Hawaii - James Michener [626]
In conclusion his voice changed to one of exhortation: "And neither Goro nor I will stop, because we can remember the day our father took us to the old plantation camp on Kauai and showed us the barracks where the lunas used to tramp through with whips and lash the field hands, and we swore that that would stop. Now, sir, you who asked the question about communism, I want to ask you two questions in return: where were you when, my brothers Minoru and Tadao were giving their lives for American democracy? What have you done comparable to what Goro and I have done to clean up the democracy they saved? Won't you please come up to see me after the rally, and if you have done half as much as we have done, I want to embrace you as a damned good American, because, brother, you are certainly not a communist, nor am I."
The audience always applauded madly at this point, and when Black Jim McLafferty first heard the reply he cried, "My God, we've got to plant somebody in the audience to ask that question every night. I never heard a better answer. Demagoguery at its best, and of course you know what they call demagoguery at its best? Oratory." But Shig refused to have anybody planted, because he was afraid that that might cut the edge of his conviction, because his answer had this merit: on more than half the occasions at which he used it, the questioner did come up afterwards to talk about old army days or the unhappy plantation experiences of his family, so that Shig's reply actually converted hecklers into supporters, which, as McLafferty pointed out, "is about the best you can expect of any answer."
But one thing that McLafferty said rankled in Shig's memory: the word demagoguery. "Am I guilty of that?" he asked himself, and as he analyzed each portion of his well-known reply; he could explain everything until he got to the part about the lunas, and then he always stumbled. "What actually happened?" he asked himself. "One day, one luna hit my father one time. The first time Pop told about it, he told the truth. 'Here is where the luna hit me that day.' Then our family constructed the legend: 'Here is where the lunas used to beat us.' And finally it comes out: 'Here is where the lunas used to beat all the Japanese.'" And he saw clearly that this conversion of the truth was indeed demagoguery of the worst sort, because it kept alive community hatreds, which, even if they had been legitimately founded were better dead in the graves of memory; but the speech did get votes, and one night after a particularly heated rally he put the problem frankly to Black Jim. "That part about the lunas beating the Japanese? Do you think I ought to keep saying that?"
Black Jim was tooling his old Pontiac down Kapiolani Boulevard and for some time said nothing. Then grudgingly he admitted, "It gets votes."
"What I asked was, What do you think of it?'" Shig pressed.
"Well, when I hear it coming, I usually go out in the alley," Black Jim confessed. "Just in case I have to vomit." So Shig dropped that part of his demagoguery, but he noticed that when Goro unveiled the murals at his new labor headquarters, there was the plantation camp with lunas slashing their way through the laborers with bull whips, and Shigeo thought: "This is the greatest evil that grows out of a wrong act. Somebody always remembers it ... in an evil way."
When the campaign reached its height, complicated by the trial of the communists, Shigeo received in his office a visitor he had never heard of and whose existence surprised him. It was a young haole woman, twenty-six years old and marked by a pallid beauty. She said nervously, "My name is Noelani Hale Janders. I'm divorced but I haven't taken back my maiden name. I like what you've been saying on the radio, and I wish to work in your campaign."