Hula, p.15
Hula, page 15
Grandma passed a year before Grandpa. She’d never complained about her heart; it broke when no one was looking. In those next twelve months, Grandpa smoked all the cigarettes and drank all the whiskey he wanted, but his heart ticked on no matter how many times he took himself to the hospital and told the nurses he was dying.
The day before Grandpa fell into his forever sleep he’d told Laka he was ready to go, that he’d spent most of his life with Grandma bossing him around, that drinking and smoking without having to sneak took all the flavor away, and he was ready to get up to heaven already so Grandma could start telling him what he can’t do again. Laka didn’t cry at his funeral. How could she be sad about a man getting what he wanted? Her dad didn’t cry either, but that was different. George was old-school.
The Volcano house was cleaned out, the hydrangea clipped one last time, and Grandma’s jewelry divided throughout the family. Hulali removed the honu shell and its Ni`ihau adornment from its throne upon the wall and locked it away where no one would find it. It was only in the vacuum of its absence that Laka understood its value. The tears finally came. She begged for the shell’s return and wailed for a week when Hulali refused. Given all the babies, there was too much crying as it was, so Hulali finally took out the belt. Laka went back to silence.
(We minded our own kuleana. Hulali was both the eldest and the mother of the eldest. She was the only one with any say in the matter, and the only thing Hulali was willing to talk about was hula.)
Before he’d died, Grandpa insisted to anyone who’d listen that Laka was the most beautiful hula dancer in the world. Whenever he saw her dance, he whispered like a prayer in church. She was only thirteen, but her hands could make worlds appear.
When it came to hula, Hulali pushed Laka until her feet bled and the tears ran. In her grandfather’s eyes, Laka could do no wrong. In her mother’s, she could do no right.
Something went quiet in George once both his parents were gone. Three times a week he’d disappear on his boat to fish and wouldn’t return until late the next morning, when he’d slip into bed and sleep clear until the next day. Though that didn’t mean there was silence in their house. There was no halau back then, no fight about who would carry on its legacy. There was only their dirt driveway and her mother’s hawk eye and body that dripped babies. Hulali’s promise to her grandmother Ulu—that their family would never again lose their land to the white men who came from the other side of the tides, that she would have Hawaiian babies and dance hula and dedicate her life to the perpetuation of the Hawaiian people—lived like a cross on the wall. When Laka was fifteen she started complaining about wanting to take a break from hula. This made Hulali launch into the entire Naupaka saga, beginning with the arrival of Captain Cook and their farm in Waikiki, and ending with Ulu and Hulali taking their first steps into what would become their treasured Keaukaha. She’d grab Laka by the chin and ask her if she wanted it all to disappear. Because that’s what would happen if Laka didn’t dance.
Hulali never complained about the hours of hula. Even birthing didn’t cause her to miss a day. As soon as she popped one out she’d set it aside and grab her ipu. If the baby didn’t fall asleep to the boom of the pahu it would be carted away and left to cry in a room well out of earshot. We all said that if there was ever a woman who got pregnant every time she drank a glass of water, Hulali was it, but Laka knew it wasn’t something in the water. It was the ghost of Ulu in the walls.
After Hulali gave birth to her seventh child, she birthed her halau, and there were no more babies, only haumāna. The first students were extended family, cousins sent by their mothers to learn what their generation had not had the chance to, then others.
We are only responsible for the brothers and sisters who are younger. But for Laka, that meant wiping hanabata from the noses of an entire crew. Between taking care of her six younger siblings and hula she barely registered when her father was home. Hulali always threatened to “tell your faddah,” but most of his time at home was spent snoring.
