Hawaii (56 page)

When it came time for the Thetis to carry the missionaries to Honolulu, Abner discovered the thrill that ugly memories yield when they have receded with their pain, for he was to bunk in his old stateroom and John Whipple would share it; but his pleasure was considerably dampened wnen a canoe arrived from the other end of Maui bearing the missionary Abraham Hewlett, his handsome little boy Abner, and his Hawaiian wife, Malia, the native pronunciation of Mary.

"Are they sailing with us?" Abner asked suspiciously.

"Of course. If we don't have them, we don't have a trial."

"Won't it be embarrassing if Hewlett's on the same ship with us?"

"Not for me. I'm voting for him."

"Do you think hell be put in our stateroom?"

"He shared it with us once," Whipple replied.

The two missionaries looked with interest as Mrs. Hewlett, if anyone so dark could be given that name, came aboard the Thetis. She was taller than her husband, very broad-shouldered and grave of manner. She spoke to the little boy in a soft voice, and Abner whispered in disgust, "Is she talking to that child in Hawaiian?"

"Why not?" Dr. Whipple asked.

"My children are not allowed to speak a word of Hawaiian," Abner replied emphatically. " 'Learn not the way of the heathenl' the Bible directs us. Do your children speak Hawaiian?"

"Of course," Whipple replied with some impatience.

"That's very unwisel" Abner warned.

"We live in Hawaii. We work here. Probably my boys will go to school here."

"Mine won't," Abner said firmly.

"Where will you send them?" John asked with some interest, for he often discussed the matter with his wife.

"The Board will send them to New England. Then to Yale. But the important thing is that they never come into contact with Hawaiians." Dr. Whipple watched the Hewletts cross the deck and go down the hatchway aft, and the manner in which the Hawaiian

woman watched over little Abner Hewlett proved that whereas she might have crept into the father's bed by some trick or other, she certainly loved the child.

"Boy's lucky," Whipple said. "He's got a good mother."

"She doesn't look the way I expected," Abner confessed.

"You expected a painted whore?" Whipple laughed. "Abner, once in a while you ought to look at the reality of life."

"How did she become a Christian?" Abner pondered.

"Abraham Hewlett took her into the church," Whipple explained.

There was a thoughtful pause, and then Aimer asked, "But how could they have been married? I mean, if Hewlett was the only minister who could have married them?"

"For the first year nobody did."

"You mean, they lived in sin?"

"And then I came along ... on one of my regular trips. I was in a Russian ship."

"And you married a Christian minister to a heathen?" Abner asked, aghast.

"Yes. I'm probably going to be censured, too," Whipple said dryly. "And I have a suspicion in here," and he touched his heart, "that I won't accept the censure. I stand with St. Paul: 'It is better to marry than to bum.' Can anyone seriously doubt that Abraham is better off today than he was when you left him in Wailuku?"

The meeting in Honolulu went as expected. At first Abraham Hewlett made a sorry spectacle of himself, confessing that in marrying the Hawaiian girl Malia he had sinned against the decrees of God, thus bringing degradation upon both himself and the church. He begged forgiveness, asking the brethren to remember that he had been left alone with an infant boy; and at the recollection of his misery in those lonely days he wept. Later, when it was suggested that perhaps the sly Hawaiian woman had been responsible for his downfall, he recovered a portion of his dignity by avowing that he loved this gracious, tender girl and that it was he who had insisted upon the marriage, "and if the brethren think they dare imply censure of Malia, they are indeed mistaken."

The vote was an easily predicted condemnation and expulsion, only Whipple and Quigley speaking in defense. The meeting thought it best that the Hewletts leave the islands: "For your presence here would be a constant humiliation to the church. But it is recognized that it would be equally disgraceful for a Christian minister�art unfrocked one, that is�to return to America with a Hawaiian wife, for there are many in America who are eager to castigate missionaries, and your appearance among them would merely add ammunition to their blasphemies. It is therefore concluded that you and your family ought . . ."

At this point Abraham's tears were dried and he interrupted bluntly: "It is not within your province to advise me in these matters. I shall live where I wish."

