The Water is Wide

by Pat Conroy

He was a product of the upcountry of South Carolina, the Bible Belt, sand-lot baseball, knife fights under the bleachers. His pride in his doctorate was almost religious. It was the badge that told the world that he was no longer a common man. Intellectually, he was a thoroughbred. Financially, he was secure. And Jesus was his backer. Jesus, with the grits-and-gravy voice, the shortstop on the mill team, liked ol’ Henry Piedmont.

I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think.

These were children of the South just as I was. They were products of homes where the flag was cherished like Veronica’s veil, where the military was the pluperfect defender of honor, justice, and hymens, and where conservatism was a mandate of life, not merely a political philosophy.

Each night I joined my best friends, George Garbade, Mike Jones, and Bernie Schein, in front of the television for the evening news. The war in Vietnam ate people on film. The seven o’clock news smoked with napalm and bodies. After the news, we held disorganized, vehement debates.

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.

So it was a little before Dachau that the mortar of cynicism was hardening. I was becoming convinced that the world was a colorful, variegated grab bag full of bastards.

By not being able to tell me anything about themselves, they were telling me everything.

So the day continued and with each question I got closer and closer to the children. With each question I asked I got madder and madder at the people responsible for the condition of these kids. At the end of the day I had compiled an impressive ledger of achievement. Seven of my students could not recite the alphabet. Three children could not spell their names. Eighteen children thought Savannah, Georgia, was the largest city in the world. Savannah was the only city any of the kids could name. Eighteen children had never seen a hill—eighteen children had never heard the words integration and segregation. Four children could not add two plus two. Eighteen children did not know we were fighting a war in Southeast Asia. Of course, eighteen children never had heard of Asia. One child was positive that John Kennedy was the first President of the United States. Seventeen children agreed with that child. Eighteen children concurred with the pre-Copernican Theory that the earth was the center of the universe. Two children did not know how old they were. Five children did not know their birth dates. Four children could not count to ten. The four oldest thought the Civil War was fought between the Germans and the Japs.

To make matters even more serious, none of them could understand me. Among the peoples of the world I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of my mouth like fat fish. Having lived my life in various parts of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas and having been sired by a gruff-talking Marine from Chicago and a grits-and-gravy honey from Rome, Georgia, what has remained is an indefinable nonspeech, flavored subtly with a nonaccent, and decipherable to no one, black or white, on the American continent.

Mr. Conroy, ever see how snake eat egg?” Lincoln asked. “No, Lincoln, but I’m afraid to ask.” “He swallow the egg whole. Then he climb up tree, jump off branch, land on ground, and pop egg in belly.” “That’s how I eat eggs, too, Lincoln.”

I returned to the serpent mythology on numerous occasions during the year, exhorting the students to look truth in the eye and to understand that the things we learn in our youth are not always literally correct. With brilliant logic they argued that what I had learned in the city about snakes was not any better than what they learned while living on the island. They had lived with snakes all their lives; I had merely read about them.

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

So the county transported 2000 books out to the island, put them in the community center, and hired a part-time librarian as custodian of the books. The books, of course, reflected the great trends of literature; the selection was vast and represented all the eminent authors. Here an old oyster-shucker could find Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

You bust your ass to help them, and they don’t even check out a book.” Good intentions flourish on Yamacraw Island. The projects of concerned white folks are evident everywhere. Supply books and by a miraculous process of osmosis, the oyster-pickers will become Shakespearean scholars. All dem nigras need is books and a little tad of education.

The record album that came under the most careful study by Top Cat was a gift from my mother back in those ancient days when Mom thought her family should develop some familiarity with the arts. She invested a considerable sum of money in the Reader’s Digest series of records and books designed to give cultural dimwits at least a surface knowledge of the world’s finer things.

My pre-Yamacraw theory of teaching held several sacred tenets, among these being that the teacher must always maintain an air of insanity, or of eccentricity out of control, if he is to catch and hold the attention of his students. 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.

Bernie and I both believed in teacher dramatics, gross posturings and frenzied excesses to get a rise out of dead-head, thought-killed students, who daily sat before us like shoed mushrooms. The master of clowns, Bernie could twist his face into a thousand contortions to get kids to laugh with or at him. Bernie would tell me, “Boy, keep them laughing. Make them laugh so damn hard and so damn loud that they don’t realize they are learning.”

My tactics were different. I concentrated on variety as the primary method. Sweet talk, Shakespearean monologues, Marine Corps brutality, prayers—anything that could possibly inflame the imagination, even mom...

“We don’t like the news,” one child whispered. “Tough crap, we are going to listen to the news whether you like it or not. Let’s take a vote. Who does not want to listen to the news?” Every hand in the room shot up. “I am going to break every arm that is raised in the air after we take the next vote. Who does not want to listen to the news?” No one raised a single hand. “Ah, excellent. Then it is unanimous, and I mu...

