Part 7

Up the long lane from the railroad station and past the penitentiary; then some tumbledown sheds in the last stages of decay but occupied by human beings; next a few cottages, reasonably well-kept and attractive, all of them rented for immoral purposes. Then the canneries themselves. But up this road, almost half a mile long, must come the women and girls who work in the three establishments offering practically all the work obtainable in Honolulu by unskilled workers. The only alternative to this route is the unsafe one across the railroad tracks. Not only must the workers come this way, but they must return home either through this district—meeting and being accosted by soldiers and citizens on their way to the dives—or else they must cross the railroad tracks, almost always after dark, with dim light down the alley and no light at all across the tracks.

Immediately beyond the canneries lies the remainder of the Iwilei district—running up almost to the cannery gates. In this section are the only lunch rooms available for the cannery employes. The girls and women must either come here, or must bring their lunch, or purchase the sweet rolls, cakes, candy and soda water which are the only refreshments sold by the Japanese who bring their lunch wagons to the cannery premises at noon and in the evening. Either course means a cold meal after five hours of work, with no place to sit down and eat it.

The restaurants of the district are surprisingly clean and all owned by Chinese. They fill to their capacity a few moments after 12 o’clock with men and women, boys and girls, of all nationalities. The bill of fare varies from coffee and rolls for five cents to a dinner:—a bowl of soup with bread, accompanied by an egg or a plate of stew, for fifteen cents. A Chinese woman and a child—a girl about ten years old—shared a ten cent plate of rice and stew. Men and girls chaffed one another familiarly.

A tall, bony Korean made his lunch of coffee and sweet rolls. He said he had had the same thing for breakfast, before starting work at 7 o’clock, but sometimes varied this menu with a bowl of milk. He got his dinner at a restaurant in town for ten cents. He said he was working his way through school.

In another restaurant a Porto Rican woman sat in the corner smoking a cigarette. She spoke no English. Her neighbor at table was a young Hawaiian woman—an ex-teacher—who told us she had married and given up her school; but her husband earned only $35 a month driving a baker’s wagon, so she worked during the canning season. This particular restaurant stands between two of the most notorious resorts in the district.

As we left, a small, thin Hawaiian girl was about to enter the shop to buy a sweet to finish lunch. She and her grandmother worked together in one of the canneries. She had earned $4.50 the week previous. She said she was sixteen years old, but she did not look fourteen. Her grandmother, between canning seasons, earns $3 a week packing coffee. The grandfather has asthma and cannot work. The girl said they had only poi for each of their three meals, sometimes with a little dried fish or an onion for flavoring.

The women of the district, when asked about the cannery girls’ presence in the district, spontaneously expressed the opinion that “it was wrong for the little ones to come here.” They said keepers of houses in the district frequently accosted the girls in the restaurants; but they had not seen any of the girls go into the houses.

One of the women told us of a little Filipino wife, only fifteen years old, who worked in the cannery with her husband; but he had been sick and when the baby came they had no furniture and there was no money to provide the necessaries for either mother or child. “And so” said M—— “we women just got together and made the baby clothes, and got her a bed and some things. Why,” she added shamefacedly, “you’d have thought it was a sewing circle, to look at us.”

We saw what I was told is a very rare thing indeed—a pure-blooded Hawaiian girl in one of the resorts. We spoke to her, and the Humane Officer, who was with me, and who spoke her native tongue, said the girl appeared to be weakminded.

The suggestion was offered by the foreman at one of the canneries that if a serious effort were made the district might be turned into a community of workingmen’s cottages. This seems a much more likely way of cleaning up the industrial district at any rate, than any process of law would be likely to lead to. If this could be done, and a club house established where hot luncheons would be served and a rest-room provided, it would indeed be replacing figs for thistles. No more promising place for establishing a basis for relationship with the girls who work in the canneries could be wished for than would be afforded by such a center.

THE WORKERS

HAWAIIAN.

The wage-earning Hawaiian has, as the kindly French saying goes, the faults of his qualities. Naturally gay and pleasure-loving he has worked, fished, swam, sang and feasted his way through life as he listed, and it is only a generation since he took his rest with equal ease on the shores of his beloved ocean or beneath the boughs of the hau tree. Luaus and hulas were frequent and Hawaiian hospitality is still proverbial. He has never learned to say “no” to whomsoever may be the latest comer.

Each man had the grant of his own kuleana, with a taro-field on the mountainside or up in the valley where the showers are frequent and a place to fish on the seashore. The newly prepared taro-field yielded first its wild crop of popolo; and cocoanuts, guavas, yams, mountain apples, water lemons and breadfruit were his for the gathering.

Large numbers of the natives have now, however, almost wantonly mortgaged, sold or given away their property. The temptation has been great to lease the acre or acre and a half constituting their little domain, to the Japanese or Chinese gardeners at $40 or $50 annually, and then borrow small sums from their tenants, until some morning they wake and find themselves no longer in possession.