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"You will receive no sustenance from us," the meeting reminded him.

"I have entered into a contract to raise pigs and sugar cane for the whaling ships at Lahaina, and beyond this you are required to know nothing. But before I go I must point out that your mission is founded upon an impossible contradiction. You love the Hawaiians as potential Christians, but you despise them as people. I am proud to say that I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion, and it is therefore appropriate that I should be expelled from a mission where love is not." Dr. Whipple thought that when the scrawny man with the big eyes finally left the judgment room, he departed with some dignity.

The meeting then turned to the doctor's case and condemned him for having married the pair, thus constituting himself, as one minister pointed out, "the agency, if not the cause, whereby our miserable brother from Hana fell into temptation and sin."

Dr. Whipple retorted, "I should rather have thought that I was the agency whereby he fell out of sin."

This sally, being both witty and cogent, furthered the case against the doctor, and all the missionaries except Quigley joined in a vote of censure. Whipple was reproved and advised to be more circumspect in the future. To Abner's surprise, his roommate accepted the condemnation and sat without even a look of resentment as the meeting turned to less weighty matters, including assignments of the mission family to new posts.

But when it came time for the Theb's to return to Lahaina, Abner was surprised to find Dr. Whipple, his wife Amanda, and their two boys ensconced in the stateroom. "I thought you were directed to go to Kauai," Abner remarked.

"Where I am directed to go and where I go are two vastly different matters," Whipple said easily, and Abner was relieved to notice that they had no luggage, so apparently they were on a short visit to one of the way islands, Molokai or Lanai. But when these ports were cleared, the Whipple family was still aboard, and at the pier in Lahaina, John grabbed Abner's hand and said, "Don't leave. I want you to witness exactly what happens. There's Jerusha. I'd like to have her come along, too, because I don't want contradictory reports circulated regarding what I'm about to do."

And with his wife and children in tow, he led the Hales to Captain Janders' store and said boldly, "Captain, I have come to throw myself on your mercy."

"What do you mean?" Janders asked suspiciously.

"You're doing a large business here, Captain, and with more whalers coming each year, you'll need a partner. I want to be that partner."

"You leaving the mission?"

"Yes, sir."

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"Over the Hewlett affair?"

"Yes, sir. And others. I happen to believe that men who work should get a just salary." He tugged at his ill-fitting trousers, pointed at Amanda's dress and said, "I'm tired of going down to the mission grab bag in Honolulu to see what scraps the good people in Boston have sent us this year. I want to work for myself, get my own wage, and buy my own things."

"Does Amanda feel the same?" Captain Janders asked.

"She does."

"Do you, Amanda?"

"I love the Lord. I love to serve the Lord. But I also love an organized home, and in these matters I am with my husband."

"You got any money to put into the venture?" Janders asked warily.

"My family comes to you with absolutely nothing," the handsome dark-haired doctor, then twenty-nine, replied. "We have these clothes, picked from the rag bag, and that is all. I have no medicine, no tools, no luggage. Certainly I have no money. But I have a knowledge of these islands that no other man on eaith has, and that's what I offer you."

"Do you speak the tongue?"

"Perfectly."

Janders thought a moment, then stuck out his rugged hand. "Son, you're my partner. On the Thetis, when you asked so many questions, I remarked you."

"I have only one request, Captain," Whipple said. "I want to borrow enough money . . . right now . . ."

"We'll fix you up with clothes and a place to live."

"Enough money to buy my own medical outfit. And anyone who wants medical advice from me can get it free. For I am a servant of the Lord, but I am determined to serve Him in my way, and not some other."

By the end of the week the Whipples had moved into a small grass shack, which Kelolo gave them along with a substantial square of land in return for medical care for Malama, whose exertions on behalf of the new laws had taxed her strength, and at the start of the next week the first of many signboards that were to become famous throughout Hawaii appeared on the dusty main streets of Lahaina: "Janders & Whipple.

