The Not-Quite States of America Read online

  We booked a room at a hotel called Sadie’s by the Sea, named for the lady-of-the-night protagonist of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 short story “Miss Thompson,” which was turned into the movie Rain, starring Joan Crawford, and also inspired its share of stateside theme restaurants with rain sound effects.‡ And in late June, we flew to LAX, then Honolulu, then five hours south by southwest, across the equator and just a few miles shy of the International Date Line, to Tutuila, the main island in American Samoa (in the independent nation of Samoa, forty miles west, it was already the next day).

  We arrived at night in a haze of jet lag and collapsed in bed. In the morning, refreshed and bright-eyed, we poked our heads outside to see if any of our fantasy was true. The hotel sat near the mouth of the broad Pago Pago Harbor, which thrust so far inland that we couldn’t see, from here, where it ended up. White tuna-fishing boats lolled in the cobalt waters. Jungle-shrouded snaggletooth hills ran up and down the coastline, forming the spine of the twenty-mile-long island; straight across the harbor was Rainmaker Mountain, scratching the clouds that swirled on a whispering trade wind, the only sign that it was the beginning of winter here in the only bit of the USA south of the equator. We walked up a path past a sliver of a beach and a swimming pool in the shape of a fruit bat, to the reception desk, where we were welcomed by a young woman in a blue muumuu and with a white hibiscus flower tucked behind her ear. She gave us directions into town, a short walk away, and then turned to two burly men who had just entered, wearing sarong-like wrap skirts called lavalavas and swirling geometric tattoos on their bulging biceps. The men greeted us in unaccented English, then addressed the receptionist in a flowing melody of glottal stops that I took to be Samoan. The road into town, Route 1, was narrow, and traffic proceeded slowly. Tutuila’s speed limit is twenty-five miles per hour and there are no stoplights in the territory. The sidewalk was edged with shoulder-height bushes with bright bursts of flowers.

  Maren and I exchanged looks: So far, so good.

  IN THE BEGINNING, there was the god Tagaloa, who lived in the expanse of infinite space. There was nothing else until Tagaloa grew tired and created a rock to rest on. He called the rock Manu’atele, but we know it as the Manu’a Islands, out in the eastern part of American Samoa. Tagaloa split the rock into pieces. They became sky and earth and water and everything that exists. From the original rock, he made the rest of the islands of Polynesia, and also the first people: a man named Fatu—Heart—and a woman named Ele’ele—Earth. He put them on Manu’atele, and then he placed two more people on each of the other islands: Fi and Ti on Fiji, To and Ga on Tonga, Tutu and Ila on Tutuila. This is how we all got here.

  Or, according to the archaeologists’ version, American Samoa was settled about thirty-five hundred years ago, by the Lapita people from Fiji. They’ve found pottery that connects the cultures. The Lapita were masters of the sea, just like their ancestors and their ancestors, going back to people who left Malaysia and Indonesia around 7,000 BC. Entire families spent weeks on outrigger canoes, not knowing where they were heading, but hoping they’d reach somewhere nice, and they settled here.

  “Either history is pretty impressive, right?”

  This was the earnest-faced question from a young docent named Ioane—“Samoan for William, but you can call me Will.” Maren and I had stopped at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Center on our way into Pago Pago—the territory’s capital—and Will led us around a one-room exhibit space about the territory’s marine conservation areas, of which there are ten. The history and traditional stories were all Will’s addition, told with an eager smile. This, he said, would help us understand why people cared so much about keeping their surroundings as pristine as possible. When we’d arrived, the center’s main room, a high-ceilinged hexagon, had been filled with a conservation day camp, forty or so kids hunched over small tables, eyeing a PowerPoint projection reading VERTEBRATES, with a still from Finding Nemo as the background.

  Will continued, adding that the Lapita used wave patterns and stars and clouds to find their way; there are still a handful of people, he said, who can navigate this way.

  Our Bearer of Traditional Tales wore a yellow polo shirt and tan cargo shorts and a fauxhawk. “How long do you think you’d last out there in a canoe?” he asked me with a smirk.

