A few days later Helen asked me to drive her down to the Keawala’i Congregational Church in Makena. After showing me around to several graves, telling me who was buried in them and what place they had in the family she took me aside and said, “You know I’m a good Christian, but we also have our own traditions and beliefs. So I’m going to show you some things you must not show anyone else.”
Helen had already shared some of her healing remedies with me. She was the family healer and I learned that one day when someone had brought her a child who’d broken his leg. It had been set and put in a cast in the hospital, but they’d brought him to Helen so she could “help” the healing. She took me out and showed me the young leaves of a certain tree, told me to pick them for her and brought them back where she used a mortar and pestle to pulp them and make a tea the boy was made to drink. She also said some words in Hawai’ian while passing her hands over his cast. She’d explained what she was doing at each step.
So I knew she was a healer and that she was teaching me. Now I’d learn that she was a shaman. She was a kahuna lāʻau lapaʻau.
We walked a way behind the church to a certain spot where she introduced me to a certain tree. Then a large rock or stone she explained was sacred. And finally down a path she’d chosen to a place along the shore above the ocean. She told me that this was where the spirits of her ancestors would visit and help the living. She told me how they were summoned. In a way I can’t describe I was visualizing and hearing the scenes she was describing to me. She told me that I needed to know these things because I was joining the family. So I’m respecting her wish and not describing the Wahi Pana in detail.
For the next few months I saw little of anyone outside the extended family and they’d speak to me in Hawai’ian. So I was slowly and unconsciously finding myself conversing with them, and to such an extent that I had to consciously switch back to English.
One day that all changed so suddenly that I took some time for me to adjust. Helen arrived at my door looking down and depressed. I’d never before seen her like this. Angry, yes. Worried, yes. But never like this.
She started off by apologizing to me for the hurt this would cause. She was also upset by the “shame” it had brought on her family. Her granddaughter was pregnant. It still hadn’t gotten through to me that all this had been about me marrying her granddaughter. A friend had joked about the significance of the pikake lei, but I treated it as a joke. The suggestion that I’d proposed to her island style didn’t resonate.
According to Helen, the granddaughter had had a brief but clearly significant affair with a “carpet layer” who was working in a crew that put in new carpet in the place where both Helen and her granddaughter worked. Not that a bride is expected to be a virgin in Polynesia, but at least pregnant with the groom’s child.
The penny finally dropped. The granddaughter and I were never close. Far from it. I thought she disliked me and everything I saw confirmed it. I imagine the marriage had been the family’s idea and she went along with it because she wasn’t given a choice. Maybe getting pregnant was her way out of it. It was certainly mine. Laid by a carpet layer!
My relationship with Helen remained close. But I was no longer being trained up for something in the future. I was back to where I started. Not ostracized. Close, just not one of the extended family anymore.
I still had some amazing experiences and Maui continued to be what I came to refer to as a “cosmic playpen in a crystal sea.” But more of that later.
My Hānai Mother © Robert R. Feigel 2022
Pieces from a Puzzling Life 