In Hawai'ian, "ohana" means "family." But they say it means more. It means not only the people you're related to, but the people you most care about, who make up your world. It is supposed to be the most sacred bond there is. I believe it, because for the shortest time, I felt it myself.

During World War Two, I was stationed on a cruiser in the Pacific. My shipmate was a big Hawai'ian named Malu Pahukula. We were both assigned to artillery, manning the big cannons, and often found ourselves working together. The main thing we had in common was that, unlike most of the other crew, we weren't white. He was an Islander, and I was Black. So we became friends. When we docked in Pearl Harbor, he took a day's shore leave to visit his family. "Come on along," he said, and so I did. He told me there'd be swimming, so I brought a pair of shorts that would serve as swim trunks.

His brother picked us up at the gate in a battered Packard, and we drove up the west coast of Oahu for about an hour. He turned off the road and we drove through some sugar cane plantations for a while, emerging on the coast.

In celebration of Malu's return, the family was having a luau, which I found out was a sort of outdoor feast featuring a pig that had been roasted in an underground pit. The food was plentiful, and Malu introduced me to the forty or fifty people who were there. They were all brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles or cousins, and I'd completely given up keeping the relationships straight after about the tenth introduction. "It doesn't matter," Malu said. "We're all ohana. And because we serve together on a ship, you're my warrior-brother, so you're ohana, too. So enjoy yourself."

After an hour, I began to relax. Around us was convivial chatter, all of which was in Hawai'ian, of which I understood not a single word. But the language itself was like singing, all flowing rhythms and music. The festivities reminded me of the church picnics my family attended back when I was growing up in Mississippi. Everybody was dressed in swimming clothes -- baggy trunks for the men and modest one-piece swimsuits for the women, as was the custom of the time -- and we'd swim in the ocean and then rinse the salt off with a fresh-water shower set up on the beach. The only ones without swimwear were the children, who scampered around nude, boys and girls alike. None of the women looked really comfortable in her swimwear, and I suspected that they seldom wore bathing suits when strangers weren't around.

One girl in particular caught my fancy. She was pure Polynesian, like all the attendees but me, and although she looked to be in her early teens, she filled out her petite swimsuit quite nicely. Her hair was long, straight, and as black as black could be. Her eyes were dark, too, with the slight fold of the Oriental that marks so many Oceanic peoples. She had beautiful legs, long and thin, and graceful hands. I asked Malu who she was. "That's Lani. She's my cousin. Actually, she's my cousin's daughter. It doesn't matter."

"How old is she?"

"She's going to be fifteen in September. I think she's probably the smartest one in the family. She reads the paper, and listens to the radio all the time. And she's the best dancer of us all."

At that point, the sun was setting, and some of the family got out musical instruments, including a strange sort of guitar that the guitarist held in his lap and played with a slide. There were also ukuleles, a fiddle, a kind of flute, and drums of different sizes and tones. While the musicians played, several woman and a few men danced to the sensuous sounds.

Then some other women came out, dressed in a sort of sarong. They moved to an open area that served as a stage, and started dancing the hula as an older man sang a traditional song in a voice that slid from tenor to falsetto as effortlessly as the women danced. I was spellbound.

Manu came over and asked me how I was doing. "I'm doing fine, thanks. Is that the traditional hula?"

"Well, it's the best we can do. A lot of those traditions were lost when you haoles took over. But the old people say that we have the spirit right."

"I'm not a haole! I'm colored!"

"Well, to us, you're haole, just the brown kind. It's a culture thing, not a skin thing. But tonight, you're ohana, too. We'll prove it to you."

"I sort of expected hulas to be danced by ladies in grass skirts and cocoanut bras, like the movies."

He made a face. "That's for the tourists. This is da kine. The real thing. But now you'll see something."

And indeed I did. Lani came onstage, dressed in a loose-fitting silk sarong, and began to dance. If I thought the other women were graceful, it was nothing compared to her. Her hands and arms and hips moved in sensuous patterns, telling a story in a language I could not understand, but I knew that it was a beautiful one. And through the sheer fabric, I glimpsed a body that was just starting to ripen. Her small breasts pressed against the fabric but moved underneath it, unrestrained by a bra. She turned slowly, and I caught a glimpse of her nude body through the fabric, silhouetted in the light of the tiki torches. Her hands traced languorous arcs in the air, palms up and then down. There was not a single gesture that was licentious or suggestive, but the overwhelming impact of sensuousness left me deeply stirred. I found myself dabbing the tears from my eyes.

