ‘oe o lo’u fa’amoemoe.”
With my delicate features and Val’s fair skin and russet curls, we looked no more Polynesian than the tourist couple did, but we thought we were convincing enough to pass as afakasi—half-Samoan, half-palagi.
“Oh,” said the sunburned woman. “We’ll find someone else to ask.”
I watched them walk away—headed toward Utulei, not Fagatogo—and had an impulse to run after them and point them in the right direction. Instead, I waved and called out “Amerika Samoa!” Then turning to Val: “Stupid palagi tourists!”
Bored and hungry after an hour or so of touring Mariposa, of jabbering in ersatz Samoan, and stuffing souvenir cocktail napkins, matchbooks, and swizzle sticks into our purses, Val and I debarked and walked across town to our favorite hangout, Tropic Isle snack bar. A one-room café with a couple of gas pumps out front and a screen door that banged, Tropic Isle was the only place in town that served hamburgers, and though they weren’t like hamburgers back home—the buns were homemade and heavily coated with mayonnaise, and the patties were thin as poker chips—they were nonetheless hamburgers, and we were American teenagers craving American teenager food.
Inside the café, an electric fan droned and stirred air that smelled of frying meat and fresh-baked bread. Two unsmiling Samoan women with towering chignons like those of the women at the dock stood behind a Formica-topped counter.
“Yesssssss?” said one, her eyes sweeping over Val and me with an indifference too deliberate to be truly indifferent.
“Can we get two hamburgers, two donuts, and two red pops?” I used my meekest voice and clasped my hands at my waist like a penitent. Val, hand on cocked hip, displayed a cheekier attitude.
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