Come Dance With Me

27 Christabel Alderton

26 January 2003. Here I was then, with the night to get through and ten years ago on my mind. I’d thought January 1993 would be off-peak for holidaymakers but the Aloha Airlines flight was full, many of them hoping to see whales. ‘I’d like to swim with them,’ said a boy across the aisle to his girlfriend.

‘I don’t think they let you do that unless you’re David Attenborough,’ she said.

Django was craning his neck to see out of the window. ‘Are there sharks down there?’ he said.

‘All kinds of things,’ I said. Such a deep dark blue, the water below us, then a fringe of white surf as Kahului Airport came into view back in 1993. The palm trees were moving a little as if they didn’t care one way or the other. It was a dull day and those trees put a jungly smell in my mind.

Some of the arrivals were being greeted with leis, some not. Bert Gresham had been to Maui and he had arranged for Rudy Ka’uhane to meet us. Rudy was holding a placard that said ALOHA CHRISTABEL & DJANGO in large capitals. I was startled to see Django’s name like that, it was almost as if he’d grown up and gone away. He was quite pleased with it because he could already read his name. ‘Aloha,’ said Rudy, and he hung leis around our necks. Then he explained the honi greeting and did it with Django and me just as I did it with Henry Panawae this night ten years later. The pink flowers of our leis looked edible and they smelled like youth and first love, which seemed a little shocking since they and I had only just met. ‘Plumería,’ said Rudy. ‘My wife grows them at our place. Those are some of our leis that the kids are hanging on people now.’

‘But not on everybody,’ I said.

‘Some of them are ordered before the flight, some people buy them here, others don’t bother with them.’ A very large brown man, Rudy. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and his arms and legs were like tree trunks. He took our cases and led the way to his car, and when we stepped outside the jungly smell I’d had in my mind was the real smell of the place. With a little petrol added.

Django said, ‘This is far away.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’

‘Far-away trees.’ he said.

‘Palm trees,’ I said. The sun had come out and it printed the shadows of the palms on the ground with every frond and the spaces between sharp and clear and black.

‘Does God see everything?’ said Django.

‘What makes you ask that?’ I said.

‘The shadows.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘He sees what He wants to see. Sometimes He looks away.’

Django nodded. We’d never talked about God, he must have picked it up in playgroup.

‘God is somebody who looks away most of the time,’ said Rudy to me. ‘He sure was looking away when the Americans hijacked these islands.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, they don’t have it in white history books?’

‘Rudy’ I said, ‘I’m a singer with a rock band and I don’t read a whole lot of history.’

‘OK. In 1900 Hawaii became a US territory. It was illegally annexed and everything since then, statehood and the rest of it, is illegal. I better not get started on this. Here’s my car.’ His Land Rover looked as if it had a lot of mileage on it and not much of it on roads. A hand-lettered bumper sticker said KOKO AND NO UKE.

‘What’s koko?’ I said.

‘Hawaiian blood. Don’t matter if you got a lot or a little, you Hawaiian and your land been took from you. So let’s get it back.’

Django and I were both knackered from all those hours of travel and Rudy was making me uncomfortable. ‘Could we perhaps put history and politics aside for now?’ I said. ‘We’re only here for the whales.’

‘What’s uke?’ said Django.

‘Ukelele,’ said Rudy. He mimed strumming one. ‘I don’t got no uke for playin’ on da beach at Waikiki.’

Django let that pass. ‘I like this car,’ he said.

‘Her name is Lucille,’ said Rudy.

‘Like B. B. King’s guitar?’ I said.

‘You got it. She da kine good old girl.’

‘You da kine good old man?’ said Django.

‘That’s me,’ said Rudy. ‘You da kine smart kid, brah.’

‘When I’m big I’ll have a Lucille,’ said Django.

‘She da one,’ said Rudy. ‘You da kine man she like.’

‘What’s da kine?’ I said.

‘It’s just only a kind of talk we do here sometimes,’ said Rudy. He loaded our luggage and us into Lucille and off we went with a roar and various rattles. ‘I’ll take you to the Pioneer Inn now,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to get some rest, have a look around Lahaina. Tomorrow I’ll show you the Iao Needle, next day you do a whale-watching cruise.’

‘What’s the Iao Needle?’ said Django.

‘It’s a big rock in Iao Valley State Park — it’s something you should see before we go anywhere else.’

‘How come?’ said Django.

‘You’ll see when we’re there,’ said Rudy.

‘When we go whale-watching,’ I said, ‘we don’t want to do it from a boat.’

‘Why not?’ said Rudy.

‘I’ve been having bad dreams about water.’

‘No problem, I can show you where to watch from shore. Tomorrow I’ll bring you something to keep away bad dreams.’

There was singing on Lucille’s radio but the engine noise was drowning it out until Rudy pulled over and stopped. Then we could hear, in Hawaiian at first, a vocalist with very lush backing and a voice that was like the voice of oceans and islands coming on the wind from far away. The refrain was in English:

Cry for the gods, cry for the people,

Cry for the land that was taken away,

And then yet you’ll find Hawai’i.

