The crowd began to stir as a single organism, and we found ourselves being moved from the entryway and into a large open space. Here, as in the first room, there was no furniture, and some of the floorboards had cracked and split from the moisture. In this room, above the chatter, I heard a roaring, like an airplane passing overhead, but then I looked out the window and realized the sound was coming from a waterfall at the bottom of the property.
After we had all settled ourselves on the floor, there was a nervous silence, one that seemed to lengthen and deepen. “The fuck’s happening?” someone, a guy, asked, and was shushed; someone else giggled. On and on the silence went, and finally, the shuffling and whispering quieted, and for at least a minute, we sat there, together, mute and immobile.
It was then that the tall black man picked himself up from where he’d been sitting in the middle of the crowd and loped to the front of the room. The combination of his height and our position on the ground, staring up at him, made him seem towering, an edifice rather than a man. He was not so black—I was darker than he was—nor was he exactly handsome: His skin was shiny, and he had a patchy beard and a smattering of pimples across his left cheek that made him look more childlike than I think he’d have preferred. But there was something indisputable about him; he had a wide, gap-toothed smile that he could make look either goofy or fierce, and long, liquid arms and legs that he bent and twisted into shapes as he moved, so that you were forced to not only listen to him but to watch him as well. But it was his voice that really captivated: what he said, but also how he said it, gentle and low and furred; his was a voice you’d like to hear telling you how much he loved you, and why, and how.
He began with a smile. “Brothers and sisters,” he said. “Aloha.” The crowd clapped then, and his smile widened, sleepy and seductive. “Aloha and mahalo for bringing me to this beautiful land of yours.
“It seems particularly right to me that we should be at this house tonight, for do you know what I was told the name of this house is? Yes, that’s right, it has a name, that’s something all fancy houses do, I guess, all over the world—it’s Hale Kealoha, the House of Aloha: the House of Love, the House of the Beloved.
“And that’s particularly interesting to me, because I too am named after a house: Bethesda. Who of you here remember your Bible, your New Testament? Ah, I see a hand in the back; there’s another. You, sister in the back, tell me what it means. That’s right, the Pools of Bethesda, Bethesda meaning the house of mercy, the pools being the place where Christ healed a crippled man. So here I am: the House of Mercy in the House of Love.
“I was asked to come, not just here, tonight, but to your islands, your home, by my good friend, the brother sitting all the way to the right, Brother Louis. Thank you, Brother Louis.
“I’m ashamed to say this now, but when I was invited to come here, I thought I knew everything about what this place was. I thought: pineapples. I thought: rainbows. I thought: hula girls, swaying their hips back and forth, all nice and sweet. I know, I know! But that’s what I thought. But within a few days, even before I left California, I realized I was wrong.
“I’m also ashamed to say that I didn’t even want to come here, not at first. You know, what you have here, I thought, is not reality. It’s not part of the world. I live near Oakland—that is part of the world. You see what’s happening there, what we’re struggling against there, what we’re fighting against there: the oppression of the black man and woman, the oppression that’s gone on since America was founded and will go on and on until it burns down to the ground and we begin something new. Because there is no fixing what America is—there is no way to do work around the margins and say justice has been restored. No, brothers and sisters, that’s not how justice works. My mother worked as a nurse’s aide in what they used to call the Houston Negro Hospital, and she would tell me stories of the men and women who came in with heart attacks, about how they’d be gasping for breath, about how their nails would turn blue because they weren’t getting enough oxygen. My mother would be told by the senior nurses to massage her patients’ hands, to get the blood flowing through the extremities, and as she did, she’d watch their nails turn pink again, and feel their hands warm up with her touch. But one day she realized that this wasn’t solving anything—she was making their hands prettier, maybe even work better, but their hearts were still sick. Nothing had really changed after all.
“And in the same way, nothing has really changed here. America is a country with sin at its heart. You know what I’m talking about. One group of people sent away from their land; another group of people stolen from their land. We replaced you, and yet we never wanted to replace you—we wanted to be left where we were. None of our ancestors, our great-great-great-grandparents, ever woke up one day and thought: Let’s sail halfway around the world, be part of a land grab, pit ourselves against some other native peoples. No way, no how. That is not how normal people, decent people, think—that is how the devil thinks. But that sin, that mark, never goes away, and although we didn’t cause it, we are all infected by it.
“Let me tell you why. Imagine that heart again, but this time swiped with a smear of oil. Not cooking oil but motor oil, the thick, gluey black kind, the kind that sticks to your hands and clothes like tar. It’s just a small bit of oil, you think, and eventually it’ll get washed away. And so you try to forget about it. But that isn’t what happens. What happens instead is that with each beat, with each thump of your heart, that oil, that little mark, spreads and spreads. The arteries carry it away; the veins carry it back. And with each journey through your body, it leaves a deposit, so that eventually—not right away, but over time—every organ, every blood vessel, every cell, has been tainted by that oil. Sometimes you can’t even see it—but you know it’s there. Because by this time, brothers and sisters, that oil is everywhere: It’s coating the inside of your veins; it’s lining your large intestine and liver; it’s slicking your spleen and kidneys. Your brain. That little bit of oil, that little splotch that you thought you could ignore, it’s now everywhere. And now there is no way to clean it out; the only way to clean it out is to stop the heart altogether—the only way to clean it out is to burn the body pure of it. The only way to clean it is to end it. You want to eliminate the stain, you’ve got to eliminate the host.
“Now. Now. What does this have to do with us here in Hawai‘i, you might be saying. The country, you might be saying, is not a body. The metaphor doesn’t hold. But doesn’t it? Here we sit, brothers and sisters, in this beautiful place far from Oakland. And yet it’s not far at all. Because here’s the thing, brothers and sisters: You do have pineapples here. You do have rainbows. You do have hula girls. But none of those things are yours. Those pineapple fields Brother Louis took me to see? Who’re they owned by? Not by you. Those rainbows? You have them, but can you see them for those high-rises going up, those hotels and condominiums in Waikīkī? And who owns those buildings? Do you? How about you? Those hula girls—those are your sisters, your brown-skinned sisters, and yet you’re letting them dance…for whom?