The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

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

I wish I had no history to report. I’ve pretended for so long that my childhood did not happen. I had to keep it tight, up near the chest. I could not let it out. I followed the redoubtable example of my mother. 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, I could not afford to address them directly about the felonies committed against all of us. I could not hold them accountable or indict them for crimes they could not help. They, too, had a history—one that I remembered with both tenderness and pain, one that made me forgive their transgressions against their own children. In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

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 will tell you my story. Nothing is missing. I promise you.

and I know what no New Yorker I’ve ever met knows: that this island was once surrounded by deep, extraordinary marshes and estuaries, that an entire complex civilization of a salt marsh lies buried beneath the stone avenues. I do not like cities that dishonor their own marshes.

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 could see it now: One member of the family, by a process of artificial but deadly selection, is nominated to be the lunatic, and all neurosis, wildness, and displaced suffering settles like dust in the eaves and porches of that tenderest, most vulnerable psyche. Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.

My manhood! 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.

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

I longed for their approval, their applause, their pure uncomplicated love for me, and I looked for it years after I realized they were not even capable of letting me have it. To love one’s children is to love oneself, and this was a state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance. I needed to reconnect to something I had lost. Somewhere I had lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being. I needed to effect a reconciliation with that unborn man and try to coax him gently toward his maturity.

There was such beauty in the economical structure of spiders; they moved across webs with the secret of lace making and silk screening implied in their loins, aerialists in a quart of Georgia air. They were good at doing what they were born to do.

and felt the old thrill of disobedience buoyant in young hearts gallant enough to ignore the strange laws of adults.

window. I had never seen a man stare at a woman with such primitive lust until I saw that stranger looking at my mother. I had never studied eyes that were born to hate women.

I said, taking a sip of the martini, wincing when I tasted the salty ghost of the loathed and pungent olive.

No one has the patent on human suffering. People hurt in different ways and for different reasons.”

Eventually she will die the way all old people in America die . . . from humiliation, incontinence, boredom, and neglect.

Her secret, we would discover, was that once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers, that the mind can never break off from the journey.

Tolitha never scolded us, disciplined us, disapproved, or made her love conditional on our behavior in any way. She simply adored us in all the manifestations, both troubling and endearing, of our childhood. From her mistakes, she had codified an unadulterated ethic: Love was not a bridesmaid of despair; love did not have to hurt.

His childhood had been a sanctioned debacle of neglect, and my grandparents were the pale, unindictable executors of my father’s violations against his own children.

If your parents disapprove of you and are cunning with their disapproval, there will never come a new dawn when you can become convinced of your own value. There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.

with astonishing, outsized gifts for making slack-jawed southern morons fall in love with the language they were born to damage.

“Nature abhors a vacuum, but it abhors perfect happiness even more,”

Like most southerners, Tolitha had fashioned a small and personal art form out of ancestor worship, and the authentic intimacy of cemeteries made her happy. She looked upon death as a dark and undiscoverable longitude encircling the secret geography of the earth. The subject of her own death filled her with pleasant reveries of journeys both imminent and surprising. Because my grandmother did not attend church regularly or openly profess a belief in God, it gave her license to embrace more exotic prescriptives of the spirit, more vivid distillations and tonics to add character to her view of the world.

Her faith was a catechism of undigested verities. She consorted with psychics, witch doctors, and prognosticators. All were weathermen of her bouncy, untroubled soul. Tolitha was the most Christian woman I have ever known.

When he wished us a good day, his voice was reptilian and unctuous and you knew he was only truly comfortable in the presence of the dead. He looked as if he had died two or three times himself in order to appreciate better the subtleties of his vocation. Winthrop Ogletree had the face of an unlucky vampire who never received an adequate portion of blood.

She was a huge, grandly proportioned woman who struck immediate terror in the hearts of children. In Colleton she was thought of as “a presence,” and she stood in the doorway eyeing us with that peculiar overpowering intensity that older people who loathe children have developed to the point of art.

Before we spoke, this old coach, veteran of a generation of boys, saw the nocturnal light moving beyond the horizons of his dark eyes and heard the distant thunder of his small but consequential war with the world.

She could smile one moment and make me think of the shy commerce of angels; the next moment the same smile could suggest a hermitage for morays and an asylum for terrorists.

From my mother I received far darker and more valuable gifts: a love of language, the ability to lie without remorse, a killer instinct, a passion to teach, madness, and the romance of fanaticism.

We mistook his love songs for battle hymns. His attempts at reconciliation were mistaken for brief and insincere cease-fires in a ferocious war of attrition. He lacked all finesse and tenderness; he had mined all harbors, all approaches to his heart. Only when the world brought him to his knees could I reach up and touch my father’s face without him bloodying mine.

and learned the deadly art of the sniper by examining my father privately with the insurrect, unforgiving eyes of a damaged child. I studied him through the cross hairs of a telescopic sight I leveled at his heart. What I know of human love I took first from my parents; with them, love was a deprivation and a withering. My childhood was one of disorder, peril, and small craft warnings.

was an article of faith to Henry Wingo that he was a businessman of genius. Never has a man’s basic assumption about himself been so heartbreakingly wrong or caused him or his family so much prolonged and unnecessary grief.

IF YOU GROW up in the house of a man who both loves and mistreats you, and who does not grasp the paradox of his behavior, you become, out of self-defense, a tenacious student of his habits, a weatherman of his temperament.

As lovers, they begat children; as enemies, they created damaged, endangered children.

“Because they just aren’t interesting animals, Tom. Not like Caesar. He doesn’t give of himself lightly. I like that. I really like that. He makes you earn it all.”

Secretly, I would try to figure out what made it work, what sinister or benevolent forces kept their militant alliance intact, what tender or explosive elements lay beneath the surface of their strange and incandescent love for each other.

She did not know that she was on a collision course with a boy so damaged and bewildered he would spend his whole life trying to figure out how love was supposed to feel, how it manifested itself between two people, and how it could be practiced without rage and sorrow and blood.

It was the summit and the Grand Guignol of my grandfather’s liturgical year; it embodied characteristics of both the saints and the asylum. There was always a lunatic beauty to his walk.

I had a feeling that sainthood was the most frightening and incurable disease on earth.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.