"I didn't tell you before," he admitted, "but I got into a fight today."
"Where? With who?"
"Woody and me were down Waikiki, surfing, when some haole kidtourist kid-gives us the stink-eye and says, `Sure is a lotta garbage on this beach.' I ask him, `Is there a problem?' He says, `My pop says it's chinks like you coming here that's the problem.' So I say"-he managed a small smile-"'That's funny, 'cause my pop says your pop is full of shit.' "
"Harry!" My eyes widened in reproach, even as I was trying not to laugh.
He gave a little shrug. "That's when we started duking it out."
I sighed. "Well, you look none the worse for it."
"I did more duking than he did."
"You don't look too happy about it."
He hesitated. "They threw us off the beach."
"What? Who did?"
"The manager of the Moana Hotel. The haole kid complained about us, and even though he threw the first punch-and Steamboat and Panama took our side-they threw us off the beach." I now understood the hurt and anger in his eyes. "Can you beat that? These no-good malihinis come here, they do whatever they want, and they get away with it! They-"
He broke down, suddenly weeping, and I held him to me as he sobbed.
"No, they can't," I said, gently stroking his hair. "They won't. You'll see."
The following day I accepted a long-standing offer from Esther to secure me a seat in the courtroom-two seats, actually. On Wednesday, April 27, the last day of the trial, Harold and I found ourselves seated behind Esther and Pascual, two of only a handful of "locals" present on this final day. I wanted Harry to see the defendants as they were brought into the courtroom, no more privileged than he or I as they sat before a jury of their peers. I wanted him to see the American legal system at work, for better or worsea system I could not help but believe in, as it had freed me from the tyranny of Mr. Noh. I did not know whether justice would prevail in this trial, but it seemed to me that Harry at least needed to see justice trying to prevail.
Unfortunately, this meant listening to Clarence Darrow's endless closing summation, which recapitulated in great detail the entire series of events from the alleged assault on Mrs. Massie through the Ala Moana trial, Joe's death, and the present circumstances-culminating in this question to the jury:
"Gentlemen," he said, "I wonder what fate has against this family, anyhow? I wonder when it will get through taking its toll and leave them in peace?"
He was not referring to Joe's family, of course, but to Mrs. Massie's.
He spoke of the pain of her "ravishment" and said, "I don't care whether it is a human mother, or the mother of beasts or birds in the air. They are all alike. To them there is one all-important thing and that is a child they carried in their womb, and without that feeling there would be no life preserved upon this earth."
He pointed to Mrs. Fortescue. "There she is-that mother-in this courtroom! She is waiting to go to the penitentiary. All right, gentlemengo to it! ... If this husband and this mother go to the penitentiary, it won't be the first time a penitentiary has been sanctified by its inmates!"
When the defense had rested its case, Harry turned to me and whispered, "What happens now?"
"Now," I said, "someone speaks up for Joe."
District attorney John Kelley paced before the jury and delivered a forceful summation, and a blistering portrayal of the defendants as cold-blooded killers who "let a man bleed to death in front of them, inch by inch." He excoriated Lieutenant Massie's so-called insanity defense and pointed out things he testified to that he should not have remembered had he truly "blacked out." Then he told the jurors, "Hawai'i is on trial. Is there to be one law for strangers and another for the rest of us?"
I could see Harry sit up a little straighter beside me.
And what will happen, Kelley asked, if the jury acquits Massie? "Why, they'll make him an admiral! They'll make him chief of staff! He and Admiral Pratt are of the same mind, they both believe in lynch law!"
But Kelley reserved his greatest scorn for the defense attorney's words:
"Mr. Darrow has spoken of mother love. He has spoken of `the mother' in this courtroom. Well, there is another mother in this courtroom. Has Mrs. Fortescue lost her daughter? Has Massie lost his wife?"
He turned and pointed at Esther, who was now weeping.
"But where is Joseph Kahahawai?"
Darrow felt the sting of the courtroom's silence.
