Michener, James

by Hawaii

  Reiko-chan answered for her brother: "Ifs the best school in the islands. To go there would be worth anything."

  "We think so," Hale replied. And the three men shook hands with Tadao, the new boy at Punahou.

  When the men were gone, Kamejiro exploded. "What happened?" he shouted at Goro.

  "Tadao has been accepted at Punahou," the interpreter replied.

  "Punahou!" The name had rarely been mentioned in the Sakagawa household. It was a school that had no reality to the Japanese, a haole heaven, a forbidden knd. A Japanese boy could logically aspire to Jefferson, and in recent years some were making it, but Punahoul Kamejiro sat down, bewildered. "Who applied to Punahou?" he mumbled.

  "Nobody. The school came to him because he has good grades and can play football."

  "How will he pay?"

  "They have already paid him," Goro explained, 'pointing to Tadao's money.

  It was at this point, as Kamejiro studied the twenty dollars, that the Sakagawa family as a whole acknowledged for the first time, openly and honestly, that the boys would probably not return to Japan; for they could see Tadao at Punahou, one of America's greatest schools, working with the finest people in the islands, and graduating and going on to college and university. He would become a doctor or a lawyer, and his life would be spent here in America; and the family looked at him in this moment of realization and they saw him as forever lost to Japan; for this was the power of education.

  The three blue-suited alumni who visited that night had warned Tadao that life at Punahou would be difficult, but the source of the difficulty they failed to identify. It came not from Punahou, where Tadao's football prowess won respect, but from Kakaako, where the submerged people had long ago suspected Tadao because of his mastery of English. Now he was openly stigmatized as a haole-lover, and six times in September, Kakaako gangs waylaid him as he came home from football practice and beat him thoroughly. "We'll teach you to be better than we are!" they warned him. When he made three touchdowns against a team mainly of Japanese and other pidgin-

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  speakers, they hammered him desperately, shouting, "You goddamned traitor! Who do you think you are, playing for Punahou?" Tadao never tried to enlist Goro's aid. This punishment from Kakaako was something he had to absorb. He learned to keep his hands over his face so that his teeth would not be broken, and he quickly mastered the art of using his feet and knees as lethal weapons. By mid-October the assaults ended, especially since McKinley was having a good year with Goro as one of its brightest stars.

  This football business in Honolulu was one of the strangest aberrations in the Pacific. Because Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos were mad about games, and because haoles like Janders, Hoxworth and Hale constantly, recalled their days of glory at Punahou, the islands were sports-crazy and the easiest way to sell a newspaper was to work up a frenzy over football or basketball. Having no college league to focus on, the entire community bore down on the high schools. Radio commentators reported breathlessly that Akaiamu Kalanianaole had damaged a tendon in his right foot and would not be able to play Saturday for Hewlett Hall. Newspapers carried enormous photographs of fifteen-year-old boys, growling ferociously under captions like "Tiger Chung About to Tear into Punahou." Youths who should have been thinking of themselves as unshaven adolescents having trouble with the square roots of decimals, were forced to believe that they were minor Red Granges, and all the publicity that on the mainland was thrown at mature professional athletes, was in Hawaii directed at callow youths in nigh school. Consequently, from one year to the next, disgraceful scandals erupted in which adult gamblers bribed these boys to throw games. Then headlines moralized over the lack of character-training in the schools and occasionally some bewildered lad was actually thrown into jail for "corrupting the fabric of our sports world," while the adult gamblers who framed him went free.

  At no time did this great Hawaiian nonsense flourish with more abandon than in the fall of 1938 when Goro Sakagawa was playing his last year at McKinley and his brother Tadao his first at Punahou. As the Thanksgiving Day classic between the two schools approached, all the local newspapers carried flamboyant stories about the two dramatic young men. The Mail got a fine shot of their father Kamejiro standing before his barbershop with a Punahou pennant in one hand, a McKinley banner in the other. "Impartial!" the caption read. It was one of the first pictures of a Japanese other than a criminal or an embassy official to appear outside the sports pages of a Honolulu newspaper.

