Horror in Paradise Read online

  “It smells of the spirit-world,” she commented with delight, as she observed its redness and sniffed its medicinal aroma. Surely the gods would now be favorable. She shaved off thin flakes of it and laid them gently on the infected area.

  By this time I was feeling much better and had begun to stir around the house and even to walk out into the street. Temata passed, on her way to the well. I had been waiting for this occasion to try a little experiment.

  Pouring a few drops of alcohol on a ball of cotton, I touched a match to it and stood in the doorway, tossing the burning cotton up and down on the palm of my well hand, and chanting what I could remember of a Hawaiian prayer which in ancient times was chanted, with proper accompanying ceremonies, to bring retribution upon one guilty of black sorcery.

  “The fire burns,

  fire of the dense darkness . . .

  Fire is in the heavens,

  decay, maggots, corruption,

  death is in the heavens!

  O Kane, o Lono, o Ku,

  breathe death upon the sorcerer

  and upon him who procured the token of death . . .”

  The divergent dialects of the Polynesian language have enough words in common to enable a Tuamotuan to grasp something of the import of such an invocation. Temata was alarmed. She ran toward me, scooping up sand, as she ran, to throw upon the flame.

  I chanted on, waving the burning cotton out of reach.

  Hurling another handful of sand, she walked away, more uneasy, I knew, than she was willing to admit. The sorcery of Hawaii is famous throughout the Polynesian countries.

  “Will she die today?” asked Roki, in awe.

  “She will not die,” I reassured her. “I have not made the spell complete. I only wanted to frighten her, because in my illness she mocked me. If I had taken a lock of her hair and burned it with the magic fire that does not bum my hand, then she might indeed die.”

  “She deserves to,” said Roki severely. “She is a woman without kindness.”

  Next day Toriu bent a long yellow-white fiber of coconut husk into a noose and twisted it gently but firmly deep down in the infected place; then, with a sudden sharp movement, drew it out, removing the “core” of the infection.

  “In three days you will be well,” he promised.

  He continued to apply the soap dressing for a day or two; then announced that it was time for the final medicine. This was a fine charcoal, made by burning coconut shells in a fire of husks. He dusted this dry dressing carefully into and over the wound.

  “Let this powder remain. Don’t bandage the finger with a cloth.”

  The following day he came for the final treatment. His little son played on the floor with his pet pig as Toriu dressed the wound.

  “A fine boy,” I said, making conversation. “What is his name?”

  “His name is Rino. I have a daughter, too,” he added, “a grown-up daughter, fourteen years old.”

  “I have met your daughter Temaru. She is very beautiful.”

  I refrained from adding that she also had many lice.

  “Do you want her?” inquired Toriu hospitably. “If so, I will send her to you tonight.”

  “You are indeed kind,” I answered. “But I am still weak from my illness, and the boat cannot be held any longer. Now that I am well, we must sail at once.”

  A week later, at Vahitahi, two natives led me to a small house at the farther side of the village.

  “This is the house of Hinao. He is very ill.”

  There lay Schenck, who had warned me three months before—now propped up in a vast bed, against a pile of pillows, his emaciated features, uncut hair, and drooping mustache suggesting a ghost come back from the Great Darkness. Beside him lay a cane, with which it was his custom, when needing attention at night, to batter on the sheet of corrugated iron that closed in one side of his house, to summon the other white visitor on the island, Ua, to his aid.

  “Have you any quinine?” he inquired. “There’s none on the island. I’m having a recurrence of that fever I caught in Fiji”

  Quinine was brought from the cutter. Hinao, as they called Schenck there, had lost twenty-six pounds and had been unable to retain solid food for two weeks, but in three days more he was able to ride in the handcart which is used to transport copra to the landing and corpses to the cemetery. We put him aboard the copra schooner for Papeete, in care of the bishop of French Oceania, who was returning there from Mangareva.

  “Never eat fish cooked,” the bishop was saying as the sailors dragged the whaleboat off the reef.

  His Grace had been a resident priest at our own island of Tepuka Maruia, and had been so long in the service that he had acquired a native palate.

