Hawaii - James Michener [472]
"Mr. Hale!" the labor man called, catching up with him and grabbing his coat.
"Don't you ever touch me!" Hale stormed.
"I apologize," the man said contritely. "I just wanted to warn you that Hawaii's no different from the rest of America."
"Apparently you don't know Hawaii," Hale said, and left.
In his cold, efficient governance of The Fort he manifested only two peculiarities which could be construed as weaknesses. Whenever he had a major decision to make he spent some time alone in his office, pushing back and forth across his polished desk a reddish rock about the size of a large fist, and in the contemplation of its mysterious form he found intellectual reassurance. "The rock came from his great-great-grandmother on Maui," his secretary explained. "It's sort of a good-luck omen," she said, but what the good luck derived from she did not know and Hale never told her. Also, whenever The Fort started a new building Hale insisted that local kahunas be brought in to orient it. Once a mainland architect asked, "What's a man with a Yale degree doing with kahunas?" and Hale replied, "You'd be surprised. In our courts it's illegal to force a Hawaiian to testify if a known kahuna is watching in the courtroom." The architect asked, "You certainly don't believe such nonsense, do you?" and Hale replied evasively, "Well, if I were the judge, I would certainly insist that any known kahunas be barred from my courtroom. Their power is peculiar."
One unspoken rule regarding The Fort was observed by all: The Fort did not exist; it was a phrase never mentioned in public; Hale himself never spoke it; and it was banned from both newspaper and radio. The building in which the men met remained as it was during Wild Whip's tenancy: a rugged red-stone commercial headquarters built like a fort and bearing a simple brass plate that read: Hoxworth & Hale, Shipmasters and Factors.
BACK IN THE 1880's, when the Chinese vegetable peddler Nyuk Tsin decided to educate her five sons and to send one of them all the way to Michigan for a law degree, Honolulu had been amazed at her tenacity and instructed by the manner in which she forced four of her sons to support the fifth on the mainland. But what Hawaii was now about to witness in the case of Japanese families and their dedication to learning made anything that the Chinese had accomplished look both dilatory and lacking in conviction. Specifically, the penniless night-soil collector Kamejiro Sakagawa was determined that each of his five children must have nothing less than a full education: twelve years of public school, four years at the local university, followed by three at graduate school on the mainland. In any other nation in the world, such an ambition would have been insane; it was to the glory of America, and especially that part known as Hawaii, that such a dream on the part of a privy-cleaner was entirely practical, if only the family had the courage to pursue it.
From the Kakaako home each morning the five Sakagawa children set forth to school. They were clean. Their black hair was bobbed straight across their eyes and their teeth had no cavities. They walked with an eager bounce, their bright scrubbed faces shining in sunlight, for to them school was the world's great adventure. Their education did not come easily, for it was conducted in a foreign language: English. At home their mother spoke almost none and their father knew only pidgin.
But in spite of language difficulties, the five Sakagawas performed brilliantly and even teachers who might have begun with an animus against Japanese grew to love these particular children. Reiko-chan set the pattern for her brothers. In her first six grades she usually led her class, and when teachers had to leave the room to see the principal, they