Hawaii by James A. Michener
The rioting continued for three more days, and girls who had been well along in Jerusha’s school, standing midway between the savage and the civilized, reverted to the insane joy of sleeping, six and eight and ten at a time, in the hot fo’c’s’ls of the whaling ships. Murphy’s grog shop rollicked with songs. Old men who tried to keep sailors out of their homes were beaten up, and their daughters taken. And at the palace, tired, bewildered Malama ordered all women to the hills and found it increasingly difficult to breathe.
It was on the third day of the riots that she summoned Abner and asked with difficulty, “How did these things happen, my dear teacher?”
“We are all animals, Malama,” he explained. “Only the laws of God keep us within the confines of decency.”
“Why have your men not learned those laws?” Malama asked.
“Because Lahaina has itself been so long without the law. Wherever there is no law, men think they can do as they will.”
“If your king knew about these days … the cannon and the burning of the houses … would he apologize?”
“He would be humiliated,” Abner affirmed.
“Why is it that the Americans and the English and the French are so determined that we sell whiskey in our stores … and allow our girls to go to their ships?”
“It is because Hawaii has not yet established herself as a civilized nation,” Abner explained.
“Are your men civilizing us?” Malama asked wearily. “By firing the cannon at us?”
“I am ashamed for our men,” Abner said in despair.
This was the moment Malama had been waiting for, and after a long pause she said softly, “Now we are equal, Makua Hale.”
“In what way?” Abner asked suspiciously.
“You have always told me that I could not achieve a state of grace without humility, without admitting to God that I am lost and totally evil. You would not accept me into your church because you claimed I was not humble. Makua Hale, I will tell you something. I wasn’t humble. And you were right to keep me out of your church. But do you know why I could not be humble?”
“Why?” Abner asked carefully.
“Because you were not humble. Your ways were always right. Mine were always wrong. Your words were always white. Mine were black. You tried to make me speak Hawaiian because you wanted to learn Hawaiian, and I would not beg to join your church, because you spoke of humility but knew it not. Today, Makua Hale, with the fort destroyed and your home knocked down by your own people, we are equal. I am humble at last. I am unable to act without God’s help. And for the first time I see before me a humble man.”
The great huge woman began to weep, and after a moment she rose painfully to her knees, pushing aside her sorrowful attendants and making a prayer-temple of her hands. From that position she said in total contrition, “I am lost, Makua Hale, and I beg you to accept me into your church. I am going to die and I want to speak with God before I do.”
From the Bay Tree some fools were firing the cannon again at the house of a man and wife who would not give them their daughter, and at the western end of town a building was ablaze. There was a dance under way at Murphy’s, and three of Pupali’s daughters were in Captain Hoxworth’s cabin. It was under these conditions that Abner said, “We will baptize you into the church of God, Malama. We will do it on Sunday.”
“We had better do it now,” Malama suggested, and one of the waiting-women nodded, so Abner sent for Jerusha, Keoki, Noelani, Kelolo, Captain Janders and the Whipples. They came through the rioters, who jeered at Janders for not being a real sea captain and at the Whipples for being missionaries, but when Dr. Whipple saw Malama he was greatly concerned and said, “This woman is very ill,” at which huge Kelolo began to sob.
It was a mournful crowd that formed a semicircle around Malama, who lay flat on the floor, wheezing painfully. The cannon sounded in the distance, and half a hundred hoodlums who had trailed the Whipples jeered outside the palace gates. Without a Bible, Abner recited from memory the closing passages of Proverbs, and the words had a special application to Malama, the Alii Nui: “ ‘Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.’ ”
Then he announced to the gathering: “Malama Kanakoa, daughter of the King of Kona, having entered into a state of grace, seeks baptism into the holy church of God. Is it your wish that she be accepted?”
Keoki spoke first, then Janders and the Whipples, but when it came time for Jerusha, who in the last days had appreciated for the first time the courage Malama had shown in governing Maui, she did not speak but bowed down and kissed the sick woman. “You are my daughter,” Malama said weakly.
Abner interrupted and said, “Malama, you will now put aside your heathen name and take a Christian one. Which do you wish?”
A look of supreme joy came over the sick woman’s massive face and she whispered, “I should like the name of that dear friend of whom Jerusha has often told me. My name will be Luka. Jerusha, will you tell me the story for the last time?”
And as if she were talking to her own children at dusk, Jerusha began once more the story of Ruth—Luka to the Hawaiians—and when she came to the part about the alien land she broke down and was unable to continue, so Malama concluded the story, adding, “May I like Luka find happiness in the new land to which I shall soon go.”
After the baptism, Whipple suggested, “You’d better leave now. I have to examine Malama.”
“I’ll die with the old medicines, Doctor,” Malama said simply, and she indicated to Kelolo that he must now bring in the kahunas.
“Are kahunas proper, when we have just …” Abner began, but Jerusha pulled him away, and the little procession marched back to the center of town, where Amanda Whipple suggested, “You had better stay with us, Jerusha and Abner.”
