Black Marks on the White Page

by Witi Ihimaera

  The missionaries who brought the Book to Hawai‘i preached that the leviathans were the instrument of their God. He had sent them to punish us for our idolatrous and heathen ways. Most of our people felt this must be true, as the Tutua only began to appear after the missionaries’ religion had gained a foothold.

  But I was never a believer in the missionaries’ talk. None in my family ever sat in a wooden pew listening to them or other foreigners calling us ignorant savages and mangling our language through their crank-powered voice amplifiers. And those who kept to the old ways, like my mother, and her mother before her, knew the truth anyway.

  We who had hidden the bones and the carved god-images knew the real reason why the Tutua came. The great leviathans came to feed on the mana imbued in these objects, the strength of our ancestors.

  Ku‘u makuahine, ke kahuna My mother, the kahuna

  THOSE WHO FOLLOWED THE old ways paid a high price.

  Few openly held to the old gods and old religions anymore, and those who did were shunned and ostracised. No epithet was as shameful those days as ‘kahuna’, a title the people in my family had always worn with pride.

  My mother was such a prophetess. She was a kind and wonderful woman, but damnably stubborn. Despite my remonstrances, she kept to her traditional beliefs and refused to observe the foreigners’ Sabbath or the laws passed to ensure compliance with their commandments: no physical labor on Sundays, no loud noises to disturb prayer, not even a cookfire, whose smoke might obscure people’s reflections on their one god. Even the soughing steam carriages did not run on Sundays. Yet for my mother, certain moons were better for performing our ritual ceremonies, or planting and gathering medicine, so if those moons called for that work to happen on a Sunday, then Sunday was when she was going to do it. She had nothing against the missionaries or their beliefs, but she had seen too much from her 400,000 gods to accept that there was only one.

  On my ninth birthday I witnessed the consequences of insisting on tradition. My mother refused to allow me to attend the mission school, so I was never drawn to the missionaries’ teachings, but I felt no real attraction to my mother’s practices either. Although I was an inquisitive child and readily learned what she taught me, her world always seemed at odds with what I saw beyond the walls of our compound. There, I could enjoy all the books and clockwork gadgets that the foreign traders brought back from ‘Amelika and Beretania. For my birthday, I pestered my mother for weeks about getting a bisque doll I had seen. She finally relented, even though we didn’t really celebrate birthdays with gifts the way foreigners did.

  I was in the happy oblivion of childhood as my mother and I went to purchase the porcelain-skinned doll. I practically skipped along, holding her hand as we walked down the packed dirt of the bustling King’s Street, dodging muttering people and hissing steam carriages. I was in my play-stained frock and I was so proud of my mother. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, wrapped in her kīkepa made of barkcloth scented with ferns, the brown skin of her bare, tight-muscled shoulder drawing the eyes of everyone on the street.

  I was so busy chattering away about how I would bathe the doll and teach her Hawaiian and show her which plants to pick for salves that I didn’t notice how stiffly my mother was walking. I looked up at her silence and saw her jaw clenched, her nostrils flaring in anger.

  I glanced around and noticed that all the men, both foreign and native, in their dark coats were giving her hard stares and turning their backs on her in the street. The women in their high-necked dresses were giving her pitying looks and calling out prayers for her soul. I didn’t know what was happening and nearly fell back when an especially angry woman snarled, ‘Kahuna!’ and then spat on the street right in front of me. We never hid the fact that we were from a kahuna family, but the woman’s look of disgust made me ashamed.

  Even when we got to the store, Kamaka, the shopkeeper, whose infant son my mother had treated just a few weeks prior, pointedly ignored her. He threatened to call the constables when she spoke sternly to get his attention.

  My mother led me out with her head held high, but her arms shook as she held my hand. After all, our family had advised the ruling family for generations, and that association had usually buffered my mother from this sort of treatment. But as the men of the Book grew in power and influence, she began to lose the ear of the king.

