Hawaii - James Michener [508]
To this Hale added, "At least, in Hawaii, we will never have civil war. We will never have bloodshed."
Sir Ratu, a giant of a man, in all ways, could not let this pass, so he added, "And in a few years you'll have no bloody Hawaiians, either." And the party broke up.
It was with badly mixed emotions that Hoxworth Hale left Fiji, but when his PBY deposited the inspecting team in American Samoa he was propelled into an even more perplexing speculation. He arrived at Pago Pago the day before the islanders were scheduled to celebrate their annexation to America, which had occurred in 1900, and he was told that since a Japanese submarine had recently bombarded Samoa, the islanders this year wished to demonstrate in special ceremonies their loyalty to America. But when Hale rose next morning he saw that the forbidding peaks which surrounded Pago Pago had trapped a convoy of rain clouds, which were in the process of drenching the islands, and he assumed that the ceremonies would be cancelled.
But he did not know Samoans! At dawn the native marines stood in the rain and fired salutes. At eight the Fita Fita band, in splendid uniforms, marched to the "Stars and Stripes Forever," and by ten all citizens who could walk lined the soggy parade ground while Samoan troops executed festive maneuvers. Then a huge, golden-brown chief with a face like a rising sun and enough flesh for two men, moved to the foot of the flag pole and made an impassioned speech in Samoan, proclaiming his devotion to America. Others followed, and as they spoke, Hoxworth Hale began to catch words and finally whole phrases which he understood, and with these Polynesian tones reverberating in his memory he experienced a profound mental confusion, so that when the Fita Fita band played the "Star-Spangled Banner" and the cannon roared, he did not hear the wild cheering of the crowd.
He was comparing what he had seen in Samoa with what he remembered of the way Hawaii celebrated its Annexation Day, and he was struck by the difference. In Samoa guns boomed; in Hawaii decent people maintained silence. In Samoa people cheered; in Hawaii many wept. In Samoa not even storms could daunt the islanders who wanted to watch once more their beloved new flag rising to the symbolic tip of the island; but in Hawaii the new flag was not even raised, for Hawaiians remembered that when their islands were joined to America, the act had been accomplished by trickery and injustice. In the inevitable triumph of progress, a people had been raped, a lesser society had been crushed into oblivion. It was understandable that in Samoa, Polynesians cheered Annexation Day, but in Hawaii they did not.
To Hoxworth Hale these reflections were particularly gloomy, for it had been his great-grandfather Micah who had engineered the annexation of Hawaii, and Hoxworth was always reminded by his family that the event had coincided with his own birth, so that friends said, "Hawaii is the same age as Hoxworth," thus making a family joke of what many considered a crime. But he could also remember his great-grandmother, the Hawaiian lady Malama, as she told him before she died: "My husband made me attend the ceremonies when the Hawaiian flag was torn down, and do you know what the haoles did with that flag, Hoxy? They cut it into little pieces and passed them around the crowd."
"What for?" he had asked.
"So they could remember the day," the old lady had replied. "But why they would want to remember it I never understood."
There were many Hawaiians, even in 1942, who preferred not to speak with a Hale and who refused to eat at the same table with one. But others remembered not stern Micah who had stolen their islands but his mother Jerusha who had loved the Hawaiians, and those who remembered her would eat with the Hales while the others would not. Now, in Samoa where the rains fell, Hoxworth Hale, the descendant of