Mama Tala

An Atlantic “First”

by Johnny Frisbie

MY GRANDMOTHER Tala, who is known in our family as Mama Tala, is eighty-three. Her home is Puka-Puka, a low coral atoll in the Cook Islands, ten degrees south of the equator in the central eastern Pacific. She has been content to live most of her life on this small island which, according to my father‘s old map, totals not more than one square mile of land area. When she was about twenty-five, she sailed away with her second husband, a native Puka-Pukan missionary of the London Missionary Society. Mama Tala thinks it was about 1905, but she is not sure, since islanders seldom kept accounts of the years when she was young. She recalls she was gone two years. After returning, she did not leave Puka-Puka until 1962, when I went to get her.

I first remember Mama Tala when I was a girl of five or six. We gathered taro roots every Saturday morning, and when we had filled our woven coconut leaf baskets with the starchy vegetables, she sat and let me splash and wallow for a while in the warm, muddy fresh rainwater in which the plants grew. Then we walked home along the gray coral path that crossed the swamp, balancing the baskets on our heads. After scraping off the taro’s black skin with the sharp edge of a broken coconut shell, Mama Tala arranged the roots in neat bundles of banana leaves. And while we awaited the return of the men with the day’s fishing catch she always took me on her lap, and feeding bits of grated coconut meat into the fire, which sent clouds of pungent smoke swirling pleasantly about our heads out through the thin thatched roof, she sang to me:

When the men arrived, laughing and joking about the day’s catch, Mama Tala put me down and sternly examined the fish before shooing the fishermen out of the hut like so many cocky roosters; and once more undisputed mistress of her kitchen, she got down to the serious business of cooking. She wrapped the fish in banana leaves, then tied the bundles with bits of strong coconut-frond fiber and placed them on the hot coals. To go with the fish she prepared roroi, a mixture of fresh young taro leaves and cream pressed from the flesh of the coconut, wrapped in banana leaves to bake. Whenever I taste creamed spinach today, I am reminded of this dish.

We followed this routine each week, always cooking the Sunday meal on Saturday, for on PukaPuka no work of any nature was permitted on the Sabbath. Even boiling water would surely call down the wrath of God himself, we believed. God was very much in our thinking then, for we knew Him to be very strong and vengeful if His commands were broken. Something unfortunate always seemed to happen to a person who broke the Sabbath rule; a broken arm, perhaps, or a sickness, or even a death in the family. So we were very much afraid to offend Him and honored Sunday with strict inactivity interrupted only by our several daily trips to church.

Children soon learned the discipline of Sunday. One of my earliest memories is of Mama Tala jumping up from her mat to chase me into the coconut trees because I was too noisy. Wielding the end of a coconut frond, she gave me a good hiding, during which we both must have disturbed the cathedral quiet of the day; but this sort of disciplinary noise was permitted, perhaps even welcomed!

Mama Tala was seldom without that coconut frond, for on Puka-Puka a frond is as essential to an old woman as part of her body is. I say she was “old,” for in a climate where sun and salt dry the body a wrinkled deep brown by the time one is forty, sixty is an ancient age. But Mama Tala was still as agile as a young dancer and was particularly proficient in the use of her coconut frond, keeping in constant practice by chasing hens out of her house, killing mosquitoes, brushing away lizards from her feet, and swatting all children who did not listen to her. Her legs were strong, and her voice so commanding that when she called, we children were hushed with awe. But I also remember a gentle voice, when Mama Tala held me at night, singing quiet island songs or reciting a night prayer as I fell off to sleep. “God, we are asking You to look over us tonight: my grandchildren, my husband and our children, and we beg of You to bring tomorrow with the same happiness You have given us today.”

OUR isolation on Puka-Puka was nearly complete, broken only two or three times a year by an island trading schooner calling for copra. Such a visit was always exciting, for it meant sacks of rice, sugar, and flour, cases of bully beef and cheap salmon, scented powders and sweet-smelling soaps, fishhooks and the all-important twisted tobacco. The copra was carried to the ship in sturdy outrigger canoes capable of traveling great distances across the open sea in all weather, but of such shallow draft that they were pulled across the reef in water no deeper than two feet.

