54 pages • 1 hour read
Alan BrennertMoloka'i
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Stone Leaf”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
Rachel and the others headed for Moloka’i face the winds of the journey, locked in a crowded pen on the deck of the steamer, unlike the crew or paying guests who are sheltered from the elements. Approaching Kalaupapa Peninsula, Rachel sees the towering cliff, called a pali, rise up like a fortress, and is awed by its vastness. As those exiled to Kalaupapa travel to shore in boats of five, the outlines of those on the shore become visible. Rachel notices, in spite of their tumors and lesions, they’re all smiling.
As she disembarks her rowboat, Rachel sees Pono and runs into his arms. Rachel meets Haleola, his lover and a healer. Ambrose Hutchinson, a patient and resident superintendent, checks Rachel in. As they leave the shore, Rachel and Haleola discuss Kalaupapa and Haleola explains that she and Pono live in Kalawao. The site of the original colony, Kalawao was chosen for its cold weather, but, as Haleola explains, the government will move everyone to Kalaupapa eventually. Offering the history of the colony, Haleola tells Rachel that she came originally to take care of Keo, her husband, before contracting leprosy herself.
Haleola tells Rachel she has three children, who are grown, and whom she hasn’t seen in 23 years. Traveling to Kalawao, she admits, is expensive. Haleola sleeps at her own house that night, and, while Rachel unpacks, she finds a new doll in her trunk, made by her father and wearing a lei and kapa skirt. The next day Ambrose comes to take Rachel to Bishop Home, where young, unmarried women must stay in Kalawao. There is a fear that they would be in danger from the men on the island. Haleola remembers Father Damien. Stubborn, he fought against the practices of the native Hawaiians, including the luau and the worship of Laka. She remembers, as Keo was dying, that Damien attempted to give him last rites.
Fourteen years after Keo died, Haleola remembers she met Pono. As she thinks about Keo and Pono, Haleola and Pono approach Bishop Home. Meeting Mother Marianne, who runs the home, Pono and Haleola argue that Pono can take care of Rachel and she should not have to move. Sister Victor serves them tea with disdain. Rachel has to remain at Bishop Home.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “1893-94”
Sister Mary Catherine Voorhies, one of the Franciscan sisters at Bishop Home, changes the bandages of her patients, trying to remain calm and not become sick. From Ithaca, NY, Sister Catherine (named Ruth) came to Hawaii to deal with her grief after her father died by suicide. As she dresses the wounds of a young girl named Noelani, she becomes sick and leaves to rest. Sister Victor comforts her before Sister Catherine returns to her shift. After she finishes, Sister Leopoldina shows her the piano Robert Louis Stevenson gave Bishop Home and reads her the lines Stevenson wrote about Bishop Home.
Rachel sees her room in the girls’ dormitory and meets her roommates, including Emily, Josephina, and Violet. The last two are bedridden. Rachel shows off her dolls, and, after class, as a storm lashes their dorm, they tell scary stories. Rachel grows sad and scared, missing her parents. Emily comforts her, telling Rachel she’s glad to be away from her abusive father.
Haleola and Pono visit the next day, and Pono plays croquet with the girls. As they leave, Rachel soon becomes emotional again. Haleola and Pono visit as frequently as possible, until Pono becomes sick one day. Haleola manages to see the girls at the beach, who are accompanied by Sister Catherine. On the beach, Rachel sees a shrine made of rocks, and Haleola explains much of her belief system, inspired by the shrine.
After Rachel returns from the beach, she finds three letters: one from her mother, one from her father, and one from Sarah. As she reads them, Rachel talks to Violet who wants to read them. The next day, Violet isn’t in the dorm, and Rachel realizes that she’s died.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
Sister Catherine and Sister Victor have breakfast after mass and discuss their work with the patients. Victor admits she hates Hawai’i and feels afraid around the patients, even though she cared for patients with tuberculosis in Syracuse with Mother Marianne.