I leaned forward and placed a consoling hand on Esther's shoulder. Harold blinked back tears. I could not have asked for a better exemplar of the American legal system than John Kelley.
As Harry and I left the courtroom that day, I noticed Mrs. Quigley and one of her kama'aina friends leaving the courthouse as well. Perhaps she felt my eyes on her, because after a few moments she looked up and saw me. We briefly held each other's gazes-but I admit, I saw no anger or recrimination in her eyes, only sorrow, before she dropped her head and turned away.
After some fifty hours of deliberation, the jury of seven haoles, two Asians, two Hawaiians, and a Portuguese returned a verdict-finding all four defendants guilty of manslaughter in the death of Joseph Kahahawai Jr.
was relieved and, I confess, a little surprised. After all that I had seen and heard, I thought there was a good chance the accused would escape the consequences of their actions. But the jurors had done a great service to Hawai'i and their country, affirming the rule of law over vigilante justice. Upper-crust Honolulu society may have been dismayed, but in Palama there was celebration that Hawai'i had shown itself to be true not just to the American ideal of "equal justice under the law," but to the words of Kamehameha III that had become Hawai'i's motto: Ua mau Ke Ea 0 Ka Aina IKa Pono-"The Life of the Land Is Preserved in Righteousness."
Unfortunately the rest of America did not live up to its founders' ideals, and the mainland exploded in a rage over the conviction of four people many considered to be heroes, not villains.
Only a few days later I was at work sewing together a shirt when I heard the door chime and looked up to see Esther Anito, shaken and pale, enter the shop.
"They've won," she said hoarsely.
"What? Who's won?"
She looked like a woman who had had everything taken from her and had nothing left to give up.
"I was at the courthouse," she said, "when the judge sentenced them each to ten years' hard labor at O'ahu Prison. But they were all smiling-like cats that had just swallowed big fat canaries. Then it was announced that the governor had commuted their sentences."
"'Commute'? What does that mean?"
"It means he reduced the ten years they would have had to serve in prison," she said, "to one hour `in custody of the High Sheriff.' And then they all went off to the governor's office to pass the time and have their pictures taken for the press."
I was stunned. I could scarcely believe it. "Governor Judd did this?" He had always seemed like a good man to me.
"One hour," Esther said bitterly. "That's all my boy's life is worth: one hour of their time!"
She started to weep, as outside, newsboys began hawking extras announcing this latest, terrible turn in the case. I could not find any words of consolation for her, for there were none. Nor could I find any to console my children that night-especially Harold-when they asked me why the people who killed Joe were going free. The outcome had made a mockery of all my faith in the law, and I was helpless to shield them from this, their first taste of the world's injustice.
In the following days we would hear how the governor had been under intense pressure from Washington to grant the four defendants a full pardon, or else the territory would be placed under military rule. Judd had refused to consider a pardon, which would have wiped away their criminal convictions. "By their verdict the jury has built a monument upon which it is inscribed that lynch law will not be tolerated in Hawai'i," the governor declared, "and for the public good I propose to do nothing which would in any way tear down or destroy that
monument." But it was a tarnished monument at best.
No matter his reasons, Governor Judd's actions were wrong and served only to demonstrate, as John Kelley had said, that there were two standards of justice in Hawai'i: one for haoles, and one for everyone else.
Four days after the commutations, amid the flash of news cameras, Thomas and Thalia Massie, Grace Fortescue, and Clarence Darrow left for San Francisco aboard the Malolo-leaving behind a Honolulu that would be forever changed by their brief and sorrowful transit through the islands. In that fall's elections, the Republican party-and the haole elite that controlled it-suffered their first major loss at the polls, thanks largely to the votes of young Asian-American citizens. It was the beginning of the end for the Big Five.
n an effort to close the books on the Ala Moana case-and to determine whether Horace Ida, Henry Chang, Ben Ahakuelo, and David Takai ought to be retried-John Kelley suggested to Governor Judd that he commission the Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation surrounding the facts of the alleged attack upon Thalia Massie.