  On the day of the game there were two half-page spreads, one of Goro looking like an insane bulldog about to tear a squirrel apart and one of Tadao straight-arming an imaginary tackier. "Brother against Brother" read the headlines, two inches tall. It was a great game, and except for an extraordinary play by Goro in the last fifteen seconds, Tadao's three flaming touchdowns would have led Punahou to victory. That night, as he walked home through Kakaako, confused

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  by the plaudits of the huge crowd who had eulogized him as the star of the Punahou team, he got his worst beating from the toughs. When they left him they warned: "Don't you never play like that against McKinley again I"

  He stumbled home, his face bleeding from three different cuts, and GOTO had had enough. "You know who did it?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Let's gol" They took sixteen-year-old Minoru and fifteen-year-old Shigeo along. GOTO gave each a baseball bat or a railing from a picket fence, and they cruised Kakaako until they came upon seven members of the gang. "No mercy!" Goro whispered, and with deadly efficiency the four brothers moved in. Next morning the newspapers, writing of the game, called it, "Triumph of the Sakagawa Brothers," and when Goro saw the headline he told Tadao, "We didn't do so bad last night, either."

  While the Sakagawa boys were thus clawing their way up the ladder of island life, boys of Hawaiian ancestry were enjoying quite a different experience. When old Abraham Hewlett on the island of Maui took as his second wife a handsome Hawaiian girl, he found that her family owned about half of what was to become the hotel area of Waikiki. Eventually the Hewlett lands were valued at over one million dollars an acre, and because of the far-sighted missionary generosity of old Abraham, the entire income was applied to Hewlett Hall, where boys and girls of Hawaiian blood were entitled to a free education. Under the guidance of a board usually composed exclusively of Hales, Hewletts and Whipples, the famous Hawaiian school developed into a marvelous institution. It had a sparkling band, one of the finest choruses in the islands, loving teachers and handsome dormitories. All was free, and an outsider looking casually at the school could have been forgiven if he had concluded: "Hewlett Hall has been the salvation of the Hawaiian race."

  Actually, the facts were somewhat contrary. Physically, Hewlett Hall was about perfect, but intellectually it was limited by the vision of the great families who dominated its board. They sent their sons to Punahou and Yale. It never seriously occurred to them that Hawaiian boys had exactly the same capacities as haoles; consequently, they consciously forced Hewlett Hall into a trade-school mold; its directors, with the greatest love in the world, rationalized: "The Hawaiians are a delightful, relaxed race. They love to sing and play games. They make wonderful mechanics and chauffeurs. Their girls are excellent teachers. Let us encourage them to do these things even better." And the Hawaiians, by their own friends, were so encouraged.

  Now in the old days when a brilliant Chinese boy had fallen under the wing of preposterous Uliassutai Karakorarn Blake, he was told daily: "You are as great a human being as I have ever known. There is nothing of which you are not capable." And these boys grew into doctors, political leaders and bankers. When outstanding

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  Japanese boys like GOTO Sakagawa crammed themselves into Me-Kinley High�called locally Mikado Prep�they invariably found some inspired woman teacher imported from Kansas or Minnesota who told them: "You have a mind that can ac
complish anything. You could write great books or become a fine research doctor. You can do anything." So the Chinese boys and the Japanese battled their way to proficiency, but the Hawaiians were not so goaded. They were given everything free and were encouraged to become trustworthy mechanics, and no society has ever been ruled by trustworthy mechanics and loyal schoolteachers.

  Back in 1907 when Dr. Hewlett Whipple was made a member of the board for'Hewlett Hall, he had tried manfully to revitalize the curriculum and to find dynamic teachers like old Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, but the Hales and Hewletts stopped him: "We must not try to educate these fine Hawaiian children above their natural capacity." After three years of futile struggling, Dr. Whipple resigned, and on the night he quit he told his wife, "With love and money we have condemned these people to perpetual mediocrity. Hewlett Hall is the worst thing that has happened to the Hawaiians since the arrival of measles and the white man." So while the Chinese and Japanese learned to manipulate their society, the Hawaiians did not.

