Gardens of Earthly Delight
Together with my brother, I was one of two Hawaiian-born among the family. My parents left the Philippines and immigrated to Hawaii in 1946, an odyssey that marked the end of World War II for them. Leaving was not an easy decision, and my oldest brother and sister stayed behind in the custody of my grandparents. It would be many years before they were able to join us in Hawaii, but that’s another story.
At that time, the United States government was seeking laborers for the highly lucrative and rapidly expanding sugarcane and pineapple industry in Hawaii. The war had scarred the Philippines with devastation, leaving millions of its residents out of work. Hawaii was the place where my parents and thousands of other migrant workers chose to pursue their golden opportunity.
One of my brothers and three sisters accompanied my parents on their journey to Hawaii, that faraway place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the years that followed, they did not speak much about that trip, except to say that the ships that carried them were full of people, and they wondered where all of them had come from. For almost thirty days, they and their shipmates kept up their strength on rationed food and waited patiently to step on the shores of a new land.
After my nearly tragic but ultimately triumphant birth, I was baptized Roman-Catholic at St. Raphael Church in Koloa. My parents were devoted Catholic Christians, so I attended part of my elementary school in Catechism of the Catholic Church. Both of my parents valued hard work and spent every hour of every day doing whatever was necessary to keep our family together. We were what most people considered poor, but we were taught to view hardship as a challenge that could be overcome rather than a real setback.
My father was a laborer at the Grove Farm sugar plantation, and my mother was the caregiver of our family. She kept herself busy all day, preparing delicious meals on a modest budget and doing household chores. As a child, I was strapped to a cotton harness that she wore on her back, and I recall her humming as she did her daily housekeeping and laundering. In addition to washing our own family’s clothing, to supplement my father’s income, she washed, dried, and folded clothing for some of the unmarried laborers in our community. I do not remember ever seeing my parents take time to rest.
We lived in an area called the Spanish Camp, a half-mile north from downtown Koloa. It was a plantation-style camp designed primarily for employees and families of those who worked for the sugar plantation or pineapple canneries; they had once been primarily of Spanish descent, hence the name. The house we lived in was a testament to utility. It had three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a front porch—no more than 800 square feet of living space, in which 8 of us managed to live together. The home was built three feet off the ground to prevent water from flooding the house during the rainy season. Through the cracks in the floorboards, I could see into the deep, dark hollow under the house. All of the homes in the Spanish Camp looked the same, with walls made of thin pine, capped with a corrugated tin roof. During the rainy season, the wind, rain, and rushing water performed a symphony on those metal rooftops.
We did not have many luxuries, including running hot water. The bathhouse was strategically situated ten feet away from the main house. For the first ten years of my life, we had to bathe daily by heating our own water in a fifty-gallon drum over an open fire pit. This chore fell to the men in the family, and I remember many nights when I and my brothers passed between the house and the bathhouse, shivering, while the entire family cycled through their bathing routine.
True to form, the Tabalnos were not about to settle for the condition of our home. My father, a self-taught carpenter of rather amazing skill, rounded his friends up and jumpstarted the additions to our humble abode. I think it was an opportunity for him to show off his construction skills to the guys. In no time, they had built a detached garage on the right side of the house and another in the rear. They also constructed a wraparound porch that did not quite wrap all the way around. We needed the garage, because my dad took great pride in his car and loved to drive it around our camp and the neighboring towns. If my mother had known how to read, write, and speak English, I am sure nothing would have stopped her from getting a driver’s license too. Nevertheless, that amazing woman’s tenacity and commitment to her family have shaped me throughout my life.
“Mama!” I said, running through the screen door at the back of the house, “I’m going do some work on the Bates’s back yard on Saturday.”
Like our parents, the notion of idleness was not in mine or my siblings’ vocabulary. From a young age, we began taking on odd jobs, working as a family to make ends meet. Our economic status only motivated us to work harder and look deeper for opportunities to succeed. I was excited whenever I was given the opportunity to work.
Unlike our plantation house, the Bates’s residence was among the better-constructed homes located outside our camp. Those houses were nearly four times bigger than our humble dwelling and had larger yards. All of the larger houses were reserved for plantation supervisors and their families. Most of the families were haoles (white) too. Periodically, the ladies who resided there asked kids like me to help trim and clear the fast-growing grass and shrubbery.
“I going make some rice balls and boiled egg for lunch,” my mother said.
I knew a couple of small rice balls and a hard-boiled egg would be more than enough to sustain me, considering that I would be munching on delicious lychees and juicy Haden mangoes too. “Okay, Ma. I going ten in the morning for four hours. She said she going pay me one dollar to cut some bushes and clean up da yard.”
“Make surwa you tell yo fadda which cutting tools you going use. You know haw he is when his tools missing.”
“I know, Ma.”
My dad made many of his own tools out of wood and scrap metal, and he knew where each one was at all times. I searched through the tool shed and set aside my choice of gardening tools: a regular hoe, a sharpened sickle, and the all-purpose machete. At thirteen, I was already a seasoned yard boy, having started at the ripe old age of five by helping dad and my siblings maintain our own small yard.
We had a small but enchanting garden behind our house. It was more than the average vegetable garden. It abounded with luscious fruit trees and a variety of vegetables. Our home was surrounded by that small garden paradise of papayas, avocados, bananas, mangoes, and many other delectable delights grown from the earth. To add to the magic of the place, we built a modest pond, eight by ten feet and a little more than two feet deep, in which we raised and stocked catfish. In addition to the pond, there was the nearby Waidagi River and the Waita Reservoir, the largest in the state of Hawaii for freshwater tilapia, catfish, and bass as well. The ocean beaches of Black Mountain, Mahaulepu, Ship Wreck, Poipu, and Kukuiula were our fishing grounds, the source of many-a-fresh meal.
Life was bountiful, regardless of our economic means. I worked at the big houses outside our camp, and I was grateful for the work, but seeing the money others had never made me appreciate the beauty of our own home any less.
Garden of Sugar and Pineapples