After a year without it, the Miss Aloha Hula competition was added to the Merrie Monarch Festival to spice things up. With the sugar industry going kaput and all the businesses in Hilo feeling the slump, the town needed a boost. When Hulali decided Laka would be competing, she chose her daughter’s oli, kahiko, and `auana with careful consideration. She did not bother to explain or justify them, and Laka dared not ask for reason. She did not question why her mother had chosen that particular `auana, a tribute to the sacred shells of Ni`ihau. They never spoke of the necklace, her inheritance. She practiced the hula as a stranger might, blank-eyed and robotic, emotionally detached. Laka wasn’t even sure Hulali trusted her to wear their family heirloom when it came time for the actual competition. But Hulali’s decision for Laka’s traditional dance, her kahiko, earned a very different reaction. Laka put her foot down. What good had the Mo`olelo no Kuula ever done? The legend of how Kuula had bested the evil eel Kekoona and ultimately saved the Hawaiian people from famine had not saved the king. It had not helped the Naupakas. Besides, it was her great-grandmother Ulu’s hula, not hers. She told her mother she would dance anything else, anything but that. When Hulali tried to force the matter, Laka resisted so much that to have her dance it would have served not as homage but as insult. In the early years of Laka’s training, Hulali had learned that as much as Laka grumbled and protested before hula practice, once she got dancing, the hula took hold of Laka’s body and spoke through it, which encouraged Hulali to continue pushing. If Laka’s destiny wasn’t obvious to Laka, it was nakedly apparent to Hulali. But in this fight, no matter how many times Hulali insisted Laka practice the Mo`olelo no Kuula, the dance remained an uninvited stranger to Laka’s body, and eventually Hulali grimly conceded.
Chapter 2
1966
Two months before Laka competed for the Miss Aloha Hula crown a slipper caught her on the ear. She made like a pill bug under her blanket.
“Don’t make me t’row da oddah one, girl. Time fo’ get up.”
With that, Hulali padded back to bed. A moment later, a baby stopped crying. Other than inside the halau, where Hulali was her kumu first and her mother second, the brief interaction summed up Laka’s relationship with Hulali. To give her credit, she wasn’t the kind of mother who was soft to any of her keiki. She didn’t have it in her to be one of those women who covered her babies with hugs and honis, who kissed booboos and tucked in the blankets at bedtime. Hulali was of the mind that her children would be worse off for any of those things, spoiled and weak. She showed her love the way she knew how—through biting attention and critique. But for Laka the bite had always had more fang than necessary. Growing up, she’d learned that silent acquiescence was key to her survival. Better to starve a fire than give it oxygen. Over the years they’d come to a sort of understanding. The fewer words spoken between them, the better, which had ultimately amounted to this: Hulali issuing orders concerning housework, chores, and taking care of the younger Naupakas, and Laka finding ways to live her own life within whatever space between those things allowed.
Laka stretched and untangled her feet from the sheet sticky with her sweat. Outside, the sky was dumping. The room she shared with two of her sisters was humid as a boiling pot with the lid on.
She pulled a pareo around her body, knotting it between her breasts before padding into the kitchen to race through breakfast. When she had time, she made waffles or pancakes with guava syrup. For Christmas one year she’d gotten fancy, filling muffin tins with ham and eggs that she called ham muffins. Huffins. There was no time for huffins or pancakes now. Didn’t matter. The kids in the house responded to those meals the same way they did to milk and a box of cereal or sweet bread and butter. Always starving, voracious bottomless pits.
Just as she was putting out what was left of last night’s rice pot and a can of tuna on the table, her eldest brother, Butch, came through the door wearing his trademark scowl. Pua and Lilinoe, the two youngest besides Moku, the baby, followed closely behind. The girls were singing a nursery rhyme on repeat, gleeful of the effect it was having on their brother, who had his fingers stuffed firmly in his ears. Laka quickly finished what she was doing, caught Lilinoe for a quick kiss on her head, and headed upstairs to finish getting ready. If they didn’t like what she served they could make their own food. She reminded Butch that they were in charge of washing their dishes, pretty sure he could hear well enough. Anyone who left even a spoon in the sink would get it, she told the girls, who continued with their song.
