To Paradise (36 page)

“I’m also ashamed to say that I didn’t even want to come here, not at first. You know, what you have here, I thought, is not reality. It’s not part of the world. I live near Oakland—
that
is part of the world. You see what’s happening there, what we’re
struggling
against there, what we’re fighting against there: the oppression of the black man and woman, the oppression that’s gone on since America was founded and will go on and on until it burns down to the ground and we begin something new. Because there is no fixing what America is—there is no way to do work around the margins and say justice has been restored. No, brothers and sisters, that’s not how justice works. My mother worked as a nurse’s aide in what they used to call the Houston Negro Hospital, and she would tell me stories of the men and women who came in with heart attacks, about how they’d be gasping for breath, about how their nails would turn blue
because they weren’t getting enough oxygen. My mother would be told by the senior nurses to massage her patients’ hands, to get the blood flowing through the extremities, and as she did, she’d watch their nails turn pink again, and feel their hands warm up with her touch. But one day she realized that this wasn’t solving anything—she was making their hands prettier, maybe even work better, but their hearts were still sick. Nothing had really changed after all.

“And in the same way, nothing has really changed here. America is a country with sin at its heart. You know what I’m talking about. One group of people sent away from their land; another group of people stolen from their land.
We
replaced
you,
and yet we never wanted to replace you—we wanted to be left where we were. None of our ancestors, our great-great-great-grandparents, ever woke up one day and thought:
Let’s sail halfway around the world, be part of a land grab, pit ourselves against some other native peoples.
No way, no how. That is not how normal people, decent people, think—that is how the devil thinks. But that sin, that mark, never goes away, and although we didn’t cause it, we are all infected by it.

“Let me tell you why. Imagine that heart again, but this time swiped with a smear of oil. Not cooking oil but motor oil, the thick, gluey black kind, the kind that sticks to your hands and clothes like tar. It’s just a small bit of oil, you think, and eventually it’ll get washed away. And so you try to forget about it. But that isn’t what happens. What happens instead is that with each beat, with each thump of your heart, that oil, that little mark, spreads and spreads. The arteries carry it away; the veins carry it back. And with each journey through your body, it leaves a deposit, so that eventually—not right away, but over time—every organ, every blood vessel, every cell, has been tainted by that oil. Sometimes you can’t even see it—but you know it’s there. Because by this time, brothers and sisters, that oil is everywhere: It’s coating the inside of your veins; it’s lining your large intestine and liver; it’s slicking your spleen and kidneys. Your brain. That little bit of oil, that little splotch that you thought you could ignore, it’s now everywhere. And now there is no way to clean it out; the only way to clean it out is to stop the heart altogether—the only
way to clean it out is to burn the body pure of it. The only way to clean it is to end it. You want to eliminate the stain, you’ve got to eliminate the host.

“Now. Now. What does this have to do with us here in Hawai
‘
i, you might be saying. The country, you might be saying, is not a body. The metaphor doesn’t hold. But doesn’t it? Here we sit, brothers and sisters, in this beautiful place far from Oakland. And yet it’s not far at all. Because here’s the thing, brothers and sisters: You
do
have pineapples here. You
do
have rainbows. You
do
have hula girls. But none of those things are
yours
. Those pineapple fields Brother Louis took me to see? Who’re they owned by? Not by you. Those rainbows? You have them, but can you see them for those high-rises going up, those hotels and condominiums in Waik
ī
k
ī
? And who owns those buildings? Do you? How about you? Those hula girls—those are your sisters, your brown-skinned sisters, and yet you’re letting them dance…for whom?

“This is the dissonance of living here. This is the lie you’ve been fed. I look at all of you here, your brown faces, your kinky hair, and then I look at who’s running this place. I look at who your elected officials are. I look at who runs your banks, your businesses, your schools. They don’t look like you. So: You’re poor? You got no money? You want to go to school? You want to buy a house? And yet you can’t? And why? Why do you think that is? Is it because you’re all stupid? Is it because you don’t deserve to go to school, to have someplace to live? Is it because you’re bad?

“Or is it because you’ve let yourselves sleep, because you’ve let yourselves forget? You live in a land not of milk and honey but of sugar and sun, and yet you’ve become
drunk
on it. You’ve become
lazy
on it. You’ve become
complacent
on it. And what’s happened, while you surfed and sang and swayed your hips? Your land, your very soul, has been taken from you, bit by bit by bit, right beneath your brown noses, while you watched it happen and did nothing—
nothing
—to stop it. Anyone watching you would think you
wanted
to give it all up. ‘Take my land!’ you said. ‘Take it all! Because I don’t care. I won’t stand in your way.’ ”

He took a breath then, rocked back on his heels, swiped a red
bandanna across his forehead. The crowd had been utterly still, but now a hiss sizzled in the air, like a flock of insects, and when he spoke next, his voice was kinder, softer, almost placating.

“Brothers and sisters. We have something else in common. We are both from lands of kings. We both were kings and queens and princes and princesses. We both had wealth, handed down from father to son to grandson to great-grandson. You all are lucky, though. Because you remember your kings and queens. You
know
their names. You
know
where they’re buried. It’s 1969, my friends. Nineteen sixty-nine. That means it’s only been seventy-one years since your land was stolen by the Americans, seventy-six since your queen was betrayed by the American devils. And here you are—not all of you, mind, but enough of you, brothers and sisters, enough of you—calling yourselves American.
American?
You believe that ‘America is for everyone’ bullshit? America is
not
for everyone—it is not for us. You know that, don’t you? In your hearts and in your souls? You know that America despises you, don’t you? They want your land, your fields, and your mountains, but America don’t want
you
.