  I laughed. Maren laughed harder. Me? An effete Tocqueville-quoter from a landlocked city? Mere seconds.

  “How about you?” I asked. Dude was big—when we shook hands, my fingers were saplings among redwoods—but he had an athletic lightness on his feet. Plus, despite his preppy appearance, he was probably well schooled in all traditional ways and—

  “Maybe a few hours,” he said, flashing me a brief sideways look followed by an eye-bug of exaggerated fear. He seemed to be saying: I know what you’re thinking. I know your expectations here.

  He pointed to the next display. “Have you been to Vaitogi?”

  We shook our heads. Just got here last night.

  Outside the village, he said, was a cove known as Turtle and Shark, drawing its name from the story of a grandmother and granddaughter who were cast out of their family and leapt off a cliff in despair, but transformed into a turtle and a shark when they hit the water.

  Stories like this, Will said, were intrinsic to fa’asamoa, the Samoan Way. Fa’asamoa encapsulates food, music, architecture, rituals and traditions, the organization of families and communities. Every village has its own defining stories.

  “If you go over to Vaitogi and look at the water, you might be able to see them.” Will’s fauxhawk bobbed again. I wasn’t sure how to read the suggestion: Was it earnest, full of cultural pride? Or was it, “Yeah, go spend an afternoon staring at waves—good luck with that, tourist?

  Will moved on to a photo of a giant clam. “Old people think it’s a delicacy, so I guess I’m supposed to, too,” he said.

  “And?” Maren prompted.

  “I don’t really like it very much.” Will grimaced reflexively and then looked guilty for the grimace.

  PAGO PAGO is even more enjoyably Seussian when said correctly—Pongo Pongo—and, in conversation, it’s typically halved: “Let’s go into Pago,” Maren said as we left the NOAA Center. (Also, Samoa is properly pronounced “SAH-moa,” not “Sam-OH-a.”) It’s a small town, population 3,656;§ the entire territory has about 55,000, the vast majority of whom live on Tutuila. The architecture is plain, the atmosphere calm and working-class and notably safer than Charlotte Amalie; “You can walk around anywhere,” a local man told us shortly after we arrived. “Your only concern is stray dogs.” There are no colonial forts here, and also no thatch-roofed huts, just a lot of one- and two-story cinder-block buildings. It’s not South Seas Wonderland, but it does have its own low-key charm, which comes in part from its lack of tourist flash. There are no duty-free shops on Tutuila, no chain hotels, no resorts. (Tourists are so rare that hotels peg their rates to the U.S. government’s current per-diem limits, knowing that bureaucrats here on business are their core clientele.)

  At one end of downtown was the territorial legislature—called the Fono—which looked like an exact cross between a modern government building (stately, lots of windows) and a fale, a traditional Samoan structure with a domed roof perched atop wooden posts. Across the way was a row of small shops and markets and, in a parking lot, a slickly branded cell-phone kiosk with a short line of patrons. At the public market, vendors had set out baskets woven from palm fronds and filled with papayas and breadfruit and bananas whose amber color was so vibrant they seemed internally lit. An elderly woman in a long green dress was selling coconuts, and when we handed over our $2 each, she pulled out a machete and sliced a tiny piece off the top of each shaggy brown orb and inserted pink straws. We loitered for a few minutes, watching buses—which looked like close-sided versions of the USVI’s safaris—come and go from a parking lot set between the market and a new-looking McDonald’s. Across the water, we could see the island’s economic lifeblood: tuna ca
nneries, large and hulking and industrial, The Jungle at the edge of the jungle.

  A pair of teenage boys watched us with amusement. They were wearing Golden State Warriors jerseys and matching flat-brimmed baseball caps, paired with lavalavas. They looked sharp—they were pulling off the combo. I couldn’t help but notice a silvery glint underneath the hats—not diamond studs on their ears but large silver disks inside their ears. They were quarters, bus fare. Most lavalavas have no pockets, so you make do.

  I took stock of my surroundings: the market, the people, the Fono, which was flying the territorial flag, featuring a bald eagle with two traditional objects in its talons: a fue whisk and a uatogi war club. If Charlotte Amalie was a swirl of cultures, this was a perfect split between Mainland American and Samoan. And in the push-pull of cultural interaction, it was hard to see which way the balance was tipping.

