The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

After my father beat me for breaking the law and for killing the last eagle in Colleton County, he made me build a fire, dress the bird, and eat its flesh as tears rolled down my face.

It was my mother who taught me the southern way of the spirit in its most delicate and intimate forms.

But we never knew about her dreams, for my mother kept us strangers to her own interior life.

Her eyes were our keys to the palace of wildness.

I do not know, however, when my mother and father began their long, dispiriting war against each other.

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.

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.

If Henry Wingo had not been a violent man, I think he would have made a splendid father.

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.

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

It’s an act of will to have a memory or not, and I chose not to have one. Because I needed to love my mother and father in all their flawed, outrageous humanity,

The Wingos were a family that fate tested a thousand times and left defenseless, humiliated, and dishonored. But my family also carried some strengths into the fray, and these strengths let almost all of us survive the descent of the Furies. Unless you believe Savannah; it is her claim that no Wingo survived.

“I’ve warned you about boys, girls. They’re all disgusting, filthy-minded, savage little reprobates who do nasty things like pee on bushes and pick their noses.”

She only comes here when she can ruin my life in some small way.

“Friendship and motherhood are not compatible.”

“Mom, why don’t you get a job bottling guilt? We could sell it to all American parents who haven’t mastered the fine art of making their kids feel like shit all the time.

“I’m trying to figure out how I ruined my life,” I said to Orion. “I want to know the exact moment it was preordained that I would lead a perfectly miserable life and drag everyone I love down with me.”

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

She was one of those southerners who were aware from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

We were witnesses at the creation. In our house by the river we had watched a poet grow.

I first knew of my sister’s light in the darkness. What I didn’t know was how much of the darkness she would bring along on the voyage.

I just want you to remember where you came from, Savannah. I don’t want you to become like these folks.”

“Savannah. The voice. The last voice that told you to kill yourself. Whose voice was that? You didn’t tell me.” She looked at me, her brother, her twin. “That was the kindest, most awful voice of all, Tom. It was your voice they used. The voice I love the best.”

“She mentioned that day on the island.” “I heard her. You should have told her it never happened.” “It did.” “Mom told us it never happened.”

I think we’re all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.”

From earliest childhood, Savannah had been chosen to bear the weight of the family’s accumulated psychotic energy.

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.

But it was good to feel the tears try to break through. It was proof I was still alive inside, down deep, where the hurt lay bound and degraded in the cheap, bitter shell of my manhood.

Strength was my gift; it was also my act, and I’m sure it’s what will end up killing me.

She began writing as an act of outrage that she was born to such a family.”

I remembered something she had told me: that deep within her stillness and solitude, her spirit was healing itself in the unreachable places, mining the riches and ores that lay concealed in the most inaccessible passages of her mind.

The story of the Wingos is one of humor, grotesquerie, and tragedy. Tragedy predominates.

But the photograph stopped time, and those three smiling Wingo children would stand on that boat forever holding one another close in a bond of frail but imperishable love.

I stared at the laughing girl in the picture and wondered when it was, the exact moment, that I had lost her, that I let her fall too far away from me, that I betrayed the laughing girl and let the world have her.

Tide was one of the immutable constants of life by the river and he could not fathom why it had chosen this moment to betray itself and his family.

I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried of myself.

My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time, and because there was something essentially complaisant and orthodox in my nature, I allowed them to knead and shape me into the smooth lineaments of their nonpareil child.

I hated my mother, so I got back at her by giving my wife her role.

I wanted, by an act of conscious will, to make it a time of reckoning and, if I was lucky, a time of healing and reconstitution of an eclipsed spirit.

“It doesn’t fool me for a minute. I’ve been hanging around people in trouble for a long time. It’s always in the eyes.

She and my father were oddly matched. Their life together was a thirty-year war. The only prisoners they could take were children.

It was only later that I realized I loved Atlanta because it was the only place on earth I had ever lived without a father.

“The children just watched a guy with his dick in his hand trying to get to their mother. A little language won’t hurt ’em much.”

She’s a leading character in this autopsy of my family and you’ll learn that her only job on earth is to spread insanity.

She was the kind of woman who knew instinctively that extreme happiness could not be duplicated; she knew how to shut a door properly on the past.

Love was not a bridesmaid of despair; love did not have to hurt.

Love has no weapons; it has no fists. Love does not bruise, nor does it draw blood.

I learned from my mother that loyalty was the pretty face one wore when you based your whole life on a series of egregious lies.