  “Never cook fish. Never put salt on it, or lime juice or lemon juice. Eat it fresh from the sea, as the good God made it Only then can you appreciate the subtle distinctions between the flavors of the various fishes that He, in His wisdom, has provided.”

  Gavan Daws

  The Honolulu Martyrdom

  The efforts of the citizens of the Territory of Hawaii to obtain the status of statehood for the islands were seriously threatened in the early 1930’s. Although an integral part of the United States, the territory was judged to be a creation of the Congress, which could legally discriminate against the residents. A shocking demonstration of this position was the aftermath of a crime of violence—the so-called “Massie Case.”

  Headlines in September, 1931, blazoned the charge that a band of Honolulu hoodlums had assaulted the wife of a young naval officer. At the trial of the indicted youths, the jury was so baffled by uncertainties in the evidence that it was unable to agree on a verdict. While a second trial was pending, one of the defendants was taken and killed by a party made up of the naval officer, his mother-in-law, and two Navy enlisted men. The four were tried and found guilty of manslaughter, but a sentence of ten years’ imprisonment pronounced upon them was commuted by the governor to one hour.

  Lurid treatment of the case in the nation’s newspapers resulted in an investigation of law enforcement in Hawaii and some laxity and inefficiency was corrected. The threat of having Hawaii ruled under a commission form of government in which the Army and Navy would have some powers was averted, but for years the echoes of the case blackened the repute of the Territory, and Hawaii did not achieve full membership in the American Union until 1959.

  Gavan Daws, born in Australia in 1933, came to study and teach at the University of Hawaii in 1958. He is author not only of Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (1968), from which “The Honolulu Martyrdom” is taken, but also Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai (1973) and A Dream of Islands (1980). For some years Dr. Daws has held the chair of Pacific History at the Australian National University.

  IN ALL the careful social calculations being made at the islands during the twenties and thirties, one large group of men was usually discounted: the members of the United States armed forces who manned the naval base at Pearl Harbor and the army posts strung out from Fort Ruger at Diamond Head to Schofield Barracks on the central plain of Oahu. The servicemen could not be ignored altogether—there were too many of them for that. But neither could they be assimilated—again, there were too many of them. So they were tolerated, but only just.

  Pearl Harbor became the home of the Pacific fleet, and Schofield Barracks was the biggest army post in the United States. Even in the years of disarmament after World War One, between fifteen and twenty thousand men were stationed in Hawaii. These figures made the armed services big business in the islands, and especially at Honolulu. The building of a dry dock at Pearl Harbor alone involved a payroll of sixty thousand dollars a month for almost ten years (a period that included a fresh start after the first pourings of concrete collapsed). Walter Dillingham’s Honolulu Dredging and Construction Company and his Oahu Railroad and Land Company did well out of the development of the harbor, an undertaking second in cost only to the Panama Canal, according to one estimate; and all sort
s of smaller businessmen—taxi operators, barbers, tattoo artists, nightclub owners, and brothel keepers—made a killing whenever the fleet came back from maneuvers or the enlisted men of Schofield came into town with their pay.

  For the most part, however, the serviceman’s money was more welcome than the serviceman himself A surprising number of soldiers and sailors married local girls in Hawaii—thousands of them over the years—and this showed acceptance of a sort, but a feeling of estrangement between the two communities, military and civilian, persisted just the same. The question resolved itself into a matter of ingroups and outgroups, and the dividing line between servicemen and residents could not have been more clearly marked.

