DEPARTMENT:

One-night stand for posterity

By Sally-Jo Keala-o-Anuenue Bowman

The morning after, my bedroom smelled of white and yellow ginger. I opened my eyes to the spicy blossoms and myriad other lei — purple and green orchids, kukui, ti, all tributes of aloha the evening before.

It had been a one-night stand. It also was a once-in-a-lifetime event — the Honolulu book launch party for “No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa” by Henry Nalaielua and me.

That night last November Henry was one day short of 81. I was 66. “No Footprints” was a first book for both of us.

Actually, Henry could not have written a memoir much earlier. After all, you have to live a bunch before you have much worthwhile to say about your years. I had been writing magazine articles and essays on Hawaiian topics for nearly 20 years, but I’m not sure I would have been ready any sooner to shape a book.

Henry Nalaielua, from the Hämäkua Coast, and Sally-Jo Bowman, from Kailua celebrate the launch of “No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa,” a first book for each.

Age has slowed my pace somewhat, which seems a blessing because it encourages more contemplation, and taking the time to refine a project from “really good” to “truly remarkable.”

And so it was with Henry’s book. A Big Island Hawaiian plantation child diagnosed in 1936 at age 10 with what was then still called leprosy, Henry has spent 70 years in treatment, much of it at Hawai‘i’s Hansen’s disease facility at Kalaupapa on Moloka‘i.

Most people just living their lives do not think they are special. Henry was no exception. He balked when his longtime friend Gena Sasada, herself in our age group, bugged him mercilessly to write down his life story. She said that, as a patient at historic Kalaupapa, he owed it to Hawai‘i and the world as his legacy.

When he knuckled under and wrote a few pages on a yellow legal tablet, Gena typed his longhand into her computer. Then she realized that neither of them knew what they were doing.

Several years earlier, Henry had helped me with the field research for some magazine articles about Kalaupapa. Now the two of them asked my advice.

I said, “Write some more and then send it to me.” As the pages piled up, I began to see the possibility of a book. I prodded, coaxed and quizzed Henry for more detail from his prodigious memory and used it to recreate scenes and conversations. I put all the story bits in order, shaped the chapters, and wrote a prologue and epilogue. He loved what I did with his original words.

Eventually the over-50 insight kicked in, and I also began to see classic themes in Henry’s life: love and loss, sickness and health, birth and death. Common to everyone, in Henry’s story these are magnified through the lens of leprosy, becoming more tragic, more noble, happier and sadder.

“No Footprints” is a story of a man facing a medically serious and socially dread disease that initially sentences him to years of isolation by the Board of Health. But he treats Hansen’s disease as one fact of life among many, and so goes on to become an artist, musician, storyteller, historian, health care advocate, husband, father, and friend to hundreds. That could be inspiration enough.

But Henry’s story spans half of the 140-year history of Kalaupapa, which began in 1866 when the Kingdom of Hawai‘i established a quarantined facility in the Islands’ most remote spot to deal with a growing leprosy epidemic. Henry’s story takes up at the half-way point in 1936. In that respect his memoir is an important addition to Hawai‘i’s written history.

Since 1986 Kalaupapa has been a National Historical Park as well as a health care facility for an aging and shrinking patient population. Because Hansen’s disease has been treatable since the late 1940s, no patient has been involuntarily confined since then. When the last of the current patients passes on, Hawai‘i will rely on the National Park Service to educate future generations about all that happened there.

Henry’s story will be a boon to the Park Service, the people of Hawai‘i, and the rest of the world, where, in some places, Hansen’s disease remains a more widespread problem.

It is my privilege to be Henry’s co-author, a position that causes me to revel in Life After 50.

“No Footprints in the Sand: A Memoir of Kalaupapa” is available at many Hawai‘i bookstores or directly from Watermark Publishing Company in Honolulu at www.bookshawaii.net. The author of this column now lives in Oregon but was born and reared in Hawai‘i.

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