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    The Water Is Wide
    The Water Is Wide
    The Water Is Wide
    Ebook351 pages7 hours

    The Water Is Wide

    By Pat Conroy

    4/5

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    • Education

    • Community

    • Personal Growth

    • Cultural Differences

    • Friendship

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Power of Education

    • Noble Savage

    • Importance of Community

    • Coming of Age

    • Magical Negro

    • Power of Friendship

    • Star-Crossed Lovers

    • Rags to Riches

    • Betrayal

    • Literature

    • Love

    • Relationships

    • Childhood

    • Teaching

    About this ebook

    “A powerfully moving book . . . You will laugh, you will weep, you will be proud and you will rail.” —Charleston News and Courier

    Yamacraw Island was haunting, nearly deserted, and beautiful. Separated from the mainland of South Carolina by a wide tidal river, it was accessible only by boat. But for the handful of families that lived on Yamacraw, America was a world away. For years these families lived proudly from the sea until waste from industry destroyed the oyster beds essential to their very existence. Already poor, they knew they would have to face an uncertain future unless, somehow, they learned a new life. But they needed someone to teach them, and their rundown schoolhouse had no teacher.

    The Water Is Wide is Pat Conroy’s extraordinary memoir based on his experience as one of two teachers in a two-room schoolhouse, working with children the world had pretty much forgotten. It was a year that changed his life, and one that introduced a group of poor Black children to a world they did not know existed.

    “A hell of a good story.” —The New York Times

    “[Pat] Conroy cuts through his experiences with a sharp edge of irony. . . . He brings emotion, writing talent and anger to his story.” —Baltimore Sun

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateDec 20, 2022
    ISBN9780063322066
    Author

    Pat Conroy

    Pat Conroy was the New York Times–bestselling author of two memoirs and seven novels, including The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, and The Lords of Discipline. Born the eldest of seven children in a rigidly disciplined military household, he attended the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina. He briefly became a schoolteacher (which he chronicled in his memoir The Water Is Wide) before publishing his first novel, The Boo. Conroy passed away in 2016 at the age of seventy.

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    Reviews for The Water Is Wide

    4/5

    517 ratings24 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A southern memoir from a young idealist in the late 60's by an excellent writer. It is a bout a place and a time in an America under transition (as it always is). The N word is used a lot so it probably wouldn't pass todays woke censors but the book is true. I really enjoy Conroy's prosaic style though it can be a bit much sometime. I also love the sea Islands.
      A good eye opening read.
    • 4/5
      The water is wide
      This is a very readable autobiographical story of the author’s time spent as a teacher on the mythical island of Yamacraw. I learned that it’s really Daufuskie Island located between Hilton Head, South Carolina and Savanna, Georgia. The time period is the 1960s and Conroy is a 24 year old enthusiastic, innovative and sympathetic teacher who discovers that the 18 black students in his middle school class are basically illiterate and ignorant of basic knowledge about their country and the world at large.
      He learns that these students have been victims of a lousy education because they’ve had incompetent teachers, a school board president who paid lip service to black education and apathy by beaten down parents.
      Conroy’s techniques are innovative, creative, whimsical and controversial as he gains the respect and attention of students not used to exercising their brains. He cares deeply and hopes to ensure that they have gained some knowledge and basic abilities under his tutelage.
      He butts heads with Dr.Piedmont from the school board and is eventually fired.
      What I enjoyed were the characters, the southern dialogue, the camaraderie and curiosity that Conroy evokes in his students, the history of school integration and the passion for educational excellence.
    • 3/5
      Early Conroy. When one actually visits the island near Hilton Head that he fictionalizes as Yamacraw, and speaks with residents who still remember Conroy, one gets a drastically different picture than the one that Conroy depicts.
    • 4/5
      I love Conroy's prose; I loved this book until the inevitable clash with the Powers That Be. He makes it clear from the beginning that this was a temporary part of his life, but I wanted a happier ending. I'm sure he did, too.
    • 4/5
      This book is based on the year that Conroy taught in a school on a South Carolina island. It's described variously as a novel and as a memoir. Although the name of the island, the students, and other school personnel have been changed, it's not really fiction. Conroy tells his story thematically, and many of the events are not recounted in chronological order. Conroy was in his twenties when he took this job, and it shows. He was passionate about teaching, but also arrogant like many of us were in our twenties, and this eventually cost him his job. This is a must-read for educators, but one word of warning is in order. The book is a product of its time, and Conroy's frequent use of a racial epithet is jarring. (Conroy didn't use this word in his own conversation, but he quoted others who used it.)
    • 4/5
      Forty-six years after it was first published, and nearly fifty years after the events he describes in this book, Pat Conroy’s memoir stills packs a strong punch. A number of factors—from Conroy’s almost-unselfconscious use of the “n” word to his acknowledgment of his mixed motives as a reformed racist—mark the historical perspective of this tale.

