Ernie Pyle’s book Home Country recounts his visit to Kalaupapa in 1937–38. Though not without errors—he repeats a baseless claim that Hansen’s disease causes “feeble-mindedness”—it is nevertheless a spare, honest, compassionate account by a fine writer. Movingly, he recounts a conversation with the then-manager of the Kalaupapa Store, Shizuo Harada, who was diagnosed with Hansen’s just sixteen days after he graduated with a degree in economics from the University of Hawaii. “He was lonely,” Pyle writes, “because there was no one in Kalaupapa that he could really talk with as he was capable of talking. He apologized for saying what he did, and explained that he didn’t feel himself any better than the rest, but there was a difference.” When after several hours of lively conversation Pyle had to leave, Harada told him, “You have given me the happiest day I have ever had since I came to Kalaupapa. Thank you. Thank you.” Later I found, in the Bishop Museum Library, self-published annotations on Pyle’s work by a settlement physician, Dr. Eric A. Fennel: “Harada is not only a mentally keen man; he is a man of substance and solidarity. He has not been denied a career; he has had and is having one. As if the burden of his disease were not enough, Fate decreed that one brother go to Italy with the famous ‘One Puka Puka’ Battalion, made up of Americans of Japanese ancestry, and that the other one became almost hopelessly ill. So this substantial man, with his salary as Storekeeper, is the sole support of his parents, now aged seventy, and a great help to his semiwidowed sister-in-law and her two children. Hansen’s disease has not robbed him of a noble career.”
And so Charles Kenji Utagawa was born, in conscious tribute to Shizuo Harada.
Rachel Kalama is entirely a fictional creation, but what she experiences as a Hansen’s patient is very much based on the real-world experiences of many such patients. I consulted numerous oral histories and biographies, distilling them down to their common elements and from these forging the armature of Rachel’s life. To interested readers I highly commend The Separating Sickness: Excerpts from Interviews with Exiled Leprosy Patients at Kalaupapa by Ted Gugelyk and Milton Bloombaum; Quest for Dignity: Personal Victories over Leprosy/Hansen’s Disease by The International Association for Integration, Dignity, and Economic Advancement (IDEA); Olivia: My Life of Exile in Kalaupapa by Olivia Robello Breitha; Margaret of Molokai by Mel White; Miracle at Carville and No One Must Ever Know by Betty Martin, edited by Evelyn Wells. In addition I drew upon interviews and articles published in Beacon Magazine, Honolulu Magazine, Kalaupapa Historical Society Newsletter, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, The Honolulu Advertiser, Paradise of the Pacific, The Maui News, The Hawaiian Gazette, and Aloha Magazine.
Equally valuable were Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai and Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands by Gavan Daws; Pilgrimage and Exile: Mother Marianne of Molokai by Sister Mary Laurence Hanley and O. A. Bushnell; News from Molokai: Letters Between Peter Kaeo & Queen Emma 1873–1876, edited by Alfons L. Korn; Exile in Paradise: The Isolation of Hawai'i’s Leprosy Victims and Development of Kalaupapa Settlement, 1865 to the Present by Linda W. Greene; Kalaupapa National Historical Park and the Legacy of Father Damien by Anwei V. Skinsnes Law and Richard Wisniewski; Defamation and Disease: Leprosy, Myth and Ideology in Nineteenth Century Hawai'i by Pennie Lee Moblo; Yesterday at Kalaupapa by Emmett Cahill; Kalaupapa: A Portrait by Wayne Levin and Anwei Skinsnes Law; The Path of the Destroyer by A. A. St. M. Mouritz; Under the Cliffs of Molokai by Emma Warren Gibson; The Lands of Father Damien by James H. Brocker; Leper Priest of Moloka'i: The Father Damien Story by Richard Stewart; A Tree in Bud: The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1889–1893 by M. G. Bosseront d’Anglade; Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula by Nathaniel B. Emerson; Lawrence M. Judd and Hawaii by Lawrence M. Judd and Hugh W. Lytle; Hawaiian Mythology by Martha Beckwith; Reminiscences of Old Hawaii by Uldrick Thompson, Sr.; Hawaii Goes to War by DeSoto Brown; Hawaii’s War Years: 1941–1945 by Gwenfread Allen—among dozens if not hundreds of other texts I lack the space to notate.
I have used Mary Kawena Pukui’s Hawaiian Dictionary, co-authored with Samuel H. Elbert, and Place Names of Hawaii, with Elbert and Esther T. Mookini, as the standard for Hawaiian spelling and orthography in this book, departing from it only on the few occasions when I felt clarity demanded the use of an English “s” for pluralization. As for terminology, I am keenly aware of the disdain that most people with Hansen’s disease feel for the word “leper”—a word that objectifies and stigmatizes them—and have used it only in historical context, in the dialog or point-of-view of characters living in a time when the term was regrettably in wide use. To do otherwise, I felt, would have been inaccurate and dishonest.
For their assistance, expertise, and aloha, I am indebted to Patty Belcher and B. J. Short of the Bishop Museum Library; Geoff White and Allen Hoof of the Hawai'i State Archives; Helen Wong Smith of the Hawai'i Medical Library; Victoria Pula of the Maui Historical Society; and the able and helpful staffs of the Honolulu Public Library and the Hawaiian Historical Society. My editor, Hope Dellon, and my agent, Molly Friedrich, each took on this book as I did, as a labor of love, and I thank them for believing in it. Holly Henderson generously shared her insights into adopted children and their birthmothers. Robert Crais has been just as generous with his advice and advocacy for me and my work. For criticism and encouragement I must also thank Carter Scholz and Amy Adelson, as well as my first, best reader, my wife Paulette.
Moloka′iCover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part 2
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part 3
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part 4
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Endnote
Author’s Note
Table of Contents
PART ONE Blue Vault of Heaven
PART TWO The Stone Leaf
PART THREE Kapu!
PART FOUR 'Ohana
Alan Brennert, Moloka'i
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