  Things escalated after that incident. My mother was denounced from the pulpit. Angry sermons were delivered on the street corner through crank-powered amplifiers across from our house. Broadsides appeared around town mocking my mother; they were adorned with block prints of a witch doctor in a kīkepa dancing around a cauldron.

  People even shouted at me while I was playing in the yard. I quietly asked my mother if she couldn’t just try to be more like the people of the Book. Instead, she moved our whole family out to the countryside.

  When the religion of the Crucified Man took hold our people moved away from worshipping the 400,000 akua who inhabited all aspects of the world; they turned their belief to the single foreign akua. Without the mana that we fed them with our worship and ceremonies, our gods began to weaken and disappear. Now, few whispered in awe at the majesty of Kānehekili, dozens of feet tall, with one side of his body tattooed completely black, representing the thunder and lightning that always attended him. Few spoke of giving tobacco to an old woman only to find out that they had been in the presence of the volcano goddess Pele. Few attribute those of wondrous birth to the powers of Haumea, who was reborn in every Hawaiian woman. Few told stories about the akua at all.

  This was what summoned the Tutua.

  They were not malevolent; they merely came to ensure the balance of mana in the world, absorbing what mana was in the sacred structures and ancient relics to keep it from dissipating.

  Ke kau o Ho‘oilo The season of Ho‘oilo

  WHEN I WAS TEN my family moved out to the country, but things did not get much better, at least not for me. I begged my mother to let me go to the mission school nearby. She thought it was because I was lonely with no real playmates, but it was just that I was so hungry for knowledge about the outside world.

  Like most families, we read the newspapers aloud to each other. My mother and the rest of the family loved all of the traditional stories and songs that were printed; sometimes we acted out particularly funny or risqué parts, like when Pahulu, the lecherous fisherman, was tricked into having sex with a stone, thinking it was a beautiful goddess. I tried unsuccessfully to cover both my eyes and my ears when Uncle Hoku started reenacting that part.

  I would mostly sit quietly on the side when my family was gathered together and read to myself about what was happening in foreign countries. The civil war in ‘Amelika, telegraphs, the London Underground, Lister’s use of carbolic acid in Beretania.

  My mother finally gave in and let me go to the mission school, but it wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. I had access to more books and learned about world history and literature and natural science but, if anything, the pupils from the countryside looked down on me even more than the people in the capital had. And, as always, they would refer to our family’s traditional standing, hissing ‘kahuna’ at me as they pulled my hair or yanked my satchel out of my hands.

  My mother would spend time each morning making me a fragrant lei of pua kenikeni or pīkake or sometimes even maile to wear to school so I would look nice and smell pretty, but anything that stood out about me became fodder for bullying by my classmates, so I stomped home one day and told my mother that I didn’t want to wear those foolish garlands anymore. She pressed her lips tightly together as if she were going to say something, but only nodded. From then on, I did my best to blend in, only answering if I was called on and trying not to show too much avidity about what I was learning.

  I STAND THERE, BARE feet digging into the hot sand, rolling and unrolling the large sheaf of newsprint in my hands. The satchel with the clockwork device in it is heavy by my side. And damn it all
if the collar of my dress isn’t already sopping wet. Sweat drips into the hair curled at the back of my neck. I have put it up with a fine whaletooth comb my mother gave me, one of the few adornments I allow myself, but my hair is always so unruly, especially in this kind of weather.

  It is the season of Ho‘oilo, the time the elders insist used to be the cool part of the year. But everyone knows now that the weather only cools after the Tutua come and eat their fill. The sun really has teeth today, this whole year in fact, but that’s not what is making me sweat.

  The elders in my family, normally gregarious and good-natured, had turned their backs on me quietly when I told them what I was to do today. They had always tolerated my attempts to get them to move back to the city and join the modern world. They even put up with me nattering on and on about the technology I had seen in London or the newest steam-powered marvels being deployed in Honolulu.

