When Hi`i was a baby, we blamed her color on sunscreen.
We are the color of curly koa, of burnt butter, of empty beer bottles forgotten on the porch from the night before. Our rainbow is made up of browns, greens, blues.
Our keiki roamed free. They tumbled naked on the same black sands of Richardson’s that we’d tumbled free and naked on. Here, tucked away in our quiet, overlooked corner, the world made sense. But Hi`i’s skin made her mother, Laka, do things only tourists do. That babe, so different from her mama, stayed parked under the shade of a palm tree, buried in hats and coveralls in Laka’s arms, slathered from ear to toe in sunscreen so thick the ocean didn’t know what to do with her. Ke kai bounced her on its vast blue glittering surface, a pink conch baby buoy. We itched to get our hands on that babe, the next in line of the great Naupakas, a true daughter of our neighborhood, finally returned to take her place. We wanted to strip off her clothes and wipe her free of all those chemicals, to hold her up to the sun and let her bake. But Laka stayed hunched over her baby, alert, anxious, like she was trying to keep a bubble from popping. She spread her towel on the sand on the other side of the beach as if we were contagious. We kept our questions tied to our tongues, dogs on chains.
The sky was bone-dry and the moon winked bright on the night the muddy gravel driveway off Kalanianaole Street filled with rusted cars toddling on spare tires and with cracked windows. We extracted ourselves from cluttered backseats along with the foil-covered pans full of noodles for long life, lomi salmon and poi brought up fresh from the valley, tako poke, rice still steaming hot in the pot, and all the other pupus expected of a party. Six-packs clinked their way into the coolers on the porch, waiting with open arms and melting ice. The fish, caught and cleaned that morning, were salted and laid out on the hibachi to hiss and sizzle and fill the air with a smell that made the tourists driving by wish they were invited. The warped plywood floor creaked and strained under the weight of what was becoming a very heavy party. On the porch, cigarette smoke exhaled in an upward tilt toward the current of breeze that had danced its way across Hilo Bay and into the yard; hands the kind accustomed to manual labor waved at the wispy tendrils if they dared linger. We wanted to welcome her home.
But Laka was skittish, a flight risk. We didn’t want her to leave again. We got as close as we dared. We tiptoed, we teased. But into those waters, we never went deeper than our ankles. We whispered.
It’s what happens when you move Maui and like be high maka maka. When you work in the hotels with all the haole.
The long narrow length of dirt that served as Puhi Bay’s parking lot was already full. Laka fitted her car between two trucks, both with jerry-rigged lifted suspensions, their bodies towering a full foot above their oversized tires as if floating on air. She stared for a minute, puzzled. Had this existed before she left? How quickly things change.
“Eh, howzit stranger!” she heard someone call from a distance. She waved in the direction of the voice and then turned away, not quite ready.
She took her time rummaging in the backseat, gathering the accessories that were now her life: diaper bag, changing blanket, sunshade, and a squirming, fussy baby who was not happy about being stuffed in a hot car at what was usually her nap time. A passing car stopped in the middle of the road.
“Excuse me, hey,” the driver called through the open window of the car. Laka turned, catching the small Hertz Rental sticker on a corner of the windshield.
“Is this some kind of event or something?”
Laka glanced toward the crowded grassy hill behind her and shook her head. No. This was very much a private party.
The driver was about to ask her something else, never mind the cars piled up on the road behind him all trying to be polite and not honk. She hurried away before he could say another word.
School had broken for summer only a week ago, but the tent city at Puhi Bay was already in full swing. Lines strung between trees were straining under heavy wet towels and freshly rinsed pareos. Sleeping bags spilled out from the doors of ransacked tents, the result of kids changing which tent they crashed in every night after pillaging leftovers off the long tables full of aluminum foil–covered trays in the main tent, swimming with the moon, and doing who knows what else. Laka remembered it well. Some things didn’t change. She took a deep breath and followed the salty smell of roasting fish and chicken toward the fire. The uncles waved their stainless-steel tongs in greeting before returning to the cooking meat on the grill, her father among them. He offered her a sad, soft smile but did not approach her. After a moment he turned his back. Expecting as much did not lessen the sting. She wanted to run to him and bury herself in one of his bear hugs, wanted to tell him she understood why he was doing what he was doing, wanted to tell him that she understood and forgave him. Instead, she kept her distance. Her youngest sister popped into her periphery, running with a herd of kids toward someone handing out popsicles, but Laka no longer knew how to call for siblings or draw them close. She had walked away from that privilege and maybe there was no getting it back. She also did not bother looking for her mother. Laka had it on good authority that she wasn’t there, which was the only reason she’d allowed the magnet of home to pull her in today.