Our pep rallies invariably ended when Mrs. Brown’s large head would peer into the window and flash disapproving, desultory glances at me and the kids. The kids reacted as if a death’s-head was in the window. After school Mrs. Brown would lecture me about the “proper way to conduct yourself around colored children.” She repeated her offer to buy me a leather strap. I thanked her and told her that I was looking at a bullwhip in Savannah.

occasion, I looked over to find Jasper and Richard sitting nose to nose, glaring virulently at each other, saying nothing, pinching each other’s arms. Their faces were twisted in anger. Jasper pinched Richard. Then Richard pinched Jasper. And so on. When the great two-hundred-pound mediator stumbled over to intervene, I was told, “Richard cheats,” by Jasper and then, “Jasper cheats,” by Richard. Both of them proved their cases conclusively. Indeed, both of them undeniably had cheated. When Prophet said that he had seen it all and that both were wrong, I nodded my head sagaciously, delivered an impromptu sermon on the need for honesty, and left them to continue the game in peace. When I looked around again, Richard and Jasper were pinching Prophet.

It was during a session of this game that Prophet electrified the class and held it unwittingly in the palm of his hand for several staggering moments. He spun the dial and landed on the letter F. He properly identified the letter and its sound. But naming a word that started with F proved a considerable challenge. Finally, after long and tortured deliberation, he came out with a word. “Fuck,” he said rather smugly. The class and the teacher of the class were stunned. Prophet grinned. “What did you say, Prophet?” I asked inanely. “Fuck,” he repeated, with bell-like clarity for Prophet. “Would you please spell that word, Prophet?” I asked, praying for deliverance. “F-U-X,” he spelled. “Do you mean ‘fox,’ Prophet?” “Yas’m. Look like dawg.” The class erupted. Prophet smiled broadly, amazed and pleased by his ability to evoke laughter from the elder section of Yamacraw scholars.

Bluffton is sleepy, magisterially silent, and enjoys a benediction of flowers every brilliant spring. Yet it is a town that retains many of the wrinkles and arthritic cramps of the Old South.

“I be on this island plenty long time. I the midwife over here. All these chillun on this island my chillun. I take them out of their mothers. I see ’em when they first be born. I deliver so many chillun. Over one hunnert. All those chillun you teach yonder schoolhouse. They all my chillun. My husband be the undertaker befo’ he die. I bring the people into the eart’. He put ’em back in.”

So Richard rendered his version of Oz. Then Oscar, then Frank, then Mary, then Sidney, each adding their own peculiar interpretations, each emphasizing a different part of the story, and each feeling perfectly free to combine incidents from the Wizard of Oz with incidents that occurred in other television programs. Sidney got Oz confused with an episode from “Bonanza.” Hoss Cartwright battling the witches of the Purple Sage. According to Oscar, Oz and Disneyland were somehow related. Richard somehow got Captain Kangaroo confused with the wizard, and Mr. Greenjeans confused with the scarecrow.

Sure enough, a bus and a rather puzzled, nervous driver waited for instructions near the front door of the school. He was about fifteen years old and looked faintly perturbed about being pulled out of class for a project so ephemeral and disorganized. One noteworthy thing about South Carolina is the quality of school-bus drivers in the state. To qualify for a bus license one must have reached puberty and be able to recite the alphabet without stuttering.

“That’s very nice, Captain, but can you tell me if you can get those kids back to the island safely?” “Oh, I s’pose so,” he answered. “Why don’t we wait a little while. I do believe the weather gonna clear. Fact is, I can feel it in my bones.” “Great. Captain, I have got to get those kids back to the island or their parents are going to kill me.” “It gonna clear up.” Two hours later the weather had worsened considerably. Great, high waves smashed over the dock and the whole river was boiling, savage, and unrestrained. Jesus could not have gotten across that river. Moses couldn’t have opened it up. A miracle could not have calmed those raging waters soon enough to get those kids across the water to their homes.

My past had no relationship to my present except that I saw a direct connection between the education of my parents and the education of their children, the dreams of my parents and the dreams of their children, just as there existed a link, straight and uncomplicated, between the parents of Yamaeraw and their children. Everything occurred in cycles, fanged and implacable cycles. Somehow I had to interfere with the cycle or interrupt it, interject my own past into the present of my students.

I could hear some white voice coming from some collective unconscious deep within me saying, “They don’t know any better. They are happy this way.” 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.

I was challenged one morning by a prowling, spectral nemesis that crept along the lowcountry as silent as an egret’s flight—the fog. Fog caused no pain; it simply induced blindness and required one to navigate by faith instead of sight. It transformed the land into a terrible sameness; north became south and east became south and west became north. I had no compass and hoped that the routine of the daily commute would be enough to deliver me to the island. But the deeper I went into the soul of the fog, the more hopelessly lost I became, the more confused, and the more panicked.