Moloka'i (60 page)

“My mother Rachel was a remarkable woman,” she told the crowd, her voice quaking a bit with stage fright, “but you’ve all known that even longer than I. I’ve been privileged, these past twenty years, to discover just how remarkable. I’m lucky, you see: I had two mothers. One gave life to me; one raised me. But they both loved me. You know, some people don’t even get that once.

“It took me a while to say the words ‘I love you’ to my
makuahine
. It was a different kind of love than I felt for my
ok
san,
but founded on the same things. I cherished my adopted parents for the home, the love, and the past we shared. I cherished Rachel for the love she showed me, the past she opened up to me, and the home I never knew: this place. The people she cared for. All of you.

“There’s only one disadvantage, really, to having two mothers,” Ruth admitted. “You know twice the love . . . but you grieve twice as much.”

She paused to collect herself, trying to order her thoughts, to remember all she needed to remember. She took a wrinkled slip of paper from her purse and studied the words written on it. She glanced down into the casket, and in halting Hawaiian she said:

“Pono, Haleola, 'eia mai kou keika hanauna, Rachel!”

Some of the mourners were puzzled, but one old-timer recognized the words and repeated the call to ancestors:
“Pono, Haleola,”
he said, his aged treble sounding quite clear and strong,
“'eia mai kou keiki hanauna, Rachel!”

Now Peggy spoke, her voice as resonant and proud as her mother’s
“Henry, Dorothy, 'eia mai kou kaikamahine, Rachel!
Henry, Dorothy, here is your daughter, Rachel!”

A few more mourners picked up the chant, some in Hawaiian, some in English.

“Kenji-san, 'eia mai kou wahine male, Rachel,”
Ruth said. “Kenji, here is your wife, Rachel.” She gazed into her mother’s face, beautiful in eternal repose, and struggled a bit with the next words: “O Rachel, here you are departing!
Aloha wale, e Rachel, kaua, auw
!
Boundless love, O Rachel, between us, alas!”

As the mourners repeated that last word, Ruth heard for the first time the resonant Hawaiian wail of
“Auw
! Auw
!”
which sprang from every heart at once, and she was moved because it so precisely echoed the grief in her own.

Peggy handed Ruth three things: a small dish of
poi
; the dress Rachel had been wearing that day at the Hotel Saint Claire; and the cloth doll in its
kapa
skirt which Henry Kalama had painstakingly fashioned for his little girl, seventy-six years before.

Ruth tucked them all in the casket beside her mother.

“Here is food, clothing, and something you loved,” she said. “Go; but if you have a mind to return, come back.”

She leaned over her mother, tenderly kissed her wrinkled forehead, and told her again that she loved her.

Peggy did the same, bidding
aloha
to her Grandma Rachel before she was overcome by tears.

The casket was lowered; within twenty minutes an earthen blanket had covered it and Rachel Aouli Kalama Utagawa slept again beside her beloved Kenji.

Ruth thanked each guest for coming, listening to their memories of Rachel with the same fond fascination as she’d listened to her mother’s stories; then, when only she and Peggy and Hokea were left, Ruth asked him if they might be alone for a moment, and Hokea obligingly walked down to the adjacent Mormon cemetery. Ruth and Peggy sat on the ground facing the two graves and Ruth took her daughter’s hand in hers. Except for the metronome of the surf a calm silence surrounded them, tranquil beyond words. The air was moist and sweet. The ocean was pale green shot with blue, cresting white. The blue vault of the sky was bright and sheltering. For a long while they sat serenely in this most serene of places, gazing out at waves rolling in from afar to break gently on the peaceful shore.

Author’s Note

O

n December 22, 1980, the Kalaupapa peninsula was designated a National Historical Park and its residents were, as per Public Law 96–565, “guaranteed that they may remain at Kalaupapa as long as they wish.” As of this writing, there are approximately thirty-one individuals with Hansen’s disease living there in quiet dignity.

A novel is by definition a work of fiction, but this particular novel is set in a real place where real people lived and died—people to whom I felt accountable as I tried to tell a story that would also be true to their stories. By interweaving real-life patients and caregivers with my fictional cast of characters, I sought to blur the lines between fact and fiction; but now I think it’s important to redraw those lines, however briefly, in order to acknowledge a few of the people whose lives have inspired and enriched this book.

