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“You see, Sister? That’s all we have to do. Learn how to smile in the cannibal pot, and life would be so much easier.”
“ ‘There is beauty,’ she said, ‘in the least beautiful of things.’ ”
Yet sometimes it seems the world is more moved by the death of one white priest than by the passing of hundreds, thousands, of Hawaiians. Everyone knows Damien’s name now, but will anyone remember these girls, other than you and me?”
And as she watched the Lehua climb the steep incline of the ocean and gain the summit of the horizon, Rachel was filled with grief, loss, anger—and the wordless resolve that someday, somehow, she would follow her father over that horizon and down the other side, where the world lay hidden.
At the top of a tall flagpole a banner of stars and stripes snapped in the wind with a sound like gunshots. Its colors flew higher than anything else in Kalaupapa, its stars supplanting the stars in the sky, reminding Haleola and all Hawaiians in the settlement of everything they’d lost.
Haleola, for one, would have traded every scrap of lumber to see her kingdom’s flag flying again from this staff.
Small wonder that he always returned to the sea—the only place, she imagined, he felt at home any more.
“I have terrible taste in men,” Lani admitted. “But how do you make yourself want vanilla or strawberry when you really don’t have a taste for anything but chocolate?”
“No land is more beautiful,” Haleola said, “and therefore more powerful. That is what I believe in, Aouli. I believe in Hawai'i. I believe in the land.”
“Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.”
This was life, and if some things were kapu, others weren’t; she had to stop regretting the ones that were and start enjoying the ones that were not.
The sea, he told her, was always in command, humanity an invited guest; those who did not respect that did not return.
“God didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brain and the spirit to give himself wings. Just as He gave us the capacity to laugh when we hurt, or to struggle on when we feel like giving up. “I’ve come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death … is the true measure of the Divine within us. Some, like Crossen, choose to do harm to themselves and others. Others, like Kenji, bear up under their pain and help others to bear it. “I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn’t give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the
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The difference between Old Honolulu and New, she would come to decide, was the difference between a beautiful woman who was simply being herself and a beautiful woman calling attention to herself: a little vain perhaps, but you couldn’t say she wasn’t attractive.
And she grieved to realize that the home she had so loved existed now only in memory, as distant and insubstantial as the kingdom in which she’d been born.
The ache she’d felt for fifty years was gone and she could feel again what life was like without it: sweet, like a slice of cake from Love’s Bakery, or a cold glass of Tahiti lemonade on a hot day.
