“Where’s your Snookyookums?” I asked by way of introduction.
He was not surprised. Probably he heard and saw me before I did him.
“Back on Alakea Street in Honolulu,” he replied, smilingly, “where I wish I was. You’re the perofeta [prophet] they talk about. I been makin’ copra or I’d been see you before. My name is Jimmy Kekela, and I was born here in that house up on the bank, but I was sent to school in Honolulu, and I played on the Kamehameha High scrub team. The only foot-ball I play now is with a cocoanut. I had a job as chauffeur for Bob Shingle, who married a sister of the Princess Kawananakoa, but my father wrote me to come back here. I’ll wring out this shirt, and we’ll go up and see my folks.”
The Kekela home was a large, bare house of pine planks from California raised a dozen feet on a stone paepae. Unsightly and unsuitable, it was characteristic of the architecture the white had given the Marquesan for his own graceful and beautiful houses of hard wood, bamboo, and thatch, of which few were left. I wrung out my pareu, replaced it, and scrambled up the bank with him. The house was in a cocoanut forest, the trees huge and lofty, some growing at an amazing angle owing to the wind shaping them when young. They twisted like snakes, and some so approached parallelism that a barefooted native could walk up them without using his hands, by the mere prehensility of his toes and his accustomed skill. In front of the steps to the veranda of the home were mats for the drying of the copra, and a middle-aged man, very brown and stout, was turning over the halves of the cocoanut meat to sun them all over.
Tahiatini, Many Daughters, the little leper lass
François Grelet, the Swiss, of Oomoa
“My father,” said Jimmy to me, and “Perofeta” to him. He shook hands gingerly in the way all people do who are unaccustomed to that greeting, and said, “Kaoha!” My answer, “Aloha nui oe!” surprised him, for it was the Hawaiian salute. On the veranda I was presented to the entire Kekela family, four generations. By ones and twos they drifted from the room or the grounds. Hannah, the widow of Habuku, was very old, but was eager to talk.
“I am a Hawaiian,” she said in that language, “and I have been in Atuona, on this piece of land, sixty years. My husband brought me here, and he was pastor in that church till he died. Auwe! What things went on here then! I have seen many men being carried by toward the Pekia, the High Place of Atuona, for roasting and eating. That was in war time, when they fought with the people of Taaoa, or other valley. Kekela and my husband with the help of God stopped that evil thing. Matanui, a chief, came to Hawaii in a whale-ship, and asked for people to teach his people the word of the true God. Four Hawaiians listened to Matanui, and returned with him to Hanavave, where the French priest Father Olivier, is now. A week later a French ship arrived with a Catholic priest. Auwe! He was angry to find the Protestants and tried to drive them out. They stayed with the help of the Lord, though they had a hard time. Then Kekela and we came, and we have seen many changes. He was a warrior, and not afraid of anything, even the devil. There are his sons, Iami and Tamueli, and his grandsons and granddaughters and their children. We are Hawaiian. We have no drop of Marquesan blood in us. Did you know Aberahama Linoconi?”