Honolulu (38 page)

I looked at the two-page lease, which called for a monthly rent of ten dollars. “That is … very kind of you,” I said, quite taken aback, “but I am not certain we can afford even this.”

“Then I will cut it in half. Here.” She snatched the lease away, took out a pen and slashed a line through Ten, replacing it with a scribbled Five. “There. If necessary, I will cut it even further. It doesn’t matter. You did not worry about money,” she said, “the day the Luna docked us half a day’s pay. When you brought me in from the sun.” For the first time since that long-ago day, I saw tears in her eyes. “But I understand if you cannot accept.”

Touched, I told her I would discuss it with Jae-sun. In truth, we had no other choices. We moved into jade Moon’s rooming house within the week, and slowly she and I found that our friendship, though damaged, was like a fabric torn on the seam: not beyond repair.

Jae-sun went looking for work, and as there was little call for chefs he applied at canneries, loading docks, and rice mills. But he was competing with thousands of jobless men in the city of Honolulu. He would come home discouraged and dispirited, as did thousands of able-bodied men throughout the United States. His lack of proficiency in English did not help. He finally found occasional work-one day a week-at the docks as a stevedore. But the few dollars this brought home was scarcely enough to feed a family of five.

Thankfully, a good seamstress remained in some demand, and my shop now became our family’s primary source of income. Mrs. Quigley continued to employ me one day a week, even when other kama’aina families were cutting back. I became the breadwinner, albeit often day-old bread, and we also ate much liver, tripe, and knucklebone soup. I patched and repatched Grace’s dresses and Harry’s trousers-everyone did during the Depression-and I ached when Charlie would ask me for a nickel’s worth of crackseed and I had to tell him we couldn’t afford it.

It was a struggle to earn enough to pay the rent on the shop and put food on the table, and I soon found myself working very long hours-twelve hours a day were not unusual. I came home exhausted, and it fell to Jae-sun to tend to the household while I worked. He was always happy to cook, of course, but I think he was less enamored of sweeping and cleaning the apartment. Each day he woke the children for school-“Easier to wake the dead, and the dead complain less”-and cooked rice gruel and kimchi for our daily breakfast.

On one such morning in September of 1931, the family had just settled in at the breakfast table when Harold-eleven years old next monthsuddenly pushed his kimchi away, announcing with a scowl, “I don’t want cabbage for breakfast anymore!”

“It is not cabbage, it is kimchi,” his father said, puzzled.

“Whatever you call it, I don’t want to eat it!”

“Why not?” I was baffled. “You’ve always liked it.”

“The other kids say it makes me stink. They call me `garlic-head’!”

“What nonsense is this?” Jae-sun said. “Who tells you this?”

“Everybody,” Harold told him.

“He’s right,” Grace agreed. “Nobody eats garlic for breakfast in America.”

“Well, they do in a Korean house,” Jae-sun declared, “and this is a Korean house, so you will eat your kimchi.”

“You eat it,” Harry said brashly, and ran from the breakfast table. He snapped up his schoolbooks and slammed out the door.

Jae-sun and I looked at each other, nonplussed, as Grace and Charlie meekly began picking at their kimchi.

“I like it,” Charlie said with dubious sincerity.

“I will have a talk with the boy tonight,” Jae-sun said as he opened his copy of the day’s newspaper.

But another shock apparently awaited him in its pages, because after one look at the front page he quickly and quite uncharacteristically folded the paper closed and laid it on his lap.

He looked at Grace a moment, then asked, “Do the other children call you names, as well?”

She shrugged. “Only if they can smell my breath.”

Jae-sun took that in soberly, as did I.

When breakfast was over and Grace and Charlie were on their way to school, Jae-sun again opened the newspaper. A headline shouted from the page:

GANG
ASSAULTS
YOUNG
WIFE

Kidnapped in Automobile, Maltreated by Fiends!

After being kidnapped by a gang of young hoodlums as she was walking along one of the principal streets of the Waikiki district late Saturday evening, a young married woman of the highest character was dragged to a secluded spot on the Ala Moana and criminally assaulted six or seven times by her abductors, who fled in an open touring car and left her half-conscious on the road. She was picked up by occupants of a passing car as she staggered along the Ala Moana toward Waikiki in the early hours of Sunday morning and was taken home. She was later transferred to the Queen’s Hospital.

