Michener, James
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"So the Indians own none of the land?" Hoxworth asked aloud.
"No, we restrict that very severely," the young man assured him. "Nor can they vote, so we won't have any trouble there, either."
"You mean, the ones born in India can't vote," Hoxworth queried.
"Nor the ones bom here," the aide explained, and Hoxworth thought: "How differently we've done things in Hawaii." And the more he saw of Fiji, the happier he was with the manner in which Hawaii's Orientals had been brought into full citizenship, with no real barriers hindering them. Did the Indians go to college? There were no colleges; but in Hawaii there were and God knows the Japanese went. Did the Indians own the land on which their crowded stores perched? No, but in Hawaii the Chinese and Japanese owned whatever they liked. Did the Indians participate in civil government? Heavens no, but in Hawaii their Oriental cousins were beginning to take over some branches. Did Indians serve as government clerks? No, but in Hawaii Chinese were sought after as government employees.
And so throughout his entire comparison of Fiji and Hawaii, Hoxworth Hale saw that what had been done to build the Orientals into Hawaiian life had been the right thing, and what the British in Fiji had done to keep the Indians a sullen, hateful half of the population was wrong; and it was from Fiji that Hale acquired his first insight into how fundamentally just the missionary descendants had been, for he concluded: "In Hawaii we have a sound base from which our islands can move into a constructive future: Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Caucasians and Hawaiians working together. But in Fiji, with the hatred I see between the races, I don't see how a logical solution will ever be worked out." Then he added grimly, but with
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humor, "By God, the next time I hear a Japanese sugar worker raising hell about a union, I'm going to say, 'Watanabe-san, maybe you better go down to Fiji for a while and see how the Indians are doing.' He'd come back to Honolulu and cry at the wharf, 'Please, Mr. Hale, let me back on shore. I want to work in Hawaii, where things are good.' "
And then, when he was congratulating himself on the superior system evolved by his missionary ancestors, he attended a banquet given by Sir Ratu Salaka, a majestic black Fijian chief with degrees from Cambridge and Munich, and when this scion of a great Fijian family appeared dressed in a native lava-lava, with western shirt and jacket, enormous brown leather shoes, and medals of valor gained in World War I, Hale intuitively felt: "In Hawaii we have no natives like this man."
Sir Ratu Salaka was a powerfully oriented man. He spoke English faultlessly, knew of the progress of the war, and stood ready, although now well along in his fifties, to lead a Fijian expeditionary force against the Japanese.
"Remember, my good friends of the air corps," he said prophetically, "when you invade such islands as Guadalcanal and Bougainville, where I have been on ethnological expeditions, you will require as scouts men like myself. Our dark skins will be an asset in scouting, our knowledge of the jungle wfll enable us to go where your men could never penetrate, and our habit of secrecy in movement will allow us to creep up upon our opponents and kill them silently, while their companions sit ten yards away. When you need us, call, for we are ready."
"Will you have Indian troops with you?" Hale asked.
At this question the dark-skinned host exploded with laughter. "Indians?" he snorted contemptuously. "We put out a call for volunteers and out of our population of more than a hundred thousand Indians, do you know now many stepped forward? Two, and they did so with the firm stipulation that they never be required to leave Fiji. In fact, if I remember, they weren't even willing to go to the other islands of this group. No, Mr. Hale, we wouldn t use any Indians. They didn't volunteer, and we didn't expect them to."
Hale thought: "In Hawaii, from the same number of Japanese we could have got fifteen thousand volunteers . . . even to fight Japan. But here the Indians won't offer to fight an enemy with whom they have no ties of emotion whatever." And again he felt superior.