  This game of ingroups and outgroups had been played for a long time at the islands, and a man’s perception of the game depended upon his place in it. On the plantations—and in the armed services, for that matter—everything was in the open, with rank and occupation displayed for all to see. But there were other versions of the game in which definitions were more subtle, so much so, in fact, that they might escape an uninstructed observer. Someone unfamiliar with Chinatown, for example, might miss the point that more than one dialect of Chinese was spoken there, that the two main groups of Chinese immigrants, the Punti and the Hakka, had not much time for each other, and that community organizations such as the United Chinese Society papered over differences among other groupings based on family, clan, village, district, and provincial loyalties—all jealously preserved, and set aside only for compelling reasons. Someone unfamiliar with the Japanese might not understand that most of them came from the southern prefectures of Japan, and that they wanted themselves distinguished at all costs from the minority of migrants who came from the Ryukyu Islands, the Okinawans. A Korean did not want to be mistaken either for a Chinese or a Japanese, and his country’s unhappy history made his point for him, if anybody took the trouble to find out about it. Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans alike took their various positions seriously, especially in relation to those late arrivals, the Filipinos, among whom, in turn, there were divisions—between Tagalog, Visayan, and Ilocano.

  People who lived in Hawaii for any length of time could not help becoming aware of what the local game involved, and with practice they became skillful players. For most the skill was purely mechanical, simply a matter of carrying in the mind not one stereotype but several. But even these people developed a talent for manipulating stereotypes that very few mainland Americans had. This was demonstrated every day, in conversation. Out of the welter of languages and dialects spoken at the islands an expressive pidgin emerged, and a conscientious island dweller made a point of using the correct version whenever he spoke to someone who looked different from himself. Even white men and women took it up, because it got better results than the historic expedient of raising the voice and speaking slowly and clearly in perfect English on the assumption that not even the stupidest alien could fail to understand.

  The serviceman, and especially the career officer, was a different case. An enlisted man from Pearl Harbor or Schofield, using up his liberty passes at the brothels of Hell’s Half Acre or Tin Can Alley on the west side of Honolulu, might gradually come to appreciate the subtle differences between one kind of local girl and another, but his superior was likely to take a simpler and sterner view of the social situation in Hawaii. An officer who was also a Southerner, for example, would have his own sense of rank and station and his own sense of the fitness of things, and he might be unable to see Hawaiians as anything but exotic Negroes, Orientals as little brown men indistinguishable one from the other, and “local boys,” especially those of mixed blood, as the embodiment of all that was worst in human nature.

  So in actuality many different games were being played at the islands. White residents—most of them, anyway—observed local conventions without any intention of committing themselves to localism, but even this small concession was likely to be beyond a naval officer in whose considered view a local boy had broken the rules just by being born.

  Once in a great while the rules were shattered, and then terrible things happened. In 1928 a deranged Japanese youth named Myles Fukunaga kidnapped the ten-year-old son of F. W. Jamieson, a white businessman, because Jamieson’s firm, Hawaiian Trust, was about to evict Fukunaga’s parents and their seven children from their rented home at Honolulu. Fukunaga demanded ransom, got it, and then strangled the boy. For a moment Honolulu seemed to be on the brink either of lynch law or racial war. The moment passed almost before it was perceived. Fukunaga was tried, convicted, and hanged not as a representative of his race, but as a sad and solitary criminal.

  Fukunaga’s crime was unsettling enough, but one way or another it could be put out of sight. This was impossible when, three years later, Thalia Massie, the twenty-year-old wife of Thomas Hedges Massie, a submarine lieutenant stationed at Pearl Harbor, told a story which—if it was true—meant that every rule of life at the islands had been broken. And once her story became known, the polite conventions and limited agreements that made it possible for men of different races to live together more or less comfortably were rendered meaningless.

  On the night of Saturday, September 12, 1931, Mrs. Massie and her husband went with some of their friends to the Ala Wai Inn, a restaurant overlooking the drainage canal that marked the boundary of Waikiki. The Inn was done up like a Japanese teahouse with a dance floor downstairs. It was popular with the junior officers of Pearl Harbor; they liked to take a table on Saturday nights, do some talking and dancing, and have a drink or two (usually of okolehao, Hawaii’s potent answer to Prohibition, a liquor distilled from mashed ti root, sold illegally and drunk openly everywhere at the islands). Thalia Massie was at the Ala Wai Inn under protest. After four years as a Navy wife she still did not like dancing or drinking, she did not like crowds, and she did not like most of her husband’s submariner friends. Late in the evening she had an argument with one of them and slapped his face, and then she went outside, by herself.