      The memoir itself relates Conroy’s year as an upper elementary school teacher on Yamacraw Island (actually Daufuskie Island) off the coast of South Carolina. Isolated both literally and figuratively from the mainland (the island is accessible only by boat), the students of the island’s lone school—all of whom are black—have been forsaken by all the powers that be. Most of the students cannot read, write, spell their name, identify the President or the country in which they live. With the zeal of a martyr, Conroy embraces the challenge of educating these children. The year is 1969, and the place is South Carolina, so the outcome is expected. This is, after all, a memoir and not a work of fiction.

      The book poignantly depicts the futile battle Conroy wages against the subversive damage wrought by institutionalized racism. To be fair, he realizes some minor triumphs along the way, but in the end, his time with the children of Yamacraw is brief, and he laments his ineffectual stint as their teacher. Conroy’s prose is legendary, and he deploys it here in service to a sad but true story that remains relevant nearly half a century later.
    • 5/5
      My better half and I love about two thirds of each other’s books, and we avoid each other’s thirds. This causes friendly disagreements over choices. Now, we have what some might call a healthy library, so there is more than a lifetime of reading for each of us. A case in point is Pat Conroy’s memoir, The Water is Wide. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t find one of her favorites finds its way into my TBR pile, and I must confess to some squirreling away of my favorites in hers. Then my book club choose this Conroy for our book club. I was trapped, I had to give in and read this book. Now, deciding which authors to read or to avoid is a complicated process for me.

      Conroy is a best-selling author, and he is noted for his novels set in his native South Carolina. River is an autobiographical story of his first year of teaching. He chooses an island off the coast of South Carolina, Yamacraw Island. Conroy’s description of the horrific lack of education turned my stomach. Conroy recites the abysmal list of the failure of the school board to take care of students merely because they were black. Conroy wrote, “‘Six children who could not recite the alphabet. Eighteen children who did not know the President. Eighteen children who did not know what country they lived in…’ I slammed twenty-three of these strange facts down their throats, hoping they would gag and choke on the knowledge. My voice grew tremulous and enraged, and it suddenly felt as if I were shouting from within a box with madmen surrounding me, ignoring me, and taunting me with their silence. My lips trembled convulsively as my speech turned into a harangue and the great secret I had nursed in my soul thundered into the open room” (266). Disgust at the treatment of these children is not powerful enough; shame is not powerful enough to brand this pitifully racist schoolboard consisting of seven whites and two African-American women. The placement of these two women was gerrymandering of a sort.

      Not only were these children neglected and dismissed as “unteachable,” Yamacraw Island faced another catastrophe. Conroy writes, “Then a villain appeared. It was an industrial factory situated on a knoll above the Savannah River many miles away from Yamacraw. The villain spewed its excrement into the river, infected the creeks, and as silently as the pull of the tides, the filth crept to the shores of Yamacraw. As every good inspector knows, the unfortunate consumer who lets an infected oyster slide down his throat is flirting with hepatitis” (5).

      Conroy confesses to a period he was racist himself. While he was in high school, a teacher invited a group of students, including Conroy, to his home. The students teased the professor for being a n****r-lover. The professor “spat out a devastating reply” then “he played ‘We Shall Overcome’ by Pete Seger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehended it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit” Of course, it still took a while for Conroy to completely abandon his prejudices, he continues, “the journey at least had a beginning, a point of embarkation” (94-95). The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy is a story we must never forget. 5 Stars
    • 4/5
      Conroy's memoir of the time he spent teaching on "Yamacraw Island," his fictional name for Daufuskie Island, off the coast of South Carolina in ~1969. His portraits of the people there and of teaching the African American children there is fascinating. Some other aspects of the book dragged a bit for me (his descriptions of getting to and from the island, his fights with the school board) were less interesting, almost entirely because I've heard such things before, and these descriptions were no different than those. That is not a criticism of the book; Conroy writing in 1972 can't be held accountable for the fact that a reader fifty years later has heard the very stories he helped make known. I do wish he had spent a little more time providing context--the history of the island and so on. But on the whole, definitely worth reading, especially as Conroy's account of this year rarely, if ever, descends into white savior nonsense: he is fully aware of his racism and his limitations and ends the book remarking that he doesn't think he changed the lives of his students one bit. It's kind of the opposite of the "inspirational teacher" trope, as far as I could see. There's nothing particularly "feel good" about this narrative, and that was somewhat refreshing in a way. Heads up for language, especially racist terms we would be shocked to find used matter-of-factly in a such a book if it were written today.
    • 4/5
      When Pat Conroy was a new teacher, he set out for a small island off the coast of South Carolina in 1969/70 to teach poor kids at a black school there. What a culture shock! Not only did these kids mostly not know how to read or write, but they had never experienced Halloween! Pat did a lot for these kids over the year, and taught them in unorthodox ways.