"See? I told you she was good."

"You're right, Manu. I've never seen any dancing like that."

"And you probably will never see it again. The tourists don't want that sort of dancing. They just want dancers to shake their hips and their tits."

"They're idiots. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"See, you're thinking Hawai'ian already! C'mon, brah, let's get some drinks."

Due to the language barrier, I spent most of my time with Malu, Lani, and a few others who could speak English. Lani, in particular, kept checking on me from time to time to make sure I felt at home. I complimented her on her dancing, and she blushed. "We women learn to dance as soon as we learn to walk. Men, too. I'll do more dancing later. You will like it, I'm sure." This she said with a wink and a smile.

As the evening progressed, I noticed a distinct change in the atmosphere. Was it my imagination, or were people flirting more with each other? There seemed to be a lot more hugging and kissing than before, especially after all the children were put to bed. The sun must have been down for three hours when the musicians and dancers returned to their places.

One of the older men got up and addressed the crowd, speaking in Hawaiian. At once, people started removing their bathing suits. I looked at Malu, and he smiled and nodded to me, even as he was slipping off his own trunks. So I did the same. I was worried that the sight of all this female skin would get me hard, but then I noticed that most of the men were already at least half erect. Malu's own penis was big and thick, in proportion to his frame, and already standing out proudly.

There were six dancers, all naked. Three were teen-aged boys, and three were women. One of them, the slimmest and most beautiful, was Lani. My heart leapt as I beheld her naked body for the first time, with her young breasts and the slightest tuft of black hair over her vulva. I could feel my cock swelling to hardness without me touching it at all. The musicians started to play, and the dance began. This time, it was frankly erotic, with the dancers caressing themselves and each other. All three cocks were hard, bobbing as the boys danced. The boys would stroked the girls' breasts, pinching the nipples, as the girls would make circles of their thumbs and forefingers and slip them over the boys' cocks. My own cock was so hard and sensitive that I couldn't bear to touch it, for fear of cumming.

I noticed that the audience, lying on blankets on the sand and watching the performance, were also paired off, man and woman, caressing each other but taking care not to cause the men to ejaculate. As they fondled each other, they continued to watch the dance, which was getting bawdier by the minute. Now the girls were plunging their fingers into their cunts as they danced. The boys moved up behind them and cupped the girls's breasts as their cocks rubbed the area between the girls's vaginas and assholes.

I realized that I was watching something extraordinarily rare: a fertility or mating dance of the sort that had been practiced on these islands for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, and still took place out of sight of Western eyes. I desperately yearned to be on that stage myself. Although I had always thought of myself as strictly heterosexual, I found myself looking at the bouncing penises of the boys as much as the jiggling breasts of the girls.

When I thought I could bear no more, the music changed. The stringed instruments and the flutes fell silent, and there was only the pulse of the drumming. The boys and girls switched places, with the girls now behind the boys. An older woman with large, low-hanging breasts came up to them with a large wooden bowl. The boys stood before it and, as we all watched, each girl stroked her partner's cock until it erupted in a flood of jism, spilling into the bowl. Then she set the bowl on a table and, squeezing her breasts, expressed a little milk into it. Then all the men in the audience got up, their own cocks leaking pre-cum.

Malu came over and took my hand. "Here's where we come in, brah. Just do what I do." We stood in line with the men, stroking our dicks to keep them hard. As each man came up to the bowl, the older women masturbated him until he came, adding his own load to the bowl. After all the sexual tension, I came in a flash, the intensity of the orgasm causing my knees to weaken, and I sagged momentarily. Then I recovered and relinquished the bowl to the next man standing with his own cock aching for release. There were a few women in line, too, and I wondered what they were doing there, but soon found out. They were lactating, and each added a drop or two of her mother's milk to the creamy mixture in the bowl.

After all the men had cum, the woman filled the bowl with oil and mixed it into the cum and milk. Then she said some sort of prayer or incantation, and set it down in the middle of us. Each man anointed a woman with the oil, spreading it onto her skin and rubbing it in. Then she did the same for him. The symbolism was plain: two life-giving fluids, male and female, mixed together to sanctify the union of man and woman. When my turn came, Lani was beside me and asked me to be her "partner" although she didn't use that term, but a Hawaiian one instead. I smeared the mixture onto her lovely little breasts, her arms, her beautiful legs, her pussy, her ass, and her back. Then she took some and gave me the same treatment, taking more time than necessary with my cock. I was getting a little bit hard again, and she smiled and hugged me. Then she went away, and another woman came up and hugged me.