Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [84]
"But what's this about the government and the grass skirts?" I persisted. We were now in the jeep once more, and Benny, with his stomach hunched up against the steering wheel, was heading for the next plantation.
"Well, that's the economy of the island. It's all worked out. Coconuts worth so much. Cows worth so much. Cloth worth so much. Wages worth so much. Everybody makes a livin'. Not a good one, maybe, but not so bad, either. Then, bang!"
Benny clapped his hands with a mighty wallop, then grabbed for the steering wheel to pull the jeep back onto the road. "Bang!" he repeated, pleased with the effect. "Into this economy comes a couple hundred thousand American soldiers with more money than they can spend. And everybody wants a grass skirt. So a Tonkinese woman, if she works hard, can make eight skirts a week. That's just what a good woman can make, with help from her old man. So in one month she makes more money than she used to in a year. You can't beat it! So pretty soon all of the Tonks wants to quit working for Monsieur Jacques Benoit and start working for themselves. And Tonk men work on plantations all day and then work for their wives all night making grass skirts, and pretty soon everything is in a hell of a mess." Benny jammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a cow.
"It's just like the NRA back in the States. Mr. Roosevelt might be a great man. Mind you, I ain't sayin' he ain't. But you got to admit he certainly screwed up the economy of our country. The economy of a country," Benny said, slapping me on the knee with each syllable, "is a very tricky thing. A very tricky thing."
"So what happened?" I asked.
"Like I told you. The economy out here went to hell. Tonks makin' more than the plantation owners. Their best hands stoppin' work on cows and coconuts. Tonk women who couldn't read makin' five, six hundred dollars a year, clear profit. So the plantation French went to the guv'mint and said, 'See here. We got our rights. These Tonks is indentured to us. They got to work for us.' And the guv'mint said, 'That's right. That's exactly as we see it, too.' And strike me dead if they didn't pass a law that no Tonk could sell grass skirts 'ceptin' only to plantation owners. And only plantation owners could sell them to Americans!"
Benny looked down the road. He said no more. He was obviously disgusted. I knew I was expected to ask him some further question, but I had no idea what. He solved my dilemma by walloping me a ham-handed smack on the knee. "Can you imagine a bunch of American men, just good average American men, letting any guv'mint get away with that? Especially a French guv'mint?"
"No," I said, sensing an incipient Tom Paine. "I can't quite imagine it."
"Neither by God did we!" he grinned. He slowed the car down and leaned over to whisper to me. "Why do you suppose all the grass skirts is yellow these days? Didn't they used to be red and blue? What do you suppose?" And he tapped his big jar of atabrine pills. "And there's nothin' in it for me. Not one goddam grass skirt do I own," he said. "Just for the hell of it!" and he grinned the ancient defiance upon which all freedom, ultimately, rests.
"And I am ashamed to admit," he added in a low voice as he turned into a lane leading toward the water's edge, "that it was the Marines who fought back. Not the Navy! I'm kind of ashamed that the Navy should take such a pushin' around. But not the Marines. Now you watch when we get around this corner. There'll be a bunch of Tonk women and a bunch of Marines. They'll think this is an MP car and they'll all run like hell. Watch!"
Atabrine Benny stepped on the gas and drove like mad, the way the MP's always do when they get out of sight of other MP's. He screeched his jeep around a corner and pulled it up sharp about fifty yards from the water. To one side, under a rude series of kiosks made of bamboo and canvas, sat five or six Tonkinese women surrounded by miscellaneous souvenirs and admiring Marines, fresh from Guadalcanal.