In the kitchen tent where meals were prepared en masse, she lashed the baby to her chest using an old pareo and set to work slicing a head of cabbage. She earned a few nods and kissed a few cheeks. No one said anything, but she could feel the stares and stiffness, the uncomfortable politeness. When the baby fussed, a girl of about fourteen came and asked to take it. The girl pointed in the direction of the large group of keiki playing in the tide pools. Laka put a protective hand around the baby and pressed it closer to her body, shaking her head as nicely as she could. When it was time for the baby to nurse, she returned to the car instead of joining the semicircle of folding chairs full of women keeping an eye on the kids jumping off the rocks, cannonballs hitting the water below in loud splashes. On the way, she ran into her eldest brother. He introduced her to his girlfriend, who was so hapai her belly looked like an overblown balloon, but he did not go so far as to kiss Laka on the cheek, or hug her, or greet her as his sister returned.
She didn’t feel ready for this, but did not know how to leave.
Later, when everyone’s opus were full moons stuffed with that night’s dinner, out came the ukuleles. This was it, Hawai`i at its best. A showcase of undiscovered master performers, a row of graying kūpuna telling stories, aunties playing cards, kids half naked running around free as birds, not a television or tear in sight. Tribe. Ohana. Where there was always enough for everyone, never an empty seat at the table but always an extra chair just in case. Laka closed her eyes and watched with her ears, this lullaby of her life. She wasn’t sure if her father was still there but he felt near. That counted as progress.
The melody changed tune, calling to her, inviting her to join. There was no way she could listen to “Na Pana Kaulana o Keaukaha” by beloved Aunty Edith Kanaka`ole and not let the song flow through her body. The ukulele singing its rhythm swayed back and forth like hala in the wind. The lyrics gave love to their Keaukaha beaches, kissing each one in turn. The baby was sleeping, there was no excuse. She allowed herself to be drawn in, hundreds of invisible hands helping her up, pulling her toward the others who had long freed their feet of their slippers and were dancing barefoot in the grass. This was her place, where she’d lived nearly every summer of her life, surrounded by generations of the spiderweb of families that were as much a part of her as her limbs and fingers and toes. A space was made for her among the dancers, familiar faces whose smiles widened as they made room. Her body moved before she gave it permission, exhaling into this familiar rhythm, this particular beat. And then she was dancing, floating. Her hips synced with the ukuleles, in her throat the words of the song caught with a sudden fierceness, a painful pang of homesickness she was only now aware she had. A great weight lifted off her chest. She wanted to shout with joy. Her voice cracked with emotion as she sang along to the words of the song being sung by the musicians at the picnic tables. How much she’d missed this, the comfort and safety and knowing.
Headlights flashed across the grass yard of the beach, a blast of horns. The baby, startled awake, began to cry. The sound was a bell toll, a spell breaker. She sank back into herself. Things were different now. There were other considerations, other complications. The song was not over but Laka dropped her hands and withdrew from the circle, now broken and confused. She left without saying goodbye. It would have been too hard to explain why.
Two rotations around the sun before, there was no Hi`i, and Laka was our princess. Our hopes and dreams, our Miss Aloha Hula, her picture in the paper like newly crowned royalty—the white velvet gown making her skin glow, the silver gray hinahina flowers tucked in her mass of thick black curls, all of Hilo’s pride filling the dark glint in her eyes. Laka and her father, Uncle George, taking up their usual table at Ken’s for daddy-daughter waffles piled high with whipped cream, him fresh off the boat that had been out in the deep all night but was now resting in the small Wailoa harbor, he exhausted but caffeinated with pride, making sure everyone who walked in noticed her newly framed picture on the wall. Then poof. Disappeared without a trace like an eel down the crack of a rock. We were sweeping the last of the festival’s flowers from the stadium floor and nursing Merrie Monarch hangovers when the news came that she’d gone to Maui. We peered at the sky, waiting for the blessings to rain down. But it had been dropless. Barren and silent. A sign.
She should have known better. By taking off she’d said none of it mattered—not the crown, not Miss Aloha Hula, not Keaukaha and her kuleana to it, bestowed upon her by her family’s legacy.
All Laka left behind was silence. The next morning when Hulali realized Laka was gone, she stood on her porch and stared out across the ocean the way a mother does when your heart exits your body and enters the world without you. We turned to her for answers but got only a warning flash across her face and stony silence.