But when Sir Ratu Salaka finished his brandy, like the crusty English squire he was, he observed: "In Fiji, I assure you, we are not proud of the way in which we have failed to assimilate our Indian sugar workers. Some day we shall have to pay a terrible price for our neglect�civil disturbance, perhaps even bloodshed�and I as a Fijian leader am particularly aware of this tragedy. But when I visit Hawaii, and see how dismally the Polynesians have been treated there, how their lands have been stolen from them, how Japanese fill all the good governmental jobs, and how the total culture of a great people has been destroyed, I have got to say that even though our Indians are not
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so well situated as your Japanese, we Fijians are infinitely better off than your Hawaiians. We own our own land. I suppose that nine-tenths of the farm land you saw today belongs to Fijians. We also control the part of the government not held by Englishmen. Today our old patterns of life are stronger than they were fifty years ago. In all things we prosper, and I can think of no self-respecting Fijian who, aware of the paradise we enjoy here, would consent to trade places with a pitiful Hawaiian who had nothing left of his own. You Americans have treated the Hawaiians horribly."
A silence fell over the group, and finally Hoxworth said, "You may be surprised, Sir Ratu, and I suppose these officers will be too, but I am part-Hawaiia'n, and I do not feel as you suggest."
Sir Ratu was a tough old parliamentarian who rarely retreated, so he studied his guest carefully and said bluntly, "From appearances I should judge that the American half of you had prospered a good deal more than the Hawaiian half." Then he laughed gallantly and offered another round of brandy, saying to Hale, "We are talking of rather serious things, Mr. Hale, but I do think this question is sometimes worth considering: For whom do invaders hold an island in trust? Here the British have said, 'We hold these islands in trust for the 'Fijians,' and in doing so, they have done a great disservice, if not actual injustice, to the Indians whom they imported to work the sugar fields. But in Hawaii your missionaries apparently said, 'We hold these islands in trust for whomever we import to work our sugar fields,' and in saving them for the Chinese, they did a grave injustice to all Hawaiians. I suppose if our ancestors had been all-wise, they would have devised a midway solution that would have pleased everybody. But you gentlemen are heading east to Tahiti. Study the problem there. You'll find the French did not do one damn bit better than the English here or the Americans in Hawaii."
To this Hale added, "At least, in Hawaii, we will never have civil war. We will never have bloodshed."
Sir Ratu, a giant of a man, in all ways, could not let this pass, so he added, "And in a few years you'll have no bloody Hawaiians, either." And the party broke up.
It was with badly mixed emotions that Hoxworth Hale left Fiji, but when his PBY deposited the inspecting team in American Samoa he was propelled into an even more perplexing speculation. He arrived at Pago Pago the day before the islanders were scheduled to celebrate their annexation to America, which had occurred in 1900, and he was told that since a Japanese submarine had recently bombarded Samoa, the islanders this year wished to demonstrate in special ceremonies their loyalty to America. But when Hale rose next morning he saw that the forbidding peaks which surrounded Pago Pago had trapped a convoy of rain clouds, which were in the process of drenching the islands, and he assumed that the ceremonies would be cancelled.
But he did not know Samoans! At dawn the native marines stood in the rain and fired salutes. At eight the Fita Fita band, in splendid
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uniforms, marched to the "Stars and Stripes Forever," and by ten all citizens who could walk lined the soggy parade ground while Samoan troops executed festive maneuvers. Then a huge, golden-brown chief with a face like a rising sun and enough flesh for two men, moved to the foot of the flag pole and made an impassioned speech in Samoan, proclaiming his devotion to America. Others followed, and as they spoke, Hoxworth Hale began to catch words and finally whole phrases
which he understood, and with these Polynesian tones reverberating in his memory he experienced a profound mental confusion, so that when the Fita Fita band played the "Star-Spangled Banner" and the cannon roared, he did not hear the wild cheering of the crowd.
He was comparing what he had seen in Samoa with what he remembered of the way Hawaii celebrated its Annexation Day, and he was struck by the difference. In Samoa guns boomed; in Hawaii decent people maintained silence. In Samoa people cheered; in Hawaii many wept. In Samoa not even storms could daunt the islanders who wanted to watch once more their beloved new flag rising to the symbolic tip of the island; but in Hawaii the new flag was not even raised, for Hawaiians remembered that when their islands were joined to America, the act had been accomplished by trickery and injustice. In the inevitable triumph of progress, a people had been raped, a lesser society had been crushed into oblivion. It was understandable that in Samoa, Polynesians cheered Annexation Day, but in Hawaii they did not.
