Honolulu (14 page)

The women who worked at Iwilei were as colorful as their clothing. The most renowned was a madam, “Society Sal,” whose house offered up a constant flow of liquor and pretty girls to serve it. She had some small competition from the remarkably trouble-prone Annie White, who had been arrested by the police on at least seventeen different occasions, always for selling liquor without a license, never for prostitution. Then there was the enterprising Dolly Gordon, who not only owned a telephone but boldly listed her number in the city directory under “businesses.” Most infamous, however, was the loud and contentious Dorothy Palmer, who was continually getting into arguments, even fistfights, with other women-earning her the dubious title of “Queen of Iwilei,” bestowed by one of the local newspapers.

More sobering to me was the revelation that a good third of the stockade’s residents were regular users of what May called “dope”-primarily opium and morphine-perhaps to blunt the numbing toll the nights took on them. May’s sanguine attitude about her profession was not a common one, perhaps owing to the fact that she had only been practicing it a few years. When I asked her how she had happened onto this way of life, she shrugged and said, “I like men and I like sex. And getting paid for it, hell, what could be better than that?” Born in a place called Nebraska, restless at an early age and at odds with her divorced parents, she eventually moved to San Francisco, where she took up her trade. There she heard tales of the “harlot’s heaven,” Honolulu, and of how money earned there in prostitution “couldn’t be touched” outside of Hawai’i. She packed her bags, set sail aboard the SS Ventura, and never looked back.

The stockade was also home to a dozen or so men-“procurers,” as polite society called them. Some supposedly held reputable jobs as chauffeurs, jewelers, or employees at the local billiards parlor, but in fact they lived off the earnings of women. May called them “pimps,” and rarely had a good word to say about any of them.

Needless to say, none of this was subject matter to be raised in one of my letters home; and for that matter I was not even sure what to say to my family about my change of circumstances. I could not allow too much time to pass without writing, for fear that Joyful Day might send a letter to Waialua and receive back a missive from Mr. Noh informing him of my betrayal of my marriage vows. I could not bear the shame of that. But I was fearful of giving anyone my current address, lest it accidentally find its way into Mr. Noh’s hands.

The solution came in the form of something called a “picture postcard” sent to May from a friend of hers living in some far place called Western Samoa. I had never seen such a card, and when I asked May if there were “postcards” here in Honolulu, she just laughed: “Well, if you look real hard,” she told me, “you might find a few.”

Indeed, at a five-and-dime store downtown I found dozens of such cards featuring hand-tinted photographs of local attractions like Diamond Head, Waikiki Beach, Kilauea Volcano, as well as assorted waterfalls, tropical flowers, surfboard riders, and beautiful native women in hula skirts. Many of these scenes seemed strange even to me; I could only imagine my family’s startled reaction to the sight of brown-skinned men on long wooden boards, standing astride ocean waves like gods straddling the seas. I finally settled on an aerial view of the harbor, the city, and the impossibly green valleys and mountains, bearing the legend
TERRITORY
OF
HAWAII-CROSSROADS
OF
THE
PACIFIC
, and wrote a short, carefully vague message in the small space on the back of the card allotted for it:

My new home, Honolulu! Life moves very fast; opportunities abound. Will write soon with new postal address.

Was that vague enough, yet specific on the point that my old address at Waialua was no longer valid? At least it purchased me some time to consider what I might do next.

Iwilei was home to more law-abiding residents as well, at least outside the stockade. A peninsula built in part on fishponds that had been filled in with coral dredged from the harbor, it was also the site of two pineapple canneries, the city gas works, a lime company, a kerosene warehouse, a soap works, an asphalt factory, and a fertilizer manufacturer. Indeed, it was hard to forget the presence of these industries since, depending on which way the breeze was blowing, you took in the sweet smell of pineapple laced with tar, soap flavored with pineapple, sulfurous pineapple gas, or old-fashioned manure-with a twist of pineapple, of course. And since much of Iwilei was also girdled by a mile’s length of railroad tracks-looping around the railway terminal to the east and Kapalama Basin to the west-there was no escape from the rattle of incoming or outgoing trains whose whistles woke us shrilly at dawn and keened on the hour.

