Seeds of Liberty: Grass Skirts, Atabrine Pills---and Defiance!
An excerpt of James A. Michener's "Fo' Dolla'" in Tales of The South Pacific (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1946) with illustrations from the author's collection.
“You
got to watch ’em,” he whispered.
“Don’t they like the taste?” I inquired, smiling back at a grinning Tonkinese woman who stood waiting. “Taste ain’t nothin’ to a guy that chews betel,” Benny said. “Everything tastes the same.”
“Don’t they like the taste?” I inquired, smiling back at a grinning Tonkinese woman who stood waiting. “Taste ain’t nothin’ to a guy that chews betel,” Benny said. “Everything tastes the same.”
“Then
why the act with the atabrine?”
“Clever
bastards,” Benny grinned. “Took ’em about two weeks to discover
that them pills is a wonderful yellow dye. They keep ’em back of
their tongues and then use ’em to dye grass skirts with.”
“Grass
skirts?” I inquired.
“Yeah,”
he replied. “They make ’em.”
When the
session was ended, Benny grabbed a handful of his precious yellow
pills and threw them on the table. “For your skirts!” he shouted,
wiggling his hips as if he were wearing one of the grass skirts the
Tonks sold to American soldiers.
As
Tonkinese [Vietnamese] women battled for the valuable dyestuff the French
plantation owner, a man of forty-eight or more, stopped us. He was a
short, sloppy fellow, round-faced, bleary-eyed, stoop-shouldered. His
pants hung in a sagging line below his belly. He had a nervous manner
and a slight cough as he spoke.
“It’s
Monsieur Jacques Benoit!” Atabrine Benny cried in a loud, pleasant
voice. The plantation owner nodded slightly and extended a wet, pudgy
hand.
“Mr.
Benny,” he said forcefully. “Again, once more I asking you. Not
give the women pills!” His voice was harsh.
“It
don’t do any harm!” Benny argued.
“But
the gouvernment! Our gouvernment! And yours, too. They say,
‘Tonkinese! No more grass skirts!’ What I can do?” He shrugged
his shoulders apologetically.
“All
right!” Benny grumbled. “All right!”
“Remember,
Mr. Benny!” the Frenchman said, half pleading, half warning.
“Atabrine pills! They drink, OK. They use for grass skirt, no!”
Monsieur Benoit shrugged his shoulders and moved away.
“Them
damned Frenchies!” Benny snorted as we climbed in our jeep at the
foot of the hill.
“What’s
this about grass skirts, Benny?” I asked.
“The
plantation owners is getting scared. That’s all,” he grumbled.
“Why, you wouldn’t want a finer bunch of people to work with than
them Tonks. You can see that. It’s just them damned plantation
owners. And the guv’mint.”
“You
really mean the government has stopped the making of grass skirts?”
“They’re
tryin’ to, sir. But as you can plainly see. I’m doin’ me best
to bitch the works, you might say. It’s this way. These here Tonks
is brought out to the plantations to work the coconuts and coffee.
They come from Tonkin China [Vietnam], I been told. A French possession. They
come for three or five years. French guv’mint provides passage.
Then they’re indentured to these plantation owners, just like in
the old days settlers was indentured in America, especially
Pennsylvania and Georgia. A professor from Harvard explained it all
to me a couple of months ago. Said it was the same identical system.
Plantation owner promises to feed ’em, clothe ’em, give ’em
medical care.”
“What
does he pay them?”
“ ’Bout
ninety dollars a year, man or woman, is standard price now. Course,
they got good livin’ out here. That ninety is almost all profit.”
“Do
they ever go back to Tonkin?” I asked.
“Sure.
Most of ’em do. Go back with maybe four hundred dollars. Wife and
husband both work, you see. Rich people in their own country. Very
rich people if they save their dough. It’s not a bad system.”
“But
what’s this about the government and the grass skirts?” I
persisted. We were now in the jeep once more, and Benny, with his
stomach hunched up against the steering wheel, was heading for the
next plantation.
“Well,
that’s the economy of the island. It’s all worked out. Coconuts
worth so much. Cows worth so much. Cloth worth so much. Wages worth
so much. Everybody makes a livin’. Not a good one, maybe, but not
so bad, either. Then, bang!”
