Sisterchicks Do the Hula (14 page)

Inside the main living area I noticed a small piano, and I asked if that was the one Juliette had used to teach the students. The guide seemed impressed with my question but didn’t have an answer. He wasn’t sure if the piano belonged to the Cooke family or if it had belonged to the Chamberlains, the first missionary family to occupy this house.

The tour moved on to a tiny building next door on the mission compound. The coral-block room contained a working replica of the original printing press.

“The first translated portion of Holy Scripture was the one-hundredth psalm,” the guide explained. “It was in leaflet form and distributed at the dedication of the Kawaiaha’o Church, the large, coral-block sanctuary, which you’ve certainly noticed right across the street.”

As I was thinking that I had probably missed seeing the church because of the downpour, the tour guide held up a sample sheet of printed paper. “It took fifteen years to translate the entire Bible into Hawaiian because, of course, before the Protestant missionaries arrived, the Hawaiian people had no written language.”

It was easy to see why the Hawaiian Bible he then held up was so thick. The Hawaiian alphabet, he explained, contained
only twelve letters. Some of the words were excessively long, and many of the phrases took several words to express.

“For example,” he said, “the book
Pilgrim’s Progress
was printed here, and the title in Hawaiian is
Ka Hele Malihini ’ana mai Kela Ao aku a Kela Ao.”

The others in the small tour group chuckled, but I wished the guide would read some of the Bible to us so we could hear the words roll off the whitewashed walls in that tiny, hallowed printing room. I wanted to hear more of God’s Word in Hawaiian to find out if it sounded as rich and filling as Kapuna Kalala’s words.

After the tour, I took my time strolling through the gift shop. I browsed through the extensive and beautiful books on the shelves and picked up one about Juliette because I was curious to know more about her.

On a table in the center of the room, I noticed a small, purse-sized oval mirror in a deep, smooth wood. The label on the back identified the wood as koa. I had never heard of koa wood, but I loved the feel. I held the mirror in my hand for a long time before deciding to buy it.

The timing was perfect because Laurie pulled up in a cab and motioned for the driver to wait while she hopped out and entered the gift shop.

“Do you need more time?” she asked.

“No, I’m ready.”

We climbed into the taxi’s backseat, and I pushed aside several bags. “Looks like you did well.”

“I did. I found two pairs of sandals that are both exactly what I needed. And look at this.” She pulled a Bible from one of her bags. “I found one just like yours at a Christian bookstore at the shopping center. Only this one is the whole Bible and not just Psalms.”

I reached for the thick book and turned to Psalm 100.

“What are you looking up?”

“Something I learned on the tour. This is the first portion of Scripture that was translated into Hawaiian. Should I read it aloud?”

“Of course.”

I read the chapter to her starting with:

I looked over at Laurie. Her eyes were glistening.

“That is so fresh. Hope, do you suppose it sounded that rich and inviting to the people here the first time they heard it?”

“Better,” I said. “They heard it in Hawaiian.”

Gazing out the cab’s window, I noticed that the sun was making a late afternoon appearance and bossing the breeze around, telling it where to go sweep up the puddles before closing time. I wondered how fast the trade winds felt like working on what had previously seemed like their day off.

Returning to the hotel, we found our evening luau had
been canceled due to the heavy rains. The water wasn’t drying quickly enough to guarantee dry seating on the grass mats at the outdoor luau. After much debate, Laurie and I decided to go ahead and make a reservation for one of the indoor luaus and not wait another night, just in case the weather didn’t cooperate tomorrow, either.

“Besides,” I told Laurie, “I’m better off in a chair. I’m not sure how I would manage to sit on a straw mat and then get up in any sort of dainty fashion.”

“I must remind myself how proper you’ve become ever since you moved to New England.”

“Proper? Me? Ha! Guess again. And for the record, I’m not sure any of my neighbors would consider me a New Englander. I’ve only lived there for, what? Seventeen years? I’m still a visitor to them.”

Laurie shook her head. “You don’t realize it, but the New Englander in you shows in the little things like the way you flatten out your
A
’s sometimes at the ends of your sentences or the way you sit in a restaurant. You’re definitely a Connecticut Yankee. They’re your people now.”

I thought about what Laurie said while we got ready for the luau. During the tour, the guide said that Juliette set sail from Boston when she was twenty-four and spent the rest of her life in Honolulu, passing away at the age of eighty-four. She certainly wasn’t a tourist. Not a visitor. Hawai’i was her home for sixty years. Had the Hawaiians truly become her people?

Laurie wore the cutest capri outfit to the luau. She had a hard time deciding between the two new pairs of sandals. I talked her into wearing the ones with the low heel because we planned to walk to a neighboring hotel for the luau.

We entered a banquet-style room where rows of tables were set with festive colors with a bowl of pineapples and papayas in the center. We signed in and were given a choice of a lei made of plastic shells or a lei made of plastic flowers.

After the amazing experience Laurie and I had that morning with Kapuna Kalala, I couldn’t bear to even look at the plastic flower leis. Apparently Laurie couldn’t either because we both deferred to the plastic shell leis. Fashionable Laurie wrapped hers around her wrist a few times and wore it as a bracelet.

We chose two chairs at a table near the front. I sat down while Laurie went to get us some tropical punch.

Slack key guitar music floated through the room as a large, boisterous group entered, ready for a good time. One of the younger girls from the group gravitated away from the rest and came over to the table where I waited for Laurie.

“Is anyone sitting here?” She pointed to the chair across from me.

“No.” I glanced at the rest of the group, secretly hoping they wouldn’t join her.

“Are you by yourself?” I asked.