Not long after I arrived here, I was out walking along the shoreline when I crossed paths with a group of small boys who were eagerly gathering the yellow pods-fallen kiawe beans from the ubiquitous algaroba trees-that littered the beach. Laughing and running, the children collected the yellow bean pods in big gunny sacks, and seemed to be having fun doing it. One of them-a dark-skinned Hawaiian boy who looked perhaps eight years oldwas lagging behind the others, and they were teasing him for it:

“Eh, slowpoke, c’mon, try catch up!”

“‘Ey, Joe, you sure one lazy kua’aina!”

Flustered, the Hawaiian boy tripped over one of the exposed tree roots and spilled half of his beans back onto the ground. The other children found this hilarious and continued on running up the shore, clutching their burlap sacks.

The Hawaiian boy looked about ready to cry when I came along and offered to help him.

`Mahalo,”he thanked me. He was very soft-spoken, and with a shy smile he bent down beside me and we began gathering up the pods.

“What do you do with these?” I asked him.

“Oh, we sell ‘em,” he said. “Make big money.”

“Sell them? To who?”

“Fertilizer company. They use ‘em for horse feed. Fifteen cents a bag!”

“That is much money. Let’s make sure we get them all.” We spent the next several minutes recovering all the beans he had spilled and then some, until his bag was brimming. It was now almost as heavy as he was, and I offered to help him carry it home.

“My name is Jin,” I said as we walked, increasingly comfortable with the name. “What’s yours?”

“Joey.”

“How old are you, Joey?”

“Six. I was born Christmas Day.”

“You are big for your age.”

“Yeah,” he said proudly. “Mama tells me, `Joey, you one fine keiki.’ ”

“What was that your friends called you? The Hawaiian word?”

He frowned a little at that.

“Kua’aina. Country boy. They make fun ‘cause I come from Maui.”

He was trying not to seem bothered by it, but I could tell it mattered to him. “Did you like living on Maui?”

“Yeah, you bet. Had my own train!”

“A toy train?”

“No! Real big.” He stretched his arms wide. “Bigger’n the house I live now.

I smiled, attributing this to youthful imagination. “You know, Joey,” I told him, “I also am from the country.”

“Yeah?” He looked at me. “You from Maui, too?”

“No, I come from a place called Korea. It’s very far away, but we have country people there too, and city people also make fun of them sometimes. No matter what your friends say, there is nothing wrong with being a country boy.”

He smiled a beautiful smile. “Yeah? No lie?”

I nodded. “No lie.”

Joey’s home was one among scores of small cottages and shacks clustered between the Honolulu Gas Works and the Hawaiian Fertilizer Company, where many of the residents worked. It resembled a plantation camp, but with a mix of nationalities-Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, a few Koreansall living together. It was nearing supper time, and from the shared outdoor stoves came a host of delicious smells, which almost, though not quite, obscured the odors from the gas works and the fertilizer factory.

Joey took me into his small cottage and introduced me to his family: “This is Jin. She’s a kua’aina, too! She helped me carry.” Proudly he showed them the sack filled to bursting with bean pods, and his mother Esther-a tall, slender, dignified woman who clearly doted on her son-congratulated him and thanked me for my assistance. Joseph Kahahawai Sr. was a large, bespectacled Hawaiian, about thirty years of age, with a soft-spoken manner not unlike his son’s. Joey’s younger sister Lillian was sweet and pretty.

Esther announced, “I’ll put out another place for dinner,” and so it appeared I was staying for supper.

“My dad’s a fireman,” Joey informed me.

I wasn’t certain about the nomenclature, but I guessed, “He puts out fires?”

“Other way around, more like it,” Joseph Sr. said with a smile. “I stoke the boiler on trains for O’ahu Railway and Land.”

“Yeah, but at Lahaina he drove the train,” Joey said proudly.

“At the sugar mill,” Joseph explained with a shrug.

I laughed as I realized, “So you really did have a train bigger than a house?”

“Yeah, you bet,” Joey said, adding wistfully, “It was one fine ride.”

We sat down to dinner and my hosts, devout Catholics, bowed their heads as Joseph Sr. recited, “Bless us, 0 Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.” We enjoyed delicious aku-raw whitefish caught by Joseph that morning, marinated in ginger, onion, soy sauce, and chili peppers-with cooked sweet potato and freshly baked pineapple pie, made from scraps of fruit discarded by the canneries.

