Hawaii by James A. Michener

Author:James A. Michener [Michener, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5140-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

These were evil years, indeed, in Hawaii. Before the coming of the white man, leprosy had been unknown. Then, in some unfathomable way, the alii contracted it, possibly from a passing sailor who had become infected in the Philippines, and from 1835 on, the great ravager had swept through the nobles of the island, so that the disease was secretly known as the mai alii, the sickness of the nobles, but coincident with the arrival of the Chinese, the virulent killer attacked the common people, who therefore gave it a permanent name: the mai Pake. In the areas from which the Hakka and Punti had come, leprosy was rarely known and it had never been a conspicuously Chinese disease, but the unfortunate name was assigned, and it stuck, so that in 1870 if a Chinese was caught with it, the measures taken against him were apt to be more stringent than those taken against others; so spies were more active among the Chinese, since rewards were greater.

These were the years when an otherwise decent man would study his enemy’s face, and when he saw a pimple or impetigo or eczema he would denounce his enemy, and the man would be hunted down, arrested and thrown into the cage. There was no appeal, no hope, never an escape. The doomed man had only one chance to enjoy even the meanest decencies during the long years of his exile: if some unafflicted person, fully aware of her actions, volunteered to accompany him to the leper settlement, she was free to go in expectation of making his inevitable death a little easier. The saintly persons who stepped forward to share the hell of leprosy became known as the kokuas, the helpers. Mostly they were Hawaiian women who thus surrendered their own lives to aid others, and sometimes they themselves contracted the awful disease and died in exile; so that from those agonizing years the word kokua was to gain a special meaning, and to say of a woman in Hawaii, “She was a kokua,” was to accord her a special benediction unknown in the rest of the world.

Therefore, in the middle of September, when Nyuk Tsin was pregnant with her fifth child and when it became wholly apparent to her that Mun Ki would not be cured and that the quack’s herbs were of no use whatever, she waited one day until the evening meal ended and then she sent the children away and knelt before her husband, sharing with him the resolve she had made more than a month before: “Wu Chow’s Father, I shall be your kokua.”

For some minutes he did not speak, nor did he look at the woman kneeling before him. Instead, he slowly picked up one of her needles and stuck it carefully into each finger of his left hand. When he had tested his fingers twice he said, “There is no feeling.”

“Shall we hide in the hills?” she asked.

“No one has spied upon me yet,” he replied. “Maybe next week the herbs will work.

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