Honolulu (41 page)

This four-star treatment could not have spoken more loudly to the people of Hawai’i, demonstrating that rank-and race-had its privileges. Soon the deck of the Alton was deluged with flowers of sympathy and support from admirers all across the United States, aggrieved at the terrible injustice being done to them.

Meanwhile, Esther prepared to bury her only son.

His body was taken to Nu’uanu Funeral Parlor in Palama, where it was on view in their chapel beginning the next evening, Saturday, at six P.M. My family and I were among the first to arrive and offer condolences to Esther, Pascual, Joseph Sr., and Lillian. As was common at Hawaiian funerals, ukulele music played softly in the background, and I was pleased to see that the deck of the Alton was not the only place overflowing with floral tributes. The chapel was brimming with wreaths, bouquets, and leis of every type and color: red roses, white lilies, pink aster, lavender orchids, red ginger. Joe’s casket was banked high with flowers and leis, but I quailed to approach it. I wanted to cry, but even after all these years in Hawai’i, I was still Korean enough not to display such emotions in public. Quietly I steeled myself and looked inside the casket.

Clad in a dark suit, as if dressed for Sunday morning Mass, Joe rested like a shadow in a lavender casket. Around his neck was draped a lei of delicate orange ‘ilima blossoms-the kind favored by Hawaiian royalty-while a silver crucifix lay on his chest, nearby the spot where the bullet had pierced and drained away his life. I saw again the country boy gathering kiawe beans along the Iwilei shore; the hurt child blaming himself for his parents’ separation; the young man who came to our cafe grieving the senseless loss of a cherished friend.

I leaned in to him and whispered, “Goodbye, my little Joey. Your Aunt Jin will always love you. No lie.”

Grace, Harold, and Charlie followed, filled with a sobriety and grief no children their age should have had to bear. We took seats in the pews and watched as a steady procession of friends and ‘ohana filed past the funeral bier, including Joe’s teammates from the St. Louis College football squad. Some looked upon Joe’s face one last time with stoic sadness; others cried unashamedly, while many gave up a familiar wail of grief: `Auwe!Auwe!”- Alas, alas!

We would have liked to have remained all night, as family and friends traditionally did in Korea, but the children grew drowsy and fidgety and I convinced Jae-sun we should take them home and come back tomorrow. We made our goodbyes to Esther and her family, then left them to what surely would be the longest night of their lives as they maintained their vigil over the candlelit coffin, to the soft plaintive chords of the ukulele.

When we returned to the mortuary the next morning, I was startled to see that the flow of visitors had not ebbed, but actually swelled: there were hundreds of people patiently standing in line outside, not just Hawaiians but Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Portuguese, even a few haoles. I recognized none of their faces. I asked one, a Filipino man, how he had known Joe. He told me that he had never met the boy in life, but felt he had to come and pay his respects to someone who could as easily have been his own son: “The haoles treat us all the same,” he said. Others in line nodded their agreement, and an old Hawaiian said in disgust, “Hilahila We keia po’e haole ” translated for me as, “The haoles are shameless.” It would not be the last time these words were spoken today.

The sentiments were echoed inside, where Bill Kama’s older brother David stood at the foot of the casket and in a clear, impassioned voice declared: “Poor Kahahawai, these haoles murdered you in cold blood. They did the same thing to my poor brother. They shoot and kill us Hawaiians; we don’t shoot any haoles, but they treat us like this. Poor boy, God will keep you; we will do the rest.”

Around eleven A.M. the chapel fell into a hush as a contingent of police pushed their way inside. There was some agitation at first that this might be another act of violence against Joe, even in death-but the police were merely escorting in the remaining four “Kauluwela Boys,” Horace, Mack, Ben, and Henry, released from protective custody to bid farewell to their childhood friend. Upon their entry a cheer went up from the crowd, but the boys kept grimly silent. Shorty Ida placed a bouquet of red gladioli at the foot of Joe’s casket. One by one they approached it, and one by one they wept. After each had had a last moment with Joe, the police swept them out again, and the crowd gave up a final cheer.