      I thought this was a memoir, but it was only at the very end of the book that it said it was “based on” his year on the island. I think it also said “fiction” somewhere, but I may be mixing that up with a review I read. I did disagree with one thing he did/argued for, but overall, I was enjoyed this book. It just might have been nice to know ahead of time that it may not have been a completely true account, though.
    • 5/5
      The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw Island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence - unless, somehow, they can learn a new life. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher. Here is Pat Conroy's most extraordinary human drama - based on the true story of a man who gave a year of his life to give an island and a people a new lifetime.
    • 4/5
      Things I thought I knew about this book: It's a nonfiction memoir about Conroy's experience in his 20s teaching at an all-black school on Yamacraw Island off the coast of South Carolina. In it, Conroy struggles with the racism of the school district in his attempt to actually teach children that most white South Carolinians seem to think of as hopeless illiterates at best and sub-human at worst. Conroy wrote the book early in his writing career, though it wasn't his first book.

      Things I didn't know about this book: The cover says it's a memoir, but it's described within the book itself as a novel. It's a fictionalized account of Conroy's real experience teaching on Defauskie Island, a Gullah community of the descendants of former slaves.

      Things I wish I knew about this book: How much is fictionalized? The location, presumably the names of all the children and the families, the school administrators? Did he really make an eloquent, impassioned speech at a school board meeting in an attempt to keep his job? Did he really sue the school district to continue teaching on the island, with the case going to trial? Did he really take the children off the island on a number of field trips, including to Washington, D.C.? Did he make any headway at all in teaching these children who he found to be functionally illiterate for the most part? Did any of them make actual academic progress? He never really says.

      Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed reading this account of Conroy's evolution from redneck good ole boy to bleeding-heart liberal, and I've always found Conroy's writing to be beautifully lyrical and descriptive. It's a little rougher here in this early book, and his tendencies toward the floridly dramatic kept less in check, but the hallmarks of his later style are already evident. But I had no idea this wasn't a straightahead nonfiction book until the very end, and that left me feeling snookered a bit. I felt totally invested in Conroy's drama with the children, the parents, the administration, and to find out that some unknown quantity of it was false left a bad taste in my mouth. I think if I'd gone into the book knowing it was fictionalized I would have liked it quite a bit more.
    • 3/5
      It wasn't clear to me, but I think this is a true story of the author teaching on Yamacraw Island. It's written in a more literary style. I wish I had seen more of the progress the author had made in reaching the children he taught--three quarters of the way through the book and I still didn't see that he'd made much progress in getting them to learn things they should have been learning.
    • 5/5
      This is a very open and candid memoir of the year (and part of a second year) that Pat Conroy spent teaching that the all black two-room grade school on Yamacraw Island, South Carolina. After teaching for a couple years in a white high school that became integrated, the author gradually changed from being a typical Southern racist who believed blacks were inferior and should be schooled separately to a believer in the basic equality of whits and blacks.

      As a result of his change in views, and a new found sense that he wanted to do something to benefit others, he applied to the Peace Corps, but was not accepted. He then decides to take a job teaching at the impoverished black school on Yamacraw Island. The book follows his story from his initial discovery of how abysmally the students' education has been ad his attempts to figure out how to teach them something.. To give an idea of what he found, here is his assessment:

      "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."

      What he finds angers him and so within just a few days of arriving he sent a scathing letter to the school superintendent expressing his outrage, a move that, in retrospect, was a mistake. He also finds the lower grade teacher, a black woman, to be more concerned with regimented behavior from the children than learning. She also liberally applies a combination of belittlement of her students and corporal punishment to whip them into shape. Conroy refuses to follow her approach, with which he is appalled anyway, and proceeds to stumble his way along with a periodically out of control class.

      The take home from this memoir to give a window into a society that had so devalued its black citizens that they might as well have been living in a different country. Conroy attempts to make a difference, and planned to teach a second year at the school, but his attempts were viewed by the school administration as beligerance and "racial agitation." In the end he is essentially railroaded out of the school after trying by every means possible to challenge his firing. It is both an inspiring story and a sad story and one well worth reading for anyone interested in the racial attitudes of the South in the 60s to early 70s. Things have changed since then, but some of the attitudes still persist, even almost 50 years later.
    • 5/5
      A beautifully written book about Pat Conway's year teaching school on a small island off the coast of South Carolina where children from a former slave population have grown up isolated from the modern world (except for TV of course). Pat Conway confesses that growing up he too was a racist but was able to put that aside and see the humanity in souls of every color. His description of the children on the island and their reaction to the first white teacher they have known are priceless. He takes them on field trips, makes them think, read, draw. All this without any real support from the school system he works for. Lyrical, enlightening, sad and hopeful all at once. A beautiful book.
    • 5/5
      Once again, this is a reread. I don't think I've read it since I became a teacher, however. That made this book even more poignant than it was in previous readings. Pat Conroy takes a teaching job on an island in South Carolina that is only accessible by boat. It is 1968, and the school is all-black, small, and forgotten by the county people. Conroy makes a difference but bucks the system one too many times. Not only does this book portray a unique education challenge, but it also gives a picture of the Deep South in the 1960s. I highly recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      couldnt find the listing, but after reading the tree book , listened to the tom Stechschulte reading which was excellent.
    • 4/5
      Another enjoyable Conroy story. Based on his experiences teaching on a forgotten island, South Carolina’s Daufuskie Island, Pat Conroy tells the tale of a teacher who truly loved his students and tried to do what was best for them, despite the obstacles around him. Told with humor and love.....
    • 4/5
      This poignant memoir tells of Conroy's early teaching career attempting to upgrade the educational experience of students in an all black school on poverty plagued Daufuskie Island (fictionalized in the book to Yamacraw Island). After teaching high school for a year, and being turned down by the Peace Corps, "Mr. Conrack" as he called by the children, finds himself teaching 18 children in grades 4-8, several of whom cannot count the 5 fingers on their hands, or recite the alphabet, and who do not know what country they live in or any other elementary facts or skills expected of 4th graders in any other school in the state.

