Hawaii - James Michener [399]
"That's the only good news we've had," snapped an older doctor who had found seven cases in the mountain area.
Dr. Whipple hesitated, then said, "Our obligation is clear."
"You mean to burn that entire outlying area?"
"I do."
"Jesus, they'll explode. They just won't permit it, Whipple."
Dr. Whipple pressed his hands to his forehead and pleaded: "Have you an alternative?"
"Look, I'm not arguing one way or another," the older man explained. "I'm just saying . . . Hell, Whipple, there must be five hundred homes in that area!"
"And every one infected with the bubonic plague."
"I want no part of this decision!" the older doctor protested.
"Nor me!" another cried. "Christ, Whipple, that's half the city!"
From his position with his head on his arms, Dr. Harvey asked harshly, "If your arm is infected with blood poisoning that is certain to destroy your entire body, what do you do?"
There was no answer, so after a moment he slammed his fist onto the table and shouted, "Well, what in hell do you do? You cut it off! Burn those areas. Now!"
"Only the government can make this decision," Whipple said in slow, terrified tones. "But it's got to make it."
"We are withdrawing from this meeting," two of the doctors warned. "Let it be recorded."
Dr. Harvey shouted, "And let it be recorded that I did not withdraw. Burn the goddamned city or perish."
On the eighteenth of January, 1900, the emergency committee decided to burn a very substantial area of Honolulu in a last prayerful attempt to save the general population, and when the doomed areas were marked in red two facts became apparent: they were not in the center of town but in the residential district; and almost everyone who lived in the area was Chinese. Two members of the cabinet, as they faced the map, were in tears, and a man named Hewlett, who had a good deal of Hawaiian blood, asked, "Why does misery always fall on those least able to bear it?"
"You burn where the plague has fallen," a cabinet member named Hale replied. "And it's fallen on the Chinese."
"Stop this talk!" the chairman cried. "There's already an ugly rumor that we're burning Chinatown as punishment because the Pakes left the sugar fields. I don't want to hear any of that libel in this room. We're burning Chinatown because that's where the plague is."
Hewlett, part-Hawaiian, felt that he was being unduly hectored, so he asked, "Would you burn here," and he banged the haole areas of the map, "if that's where the plague was? Would you burn your own houses?"
"The plague didn't come to our houses," the chairman replied. "It came to the Chinese."
On the nineteenth of January the Fire Department gave all its men the day off and advised them to sleep as much as possible in preparation for a hard day's work on the twentieth. The Honolulu Mail in its edition that day reported: "We beg all citizens of our city to be especially alert tomorrow and to watch for flying sparks, because although the able laddies of our Fire Department have proved over and over again that they know how to set fire to one house and save the next, the very magnitude of the job they now face increases the ever-present danger of a general conflagration. Brooms and buckets of water should be at hand throughout the city."
When word of the proposed burning reached Chinatown, it created panic and many tried vainly to force their way through the cordons that kept everyone within the plague area. Those whose homes were to be razed were rounded up and solemnly marched away to a refugee camp on the slopes of Punchbowl, where they could look down at their doomed homes, and this last view of buildings which they had worked so hard to acquire inspired them with a dumb rage, and that night there were many unpleasant scenes. One Chinese who knew a little English rushed up to Mrs. John Janders, the supervisor of the Punchbowl camp, and screamed, "You doing this on