“You live in Iwilei?” Esther asked. I said that I did, hesitating a moment before admitting that I worked as a seamstress for the women of the stockade.

Esther seemed mildly scandalized by this, but I explained that I was new to Honolulu and was working there in exchange for room and board.

“That’s all?” Esther said. “Room and board?” I nodded. “I sew a little myself. How many stitches do you do in a day?”

“Oh, I mend perhaps … eight or nine dresses a day.”

“Well, you might be interested in knowing that those ladies,” she said with disdain, “pay only fifteen dollars a month in rent, and even the ugliest of them earn twenty dollars a night.”

I let out a gasp at this extraordinary sum. Joseph looked at his wife and said, “How do you know what those ladies make?”

“Everybody in Iwilei knows what they make.”

“I don’t.”

“Good thing, too,” she said. Her husband laughed, but Esther fixed me with a sober look: “Either you’re being underpaid for your services, or you’re overpaying on your rent. Either way, you ought to take it up with your `employers.”’

“You could get a job with the Gas Company,” Joseph Sr. suggested. “They lease out cottages like this to employees for a dollar a month, and they pay two and a half dollars a day.” This was a generous wage by plantation standards, and I said as much.

“You worked on the plantation?” he said.

“Oh, no,” I said quickly, “but I have heard.”

I found myself envying this family: If only someone other than Mr. Noh had chosen me, I might have been sitting in my own little house, looking into my own child’s bright eyes.

When I was ready to leave, Esther told me warmly, “Mahalo for helping my boy. He hale kou.” She explained that this translated roughly as, You have a house-or in other words, “You’re always welcome here.”

Then her expression turned businesslike again. “And if I were you, I’d have a long talk with those ladies about your salary.”

I promised her that I would, though I could hardly have foreseen under what circumstances this talk would take place.

The winter of 1915-16 was an unusually wet and stormy one for the island of O’ahu, and the afternoon of January 13 was like many others of late, with a light drizzle falling from mottled skies. I was in the sitting room of May’s cottage, hand sewing a piece of lace, thinking about what Esther had told me and pondering how I might ask May about getting paid more. While I did not wish to seem ungrateful for her help, I felt dependent upon her for everything: she gave me money to buy food at the grocery store, but I had none of my own. Clearly I could not remain in this situation forever if I wished to earn enough to someday bring Blossom to Hawai’i.

May had just finished entertaining a client and was strumming a tune on her ukulele-she was actually quite good-when we heard the sound of raised voices from outside. We stepped out onto the lanai to see a group of perhaps a dozen soldiers standing outside the bungalow of one Lena Stein next door. That would hardly have been unusual, but for the color of the soldiers’ skin.

These were black men wearing the dark blue dress uniforms of the United States Army-members of the Ninth Cavalry, as we would discover later, on their way to Manila aboard the transport ship
USS
Sheridan. And they were engaged in pitched argument with Lena, who stood defiantly on her lanai:

“I toldja, no!” she yelled at the men.

“Why the hell not?” one of the soldiers yelled back.

“‘Cause you’re colored, why the hell d’you think?”

“Color of our money’s the same as anybody else’s,” another man snapped. “Ain’t that all whores like you care about?”

I confess, I had never seen a black man before, and I stared at them in mute fascination, which probably only added to their discomfort. But May did not hesitate to stalk over to Lena’s porch and take her aside.

“Jesus Christ,” she said in a low tone, “what the hell’s your beef? You’ve screwed kanakas darker than these guys.”

“It ain’t the same.”

“It’s all the same equipment, toots. Standard issue.”

“I don’t screw niggers!” Lena said heatedly, not bothering to lower her voice, which only further incensed the soldiers.

May threw Lena a disgusted look, then turned to the men with a bright smile: “Hell with her, fellas-my house is wide open for business. Who’s first?”

She looped arms at random with one of the men, then led him up the porch steps to our house.

“You always did like the dark meat, Maisie,” Lena said with a sneer, but May ignored her and ushered the soldier inside the bungalow. I tried not to gape at him as he passed by. Actually, he seemed rather handsome once I had gotten used to his complexion, so different from any I had ever seen in Korea.