  “Are there a lot of traditions the old people keep up but young people don’t?” I’d asked Will.

  Maren had shot me a look that I immediately translated as: Dude, no need to make him explain the universal truth that culture evolves. We all know this and now you’re just obnoxiously forcing him to say, “Yes, of course,” and to enumerate all the ways—

  “Well . . .” Will said, his expression suddenly ruminative after all that joking around. “It’s pretty complicated.”

  THE FIRST European to arrive on Tutuila was the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, who landed here in 1787. In the next century, he was followed by a string of merchants, whalers, missionaries, and colonizers. Germans staked a major claim first. Then came the British and the Americans, around 1869, when the Union Pacific Railroad opened, connecting the United States coasts and improving prospects for trade with the British colonies of Australia and New Zealand. That tremendous slash of a harbor in Pago Pago was a perfect coaling station for Pacific-crossing ships. As with the USVI and California and Oregon, commerce was the key.

  At the same time, Samoa’s village chiefs, called matais, were feuding. A civil war simmered throughout the 1870s and 1880s, with Germany, Britain, and the USA opportunistically nudging the fighting and power struggles toward their own interests. By the early 1880s, as Foster Rhea Dulles recounted in his 1932 book America in the Pacific, “the diplomatic wires between Washington, London, and Berlin began to hum.” It was strictly a political matter, nothing that riled up the American public, until there were reports that the Germans had destroyed American property and defaced an American flag, which “awoke a storm of indignation throughout the country.”

  In the nineteenth century, Republicans generally supported overseas expansion and Democrats typically opposed it. President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, refused calls to annex Hawaii, on the grounds that this would violate the Monroe Doctrine, since it was outside the Americas. He also didn’t think annexation of American Samoa was constitutionally justified, but here there was another factor on his mind: the possibility that Germany might take the islands if the Americans did not. Pressure built from Congress and the public, aided by the fact that, as Christina Ponsa had said, Reconstruction had ended and the nation was again looking to prove its place in the world.

  “Interest in Samoa was a straw which showed which way the wind was blowing” in terms of foreign policy, Dulles wrote, “and it is not without significance that . . . these events coincided with the successful movement for building up a new navy.”

  In August 1888, American warships stationed at Tutuila smuggled rifles to supporters of a matai named Mata’afa, who “felt the time was right to test his army against the forces of Tamasese, who were backed by German marines.”

  On March 11, 1889, it all came to a head in Apia, on the island of Upolu, in what’s now the independent nation of Samoa. Seven warships were anchored in the harbor—three American, three German, one British—and, onshore, stood Mata’afa and six thousand troops. Everything was set up for a ferocious, bloody battle, soldiers just waiting for the command. And then, before a shot was fired, a hurricane hit. The ships were tossed about in the looming waves. The German ship Eber was the first to go down, after it struck a reef; another German vessel, Olga, lost control and hit the British ship Calliope and the Americans’ Nipsic. Of all the ships, only Calliope rode out the storm; all the others sank or ran aground, killing 150 sailors. Local Samoans, their own villages flattened, risked their lives to swim out and help, forming a human chain to rescue the men from the sinking ships.

  Their battle ruined by the storm, the British, Americans, and Germans decided to simply share the administrative duties of Samoa. The Americans requested and received full control of Pago Pago Harbor. For ten years this was the setup: Samoa remained officially sovereign but was a quasi-colony with three overseers. But in 1899, the USA, Britain, and Germany decided they’d had enough with the sharing, and split Samoa in two: the Americans got Tutuila (because they already had that claim to Pago Pago) and the islands to the east, and Germany claimed the western islands, including Savai’i and Upolu, both more than twice the landmass of Tutuila. Britain got none of the Samoan islands but, in exchange, received German claims elsewhere in the Pacific and in West Africa, whose residents were presumably mystified about how they’d gotten dragged into all of this.