Benny
clapped his hands with a mighty wallop, then grabbed for the steering
wheel to pull the jeep back onto the road. “Bang!” he repeated,
pleased with the effect. “Into this economy comes a couple hundred
thousand American soldiers with more money than they can spend. And
everybody wants a grass skirt. So a Tonkinese woman, if she works
hard, can make eight skirts a week. That’s just what a good woman
can make, with help from her old man. So in one month she makes more
money than she used to in a year. You can’t beat it! So pretty soon
all of the Tonks wants to quit working for Monsieur Jacques Benoit
and start working for themselves. And Tonk men work on plantations
all day and then work for their wives all night making grass skirts,
and pretty soon everything is in a hell of a mess.” Benny jammed on
the brakes to avoid hitting a cow.
“It’s
just like the NRA back in the States. Mr. Roosevelt might be a great
man. Mind you, I ain’t sayin’ he ain’t. But you got to admit he
certainly screwed up the economy of our country. The economy of a
country,” Benny said, slapping me on the knee with each syllable,
“is a very tricky thing. A very tricky thing.”
“So
what happened?” I asked.
“Like
I told you. The economy out here went to hell. Tonks makin’ more
than the plantation owners. Their best hands stoppin’ work on cows
and coconuts. Tonk women who couldn’t read makin’ five, six
hundred dollars a year, clear profit. So the plantation French went
to the guv’mint and said, ‘See here. We got our rights. These
Tonks is indentured to us. They got to work for us.’ And the
guv’mint said, ‘That’s right. That’s exactly as we see it,
too.’ And strike me dead if they didn’t pass a law that no Tonk
could sell grass skirts ’ceptin’ only to plantation owners. And
only plantation owners could sell them to Americans!”
Benny
looked down the road. He said no more. He was obviously disgusted. I
knew I was expected to ask him some further question, but I had no
idea what. He solved my dilemma by walloping me a ham-handed smack on
the knee. “Can you imagine a bunch of American men, just good
average American men, letting any guv’mint get away with that?
Especially a French guv’mint?”
“No,”
I said, sensing an incipient Tom Paine. “I can’t quite imagine
it.”
“Neither
by God did we!” he grinned. He slowed the car down and leaned over
to whisper to me. “Why do you suppose all the grass skirts is
yellow these days? Didn’t they used to be red and blue? What do you
suppose?” And he tapped his big jar of atabrine pills. “And
there’s nothin’ in it for me. Not one goddam grass skirt do I
own,” he said. “Just for the hell of it!” and he grinned the
ancient defiance upon which all freedom, ultimately, rests.
“And I
am ashamed to admit,” he added in a low voice as he turned into a
lane leading toward the water’s edge, “that it was the Marines
who fought back. Not the Navy! I’m kind of ashamed that the Navy
should take such a pushin’ around. But not the Marines. Now you
watch when we get around this corner. There’ll be a bunch of Tonk
women and a bunch of Marines. They’ll think this is an MP car and
they’ll all run like hell. Watch!”
Atabrine
Benny stepped on the gas and drove like mad, the way the MP’s
always do when they get out of sight of other MP’s. He screeched
his jeep around a corner and pulled it up sharp about fifty yards
from the water. To one side, under a rude series of kiosks made of
bamboo and canvas, sat five or six Tonkinese women surrounded by
miscellaneous souvenirs and admiring Marines, fresh from
Guadalcanal.
At the
sight of Benny’s jeep bursting in upon them, Marines dived for the
coconut plantation and were soon lost among the trees. The Tonks
started to grab everything in sight and waddle like ducks into their
incredible little huts. But as they did so, one old woman saw that it
was not the malicious MP’s but good old Atabrine Benny.
“Haloo,
Benny!” she screamed in a hoarse voice. And that was my
introduction to Bloody Mary.
She was,
I judge, about fifty-five. She was not more than five feet tall,
weighed about no pounds, had few teeth and those funereally black,
was sloppy in dress, and had thin ravines running out from the
corners of her mouth. These ravines, about four on each side, were
usually filled with betel juice, which made her look as if her mouth
had been gashed by a rusty razor. Her name, Bloody Mary, was well
given.
Like all
Tonkinese women, Mary wore a simple uniform: sandals on her feet, a
conical peach-basket hat on her head, black sateen trousers, and
white blouse. And like all Tonkinese women, she was graceful, quick
in her movements, and alternately grave and merry. Her oval face was
yellow. Her eyes were Oriental. Her neck was beautifully
proportioned. Around it she wore a G.I. identification chain from
which hung a silver Marine emblem.
