Hawaii - James Michener [431]
"All right, Jackson," Whip muttered as the man left.
As soon as the voting was over, Whip assembled his lunas and reported: "Jackson, Allingham and Gates voted Democratic. Get them out of here before midnight."
"What shall we tell them?"
"Nothing. They know the evil they've done."
And he stood in the shadows of the royal palms as the three traitors were thrown onto the public road, their bundles of goods under their arms.
It was as a result of this election, and the dangers represented by it--Wilson ruling in Washington, men like Jackson beginning to vote Democratic on Kauai--that Wild Whip made his decision. "I'm going back to Honolulu," he told Dr. Schilling. "You're welcome to live here and take care of the pineapples."
"What are you intending to do?" Schilling asked.
"There's a spirit of rebellion in the world. Crazy liberal thinking. Probably infected my own company. I'm going back to take over control of H & H."
"I thought they threw you out? Exiled you?"
"They did," Wild Whip confessed. "But in those days I didn't own the company."
"Do you now?"
"Yes, but the Yale men running it don't know it."
"You going to chop off a lot of heads?" Schilling asked with the fiendish joy of childhood.
"Not if they're good men," Whip replied, disappointing his permanent guest. And by Christmas Eve, 1912, he was in sole, dictatorial control of the great H & H empire, and although heads did not roll in the Schilling sense of the word, every man who was suspected of having voted Democratic was fired. "In Hawaii and in H & H," Whip explained without rancor, "there is simply no place for such men."
ANY GENERAL CONCLAVE of the great Kee hui was apt to be impressive. The older sons, like Asia, who ran the restaurant, retained their Chinese names--Kee Ah Chow--and wore pigtails and black sateen suits; but the younger sons cut their pigtails and wore contemporary American dress. They also preferred the English translations of their names, such as Australia Kee instead of Kee Oh Chow.
When the hui converged upon the ugly house up Nuuanu, they formed colorful processions. Some brought their wives and by 1908 were able to bring grown grandsons along with their pretty Chinese and Hawaiian wives. On festive occasions great-grandchildren appeared in number, tumbling about the grounds on which the family still grew taro and pineapples. The Kees, counting their wives and husbands, now numbered ninety-seven, but of course they were never able to convene at one time, because a dozen or so were apt to be at school on the mainland. Neither Yale nor Harvard had yet known a Kee, but Michigan, Chicago, Columbia and Pennsylvania did, and it was possible for a Chinese in Hawaii to be born, financed, protected at law, married, tended medically and buried---all at the hands of Kees. In addition, he could rent his land from them, and buy his vegetables, his meat and his clothes.
The most conspicuous member was still Nyuk Tsin. In 1908 she was sixty-one years old, and although she no longer lugged pineapples through the streets in her famous twin baskets, she still grew them and supervised others in the peddling. Year by year she grew shorter, thinner, balder, and although her face showed the wrinkling of age, her mind retained the resilience of youth. Her life consisted of purposeful ritual. Each year, with solemn dignity, she accompanied her brilliant son Africa to the tax office to pay her taxes. Twice a year she took eight or ten members of her family to the Punti store where they sent money to her husband's real wife in China. She had died in 1881, but the family in the Low Village continued to write letters of grateful acknowledgment on her behalf. Every two or three years Nyuk Tsin assembled as many of her family as possible for the trip to the leper colony at Kalawao,