  The deal had the blessing of the highest-ranking matais on Tutuila and its small neighbor, Aunu’u, who drafted the paperwork to turn the islands over to the United States officially and with full-throated approval: “SALUTATIONS!!” the Deed of Cession begins. “We rejoice with our whole hearts on account of the tidings we have received . . .” The United States had annexed the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1898, and the matais were aware that American annexation was inevitable here, too. There was pressure, even duress, but the fact remains—and American Samoans are deeply proud of this fact—that these islands were granted to, not claimed by, the USA.

  On February 19, 1900, President William McKinley signed an executive order decreeing that “the Island of Tutuila, of the Samoan Group, and all other islands of the group east of longitude 171 degrees west of Greenwich, are hereby placed under the control of the Department of the Navy for a naval station.” Two months later, on April 17, 1900, in a ceremony in Pago Pago, the American flag was raised, while Samoan students from a missionary-run school sang “America” in English. And then: a big party, with games and sports and a feast of roasted pigs. (The three Manu’a Islands were ceded to the United States in 1904, and the territory’s final parcel, Swain’s Island, in 1925.)¶

  The matais who opposed becoming American decamped to Western Samoa, forty miles west, which was claimed by New Zealand in 1914, during World War I, and gained independence in 1962. The nation, which now has a population just under two hundred thousand, dropped “Western” from its name in 1997, although most people in American Samoa still refer to their neighbor this way, a not-so-subtle way of saying, You aren’t the only real Samoans—we are, too.

  WITH HAWAII and American Samoa now part of the USA, the interest in all things Polynesian began to build back in the states. As Sven A. Kirsten details in his excellent 2014 book Tiki Pop, the decades-long trend began with nineteenth century books by the likes of Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, but took off after the turn of the century, progressing to music—“Uncle Joe has sold his banjo / Plays his ukulele soft and low” went one 1917 song—and then to movies such as Hurricane and Mutiny on the Bounty, and spreading tiki bars, tiki motels, and even tiki bowling alleys. In the 1960s, near the end of this pop-culture moment, shows featuring actual South Seas performers were a mainstay of glitzy hotels in Las Vegas and Miami, Kirsten notes, showcasing “the Samoan fire dance, the Maori haka, the Hawaiian hula, the Tahitian drum dance”—aggregated and tailored for tourists, to be sure, but with at least some basis in actual tradition and performed “with an honest and joyful sense of ambassadorship.”

  At the Showboat Casino & Hotel in Las Vegas in the late 1960s, the marquee revue was Evalani & Her South Seas Islanders. Its star, Evalani P
earson, eventually moved back home to American Samoa and opened a restaurant called Evalani’s Cabaret Lounge, which Maren and I had heard was one of the few places to get a glimpse of the Packaged Polynesia we’d been picturing back in Minneapolis.

  It was raining when Maren and I arrived at Evalani’s one night. We’d been walking around for hours and were thoroughly soaked. As my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting inside, I felt like I’d stepped into a time warp, but not the tiki-bar throwback I’d expected—it had the air of a Rat-Pack-style lounge, with semicircular red vinyl booths, sconces with red and green bulbs, and photos of radiant Evalani, with lively eyes and a tight satin dress and a white flower tucked into her long black hair. Evalani had helped bring Polynesia to Las Vegas, and, evidently, she brought some of Vegas back to Polynesia.

  Maren and I slid into seats at the bar as a server poured herself a start-of-the-shift glass of milk, then greeted us.

  “My name is Em,” she said. “Tonight’s special is one-dollar tacos.” She handed us menus, which had a long list of fajitas, enchiladas, and burritos. It was like some kind of marvelous cultural riddle: What do you get when you filter Polynesia through Las Vegas and back again? Tex-Mex.

  Em, who I guessed to be in her mid-twenties, explained that her aunt, the chef, had lived in California for many years, and had come to love Mexican food. She wasn’t the only one—at the grocery store, we’d seen a sprawling section of tortillas and salsas. The biggest Samoan population on the mainland is in Southern California. Em grew up there and in American Samoa, “a fifty-fifty split.” Each time she came back to the bar, she stayed a bit longer and our conversation got a bit deeper.