ABNER'S DISTURBING EXPERIENCES in Honolulu, where both Abraham Hewlett and John Whipple had challenged the missionary board, confirmed his natural suspicion that there was inherent danger from too close relationships with the Hawaiian savages, and it was under the impetus of this fear that he built a high wall around his entire establishment, leaving an extra gate at the rear through which Jerusha could exit to her girls' cksses, held in an open shed under the kou trees. Within the wall not a word of Hawaiian

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was spoken. No Hawaiian maid was allowed to enter unless she knew Ertglish, and if a deputation of villagers came to see Abner, he would carefully close the door leading to where his children were, and he would take the Hawaiians to what he called "the native room," where their voices could not be heard by the little ones.

"We must not learn the ways of the heathen!" Abner constantly warned his family, for what Abraham Hewlett had suggested in Honolulu regarding all missionaries was particularly true of Abner: he loved the Hawaiians, yet he despised them. He was therefore not in very good humor when Kelolo came to visit him one night, which forced him to close off the children's room, lest they hear Hawaiian being spoken.

"What is it you want?" he asked testily.

"In church the other day," Kelolo said in Hawaiian, "I listened to Keoki read that beautiful passage from the Bible in which this man begat that man, and the other man begat another man." The big chief's face was radiant with pleasant memory of the Biblical message which Hawaiians loved above all other. "The Begaits," they called it among themselves.

Abner had long been curious about this partiality for the chapter in Chronicles, for he felt sure the Hawaiians could not understand it. "Why do you like that passage so much?" he probed.

Kelolo was embarrassed, and looked about to see if anyone was listening. Then he confessed somewhat sheepishly, "There is much in the Bible we do not understand. How could we? We don't know the many things the white man knows. But when we hear "The Begats,' it is like music to our ears, Makua Hale, because it sounds just like our own family histories, and for once we can feel as if we, too, were part of the Bible."

"What do you mean, family histories?" Abner asked.

"That is what I came to see you about. I see you at work translating the Bible into my language, and we appreciate your hard work. Malama and I were wondering, if before she dies . . . No, Makua Hale, she is not well. We wondered if you would write down for us in English our family history. We are brother and sister, you know."

"I know," Abner mumbled.

"I am the last one who knows the family history," Kelolo said. "When Keoki should have been learning it, he was learning about God. Now he is too old to memorize the way I did when I was studying to be a kahuna."

Abner, a learned man, instantly saw the value of preserving old fables, and asked, "How does a family history sound, Kelolo?"

"I want you to write it as if Keoki were saying it. I am doing this for him, so that he will know who he is."

"How does it begin?" Abner pressed.

It was dark in the grass house, with only one feeble whale-oil lamp swaying with its retinue of shadows, when Kelolo, seated cross-legged on the floor, began: "I am Keoki, the son of Kelolo who came to Maui with Kamehameha the Great; who was the son of Kanakoa, the

King of Kona; who was the son of Kanakoa, the King of Kona who sailed to Kauai; who was the son of Kelolo, the King of Kona who died in the volcano; who was the son of Kelolo, the King of Kona who stole Kekelaalii from Oahu; who was the son of . . ."

After Abner had listened for a while, his curiosity as a scholar overcame his initial boredom at this tedious and probably imaginary ritual. "How did you memorize this genealogy?" he asked.

"An alii who doesn't know his ancestry has no hope of position in Hawaii," Kelolo explained. "I spent three years memorizing every branch of my family. The kings of Kona are descended, you know, from the . . ."

"Are these genealogies real, or made up?" Abner asked bluntly.

Kelolo was amazed at the question. "Made up, Makua Hale? It is by these that we live. Why do you suppose Malama is the Alii Nui? Because she can trace her ancestry far back to the second canoe that brought our family to Hawaii. Her ancestor was the High Priestess Malama who came in that second canoe. My name goes back to the first canoe from Bora Bora, for my ancestor was the High Priest of that canoe, Kelolo."

Abner suppressed a smile as the illiterate chief before him tried to establish relations with some mythical event that must have occurred ten centuries before, if at all. He thought of his own family, in Marlboro. His mother knew when her ancestors reached Boston, but no one could recall when the Hales had got there, and here was a man who could not even write, claiming . . .