There are times when I hear people talk disparagingly about life on Hawaii’s sugar plantations, and I don’t recognize anything they’re saying. I think that’s because they didn’t live it.
My father spent his career in sugar. Both my grandfathers worked in sugar. Three of my great-grandfathers worked in sugar. I’ve lived in plantation houses in Waikapu, Wailuku, Koloa, Olokele
and Pahala.
I have never heard a person who actually worked in sugar speak bitterly about paternalism or oppression or terrible working conditions. The only people who rail about how bad sugar workers had it are people who did not grow up in sugar families.
This is what it was like:
A plantation job came with housing. Imagine that! The houses were decent and roomy and, even by today’s standards, charming. If a fuse went out in a plantation house, you didn’t pick up the yellow pages in the hope of finding an honest electrician. The plantation electrician would come that same day, and it was someone you knew by name. It was the same with plumbing, be it a drippy faucet or a backed-up cesspool. Often, the plumber brought vegetables from his garden or a big bag of mangoes. Sometimes the electrician and the plumber were the same man. The houses had yards where dogs and children could run free. People kept gardens and dried laundry in the sunshine.
In older times there were plantation doctors, but by the 1960s the plantations had health care plans. I remember my mother taking me in for immunizations and reaching into her purse for a copayment of $1.
When there was a big storm, the plantation sent out work crews and company equipment to clear downed trees from the roads — not just plantation roads, but public roads, too — anywhere the county needed help.
If there was torrential rain or high surf, the plantation would send out teams with sandbags — burlap bags filled with sand from plantation land — and pump trucks and backhoes, at any hour of the day or night.
During the holidays the towering Norfolk pines that served as Christmas trees for local schools and churches came from the line of windbreak trees planted in the fields. The plantation would cut the tree, truck it to the school and help put it up — it was a full-service donation.
The plantation was where community groups would go for donations for baseball uniforms and Boy Scouts and booths at the county fair. The plantation could be counted on to buy an ad in the drama club program or the yearbook or the pageant booklet. For big things like brush fires and small things like providing ditch toads for science class dissections, the plantation would help. It wasn’t a scary faceless corporation. It was people you knew.
Paternalistic? The sugar strike of 1946 brought huge changes to Hawaii sugar and Hawaii politics. That was 70 years ago, yet that accusation still gets unfairly thrown at Hawaii’s sugar industry. It wasn’t as though we were treated like we couldn’t think for ourselves, though the plantation was there to help if anyone asked. The plantation life supported professional growth, and promotions came from within. The younger generations went off to college, our tuition paid for by plantation wages.
Yes, the plantation required hard work. That didn’t use to be a bad thing. In fact, for generations people valued hard work as a measure of things like ability and fortitude and one’s usefulness in the community.
If you didn’t live it, don’t tell me how it was. You can pretend to your equally ignorant friends that you know all there is to know about sugar in Hawaii and get it all mixed up with a movie you saw depicting the early 1900s or the shameful past of plantations in the South. You can look down your nose at the way generations of local families grew up and the things we hold dear. You can idealize a Utopian tomorrow that you will never admit is pretty close to how the best days of sugar were for Hawaii, but you can’t tell me that what I lived wasn’t pretty wonderful.
Or you can. But you will be wrong.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
