Hawaii by James A. Michener
A longboat was lowered, with three sailors at the oars, and the police marshal who had accompanied the lepers, ordered the cage opened, and called off names, and saw each afflicted man and woman into the boat. There the government’s responsibility ended, for the policeman did not enter the boat himself. He watched it move toward the shore, dump its human cargo on the beach, and return. Then he checked off another complement, and in this way the forty lepers were thrown ashore with no stores of clothing, no money, no food and no medicine.
When the condemned were all ashore, the marshal announced formally to the kokuas: “You are now free to accompany your husbands and wives, but you do so of your own free will. The government has no concern in what you are about to do. Is it your wish to go ashore and live with the lepers?”
The kokuas, staring with horrified fascination at the lazaretto, could barely scrape their tongues with words. “I am willing,” an old man rasped, and he climbed down into the boat. “I am willing,” a young wife reported, and with trepidation she went down. Finally the marshal asked Nyuk Tsin, “Do you do this thing of your own free will?” and she replied, “I am willing.” The longboat set out for shore, and Nyuk Tsin approached the leper settlement at Kalawao.
She was surprised to see, as the green peninsula drew near, that it contained practically no houses, and she asked one of the rowers, in Hawaiian, “Where are the houses?” And he replied, unable to look her in the eyes, “There are no houses.”
And there were none … to speak of. There were a few grass huts, a few remnants of homes left by the Hawaiians who had been expelled five years before, but there were no houses as such, nor any hospital, nor store, nor government building, nor functioning church, nor roads, nor doctors, nor nurses. In panic Nyuk Tsin stared at the inviting natural setting and looked for signs of community life. There were no police, no officials of any kind, no ministers, no mothers with families, no one selling cloth, no one making poi.
The prow of the longboat struck shore, but no one moved. The sailors waited and then one said, as if ashamed to be part of this dismal scene, “This is Kalawao.” Appalled by what faced them, the kokuas rose and left the boat. “Aloha,” the sailor cried as the boat withdrew for the last time. The Kilauea put back out to sea, and Nyuk Tsin, trying to find Mun Ki among the stranded lepers, cried to no one: “Where is the hospital?”
Her plea was heard by a big, tall Hawaiian man known to the lepers as Kaulo Nui, Big Saul of the Bible. He had no nose and few fingers, but he was still a powerful man, and he came to Nyuk Tsin and shouted in Hawaiian, “Here there is no law. There is nothing but what I command.”
The newcomers were as frightened by this state of affairs as was Nyuk Tsin, but Big Saul ignored them, and pointing his mutilated hand at the Chinese couple, said, “You brought the mai Pake! You will live apart.”
“Where?” Nyuk Tsin asked boldly.
“Apart,” the big man said. Then his eye fell on the young wife Kinau, who still had flowers in her hair, and he moved toward her, announcing: “This woman is for me.”
Kinau drew back in horror from the huge, noseless man whose hands were so badly deformed. She shuddered, and Big Saul saw this, so to teach her the required lesson, he grabbed her by the left arm, pulled him to her, and kissed her on the mouth. “You’re my woman!” he announced again.
Nyuk Tsin expected to see someone—who, she could not guess—step forward to knock the big man down, but when none did, the awful fact of Kalawao slowly dawned upon her, as it did upon all the others. Big Saul, holding onto the shuddering Kinau, glared at the newcomers and repeated the news: “Here there is no law.”
Nor was there any. In all of Kalawao there was no voice of government, no voice of God, no healing medicine. In the houseless peninsula there was not even a secure supply of water, and food was available only when the Kilauea remembered to kick into the sea enough casks and cattle. In truth, the lepers had been thrown ashore with nothing except the sentence of certain death, and what they did until they died, no man cared.
If any of the newcomers thought differently, they were disabused by what happened next, for Kinau was an uncommonly pretty girl, and the fact that she had no open lesions made her extraordinary in the doomed community, so that Big Saul and his rowdier companions became excited by her beauty and could not wait till nightfall, when such things usually occurred, and three of them dragged her behind a wall that still stood, a remnant of a house where a family of fishermen had once lived, and the two who joined Big Saul were among the most loathsome of the group, for their bodies were falling away, but they thought: “We have been thrown away by Hawaii. No one cares and we shall soon be dead.” So they dragged Kinau behind the wall and started, with their fragmentary hands, to tear away her clothes.
“Please! Please!” she begged, but nothing could be done to interrupt the three hungry men, and when she was naked they admired her, and pinched her body and explored it and laughed, and then in turn two held her down while the other mounted her, and in time she fainted.
For five days Big Saul and his cronies kept her to themselves, after which any others who thought themselves strong enough to force their way into the group were free to join, and when they saw the naked Kinau, as yet unblemished, they were hungry with old memories of the days when they were whole men, and they cared nothing about what they did.