      Conroy must throw away his playbook on how to teach, and devise new methods to inspire his children to learn and to love learning. However, before he can do any of this, he must learn about them, and he must find a way to understand the local dialect known a gullah that the children speak. He discovers one young girl, Mary, is able to serve as the 'translator' for the class, so the adventure can begin.

      Set in 1969, it is the story of a year of adventures, of triumphs, and of many failures and missteps. It is the story of a small southern school district trying to come to grips with desegregation, and ignoring the needs of this heretofor 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' school. Now with Conroy butting heads with the black principal who "teaches" grades 1-3 (mostly by wielding a huge leather strap), devising numerous games, field trips, and non-traditional methods to inspire his class, the school board is faced with a devoted educator they see as a demanding renegade who refuses to abandon a town, his students, or his principles. Although he was himself the product of segregated Beaufort High School, and a graduate of the Citadel, his world view has expanded, and his championing of this group of neglected but needy children is a story both heartwarming and heartbreaking.


      Conroy's way with words is, as always, able to paint scenes, dialogue, and emotions in a way that transports his reader exactly where he wants to take them.
    • 5/5
      A memoir of a year spent teaching destitute students on a remote island, The Water is Wide challenges convention and prejudice in really powerful ways. And is proof positive that being seen to do the right thing is different from actually doing it. What I think I valued most was the author's demonstration that throwing money at a problem isn't a solution. Caring is the solution.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book! It was the first book I read of Conroy's & I can't wait to get my hands on another one (along with the movie that is based on this book). I thought it was well written & very entertaining! It was both funny & sad. I found myself laughing one minute & heart broken the next. Being based on Conroy's true life it was a very interesting look into the Carolina Low Country in the late 60's & early 70's. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys books giving insight to history,...more I loved this book! It was the first book I read of Conroy's & I can't wait to get my hands on another one (along with the movie that is based on this book). I thought it was well written & very entertaining! It was both funny & sad. I found myself laughing one minute & heart broken the next. Being based on Conroy's true life it was a very interesting look into the Carolina Low Country in the late 60's & early 70's. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys books giving insight to history, teaching or southern settings.
    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating look at the South and race and what happens when you try to buck the system. Conroy is a young school teacher in this, and he takes a job on a small island to teach the unschooled residents. He introduces them to opera and books and takes a beating from many directions as he tries.
      What astonished me is, despite knowing about the South and the (attempted) Reconstruction, is that there was still an enormous amount of prejudice against black children, with even those entrusted with education still resisting giving the kids their basic human need for learning. So many people wanted to hold on to the status quo even when it clearly was not working.
      This was a great read for me and it was appropriate for my son to read as well (he was 13). It also contains great descriptions of the coast, flora and fauna and people of the region.
    • 4/5
      I first discovered Pat Conroy this past May when Susan and I stood on line at Book Expo to get an advanced copy of South of Broad. I loved the book and went on to read Prince of Tides, which was also wonderful.

      I stumbled on The Water is Wide at my library and decided to give his non-fiction a try. Although the prose are not as wonderful and descriptive as the two fiction books I read, they are still good and the story is gripping.

      In 1969, a young, idealistic Conroy decides to teach on Yamacraw Island, a forgotten island off the coast of South Carolina. The school is a two room schoolhouse and Conroy teaches 4th-8th grade, while Ms. Brown, a disciplinarian (vs. a teacher) teaches the lower grades. An island inhabited primarily by Black families, the children are basically ignored by school administration.

      The Water is Wide describes Conroy's efforts to teach the children (many of whom do not know the alphabet, let alone current events), expose them to things outside of the island to prepare them when they move away and give them a feeling of self-worth. His battles with the old ways of the inhabitants, the lack of caring by administrators and the childrens' ignorance and fears makes for compelling reading.

      I highly recommend Pat Conroy in any form.
    • 4/5
      An autobiographical story of when Conroy was a teacher on an island in South Carolina that was more interested in baby sitting than teaching the students. He tries many times to broaden his students horizons and meets continual resistance. I enjoyed this book
    • 5/5
      A glimpse into 1970's southern life. Interesting.

    Book preview

    The Water Is Wide - Pat Conroy

    CHAPTER 1

    THE SOUTHERN SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of a superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo. Beaufort, South Carolina’s superintendent Dr. Henry Piedmont, had been in Beaufort for only a year when I went to see him. He had a reputation of being tough, capable, and honest. A friend told me that Piedmont took crap from no man.