To Hoxworth Hale these reflections were particularly gloomy, for it had been his great-grandfather Micah who had engineered the annexation of Hawaii, and Hoxworth was always reminded by his family that the event had coincided with his own birth, so that friends said, "Hawaii is the same age as Hoxworth," thus making a family joke of what many considered a crime. But he could also remember his great-grandmother, the Hawaiian lady Malama, as she told him before she died: "My husband made me attend the ceremonies when the Hawaiian flag was torn down, and do you know what the haoles did with that flag, Hoxy? They cut it into little pieces and passed them around the crowd."
"What for?" he had asked.
"So they could remember the day," the old lady had replied. "But why they would want to remember it I never understood."
There were many Hawaiians, even in 1942, who preferred not to speak with a Hale and who refused to eat at the same table with one. But others remembered not stern Micah who had stolen their islands but his mother Jerusha who had loved the Hawaiians, and those who remembered her would eat with the Hales while the others would not. Now, in Samoa where the rains fell, Hoxworth Hale, the descendant of both Micah and Jerusha, felt their two natures warring in his sympathies, and he wished that something could be done to rectify the injustices of Hawaiian annexation so that his Polynesians would take as much pride in their new flag as the Samoans did in theirs; but he knew that this was not possible, and the old sorrow
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that had attacked him at Yale when he contemplated the stolen Jarves paintings returned and he thought: "Who can assess the results of an action?" And he found no joy in Samoa.
But when he reached Tahiti, that Mecca of the South Seas, and his seaplane landed in the small bay that lies off Papeete, between the island of Moorea and the Diademe of Tahiti, making it surely the loveliest seaplane base in the world, his spirits were again excited, for these were the islands from which his people had come. This was the storied capital of the seas, and it was more beautiful than he had imagined. He felt proud to be of a blood that had started from Tahiti. He was disappointed in the legendary girls of the island, however, for few of them had teeth. Australian canned foods and a departure from the traditional fish diet had conspired to rob girls in their teens of their teeth, but, as one of the air corps majors said, "If a man goes for beautiful gums, he can have a hell of a time in Tahiti."
What interested Hoxworth most, however, was not the girls but the Chinese. The French governor pointed out that the Americans would find a secure base in Tahiti, because the Chinese were well in hand. They were allowed to own no land, were forbidden to enter many kinds of business, were severely spied on by currency control, and were in general so held down that the Americans could rest assured there would be no problems. Hoxworth started to say, "In Hawaii our island wealth is multiplied several times each year by the Chinese, who do own land and who do go into business. The only currency control we have is that all our banks would like to get hold of what the Chinese keep in their own banks." But as a visitor he kept his mouth shut and looked.
It seemed to him that Tahiti would be approximately ten times better off in all respects if the Chinese were not only allowed but encouraged to prosper. "You hear so much about Tahiti," he said in some disappointment to the general leading his party, "but compare their roads to Hawaii's."
"Shocking," the general agreed.
"Or their health services, or their stores, or their churches."
"Pretty grubby in comparison with what you fellows have done in Hawaii," the general agreed.
"Where are the Tahiti schools? Where is the university? Or the airport or the clean hospitals? You know, General, the more I see of the rest of Polynesia, the more impressed I am with Hawaii."
The general was concerned with other matters, and on the third day he announced to his team: "It's incredible, but there simply isn't any place here in Tahiti to put an airstrip. But there seems to be an island farther north where we could probably flatten out one of the reefs and find ourselves with a pretty fine landing strip."
"What island?" Hale asked.
