The Dark Underbelly of Plantation Literature
The life of a plantation worker in Hawaiʻi was the life of a slave. Sugar plantations thrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Before the time of labor laws, workers would work the fields for twelve hours a day. Employers had only to pay what they felt like, and not give a living wage. Plantation life was, for those who worked the fields, “indentured labour denounced by some as a ‘new slavery’” (Bahadur). Plantation Christmas by Vivian Thompson and All I Asking for is My Body by Milton Murayama cover life on the plantation. These stories paint a picture that, in Murayama’s case, barely touch on the social unrest, and in Thompson’s case, completely misses the social unrest prevalent in one of the most detestable examples of American capitalism and drive for wealth. Plantation workers were constantly fighting for better wages, and suffering at the hands of their overlords. These stories miss the dark and horrible truth of plantation life.
All I Asking for is My Body is a story about a young boy named Kiyoshi growing up in a Hawaiʻi plantation. Kiyoshi’s family is always in debt, and because the family debt is everyone’s problem, Kiyoshi and his brother Toshio are expected to work the sugar cane fields in order to pay off the $6000 dollars that their parents owe. Kiyoshi’s father first arrived on Oahu as a boy in 1910. The year before, Hawai’i had its “first major plantation strike… Organized by issei” (HawaiiHistory.org). Just before Murayama’s story starts, tension was rising within the plantation world. The strike was organized by the same generation of immigrant plantation workers that Kiyoshi’s father would have made friends with. The 1909 strike was “an island-wide strike involving Japanese laborers from the various plantations on O'ahu” (Nakamura 71). Japanese newspapers had long been publishing the “harsh working and substandard living conditions endured by Japanese laborers for low pay” (Nakamura 73). The reality of the situation was that Japanese workers across the island were not happy with wages, but that is a fact that Kiyoshi’s father refuses to recognise. Kiyoshi’s father is so concerned with filial piety that he can barely look beyond his own nose. At dinner one night he said to Toshio, “That Minoru Tanaka is remarkable. He worked fifteen years for his parents before he got married” (Murayama 77). Kiyo’s father expects Tosh to pay off the debt, but in reality, Japanese workers knew that they were being treated unfairly. They knew that with the wages they earned, they could never make a living. Even before Kiyo’s father had come to Kahana, workers had been fighting, together, for fair wages. The movement was so strong that Japanese who spoke out against them were considered traitors. In 1909, Tomokichi Mori attacked Sometaro Shiba, the owner of “one of the major Japanese-language newspapers in Hawai’i, in Honolulu Hawaiʻi (Nakamura 69). Shiba had connections with large sugar plantation owners in Hawaiʻi. According to Tomokichi, he was a sellout and a traitor to his people. Sometaro was injured but not mortally wounded. Murayama chooses to ignore the collective movement of the Japanese people and create Kiyo’s father as a man who is ignorant of the labor disputes, and somehow thinks that debt can be paid off through wages earned at the plantation, a claim that Japanese across the island would have refuted instantly. By doing this, Murayama creates a story that eclipses the conflict of big plantation money vs. the workers who they misused, and instead pits the family members one against the other. He briefly touches on the strikes. Kiyo’s teacher mentions that the strikes are happening. Kiyo, like his father, dismisses them. In doing this, Murayama leaves the reader ignorant of the true struggles going on in the islands.
Murayama wasn’t the worst offender. At least he touched on the dark side of plantation life. Thompson, on the other hand, tried to paint the islands as a one of a kind paradise. She painted the islands the same way that journalists, looking to attract tourists did. Thompson wrote in her short story Plantation Christmas that Christmas time in 1957 was a happy time for all in the islands, and that “you troop down with the other guests to the hall, to see the Christmas play. Mary is a dark-eyed Portuguese girl and Joseph, a stalwart Hawaiian” (Thompson 55). Thompson did not identify the race of the ranch owner, nor that of the other guests who were watching the play with her which leads me to believe that they were all white. Identifying the race of someone indicated that they are unusual, or noteworthy. Thompson understood what it was to be privileged in Hawaiʻi, and to be on good terms with plantation owners that lived like kings. Those who looked in at Hawaiʻi from the outside rarely knew any of the social unrest prevalent in the islands.