    I walked into his office, introduced myself, chatted briefly, then told him I wanted to teach on Yamacraw Island. He gave me a hard stare and said, Son, you are a godsend. I sat in the chair rigidly analyzing my new status. I have prayed at night, he continued, for an answer to the problems confronting Yamacraw Island. I have worried myself almost sick. And to think you would walk right into my office and offer to teach those poor colored children on that island. It just goes to show you that God works in mysterious ways.

    I don’t know if God had anything to do with it, Doctor. I applied for the Peace Corps and haven’t heard. Yamacraw seemed like a viable alternative.

    Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it’s very important to help Americans.

    So do I, Doctor.

    We chatted on about the problems of the island. Then he said, You mentioned that God had nothing to do with your decision to go to Yamacraw, Pat. You remind me of myself when I was your age. Of course, I came up the hard way. My folks worked in a mill. Good people, both of them. Simple people, but God-fearing. My mother was a saint. A saint on earth. I worked in the mill, too. Even after I graduated from college, I went back to the mill in a supervisory capacity. But I wasn’t happy, Pat. Something was missing. One night I was working late at the mill. I stepped outside the mill and looked up at the stars. I went toward the edge of the forest and fell to my knees. I prayed to Jesus and asked him what he wanted me to do in my life. And do you know what?

    No, sir, what?

    Then Dr. Piedmont leaned forward in his seat, his eyes transformed with spiritual intensity.

    He told me what to do that very night. He told me, ’Henry, leave the mill. Go into education and help boys to go to college. Help them to be something. Go back to school, Henry, and get an advanced degree.’ So I went to Columbia University, one of the great universities of the world. I emerged with a doctorate. I was the first boy from my town who was ever called Doctor.

    I added wittily, That’s nice, Doctor.

    You remind me of that boy I was, Pat. Do you know why you came to me today?

    Yes, sir, I want to teach at Yamacraw.

    "No, son. Do you know the real reason?’

    No, sir, I guess I don’t.

    Jesus, he said, as if he just found out the stone had been rolled back from the tomb. You’re too young to realize it now, but Jesus made you come to me today.

    I left his office soon afterward. He had been impressive. He was a powerful figure, very controlled, almost arrogantly confident in his abilities. He stared at me during our entire conversation. From experience I knew his breed. The mill-town kid who scratched his way to the top. Horatio Alger, who knew how to floor a man with a quick chop to the gonads. 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.

    Yamacraw is an island off the South Carolina mainland not far from Savannah, Georgia. The island is fringed with the green, undulating marshes of the southern coast; shrimp boats ply the waters around her and fishermen cast their lines along her bountiful shores. Deer cut through her forests in small silent herds. The great southern oaks stand broodingly on her banks. The island and the waters around her teem with life. There is something eternal and indestructible about the tide eroded shores and the dark, threatening silences of the swamps in the heart of the island. Yamacraw is beautiful because man has not yet had time to destroy this beauty.

    The twentieth century has basically ignored the presence of Yamacraw. The island is populated with black people who depend on the sea and their small farms for a living. Several white families live on the island in a paternalistic, but in many ways symbiotic, relationship with their neighbors. Only one white family actively participates in island life to any perceptible degree. The other three couples have come to the island to enjoy their retirement in the obscurity of the island’s remotest corners. Thus far, no bridge connects the island with the mainland, and anyone who sets foot on the island comes by water. The roads of the island are unpaved and rutted by the passage of ox carts, still a major form of transportation. The hand pump serves up questionable water to the black residents who live in their small familiar houses. Sears, Roebuck catalogues perform their classic function in the crudely built privies, which sit, half-hidden, in the tall grasses behind the shacks. Electricity came to the island several years ago. There is something unquestionably moving about the line of utility poles coming across the marsh, moving perhaps because electricity is a bringer of miracles and the journey of the faceless utility poles is such a long one—and such a humane one. But there are no telephones (electricity is enough of a miracle for one century). To call the island you must go to the Beaufort Sheriff’s Office and talk to the man who works the radio. Otherwise, Yamacraw remains aloof and apart from the world beyond the river.

    It is not a large island, nor an important one, but it represents an era and a segment of history that is rapidly dying in America. The people of the island have changed very little since the Emancipation Proclamation. Indeed, many of them have never heard of this proclamation. They love their island with genuine affection but have watched the young people move to the city, to the lands far away and far removed from Yamacraw. The island is dying, and the people know it.

    In the parable of Yamacraw there was a time when the black people supported themselves well, worked hard, and lived up to the sacred tenets laid down in the Protestant ethic. Each morning the strong young men would take to their bateaux and search the shores and inlets for the large clusters of oysters, which the women and old men in the factory shucked into large jars. Yamacraw oysters were world famous. An island legend claims that a czar of Russia once ordered Yamacraw oysters for an imperial banquet. The white people propagate this rumor. The blacks, for the most part, would not know a czar from a fiddler crab, but the oysters were good, and the oyster factories operating on the island provided a substantial living for all the people. Everyone worked and everyone made money. Then a villain appeared. It was an industrial factory situated on a knoll above the Savannah River many miles away from Yamacraw. The villain spewed its excrement into the river, infected the creeks, and as silently as the pull of the tides, the filth crept to the shores of Yamacraw. As every good health inspector knows, the unfortunate consumer who lets an infected oyster slide down his throat is flirting with hepatitis. Someone took samples of the water around Yamacraw, analyzed them under a microscope, and reported the results to the proper officials. Soon after this, little white signs were placed by the oyster banks forbidding anyone to gather the oysters. Ten thousand oysters were now as worthless as grains of sand. No czar would order Yamacraw oysters again. The muddy creatures that had provided the people of the island with a way to keep their families alive were placed under permanent quarantine.

