The Water is Wide

by Pat Conroy

The imprint of Dachau branded me indelibly and caused me to suffer the miscarriage of my hopeful philosophy. If man was good, then Dachau could never have happened. Simple as that.

I felt that I had extracted the essential message of Dachau and that our philosophy was simply an exercise of innocence and nothing more. Nor could all the paint and clay of the Louvre dim the memory of one photograph: of a mother leading her small children to the gas chamber.

“White man crazy,”

Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.

The teacher must always be on the attack, looking for new ideas, changing worn-out tactics, and never, ever falling into patterns that lead to student ennui.

He crazy,”

We could not be wrong, because we were young, humanistic, and full of shit.

No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education.

No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school boards in the world.

Yet all around me, in the grinning faces of my students, I could see a crime, so ugly that it could be interpreted as a condemnation of an entire society, a nation be damned, a history of wickedness—these children before me did not have a goddam chance of sharing in the incredible wealth and affluence of the country that claimed them, a country that failed them, a country that needed but did not deserve deliverance.

Violence was part of the culture and it erupted periodically during the year and affected the children in my class.

I taught just like you’re doin’ now, Pat. Only I taught mill kids where you’re teachin’ colored children. I was a mill kid myself. These colored people think they know prejudice. I knew prejudice, too. I was called lint head. And being called lint head is just as bad as being called nigger, believe me.”

Of the Yamacraw children I can say little. I don’t think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth. I felt much beauty in my year with them. It hurt very badly to leave them. For them I leave a single prayer: that the river is good to them in the crossing.