  They were disappointed when I decided not to finish training as a kahuna under my mother and left instead to study the foreigner’s medicine in Beretania. Nevertheless, they had been understanding and even kind, often writing me letters and sending clippings of traditional stories published in the newspaper — both extravagances of a sort, considering the cost of paper here. When I came home from London, heartbroken from a failed relationship, my mother gently but firmly pulled me out of my grief with liberal doses of hugs, backbreaking work on our land, and my favorite raw fish. And my uncles helped my recovery as well with their merciless teasing, gentle songs and boisterous laughter.

  This morning is different. I had got up early and picked pua kenikeni to make a lei for my mother. My uncles filed in, chuckling and muttering, while I was clipping the blossoms before stringing them. Each smiled and came to press his nose against mine.

  We gathered around the bowl of fragrant flowers and chatted idly. Uncle Kalae limped over to get some dried fish to snack on and rasped that these hot days felt so much cooler with the scent of flowers in our nostrils. Uncle Hoku, wearing only his malo, teased me that I always dressed like I was still in London and laughed that hissing laugh of his. Uncle Hali‘a, who was the youngest, came over and put his rough hands on my shoulders and watched quietly as I strung the flowers.

  My mother walked in with an armload of hō‘i‘o ferns that she had picked from near the river. ‘Ho, Kahalalaulani! What, sleeping in today?’ bellowed Uncle Hoku, but he knew she had been up working before all of us.

  She flicked them a glance that made them fall silent instantly, put down the ferns and gave me a big hug, inhaling the scent of the pua kenikeni. They were her favorite, and she knew the lei I was making was for her, even though I hadn’t said anything. My mother and her brothers chatted about what work had to be done today and which of their children would watch the grandchildren.

  When a break in the conversation happened, I spoke quietly. ‘I agreed to do what the king wanted.’

  Uncle Hoku’s shoulders tensed like he felt a cane spider on his back. All the uncles began to shake their heads. Hoku and Kalae exhaled audibly in disappointment, and Hali‘a tried to stand up for me by declaring, ‘No one refuses the king’s summons!’ Each of the men vowed that they would take the carriage into town and set Kalākaua straight, listing off all of the things our family had done for the monarchy.

  My mother just stood there, silently regarding me. A single look from her was often enough to bring my boisterous uncles to heel, but this was different. There was no anger there. She could tell that the king had needed no compulsion to get me to do what he wanted.

  ‘She wants to do it,’ my mother said.

  My uncles fell silent, and then started up again. Why would you agree to fight the Tutua? Why would you help those foreigners who spit at us on the street? How could you do this?

  They didn’t even wait for my answer. The three of them just left. I ran after them, telling them that it was for the best and that it would help our family get back into the king’s good graces, but my pleas fell like pebbles from my lips, clattering to the floor, small and insignificant.

  I stood quietly and put the lei around my mother’s neck. She smiled wanly and reminded me of the prophecy made a hundred years ago.

  ‘The land shall come from the sea,’ she said.

  Ke kāhea ‘ana i ke kāhea Summoning the lā‘au kāhea

  MOST PEOPLE, INCLUDING ME, felt the prophecy referred to the foreigners who had come on their ships from so far away, who had washed over us like the ocean and taken so much of our land. My family, however, had always insisted that the prophecy was yet to be fulfilled and that the true power over the land had yet to arrive from the sea. Everyone could clearly see how much influence the foreigners wielded, but my family, and my mother in particular, refused to believe that these missionaries-turned-businessmen were so powerful as to be the fulfilment of the prophecy.

  I couldn’t tell my mother that I was the one who had suggested the plan to Walter Murray Gibson, the king’s science advisor. I felt such a stirring when I read those old stories my family sent me in London. They were reminders of how far Hawai‘i had come since making contact with the foreigners. We were an independent nation among nations, and it was because we were not afraid to embrace change.

  We couldn’t just hold on to the past. The foreigners had so much to offer us. Knowledge. Technology. Business. We needed to show the rest of the world that Hawai‘i belonged in this family of nations.