Because
of her ill-fitting sandals, she rolled from side to side as she
walked and the Marine emblem moved pendulum like across her bosom. But
her little peach-basket hat remained always steady above her white
blouse. She had a sly look as she approached the jeep. Her almond
eyes were inscrutable, but jesting. It was clear that she liked
Benny.
As soon
as she reached the jeep, she darted her strong small hand in, grabbed
the atabrine bottle, popped three pills into her mouth, chewed them
up, taste and all, and swallowed them without water. She then stole
a handful of the precious dye and placed it in a pocket of her sateen
pants. In a continuous motion she replaced the bottle, smiled her
horrible smile, black teeth now tinged with pale yellow, and walked
sedately away. Benny grabbed his bottle and waddled after her. To me,
they looked like two old ganders heading for the water.
Bloody
Mary, oblivious to everyone, returned to her bootlegger’s kiosk and
sat cross-legged on the earth beside a weird collection of items. She
had some grass skirts, predominantly yellow, some beautiful sea
shells, some mother-of-pearl, two bows with arrows, a new
peach-basket hat, three toy outrigger war canoes, and two hookahs,
the water-filled smoking pipes good either for tobacco or for opium.
Mary would probably get not less than eighty dollars for what she had
on display.
With
rapid motions of her arms she signaled the Marines in the coconuts to
come on back. Slowly they emerged, young, battle-old veterans who saw
in Bloody Mary a symbol of age-old defiance of unjust laws. I stood
to one side and to my surprise the first two men who entered her
kiosk were not Marines at all, but terribly embarrassed SeaBees.
Grinning at me and at the Marines, they unrolled the bundles they had
under their arms. Well made grass skirts tumbled out.
So the
stories were true! The SeaBees were a bunch of dressmakers! The Tonks
were selling grass skirts faster than they could make them or buy
them from natives. So the omnipresent SeaBees were in the game, just
as they were making Jap flags, Australian bracelets, and New Zealand
memorial gods. They were remarkable men, ingenious men, and there
just weren’t enough airfields to build to keep them busy all the
time.
Bloody
Mary appraised the skirts of the first SeaBee. She liked them. She
held up two fingers. “Two dolla’,” she suggested. The SeaBee shook his head. “Two-fifty!” he countered.
“Goddam
snovabcech no!!” Bloody Mary screamed at him, hitting him in the
stomach and kicking the skirts away.
“Two-fifty!”
the SeaBee persisted.
At this
Mary went into a paroxysm of rage, Tonkinese profanity ricocheted off
the surprised SeaBee’s head. When he could stand no more of Mary’s
cursing and the Marines’ laughter, he bundled up his wares and
moved away. But Mary kept after him. “Goddam stinker!” she
screamed hoarsely, following that with bursting Tonkinese epithets,
and ending with the Marine Corps’ choicest vilification: [fucking] bastard!”
Then
composing her placid face, the old harridan ignored the Marines’
applause, smiled sweetly at the next SeaBee, and began fumbling his
skirts. When he drew back, she patted him on his shoulder and
reassured him in Pidgin English, “Me look, me look, me buy.”
On the
way home Atabrine Benny told me how Mary had acquired her vocabulary.
“After the new laws she sneaked out here. Does a very good
business, although I expect they’ll close her out one of these
days. Well, after she had been here a little while, this bunch of
Marines from Guadal moved in. Rest cure. They came to like the old
devil. Then Benny went on to tell of how the Marines, with nothing
better to do, would hang around the betel-stained old Tonk and teach
her their roughest language.
“Stand
up like a man, and tell them to go to hell, Mary,” the old, tough
Marines would tell the old, tough Tonk. Mary would grin, not
understanding a word of what they were saying, but after they came to
see her for many days in a row the old miracle of the subdued races
took place again. The yellow woman learned dozens of white words but
the white men learned not one yellow word. When she had mastered
their vilest obscenities, they made her an honorary Marine, emblem
and all.
The
words Mary learned were hardly ones she could have used, say as a
salesgirl in Macy’s or Jordan Marsh. For example, if a sailor just
off a boat asked her the price of a grass skirt, she would smile
sweetly and say, “Fo’ dolla’.”