After the schooner sailed, the money from the sale of the copra was divided into lots, one for each of the three villages of Ngake, Loto, and Yato, each lot then subdivided among the villagers, each getting a share which seldom came to more than two or three New Zealand pounds. This money was immediately exchanged for the freshly arrived goods, and the three stores serving the island, one to each village, were sold out within a few days. But our people did not worry, for they knew Puka-Puka would support them just as it had for centuries.

Today, little has changed. The island is still selfsufficient. Each village has its own taro swamp, and each individual his own plot from birth to death. My plot measures seven by three feet and is in the taro fields belonging to Ngake village. After twenty-one years, I found this plot still intact and cared for by relatives. It is next to those of my two brothers and two sisters who have also been absent since 1941. Although they may never return, the land will be theirs until they die. Together our live plots compose an impressive holding as Puka-Pukan sizes go – over a hundred square feet!

During those years away from Puka-Puka I often thought of Mama Tala and wondered if I would ever see her again. Her age made it seem unlikely, and my chances of returning seemed slim, for I was now living in Honolulu, married, with two young children. Puka-Puka seemed as far away as a longremembered dream – lovely but intangible. But in 1959, the Geophysical Year and the moon conspired to send an American scientific team to PukaPuka to observe a total eclipse of the sun. Lowell Thomas visited the expedition to film it for television, and when he returned, he brought a simple message from Mama Tala: “She wants to see you.” And I knew that I must go back.

But even when you have decided, it is not easy to get to Puka-Puka. After I had arrived with my husband and children in Auckland, New Zealand, in June of 1961, we were delayed until October before space was available on the three-thousand-ton government motor vessel Moana Roa. But it went only as far as Rarotonga, the capital island of the Cook Islands, still nine hundred miles southeast of PukaPuka. There we learned that the last ship to the northern group, the island trading schooner Tiare Taporo, had already sailed, and that there would not be another ship until the hurricane season ended. So it was not until April of 1962, nearly three years after Mama Tala had sent for me, that we finally stepped ashore on my home island, at the leeward embarking beach at Yato village.

I found her sitting down hunched among a group of old ladies on the coral gravel outside her house. She was dressed in a white mother hubbard dress, accenting her shiny black hair, while in her hand, swishing with automatic precision at the flies, was the well-remembered coconut frond. For a moment I stood on the crowded path, under the hot PukaPuka sun, memories dimming my eyes. But when she called in the old familiar way, I rushed to her side and pressed my cheek to hers, instinctively remembering the Puka-Pukan custom prohibiting the young from kissing the old. “Tera a Tiane” (“There is johnny”), she whispered. And clutching me by the shoulders, she fell into a quiet, almost melodic sobbing, gradually slipping to the ground until she held me around the knees. Many people were watching, but I felt no embarrassment, even when she pulled me down and began prodding my whole being with her bony hands, her fingers exploring my arms, legs, and body the way Puka-Pukans do to ascertain a person’s health. We sat on the gravel for many minutes holding each other, rocking together back and forth, and I became aware of the strong scent of mothballs and thought she must have had this dress before I was born. Eventually, in a firm voice, in the Puka-Pukan tongue, she announced, “Yes, you are big now. Your arms are strong. They have been very good to you over there.” And with a smile, she pushed me away and told me to meet the rest of my relatives.

MAMA TALA and her third husband, Taingauru, meaning “ten,” live in Loto village in a two-room thatched hut by the mother road, which joins all three villages. Fortunately, the church is close, for Mama Tala finds it difficult to walk unaided and would not like to be carried to service. From pandanus-pole rafters hang their everyday items: flour in tins, rolls of handwoven sennit rope, fishline, and clothes. An ancient but treasured sewing machine stands on the back veranda, which faces the cookhouse set among the coconut trees. The cookhouse is open at the sides ad is built ot pandanus poles, which support a thatched roof covering an underground oven dug into the coral rock. Next to this cookhouse and built of the same material is the bathhouse, containing a cracked enamel washbasin and a piece of washing soap. Water for bathing is stored in a rusted oil drum.

