Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  Dorothy was mortified, but she told herself this would pass in time, and for now she must swallow her anger and her hurt and remember Christ’s admonitions that “ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” And so the more they avoided her, the more she tried to engage them in conversation. The greater the fear in their eyes, the louder she sang the hymns, to show them all how deeply she believed, how fervently she held Christ in her heart.

  For the annual Christmas bake sale, raising money to buy gifts for sick and underprivileged children—including those at Kalaupapa—Dorothy baked, as usual, an angel-food cake with passionfruit filling and sweet coconut icing. She brought it to church and gave it to Mrs. Fujita, the sale organizer, who held it in her hands as though it were an unexploded artillery shell . . . then slowly handed it back to Dorothy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can’t take this.” Dorothy stared at her, uncomprehending, until she added, “For . . . sanitary reasons.”

  The words stung Dorothy as nothing else had. She blinked back tears and quickly left. She walked the ten blocks to her home carrying the cake in her hands, as though she were taking it to a party, as though she were not dying inside; only after she hurried past the yellow QUARANTINE sign and into the house did she put the cake down and allow herself to weep.

  She continued to love and worship Christ in her heart, but after that Dorothy stopped going to church.

  That Christmas was a cheerless one for Rachel. Oh, the staff at Kalihi tried to make it a festive enough day for the patients, and Mama and Papa came and brought her a new doll as a Christmas gift; but once their allotted time with her was up, Rachel cried out for them to stay longer and had to be dragged out of the visiting room. At supper, Uncle Pono’s attempts to cheer her up only made her sadder. She cried herself to sleep again that night, her doll lying forgotten on the bed beside her. Had she not been lost in her own grief and homesickness, she might have noticed that not all the girls on the ward had visitors that day, and fewer still had Christmas presents.

  With his world coming apart as if it were a matryoshka—each new horror splitting open to reveal yet another nesting inside—Henry decided he could no longer afford to spend long months at sea away from his family, and so took a job as a stevedore at Honolulu Harbor. He worked from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, and thanks to the harbor’s proximity to Kalihi he could visit Rachel each evening, unless he had to work an extra shift or Dorothy needed him at home (less and less, these days). Sometimes Pono would hobble into the visiting room with Rachel—the ma'i pk having caused wasting and contracture in his left foot—telling jokes, tickling his niece under her arms. And in those moments Henry actually envied his brother for being a leper—for being able to touch Rachel, to make her laugh or wipe away a tear.

  One evening in January, after Rachel had returned to her room, a more subdued Pono quietly asked his brother, “Henry. You seen my keiki?”

  “Yeah, sure, last month, at Eli’s.”

  “They okay?” Pono said wistfully. “I ain’t seen them in so long.”

  Over a year, Henry realized. He tried to imagine not seeing Rachel for an entire year.

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “They’re good. Florence and Eli, they’re taking good care of them.”

  Pono nodded. “Florence, she’s a good sister,” he said, then added, “And you been a good brother, Henry.”

  With difficulty Henry said, “You been a good brother too, Pono. And a good uncle to my Rachel.”

  Pono’s eyes reflected both guilt and shame. “Better uncle than a husband, ’ey?” he said gloomily. Then, “You know leprosy is grounds for divorce?”

  “Margaret won’t divorce you.”

  Pono laughed, not a happy laugh.

  “Minute I go to Moloka'i, she’ll file. You watch.”

  “Who says you’re goin’ to Moloka'i?”

  Pono pulled a wrinkled sheet of paper from his pants pocket. Since he couldn’t pass it through the wire mesh separating them, Pono held it up for his brother to read. It was a letter on Board of Health stationery, and informed Pono that on January 15, 1893, he would be transferred from Kalihi to Kalaupapa on the island of Moloka'i.

  Henry hung his head and began to cry.

  Rachel was no less upset by the news. When at breakfast the next morning her uncle told her, she too cried, but they were angry tears. “No! It’s not fair!”

