Honolulu (42 page)

Mrs. Quigley’s sentiments, it must be said, were mild compared to what was being said of Joe and his friends-of all of us-on the mainland. Time magazine continued to malign our islands as “a restless purgatory of murder and race hatred. The killing of Kahahawai climaxed a long chain of ugly events on the island of O’ahu growing out of the lust of mixed breeds for white women.”

As absurd as this may sound, it was real enough for Bill “Tarball” Kahanamoku. He was dating a white switchboard operator at the Moana Hotel named Mary Davis-whom he would eventually marry-and out of cautious fear he made sure to walk on the other side of the street when taking her home.

MELTING
POT
PERIL! cried one mainland paper. Another declared smugly:
HAWAIIANS
MUST
BE PUNISHED!

It was this last that surely must have alarmed the haole elite who ruled Hawai’i, and likely accounted for the sudden tilt of papers like the StarBulletin toward the rule of law. The U.S. Congress was also in an uproar, threatening to replace the territory’s self-government with commission rule that would hand control of Hawai’i over to the military. This was not in the Big Five’s interests, and so they now tried to scale back the racist hysteria they had helped foment.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Fortescue told the press, “I have slept better since Friday, the eighth-the day of the murder-than for a long time…. My mind is at peace.”

She may have been the only person in Honolulu who slept so soundly.

Certainly not I, who was overwhelmed with anger and sorrow, and wanted nothing more than to escape from the tragedy and to take refuge in my sewing. But everyone who came into the shop seemed unable to talk about anything other than “the Massie case.” They told me how the grand jury had indicted the accused on charges of second, not first, degree murder. (Soldiers never hang.) They spoke excitedly of how the defendants had hired the legendary attorney Clarence Darrow, who, I was told, had a reputation as a champion of the underdog, particularly black people. As these were the same black people who were often lynched, I wondered why he was representing people accused of doing the same to a dark-skinned Hawaiian boy. I was not among the hundreds who went to the harbor the day the SS Malolo sailed into port, eager for a glimpse of the “great man.”

Unlike the first trial, I could not bear the thought of attending this one; of hearing the attorneys slander Joe’s memory in defense of heartless murderers. But I could not avoid getting a summation of the day’s events from my customers, few of whom actually got into the courtroom to see it. I heard of how Joe’s cousin Eddie identified both Lieutenant Massie and Mrs. Fortescue as being in the Buick roadster, into which Joe was lured with a fake summons to appear before the sheriff. I heard of how Joe’s clothing was found in Grace Fortescue’s rented house in Manoa, including a brown cap and a white shirt, thoroughly soaked with blood, with a bullethole in the front. And on a visit with Esther I heard from her how-as district attorney John Kelley had presented Joe’s bloodied shirt to the jurors-she burst into tears, and this man Darrow jumped to his feet and insisted she be removed from the courtroom, which thankfully the judge denied.

She related to me how she had taken the stand to testify as to what Joe was wearing the day he was killed. “I had to sit there and say, `Yes, he was wearing that cap. Yes, that was his watch, and ring. I know those clothes, I washed them all. They’re Joe’s.’ And then Mr. Kelley brought me the shirt with the bullethole, and I couldn’t help myself, I started to cry.”

The district attorney was not trying to be unkind, but he was clearly determined that the jurors would see the full sum of the violent equation that had brought them to this place.

Darrow’s defense invoked something he called “the unwritten law”-the right of a husband to avenge an attack on his wife. But just in case the jury did not believe that, Darrow also claimed that Lieutenant Massie had killed Joe in a fit of temporary insanity. The defendants freely admitted they abducted and bound Joe, and tried to force a confession from him. When Joe refused to do so, even with Massie holding a gun on him, Mrs. Fortescue said, “There’s no use fooling around any longer…. Let’s carry out our other plan.” Massie told Joe, “You know what Ida got. That’s nothing to what you will get.” He then told Seaman Lord to “go out and get the boys”-promising, “Those men will beat you to ribbons.”

Supposedly, under this trumped-up threat from unseen enemies, Joenever one to be cowed by physical threats-blurted out a confession. In a fit of rage, Lieutenant Massie pulled the trigger, blacked out, and the next thing he knew, the police were arresting him and his confederates on Koko Head Road.