‘Who is that?’ I asked Rudy.

‘IZ,’ said Rudy. ‘Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.’.

‘So much loss in the words and in his voice!’

‘Loss is the only game in town,’ said Rudy. ‘Loss is the main action of this world. Anybody says different don’t know what’s what.’

Lucille started off again and nobody said anything for a while. We were on the Kuihelani Highway heading down to the coast where we turned into the highway to Lahaina. We had the sea to our left and the mountains to the right but I was too tired to take much in and that song had filled me with sadness. Django had fallen asleep in my lap clutching his cloth crocodile.

It’s 2003 as I write this about 1993. I know I’m getting the conversations right but some of my comments can’t help being from now rather than ten years ago. Lahaina used to be a whalers’ town. Now it was selling itself as a place that used to be a whalers’ town. A while back a movie was made that starred Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra, The Devil at Four O’Clock. This island played the part of Talua, a nonexistent movie island. Lahaina and the Pioneer Inn were featured as somewhere else and there was still a poster to prove that it happened.

In the early nineteenth century (some local history here that I picked up) Lahaina became known as the whaling capital of the Pacific. It was a sailors’ town where women and drink and violence were plentiful. There was more violence in the 1820s when the missionaries came to town, not to give instruction in the missionary position but to fight sin. Sin fought back, and the sailors even fired their cannon at the mission. Eventually the local chiefs restored order, and seamen who didn’t return to their ships at sundown were imprisoned. By 1901, when the Pioneer Inn opened, Lahaina was pretty well civilised. The house rules from that year include:

YOU MUST PAY YOU RENT IN ADVANCE.

YOU MUST NOT LET YOU ROOM GO ONE DAY BACK.

WOMEN IS NOT ALLOW IN YOU ROOM.

IF YOU WET OR BURN YOU BED YOU GOING OUT.

YOU ARE NOT ALLOW TO GIVE YOU BED TO YOU FREAND.

ONLY ON SUNDAY YOU CAN SLEEP ALL DAY.

The Pioneer Inn was meant to look like an old plantation house, I was told. Sugar was still big business; the cane was burned in the Pioneer Mill whose stack overlooked the town. The inn was a very wide building with a red roof and a veranda across the whole front of it at the second level. A very shipshape-looking place. The building was blue-grey with white posts and railings, window frames and doors. From our veranda we looked out on banyan trees and Front Street and over the water to blue mountains that were like mountains in a dream. I was seeing them for the first time but they seemed half remembered, half forgotten. I thought there might be words in my mind but when I opened my mouth nothing came.

The room was plain but good: white walls and a handsome bed with a watercolour over it of a little red-roofed house among palm trees — an original painting, not a print. The lamp on the bedside table had a lathe-turned base of dark polished wood which matched the bedposts. There was a cot for Django on which he went back to sleep immediately. I’ve known a lot of hotel rooms in my time. It’s always as if a self has gone ahead to wait for you in the room; maybe a self you didn’t know you had that day: a happy self or a sad one, whatever. You walk into the room and it says, ‘Hi. This is how we are today.’ But I wasn’t sure where I was and I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted so much to watch whales. In my ignorance I’d thought of Maui just as a place where you went to enjoy yourself but after listening to Rudy and that song I felt that these islands really didn’t want me and Django.

We both had a good kip, then went out past the little lighthouse to the harbour where the whalers used to anchor. There was a square-rigged ship there, the Carthaginian. This ship also starred in a movie, Hawaii, for which it was converted from a Baltic cargo schooner to its present incarnation. As far as I could make out it never had been a whaler, although now it housed a whaling museum. Django wanted to see it so we went aboard. There was the skeleton of a whale that you could walk through but Django wouldn’t. ‘It doesn’t want us here,’ he said. The harpoons and lances upset him, as well as the blubber knives and try pots. ‘This is a bad place,’ he said, and we left.

The other vessels in the harbour were expensive sailing boats, cabin cruisers and sport-fishermen and the water sparkled with dollar signs. There were T-shirts with whales on them in the shops and the Lahaina News advertised a Slack Key Guitar Festival. Still, it was charming and lively, full of places where you could spend time and money. I mustn’t let the jaded me of 2003 get in the way. I bought Django a T-shirt with a humpback whale on it and a baseball cap that said MAUL

Later we went to the I’‘O nearby in Front Street for a candlelit dinner outside under the trees. For starters we had steamed wontons filled with ‘roasted peppers, mushrooms, spinach, macadamia nuts and silken tofu over a fragrant tomato coulis with a creamy basil yogurt purée’. The list of ingredients with its adjectives was so colourful that I took a menu away with me for a souvenir. We shared a Maui steak after that and finished up with pineapple ice cream. Front Street was full of tourists enjoying their evening as we went back to the Pioneer Inn. Some of them were singing.

When Django was asleep I went out on to the veranda. The sky had cleared and there was a little sliver of crescent moon. I stood there looking at the stars until I found the Plough. That’s all right then, I thought. This is home too. But I didn’t quite believe it.