John Frum The Reluctant Messiah

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The projector sprang to life with a bit of a clatter but there on the wall before him was the moving picture version of the photo he had discovered first in Miss Edna's cockpit and now in Professor Wharton's crate. Everyone and everything awash in that amber light that was common to 30-year-old, 8mm home movies. Everyone was happy and clowning as they gathered for what would become a popular group photo. 

As the camera panned about, John recognized some of the terrain as well as a much shinier, newer Miss Edna in the background perched on the dirt airstrip alongside its bamboo cousin, the villagers' replica P-38. There were random shots of researchers, foliage, closeups of monkeys gnawing at stolen food- all unedited and without any coherence or chronology.

Suddenly Sam's face filled the screen. He looked exactly the same.

"Was he ever young?" John jokingly asked himself.

Sam was being prepared for an interview. John recognized the backdrop used in the 1976 National Geographic documentary that Professor Wharton had shown the class as part of its discussion on the Cargo Cult. The much younger, then Chief Sam wore his trademark smile as the pompous, condescending correspondent asked the now memorable question,

"Really chief, isn't it a bit foolish to continue waiting for your Messiah? After all, it's been over seventy years now."

And without missing a beat he answered,

"No. No more foolish than you Christians who waiting for yours for two thousand years."

"Yes!!" John loved that mic-drop moment from the first time he heard it but even more so now that he knew Sam and Sam's big heart. Sam described the simple life they had and how the early colonists nearly destroyed it. He went on to explain how the American GIs were different. They were kind and caring. Most importantly, the tribe saw that dark men, men who looked like them, were treated as equals, working, and living side by side with the white man. It was then they knew that their messiah would come from such a group of people.

And of course, there were the wondrous toys they brought with them. But they suddenly vanished and the magical stuff they'd come to know and love went with them.

"This simple life, this Utopian existence you speak of... do you have any problems? Surely you must have some..." the correspondent surmised.

"Yes," Sam said. "Ratumu drink much Kava and he forget to tie canoe and wave come and take canoe away."

"That's all, that's it?" he asked. He laughed. "That's your biggest problem?"

"Oh, no," Sam said. "Ghosts. Giants come. They take women away. That very sad."

The correspondent looked at his cameraman with a snarky smirk. With that, the footage of Sam's National Geographic interview abruptly stopped, and the screen was now filled with more close-up plant samples and random scenery. John's focus once again shifted back to the stacks of papers.

Sifting through the last stack of stuff he came across a tiny picture paper-clipped to an entrance application. It was for a prep school in Hawaii and was only partially filled out. The name on the report had been scrawled in as Emerald, but the space for a last name had been left blank. If John wasn't mistaken, this was the same little girl he first noticed in all the other group shots.

Then it hit him. This was the five-year-old version of the 'EM' Professor Wharton so anxiously wanted him to meet with. Who was she? What "answers", as Professor Wharton put it, would she have? Answers about Nephilim? His past? His family?