Occasionally Big Saul left the girl, to make decisions as to how the lepers should dispose themselves, and he was adamant that the Chinese must stay apart, so Nyuk Tsin and her husband were forced to live at the outer edge of the community of six hundred dying men and women. For the first six days they slept on bare earth; and they found an abandoned wall against which they built a rough lean-to, using shrubs and leaves, for there was no lumber of any kind. For their bed they had only raw earth, and when rain came it crept under them so that Mun Ki, already shivering with ague, came close to dying of pneumonia. Then Nyuk Tsin, using her bare hands, for there were no implements, scraped together a platform of earth and covered it with twigs and leaves, and this made a bed into which the water could not creep unless the rainfall was unusually heavy.
The two outlawed Chinese were forbidden access to the food barrels until all others had partaken, and even then Big Saul decreed that they live on half-rations, and if it had not been for Nyuk Tsin’s resourcefulness they would have starved. On the reef she found small edible snails, and in one of the deserted valleys she discovered dry-land taro that had gone wild. With twigs she collected from the cliffs she built a small underground oven in which she baked the taro, so that life apart from the others had minor compensations. Certainly, the Kees lived better than the pathetic lepers who could no longer walk.
In Kalawao in 1870 there were over sixty such unspeakable persons: their feet had fallen away, their hands were stumps, and they crawled about the settlement begging food which they themselves could neither obtain nor prepare. Horrifying echoes of humanity, they often had no faces whatever, excepting eyes and voices with which to haunt the memories of those who came upon them. There was no medicine for them, no bed, no care of any kind. They crawled along the beach of Kalawao and in God’s due time they died. Usually they did not even find a grave, but were left aside until their bones were cleaned and could be laid in a shallow ditch.
Sometimes the authorities in Honolulu forgot to send the Kilauea with replenishments of food, and then the settlement degenerated into absolute terror. Big Saul and his cronies commandeered whatever supplies remained, and protected their rights with violence. The death rate soared, four or five cases each day, and a legless woman might lie in the path all day screaming for food or water, and no one would listen to her, hoping that in the cold night she would die. And usually she did, and her tormented body might lie there, just as she had left it, for a day or even three, until Big Saul commanded someone to remove it.
There was no law in Kalawao and there was almost no humanity. What made the situation doubly terrible was that regularly the ugly
After six weeks of keeping the beautiful young wife Kinau a prisoner, during which time more than eighteen men enjoyed her unmarked body, she was turned loose for whoever wanted her. She was allowed one flimsy dress, but the way in which she wore it proved that she had by God’s grace lost her mind. She could remember nothing of what had happened to her, and she walked in a daze, unable to focus on the present, so that for a space of three or four months whatever man wanted her simply grabbed her and took her to where he slept on the cold earth and played with her for as long as he wished. Then he shoved her along, and she moved like a ghost, her dress askew and no flowers in her matted hair, until some other man wanted her, and then she was his. The women of Kalawao felt sorry for her, but each had her own problem, so that no one tended the poor crazy girl.
In the fourth month, in February of 1871, that is, the virulent leprosy that abided in Kinau broke loose, and within the space of a few weeks she became a horribly riddled thing, a walking corpse with thick, bloated face, shivering lips about to fall away and sickening illness in her breasts. Now men left her alone, but in her dementia she took off her flimsy dress and exposed the sores of her body. She walked slowly from Big Saul to his first lieutenant and then on to his second, whimpering, “Now I should like to lie with you again.” She became such a sore on the community that men could not stand seeing her approach, her body falling apart, and finally Big Saul said, “Somebody ought to knock that one on the head.” So on a dark night, somebody did, and she lay dead in the path for two days before she was finally dragged away for burial.
Of course, no woman was safe on Kalawao, for Big Saul and his men were free to take whom they liked, and those who arrived on the beach with no men to protect them suffered grievously, for they were usually women not far advanced in the disease, and to be raped repeatedly by men with no faces or with hands eroded to stumps was unbearable, but there was no escape, and Kalawao was filled with women who fell into a kind of stupor, crying to themselves, “Why has God punished me?”
It must not be assumed that women were blameless for the degeneration that overtook Kalawao, for there were many presentable women who felt: “I have been abandoned by society. There is no law here and no one cares what I do.” Such women helped the men brew a raw and savage liquor from roots of the ti plant, or muddy beer from stewed sweet potatoes, and for weeks at a time, whole sections of the leper population stayed madly drunk, coursing loudly through the settlement, brawling, screaming indecencies at the general population and winding up in some public place naked and lustful, there to indulge themselves with one another to the applause of cheering witnesses. Those who inflamed these orgies and who seemed to enjoy them most were women, and it was not uncommon in those days, when no priests or ministers or government officials were present to protect order, to see a half-naked woman, at the end of a nine-day drunk, stagger into a public place and cry, “I can have intercourse with any four men here, and when I’m through with them, they’ll be half dead.” And volunteers would leap at the offer, and there would be a wild, insane testing to see if she could make good her challenge, and when she was finished, she would fall asleep in a drunken, exhausted stupor, right on the ground where she lay, and the night rains would come and no one would cover her, and after a few years she would die, not of leprosy, but of tuberculosis.