Because of Tala’s and Taingauru’s age, they have adopted two young boys to run those errands which only young limbs can perform: climbing coconut trees for drinking nuts, carting water from the shallow well, gathering taro, and so on. In exchange, the children have a home until they are old enough to fend for themselves, at which time Mama Tala and Taingauru will adopt two more youngsters. It is a common practice; no one ever need live alone on Puka-Puka. I was to find this gregariousness both irritating and comforting in the two months I spent there; mainly welcome though, for my husband had to continue with the ship when it sailed after only an afternoon at the island.

That night, Mama Tala announced that her home was not satisfactory for me and my children and that I ought to stay in my uncle’s house, which has a cement floor, a corrugated iron roof, a screened cupboard to keep away the flies and cockroaches, and a private WC. “You have lived ‘over there,’ and I know they do not have thatched roofs and everyone sleeps under a roof of tin or even ot wood.” This apology for her root was typical, because in spite of the greater comfort and coolness of pandanus thatch, metal is a mark of prestige in the Cook Islands because it is used by the popaas (“white men”) for their own homes. But I dreaded the daytime heat of a tin roof and persuaded Mama Tala to allow me to stay in her house. However, when she insisted that I sleep on the only bed while she and Taingauru slept on the floor, I knew it would never do. Finally we settled on another of my uncle’s buildings, an unused thatched-roof cookhouse built on the lagoon shore. Here the wind from the water swept freely through its open sides while towering, sixty-year-old coconut palms spread their long fronds to shelter it from the burning midday sun. Of course, Mama Tala came to live with me.

In this house, I rediscovered the soul of PukaPuka. Each night, snug inside her mosquito net, Mama Tala recited in loving detail another chapter from her limitless fund of accumulated island gossip. And always we ended talking of my mother. Mama Tala spoke of her third daughter as if she still lived. Her voice choked as she described dresses Mama had worn to church thirty years before, or dishes of food she had eaten as a child. “Your mother, Nga, and her younger sister Till were the best of my nine children. I ask God why he took those two away. Often I unlock my trunk to look at your mother’s shawl and ring, for the sight of them makes me close to her again. When I am dead you may have the shawl, but I will always keep the ring. In a few days we shall look into the trunk so that you may see these things for yourself.”

While we talked, a lovesick young man sang himself to sleep on the veranda of the house next door: “Mei te ei inano i te po, kua pera katoa ia au” (“Like a garland of pandanus blossoms in the night am I”). He chanted every love song he knew until forced to start over again. Only when the tip of his forefinger ached from strumming his coconut-shell ukulele would he stop. One afternoon the object of this musical outpouring passed by. The boy immediately broke into the song “Manea, manea taku tiare” (“Beautiful, beautiful my flower”). Whereupon the girl smiled shyly but continued on her way. The young man called after her, “Come around tonight, and I‘ll show you my other accomplishments.” She kicked her foot in his direction and lifted her hip as if to say, “Just big talk!” But the boy was happy and awaited the night, for he knew she would return. Such is courtship on Puka-Puka.

Lovers find it difficult to keep secrets, but it is because ol the atoll way of life that denies privacy to all. In our little house, Mama Tala and I could make few moves without the entire village of Loto‘s knowing. Because of the deep curiosity stirred by my return, our house was constantly watched. Often in the evenings, large groups of people came from all three villages to squat on the coral pebbles surrounding our home and smoke their pandanus leal cigarettes until I joined them to tell stories of the outside world. But even if no one gathered, there was always Rakuraku, a man of ancient years who lived about twenty yards along the lagoon road. All day long he sat cross-legged on a pandanus mat, closely watching me as if I were a never tiring performer in a play. At night he slept little, reclining on the same spot.