Hulali readjusted her pareo wrapped tight around her chest and walked barefoot to the coconut grove at Puhi Bay that she had planted years ago with her tutu. A tree for each Naupaka. She cleared the dead fronds from the palms, carefully and quietly, leaving the one planted for Laka untouched. An unspoken message that something was very very wrong. In the days that followed, Hulali went every morning to the grove, clearing leaves and knocking down nuts grown thick and husky so they didn’t fall on stray keiki who might come to play. But she never again went near the tree she’d planted to honor the birth of her eldest daughter. The palm slouched and quickly took on the look of a dress left out on the line too long. Fronds bled out their green and went limp, dangling treacherously from sinews. Coconuts grew heavy and threatened to drop on our heads. We warned the keiki to stay away. The poi had gone sour.
If she had been ready to listen, we could have warned Laka about Maui, avoided all the hakakā that followed. She shouldn’t have gone, shouldn’t have taken that job, cleaning up after those haoles who walked around the resort with towels draped across their shoulders like capes, Laka waking at dawn to rake the sand on the beach to protect their fragile feet, smiling when they took her picture without asking. They turned her into a spectacle, a circus performer. She let them.
Laka wasn’t the first to get hapai from the wrong guy. She wouldn’t be the last. We only wondered why she’d kept it from us. We didn’t judge. That might be how things work on the mainland, but this was Keaukaha. Things happen. What breaks you won’t break us. We are made of glue. We hold things together.
Once upon a kingdom, visitors wobbled their way down steamship gangplanks, trickling into Hilo one at a time, barely making an indent in our soil. Now airplanes vomit them out. Their planes smother the songs we sing in the backyard, jet engines extinguishing the strum of our ukuleles. Their shiny rental cars, their bumbling tour buses, they stop in the middle of the road for every mongoose in the bush or whale tail on the horizon, interrupting the flow like rocks dumped in a stream. The interrupters make us late for work. They cut into our periphery as we dance and pray, sneaking into the corners of the pictures we take to prove we are here too—that we are not landscape, not shadows in a postcard. Between their honeymoons and bucket list vacations we steal moments for ourselves. It is the only space where we are allowed to exist.
While we punch the clock and mend the pukas that show up in our clothes and roofs, we search for ways to end our poverty, our lack of jobs, the failure of our health. The airplanes idle on the tarmac, inviting us. Better jobs, better healthcare, better schools maybe somewhere else? We consider it. We all have our What Ifs. Our imagined airplane ticket. Our destination.
Some of us took the bait, filled those seats, escaped our problems only to find someone else’s problems somewhere else. Severed the umbilical cord connecting us to the `āina, ignoring the cry of our piko as we turned away from our life source.
The escapees all come home eventually. We watch them return, like Laka with her tail between her legs and a baby we didn’t know what to do with.
We still had our What Ifs. Laka had a What Now. She’d gone, she’d come back, and what good had that done?
The year she left, the summer of ’66, was the beginning. More than 600,000 interrupters interrupted—a record for Hawaii tourism. A war started in Vietnam.
By the time Laka came back, barely two years later, jumbo jets meant more than a million interrupters interrupting and Vietnam had already wiped out eighty-eight of our boys. McDonald’s was getting ready to open its doors in Aina Haina. Duke Kahanamoku was dead. Rumors were that the University of Hawai`i was going to put a telescope on a sacred spot, Mauna Kea.
This was a war between Hawai`i our home and Hawaii the destination. We were losing ground—literally and spiritually. We needed all hands on deck. If we weren’t diligent, if we didn’t all stand together, our Hawai`i would slip through our fingers like dry sand. We would be scorched earth.
To protect a bay from a tidal wave, you build a breakwall. To protect a species, you put a kapu on killing it. But there is only one way to protect a place. You sit your `ōkole down and stay there. You stand guard. You learn from the kūpuna the old chants, the hulas from their memories, before those kūpuna are no more.
In Hilo, babies come with dreams and rain. Hi`i came with neither. But these were the days we had so much to worry about that there was only so much worry to go around. If not for Laka’s weirdness, we probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
No one had the baby dream, so when we got word of her impending return, the coconut phone rang and rang, the gossip channel buzzing. We made ready. We calculated months and prepared for the sight of her watermelon belly stretching out her shirt. Laka’s name hadn’t passed her mother’s lips since she disappeared off to Maui, but we had no doubt Laka would come home to give birth, with or without Hulali’s blessing. Where else was she going to bury the baby’s piko, where but under the ulu tree where her own piko was buried, to join the cord of life to the land that gave it?
Since Hulali refused to see her daughter, we made ready to clear a room for Laka somewhere other than the Naupaka hale. Whose house? Whose kids would we send to help with the baby? We pulled straws.
