Moloka'i

“The news was telephoned from Diamond Head and quickly spread across the city like a shadow across the sun; the festive banners and bunting put up in anticipation of Kalākaua’s return were quickly torn down and replaced with solemn black crepe.”

As the steamer bringing the king back from the United States flies a flag at half mast, a signal he has died, the mood in Honolulu changes, and the city transforms from one filled with joy to one filled with grief. Imagining the news as a shadow blocking out the sun conveys the totality of it, blanketing the city, like solemn black crepe covering the sun.

“Pono lay on the ground, half blinded, the tears in his eyes not from the smoke but from the thought of what he was about to lose. His cheek had been abraded by the bramble of cane, but the livid red blemish beneath his left eye was a wound of a very different sort, and a mark—permanent and ineradicable—of his shame and his fear.”

As the Health Inspector attempts to apprehend Pono, the overseers set the cane field ablaze, smoking him out like a hunted animal. While the cane scratches him, a wound without pain marks him more completely—the blemish associated with Hansen’s disease wounds the body and the status, stigmatizing its bearer.

“And now its offspring comes—grown like a mold from the culture of our lust and laziness—and my children, it comes to kill us! To burn the very memory of us from the earth as lava boils away the sea, and if we let it happen, then we deserve it.”

In a possible echo of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Hawaiian preacher at Dorothy’s church personifies sin, especially sexual sins. He claims that these sins produce “leprosy” as punishment. Invoking apocalyptic imagery, the preacher compares the spread of Hansen’s disease to the cooling of lava in the ocean, seeing loss in a process that actually helped create the Hawaiian islands.