When I opened a can of bully beef, he might call in a lazy manner, “Tiane e, what is that you are opening?” And his eyes would brighten at the prospect of a bite or two. After a few days of this I ceased to answer, simply because I no longer heard him. But he only called more loudly, “ Tiane e, you are the lucky one, then, to be so rich you can afford to eat bully beef every day.” And I had to send him a small helping, utilizing one of the ever present children. When a relative came by to ask for tobacco, whispering in hope that he would not have to share his smoke, old Rakuraku would wake from his fragile doze and yell for all the village to hear, “Tiane e! What are you giving to that beggar of a relative” And he would lean back on his elbow and call in a quieter voice, “Well, if you happen to have a spare cigarette, it would surely quench my desire.”When I took my bath behind a pile of coral rock, Rakuraku would often send me an unneeded pail of water, with a request for the soap when I had finished with it. Or when I was drying myself from a swim, he would call, “I suppose that towel comes from America, Tiane e, you are leaving most of your things when you leave our island, e? just remember Rakuraku, who fished with your father and was such a good friend to him, always giving him part of his catch.”

EARLY one morning Mama Tala sat resting against a pandanus post, watching while I wrote PukaPukan words in my diary. Eventually I looked up and saw that she was sad, and I moved to her side, not speaking, for one does not question the old unless invited. In time she said, “Auwe! To think that you were among those strange people for so many years without me to help you. And there was no one to wash you when you had your babies.” Her tears came, and she sighed that she had been useless to me when I had needed her. And I could not tell her that I had had my children in a wellequipped maternity hospital. It would only have made her feel foolish and useless.

So we sat there in sympathetic silence until a councilman of the next village came pompously down the road, calling out a proclamation for a umukai (“feast”). Mama Lala quickly lost her sad mood and turned her head to hear better. But the words escaped her, and in annoyance she heaved herself to her feet and walked crookedly out of the cookhouse to the side of the mother road, where the man had eollected a small crowd. Leaning on her cane, Mama Tala pointed a finger at him. “This man,” she scolded, sounding just like the woman who used to chase me through the trees, “This man! I can’t hear him! Speak louder.” The man was silenced in midphrase, and stood motionless for a moment, as if stunned.

This woman, the speaker finally replied, glaring at Mama Tala, “has come and spoiled my speech. It is cut in half, and I must begin again,” which he did. But Mama Tala, feeling the attention on her, grinned mischievously, and still leaningon her cane, wiggled her bottom in a drum dance of seventy years past as if to tempt the speaker, who had to stop again while the people of Loto clapped their hands and shouted their approval. Satisfied to have repaid the councilman for his discourtesy, Mama Tala came back smiling and sat down without any help.

EARLY on my first Sunday back on Puka-Puka, Mama tala and I prepared for the morning church service. After washing in the white enameled basin, we rubbed our legs, arms, and hair with fresh and sweet-smelling coconut oil, taking turns brushing each other‘s hair. We sheltered behind the wide trunk of a coconut tree, and although we were hidden from the view of those on the road, anyone sitting in the public WC, located on stilts about twenty yards out in the lagoon, could easily see us. But this did not matter, for we could not see who they were. My nylon brush fascinated Mama Tala. “Auwe! the white woman’s way!” she exclaimed in wonder, fingering the still bristles. “A very strong pig he must have been.” Mama Tala rolled her hair in a bun, much favored among Polynesian women, and secured it with a shell comb, the oil causing her black hair to glisten like a young girl’s.

Wrapped in gay pareu cloth we walked back to the house, where Mama Tala beckoned me to her family trunk, which had been transferred when she moved. “Not one person is allowed to open my trunk, not even my children. But you can look through it, for one clay it will be yours.” She took the key from the pages of her Polynesian-language Bible, which she kept on a bully-beef crate beside her bed, unlocked the rusty padlock, and lifted the old lid. A strong scent of mothballs assailed us and momentarily infected me with great sadness, for I recalled my own mother kneeling on the floor in just the same way, picking out my starched and ironed, well-folded dress for church.

Mama Tala’s trunk contained nearly all she possessed: a few pieces of costume jewelry, her first husband‘s broken pocket watch, a shell back-comb, a tiny box containing pins, thread, and needles for the sewing machine, a small unused bottle of toilet water I had sent three years before, and my mother‘s wedding ring and silk shawl from Tahiti. She lifted out each item for inspection, handling it gently and with much reverence. Eventually she reached her five dresses at the bottom. Under a pink dress, which she set aside for the church service, were two ancient high-necked white dresses for weddings and baptisms, a flower-patterned dress for casual wear, and finally, at the very bottom, a dress of black.