Sister Catherine notices that Rachel skipped school and asks Rachel why. Angry about Violet, Rachel questions God, before announcing that she hates him. Shocked, Sister Catherine slaps her, and Rachel runs out of the dormitory. One of the nuns sees her in the rain and then makes her change and dry off. Worried about Pono and Haleola and their recent absence, Rachel asks about visiting them. Rebuffed by the sisters, Rachel ignores Sister Catherine.
Haleola asks a doctor to visit Pono, who’s fighting off a kidney infection. Sister Victor and Sister Catherine share plum wine, and then Sister Catherine runs to the beach, and, disrobing, plunges into the ocean. After Sister Victor convinces her to leave the water and dress, Sister Catherine returns to her room. The next morning, she awakes to find out that Rachel has disappeared.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
Running in the darkness to Kalawao to see her uncle, Rachel falls on the muddy roads. Ditching her sandals, she continues. As the mud grows thicker, Rachel sees a trail off the road, which she takes. As she climbs higher and higher in the rain, Rachel eventually sees a house before falling and injuring herself. Moko, an old man, tends to her wounds. The next morning, as Rachel asks about Pono, Moko puts her to work to thank him for his help. Fetching water, making poi from taro, and milking his cow, Rachel works throughout the morning.
Sisters Catherine and Leopoldina search for Rachel, visiting Pono’s house, only to find him too ill to help. Enlisting Haleola and Brother Dutton, of nearby Baldwin House, to help, they scan the shorelines, searching for Rachel. Moko continues to force Rachel to work for him, and she becomes angry, demanding to see Pono. He hits her, busting her lip. As he rests afterward, Rachel runs away, soon followed by Moko. As he catches up to her, she hits him in the throat with a branch, escaping. On the road, Rachel meets Nohi a man on a horse who offers her a ride. Rachel declines his offer initially, before accepting it. Coming to Kalawao, she reunites with Sister Catherine and sees Pono, more ill than before. Catherine asks for and receives permission for them to stay at Baldwin House to give Rachel more time with Pono. Pono dies a few days later, and, at his funeral, Haleola explains to Rachel the difference between her heaven and Catherine’s heaven.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
After Pono’s death, Mother Marianne bars Haleola from the convent, but Catherine and Haleola often meet with the girls at the beach or near the pali, seemingly by accident. Josephina, who had been bedridden, recovers, but Mary, a healthy resident of Bishop Home, suddenly dies. Francine, Rachel’s friend from the receiving station, joins the girls at Bishop Home.
Rachel receives another package from her father, a Flamenco doll from Buenos Aires, while her letters to her mother return undeliverable. Rachel begins to skip class and act out, and Catherine writes to Dorothy. As her letter returns, Catherine brings Rachel into the convent, where she isn’t permitted, and shows Rachel the undeliverable letter from Dorothy. Rachel breaks down.
In October, her teacher excuses Rachel from class, and she walks with Leopoldina to Kalaupapa’s harbor, as the steamer Lehua arrives. Surprising her, Rachel’s father meets her. Henry explains that Dorothy and Rachel’s siblings moved from Honolulu to O’ahu to live with Dorothy’s sister, to escape the shame of Rachel’s leprosy. Catherine and Henry meet, and Catherine offers to take Henry and Rachel to Kalawao. Haleola and Henry meet and reminisce about Pono.
Sister Victor implores Catherine to join her in taking the girls to the beach. Bertha, one of the girls stops breathing and doesn’t surface, after submerging in the water. Sister Victor manages to revive Bertha, clearing her lungs and massaging her bluish body. Fearing she’s been infected, Sister Victor awakes in terror that night, screaming at something unknown in her room. Sister Victor leaves Kalaupapa, taking the same steamer from the island as Henry.