The report was not made public until a year later; even then, it was only quietly reported on in Hawai'i. The Pinkertons concluded that Mrs. Massie "did in some manner suffer numerous bruises about the head and body, but definite proof of actual rape has not in our opinion been found." It went on to confirm the boys' alibis: "The movements and whereabouts of the defendants on the night of the alleged assault remain precisely as they were accounted for"-and found no reason to doubt their "probable innocence."
Accordingly, the Territory of Hawai'i dropped all charges against the remaining defendants, clearing their names as well as that of Joe Kahahawai. It could not bring Joe back, but perhaps his spirit might sleep a little easier.
It was some, but scant, comfort for Esther, who would never quite recover from the loss of her son. Joseph Sr. also continued to mourn, and I wonder how his grief and the stress of the trials might have hastened his death, at the age of fifty, seven years later. But not long after the bitter pill of the commutations, he and his wife Hannah announced some joyful news, at least: They were going to have another child. Their fourth and final son was born to them on December 20-five days before the birthday of the halfbrother he would never know-and his parents named him Joseph.
Eighteen
oe's murder and his killers' deliverance had a profound effect on me, plunging me into a melancholy the like of which I had not felt since the death of my first, unborn child. The injustice of it colored the way I now looked at life in America-or perhaps life here had already been colored by my naivete, and I was viewing it clear-eyed for the first time. Hawai'i was ruled by a privileged elite who felt themselves above the law, and those of us with darker skin or a different cast to our eyes were merely second-class citizens. We had been brought here to do the hard manual labor that haoles would not stoop to perform, and that was what we always would be in their eyes: common laborers, who were simply not to be accorded the same rights as they.
Some people could drink from this bitter cup without it poisoning their lives, and I tried to tell myself that this was simply another kind of han to be borne bravely and silently; no worse, certainly, than what I had lived under in Korea. Had it only affected my own life, it might not have bothered me as much. But to think that my children could be struck down as capriciously as Joe had been, their lives not worth more than an hour of a haole's life-that I could not bear.
Like a good Korean, I did not betray the extent of my desolation, certainly not to the children. My husband recognized what I was going through and tried to console me with a touch, a smile, a gentle word here and there. And Beauty understood as well, often spending mornings visiting with me in the tailor shop, since her business at the barbershop was largely confined to afternoons and evenings. We would talk about how our keiki were getting along in school, about our fellow picture brides, about everything and nothing; and in the calming drone of each other's chatter I found a welcome distraction from darker thoughts.
On one such morning Beauty and I were chatting when the door opened to admit two men in their early thirties: one a tourist and the other a beachboy of my acquaintance, Eugene "Poi Dog" Nahuli, a member of the Waikiki Beach Patrol. This was a group founded in the wake of the Massie case to organize services and concessions at Waikiki, and not incidentally to polish the tarnished public image of the beachboys. Poi Dog-the nickname came from a little terrier-mix he took to the beach with him every day-had the quiet good looks of a Duke Kahanamoku and an impish grin not unlike Panama Dave's. "Got a customer for you, Jin," he announced. He had brought in a guest staying at the Royal Hawaiian who wished to have a custom shirt made from a colorful cotton print-green Japanese pine trees against a dark blue background.
"Ah, this is very pretty," I said, starting to examine the fabric, when I felt a reproving kick to my ankle that could only have come from the person sitting beside me. It was then I noted Beauty gazing hungrily at Poi Dog as if he were, well, not poi, but perhaps kimchi.
I did not require a second kick and quickly made introductions. Beauty was wearing her white barber's smock and Poi Dog looked her over with a smile. "You a barber girl, eh?"
She nodded and smiled. "Yes, my shop is on Merchant Street."
"Just had a haircut last week," he said. "Guess it's 'bout time for another."