“ At’s
too much for a grass skirt, baby.”
Then
Mary would scream at him, thrusting her nose into his face,
“Bullshit, brother!”
She wasn’t quite sure what the words meant, but from the way new men would jump back in astonishment as if they had been hit with a board, she knew it was effective. And so she used it for effect, and more men would come back next week and say, “Four bucks for that. Not on your life!” just to hear the weathered old Tonk scream out some phrase they could report to the fellows in the saloon back home, “and then, by God, maybe those guys would know us guys was really seein’ somethin’ out here!” And for Mary the best part was that after she had cursed and reviled them enough, the astonished soldiers and sailors usually bought what she had to sell, and at her price.
She wasn’t quite sure what the words meant, but from the way new men would jump back in astonishment as if they had been hit with a board, she knew it was effective. And so she used it for effect, and more men would come back next week and say, “Four bucks for that. Not on your life!” just to hear the weathered old Tonk scream out some phrase they could report to the fellows in the saloon back home, “and then, by God, maybe those guys would know us guys was really seein’ somethin’ out here!” And for Mary the best part was that after she had cursed and reviled them enough, the astonished soldiers and sailors usually bought what she had to sell, and at her price.
When it
became apparent that Bloody Mary was not going to abide by the island
order, plantation owners asked the government to intervene with the
American military authorities.
“Would
the island command place Bloody Mary’s kiosk out of bounds?”
“Certainly!”
An order went out forthwith, and two military police were detailed to
see that no Americans visited the kiosk.
But who
was going to keep the kiosk from visiting the Americans? That was a
subtle problem, because pretty soon all that the military police were
guarding was an empty chunk of canvas strung across a pole about five
feet off the ground. Mary wasn’t there any more. She was up the
island, hidden among the roots of a banyan tree the Marines had
found. She was selling her grass skirts to more men than before,
because she was the only woman who dared defy both the civil and
military governments.
“But
commander,” the civil representative protested. “Your men are
still trading with her. The whole purpose of the law is being
evaded.”
“What
can we do? We put her place under restriction. But she doesn’t live
there any more. It seems to me that’s your problem.”
“Please,
commander! I beg you. Please see what you can do. The plantation
owners are complaining.” The civil representative bowed.
The
island commander scratched his head. His orders were to keep peace
and good will, and that meant with plantation owners, not with
Tonkinese or sailors off stray ships. Accordingly he dispatched an
underling to seek out this damned Bloody Mary what’s her name and
see what the score was.
The
officer, a naval lieutenant, went. He found Mary under a tree with a
half dozen admiring Marines around her. They were teaching her new
words. When the lieutenant came up, he bowed and spoke in French.
Mary listened attentively, for like most Tonks, she knew French
fairly well. The lieutenant was pleased that she followed his words
and that she apparently understood that she must stop selling grass
skirts not only at the kiosk but everywhere else as well. He smiled
courteously and felt very proud of himself. Dashed few officers
hereabout could speak French. He was not, however, prepared for
Mary’s answer. Standing
erect and smiling at her teachers, she thrust her face into that of
the young lieutenant and screamed, ''[fuck] you, major!”
The
officer jumped back, appalled! The Marines bit their lips and twisted
their stomach muscles into hard knots. Mary just grinned, the reddish
betel juice filling the ravines near her mouth. When she saw that the
lieutenant was shocked and stunned, she moved closer, until she was
touching him. He shrank away from the peach-basket brim, the sateen
pantaloons, but he could not writhe away from the hoarse,
betel-sprayed shout: “Bullshit, major!”
All he
could say was, “Well!” And with that austere comment on
Marine-coached Tonkinese women, he walked stiffly away and drove back
to the commander, who laughed down in his belly the way the enlisted
men had.
The
upshot was one of those grand Navy touches! By heavens, Bloody Mary
was on Marine property now. She was their problem! She wasn’t a
Navy problem at all! And the curt, very proper note that went to the
Marine Commandant made no bones about it: “Get the Tonkinese woman
known as Bloody Mary the hell off your property and keep her off.”
Only the Navy has a much better way of saying something like that
to the Marines, The latter, of course, aren’t fooled a bit by the
formality.....”
Semper Fidelis
Kenyon, July 4, 2020
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