She gave her outfit for school little thought, grabbing the first item on the top of the pile on her “dresser,” two milk crates with a plank of plywood between them. Her backpack was zipped and waiting by her door. She slung it on her shoulder and paused in the hall to listen. The clinking sounds of spoons against bowls drifted in from the kitchen. They were fine. She shut the door on her way out.
She walked toward the front street a few steps but then hung a sharp right toward Back Road, the evacuation route for whenever there was a tsunami, going in the opposite direction from Hilo High School. Windows flickered with the glow of televisions—those were the days we all had to have a TV, and the things never went off.
(There was so much happening that we thought maybe if we turned the TV off the world would end and we’d be the last to know. U.S. President Johnson was coming to Hawaii—how he could come to Hawaii when his country was up in flames with Freedom Riders and angry haoles blowing up buses, we had no idea—we got our own professional baseball team, and Russia shot a person into space.)
Leaving behind the last of the streetlights, Laka followed the chain-link fence that divided Keaukaha from the Hilo Airport property until her house was completely out of sight. She rummaged through her backpack until she found the pair of fishnets she’d buried underneath her books. The first time she’d changed her clothes in the bushes she’d been terrified, stomach clenched tight enough to cut off circulation. The earthquake in her legs had nearly ripped the stockings in two. Now she wiggled and crouched like an old pro, sucked in, doubled over. She was stuffed like sausage in casing in no time at all. The jean skirt and crop top took less than a minute. She combed her fingers through her hair and swiped red lip gloss across her mouth. Then she tossed the backpack behind a tree and waited.
Laka and David had discussed the possibility they were getting sloppy. When they’d first started sneaking around, Laka had forced them through layers of precautions, mapping out stories, stirring up the silt, muddying the waters for safe passage. But no one had seemed to notice, and after a while, she’d wondered if she was expending all that energy on nothing. Her legs stopped trembling. She got bold, daring the world to find out. She’d kissed him in the wet grass near the plumeria bushes under her window. She’d snuck him into the shed where the uncles stashed their stash, where they hung their pakalolo from the ceiling to dry.
There was nothing wrong with David. She wasn’t ashamed to be with him. That wasn’t it.
A rancher with a horse’s work ethic, he was as honest as he was clean. He’d never done a drug a day in his life, drank only at parties, and even then, only a beer or two. Nothing like any of the other boys she knew. When they’d first met, she’d thought him standoffish and shy, an oddball who didn’t care if the surf was up. He never went to the beach. She didn’t even know if he could swim. But she quickly learned of the joy that filled his face when surrounded by animals, stomping around the mud in his boots and cowboy jeans. It was there he’d opened up, and she’d felt as if she’d stepped into an unknown world, a private one made just for them. His dream was to someday own his own ranch, riding horses and raising cattle. His family, from what he’d told her of them, were loving and supportive of their only son. They were divorced, but both lived in Vegas. David lived with an uncle, but now that he’d turned eighteen, he was going to start looking for his own place. Then they could stop sneaking around.
One day, he promised, he was going to fly her to Vegas to meet his mother. Laka never mentioned the possibility of introducing him to her parents. It was impossible.
For one thing, he rolled his eyes at night marchers and menehune. He didn’t believe in ghost stories, he said. (Laka kept the Naupaka historic encounters with the honu `aumakua to herself. If he didn’t believe in night marchers, she didn’t want to know how he’d feel about a message-bearing turtle.) And the only thing he liked about hula was that she danced it. When his friends grumbled about saluting the American flag, he said to stop moaning and get over it—the United States government wasn’t giving anyone any kingdoms back, least of all Hawaiians. On one of their first dates he’d refused to tell her where they were going, saying only that she should wear jeans and covered shoes. They drove and drove until they reached the cool, misty town of Waimea. He turned down a long gravel road and parked the car in front of a locked gate that they then climbed over. Through a trail of craggy trees and overgrown grass she followed his muddy footsteps. He stopped at the crest of a small hill, pointing with shining eyes at the vista on the other side—fog-shrouded fields as far as the eye could see, marshy pond, a thicket in the distance. When he turned to her his eyes were shining with joy. He held a finger to his mouth to signal for her to be quiet and led them to a gathering of grazing cows. One day, he whispered in her ear. One day he was going to have enough money to buy this land. It would be his, a full working ranch where he would be the boss. Bought and paid for with his blood, sweat, and tears. For shame, he said, Hawaiians waiting around for years for America to throw them a scrap of “Hawaiian Land” and then tell them where and what and how. Never mind DHHL with its leases and rules. That wasn’t how reparations were supposed to go.