If anyone in those years had wished to see humanity at its positive lowest, humanity wallowing in filth of its own creation, he would have had to visit Kalawao, for not only was the peninsula cursed by leprosy; it was also scarred by human stupidity. The peninsula had two sides, an eastern where cold winds blew and rain fell incessantly, and a western where the climate was both warm and congenial; but the leper colony had been started on the inclement eastern shore, and there the government insisted that it be kept while the kindly western shore remained unpopulated. The eastern location, being close to the towering cliffs, received its first sunlight late in the day and lost it early in the afternoon; but on the western slope there was adequate sun. Most ridiculous of all, even though the cliffs threw down a hundred waterfalls, none had been channeled into the leper settlement. At first a little had been brought down by an inadequate, tied-together pipe, but it had long since broken, so that all water had to be lugged by hand several miles, and often dying people with no kokuas to help them would spend their last four or five days pleading helplessly for a drink which they were never given. For six indifferent years no official in Honolulu found time to concern himself with such problems or allocate even miserly sums to their solution. In ancient times it had been said, “Out of sight, out of mind,” and rarely in human history had this calloused apothegm been more concisely illustrated than at the Kalawao lazaretto. The government had decreed: “The lepers shall be banished,” as if saying the words and imprisoning the leprous bodies somehow solved the problem.
IT WOULD NOT be fair, however, to say that during these appalling first years no one cared. Brave Christian ministers from other islands sometimes visited Kalawao to solemnize marriages of dying people who did not wish to live their last days in sin. Catholic priests and Mormon disciples occasionally made the rough crossing to the lazaretto, and their arrivals were remembered long after they had left. Dr. Whipple had come, at the age of seventy, to see what the settlement needed, and he reported: “Everything.” At one point a group of religious lepers had actually started a church, and leafing through their treasured Bible had come upon that glowing passage of hope in which the Apostle John reported: “And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: … He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.… He … washed, and came seeing.” The lepers called their church—it had no building, for Honolulu could spare no lumber—Siloama, and it kept their hope alive, for every leper was convinced that somewhere in the world there must be a pool of Siloam, or a medicine, or an unguent that would cure him.
Because Nyuk Tsin was pregnant, she escaped the attentions of Big Saul and his ruthless gang, but as her birth time approached she forgot him and suffered apprehensions of a different nature. For one thing, the lack of water troubled her, and she wondered what her husband would do when the baby came, for he had only one small receptacle for water and no fire at which to heat it. Mun Ki promised: “I’ll ask some of the Hawaiian women to help, and they’ll have buckets.” But Big Saul would permit no one to go near the Chinese shed, and on the final day Nyuk Tsin gave birth to her fifth son under conditions that would not have been permitted had she been an animal: no water, no clean clothes waiting for the child, no food to speed the mother’s milk, no bed for the infant except the cold ground; there was not even clean straw upon which the mother could lie. Nevertheless, she produced a ruddy-faced, slant-eyed little fellow; and then her great worries began.
No one knew at that time how the contagion of leprosy operated, for it was a fact that many kokuas like Nyuk Tsin lived in the lazaretto for years in the most intimate contact with lepers without ever acquiring the mai Pake, so mere contact could not be the explanation; but she had learned that if children below the age of eight stayed very long in contact with leprosy, they were sure to catch it; so she nursed her infant as best she could and prayed for the arrival of the next Kilauea. While she waited, she did many things to make her son prematurely strong. She exposed him daily to the winds so that he would know them; she fed him constantly to build health; she slapped him vigorously to make him resist shock; but at night she cuddled him warmly between her sallow breasts, and she loved him desperately.
When
“We’ll ask the captain,” shouted back one of the sailors, and on the next trip in he yelled, “Where’s the Pake with the baby?” and Nyuk Tsin almost stumbled she ran so fast to give her reply, but she was near tears when the sailor shoved the baby back and said, “Captain wants to know where the baby goes.” Nyuk Tsin eagerly explained: “He goes to Dr. Whipple, in the big house.”
“Doc Whipple died last month,” the sailor growled, and prepared to shove off.
Nyuk Tsin was staggered by this news and sought frantically for an alternative. “Give the baby to Kimo and Apikela, the maile gatherers,” she cried eagerly.
“Where in hell’s that?” the sailor asked, and they rowed back to the ship. On the next trip they advised the agonized Chinese woman that they thought they’d better not take the child, because they had no idea what to do with it when they got to Honolulu, and since there was no wet nurse aboard on this trip, the baby would have no food for a full day. Nyuk Tsin tried to explain that the captain could give the child to any Chinese, and as for food, she had made little bags filled with poi which he could suck. But the longboat pulled away, and in complete panic Nyuk Tsin saw the Kilauea prepare to steam off, so without knowing what she was attempting she walked out into the surf, with her child in her arms, and she started vainly to attempt swimming to the departing ship, but as soon as she was in the water the fine Hawaiian swimmer who had shared the leper cage with Mun Ki saw her plight, and leaped in beside her, grasped the infant in his left arm and started swimming strongly toward the ship. The captain saw him coming and halted the engine for a moment until the powerful brown man caught hold of a rope and with a heave pulled himself up and threw the child into the arms of a waiting sailor. Then, with the same movement, he dropped back into the sea and started a long, easy stroke which carried him back to the leper settlement.