Short Stories
MAUKI
by Jack Lo nd on
He weighed one hundred and ten pounds. His hair was
kinky and negroid, and he was black. He was peculiarly black.
He was neither blue-black nor purple-black, but plum-black.
His name was Mauki, and he was the son of a chief. He had
three tam bo s. Tambo is Melanesian for taboo, and is first cousin to
that Polynesian word. Mauki's three tam bo s were as follows:
first, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a
woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings;
secondly, he must never eat clams nor any food from a fire in
which clams had been cooked; thirdly, he must never touch a
crocodile, nor travel in a canoe that carried any part of a croco-
dile even if as large as a tooth.
Of a different black were his teeth, which were deep black,
or, perhaps better, lamp-black. They had been made so in a sin-
gle night, by his mother, who had compressed about them a
powdered mineral which was dug from the landslide back of
Port Adams. Port Adams is a salt-water village on Malaita, and
Malaita is the most savage island in the Solomons—so savage
that no traders nor planters have yet gained a foothold on it;
while, from the time of the earliest b†che-de-mer fishers and san-
dalwood traders down to the latest labor recruiters equipped
with automatic rifles and gasolene engines, scores of white ad-
venturers have been passed out by tomahawks and soft-nosed
Snider bullets. So Malaita remains to-day, in the twentieth centu-
ry, the stamping ground of the labor recruiters, who farm its
coasts for laborers who engage and contract themselves to toil
on the plantations of the neighboring and more civilized islands
for a wage of thirty dollars a year. The natives of those neighbor-
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