9/11 in The 808
TOTAL READ TIME: About 10 minutes
Date: 09/11/2001
Time: 6:30am
Location: An island in the middle of the ocean.
September 11, 2001 starts like any other. My alarm goes off and it’s time to get ready for school. I’ve been awake for at least half an hour because one of my neighbors recently started training chickens for cock fights and now the birds in his backyard wake me up before my alarm does. If that weren’t enough, I also live right next to the only road in and out of our town—right down the street from our local emergency room. Any ambulance responding to an accident anywhere down the coast necessarily had to drive past my house on the way. This morning, there seemed to be quite a bit more outside activity than usual.
As I was about to find out, the world had ended.
Not actually, not yet—but that’s what 9/11 felt like. Before that, I walked into what was a fairly normal morning in my house: my mother in full-on panic mode, eyes glued to the kitchen television.
I say “kitchen” television because we had 10 of them—one in each bedroom, living room, and office. This one existed so that my mom could watch TV while she cooked. She stood, leaning against the custom-made island in the middle of the room, staring at the screen in horror.
This, of course, was a daily occurrence. If it wasn’t Sunday (chores day) (when we would listen to music instead), the Television was on, and it was tuned to something terrifying: Cops, Forensic Files, Court TV, Survivor, Family Fued... something that dealt with people at their worst. Something to make us feel better about ourselves but terrified of the outside.
Court TV was basically the homepage for our televisions. I think the little emblem was burned into most of the screens. Nancy Grace is probably the person my mom spent the most time with. All the major American trials of my lifetime we’re played out in my house like we were a part of the damn jury. I could write an entire blog about this aspect of my life (and I probably will), but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
At the time it was just normal. Seeing the worst in people was normal. Being terrified of everyone and everything was normal.
So when I walked out of my bedroom the morning of September 11th, sun not yet risen over our side of the mountain, mother in full-on panic mode, I didn’t trip. I assumed some child from another island had been kidnapped again, or another White politician did something disrespectful to Hawaiian culture (again), and now the local natives were protesting (rinse, repeat).
As I walked into the kitchen, my mom’s eyes never broke away from the TV. I sat back on my barstool to see what she was looking at.
The World Trade Center. Billowing smoke. On fire.
“Where is that?” I asked her.
“New York.”
I read the text on screen and saw that it had happened this morning.
“Where’s dad?” I asked.
“He’s at work.”
My dad was always gone before I woke up, but today was different. My dad, you see, worked for the Department of Defense. This being 9/11, of course he was at work. At the time, I didn’t put together that this is what he would spend his entire day (week, month, years) working on.
All I knew was that I was a little scared, my mom was clearly scared, and my sisters were about to get up, and I didn’t know what to do.
“Mom, do we have to go to school today?”
“Yes. Yes you do. It’s just like any other day.”
Except it wasn’t—I just didn’t know at the time that my life would never be the same again.
My elementary school was only 5-7 minutes away without traffic, but because of #gentrification it took a lot longer when everyone tried to crowd in at the same time. Much like my dad leaving at 4:30 to beat traffic, we always left quite early for school. When we got there, it seemed like people were there and school was open, so we went on with our day as normal.
My little sisters, in 3rd, 2nd, & 1st grades, still had no idea what was going on. I walked into my 6th grade classroom and was in for quite a surprise.
Ms. Tiffany was one of those teachers the other teachers talked about. She didn’t look like the other teachers. She didn’t talk like the other teachers. She didn’t teach like the other teachers but she was there to give us a real education. Looking back, I understand why. She was a native scholar from the motherland who fought immeasurable odds to get an education, a degree, and a teaching position in one of the most rural areas of the state. No one wanted to teach at our schools—but she did, passionately and with purpose.
Ms. Tiffany came into the room in a fury that morning. It was normal for teachers and counselors to meet with administration after something big happened—like a fight or a riot or a death on campus or something—but this was different.
“The principal wants me to keep you all calm and play a movie. It’s my job to listen to him so I will play you a movie, but first…”
I can’t tell you exactly what happened, but if I had to theorize, I believe in this moment of tragedy and uncertainty Ms. Tiffany did the thing that felt right deep down inside, instead of “following the rules”—she told a room full of kids (kids who society fully expected to grow up to be drug dealers, gang bangers and teen mothers) the fucking truth.
I don’t remember what she said. Back then, I didn’t understand colonization, imperialism, capitalism, or any of the forces at work that caused this tragedy (and was destroying my home, little by little, year after year). I didn’t understand how those forces combined to incriminate, brainwash, and assassinate the natives in the very land I was sitting on.
I don’t remember what she said, but I remember her energy well. So well that now, sitting on my computer typing this out in LA almost 20 years later, I can still feel it.
I know she told us the truth.
The movie she chose to show us that day was a VHS of The Devils Arithmetic. For those of you who didn’t have a leader of the rebellion as a 6th grade teacher, let me fill you in. The book-turned-film opens with a 16-year-old American girl played by Kirsten Dunst looking to pick out a tattoo at a shop in New York. You find out her parents wont sign off on the papers to let her get a tattoo because her grandmother was forced to get one as a survivor of the Holocaust. Hannah doesn’t care much about her Jewish heritage until she gets transported back to 1941 and has to try to survive a Nazi death camp.
The other thing you need to remember is that this is Hawaii—the same place Pearl Harbor was attacked 60 years earlier. When America was in trouble for any reason, Hawaii was on edge. We all believed we might be under siege at any moment. If they attacked New York, we must be next.
The whole time I’m watching this movie, I’m thinking we’re gonna get bombs dropped on us at any time. This double whammy of anxiety was probably the reason I had my first period two weeks later. My body just said, “Fuck it! She’s been through all this, she’s ready to be a woman.”
Except I wasn’t. I was not-yet-11 years old. I’d suffered plenty of trauma, and the last thing I needed was more. But the world didn’t care what I needed, and it doled out another helping for all of us.
At the end of the movie Ms. Tiffany—much calmer now—summed it up by saying it was important for us to learn about history and to seek out real truths so we could stop more bad things from repeating in the future.
After lunch, they sent all the kids home. My mom picked us up. She seemed much more collected than before. I don’t know what it took for her to collect herself; it’s not something I thought about at the time. We got McDonald’s on the way home, so I really didn’t care. I was 10.
For the rest of the day, I played outside with my sisters and didn’t think about the tragedy again until my dad got home. He would often be shipped off with the military, and I was worried they were going to send him away again—this time into real danger. It was a huge relief when he walked through the doors and said he wasn’t being sent anywhere. Not this time. Which was good, because even though I didn’t know why, I know that I was scared.
Everyone in my family had a different response to what happened. My extended ohana included native artists and mainland military, and we didn’t really talk about it much. We just fell back on our programming and consumed the media the networks wanted us to. Soon, we were back to theorizing about the latest serial killer running loose on Unsolved Mysteries, and feeling “protected” while we watched Cops.
The 6am/6pm/10pm News was on every single day to keep us in check. We kept on living in our paradise prison, waiting silently for the next alarm to sound. Would it be an attack of man, like Pearl Harbor or the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom? Or would it be an attack of nature, like a hurricane or tsunami? We had plenty of things to worry about, so we stayed busy being vigilant and afraid.
I was unsure of what was really going on out there beyond the protected coastline of my little town, but after 9/11, I started looking at the horizon differently. Encouraged by Ms. Tiffany and my experiences on that day, I began to question everything.
#staycuriousandaskquestions
xoxo,
jfs