  Pono shrugged. “Not fair we got leprosy, either. It just is.”

  “I won’t stay here, I want to go with you!” She pushed away her tray of poi and eggs; it went skidding across the table and onto the floor.

  Pono calmly picked up her discarded breakfast, then turned to Rachel and said gently, “Now how you gonna do that? You’re gonna get well, grow up, get married—they don’t send healthy old married ladies to Moloka'i, ’ey?”

  He smiled and wiped a tear from beneath her eye. “You do me a favor, though. Whoever you marry—no matter how handsome he is—you stay my special girl, okay?”

  Rachel agreed that she would, then ran weeping out of the dining hall.

  Henry visited Kalihi the night before his brother’s departure for Kalaupapa, but at Pono’s urging neither he nor Dorothy ventured to the wharf that day to see him off—for fear that if Henry’s employers saw that he was related to a leper, they would fire him. It had happened before.

  The day after Pono’s departure, shortly before five in the afternoon, Henry Kalama’s world split open like a matryoshka yet again.

  T

  here was always a great clamor at the docks—the groan of winches and cranes, the blast of a ship’s horn, shouts and curses in half a dozen languages—so when Henry, clocking out for the day, turned to leave, he hadn’t heard anything that might’ve prepared him for what he now saw: four boatloads of American sailors, rowing ashore from the USS Boston moored in the harbor.

  Henry had seen American soldiers before, but never so many: three companies of bluejackets, one of marines, a hospital unit, even a corps of musicians. And the troops now landing at Brewer’s and Charlton’s wharves were bristling with weaponry. Each man carried a rifle and double cartridge belt, and the artillery unit was bringing ashore Gatling guns and a pair of revolving cannon!

  The soldiers quickly formed a single column and began marching off the docks and into downtown Honolulu. Unlike most American sailors Henry had known, these offered no friendly smiles, no boyish waves—they walked ramrod-straight, rifles resting on shoulders, in parade formation.

  A young man lounging at the dock reminded Henry there had been a public rally that day in support of Queen Lili'uokalani, who wanted a new constitution. The old constitution had been forced on King Kalkaua by haole vigilante groups, and had stripped the monarchy of much of its power—and most Hawaiians of their right to vote. “Maybe things get ugly,” the young man speculated. Had the Americans been called to help keep the peace?

  As he watched the troops march away, Henry’s disquiet grew. Unlike most Hawaiians, he had traveled far and wide; had witnessed the might of great navies. The more he saw of the world, the more he realized how small and vulnerable these islands truly were. And he was only too aware that the twenty-six-inch guns of the American warship in the harbor could have quickly leveled most of downtown Honolulu.

  Henry followed the troops up Fort Street.

  At the corner of Fort and Merchant a marine company was detached to guard the American consulate, the remainder of the troops turning right onto Merchant Street. In minutes they were marching into Palace Square. This was where the rally was to have been held, but it was empty now; clearly the Americans were not here to quell a riot.

  Glancing toward 'Iolani Palace, Henry saw Queen Liliu'okalani herself standing on a balcony, watching the troops as they passed by. They gave her a respectful salute, the flag bearers drooping their colors, the musicians delivering four short ruffles of their drums. The queen was a large, sturdy woman, but standing there on her
balcony she seemed to Henry quite fragile.

  He found himself thinking, And the land shall belong to a people from across the sea.

  The Americans marched on under a light rain, finally encamping beneath the sheltering trees of an expensive house. There the soldiers laid aside their rifles and began to look and act more like the Americans he had known—smiling, laughing, rolling cigarettes. A haole woman came out of the house and served the troops lemonade and bananas, as if they were on a picnic. And on the grounds of the nearby Hawaiian Hotel, the Royal Hawaiian Band began its weekly Monday night concert and Henry could hear the familiar, comforting melody of “Pua Alani” under the patter of rain.