Part 2, Chapters 5-9 Analysis
These chapters link the geography of Kalaupapa to grief, creating a map of places that signify pain and yet also promise peace and redemption. The Kalaupapa Peninsula looks like a stone leaf, “a nearly flat, triangular promontory, shaped rather like a leaf, spat into the sea by a volcano which was now a spent crater at the center of the triangle” (60), bringing together the hardness of stone and the shape of a leaf reminiscent of luxuriant nature. This image of the stone leaf brings together life and death, a fitting metaphor for a place that serves as the exile for those who have been cut off from their family and sentenced to an emotional death. Yet, in spite of the hardness of life that surrounds them and the pali that serve as “the walls of a prison,” (60) joy and friendship exist on this stone leaf. As Rachel arrives, she notes that “Everyone in the crowd, despite the grim corruptions of their flesh, was smiling broadly—even those whose mouths were distorted into something Rachel would never have imagined could smile—their sometimes-fingerless hands waving gaily at the incoming ship” (61-62). The negative descriptions of these people waiting on the shore reflects some of Rachel’s own discomfort, which soon dissipates, but her observations of their joy prove as durable as the stone face of the pali or the rocky promontory that constitute the Stone Leaf. Rachel’s judgment matches that of Mother Marianne, who, while looking at the young girls who live at Bishop Home, perceives that “[t]here is beauty […] in the least beautiful of things” (82).
As Rachel spends time with Haleola and Pono and Catherine, she sees that the place functions as a palimpsest. The place changes by its new function—a center of exile for those with Hansen’s disease—but retains its old character. As the narrator makes clear, Moloka’i, including Kalaupapa, was “known for centuries as the home of powerful sorcerers capable of praying men to death, of sending giant fireballs hurtling across the sea, fiery planets of destruction seeking out hapless victims. Today the island was still an object of fear and fascination; but for very different reasons” (60). This mixture of fear and fascination symbolizes the sometimes-contradictory existence for those exiles on Moloka’i. Refused by the rest of the world, these inhabitants change this fear into something else, as they build lives and create bonds at the very edge of their world. Their efforts to transform their lives and to continue living echo the geography of their land—a connection Haleola makes in thinking about the “stark splendor” of the “craggy coastline” (101). Haleola observes that even the pali, stony and durable, “was often in motion here, boulders dislodged by rain or wind tumbling down its face” (101). At first, these descriptions recall Rachel’s earlier judgments of the residents and their transformed faces, but, instead, Haleola’s lines mark the naturalness of her fellow residents, implicitly comparing their changes to those which inexorably affect the strongest formations on the island.
Rachel soon learns of the immense grief and sadness that wears down many of the residents and workers, like Sister Victor, as powerful as the waves crashing on the coast. Befriending Violet and letting her read Dorothy’s letter, Rachel moves past her surface appraisal of those around her, reacting “with no fear, only sadness” to her sick friend (91). Her kindness to Violet in letting her read Dorothy’s letter, she soon discovers, she herself requires. Dorothy’s letters come back, proof that her mother has moved and lost contact. Catherine offers her kindness and touch: “Catherine took her in her arms and held her close, a shudder of loss and shame passing from Rachel’s body into Catherine’s, becoming Catherine’s loss too, Catherine’s shame” (126). While grief remains unavoidable at Kalaupapa, Rachel sees that it can be shared, as the inhabitants forge connections through pain. While Sister Victor fears, like many of the authorities, that Hansen’s disease can be spread, Catherine demonstrates the benefits of sharing. For Catherine, an “absence […] was like a sore that wouldn’t heal,” and so being present for another’s pain was necessary for healing.
Rachel recalls that one truth “she had learned in her brief time at Kalaupapa […] was that all things end” (130), and this realization foreshadows years of pain and joy to come, as Rachel makes good on her promise then to “follow her father over that horizon and down the other side, where the world lay hidden” (136). Like the pali, her strength cannot stop change, but she can endure and enjoy what lies on over the horizon.