Some are known to us today only as names in the superintendent’s annual report: the storekeeper George Kanikau, the baker A. Galaspo, nursery matron Lillian Keamalu, and her predecessor Mrs. Kaunamano. Some still speak to us from correspondence long buried in the files of the Board of Health. J. D. Kahauliko, in a letter dated February 1, 1866, wrote, “An opportunity has been afforded me to inform you how we are getting along in Molokai,” and who notes “we are in great need for a water calabash . . . therefore we the patients at Kalawao do hereby beg that you will give us a water-cask for us, do not refuse, but give it to your servants the Lepers.” Other residents have found some small posterity in accounts by the journalists who occasionally visited Kalaupapa, for example Annie Kekoa, “a half-white telephone operator from Hilo, on Hawaii, daughter of a native minister . . . without blemish, and very charming—educated and refined, with the loveliest brown eyes and heart-shaped face,” in the words of Char-maine London, wife of Jack London.

Ambrose Hutchison’s life is better documented. Born at Honom
'ele, Maui, in 1856, he arrived at Kalaupapa on January 5, 1879, where, he later wrote, “we were left on the rocky shore without food and shelter. No houses were provided for the likes of us outcasts.” What Haleola saw on her first day at the settlement—a sick man in a wheelbarrow dumped on the threshold of a “dying shed”—was what Ambrose saw on his first day. Much of his life was dedicated to the welfare of the community to which he had been exiled: he served as chief butcher, then manager of the Kalawao Store, and finally as either resident or assistant superintendent over a period of fourteen years. He helped improve the quality of health care and nutrition at the settlement and did his best to assure that newcomers to Kalaupapa were given, upon arrival, a place to live and (as Dr. Arthur Mouritz observed) “hot coffee and warm food.” He spent nearly fifty-four years in Kalaupapa.

In real life Samson “Sammy” Kuahine’s song, “Sunset of Kalaupapa,” was performed on bandleader Harry Owens’ television show in November of 1950 and was probably composed earlier that year. I sacrificed chronological accuracy for what I felt was the greater truth of including this only known musical composition by a Kalaupapa resident.

Some fictional characters in this book are based on real people. The artist Hokea, for example, was inspired by resident Edward Kato, also a painter of churches (as well as the rock that exhorts visitors to SMILE—IT NO BROKE YOUR FACE!), though there the resemblance ends. Like Rachel, after quarantine was lifted, Edward Kato enthusiastically traveled the world, visiting nearly every continent on the earth long denied him. And one of the Franciscan Sisters of Charity did in fact suffer a nervous breakdown and was forced to leave Moloka'i—but since much of my character’s psychology and background had to be created from whole cloth, I elected to call her Sister Victor instead of the woman’s real name.

Ernie Pyle’s book
Home Country
recounts his visit to Kalaupapa in 1937–38. Though not without errors—he repeats a baseless claim that Hansen’s disease causes “feeble-mindedness”—it is nevertheless a spare, honest, compassionate account by a fine writer. Movingly, he recounts a conversation with the then-manager of the Kalaupapa Store, Shizuo Harada, who was diagnosed with Hansen’s just sixteen days after he graduated with a degree in economics from the University of Hawaii. “He was lonely,” Pyle writes, “because there was no one in Kalaupapa that he could really talk with as he was capable of talking. He apologized for saying what he did, and explained that he didn’t feel himself any better than the rest, but there was a difference.” When after several hours of lively conversation Pyle had to leave, Harada told him, “You have given me the happiest day I have ever had since I came to Kalaupapa. Thank you. Thank you.” Later I found, in the Bishop Museum Library, self-published annotations on Pyle’s work by a settlement physician, Dr. Eric A. Fennel: “Harada is not only a mentally keen man; he is a man of substance and solidarity. He has
not
been denied a career; he has had and is having one. As if the burden of his disease were not enough, Fate decreed that one brother go to Italy with the famous ‘One Puka Puka’ Battalion, made up of Americans of Japanese ancestry, and that the other one became almost hopelessly ill. So this substantial man, with his salary as Storekeeper, is the sole support of his parents, now aged seventy, and a great help to his semiwidowed sister-in-law and her two children. Hansen’s disease has
not
robbed him of a noble career.”

And so Charles Kenji Utagawa was born, in conscious tribute to Shizuo Harada.