Hundreds of families, too, still live on the lands of their old chiefs or of the kamaaina families, who pay the taxes. So long as they live they may remain there, raising their taro, flowers, chickens and pigs. The fishing of commerce has passed into the hands of the Japanese but a man’s own “catch” is sufficient for himself and family.

This “family” is apt to be made up of all his unattached friends and relatives, male and female, less well-off than himself, who sometimes pay for at any rate their food by a donation of a proportion of the family necessities in poi or canned meats or fish. Others, however, pay nothing at all. The thrifty, hardworking man is, therefore, often heavily handicapped. The more thoughtful of the older Hawaiians say that the next ten years must bring a change: mortgages contracted with no thought of repayment (sometimes the money has been borrowed to give a luau) will fall due; competition for work will increase; and while the head of the house may at the present time be earning a comfortable living as a carpenter, a blacksmith, a painter, or a longshoreman, etc., a man in the next generation, with his rent to pay, will find that his hospitality and even his ability to care for his immediate family may be curtailed. This of course in the event of his pursuing his present improvident way.

The Hawaiian home—the wage-earner’s home—varies so that it is difficult to form any judgment of the economic status of the occupant. A tenement room, by its bareness, is apt to give an impression of extreme poverty which the facts in the case do not warrant. Cottages of well-to-do natives frequently have no furnishings but a lauhala mat on the floor and portraits of departed kings and queens on the wall. On the other hand, one happens on a heavily upholstered, gilt-picture-framed-center-table-with-the-family-Bible house which brings one back to the East Side of New York City with scarcely a jar.

The native menu is simple; one full meal a day is the rule; coffee and bread or simply a bowl of poi constituting the other two. The omission of a meal or two now and then troubles the Hawaiian not at all. Poi, fish, fruit, with an occasional indulgence in yams, taro-top-greens and pork or chicken, forms the usual bill of fare.

The holoku is still the almost universal dress of the native women. The missionary who had this sartorial inspiration was a true artist, for no other garment could give the touch of stateliness and dignity to the almost invariably full Hawaiian figure that in American attire might well be awkward and ungainly.

The native girl of pure Hawaiian blood is generally large-boned, but slender—even to daintiness when there is a mixture of some other blood—with flashing eyes and a profusion of long, black hair, almost always with threads of grey before the twentieth year is reached. Her teeth are even and white and she laughs a great deal, particularly when she tells you that father or mother has joined the Mormons—not father and mother—a procedure which is becoming more and more common, and which for some reason not yet made apparent, always affords the other members of the family much amusement.

Employers say generally that Hawaiian girls, while amiable and amenable, have not the energy and push necessary to make them thoroughly efficient. There is a general impression that they are irresponsible, and that good fishing weather, a family luau or a fancied offense are each one by itself or collectively sufficient reason for discontinuing business relations. An examination, however, which was made of the time books in three distinct occupations—a cannery, a laundry and a wholesale house, showed an almost clean record for married women and girls alike, so far as absences were concerned. With the exception of a day here and there—far less than the average of absences elsewhere—the four months covered showed steady work. The girls are prompt, employers say, in coming to work in the morning, but are apt to dawdle before settling down to their occupation both in the morning and after the lunch period.

In a number of instances, it was found that work had been given up and employment changed because pay envelopes had been short several hours’ time, in spite of the fact that in every case the mistake had been corrected when called to the foreman’s attention.

None of the women or girls spoken with had any complaints to make concerning their work. Although limping painfully after a week of standing from seven in the morning until seven or eight o’clock at night—often their first experience with any sort of occupation—they stoutly maintained that they were not tired.

Managers of both canneries and laundries say that they have no difficulty in securing Hawaiian girls. An advertisement for help always brings more applicants than there are positions, except during the few heaviest weeks of the canning season.

One tender-hearted proprietor said he never advertised because he couldn’t bear to disappoint the girls; but always secured new workers through those he already employed. Boardinghouse keepers tell of girls who waited on the table and did chambermaid’s work during the summer to pay for their books at Normal school.

Among the most ubiquitous and characteristic of the native workers—the lei-makers and vendors—one finds few young girls. Perhaps this is because of the problem peculiar to the Hawaiian girl in Honolulu, which is created for the most part by her inheritance. The echo of the old Hawaiian traditions of hospitality, or perhaps a phase of that same hospitality which now finds expression in welcoming the stranger to her native land, tends to give the less carefully trained native girl an unreserve that, combined with a genuinely sweet and friendly nature, too often causes her to fall an easy victim to men who regard her as legitimate prey. The large transient element and especially the numbers of soldiers quartered on the island, make it actually unsafe for a girl to go about her business unmolested unless she is possessed of unusual force of character.

But in spite of this, and in spite too of the fact that the problem of subsistence has not yet become acute for the Hawaiians in Honolulu, a large number of the native women and girls, with the awakening of new desires—whether for more wearing apparel, more amusement, more education, or more opportunity—are becoming serious workers.