  IN THE FALL of 1941 Honolulu was presented with evidence that Punahou, at least, was capable of producing young scholars who could turn out historical research of high literary merit. Proof appeared in the form of a mimeographed pamphlet kte one Friday afternoon as school was dismissing, and by Friday night the entire haole community had heard of it, with widely varying reactions; even some of the Orientals, by habit indifferent to literary accomplishment, were chuckling.

  No one reacted more violently than Hoxworth Hale, a sedate man, for by the time he had finished reading the fourth line of the manifesto he was apoplectic and felt, with reason, that a scandal had occurred which required action, a conclusion which the officials at Punahou had acted upon an hour earlier. Later, when he reviewed the matter, Hoxworth realized that he should have anticipated trouble, for he recalled that for some time his son Bromley had been behaving mysteriously.

  With the aid of a professional carpenter, whom he paid out of his own funds, young Brom had erected a curious structure on the back lot, and when asked what it was, he repeatedly insisted: "A play pen for adults." It stood unrelated to anything else, a half-room, with no ceiling and only two wooden walls, into which were cut four small openings, in back of which were built little boxes. The ridiculous structure did have a wooden floor, five feet ten inches long by five feet one inch wide. Two-by-fours propped up the walls, and Hoxworth noted that several of his son's friends were

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  working on the project. One day, for example, crew-cut young Whipple Janders, with a new Leica picked up on his family s last trip to Germany, had called, "Hey, Mr. Hale. Would you help us a minute?"

  "What can I do, Whip?"

  "I want you to model this contraption."

  "Only if you tell me what it is."

  "Brom calls it a play pen for adults," Whipple had explained. "Some crazy idea of his."

  "How do you want me to model it?" Hoxworth had asked.

  "I want to see if a grown man could fit into one of our little boxes."

  "You mean in there?"

  "Yes. It's well braced."

  "You want me to climb in?"

  "Sure. Use the ladder."x

  Hoxworth was perpetually unprepared for the blase' manner in which modern children ordered their parents around, and with some misgivings he climbed into the bizarre box, stretched his legs out as far as they would reach, and laughed pleasantly at young Whipple Janders.

  "I should have an Arrow collar on," he said.

  "You're in sharp focus just as you are, sir," Whip replied, snapping several shots with his Leica. "Thank you very much, Mr. Hale."

  Hoxworth, reading the inflammatory publication, thought back on those scenes and acknowledged that he had been tipped off. Whatever happened now was in part his fault. "But how can you anticipate children?" he groaned. The publication bore this title:

  SEX ABOARD THE BRIGANTINE

  or They Couldn't Have Been Seasick All the Time

  or

  THERE WAS FRIGGIN' IN THE RICGIN' A speculative essay on missionaries by Bromley Whipple Hale

  "It is acknowledged by my many and devoted friends at Punahon that I yield to no man in my respect for the missionary stock from which I, and many of my most intimate friends, derive. I count among my dearest possessions the time-worn memorials that have come down in my family, those treasured reminders of the hardships which my forebears suffered in Rounding the Horn in their thirst for salvation through good deeds. But more precious I count the blood of those stalwart souls as it courses through my veins and makes me the young man I am today. Therefore, when I speak of certain inquiries of a scientific nature which I have been conducting as an outgrowth of my studies in a revered school which itself has certain mission overtones, and where I have imbibed only the purest instruction, I speak as a Hale, a Whipple, a Bromley and a

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  Hewlett. In fact, I may ask in all modesty, a trait for which I have been noted by my friends: Who of my generation, the sixth, could speak with greater propriety of mission matters? In equal modesty I would have to reply: No one.

  "Bred as I was on missionary mythologies, I have always been profoundly impressed by several aspects of the long journey from Boston to Hawaii as undertaken by my ancestors. There was dreadful seasickness, from which almost all suffered constantly. There was binding biliousness which yellowed the eye and slowed the step, much as constipation does in our less euphemistic age. There were cramped quarters shared by eight where common decency required that there should have been only two. And there were the inconveniences of no fresh laundry, the same stinking clothes used week after week, and the uncontrollable boredom of fie in unaccustomed quarters.