Laka did not try to change his opinions about Homestead lands. She had no desire to argue. Instead, she’d thrown her arms around him and nibbled his ear until he forgot what he was talking about. What could she have done? She was a Naupaka, and the eldest.
When she eventually told him about how her grandpa had been guarding a special honu shell for her and a void had buried itself in her heart when her mother took the shell away, David accused her of tribalism. It was a sliver of an infraction compared with the way it felt to have his hand grasp for hers in the car or the movie theater. No one she knew had ever been able to put her at ease the way David did. He didn’t have to do anything more than put his arms around her and all of life’s enormous problems shrank to the size of a grain of sand.
When it came to their different perspectives on being Hawaiian, she left well enough alone. She knew the real reason David said those things. It was the same reason her parents would never approve of him. David had only a sliver of Hawaiian blood. Which meant nothing except that George had been a sugarcane mix—Hawaiian but only in part. This meant Laka had enough Hawaiian blood to keep the Naupaka land safe, but any children she might have were a different story. If she had David’s child, their baby might not qualify. The thought of having a baby with David made her blush—they were nearly babies themselves—but she knew her mother.
In spirit, David was as Hawaiian as they came, a cowboy from Moloka`i who for the most part understood the rules of Hilo and the tangled ties of Keaukaha even if he rejected the myths and legends that came with them. None of that would have mattered to Hulali. To Hulali, being Hawaiian meant blood. David and Hulali were like Keaukaha itself: homelands, non-homelands, county land, non-county land, sovereign territory, non. We were the whole damn lot of it. No matter how anyone cut it up into sections, Keaukaha could never be clearly defined by any of those individual bits. We, and it, were bigger than the sum of our parts.
Laka was not without hope. Her mother had often argued that “the most important thing a Hawaiian could do was be Hawaiian,” telling anyone who’d listen that their culture, after being abolished and buried so long, needed to rebuild itself, that they were all duty bound to dedicate their lives to the arts and humanities of their islands. Which sounded a lot to Laka like a dog chasing its tail, but it also meant perhaps there was wiggle room, that one day her mother might see David the way she did—as Hawaiian as they were.
David flashed his headlights when he rounded the corner. She waved from the shadows.
He was the only person Laka had ever met who told her she was perfect. In his eyes, there was not a single disappointing thing about her. In the early days of sneaking down to Puhi Bay to meet him behind the coconut trees on the three days a week she didn’t have hula, she’d stress that her brothers and sisters were taking too long to fall asleep, that he’d give up and leave before she was able to escape, but no matter how long it took, he was always there, waiting. She was his queen, he said, and she’d never been worshipped before.
Behind the coconut trees he’d bring her gifts, wooden hair picks he whittled himself, songs he made up to sing into the soft place behind her ear. The first time he told her he loved her, tears welled in his eyes. She’d shivered with his words, body reacting to every syllable.
When the rains came and didn’t stop, Laka felt sure it was her mother at work, drawing her out in the open. The uncles got tired of drinking in the wet and got it in their heads to build something at Puhi Bay, a community center so Hawaiians could congregate, as the missionaries had done for so many years. Which meant Laka and David had to move their meeting spot to Back Road. She knew it was only a matter of time before they lost that, too.