“To wear when I join your mother. I shall be dressed well when I meet all of them,” she said, holding it up. It was a plain, simple dress that reached to her ankles. The sleeves buttoned at the wrists, and, of course, it had a high-neck collar. “My daughter Vaevae sent this two years ago. I am lucky to get one finally, for it was a big worry not to have a black dress to rest in.” When she had folded all her treasures neatly back into the trunk, she closed the lid and remained for a moment kneeling beside it, as if in prayer. “Tiane,” she finally spoke. “When I need it, you will remember my black dress?” I put my arms around her, and we were very close and full of memories.

I WOULD have preferred the afternoon service, for in the daytime heat the preacher shortens his sermon and there is more music and Polynesian hymns. But Mama Tala explained that every one of the nearly four hundred members of the congregation would be at church that morning to see if I could still recite the Lord’s Prayer in Puka-Pukan. But most important, they wanted to see a real American dress, for since arriving, I had worn nothing but shorts and a blouse or simply a pareu cloth wrapped about in the local fashion.

“You pick the dress then, Mama,” I told Mama Tala and opened my suitcase. Excitedly she fingered through the contents before exclaiming and holding up a gray dress of Chinese cut. “This dress has all shining buttons; they will like it.” But then she noticed the two side slits, and her admiring expression changed to concern. “No, Tiane, this is torn. We must sew that later.” And she set it aside. 1 told her the slits were intentional. “Why?” she wanted to know. “To show a little of the legs.”She looked shocked and murmured that it was a sin to entice men at church. “At least when one is married,” she added,

Turning back to my clothes, she held up a short light-brown Hawaiian muumuu, which was really only a sophisticated version of the same mother hubbard she wore. The pattern featured figures of ancient Hawaiian gods mingled with abstractions of fish heads and bones. “ This is beautiful,” she cried. “They will like it.” She then laid out my slip, but it was my turn to protest, for I did not wish to wear a slip on such a hot day. Tala was unmoved. “People will see your body if you don‘t wear a slip! You must not expose yourself on Sunday. Tiane, particularly now that you arc carrying a child.”

“But how can they see under such a dress?” I became impatient.

“Tiane” she said reprovingly, her old eyes sparkling. “You don’t remember the Puka-Pukans; they will try to see through. They will see.” And I had to lean over and kiss her forehead.

Each night before bed, we swam in the lagoon, our pareus balanced on our heads so we would have cover when we left the water. After drying, we often joined one group or another on the beach, to exchange stories in the light of a coconut-shell fire. By day, while Mama Tala rested in the sun, I often took a canoe out upon the flat surface of the clear, multicolored lagoon to fish, or I collected shells on the coral sand beaches.

Gradually the outside world faded and grew less real as I fell back into the atoll life I happily discovered had never been forgotten. Soon after I arrived, our village moved to Motu Ko, Ngake’s private coconut and bird-reserve island. We traveled by canoe, five miles across the lagoon, in a sort of miniature migration. There, for four weeks, we made copra, husking the nuts and splitting them to dry in the sun. I husked fourteen hundred nuts, which was the proportion allotted to Mama Tala and me; for no one is exempt during the copra harvest.

But one night, while fishing from a canoe for flying fish, my companions were silhouetted against the sky by a sudden, tremendous flash of white light on the northeast horizon. The glow held for several long moments, while no one dared speak. Then eyes wide with fear turned to me, as if I should know why this thing had happened. Trembling in every muscle, I explained in a shaky voice that it must be a bomb test. They seemed satisfied and went back to their search for fish without another thought, but my pleasure in the night had been destroyed. It was a sharp reminder of that outside world that I had so easily forgotten.

And a few mornings later, the early light revealed the stubby outlines of the trading schooner Taveuni, slowly riding off Yato reef. It had come to take passengers to Rarotonga and was sailing that very afternoon. We did not have enough time to say farewell to Puka-Puka, but my sadness was lessened by the thought that Mama Tala was sailing with me. For she had agreed to leave Puka-Puka for the first time in over fifty years, in order to get a pair of false teeth at the hospital in Rarotonga.