Rachel Kalama is entirely a fictional creation, but what she experiences as a Hansen’s patient is very much based on the real-world experiences of many such patients. I consulted numerous oral histories and biographies, distilling them down to their common elements and from these forging the armature of Rachel’s life. To interested readers I highly commend
The Separating Sickness: Excerpts from Interviews with Exiled Leprosy Patients at Kalaupapa
by Ted Gugelyk and Milton Bloombaum;
Quest for Dignity: Personal Victories over Leprosy/Hansen’s Disease
by The International Association for Integration, Dignity, and Economic Advancement (IDEA);
Olivia: My Life of Exile in Kalaupapa
by Olivia Robello Breitha;
Margaret of Molokai
by Mel White;
Miracle at Carville
and
No One Must Ever Know
by Betty Martin, edited by Evelyn Wells. In addition I drew upon interviews and articles published in
Beacon Magazine, Honolulu Magazine, Kalaupapa Historical Society Newsletter, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, The Honolulu Advertiser, Paradise of the Pacific, The Maui News, The Hawaiian Gazette
, and
Aloha Magazine
.

Equally valuable were
Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai
and
Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands
by Gavan Daws;
Pilgrimage and Exile: Mother Marianne of Molokai
by Sister Mary Laurence Hanley and O. A. Bushnell;
News from Molokai: Letters Between Peter Kaeo & Queen Emma 1873–1876,
edited by Alfons L. Korn;
Exile in Paradise: The Isolation of Hawai'i
’
s Leprosy Victims
and
Development of Kalaupapa Settlement, 1865 to the Present
by Linda W. Greene;
Kalaupapa National Historical Park and the Legacy of Father Damien
by Anwei V. Skinsnes Law and Richard Wisniewski;
Defamation and Disease: Leprosy, Myth and Ideology in Nineteenth Century Hawai'i
by Pennie Lee Moblo;
Yesterday at Kalaupapa
by Emmett Cahill;
Kalaupapa: A Portrait
by Wayne Levin and Anwei Skinsnes Law;
The Path of the Destroyer
by A. A. St. M. Mouritz;
Under the Cliffs of Molokai
by Emma Warren Gibson;
The Lands of Father Damien
by James H. Brocker;
Leper Priest of Moloka'i: The Father Damien Story
by Richard Stewart;
A Tree in Bud: The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1889–1893
by M. G. Bosseront d’Anglade;
Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula
by Nathaniel B. Emerson;
Lawrence M. Judd and Hawaii
by Lawrence M. Judd and Hugh W. Lytle;
Hawaiian Mythology
by Martha Beckwith;
Reminiscences of Old Hawaii
by Uldrick Thompson, Sr.;
Hawaii Goes to War
by DeSoto Brown;
Hawaii’s War Years: 1941–1945
by Gwenfread Allen—among dozens if not hundreds of other texts I lack the space to notate.

I have used Mary Kawena Pukui’s
Hawaiian Dictionary
, co-authored with Samuel H. Elbert, and
Place Names of Hawaii
, with Elbert and Esther T. Mookini, as the standard for Hawaiian spelling and orthography in this book, departing from it only on the few occasions when I felt clarity demanded the use of an English “s” for pluralization. As for terminology, I am keenly aware of the disdain that most people with Hansen’s disease feel for the word “leper”—a word that objectifies and stigmatizes them—and have used it only in historical context, in the dialog or point-of-view of characters living in a time when the term was regrettably in wide use. To do otherwise, I felt, would have been inaccurate and dishonest.

For their assistance, expertise, and
aloha
, I am indebted to Patty Belcher and B. J. Short of the Bishop Museum Library; Geoff White and Allen Hoof of the Hawai'i State Archives; Helen Wong Smith of the Hawai'i Medical Library; Victoria Pula of the Maui Historical Society; and the able and helpful staffs of the Honolulu Public Library and the Hawaiian Historical Society. My editor, Hope Dellon, and my agent, Molly Friedrich, each took on this book as I did, as a labor of love, and I thank them for believing in it. Holly Henderson generously shared her insights into adopted children and their birthmothers. Robert Crais has been just as generous with his advice and advocacy for me and my work. For criticism and encouragement I must also thank Carter Scholz and Amy Adelson, as well as my first, best reader, my wife Paulette.