Horror in Paradise (10 page)

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 Lieutenant 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.”)

Mrs. Massie’s name was not printed, but within a few days the five suspects were identified in the press. The two Japanese, Horace Ida and David Takai, had never been in trouble with the police, but the other three had. Joe Kahahawai had been jailed earlier in 1931 for assault and battery. Henry Chang and Benny Ahakuelo were convicted in 1929 of attempted rape, and they served some months in prison before they were paroled. This clinched the case against them, so a good many people thought.

While the prosecutor’s office was preparing its case, the suspects were tried in the newspapers; in fact “local boys” as a group were tried. Every stock character in the drama of outraged sexual morality made an appearance in the letters-to-the-editor column—“Indignant Citizen,” “Vigilante,” “Mother Of Three Daughters,” and all the rest. Every imaginable act of lust was discussed and every imaginable punishment was considered—whipping, sterilization, emasculation. As the
Advertiser
said, the “gangsters” of Hawaii deserved nothing less; they were beasts at once primitive and degenerate, less civilized than the aboriginal blacks of Australia or New Guinea.

Mrs. Massie’s mother, Grace Hubbard Bell Fortescue, arrived at Honolulu before the trial began. Lieutenant Massie had sent her a hasty telegram, and she took the first ship to the islands. As soon as Mrs. Fortescue heard her overwrought daughter’s story, she began to worry that Thalia might be pregnant—a terrible prospect. Mrs. Fortescue arranged for an examination and an operation. The results showed no sign of pregnancy.

Among the interested parties in the case was Rear Admiral Yates Stirling, Commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District, which included Pearl Harbor. Stirling was an officer, a gentleman, and a Southerner. He had spent part of his career fighting revolutionaries in the Philippines and Chinese warlords on the Yangtze River, and he found little to impress him in the East. Hawaii, where not only Filipinos and Chinese but Japanese and native Hawaiians lived in what seemed to him disgusting closeness to white men and women, impressed him even less. He had nothing but scorn for “enthusiastic priests of the melting-pot cult,” and even on the most beautiful Hawaiian day he could not get the “sordid people” of the islands out of his mind for more than a few minutes at a time. Now that the local boys had shown their true sexual colors, Stirling was caught between two duties: his responsibility as an officer serving the United States government, and his responsibility to his private code of honor. His first inclination, as he said, was to “seize the brutes and string them up on trees.” But he realized that the law must take its course, “slow and exasperating” though it was bound to be.

When the case finally came to trial in November, 1931, the selection of a jury took two days. The difficulties were obvious. White jurors,
haoles
, might find the defendants guilty because of their race; Oriental or Hawaiian jurors might do the opposite. The Navy had a special interest in the verdict, too, and the Navy was one of the best customers of Honolulu’s businessmen. If a juror worked for a firm that did business with the Navy, how would he vote? In the end a jury was chosen consisting of six white men, one Portuguese, two Japanese, two Chinese, and one Hawaiian.

The case for the prosecution was shaky, to say the least. The defendants had undergone a thorough physical examination when they were arrested, and their bodies and the clothes they were wearing that night showed no sign that they had had sexual intercourse. Neither, for that matter, did Mrs. Massie’s body or her clothes show that she had been raped. That she had been beaten was clear; but beyond that very little was clear, even though her story of what happened after she left the Ala Wai Inn got more and more detailed the more often she told it. In court she identified four of the five defendants, more than she had managed to do before, but of course they were the only suspects she was ever shown, and she had never been asked to identify them in a lineup. She also got four of the five digits in the number of Ida’s car correct, but again she had the help of the police in this. Her beads and cigarettes and other belongings were found in a clearing off the Ala Moana, and tire marks from Ida’s car were found there too, but this did not mean much either, because some of the detectives assigned to the case had driven Ida’s car to the spot to conduct their searches. The defense leaned heavily on the element of time. It was unlikely that five men could have raped Mrs. Massie a total of six times, as she said they did,
when
she said they did, and then driven to the other side of town in time to get into a near collision at the comer of King and Liliha Streets when this was known to have happened. To be sure, no other suspects had come to light, but then the police were not looking for other suspects.

The jury stayed out from the afternoon of Wednesday, December 2, until the afternoon of Saturday, December 5, when sounds of fighting were heard in the jury room. The foreman came out to say that they could not agree. Judge Alva E. Steadman told them to try again, but at ten o’clock on Sunday night the foreman sent out a note saying that the jury found it impossible to reach a verdict. Steadman declared a mistrial. A new trial would have to be arranged, and in the meantime Ida, Kahahawai, Chang, Ahakuelo, and Takai were freed on bail.

As Admiral Stirling heard it, “The vote of the jury began and remained to the end, seven for not guilty and five for guilty, the exact proportion of yellow and brown to whites on the jury.” In Stirling’s view the mistrial was a plain miscarriage of justice. The defendants were not men “who might be given the benefit of a reasonable doubt.” Stirling was sure he spoke for most good Navy men. They were under discipline, but all the same the admiral “half suspected” that he would hear any day that one or more of the defendants had been found “swinging from trees by the neck” in Nuuanu valley. Stirling was half right in his half suspicions. Six days after the court case ended some men from the submarine base found Horace Ida in downtown Honolulu, bundled him into their car, drove over the Nuuanu Pali to windward Oahu, took their leather belts, and beat and kicked him unconscious.