  "No mission child has suffered more from a vicarious contemplation of these hardships than I. In fact, I have recently gone so far as to reconstruct the actual conditions under which my forebears struggled against the sea, and for several nights I have tried to live as they must have lived, endeavoring by these means to project myself into their reactions. In the first pictures that accompany this essay will be found my responses to the hardships borne by my ancestors."

  Hoxworth Hale turned the page gingerly and found that Whipple Janders' Leica had been used to excellent effect. From the bunk leered Bromley Hale, his body contorted by the narrow quarters and . . .

  "Good God!" Hoxworth gasped. "Isn't that Mandy Janders?" He studied the next photograph, which showed how husband and wife slept in the narrow bunks, and sure enough, there was his son Bromley Hale snoring while pretty, long-legged Amanda Janders, in a poke bonnet, lay beside him, staring in disgust. "Oh, my God! I'd better call Mand/s father right away," he said weakly, but the essay held him captive, just as it was imprisoning everyone in Honolulu lucky enough to possess one of the three hundred mimeographed copies accompanied by Whip Janders' glossy photos.

  "As can be clearly seen," Bromley Kale's essay continued, "life aboard the brigantines must have been exactly as bad as our forebears have reported. But it has always seemed to me that our good ancestors were strangely silent on one important matter. Life on the brigantines was unadulterated hell, granted. But life went on. Oh, yes indeed, it went on. In fact, aided by the superb libraries resident in Honolulu, I have assembled certain statistics about just how fast life did go on. Take, for example, the brig Thetis, on which some of my ancestors, both on my father's side and on my mother's, reached these hospitable shores. The Thetis departed Boston on September 1, 1821 and reached Lahaina on March 26, 1822, after a passage of 207 storm-ridden days.

  "Applying to these data certain facts which have been established

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  beyond chance of successful, contradiction in Botany 2, any child born to the eleven mission couples prior to May 27, 1822, must have been conceived�in holy wedlock to be sure�on knd in New England, and any infant bom after December 21, 1822 must by the same reasoning have been conceived on knd in Hawaii. But surely, any child born
to these particular mission families between May 27 and December 21, 1822, could have been conceived nowhere else but aboard the bouncing brig Thetis. Let us look at what happened to the occupants of one stateroom:

  Parents OffspringBorn

  Abner and Jerusha Hale son MicahOctober 1, 1822

  John and Amanda Whipple son JamesJune 2, 1822

  Abraham and Urania Hewlett son AbnerAugust 13, 1822

  Immanuel and Jeptha Quigley daughter LucyJuly 9, 1822."

  Relying upon old records, Bromley Hale proved that of the eleven mission couples aboard the Thetis, nine had produced offspring within the critical period. In turn, he moved to each of the other revered missionary companies, establishing departure and arrival dates, against which he compared the birth records until at last he was able to present a fairly staggering array of statistical evidence. "Good God!" Hoxworth groaned, "if a boy spent half as much ingenuity on something important . . ." But like the rest of Honolulu, he read eagerly on.

  "Does not this amazing fecundity aboard the brigantines suggest rather directly that in the crowded staterooms there must have been one additional occupation whereby the idle time was whiled away, an occupation which our forefathers, through considerations of modesty, did not report to us? I think so.

  "In what I am now about to discuss, I consider myself far from an expert, but from having hung around poolrooms and from arguments with my betters during football rallies, I think it fairly well established that for a human male to impregnate a human female�and God forbid that he try his tricks on any other�requires on the average not one act of intercourse but at least four. As I understand it, that is the normal experience of the human race, popular novels and sentimental movies that rely upon lucky coincidence nothwithstand-ing. Therefore, it can be seen that for the nine pregnancies achieved aboard the Thetis . . ."

  Hoxworth slumped in his chair. "This boy has a diseased mind," he groaned. "Now he's getting clinical!" Hoxworth was right: young Bromley had produced all sorts of hilarious statistical tables and at one point had fortified them with resounding rhetoric: "I think I may be allowed the privilege of at least taking into con-sideration the theories lately advanced by His Holiness in the Vatican, which theories establish beyond much doubt the fact that for the human female there is a period which the ecclesiastics designate as 'safe/ and although it is naturally repugnant for me, a