    Since a factory is soulless and faceless, it could not be moved to understand the destruction its coming had wrought. When the oysters became contaminated, the island’s only industry folded almost immediately. The great migration began. A steady flow of people faced with starvation moved toward the cities. They left in search of jobs. Few cities had any intemperate demand for professional oyster-shuckers, but the people were somehow assimilated. The population of the island diminished considerably. Houses surrendered their tenants to the city and signs of sudden departure were rife in the interiors of deserted homes. Over 300 people left the island. They left reluctantly, but left permanently and returned only on sporadic visits to pay homage to the relatives too old or too stubborn to leave. As the oysters died, so did the people.

    My neck has lightened several shades since former times, or at least I like to think it has. My early years, darkened by the shadows and regional superstitions of a bona fide cracker boy, act as a sobering agent during the execrable periods of self-righteousness that I inflict on those around me. Sometimes it is good for me to reflect on the Neanderthal period of my youth, when I rode in the backseat of a ’57 Chevrolet along a night-blackened Carolina road hunting for blacks to hit with rotten watermelons tossed from the window of the speeding car, as they walked the shoulder of thin backroads. We called this intrepid form of entertainment nigger-knocking, and it was great fun during the carnival of blind hatred I participated joyfully in during my first couple of years in high school.

    Those were the years when the word nigger felt good to my tongue, for my mother raised her children to say colored and to bow our heads at the spoken name of Jesus. My mother taught that only white trash used the more explosive, more satisfying epithet to describe black people. Nigger possessed the mystery and lure of forbidden fruit and I overused it in the snickering clusters of white friends who helped my growing up.

    The early years were nomadic ones. Dad’s pursuit of greatness in the Marine Corps carried us into some of the more notable swamplands of the East Coast. I attended Catholic schools with mystical names like the Infant of Prague and the Annunciation, as Dad transferred from Marine base to desolate Marine base, or when we retired to my mother’s family home in Atlanta when the nation called my father to war. Mom’s people hailed originally from the northeast mountains of Alabama, while Dad’s greased the railroad cars in Chicago, but attitudinally they could have used the same sheet at a Klan rally.

    I loved the smooth-watered fifties, when I worried about the top-ten tunes and the homecoming queen, when I looked to Elvis for salvation, when the sharp dichotomy between black and white lay fallow and unchallenged, and when the World Series still was the most critical event of the year. The sixties brought this spindly-legged dream to its knees and the fall of the dream buried the joy of that blue-eyed youth forever.

    Yet there were days that haunted the decade and presaged the tumultuous changes of the later sixties. By some miracle of chance, I was playing a high school basketball game in Greensboro, North Carolina, on the day that black students entered a dime store for the first nationally significant sit-in demonstration. I was walking past the store on the way to my hotel when I heard the drone of the angry white crowd. Word spread along the street that the niggers were up to something, and a crowd started milling around the store. With rolled-up sleeves and the Brylcreem look of the period, the mob soon became a ludicrous caricature of an entire society. The women had sharp, aquiline noses. I remember that. Everyone was surprised and enraged by the usurpation of this inalienable Caucasian right to park one’s ass on a leather stool and drink a Coke. I moved quickly out of the area, following a Conroy law of survival that says that restless mobs have a way of drawing trouble and cops—although the cops would not have bothered me on this day, I realized later. It would be nice to report that this event transformed me into a crusader for civil rights, but it did not. It did very little to me.

    I moved to Beaufort, South Carolina, in the early sixties, a town fed by warm salt tides and cooled by mild winds from the sea; a somnolent town built on a high bluff where a river snaked fortuitously. I was tired of moving every year, of changing home and environment with every new set of orders, of uprooting simply because my father was a nomad traveling under a different name and occupation. So we came to Beaufort, a town I grew to love with passion and without apology for its serenity, for its splendidly languid pace, and for its profound and infinite beauty. It was a place of hushed, fragrant gardens, silent streets, and large ante-bellum houses. My father flew jets in its skies and I went to the local segregated high school, courted the daughter of the Baptist minister, and tried to master the fast break and the quick jump shot. I lived in the security of a town founded in the sixteenth century, but in the world beyond it walked John F. Kennedy, the inexorable movement of black people coming up the road in search of the promised American grail, the television performances of Bull Connor, the snarling dogs, the fire hoses, the smoking names of Montgomery, Columbus, Monroe, and Birmingham.