The stream of mourners continued until three o’clock that afternoon, when Joe’s casket was closed and taken by hearse to the Catholic church, accompanied by a squad of motorcycle policemen and an honor guard of twelve pallbearers walking beside the car. I was amazed at the size of the funeral cortege-over a hundred automobiles winding their way up Nu’uanu Avenue to Pauahi Street and thence to Fort Street-and like a ball of yarn gathering size as it rolled, the procession only grew larger along the way, as hundreds of onlookers joined the solemn march.

Our Lady of Peace Cathedral stood regal as a queen at the corner of Fort and Beretania, a coral-block building whose steepled bell tower and spire was crowned by a gilded cross and globe. Inside it was equally grand, with high vaulted ceilings of redwood and gold leaf. The nave was large enough to accommodate hundreds of worshippers, and my family and I watched with awe as every last seat was taken. Even the balconies were filled; the church was literally packed to the rafters with mourners. And there were hundreds more outside, crowding the palm-shaded sidewalks in front of the church, wending around the corner and up Beretania Street. Wouldn’t Joe have been astonished to see this!

The casket was wheeled solemnly down the center aisle as the cathedral shook with the somber tolling of the bronze bells in the tower above. The candles on the casket and the altar flickered like stars in the wind. Then Father Patrick Logan began reading from the Latin liturgy:

“Requiem ceternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis. Te decet hymnus Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem …

The words were strange and beautiful, the dead language come to stirring life-even as Joe’s spirit, Jae-sun assured me, would be resurrected in eternal life.

“Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison …

After the Requiem Mass, Father Logan delivered a closing prayer in English, which ended with the words:

“And thou hast been delivered from the hands of thine enemies.”

I felt an unexpected flush of anger at those enemies, and I struggled again to fight back tears. I had been prepared to quell my feelings of grief, but this suddenness of rage took me by surprise. I felt Jae-sun’s hand on mine, and glanced over to see him trying to contain his own emotions. I closed my hand around his and took strength from my husband’s compassionate presence.

The casket was taken back up the aisle to the waiting hearse and we filed slowly out of the church. We followed the cortege along streets lined on both sides with hundreds of people who solemnly stood and watched the procession pass by. Finally we arrived at Puea Cemetery on South School Street, not far from where Joe had spent most of his too-short lifetime. It was a small, ill-tended graveyard where the poorest of Honolulu’s citizens found a last home no more gracious than the squalid tenements and shanties they had known in life. Already a crowd had gathered there to watch as Joe’s body was returned to the ‘aina, the land. But once again we were unprepared for its size.

There were easily two thousand people squeezed onto this small patch of hallowed ground. Many were dressed in their Sunday finest, while others had no such finery but came wearing their sorrow and respect. There were so many people that the cortege’s police escort had to clear a path from the road to the burial plot, and then again at the grave to make room for the casket and family. I had not seen this many people gathered in mourning since Lili’uokalani’s passing. Their faces were the faces of Hawai’i itself, reflecting every race, color, religion-and a shared grief. Only later would we realize that this was the first time in our islands’ modern history that so many-from different cultures, each with its own traditions, prejudices, and strivings-would come together like this, moved by a single impulse.

“Mama,” Grace asked me wonderingly, “do all these people miss Joe?”

I smiled for the first time that day … perhaps for many days.

“Yes. I believe they do.”

The Reverend Robert Ahuna, a former state legislator as well as a Christian Science minister, officiated over the burial. First a hymn, “Angels Welcome,” was sung in Hawaiian, and then Reverend Ahuna spoke, in a mix of Hawaiian and English, of Joe’s accomplishments in sports and of how “this innocent man, obeying the law, had gone to report at the place where law is sacred, and it cost him his life.” He reminded us that Cain had killed Abel in revenge and jealousy, and compared Cain’s act to that which had befallen Joe: “And what was the cause of the bloodshed? Revenge. I call upon the Lord to pass judgment on those who committed this crime.”

But gazing out at this vast crowd, his face softened and he said, “I am happy to see this demonstration of sympathy for the parents of him who lies here, who was the son not only of his parents, but of Hawai’i and the Hawaiians.”