Small wonder that I continued to have difficulty sleeping, and would often get up at two in the morning to hand-sew in the calm darkness of our kitchen-as if by this act I could somehow stitch together the scraps of my old peace and contentment. But I was not the only one in our household whose slumber was disturbed. To my surprise, one night I found Harold-who had seemed the least affected by all these events-sitting in the kitchen, looking tense and troubled. I asked him what was wrong. He looked up at me, sheepishly, but there was more than embarrassment in his eyes; there was pain.

“I didn’t tell you before,” he admitted, “but I got into a fight today.”

“Where? With who?”

“Woody and me were down Waikiki, surfing, when some haole kidtourist kid-gives us the stink-eye and says, `Sure is a lotta garbage on this beach.’ I ask him, `Is there a problem?’ He says, `My pop says it’s chinks like you coming here that’s the problem.’ So I say”
he managed a small smile
“‘That’s funny, ‘cause my pop says your pop is full of shit.’ ”

“Harry!” My eyes widened in reproach, even as I was trying not to laugh.

He gave a little shrug. “That’s when we started duking it out.”

I sighed. “Well, you look none the worse for it.”

“I did more duking than he did.”

“You don’t look too happy about it.”

He hesitated. “They threw us off the beach.”

“What? Who did?”

“The manager of the Moana Hotel. The haole kid complained about us, and even though he threw the first punch-and Steamboat and Panama took our side-they threw us off the beach.” I now understood the hurt and anger in his eyes. “Can you beat that? These no-good malihinis come here, they do whatever they want, and they get away with it! They-”

He broke down, suddenly weeping, and I held him to me as he sobbed.

“No, they can’t,” I said, gently stroking his hair. “They won’t. You’ll see.”

The following day I accepted a long-standing offer from Esther to secure me a seat in the courtroom-two seats, actually. On Wednesday, April 27, the last day of the trial, Harold and I found ourselves seated behind Esther and Pascual, two of only a handful of “locals” present on this final day. I wanted Harry to see the defendants as they were brought into the courtroom, no more privileged than he or I as they sat before a jury of their peers. I wanted him to see the American legal system at work, for better or worsea system I could not help but believe in, as it had freed me from the tyranny of Mr. Noh. I did not know whether justice would prevail in this trial, but it seemed to me that Harry at least needed to see justice trying to prevail.

Unfortunately, this meant listening to Clarence Darrow’s endless closing summation, which recapitulated in great detail the entire series of events from the alleged assault on Mrs. Massie through the Ala Moana trial, Joe’s death, and the present circumstances-culminating in this question to the jury:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I wonder what fate has against this family, anyhow? I wonder when it will get through taking its toll and leave them in peace?”

He was not referring to Joe’s family, of course, but to Mrs. Massie’s.

He spoke of the pain of her “ravishment” and said, “I don’t care whether it is a human mother, or the mother of beasts or birds in the air. They are all alike. To them there is one all-important thing and that is a child they carried in their womb, and without that feeling there would be no life preserved upon this earth.”

He pointed to Mrs. Fortescue. “There she is-that mother-in this courtroom! She is waiting to go to the penitentiary. All right, gentlemengo to it! … If this husband and this mother go to the penitentiary, it won’t be the first time a penitentiary has been sanctified by its inmates!”

When the defense had rested its case, Harry turned to me and whispered, “What happens now?”

“Now,” I said, “someone speaks up for Joe.”

District attorney John Kelley paced before the jury and delivered a forceful summation, and a blistering portrayal of the defendants as cold-blooded killers who “let a man bleed to death in front of them, inch by inch.” He excoriated Lieutenant Massie’s so-called insanity defense and pointed out things he testified to that he should not have remembered had he truly “blacked out.” Then he told the jurors, “Hawai’i is on trial. Is there to be one law for strangers and another for the rest of us?”

I could see Harry sit up a little straighter beside me.

And what will happen, Kelley asked, if the jury acquits Massie? “Why, they’ll make him an admiral! They’ll make him chief of staff! He and Admiral Pratt are of the same mind, they both believe in lynch law!”