"It's called Bora Bora," the general said, and early next morning he flew the PBY up there, and Hoxworth Hale thus became the first part-Hawaiian ever to see his ancestral island of Bora Bora from the
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air. He saw it on a bright sunny day, when a running sea was breaking on the outer reef, while the lagoon was a placid blue surrounding the dark island from which rose the tall mountains and the solid, brutal block of basalt in the middle. He gasped at the sheer physical delight of this fabled island, its deep-cut bays, its thundering surf, its outrigger canoes converging near the landing area, and he thought: "No wonder we still remember poems about this island," and he began to chant fragments of a passage his great-great-grandfather Abner Hale had transcribed about Bora Bora:
"Under the bright red stars hides the land, Cut by the perfect bays, marked by the mountains, Rimmed by the reef of flying spume, Bora Bora of the muffled paddlesl Bora Bora of the great navigators."
The other occupants of the PBY were equally impressed by the isknd, but for other reasons. It possessed an enormous anchorage, and if necessary an entire invasion fleet could find refuge within the lagoon; but more important, the little islands along the outer reef were long, smooth and flat. "Throw a couple of bulldozers there for three days, and a plane could land right now," an engineer volunteered.
"We'll fly around once more," the general announced, "and see if we can agree on which of the outer islands looks best." So while the military people looked outward, to study the fringing reef, Hoxworth Hale looked inward, to see the spires of rock and the scintillating bays that cut far inland, so that every home on Bora Bora that he could spot lay near the sea. How marvelous that island was, how like a sacred home in a turbulent sea.
Now the PBY leveled off and started descending toward the lagoon, and Hoxworth thought how exciting it was to be within an airplane that had the capacity to land on water, for this must have been the characteristic of the first great beasts on earth who mastered flight. They must have risen from the sea and landed on it, as the PBY now prepared to do. When it was near the water, speeding along at more than a hundred miles an hour, Hoxworth realized for the first time how swiftly this bird was flying, and as it reached down with its underbelly step to find the waves, he caught himself straining with his buttocks, adjusting them to insure level flight, and then seeking to let them down into the waves, and he flew his bottom so well that soon the plane was rushing along the tiptop particles of the sea, half bird, half fish, and then it lost its flight and subsided into the primordial element, a plane that had conquered the Pacific and come at last to rest upon it.
"Halloo, Joe!" a native cried at the door, and in a moment the plane was surrounded by Bora Borans in their swift, small canoes.
Among the first to go ashore was Hale, because he knew a few words of Polynesian and many of French, and as he sat precariously
on the thwarts of one of the canoes, and felt himself speeding across the limpid waters of the lagoon toward a sprawling, coconut-fringed village whose roofs were made of grass, he thought: "Hawaii has nothing to compare with this."
In a way he was right, for after the general and his staff had been fed with good sweet fish from the lagoon and red wine from Paris, the headman of the village approached with some embarrassment and said in French, which Hale had to interpret: "General, we people of Bora Bora know that you have come here to save us. God himself knows the French would do nothing to rescue us, because they hate Bora Borans, and do you know why? Because in all history we have never been conquered, not even by the French, and officially we are a voluntary part of their empire. They have never forgiven us for not surrendering peacefully like the others, but we say to hell with the French."
"Shut him upl" the general commanded. "The French have been damned good to us, Hale, and I want to hear no more of this sedition."
But the headman was already past his preamble and into more serious business: "So we Bora Borans want to help you in every way we can. You say you want to build an airstrip. Goodl We'll help. You say you'll need water and food. Good! We'll help there too. But there is one matter you seem not to have thought about, and on this we will help too.
"While your flying boat sleeps in the lagoon, you will have to have some place to sleep on shore. We will put aside seven houses for you."
"Tell him we need only two," the general interrupted. "We don't want to disrupt native life."
The proud headman, dressed in a brown lava-lava and flowered wreath about his temples, did not allow the interruption to divert him: "The biggest house will be for the general, and the rest are about the same size. Now because it is not comfortable for a man to sleep alone in such a house, we have asked seven of our young girls if they will take care of everything."