Americans saw the islands as a place of magic. In 1947 Frank Taylor wrote a piece titled Labor Moves in on Hawaiʻi. Frank knew as little about the islands as anyone who had never set foot here. He wrote “The Hawaiian Islands, whose residents boasted for years that theirs was a melting pot that really melted, a sort of paradise where racial prejudice was unknown…” (Taylor). Taylor and Thompson knew nothing about the Big Five, a group of companies owned by a cast of all white members: “Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., American Factors (now Amfac) and Theo H. Davies & Co” who ruled the islands with an iron fist (Danninger). In the plantations, the cultures didn’t melt. The whites were on top, the rest were on the bottom. The power structure was so rigid that Attorney General of Hawaiʻi, Edmund Pearson Dole, said in 1903,“There is a government in this Territory which is centralized to an extent unknown in the United States, and probably almost as centralized as it was in France under Louis XIV” (Benham 137). Thompson saw Hawaiʻi in the same way that Taylor did. She saw the smiling faces of the oppressed people and assumed that all was well. But in 1957, the year in which her story took place, some of the hardest struggles for equality took place in the islands.
The 1950s were an especially hard time for budding unions including the ILWU in Hawaiʻi because, “the employers and the government stepped up their anti-union activities under the guise of anti-communism. When intimidation failed, they turned to outright frame-ups, as in the case of Jack W. Hall, ILWU’s regional director in Hawaiʻi. FBI agents seized Hall at his home at 6 p.m., August 28, 1951. He was indicted along with six other people, who, though not connected with ILWU, were named as Communists” (The ILWU Story). James Hall was convicted, and his sentence was overturned in 1958 after the United States Supreme court found the Smith Act, the act that Hall was convicted under, unconstitutional. In the 1950s, leaders of the Big Five would do anything in order to stifle union progress and retain control of their profits. Starting in September of 1957 the union asked for a twenty-five-cent an hour wage increase for all workers. Representatives of the Big Five said that a raise of that amount would be simply impossible. It would not be possible to give workers a living wage and make a profit. Workers went on strike and on December 18th, 1957 right before Christmas, “Industry ‘unequivocally rejected’ union’s demands” (Chronology).
Only a week before Thompson’s story took place, people across the island of Oʻahu were planning to strike. Tensions had come to a breaking point because representatives of the Big Five refused to raise wages and pay a living wage. How was it that Thompson saw a people so happy, when they were suffering so?
On February 1st of the next year, “13,800 sugar workers strike. Strike committees on all islands organized with the negotiating committee becoming the Territorial Strike Strategy Committee” (Chronology). Plantation workers all across the islands were fighting with their lives on the line at the end of 1957 and the beginning of 1958. Workers didn’t earn money while they were on strike. Slowly they were withering away, hoping for a brighter future, and all Vivian Thompson could see was how happy and cheerful everyone was.
Neither Thompson nor Murayama covered the hardships of striking and fighting with the Big Five, and in doing so, misrepresented what was really going on in the islands. Murayama chose to overlook it, in favor of hardships felt at home. Thompson looked at Hawaiʻi through the eyes of an American, and found beauty that was only covering up the dirt beneath.
Works Cited
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Benham, Maenette K. P., and Ronald H. Heck. Culture and Educational Policy in Hawaiʻi: The Silencing of Native Voices. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1998. Print.
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Danninger, Lyn. "Isle Institutions Economic Impact Endures." Honolulu Star-Bulletin Special. Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 29 Sept. 2002. Web. 12 Mar. 2015.
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Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. Honolulu, Hawaii: U of Hawaii, 1988. Print.
Nakamura, Kelli Y. "Violence And Press Incendiarism: Media And Labor Conflicts In The 1909 Strike." Hawaiian Journal Of History 45.(2011): 69-99. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Mar. 2015.
Thompson, Vivian. “Plantation Christmas.” Island Fire. Ed. Cheryl Harstad and James Harstad. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002. 55-57. Print.
“The ILWU Story - Hawaii.” ILWU Local 19, January 14, 2015. Web. 27 Feb. 2015. <http://www.ilwu19.com/history/the_ilwu_story>
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