“We will stay in our house,” Jerusha said firmly, and when they were there, after the riotings had subsided and the ship captains were beginning to feel ashamed of themselves, for natives were whispering that sailors at the fort had killed Malama, or had caused her near-death, Captain Rafer Hoxworth, fully dressed, with polished cap and buttons, came up the pathway to the mission house, followed by five sailors with armloads of gifts.
Tucking his hat under his arm, as he had long ago been taught to do when addressing a lady, he said gruffly, “I apologize, ma’am. If I have broken anything I want to replace it. The other captains have contributed these chairs and this table …” He paused in some embarrassment and then added, “And I’ve gone among the ships and got this cloth. I trust you’ll make yourself some decent … I mean some new dresses, ma’am.” He bowed, placed his hat on his head, and left the mission grounds.
At first Abner was intent upon demolishing the furniture. “We’ll burn it on the pier,” he threatened, but Jerusha would not permit this.
“It has been sent to us as an act of retribution,” she said firmly. “We have always needed chairs and a desk.”
“Do you think that I could translate the Bible … on that desk?” Abner asked.
“Captain Hoxworth did not send it,” Jerusha replied, and while her husband watched, she started arranging the chairs in the damaged room. “God has sent these things to the mission,” she said, “and not to Abner and Jerusha Hale.”
“I’ll give the cloth to Malama’s women,” Abner insisted, and to this Jerusha agreed, but when he was gone, and the town was once more quiet, she sat in one of the new chairs at her new kitchen table and composed this letter:
“My dearest Sister Esther in God. You alone of all the people I know will have the grace to forgive me for what I am about to do. It is an act of vanity and one, under the circumstances of my life, truly unforgivable, but if it is sinful, it must rest on me alone, and I am powerless to avoid it. Dearest sister, do not smile at me and above all tell no one of my vanity.
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“I should like it to be russet in color, with either blue or red trimming, and I would be especially grateful to you if it could have the full round sleeves that seem to be in popular style today. I saw such a dress some years ago on a woman heading for Honolulu, and I thought it very becoming. But if the styles have changed substantially, and if there is now a fashion that I do not know of, I would rather wish you to follow the newer style. Hats I do not need, but if you could find it in your heart to send me a pair of gloves, with lace as in the old days, I should be most deeply appreciative.
“I do not need to tell you, dearest Esther, that I have no money wherewith to pay you for this extraordinary request, for I have not seen a dollar in over seven years and do not require to see any; and I appreciate that this is a vain and costly imposition to place upon a friend. But I pray that you will understand.
“I am not as stout as I used to be, and seem not to be as tall, so do not make the dress too large. I would judge from what your dear brother tells me that I am now about your size, but I do not want one of your dresses or anybody’s. The cloth must be wholly new and mine. And may you find the charity in your heart to forgive me for this begging letter. Your sister, Jerusha.”
When she went to Janders & Whipple’s store to post the letter she discovered that the Carthaginian had sailed and that lovely Iliki, Pupali’s youngest, had joined the captain. She felt sorrier for this than for anything that had happened in the past days, and she could not refrain from tears. “She was an adorable child,” Jerusha said mournfully. “We shall not find another like her. Already I feel her departure as a great loss, for I had come to think of her as my own daughter. I do hope the world is good to Iliki.” And she tried to dry her eyes, but the tears would not cease.
ONE OF THE LAST PUBLIC ACTS Malama performed was to climb into her land canoe, adjusting herself painfully on piles of tapa and directing her bearers to carry her through the damaged streets. Wherever she went she said simply, “The laws we gave are good laws. They must be obeyed.” She stopped to encourage policemen, and at Murphy’s grog shop again announced, in short gasps: “No more alcohol may be sold to Hawaiians. Girls must stop dancing here undressed.” And the force of her words, coming as it did so soon after the riots, was four times what it had been before, and gradually Kelolo’s policemen retrieved the control they had lost, and gained more besides. In her ludicrous canoe, followed by her two enormous ladies-in-waiting and the men with feathered staves, Malama became a figure of considerable dignity.
Both Abner and Jerusha noticed that on this strange canoe journey Malama’s children, Keoki and Noelani, were drawn closely to her, and at the fort, where the largest congregation had assembled, Malama went so far as to announce: “I am going to die. My daughter Noelani will be the Alii Nui.” There was no applause, but the citizens studied the handsome young girl with increased respect.
Abner now observed that the important kahunas of the island were gathering about Malama and arguing with her fervently, and he assumed that they were trying to cajole their renegade leader into abandoning her new religion, but this was not the case. The kahunas were satisfied with Christianity and were willing to acknowledge that its god was patently superior to their own, so prudence alone directed them to respect the potent newcomer; but they were also eager to overlook nothing in protecting their calm and massive alii in her last days, so as Abner prayed to Jehovah, they silently prayed to Kane. They massaged Malama with special care, sought traditional herbs to soothe her, and prepared favorite foods, on which she continued to gorge, feeling that only in this way had she any chance of recovering her strength. She ate four times a dav, and sometimes five, and at a normal meal consumed a pound or two of roast pig, part of a dog, some baked fish, a substantial helping of breadfruit and not less than a quart of poi and oftentimes two or three, after which the lomilomi women would knead her stomach to spur her faltering digestion. Dr. Whipple stormed: “She’s eating herself to death, but she started doing so when she was twenty. Such fantastic meals!”