“I’m trying to be,” she said in a low voice. Looking over her shoulder she added, “I’m here for a dinner with my company.
It’s our annual sales conference. But I would have stayed in my room if they would have let me.”

She had warm, brown skin and expressive, dark eyes. I was surprised at how open she seemed. Maybe I was the closest thing to a motherly figure in the room, and she felt safe with me.

“Are you okay?” I asked, knowing that she could take that any way she wanted. If some weasel was stalking her at this company picnic, I could give her a few tips on self-defense. However, if she merely felt a headache coming on, I could recommend a little sip of fruit punch to bring up her blood sugar.

“Yeah, I’m okay.” She looked around again and then said, “I grew up here. Well, not here, but on the Big Island. I live in San Diego now, and I was excited about coming back, but I forgot how commercial it can feel here in Honolulu. I have a hard time with this.” She motioned to the stage and the frilly decorations on the tables.

I nodded as if I agreed but knew I had no point of reference and thought I should confess that. “I haven’t been to a luau before. I’m visiting from New England. My name is Hope.”

“I’m Amy. Nice to meet you.”

Laurie appeared just then joining in with, “And I’m Laurie. Tiki punch, anyone?”

Amy raised her eyebrows. “That depends. How drunk do you want to get?”

T
hanks to Amy, we avoided the alcohol-saturated tiki punch, which was offered as the complimentary beverage of the luau. We sent Laurie back to the open bar for ginger ale.

Also, thanks to Amy, we had our own specialist to explain to us the tradition of the hula before the floor show began. No one else sat at our table, so we had Amy all to ourselves. She told us about how she had taken hula lessons for five years and even danced in local competitions when she was a little girl.

“You have to think of it as two separate schools of hula: ancient and modern,” she said. “The ancient Hawaiians had no music. They used chants to tell the stories of old times and pass on the history of the people. The dancers never smiled. They bent their knees low to absorb the
mana
from the earth.”

“The mana?” Laurie asked.

“That’s the word for strength or power. You know, the spiritual energy. When the missionaries arrived, so many
Hawaiians became Christians that the ancient hula went underground.”

“Why was that?” Laurie asked. “Didn’t you just say it was their way of passing on history since they didn’t have a written language?”

“Yes, but ancient hula—the
hula kahiko
—involved animal and human sacrifices to worship the goddess Laka. The ceremonies were performed in secret places with mysterious rituals. You can see why the missionaries had a problem with it.”

Just then a young man stepped onto the stage and called out, “A-lo-ha!”

“A-lo-ha!” answered the audience.

In a far corner of the room, another young man wearing a wreath of green leaves around his head blew into a large conch shell that sounded like a deep foghorn.

“E como mai!
Welcome!” the announcer said. Drums followed his words, and two young women in bright yellow grass skirts with tall headdresses and feathery shakers in their hands swiveled their hips at an amazing pace in time with the drums. They turned their backs to the audience and kept up in perfect rhythm. I couldn’t figure out how they managed to keep the top portion of their bodies perfectly still and straight while getting so much movement going from the hips down.

The drums ended with a
tum
, and the hips froze. An unexpected
tum, tum
sounded, and the dancers’ hips responded right on cue. With their hands turned knuckles in to their hips and their elbows out to the side, the two women strutted offstage.

“Do you think those were real coconut shells they were wearing on top?” Laurie whispered.

“I don’t know. All I know is that I’m glad they stayed on.”

“Let’s give a big round of applause to our dancers, who will be coming back for your after-dinner entertainment,” the announcer exclaimed.

Above the enthusiastic applause, Laurie leaned over to Amy. “I’m guessing that wasn’t the ancient hula, or was it?”

“No, that was Tahitian,” she said. “There’s nothing Hawaiian about that. It’s a crowd pleaser, as are the fire dancers.”

“Is fire dancing not originally Hawaiian either?” I asked.

Amy shook her head. “Sorry to ruin all this for you.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “We’d much rather have the inside scoop. You’re not ruining anything. It’s the opposite. You’re making this interesting for us.”

“Exactly,” Laurie agreed.

We were directed toward the buffet line, and again we were thankful for our personal guide. The tossed green salad and the macaroni salad were the only two items that looked familiar to me.

“What is this?” Laurie pointed to what looked like pink salsa.

“It’s
lomi lomi
salmon. You should try a little of everything,” Amy recommended. “I’ve heard they do a good job with the food here. And the
kalua
pork is actually cooked all day in an
imu
. At least that’s what it says in the brochure in our rooms here at the hotel.”

“Do I want to know what an imu is?” I asked.

“It’s an underground oven. Basically it’s just a hole in the ground. The whole pig is cooked all day on hot rocks and covered with
ti
leaves. The kalua pork is a typical part of an authentic luau.”

I used the tongs to place some of the shredded pork on my plate. It looked good.

“And you have to try the
poi
,” Amy said. “Not a lot, just enough to say you tried it.”

“This is poi?” Laurie dipped her spoon into the small bowl of gray pudding. “It looks so sad. Like wallpaper paste that was left out a little too long. What does it taste like?”

“Poi,” Amy said. “It grows on you after a while. You’re supposed to dip your first two fingers in it and eat it that way. I mix it with the lomi lomi, and it goes down nicely.”

“You don’t happen to see any tortilla chips around here, do you?” Laurie asked.

Amy laughed. “Let me guess; you’re from California.”

“You got that right. Tortilla chips go with everything on the Left Coast, you know.”

As we made our way back to the table, I wondered what my little Emilee would do with all the strange new foods I was about to send her way. To be on the safe side, I had taken one of the Hawaiian sweet dinner rolls. If nothing else, I could eat bread and salad and sip ginger ale.