The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

my port of call.

My father did not permit crimes against the land.

my mother who taught me the southern way of the spirit in its most delicate and intimate forms. My mother believed in the dreams of flowers and animals.

My great-great-grandfather, Winston Shadrach Wingo,

day

won Melrose Island in a horseshoe game near the end of his life, and

my mother and father began their long, dispiriting war against each other. Most of their skirmishes were like games of ringolevio, with the souls of their children serving as the ruined captured flags

I still believe that they both loved us deeply, but, as with many parents, their love proved to be the most lethal thing about them.

queen of exquisite imagery in the eye of a worshipful son, yet I cannot forgive her for not telling me about the dream that sustained her during my childhood, the one that would cause the ruin of my family and the death of one of us. The child of a beautiful woman,

I was shaped by life on the river, part child, part sacristan of tides.

when we spoke of our childhood, it seemed part elegy, part nightmare.

In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

true....

“Name the poem, Savannah, you wrote in honor of your family.” “‘The History of Auschwitz.’”

This has not been an easy century to endure. I entered the scene in the middle of a world war at the fearful dawning of the atomic age. I grew up in South Carolina, a white southern male, well trained and gifted in my hatred of blacks when the civil rights movement caught me outside and undefended along the barricades and proved me to be both wicked and wrong. But I was a thinking boy, a feeling one, sensitive to injustice, and I worked hard to change myself and to play a small, insignificant part in that movement—and soon I was feeling superabundantly proud of myself. Then I found myself marching in an all-white, all-male ROTC program in college and was spit on by peace demonstrators who were offended by my uniform. Eventually I would become one of those demonstrators, but I never spit on anyone who disagreed with me. I thought I would enter my thirties quietly, a contemplative man, a man whose philosophy was humane and unassailable, when the women’s liberation

movement bushwhacked me on the avenues and I found myself on the other side of the barricades once again. I seem to embody everything that is wrong with the twentieth century.

“Don’t listen to a thing your parents say. That’s the only rule of life I want you to be sure and follow.”

parents were put on earth for the sole purpose of making their children miserable.

After you grow up and leave me, kids, my only duty in the world will be to make you feel guilty. I’ll try to ruin your lives.”

a southerner is one of God’s natural fools.”

“Friendship and motherhood are not compatible.”

I know she loves me with all her heart. But we sit there and say things that wound and damage and destroy.

I never know exactly how I feel about something. There’s always something secret hidden from me.”

It’s the old dance and I know all the steps.”

“You blame your parents for so much, Tom. When does it start becoming your own responsibility? When do you take your life into your own hands?

If I could hurt the body, I would not notice the coming apart of the soul.

It is an art form to hate New York City properly.

feeling of displacement,

There is too much of too much there.

I do not like cities that dishonor their own marshes.

if it had the authenticity and stamp of Manhattan approval, then Savannah embraced it with the fervor of a catechist.

supernatural power of poetry

no gargoyles in her work, only defiled angels crying for home.

I believe in the ties of Gemini, the perfect, superhuman connection of twins.

“Until I figure out the past, I can’t bear to think about the rest of my life.

People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

Savannah’s living proof that writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”

Savannah had been chosen to bear the weight of the family’s accumulated psychotic energy. Her luminous sensitivity left her open to the violence and disaffection of our household and we used her to store the bitterness of our mordant chronicle.

I tried to think of all our roles. Luke had been offered the role of strength and simplicity.

Luke was neither poet nor psychotic. He was a man of action, and that was the intolerable burden our family presented to him simply because he was born first of all.

My designation in the family was normality. I was the balanced child drafted into the ranks for leadership, for coolness under fire, stability.

I was the neutral country,

I spotted Savannah’s second book of poetry, The Prince of Tides. I opened it to the dedication page and almost cried when I read the words.

How I loathed being a man, with its fierce responsibilities, its tally of ceaseless strength, its passionate and stupid bravado. How I hated strength and duty and steadfastness.

Strength was my gift; it was also my act,

My poems are my war with the world.

Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.

“The southern way?” she said. “My mother’s immortal phrase. We laugh when the pain gets too much. We laugh when the pity of human life gets too . . . pitiful. We laugh when there’s nothing else to do.” “When do you weep . . . according to the southern way?” “After we laugh, Doctor. Always. Always after we laugh.”

catatonia.

the solemn dress rehearsal for death itself.

American teachers are all trained to think poor; we love conferences and book fairs with hospitality suites,