Seven suspects, one arrested early Sunday morning by Detectives John Cluney and Thurman Black, and the other six Sunday afternoon by Detective Lucian Machado, are being grilled by Chief of Detectives John McIntosh. One of those held is said to be the owner of the car which the gang used to abduct the woman, and two of the others are said to have jail records, one having been previously arrested for rape and one for robbery.

I understood now why my husband had not wanted the children to see this. It was a terrible tale, and upon reading it I felt what any decent person would: sympathy for the poor woman, who was unnamed, and disgust and anger at her brutal attackers, “fiends” and “hoodlums” as the paper called them.

The story was on everyone’s lips in Honolulu that day-it was all anyone who came into the tailor shop could talk about. In addition to what was revealed in the papers, word quickly spread via the “coconut wireless,” or rumor mill, that the victim was a haole woman-the wife of a Navy officer stationed at Pearl Harbor-and that her attackers had been Hawaiian. This in itself was remarkable; though there had been many instances of haole men assaulting Hawaiian women, no one could recall an incident in which a Hawaiian man had sexually assaulted a white woman.

Soon the even more shocking news came that two of the men arrested on suspicion of being among these “fiends” and “hoodlums” were both local sports heroes, star players in “barefoot” football as well as boxers. One was Benny Ahakuelo, who had recently competed in the National Amateur Boxing Championship at Madison Square Garden; and the other, a member of the National Guard boxing team, was one “Joe Kalani”-aka Joseph Kahahawai Jr.

I felt physically ill the whole day, hoping it was all a horrible mistake. After work I stopped at the Anito house; Esther and Pascual had spent the greater part of the day at the police station. As Pascual put on a pot of coffee, Esther told me what Joe related to her: He and his friends Ben, Henry Chang, David “Mack” Takai, and Horace “Shorty” Ida-the latter just back from a stay in Los Angeles-had been out Saturday night joy-riding in a car Horace had borrowed from his sister Haruyo. Earlier in the evening Joe and Henry had run into Shorty while “crashing” a wedding luau at the home of their friend Sylvester Correa. After they left, they drifted over to the dance pavilion at Waikiki Park, a gathering spot for local young people. Joe had had too many beers at the Correas’ and was groggy as they drove back a while later to the Correa home. But the party was pau, over, and they were on their way home when at the intersection of King and Liliha Streets their car was nearly sideswiped by a Hudson sedan driven by a white man. As the cars came squealing to a halt, the man’s Hawaiian wife called out, “Why don’t you look where you’re driving!” Joe shot back, “Get that goddamn haole out of the car and I’ll give him what he’s looking for!”

I winced. It was not hard to imagine Joe saying something like this.

“So this woman, Mrs. Peeples, gets out of her car, and”
a faint smile lightened her face
“all sides seem to agree she was quite an imposing lady.”

“Joe said she would’ve made a good linebacker,” Pascual added, chuckling.

“She gave Joe a shove; Joe shoved back. Then she grabbed him by the throat and started choking him. Joe slapped her on the side of the head and she fell back onto the running board of the car.”

At this point all involved wisely decided not to pursue the matter any further. Joe got back into the car and they drove off-but not before Mrs. Agnes Peeples took down their license-plate number.

I asked, “But what does this have to do with the white woman who was assaulted?”

“The haole woman saw the license plate of her attackers’ car,” Pascual said. “It was only one number off from Haruyo Ida’s car. And the police claim she has also identified Joe and the others as the boys who raped her.”

I was stunned. It seemed impossible; absurd. Our Joe? “I don’t believe it! Joe would never do such a thing.”

“No,” Esther agreed, “but I wonder about the other boys. There was that business with Henry and Ben and that girl at the schoolyard-”

When they were each eighteen, Henry and Ben had been arrested on a charge of rape against a seventeen-year-old Chinese-Filipino girl on a school playground. It came out at trial that the relations had been consensual, but though the two boys were acquitted on rape charges they were convicted on a trumped-up charge of sexual assault. They were sentenced to four months in prison, though Ben was released early by Governor Lawrence Judd so that he could represent Hawai’i in the amateur boxing championship in New York City.