    Having cast my lot with Beaufort, I migrated to college seventy miles up the road. I entered The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, where for four years I marched to breakfast, saluted my superiors, was awakened by bugles, and continued my worship of the jock, the basketball, and the school fight song, Dixie. For four years I did not think about the world outside the gates. Myopic and color blind, I could not be a flashy, ascotted pilot like my father, so I opted for teaching and Beaufort. At graduation I headed back down Highway 17 to begin my life teaching in the same high school that had spewed me forth several years before. But there was a difference this time: the purity of the student body was forever tainted. Thanks to the dastardly progression of law, black students now peppered the snow-white Elysium that once had harbored me.

    I loved teaching in high school. I dwelt amidst the fascists and the flag-wavers in relative obscurity and I liked the students, who daily trooped into my class chewing gum and popping pimples. Painfully aware of my youth, I tried to belie my twenty-one years by acting mature and seasoned by experience. My act held up, until one horrid day when I asked a government class what was causing the peculiar smell that hovered in the room. A sharp-eyed pupil pointed out that I had stepped in a pile of dog crap and had tracked it around the room. Thus died maturity. I reveled in class discussion and the Socratic method of drawing substance out of calcified minds untrained to think. I would argue lamely for peace in Vietnam while my students clamored for the H-bombing of Hanoi and the subsequent obliteration of Moscow and Peking. They called me a Communist for not being pro-war; they called me a coward for my failure to rise to the defense of my country in its hour of greatest peril. When I protested that I saw very little threat posed by the government of North Vietnam to the United States, they mumbled ominously that I would eat several hundred pounds of crow when swarms of fanatical reds waded ashore at San Francisco Bay. 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. George hailed from Ridgeland, South Carolina, a rural community so conservative that it made Beaufort look like a hotbed of liberalism. Mike was a divinity student who had dropped out for a year to reflect upon his impending life of spirituality among the hypocritical flocks that would be assigned to him. Bernie Schein was the twenty-three-year-old principal of a tiny school in the next county. After the news the four of us argued until the late hours of night, exposing half-hidden prejudices. We mercilessly pounced on the member of the group who dared utter a belief without foundation or without rational credibility. Those gatherings were group confessions of guilt, of cynicism, of rudderless idealism, and ultimately of hope. At the end of the year, the four of us went to Europe with our new-found credo. The world was good, we said, and it only needed minor adjustment. People were basically good, we asserted with disgusting smugness.

    In Germany I toured the concentration camp at Dachau and looked at the pictures of the piled bodies, starved and faceless, being shoved by bulldozers into mass burial pits. I stared at the furnace where Jews were reduced to piles of Jewish ash and felt that I stood on holy ground, a monument to the infinite inhumanity of man and society gone insane, a ground washed by thousands of gallons of human blood, a ground astir with ghosts and memories, of Jews and Germans trapped in a drama so horrible and unreal that the world could never have the same purity again. 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. In a hotel in Paris George, Bernie, and Mike argued anew for the basic goodness of man, but 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.

    I was getting tired of my own innocence. The year was 1968 and something had happened to me in April that also seemed to change my life. When the lone rifleman murdered Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, the reaction among the students of Beaufort High School was explosive in its generation of raw, naked emotion. The white students, who composed the large majority of the student body, for the most part reacted passively to the event. Of course the village rednecks took vicious delight in calling Mrs. King a black widow and otherwise celebrating the death of this symbol of civil rights. A contingent of black students went to the principal in a futile attempt to get him to lower the flag to half-mast. Fearing community reaction, he predictably refused and closed his office to any further discussion of the matter. Since the faculty was all white, the black students walked the halls in silence, tears of frustration rolling down their cheeks and unspoken bitterness written on their faces in their inability to communicate their feelings to their white teachers.

    On the day King was buried the blacks assembled at recess in their accustomed place on the breezeway at the side of the school. Apartheid was an unwritten law and there was very little crossing over. One of my duties as a teacher that year was to patrol that part of the campus where the black students congregated. It was in this capacity that I learned of the problems facing the blacks at the school. I talked and joked with them at recess, or at least I talked to most of them. One small, articulate group of girls eyed me with unconcealed hostility the entire year and I knew intuitively that in all their lives they would never approach a white man teacher without suspicion. I heard one of them say once that only stupid nigger boys talk to Conroy.

    On this momentous, hysteric day, however, these girls came for me. I was talking to some of the boys and did not immediately see the girls as they swarmed around me. The first to speak was Lily Smalls, a huge, imposing woman who the year before had beaten the hell out of a white girl who had made the mistake of calling her nigger. People still called her nigger but they made damn sure that Lily was not within earshot when they did. Lily shouted at me, What are you doing here, white man? You sent here by the white man to make sure we don’t do anything destructive? Her friend Liz had inched closer to me and I felt the hot moisture of her breath on my neck. She sprayed me with spittle as she yelled, Why don’t you get back with the rest of those honkies and let us cry in peace? We don’t need you to tell us how sorry you are or how much it disturbs you to see us upset. Just get your white ass back into that school and leave us alone.

    Wait! another girl screamed. I want to hear him say how sorry he is. I want to hear it. Say it. Say it.

