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Updated: June 27, 2025
When I had sat down with them on the floor, the girl began to question me about England; which I tried to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells one upon another to represent the houses, and explaining, as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the perpetual toil. 'Pas de cocotiers? pas do popoi? she asked.
I related these stories of the mei to Great Fern, who replied: "Aue! It may be. The old gods were great, and all the world is a wonder. As for me, I am a Christian. The breadfruit ripens, and I fill the popoi pit." Great Fern was my friend, and, as he said, a Christian, yet I fear that he did not tell me all he knew of the ancient customs.
They lived in a spacious house set in three acres of breadfruit and cocoanuts, an ancient grove long in their family. Often I squatted on their mats, dipping a gingerly finger in their popoi bowl and drinking the sweet wine of the half-ripe cocoanut, the while Mouth of God's mother spoke long and earnestly on the abode of the damned and the necessity for seeking salvation.
The hour of sleep had passed, and squatted before the troughs men and women mashed the ma for the popoi, or idled on the platform in red and yellow pareus, watching the roasting breadfruit. There must be poverty-stricken folk indeed, for I saw that the houses showed no sign whatever of the ugliness that the Marquesan has aped from the whites.
And on the night when the popoi pits were filled, pressed down and running over, when they had been covered with banana leaves and weighed with heavy stones, and the season's task was finished, something occurred that filled my mind with many vague surmises. I had been awakened at midnight by the crashing fall of a cocoanut on the iron roof above my head.
Might I, as a son, be equally able to answer for myself, and to show, when the Great Judge demanded the question of me, whether I had done my own duty, and honoured my father and mother! O popoi! My grandfather has quoted in his memoir a line of Homer, showing how in our troubles and griefs the gods are always called in question.
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