Joe’s coffin was then lowered gently into the hillside beneath a thicket of trees, and those of us who were privileged to be Joe’s friends each threw a single handful of red earth into the open grave. As I let the soil slip through my fingers, I finally gave up my tears, not caring who saw.

Two thousand voices now sang what had once been the Kingdom of Hawai’i’s national anthem, “Hawai’i Pono’i,” followed by Queen Lili’uokalani’s most famous composition, “Aloha ‘Oe.” Although both were sung in Hawaiian, I knew the latter’s lyrics well from many evenings spent listening to the beachboys at the Moana Pier. I knew the words and knew their meaning, and through tears no longer denied, I sang along as best I could:

Aloha be, farewell to thee,
Thou charming one who dwells in shaded bowers
One fond embrace, ‘ere I depart
A hui hou aku:
Until we meet again.

The next day’s newspapers would declare that Joe’s was the largest funeral in history for any Hawaiian not of royal birth. It was reported on respectfully, with no trace of hate-mongering or insinuation; but the same could not be said for the despicable Admiral William Pratt, chief of naval operations in Washington, who in a written statement asserted, “American men will not stand for violation of their women under any circumstances. For this crime they have taken the matter into their own hands repeatedly when they have felt that the law has failed to do justice.”

Time magazine called this justification for murder merely “a friendly pat on the shoulder” to Lieutenant Massie-but the headline in the Star-Bulletin that day read,
ADMIRAL
PRATT
CONDONES
LYNCHING
OF
KAHAHAWAI
. I did not know this word, “lynching,” but when I asked jade Moon about it she explained, “As I understand, it refers to a custom in the American South, where white men may punish the darker peoples with impunity by hanging them from trees.”

I was speechless. How could such barbarity exist in a land of freedom like America? What country was this, in which I had been living all these years?

As fervently as the Star-Bulletin had helped to whip up public hysteria over the Ala Moana case, its editors now seemed to have peered into the abyss and decided to take a large step back from it, declaring, “We have before us a horrible example of what hysteria and lack of balance will do. That ought to be enough to arouse the sober judgment of every responsible citizen in support of orderly law.”

Admirable words, though arriving far too late to do Joe any good.

That Thursday, at the Quigley estate, I was tasked with sewing floral slipcovers for the living room furniture, which required me to take measurements and do fittings. Nearby where I was working, Mrs. Quigley, her daughter, and a number of their kama’aina women friends who had come over for lunch chatted and twittered about the events that had captured the islands’ attention:

“In the trunk of the car, can you imagine-”

“
actually arrested, like some common criminal
”

“-for simply doing what the jury didn’t have the decency to do!”

Amid all this babble, Mililiani and the rest of the Quigleys’ household staff-all of them Hawaiian, Chinese, or Japanese-went about their business with faces stony and mouths shut. I followed their example, concentrating on finishing this work so I could retreat to the seclusion of my sewing room.

“The poor girl, first she’s viciously attacked, now she has to see her husband and her own mother incarcerated-”

“Well, if you ask me, I think the brute got just what he deserved.”

My stomach knotted upon hearing these words, not least for who had voiced them.

I suddenly heard myself addressing Mrs. Quigley:

“What did you say?”

She looked at me, surprised at my presumption in interrupting a private conversation; but her affection for me clearly outweighed the impropriety and she just smiled. “I only said, dear, that I think the brute got exactly what he deserved.”

“Amen to that,” another woman said, and they all chimed their agreement.

I put aside my work, stood, and walked over to my employer.

“You have been very kind to me, Mrs. Quigley,” I told her, “but I cannot work here any longer.”

“What?” She was clearly taken aback. “Why on earth not, Jin?”

“He was not a brute,” I said, unwilling to mute the anger in my voice. “He was a boy who loved to ride his father’s sugar train. Who took pride in being a National Guardsman. Who would never have done to anyone what was done to him. And he would never, ever have applauded such a thing, as I hear it applauded here today. He was better than that. He was better than you.

In the shocked silence that followed I strode out of the room; as I passed Mililiani she gave me a small smile, quickly covered up.

At home I cried and apologized to Jae-sun for abandoning such a lucrative account in such difficult times, but he told me he would have done the same thing in my place. “We will not go hungry for the want of such blood money.