“The girl consented,” Pascual reminded Esther. “She said so at the trial.”

“And what about Lillie Ching?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Ben’s girl. She’s six months pregnant with his child. Ben wants to marry her, but so far Mrs. Ching’s refused to let him.”

“Just because he got a girl in pilikia,” Pascual said, “doesn’t mean he would-”

Esther lost her usual poise in an anxious outburst: “How do you know? How do we know Ben, or one of the others, didn’t do something terrible after dropping off Joe at home?”

I had never seen her look so tired and frightened.

Joseph Sr. arrived a few minutes later with what turned out to be the only good news of the day: “Benny’s mother called Princess Abigail.” Princess Abigail Kawananakoa was one of the last of the Hawaiian ali’i, and one of the most prominent citizens in Honolulu. “The princess called Senator Heen and said, `Bill, somebody’s got to represent these Hawaiian boys and see they get a fair trial.’ ”

This was the same William Heen who, as a judge, had granted me my divorce. He had gone on to become a state senator and was now in private legal practice. “He’s a good man,” I said. “He’ll see to it the boys are treated fairly.”

“You’ll see,” Joseph predicted, gently trying to calm the mother of his child. “This will all blow over in a few days.”

But alas, it did not. The sudden tempest that had swept up Joe and his friends intensified into something resembling a typhoon. There was widespread outrage among the island’s haoles over the treatment of this “white woman of refinement and culture,” as the city’s Englishlanguage newspapers called her, while the mildest description of Joe and his friends was as a “gang” of “local” boys-the latter an apparent euphemism for “nonwhite.” It was the first time any of us had seen the word used in this way. And while these papers zealously maintained the anonymity of the victim, they did not hesitate to publish the names and home addresses of the “Ala Moana boys,” as the papers had unfairly dubbed them-as if there was no question that they had committed the crime.

A few days later, a Japanese paper, the Hawaii Hochi, revealed the name of the victim: she was Thalia Massie, the wife of a United States naval officer, Thomas Massie, stationed at Pearl Harbor. The Hochi also disclosed that when first questioned by police, Mrs. Massie “could not remember the number of the automobile nor could she recognize the culprits because it had been too dark.” But now, somehow, her memory had markedly improved, and she positively identified all but one of the suspects and even recalled their license number. Interestingly, a haole man was seen following Mrs. Massie that night, and soon the town was buzzing with rumors that he was a Navy officer with whom she was having an affair-that it was he who had beaten and raped her, and she had accused the five boys to divert suspicion from her lover.

Meanwhile, the English-language newspapers laid the blame for this supposed crime on the most unlikely of doorsteps. They blamed the beachboys of Waikiki and their “loose relations” with women tourists for encouraging miscegenation between whites and “half-castes.” The beachboys wasted no time in condemning the crime, but it was an accusation that would be endlessly and absurdly repeated by the press here and on the mainland.

A more immediate problem for our family presented itself the next day, when the children came home from school and a confused Grace, now thirteen years old, asked me, “Did Joe do something bad to a lady?”

Jae-sun and I looked at each other, sighed, and sat down with the children to try and explain the situation as best we could.

“The police believe he did,” I told her, “but that doesn’t mean they’re right.”

“Then why do they think he did?” Charlie, now ten, wanted to know.

“People believe all sorts of things that aren’t always true.”

“This is what laws are for,” Jae-sun told them soberly, “to determine what is true and what is not.”

Grace thought a moment, then asked, “Mama, what does `rape’ mean?”

Jae-sun went pale, stood up, announced, “I have something I need to do,” and quickly left the room.

I weighed my words carefully. “Rape … is something a man does to a woman without her permission.”

“Doris says it happens between your legs.”

Hearing these words from my young daughter chilled me in a way few things ever have.

“Yes,” I told her. “That is so.”

I explained the rest of it as best I could, telling her that if any boy tried to do the same thing to her she should scream, fight, kick, and run, if she could.