The crowd cheered, and I looked through the window to see Mrs. Bishop, in a close-fitting yellow holokū printed with white hibiscus, a lei of orange puakenikeni around her head, her hair coiled into a bun, her lips scarlet, ascend to the small stage. She waved to the audience, which was clapping, and I watched as she danced to “My Yellow Ginger Lei” and “Pālolo.” She was a beautiful dancer, and although I didn’t speak more than a few words of Hawaiian, I understood the lyrics from watching her movements.
It occurred to me as I watched her, her face lit with happiness, that, although I had always liked her, part of me had wanted to see her degraded in some way. “Dancing,” in my classmates’ voices, had sounded so sordid, something a desperate woman would have to do, and something in me had craved witnessing it. Watching her now, queenly and elegant, was both a relief and, as much as I hated to admit it, a disappointment—I realized that I resented her son after all, that I wanted him to have something to be ashamed of, and that I had wanted that something to be his mother, who had always been kind to me, kind in a way her son could never be. She was not dancing because she had been forced to out of circumstance—she was dancing because she loved to dance, and although she dipped her head graciously at the crowd’s applause, it was also clear that her joy was separate from their approval.
I left before her set was over. But in bed that night, I lay awake thinking of the night I had departed the Bishops’ house for the first time and had turned back to see them in the kitchen together, laughing and talking in the house’s warm yellow light. Now I revised that memory: They had put a record on the player, and Mrs. Bishop, still in her Mizumoto’s uniform, was dancing, and Edward was strumming his ukulele, playing along. Outside, in the tiny yard, were crowded all of Edward’s and my classmates, and all of the patrons from Forsythia as well, all of us watching and clapping, though mother and son never turned to acknowledge us—to them, there was only each other, and it was as if we didn’t exist.
* * *
—
That was the first incident I wanted to tell you about. The second occurred three years later, in 1959.
It was August 21, and the school year had just begun. I was in tenth grade, almost sixteen. Now that we were in high school, I saw more of Edward than I had in the previous years, when we had been assigned to single, different classrooms. Now we moved from teacher to teacher, and sometimes we were in the same class. His earlier spell of popularity, when it had been discovered he could play sports, had tempered, and now I mostly saw him around the same three or four boys. As always, we nodded at each other in passing, and sometimes we even spoke a few words if we were in proximity—I think I messed up on that chem test. Oh, me too—but no one would have identified us as friends.
I was in English class when the intercom crackled and the principal’s voice, rapid and emotional, started speaking: President Eisenhower had signed a bill granting Hawai‘i statehood. We were now officially the fiftieth American state. Many of the students, and my teacher, began clapping.
We were given the rest of the day off in celebration. For most of us, this was a formality, but I knew that Matthew and Jane would be excited; they had lived in the territory for thirty years—they wanted to be able to vote, which was not something I’d considered.
I was walking up toward the campus’s western gate when I saw Edward heading south. The first thing I noticed was how slowly he was moving; other students were passing him by, talking about what they were going to do with their unexpected free day, but he appeared to be sleepwalking.
I was nearing him when he suddenly looked up and saw me. “Hi,” I said, and then, when he didn’t respond, “What’re you going to do with your day off?”
For a moment, he didn’t answer, and I thought that he perhaps hadn’t heard me. But then he said, “This is horrible news.”
He spoke so quietly that I at first thought I’d misheard him. “Oh,” I said, stupidly.
But it was like I’d tried to argue with him. “It’s horrible news,” he repeated tonelessly, “horrible.” And then he turned from me and kept walking. I remember thinking he looked lonely, even though I’d seen him alone many times and had never associated his aloneness with loneliness, the way I did with mine. This time, though, something felt different. He looked—though I wouldn’t have had the word for it then—bereft, and although I couldn’t see his face, there was something about his back, the slump of his shoulders, that, had I not known better, would have made me think he had just suffered a terrible loss.
* * *
—
I understand that that incident, knowing what you do of Edward, might not seem particularly notable. But it was uncharacteristic of the Edward I knew—admittedly not very well—back then. However, I would have known—through him or through gossip—if he had expressed any strong sentiments about native Hawaiian rights, even given the fact that the very idea of native Hawaiian rights had not yet been invented. （Now I can hear Edward saying, “Of course it had been invented.” So, all right: It had not yet been named. Named, or popularized, not even on a small scale.） There were a few boys in our grade who were interested in politics—one, whose father was the territorial governor, even got it into his head that he would one day be president of the United States. But Edward was not one of them, which made what happened later all the more surprising.
I should add, though, that Edward was not the only person who was upset that day. Back home, I found my mother sitting in the sunroom, quilting. This was unusual, as she was typically with the Daughters on Friday afternoons, volunteering at a food kitchen that served Hawaiian families. When I entered the room, she looked up, and we stared at each other in silence.
“They let us out early,” I said. “Because of the announcement.”
She nodded. “I stayed home today,” she said. “I just couldn’t bear it.” She looked down at her quilt—it was a breadfruit pattern, dark green on white—and then back up at me. “This doesn’t change anything, you know, Kawika,” she said. “Your father should still be king. And someday, you should still be king, too. Remember that.”
It was a strange mix of tenses, a sentence of promises and grievances, reassurances and consolations.
“All right,” I said, and she nodded.
“This changes nothing,” she said. “This land is ours.” And then she looked back at her quilting ring, my signal that I was dismissed, and I went upstairs to my room.
I had no strong feelings about statehood. I thought of it as falling under the broad roof of “government,” and I had no interest in government. Who was in charge, which decisions were made—none of it affected me. A signature on a piece of paper was irrelevant to the facts of my own life. Our house, the people within it, my school: These things wouldn’t change. My burden was one not of citizenry but of legacy; I was David Bingham, my father’s son, and all that went with it. I suppose, looking back on it, I might even have been relieved—now that the islands’ fate was settled, it would perhaps mean that I would no longer bear the responsibility and obligation of trying to correct a history I had no hopes of changing.