  Large tracts of land near sacred sites remained unused. State-of-the-art steam machinery rusted away because investors had no guarantee that their money and effort would not end up as rubble when the high tide brought the Tutua. If I helped the king rid the land of the leviathans, maybe I could win back the king’s favor. Maybe I could make a place for my family in our kingdom’s future. Maybe I could even help shape that future.

  The king’s summons directed me to use my lā‘au kāhea with a clockwork device that Gibson had built. My family was skilled in many types of incantations, but we were most known for our lā‘au kāhea, the art of summoning the highest spiritual powers to heal with just our voices. Indeed, my mother had been among the last of those to know the chants and skilled enough to implement them in the appropriate ceremonial ways and she had been inducting me into the art, though I hadn’t finished my training.

  My mother hissed and sucked her teeth when I made the mistake of telling her I met with Gibson. ‘Tsā! He is a usurper, giving poor counsel to the king. I don’t trust that pirate with his devices and talk of progress. He is a plover nosing around other birds’ nests.’

  Kalākaua has always been interested in the latest technological advances, and Gibson had drawn the king’s attention by crafting intricate spyglasses and ticking brass puzzles for him. As Gibson’s influence at court had grown, so had his devices. He believed that every problem could be solved by the application of technology. One of the most recent machines he designed was a gigantic steam-driven furrower that could plow acres and acres of sugar fields in a single day.

  And now he had made a device that would amplify my voice so that my lā‘au kāhea would have the sonic strength to overpower the Tutua. It was a burnished brass mask that covered the lower half of my face. An ornate grille adorned with stylised clouds and puffs of wind housed a mesh screen that let air in and out. Leather straps fitted the mask to my face.

  ‘It is essentially a music box,’ Gibson said.

  He told me how he miniaturised the comb and tuned its one hundred teeth to play particular notes that were nearly outside the normal range of human hearing. ‘But the cylinder! The cylinder is where the magic happens!’ he crowed. ‘Once the cylinder is wound, it will spin hundreds of revolutions per minute, repeating the melody over and over, too fast to even hear the individual notes.’

  Gibson was convinced that the sonic distortion from his device would shape the words of my kāhea into a battle song of all songs.

  My mother stopped me before I left, and we pressed our foreheads together to share
our breath. She inhaled, and said:

  ‘You know, don’t you, that when you unleash the lā‘au kāhea, you have no control over it. The kāhea will go where it will and do what it will. It may help you in your mission but then … it might help me in mine.’

  What did my mother mean?

  ‘What you’re doing is wrong, but the time is right.’

  No ke kai mai ka Tutua The Tutua from the sea

  I GLANCE OVER MY shoulder and see the king and his retinue lounging under their great canvas pavilion a hundred yards away. They are far from the booming winter surf crashing on the shore. Each wave comes closer, as if desperately trying to gain audience with the king. The court sits unaware, dressed in their finery, sipping iced juices, attendants cooling them in the salt air with large fans woven from hala leaves. King Kalākaua and Walter Murray Gibson, the science advisor, watch me intently.

  I look away from them and scan the horizon.

  A CROWD GATHERS AND waits for the tide change, though they keep a respectful distance from Kalākaua’s tent. Foreigners with their light skin and dark suits stand out among the sea of brown faces. The richest are in the pavilion with the king, but everyone in the crowd, whether businessmen in tailored suits or plantation workers in roughspun, is looking at me.

  I feel what they’re thinking. They wait to see what a woman can do in the face of a Tutua.

  This is my chance.

  Waimea Bay is a gentle moon of white sand shoreline, with a small river drawing a lazy arc out from the terraces and lo‘i of the valley to empty into the sea. The fertile joining of fresh water and salt attracts all manner of sea life, and it is a favorite place for my family to catch ‘ōpelu. There, high up on the mountain above the deep blue waters of the bay, stands Pu‘u o Mahuka heiau, one of the largest temples in the islands.