“This land was never their land. Legally, it’s barely their land. This land was taken. That is not your fault. But letting it
stay
taken? Well, that
is
your fault.

“You’ve let them buy you off, brothers and sisters. You’ve let them promise that they would give you some of your land back. But look around you: You know that there are more of you in prison than anyone else here? You know that there are more of you in poverty than anyone else? You know that there are more of you that go hungry than anyone else? You know that you die younger, that your babies die sooner, that you die in childbirth more than anyone else? You are
Hawaiians
. This land is yours. It’s time to take it back. Why are you living on your land like tenants? Why are you scared to ask for what’s yours? When I walk through Waik
ī
k
ī
—as I did yesterday—why are you smiling, thanking these white devils, these thieves, for coming to your land? ‘Oh, thank you for visiting! Aloha for visiting! Thank you for coming to our islands—we hope you have a good time!’
Thank you?
Thank you for
what
? For making you
beggars in your own land? For turning you, you kings and queens, into jesters and clowns?”

Again, that hiss, and the audience seemed to recoil as one, leaning away from him. Throughout this part of the speech, he had grown quieter and quieter, but when he spoke again, after letting the silence hang in the air a few unbearable seconds, his voice was strong once more.

“This is
your
land, brothers and sisters. It is up to
you
to reclaim it. You
can
do it. You
must
do it. If you don’t do it for yourself, no one will. Who should respect you if you don’t ask for respect?

“Before I came here, before I came to visit your land—
your
land—I did some research. I went to the public library, and I started reading. And although there were a lot of lies in the books, as there are in almost
all
books, my brothers and sisters, it doesn’t matter, because you learn how to read between the lies; you learn how to read the truth that lurks behind those falsehoods. And it was there, in my reading, that I found this song. I know many of you will know this song, but I’m going to recite to you without music, in English, so you can really hear the words:

“Famous are the children of Hawai
‘
i

Ever loyal to the land

When the evil-hearted messenger comes

With his greedy document of extortion—”

He had only said the first line when the singing began, and although he’d said he wanted us to listen to the lyrics, he clapped his hands together when the melody started, and then again when the first person, his friend Brother Louis, stood to dance. This was a song we all knew, written shortly after the queen was overthrown. I had always considered it an old song, even though, as Bethesda had said, it wasn’t so old at all—there were people alive today who would have heard it played by the Royal Hawaiian Band shortly after it had been written; there were people in the room whose grandparents would have remembered seeing the queen in her black bombazine, waving to them from the palace steps.

Now he stood and watched us, his smile wide again, as if he had willed all of this to happen, as if he had brought us back to life after a long hibernation and was witnessing us remember who we were. I hadn’t liked the pride on his face, as if we were his clever children and he our tireless teacher. Each stanza was sung once in Hawaiian and then again in English, and I hadn’t liked how he recited along with the translation, referring to the sheet of paper he’d taken from his pants pocket.

But mostly, I hadn’t liked the look I’d seen on Edward’s face when I had glanced his way: rapt as I’d never before seen him, his fist raised in the air like Bethesda’s, practically bellowing the song’s most famous lyrics, as if there were before him an audience of thousands, and all of them had gathered to hear him say something they had never heard before.

If you were to ask my mother what happened next—not that I can, and not that anyone else would—she would say it was sudden, a complete surprise. But that isn’t true. Though I can also understand why she might feel that way. There were years of apparent inactivity followed by—without warning, she would probably say—a rupture. One night, you and I were there in the house on O
‘
ahu Avenue, lying in our beds; the next night, we were not. Later, I know, she would discuss our departure as a disappearance, something abrupt and unexpected. Sometimes, she would characterize it as a loss, as if
the two of us were buttons or safety pins. But I knew it was more of a vanishing, a bar of soap smoothing and rounding itself into nothingness, diminishing beneath her fingertips.

There was another person, however, who would have agreed with my mother’s characterization of the events that followed, and ironically, that person was Edward. Later, he would say that he had been “transformed” by that night at Hale Kealoha, that it had been a kind of resurrection. I believe he felt that. On the ride back to town that night, we had been mostly silent, me because I was uncertain what I thought about Bethesda and what he had said, Edward because he had been so thunderstruck by it. As he drove, he would occasionally strike the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, bursting out with a “Damn!” or “Man!” or “Christ!,” and had I not been so unsettled, I might even have thought it was funny. Funny, or alarming—Edward, who showed so little excitement about anything, capable only of expulsions of sound, rather than speech.

Bethesda’s lecture had been recorded, and Edward procured a copy. In the weeks that followed, we would lie on the mattress in the bedroom he was renting from a family in the valley, listening to it again and again on his reel-to-reel, until we both had it memorized—not just the speech itself but the audience’s angry gasp, the creak of the floor as Bethesda shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the crowd’s singing, faint and tinny, atop of which Bethesda’s occasional claps were like explosions.

And yet, even after that night, it took some months for me to realize that something irrevocable had changed for Edward. I had never known him (insofar as I knew him at all) to be a dabbler or a bounder, someone who vaulted from one enthusiasm to another, so it wasn’t as if I witnessed his increasing interest in Hawaiian sovereignty and thought it was just a phase—rather, I’m convinced that he hid something of his transformation from me. I don’t believe it was because he was being duplicitous; I think it was because it was precious to him, precious and personal and also to some degree unfathomable, and he wanted to nurture it in private, where no one could see it and comment on it.