Instead of the watermelon we expected, Laka arrived with a mouth suctioned to her tit. She didn’t want our room. We gave her a ride to the place she’d rented on the periphery of Keaukaha. We stole a peek at the babe, bundled like a laulau in banana leaf, caught a glimpse of a cheek. It was an odd color, we thought . . . maybe jaundice? As for Laka, motherhood had transformed her. It took us back to Hulali’s baby-making days, when there was always one on her tit and one on her hip, with a few crawling around her feet. We kept that memory to ourselves. Laka was in no mood. We waited for her to come back to us, with nothing but history to say that she would. Without the Naupakas, there would be no Keaukaha. Without Keaukaha, we would have joined the ranks of the infinite and unknown, the languages and ways and tribes of the world who have faded into obscurity, who no longer make a ripple on the water. This fracture between mother and daughter, whatever had caused it, needed to mend.
Time, we thought. The medicine that would heal the wound.
As our mothers had to us and their mothers to them, we gathered our Keaukaha keiki and fed them in batches so we could run errands in town and clean the yard and hang the laundry and make dinner. But Laka didn’t offer her tit to no baby except her laulau, and her laulau didn’t want no tit except hers. We wasn’t grumbling. If she wanted to stay home every day and never take her turn to freedom, we’d take it for her.
In the sand the babies crawled to her for the occasional suckle, precious bare buns tilted toward the blue sky. When Hi`i learned to crawl, she stayed by her mother’s side. After swimming all morning, the babies balled their forceful little fists and ground them into their drooping eyes. Laka led them back to the closest house for lunch. They followed her like ducklings. When the bowls of rice and poi were empty, she draped a towel over the futon in the living room and spread them on it, sardines in a can. Then she’d race through the chores and weave as much hala as she could before the gaggle stopped snoring, glancing at times at the pale limbs of her babe tangled among the others, as if she were worried the kid was going to fade away into thin air. Keaukaha kids, they’re full of mana. Strong and powerful and resilient.
The baby didn’t look too worried. Hi`i slept on her back, arms splayed across the others, the posture of someone who knows deep in their na`au that they are safe.
But Laka kept on, cautious and careful. Like she smelled something in the stillness, a hurricane on the horizon that we didn’t see coming.
As Hi`i learned to hold her head up, sit on her own, and crawl, we thought maybe her eyes would darken. That the pink of her skin would eventually deepen—it had happened before. But months passed and her eyes brightened to the color of wet seaweed. Her skin shed its newborn chafe but the color went no deeper, skimming the surface from conch to coconut. The brown tufts of hair on the crown of her head turned a burnished red. We thought maybe it was her lava coming out, that maybe this was Hawai`i emerging from wherever it was buried deep inside her, that ehu color of Pele when she’s molten. That maybe the sunburn her mother had worked so hard to protect her from had found her anyway.
When Hi`i grew old enough to suck poi from fingers and hold on to pulpy ripe banana with her fat baby hands, we took her. There was no excuse anymore—the girl could eat without her mother, and Laka got a job she needed to get to. By then Hi`i had turned `opihi, suctioned to her mother with the ferocity of that most stubborn of limpets who hold so tight to the cliffs of our islands even the strongest of waves can’t budge them. Hi`i needed to bathe and eat and play at the beach with the other keiki. Hover over something and it becomes fragile, easily broken—Laka knew that as well as we did. We told her Hi`i needed to build up her immunities, her calluses. We had to make like the `opihi picker and pry them apart.
Laka stayed glued to the doorway of the kitchen full of toddlers and the smells of breakfast, watching the chaos of chubby confident arms grabbing for fistfuls of fish and rice. She stepped forward when her daughter reached for a sliver of papaya the color of a Kona sunset. We stopped her just in time. We ordered her out.
“You like her cry? No be selfish? Moe bettah you go when she not looking.”
A boy wearing rubber slippers and not much else made a grab for Hi`i’s papaya. The girl curled protectively over her fruit and stuffed it into her mouth.
“See? She fine. She already forget you.”
Laka drew an arm across her chest. We thought she might fight back, the old Laka would have, but now her eyes filled with tears. She retreated to her car. We listened as the rusted engine of her clunk of junk puttered to life. She threw her weight onto the manual lever of the car window and rolled it down. The glass moved sticky into its slot. She ignored us as we shooed her away, pausing as if to get one last listen to her daughter’s voice, something to hold on to for the remainder of the day. But the surf across the street and the rustle of the palm fronds had already filled the distance between her and her daughter, the sounds of the `āina overriding any that might have come from inside. She threw the car into gear and drove off. We caught the relief on her face the minute she hit open road. We didn’t blame her. We understood. Without the baby, Laka could be home. Without the baby, Laka could be who she’d been destined to be.
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