She laughed, but he wasn't joking. He stopped by that afternoon for a shave, and they soon became inseparable.
That turned out to be an eventful week. Only a few days later I was working on that Japanese print shirt when a dapper young ChineseAmerican man in a business suit entered the shop, greeting me with a smile. "Aloha. I'm your neighbor, Ellery Chun-from King-Smith Clothiers, next door?"
I met this with a blank stare at first. "Ah, you mean Chun Kam Chow's?"
"Yes, he's my father. I changed the name a few weeks ago."
"I'm sorry. I'm afraid I hadn't noticed."
"Are you the owner of this shop?" he asked.
"Yes, my name is Jin. May I assist you with something?"
"I think you may," he said. "Are you also the seamstress who's been turning some of the yukata fabric I sell into shirts?"
I conceded that I was.
"How long does it take you to put one together?"
I had never considered this before. "Well, cutting the initial pattern consumes the most time, but once I have that, the actual cutting of fabric and assembly of the pieces takes ... oh, perhaps two hours."
"That's impressive," he said. "Are you working on one now?"
"Yes, a friend of mine brought a customer in just the other day."
"May I see it?"
I brought out the two front pieces and the back of "the pine tree shirt," as I thought of it. "Yes, this is a lovely pattern," Mr. Chun said as he looked it over. "And you do impeccable work."
"You are too generous, I think."
"Don't give me that Confucian humility, I get enough of that from my father. You're very good. I've been watching the tourists come in here, placing custom orders, and I got to thinking, maybe they'd buy ready-to-wear shirts like these if someone were to offer them. How would you like to work for me?"
This was certainly the last thing I had expected to hear.
"You mean-make shirts for you to sell in your store?" I said.
"Right. Cut out the middleman."
"The middle of what man?"
He laughed. "Never mind, just an expression. How much do you usually charge per shirt?"
"Oh, about ... thirty cents."
"I'll pay you fifty," he announced.
My eyes must have popped at this. "Fifty cents per shirt?"
"And to start I'll place an order for thirty-no, make that forty-shirts."
A bit of quick arithmetic yielded an impressive guarantee of wages.
"How long do you think it will take you to make that many?" he asked.
The largest number of shirts I had ever done before, in a
ddition to my mending and fitting work, was four in one week's time. If I doubled that output, that would be four or five weeks-no, that was too long to make him wait. "Oh ... perhaps ... three weeks?" I said hopefully.
"Fine," Mr. Chun said. "Do we have a deal?"
He held out his hand, and after only a moment's hesitation I took it.
"It would seem so," I said with a smile.
llery Chun may have been young-only twenty-two years old-but clearly he was already a shrewd businessman. An alumnus of the prestigious Punahou School, he had never imagined he would have anything to do with the garment trade. He graduated from Yale University in 1931 with a degree in economics and a desire to engage in foreign trade, but in the Caucasian business hierarchy of Honolulu at that time there was no place for a young, ambitious Chinese-American. When his father asked him to take over management of the family dry-goods store, its revenues declining as the Depression tightened its grip, he accepted out of filial duty-and not without a measure of frustration and resignation that this was the best he could do.
He promptly gave the store a more American name-after the closest streets, King and Smith-and was searching for something to stimulate new business when he took notice of what was coming out of my shop, as well as others around town like Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker.
On my first day of work I gazed up at the hundreds of bolts of fabric stacked on the King-Smith shelves and began to wonder if I had been mad to promise so many shirts in so short a time. But all I could do was try, and not let Mr. Chun see how terrified and intimidated I truly was.
He showed me some shirt patterns he had designed and a bolt of Japanese silk called "kabe crepe," which had a crinkly, pebbled surface. The handscreened print depicted slipper-shaped Japanese boats navigating a sea of blue surf and white foam, the waves looking rather like blue mountains capped with snow.
"This is lovely," I said, tracing the pebbled surface with my fingertip, "but delicate. I will have to hand-baste the seams-machine-basting is too likely to tear them."