I went to the library, where I read books I had already read about the overthrow; I went to the museum, where my great-grandfather’s feather cape was displayed in a glass case, donated—the cape and the case—by my father. I tried to feel something—but all I could feel was a faint sense of amused disbelief that it was not the haoles who were doing things in my name but these activists themselves. Keiki kū Ali‘i: the children of royalty. But I really was a child of royalty. When they talked of a king who would be someday restored, they meant me, by rights, and yet they didn’t know who I was; they spoke of the king returning, yet they never thought to ask the king himself if he would want to return. But I also knew that what I was would always be more significant than who I was—indeed, what I was was the only thing that made who I was significant at all. Why would they ever think to ask me?
They wouldn’t, but Edward would. I’ll admit that, while I was too cowardly to speak to him, I was always looking for him. I squinted at the television, scanning the gang of protestors trying to infiltrate the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, the university president’s office. But although I saw Louis—Brother Louis—once or twice, I never saw Edward. Yet I always believed that he was there anyway, just out of camera range, leaning against a wall and surveying the crowd. In my imaginings, he even became something of a leader, elusive and evasive, bestowing his rare smile like a blessing on his followers when they did something to please him. At night, I dreamed of him standing in a shadow-filled house much like Hale Kealoha, giving a speech, and when I woke, I was astonished and full of admiration for him, his eloquence and elegance, until I realized that the words I had been so captivated by were not his but Bethesda’s, now recited back to myself so many times that they had become a hymn of my subconscious, like the state anthem or the song that Jane had sung to me as a boy, and which I now sang to you: Yellow bird, up high in banana tree / Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me…
So, when I finally did encounter him, I was only surprised it had taken as long as it had. It was a Wednesday, which I know because every Wednesday, after dropping you off at school, I took a long walk, all the way to Waikīkī, where I sat beneath one of the trees in Kapi‘olani Park we had sat beneath together when you were a baby, and ate a package of crackers. Each package had eight crackers, but I’d only eat seven; the last I’d crumble into ash and feed to the mynah birds, and then I’d get up again and keep walking.
“Wika,” I heard someone say, and when I looked up, there he was, walking toward me.
“Well, well,” he said, smiling. “Long time, no see, brother.”
The smiling was new. So was the “brother.” His hair was even longer now, almost blond in parts from the sun, and twisted into a bun, though strands of it floated around his head. He was tanner, which made his eyes look lighter and brighter, but the skin around them had wrinkled, and he had lost weight. He wore a faded aloha shirt, bleached a pale blue, and cutoff jeans—he looked both younger and older than I’d remembered him.
What remained the same was his lack of surprise at encountering me. “You hungry?” he asked, and when I said I was, he said we should walk to Chinatown and get some noodles. “Don’t have the car anymore,” he said, and when I made a sound of concern, or sympathy, he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll get it back. I just don’t have it now.” His left incisor was stained the color of tea.
The biggest change was his new volubility. （In those first six months of our most recent reacquaintance, I was always measuring what was different in him and what was familiar, which invariably led to the same unnerving realization: I didn’t know who he was. I knew a few facts, I had a few impressions, but the rest I had conjured, making him into whoever I needed him to be.） Over lunch, and then the following months, he talked more and more, until there were days when we would drive for hours （the car, which had vanished mysteriously, had reappeared just as mysteriously） and he would talk and talk and talk, and at times I would stop listening altogether, just lean my head back against the seat and let his words wash over me, as if it were a boring news report on the radio.
What did he talk about? Well, first, there was how he talked; he had adapted a kind of pidgin inflection, except because he hadn’t grown up speaking pidgin—he was a scholarship boy, after all; he wouldn’t have gotten into the school if his mother hadn’t been vigilant about his speaking standard English—it sounded artificial and weirdly formal. Even I could appreciate how rich and robustly casual pidgin sounded when spoken by natives: It wasn’t a language for exchanging ideas but one for trading jokes and insults and gossip. But Edward made it, or tried to make it, a language of instruction.
He didn’t need to ask if I understood the way things were—he knew I didn’t. I didn’t understand why our fate as Hawaiians was linked to black people’s fate on the mainland （“There are no black people in Hawai‘i,” I reminded him, echoing my mother’s statement as we watched a news report about some protest among blacks on the mainland one day. “There are no Negroes in Hawai‘i,” she had announced, the ghost of what she didn’t bother to say next—Thank goodness—hovering in the air between us）。 I didn’t understand how we’d been used as pawns, or his argument that the Orientals were taking advantage of us—many of the Orientals I knew and saw were clearly poor or, at the very least, far from rich, and yet, to Edward, they were as much to blame as the haole missionaries for the disappearance of our land. “You see them now, buying houses, opening businesses,” he said. “If they’re poor, they won’t stay poor forever.” Yet it seemed impossible to separate the Orientals and the haoles from who we were—every Hawaiian I knew was also part Oriental, or part haole, or both, or in some cases, like Edward’s （though I did not say this）， mostly haole.
One of the most difficult concepts for me to understand was this idea that I, and my mother, belonged to an us at all. Those thick brown men, slow-moving and massive, whom I saw drunk and dozing in the park: They may have been Hawaiian, but I felt no kinship toward them. “They’re kings too, brother,” Edward reprimanded me, and although I didn’t say it, I thought of what my mother would tell me when I was young: “Only a few people are kings, Wika.” Perhaps I was like my mother in the end, though I meant no harm; she would have seen those people as unlike her because she thought them beneath her, while I saw them as unlike me because I was scared of them. I wouldn’t deny that we were of the same race, but we were different sorts of people, and that was what divided us.
I had assumed all along that Edward was a member of Keiki kū Ali‘i—in my dreams, as I have said, he was not only a member but their leader. But that turned out not to be true. He had been a member, he told me, but he had soon afterward left. “Bunch of ignoramuses,” he scoffed. “Didn’t know how to organize themselves.” He had tried to teach them what he knew about organizing from his time on the mainland; he had pushed them toward being more expansive, more radical in their approach. But they had wanted only small things, he said: more land set aside for poor Hawaiians, more social welfare programs. “That’s the problem with this place—it’s too provincial,” he often said. For, as appalled as he would be if this were pointed out to him, he too could be a snob; he too thought himself better.