When word reached the other islands that Malama, daughter of the King of Kona, was dying, the alii assembled, as they had at deathbeds for untold generations, and in after years whenever an American who had been in Lahaina at the time was asked for his most vivid impression of the island, he never referred to the cannonading but to this last mournful gathering of the alii: “They came from distant Kauai in ships and from Lanai in canoes. They came singly and in groups. Some came in western clothes, I recall, and some in yellow capes. But they all landed at our little pier, walked gravely past Kamehameha’s old palace and eastward along the dusty road beneath the kou trees. I can see them now. What giants they were!”
Queen Kaahumanu, regent of the islands, came attended by Queens Liliha and Kinau, both of enormous girth. From Hawaii came Princess Kalani-o-mai-heu-ila, heavier by forty pounds than Malama, and from Honolulu, Kauikeaouli, the boy king. The great men of the islands were there: Paki and Boki and Hoapili and the leader called by westerners Billy Pitt; and Dr. Whipple, seeing them assemble, thought: “In one lifetime they lifted their islands from paganism to God, from the Stone Age to the modern. And to do so they had to fight off the Russians, the English, the French, the Germans and the Americans. Every time a civilized warship came to their islands it was to make them turn over girls for the sailors or rum to the natives.” They were an amazing race, the old alii of Hawaii, and now as they gathered in formal panoply for the death of Luka Malama Kanakoa they seemed to be mourning for themselves.
Dr. Whipple observed to Abner: “They are like echoes of the great animals that once roamed the world and marched slowly to their death as changes overtook them.”
“What animals?” Abner asked suspiciously.
“The monstrous ones before the ice ages,” Whipple explained. “Some scientists think they vanished because they became too huge to be accommodated on the changing earth.”
“I have no interest in such speculation,” Abner replied.
In her grass palace Malama greeted each of the great old friends. “Aloha nui nui,” she repeated constantly.
“Auwe, auwe!” they wept. “We have come to weep with our beloved sister.”
When extreme pain in breathing attacked her, she bit her lower lip and gasped through the corners of her big mouth, resuming her smile as soon as the pain passed, while around her, in a vast semicircle, hunched the alii, whispering to themselves and praying.
Now Kelolo decided that it was time to move the woman he had loved so deeply onto the bed where she would die, so he sent his men to the hills to fetch bundles of fragrant leaves—api for protection against evil spirits, ti for healing, and mysterious maile whose penetrating aroma was the best loved—and when these leaves arrived, redolent and reminiscent of courtship days on Hawaii, Kelolo gently broke the back of each one so as to release its odor, and he arranged them in a formal pattern over the tapa blanket. Over this fragrant bed he placed a softly woven pandanus mat, and then a soft tapa, and over all a sheet of Cantonese silk embroidered with golden dragons. And whenever giant Malama moved on this bed, she caught the smell of maile.
Next, Kelolo went to the beach and had his fishermen procure fresh aholehole, which in the old custom of the islands he cooked himself. He grated coconuts and saw to the baking of breadfruit, and in her last days she ate not a morsel except from his fingers. In the long hours of the night it was he who waved the soft feathered wands to keep away the flies from the great sleeping body that he had lov
She died looking at Kelolo, seeing him as he had been in their youth, before strange gods and missionaries had intervened between them, but her last words reflected the new society which she had been instrumental in launching: “When I die no one must knock out his teeth. No one must blind his eye. There must be no furious lamenting. I shall be buried as a Christian.” Then she summoned Kelolo and whispered to him for the last time, raising herself upon her elbow to do so, so that when she expired she fell backwards, a mighty surge of lifeless flesh, crushing the maile leaves.
Malama’s wish was granted, and she was accorded a Christian burial in a cedar box on an island in the center of a marshy area where the alii had often gone on outings. Abner preached a moving graveside sermon, and the towering alii, standing beside the first Christian grave that many of them had ever seen, thought: “This is a better way to bury a woman than the old way,” but the common people, not allowed onto the kapu island, stood on the shores of the river and wept piteously in the old fashion. None of them, however, knocked out their teeth or gouged their living eyeballs as they had done in the past when an alii nui died. Instead they watched in awe as the funeral procession formed: Makua Hale and his wife in front, intoning prayers for their beloved friend, followed by Captain Janders and Dr. Whipple and their wives. Then came the kahunas wreathed in maile and secretly muttering old heathen chants to themselves, followed by the towering alii, weeping in massive grief. Eight of the men, wearing yellow capes, carried poles on which was placed the cedar box. It was covered with maile and lehua blossoms and by a huge silken coverlet embroidered in purple dragons.