  Henry told himself he was being silly; surely the Americans were simply here on some sort of maneuvers. He caught a trolley going west on King Street, toward Kalihi, and put everything but Rachel out of his mind.

  The next day, the shocking news radiated across the city: the queen had been deposed.

  I

  mmediately after Lili'uokalani’s call for a new constitution, a small coterie of white businessmen had formed a Committee for Safety—their own. Fearing that a more powerful queen might threaten their property and business interests, they dedicated themselves to her overthrow. They would have been easily overwhelmed by the Queen’s Royal Guard had it not been for the collusion of the American Minister to Hawai'i, John Stevens, who landed troops to “prevent the destruction of American life and property,” though there was no such property anywhere near where the troops were deployed.

  Before the Committee had time to rearrange the furniture in the Government Building, Stevens formally recognized the Provisional Government. That night, on the reasonable assumption that her Royal Guard was outnumbered by American forces, the queen reluctantly surrendered.

  In the days after the coup, there was little practical difference in the way people lived their lives. Streetcars ran on the same schedules, stores kept the same hours, the price of a shank of beef remained the same. At a public meeting at Kaumakapili Church, Reverend Waiamau suggested that nothing important had been lost, and in the long run Hawai'i had much to gain from the new status quo. Henry argued that what they were in danger of losing was their very history: for what were the ali'i, the royalty, but the Hawaiian people’s living kinship to their own past?

  Most people thought the whole thing would simply blow over. Henry’s own father reminded him of another coup—engineered by a rogue British consul, not unlike this man Stevens—which overthrew the king when Maka had been a small boy. (Assignment to Hawai'i seemed to bring out the worst kind of colonialist megalomania in foreign diplomats.) When word of that coup reached England, the British government wasted no time reversing the consul’s actions and restoring the Hawaiian monarchy. “The same will happen this time,” he assured Henry. Surely, he maintained, as great and freedom-loving a country as the United States could not allow such a fla-grant miscarriage of justice to long stand.

  R

  achel never stopped missing her Uncle Pono, but she made other friends at Kalihi, especially Francine, whose pixieish looks belied the heart of a true hellion. Once Rachel overcame her dread of her roommate’s clawed hand, the two became fast friends and partners in crime, principally frivolous escape. One evening at the height of summer, the air as thick with mosquitoes as with humidity, Rachel and Francine sneaked past the night watchmen, climbed the six-foot wire fence behind the hospital, and took a refreshing dip in Kalihi Bay. Their absence was discovered almost immediately (it wasn’t hard to follow the sounds of splashing and giggling) and they were confined to their room for a week. But this didn’t discourage them from other excursions over the fence, such as the occasional trip to buy ice cream; and they began to accumulate a disquieting number of black marks on their record.

  On a particularly hot, muggy day in July, as Rachel and other keiki kept cool by tossing handfuls of drinking water at each other, a group of adult inmates listened to a riveting newspaper account from the island of Kaua'i—where a leper named Ko'olau and his family had successfully evaded capture by hiding in the thickly wooded Kalalau Valley. When Deputy Sheriff Louis Stolz finally tracked them down, Ko'olau told him he would only go to Moloka'i if his wife and child could accompany him. Stolz flatly refused, despite the fact that there was a long custom of allowing healthy spouses (though not children) to go to Moloka'i as kkuas—helpers. The family fled again into the lush recesses of the valley. When police pursued them, Ko'olau shot Stolz dead with his rifle, wounded two other officers, and inadvertently caused the death of a fourth.

  When the man reading the paper finished, there was a long silence. Then an elderly man spoke up, saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”—and everyone within hearing roared with laughter.