But Kelley reserved his greatest scorn for the defense attorney’s words:

“Mr. Darrow has spoken of mother love. He has spoken of `the mother’ in this courtroom. Well, there is another mother in this courtroom. Has Mrs. Fortescue lost her daughter? Has Massie lost his wife?”

He turned and pointed at Esther, who was now weeping.

“But where is Joseph Kahahawai?”

Darrow felt the sting of the courtroom’s silence.

I leaned forward and placed a consoling hand on Esther’s shoulder. Harold blinked back tears. I could not have asked for a better exemplar of the American legal system than John Kelley.

As Harry and I left the courtroom that day, I noticed Mrs. Quigley and one of her kama’aina friends leaving the courthouse as well. Perhaps she felt my eyes on her, because after a few moments she looked up and saw me. We briefly held each other’s gazes-but I admit, I saw no anger or recrimination in her eyes, only sorrow, before she dropped her head and turned away.

After some fifty hours of deliberation, the jury of seven haoles, two Asians, two Hawaiians, and a Portuguese returned a verdict-finding all four defendants guilty of manslaughter in the death of Joseph Kahahawai Jr.

I was relieved and, I confess, a little surprised. After all that I had seen and heard, I thought there was a good chance the accused would escape the consequences of their actions. But the jurors had done a great service to Hawai’i and their country, affirming the rule of law over vigilante justice. Upper-crust Honolulu society may have been dismayed, but in Palama there was celebration that Hawai’i had shown itself to be true not just to the American ideal of “equal justice under the law,” but to the words of Kamehameha
III
that had become Hawai’i’s motto: Ua mau Ke Ea 0 Ka Aina IKa Pono-“The Life of the Land Is Preserved in Righteousness.”

Unfortunately the rest of America did not live up to its founders’ ideals, and the mainland exploded in a rage over the conviction of four people many considered to be heroes, not villains.

Only a few days later I was at work sewing together a shirt when I heard the door chime and looked up to see Esther Anito, shaken and pale, enter the shop.

“They’ve won,” she said hoarsely.

“What? Who’s won?”

She looked like a woman who had had everything taken from her and had nothing left to give up.

“I was at the courthouse,” she said, “when the judge sentenced them each to ten years’ hard labor at O’ahu Prison. But they were all smiling-like cats that had just swallowed big fat canaries. Then it was announced that the governor had commuted their sentences.”

“‘Commute’? What does that mean?”

“It means he reduced the ten years they would have had to serve in prison,” she said, “to one hour `in custody of the High Sheriff.’ And then they all went off to the governor’s office to pass the time and have their pictures taken for the press.”

I was stunned. I could scarcely believe it. “Governor Judd did this?” He had always seemed like a good man to me.

“One hour,” Esther said bitterly. “That’s all my boy’s life is worth: one hour of their time!”

She started to weep, as outside, newsboys began hawking extras announcing this latest, terrible turn in the case. I could not find any words of consolation for her, for there were none. Nor could I find any to console my children that night-especially Harold-when they asked me why the people who killed Joe were going free. The outcome had made a mockery of all my faith in the law, and I was helpless to shield them from this, their first taste of the world’s injustice.

In the following days we would hear how the governor had been under intense pressure from Washington to grant the four defendants a full pardon, or else the territory would be placed under military rule. Judd had refused to consider a pardon, which would have wiped away their criminal convictions. “By their verdict the jury has built a monument upon which it is inscribed that lynch law will not be tolerated in Hawai’i,” the governor declared, “and for the public good I propose to do nothing which would in any way tear down or destroy that monument.” But it was a tarnished monument at best.

No matter his reasons, Governor Judd’s actions were wrong and served only to demonstrate, as John Kelley had said, that there were two standards of justice in Hawai’i: one for haoles, and one for everyone else.

Four days after the commutations, amid the flash of news cameras, Thomas and Thalia Massie, Grace Fortescue, and Clarence Darrow left for San Francisco aboard the Malolo-leaving behind a Honolulu that would be forever changed by their brief and sorrowful transit through the islands. In that fall’s elections, the Republican party-and the haole elite that controlled it-suffered their first major loss at the polls, thanks largely to the votes of young Asian-American citizens. It was the beginning of the end for the Big Five.