    I tried to say something, something redemptive or purgative, but no sound came from my throat. My vocal chords were not functioning well in this crisis. A sea of voices surrounded me, washed over me, and sucked me into a great whirlpool of sound and confusion. Bodies pressed up against me. A girl dug her nails into my arm until blood was drawn. Another girl screamed into my ear that the white bastards would kill all the black people in America. Lily’s voice shouted, You white folks are happy to see Martin Luther King get shot, but you wait and see who takes his place. We gonna get mean, Conroy, and we ain’t gonna take shit from no whitey. You can tell all of your friends that the days of nonviolence and prayin’ for the white cat that beats you over the head is over. Man, they are gone, gone … Then Lily wept. She stood there, almost nose to nose with me, and cried as though her soul was trying to wrench free of the prison of her body, as if all the tomorrows in the world were not worth the pain she felt right now.

    But as she cried, other voices rose to fill the void of her silence. A boy pressed his mouth close to my left ear and rasped, We are gonna burn this town down tonight. We gonna burn every white man with it. A voice behind me wailed in rhythmic cadences a strangely moving lamentation, Oh God, why can’t they leave us be? Why can’t they treat us right? Why can’t they love us like Jesus taught? Why do they hate us? Why do they hate black people? More fingernails in my arm. Someone reached up and scratched my neck. I thought I felt strong fingers close about my throat, then release it suddenly. The entire mob was soon convulsed with raw, demonstrative sorrow. Martin’s dead, Martin’s dead, Martin’s dead, a voice cried. The whites eat shit, said a boy. Fuck you, Conroy, said a girl. And the bell, mercifully, rang.

    At a later date I heard the black kids laughing and snickering when Lurleen Wallace died of cancer. I questioned the appropriateness of their response as compared to the response of the crackers when King died. She was a racist, came the unanimous reply. 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.

    But the shadow that hovered over me, white guilt, still had to be reckoned with. So in the days after King’s assassination, greatly moved by the death of one I had admired so much, I lobbied for a course in black history in a school 90 per cent white. At that time, a black-history course was as common as a course in necrophilia. Now, with the times changing so rapidly, these courses have proliferated over the entire state. It seemed like big stuff then. I nursed the course through mild disapproval, coddled it through every pitfall encountered on the way up proper channels, argued with timorous authorities, wrote out a magnificent course outline, then realized I did not know a single thing about the history of black people in America. The course was mildly successful, but more as a symbol of the great flow of time than as a significant classroom experience. The year was fraught with embittering experiences for me with some of my fellow teachers. One lady with the delicate sweetness of a lemon told me that her father had required her to carry a gun when she was growing up to protect herself from lecherous attacks by black men. That, she told me, was the only nigger history she knew or needed to know.

    The same year the very coach that once had coached me in football relieved me of my job of junior-varsity basketball coach because he felt I favored the coloreds. As a senior I had surmised that this coach had a brain the size and density of a Ping-Pong ball, so it came as no great surprise when he banished me forever from his gymnasium. But I was tired of fighting. Most of the teachers remained concerned and dedicated, and I respected them greatly for their efforts. Strange urges and a vague, restless energy made me look for something new and even adventurous. It was here that my good friend Bernie changed my life.

    Bernie Schein first told me about the job-opening on Yamacraw Island. He is one year older than I am and had been principal of an elementary school for three years. His first job, when he got out of Newberry College, was as principal of Yemassee Elementary School. Yemassee is a bunion of a town not far from Beaufort. Trains stop there. That is Yemassee’s singular mark of notoriety. Nothing else happens there. Bernie somehow talked the superintendent of Hampton County into letting him have the job. He had no qualifications, no experience, and no aptitude in administration, but since Bernie could talk a Baptist into burning a Bible, the superintendent had no other choice. Bernie took a room in a fly-by-night hotel, fought off an army of roaches, ate hamburgers for lunch and supper, watched the late movie every night, and became a great principal. He discovered an infallible formula: choose a town so dismal that the only thing left is study and hard work. When several of his friends started teaching in Beaufort, Bernie got a job as principal of Port Royal Elementary School, right outside the city limits. He felt that it was time for him to leave Yemassee. A rumor had it that Bernie was having an affair with a fifty-year-old teacher on his staff, and several Klansmen in the community were looking at this liberal Jewish principal with cross-burning eyes.

    We were inseparable from the beginning. We agreed with each other that Vietnam was intolerable, that the South had shit on the heads of the blacks, that the North was just as bad. Eugene McCarthy was an Arthurian figure elevated to knighthood in a moment of crisis; it was tough being a Jew in the South; it was tough being a Jew anywhere; we did not like Hitler, Strom Thurmond, Mendel Rivers, warm beer, or going to Atlanta for dates on the weekend. It was coming back from Atlanta that Bernie mentioned the job on Yamacraw Island. Since Bernie and I entertained delusions that we would somehow save the world, or at least a small portion of it, the idea of our own island, free from administrative supervision, appealed to us very much. Bernie told me what he knew about Yamacraw.

    "The school is all black. They’ve had two black teachers out there who evidently hate each other’s guts. The kids can’t read very

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