  The Goto treatments helped heal some patients’ sores, but Rachel showed no particular improvement; the sore on her thigh was still there, as was the one on her left foot, but at least she got no worse. In November, after a year at Kalihi, it was time to reevaluate her condition. Once again Rachel was told to take off her clothes and put on a gown, then brought into the white-tiled examination room, this time to face just one of the doctors who had conducted her initial exam. “Please remove the patient’s gown.” As it fell around her feet Rachel tried to give him the stink-eye, but his gaze never met hers—it just tracked across her body as a butcher might inspect a spoiled cut of meat. The nurse jotted down his comments as the doctor noted dispassionately, “Female, Hawaiian, age—seven, is it?—eyebrows intact, no sign of alopecia. Face not affected. Open your mouth, please.” He stuck in a tongue depressor and peered inside. “Slight thickening in roof of mouth, extending back to soft palate. No indication of tubercular-leprous vegetations. Hold out your hands?”

  He looked over her hands, still free of blemishes. “Hands, fingers, appear not to be affected.” He examined her feet, poking at her left foot with a sharp needle. “Small patch of scaly dry skin on left foot, with anesthesia.” He worked his way up to the spot on her thigh. “Red ringed tubercle on inside of right thigh, skin thick, anesthesia present. Genital development,” and here he put a gloved hand between her thighs, “appears to be normal.” He palpated her groin, and Rachel flinched.

  “That hurts!”

  “Skin of the groin shows some sensitivity,” he noted, otherwise ignoring her discomfort; Rachel jerked away.

  “Stop it!” she yelled.

  “Please stand still,” the doctor responded curtly, reaching again for her groin. Angrily, Rachel reached for his groin—grabbed and squeezed, as he had done to her.

  The doctor howled so vigorously that Rachel immediately let go and jumped back a good two feet. He doubled over in exquisite distress, and the nurse, deciding on her own initiative that the examination was over, threw Rachel’s gown over her and hastened her out of the room.

  She was taken back to the dormitory and never heard another thing about the incident, but less than a month later her parents received a terse letter in the mail:

  BOARD OF HEALTH

  November 10, 1893

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kalama:

  You are advised that at a regular meeting of the Board of Health, held on November 7, 1893, after a full assessment of your daughter’s records it was decided that continued treatment is no longer of any benefit to her, and voted that she be transferred to the Leprosarium on Molokai.

  She is to be transported by steamer SS Mokolii, leaving at 5 P.M., November 30, 1893.

  By direction of the President and the Executive Officer, Board of Health,

  William O. Smith

  Henry and Dorothy went at once to see the head administrator at Kalihi; but though he grudgingly agreed to postpone Rachel’s transfer until after Christmas, he coldly insisted she must and would be transferred to Moloka'i. Whether it was true that the treatments were ineffective, or whether Rachel was being punished for troublesome behavior, they couldn’t tell; all that was certain was that in less than two months’ time their little girl
would be on her way to the open grave known as Kalaupapa.

  At home that night they argued as vociferously as ever. “Seven years old, she can’t go alone,” Dorothy said. “I’ll go with her; kkua her.”

  “You got three other kids to take care of,” Henry said. “I’ll go.”

  “And who’s gonna work, put food on the table?” Dorothy asked. “Ben and Kimo and Sarah, they’re gonna go hungry ’cause their papa’s gone to Moloka'i?”

  In the end, the bleak truth was that neither of them could go, even if the government allowed it, which, as Ko'olau could have told them, increasingly it did not. The only consolation—more consolation than many a family had—was that Pono was already on Moloka'i. His heart breaking, Henry wrote his brother to ask if he would take care of Rachel.

  Henry barely slept that week. He walked the house at night, looking at Rachel’s dolls, her toys—knowing that he would never see his daughter here, in this house, ever again. He wept inconsolably, mourning a girl still alive, wishing that his skin would erupt in hideous sores so that he might yet accompany her to Moloka'i. He loved all his children, but now he was forced to admit to himself that he loved Rachel best, and that rended his heart even more.

  The next day they went to see her, Rachel and her parents separated as ever by the wire mesh barrier as a guard stood outside, and Henry told her the truth.

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” he said. “The Board of Health says you gotta go to Kalaupapa.”