WAILUA — A prison guard whistled.
“Step to the side. We’ll do a head count,” he told the inmates. “Now.”
About half the crowd gathered under a pavilion in the minimum security area at Kauai Community Correctional Center shuffled into formation. The women lined up shoulder to shoulder on a sidewalk facing the parking lot, where the men stood at attention. They wore T-shirts — males in white, females in gray.
Down the line, they counted off, each inmate yelling out their spot in line, “Seven! Eight! Nine!…”
“Bear with us,” the guard told the crowd, a few dozen senior citizens, mostly aunties in colorful blouses, who laughed along. “We just make sure nobody ran away.”
Kauai’s convicts and seniors celebrate Thanksgiving together on Tuesday, and in each other, they found a lot to be grateful for.
One inmate got up to give a speech. He talked about the history of Thanksgiving but sounded a bit bored.
“I apologize folks. I’m gonna stop reading this and talk about something else,” he said after a few minutes, folding the thin stack of papers he had been shuffling and stuffing them in the back pocket of his jeans. “Appreciation. That’s what Thanksgiving is all about, yeah?”
He gave up on the story of the national holiday and told his own. During the same event last year, he stood leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, watching the other inmates dance and eat and laugh with aunties and uncles.
“On the outside, I was smiling,” he said. “But inside, I felt like having a panic attack.”
A year later, he said the thought of being around so many people didn’t scare him anymore. He still panicked all week about giving a speech in front of everyone, but the progress he made was not lost on him.
“I’m going to be grateful for every opportunity that comes my way,” he said. “Every moment in here is an opportunity.”
Auntie Marilyn Matsumoto, president of Lihue Senior Center, walked up to the mic with her harmonica and played “Amazing Grace.”
A few notes into the song, female inmates from all across the back of the pavilion started singing along.
They hummed, or mumbled the words softly. The chorus grew. Mumbles turned to words. One of the male prisoners joined in, then another, and another. When a table full of aunties in the middle of the crowd broke out singing, everybody followed.
Auntie Marilyn played the last note and said, “OK, now everybody sing.” And everybody did. With one voice, they sung like it was church — no shame.
Once a year, KCCC invites kupuna from an adult care facility to eat, listen to live music and dance in the gazebo area in front of the facility.
The male and female inmates from Lifetime Stand brought aunties and uncles Styrofoam lunch trays piled with food they had spent the last 24 hours making. They served turkey and noodles and fried chicken and rice and cans of ginger ale, but pork was the main thing.
“Uncle Sia has a trap in the back,” Tasha Ka‘auwai-Ragudo said. “On Friday nights we have cookouts.”
Sergeant Tagipo Salausa, better known to the inmates as “Uncle Sia,” said he set up his trap because pigs always come down down the mountain at night and eat up the inmate’s garden. He guessed the one he caught this week was about 100 pounds. It fed a lot of people, and there were leftovers.
The inmates have plenty of ways to prepare a pig when they get their hands on one, Ka‘auwai-Ragudo explained.
“The last time we caught it, we made it into a stew — we boiled it. It was really good,” she said. “Or sometimes the boys save it and make smoke meat for their lunches.”
This time, they prepared it Native Hawaiian style.
“They were cooking from yesterday,” Mikela Brown said, leaning around her friend, Faith Chambers, who had just finished serving everyone and finally had the chance to sit down and eat.
Chambers said they cooked the pork in an imu: “That’s why it’s so soft.” When asked how an imu works, she said, “I don’t know. I’m not Hawaiian.”
A Hawaiian woman sat a little ways down the bench and overheard the conversation.
“In the ground, dig a hole,” Megan Lahelakawehi Delima-Kamai said. “Throw in the keave wood. Then put the banana leaf, then the food, then a banana leaf, and then cover ‘em up with dirt.”
At a table nearby, a young woman in a gray T-shirt pressed her hands together in prayer, looked at the sky sincerely and said, “Dear Lord, mahalo nui loa, domo arigato, salamat!” Her friends laughed. She shrugged and said, “I know the important things in life.”
Two aunties in their 70s, Marian Ogata and Carol Teragawa, sat next to each other. Teragawa quietly enjoyed the food, which she said was excellent, and smiled at everyone. Ogata was waiting for the music to start.
“Usually the girls do the hula and the guys sing. And they got ballroom dancing,” she said. She winked and added, “And you can get somebody to dance with you.”
The band started playing a few minutes later. The lead singer and guitarist were inmates. They played old favorites from the ’60s and ’70s, and the crowd loved them.
“Look at all this talent,” said one guard, watching the band from the back of the pavilion.
He pointed at the elaborate flower center pieces on each table and explained how one inmate, Kanbert Alapai, recently sentenced to 20 years in jail on drug charges, designed the arrangements and carved the vases from hollowed-out banana tree trunks.
The dance floor filled up. Large men with tattoos on their arms and work boots on their feet led little old ladies by the hand. A slow song came on, and a female inmate paired up with an uncle who didn’t look much older than her. They smiled into each other’s eyes and talked quietly while they danced. Her hand rested on the back of his neck.
Caleb, and your editors, this is the best-written story Iʻve seen in the Garden Island in the two years weʻve lived here. You did a great job, on a perfectly apt Thanksgiving story. Mahalo!