The wind blew salty spray in our faces as the outrigger sliced through the reef breakers and plowed out into the open sea to meet the Taveuni. The high, choppy seas crashed our canoe against the side of the schooner, lifting us level with its deck one moment, then dragging us down below the red waterline. The islander sailors, half naked but well smeared with warming coconut oil, screamed and laughed with delight at the freshening weather, while dear Mama Tala stood in the pitching canoe clutching a rope from the schooner, perhaps wondering if new teeth were worth this. She looked down at me and called, “Tiane. you stay behind me. When I begin the climb, you push me up and make sure my dress is properly covering me.” The sailors yelled: “Old woman! Now is the time to jump. Jump quickly!” Whereupon she gave me a weak smile and swung out on the rope, and with the sailors pulling and me pushing, managed to get one leg up over the railing. And there she clung, on her stomach, her frail legs gripping the wood, giving an embarrassed laugh as the sailors lifted her onto the deck.

We were the first aboard and claimed a section of the forward hatch by spreading out two pandanus mats and sitting on them. The hatch was about twenty by thirty feet, and we were soon joined by thirteen other islander passengers, who huddled with us under a sailcloth roof which protected us from the rain that was starting to fall. This was to be our home in the eighty-foot ship for the nine-hundred-mine ocean trip. Our position directly in front of the wheelhouse afforded us little privacy from the crew, but we managed to block off our small area with a little wall formed by our bundles of clothing and food. This done, we resigned ourselves to the sea and were immediately sick, scarcely noticing when the ship got under way.

For several days we lay there, moaning in our misery and eating nothing. The ship was subject to frightening vibrations each time it met a heavy sea, sending the water washing over the deck as we clung to anything handy and rolled in our heavy wet clothes.

After nine days of this we arrived, as if by miracle, at Rarotonga, and everyone was suddenly well and happy again. With typical Polynesian acceptance of the immediate present, the past days of misery were totally forgotten, and we greeted our friends and families as if life were always good.

After a half century on Puka-Puka, the wonders of civilization were a shock to Mama Tala. Her first movie, a war movie, had her sighing and crying for the soldiers killed in mock battle. “Auwe, so many good men die in this world.” She clutched her chair, muttering unhappy sounds. After the show she wiped her eyes with her skirt, and whispered almost in anger, “Can we see a happy movie next time?” After that we saw only musicals, and she was proud to describe to her friends the elegant dresses and the sweet voices of the actors.

As the time approached for me to give birth I felt a growing fear of having the child in a natural way, with none of the conveniences I was used to in the maternity hospital in Honolulu. Mama Tala offered encouragement and advice. Her fingers felt the lower portion of my stomach, and she whispered, as if in fear of disturbing the unborn child, “When the pains finally come, you breathe in from this part, until the pain goes away. And when you need to hold something, grab the back of your thighs and pull them toward you.” Then she rubbed my back with coconut oil. “I used to do this to your mother when she was big with child. Don’t be afraid.”

The baby girl came, much more easily than her brother and sister had in Honolulu, and Mama Tala buried the placenta under a flowering plumeria bush so the child would be beautiful. Every morning she collected the baby’s soiled diapers and washed them under the tap, with pride, and I could see that she was completely happy.

When the baby was a week old, the Matson liner Mariposa called at Rarotonga, and my husband said it was time to go. On the wharf to say good-bye, Mama Tala pressed her nose against my cheek, the tears flowing but her sobs restrained so she could whisper, “I am so happy you did not forget me. God will take care of you and your family.” When I turned to leave she walked to a post and held it, her face lost in a thick handkerchief.

Mama Tala sailed before Christmas on the schooner Tiare Taporo, bound for Puka-Puka. But midway, the ship was caught by a hurricane, lost her mainmast, and lay drifting helplessly for several days until taken back to Rarotonga in tow. Such an experience might well have been the finish for any eighty-three-year-old woman, but Mama Tala has written from Rarotonga with assurances that she is fit and happy. And my friends write that she is getting fat now that she has her beautiful new teeth.