  The Hawaiian orchestra usually packed up for the night at twelve o’clock, but this time someone paid for another hour of music. Lieutenant Massie looked here and there at the Inn for his wife between midnight and one o’clock, but the dance came to an end and she was still missing. She had wandered away from the Inn, down John Ena Road toward Ala Moana, a road which ran along the water from Waikiki past a shantytown toward Honolulu. At about one o’clock she staggered out onto Ala Moana and hailed a car driven by a man named Eustace Bellinger. Her jaw was broken, her face was bruised, her lips were swollen, and she could hardly make herself understood. She asked Bellinger if he and his friends were white, and then she told them that she had been beaten up by five or six Hawaiian boys. She did not want to call the police, and Bellinger drove her home to Manoa valley.

  Lieutenant Massie left the Ala Wai Inn when it closed. He thought that perhaps his wife had gone home with some Navy people who lived in Manoa, and he tried their place. Mrs. Massie was not there, so he used their telephone to call his own house. His wife answered. “Come home at once,” she said. “Something awful has happened.” Massie found her crying, and it was some time before she could tell him what had happened—the Hawaiians who forced her into their car on John Ena Road had beaten her, taken her to Ala Moana, raped her, so she said, and left her there. Massie called the police just before two o’clock.

  The police were already looking for a carload of local boys. Between midnight and one o’clock a Hawaiian woman named Agnes Peeples and her husband, a white man, were driving through the intersection of King Street and Liliha Street, some miles away from the Ala Wai Inn on the other side of Honolulu, when another car came through the intersection and nearly collided with them. Both cars stopped; Mrs. Peeples got out, and one of the passengers in the other car, a Hawaiian named Joseph Kahahawai, got out too. They exchanged words, and then they exchanged blows. Mrs. Peeples took the number of the other car and went straight to the police. A radio description was being broadcast when L
ieutenant Massie telephoned to say that his wife had been assaulted.

  Massie took his wife to the emergency hospital to find out if she was badly injured. While they were there a police car, with its radio turned up loud, broadcast the details of the fight between Agnes Peeples and Joe Kahahawai. The number of the car, 58-895, and its make, a Ford phaeton with a cloth top, were mentioned several times, and then some added information came over the air: the driver of the car, a young Japanese named Horace Ida, had been picked up for questioning. After Mrs. Massie was examined, she went to the police station to tell her story once again, in detail, and this time she was able to give the police a description of the car in which she had been abducted. It was a Ford tourer, she said, and its number was 58—805. Horace Ida was brought into the room, and she asked him some questions. He did not say much. Later he told the police the names of the others who had been in the car with him: Joe Kahahawai, the Hawaiian who hit Agnes Peeples; Henry Chang, a Chinese-Hawaiian; David Takai, a Japanese; and Benny Ahakuelo, a Hawaiian. The police arrested all but Ahakuelo on Sunday morning and took them to the Massies’ house in

  Manoa. Mrs. Massie was sure Chang had assaulted her, but she could not identify any of the others with certainty. Benny Ahakuelo was arrested later the same day. By that time Mrs. Massie was in Queen’s Hospital under the care of her own doctor, and Ahakuelo, Chang, and Takai were brought there. She said she could not identify Ahakuelo. The five young men, telling their stories to the police separately, said they had been driving around in Ida’s car the night before. They had spent some time at a dance in Waikiki, and some time at a party in Nuuanu valley. They had nothing to do with the attack on Mrs. Massie.

  The English language newspapers at Honolulu were sure the police had the right men. The Advertiser called them “fiends” who had kidnapped and maltreated a “white woman of refinement and culture,” a “young married woman of the highest character.” (The Advertiser, as a matter of fact, gave its readers their choice of sexual shocks on the day the first news of the assault on Mrs. Massie was released. Its front page carried wire-service stories about the evangelist Aimee McPherson, who had eloped with her voice teacher; a “society love tangle” on the American mainland; a duel over a “German beauty;” a kidnapping that turned out to be a “love hoax;” and the adventures of a “white queen of the jungle.”)