The Water Is Wide Read online

  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 well. Same old story. Lack of materials, lack of motivation. Cut off from the outside world. I’ve never been over there, Pat, but we can borrow a boat and visit the island to see if we like it.”

  “Can you drive a boat, Bernie?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. Can you?” he answered.

  “Nope.”

  “Then I’ll ask someone about the job to see if we can both go over there for a year.”

  The next day Bernie talked to the official hiring man of the county. When he asked about chances for getting the job on the island, several members of the administrative staff hooted him out of the office. Bernie reported back that the stupid sons a bitches did not even listen to him make his sales pitch. Screw them, we both said, and sent in our applications to the Peace Corps. We had a tough time deciding whether we wanted to save Africa or Asia. We finally chose Africa. Within a month, the Peace Corps accepted Bernie for a project in Jamaica. I waited to hear. Months passed. No word from the Peace Corps. Toward the end of each school term, my draft board gets a restless desire to know of my intentions for the following year. I did not wish to return to the high school. I was through with teachers more concerned with the length of mini-skirts and hair than with education. But I certainly did not wish to join the Marine Corps, romp about the marshes of Parris Island, and emerge the product of a military system I had come to loathe. So I decided to go to the superintendent and ask about Yamacraw Island.

  CHAPTER 2

  AFTER THE ADMINISTRATION became reasonably convinced that I was seriously thinking about the job, they promised to help me in every way possible. Ezra Bennington, the elderly deputy superintendent, showed special interest in my teaching on the island. Before the consolidation of Beaufort County school systems into one smoothly coordinated integer (at least in theory) Bennington had been in command of the Bluffton district, of which Yamacraw was a part. For over thirty years he had ruled his district like a Persian satrap. With consolidation he had had to accept the arrival of a more powerful presence in his midst and Dr. Piedmont had taken particular delight in letting his subordinates know that he was sitting with both buttocks solidly planted on the throne. Ezra had taken his fall from Eden gracefully, at least externally. But he still kept a vigilant eye on his old province of Bluffton, going over lists of new teachers, calling the principal who once worked under him to give unsolicited advice. When he learned that I was thinking about teaching on Yamacraw, he insisted that he be allowed to take me around the island.

  Ezra Bennington was the perfect name for him. He had a finely chiseled, fashionably wrinkled face that suggested integrity and character. His blue eyes were liquid and innocent. A gray mane covered his head. Ezra was Everyman’s grandfather. He would look good dressed in a white linen suit, rocking on a high verandah, shouting orders to Negroes working in the garden below him. Ezra looked, talked, and acted like a huge southern cliché, a parody who was unaware that his type had been catalogued and identified over and over again. Yet it is impossible to dislike men like Ezra. I have met a hundred of them in my life and, despite myself, have liked every one of them.

  Ezra agreed with the Piedmont formula that I sat on the right hand of the Father for going over to the island. He then said, “Lord knows how I have tried to help these children, how I’ve fought to get them educated. As you know, Yamacraw is a problem, Mr. Conroy. I have tried to solve it for years and years. I tried to talk teachers into going over there to live. But no one would do it. Mrs. Brown was the first decent teacher I could get. You’ll meet her when we go out to the island.”

  I asked him, “Did you ever try to get anyone to commute to the island?”

  “Oh, no. You obviously don’t know about the waters around Yamacraw. They are very treacherous. During the winter it would be impossible for someone to commute. There are days when no one can get on or off the island.”

  “It just seemed like a good answer to me, Mr. Bennington. To have teachers commute to the island or to have a large boat to transport the children to the mainland. They have done this in other areas of the United States.”

  “It’s too far,” Ezra said, shaking his head remorsefully. “It’s just impossible. Just impossible.”

  Bennington spoke slowly. Each word rolled off his tongue like a drop of cold honey from the lip of a jar. He was straight and dignified and, jeepers creepers, he seemed like the most sincere human that ever came under the glance of the Lord.

  The county hired Andy Pappas to take Ezra and me over to Yamacraw. Andy was a short, fat Greek who ran a gas station in Bluffton. An avid fisherman, he knew the waters around the off-lying islands extremely well. He was the official boatman designated to take school personnel from the mainland to Yamacraw Island and he received twenty-five dollars every time he made the expedition. (The one thing I demanded in exchange for teaching on the island was that the school board buy me a boat for traveling to and from the island.)

  During the ride over, I concentrated on learning the water route from Bluffton to Yamacraw. Many sandbars and oyster banks scar the shallows of the saltwater creeks and rivers in lower South Carolina. In high school I had hit a sandbar while water skiing, flipped wildly in the air, and landed painfully on my back. I respected the presence of these latent hazards. I also listened to Bennington. Like many old people’s, his conversation constantly reverted to the past, and during the trip he reminisced about his boyhood and his career in education. He was reared, he said, on a prosperous farm in the upper part of the state. He was a southern agrarian, rooted in the rich, black soil of the Carolina midlands. He had farmed for a while, but ultimately decided to exchange the plow for the blackboard. He came to Bluffton as an agricultural teacher, then shifted to administration. An accomplished raconteur, he made Andy giggle hysterically on the trip to Yamacraw by relating stories salted with a rural flavor.

  That first visit to the island told me very little about the children I would be teaching. It did serve to introduce me to the leading personalities with whom I would have to deal. A man named Ted Stone met us at the dock. Ted was a powerfully built man with steel gray hair and ice blue eyes. He greeted us matter of factly with a restraint and distance that made me a bit ill at ease. He was friendly enough and courteous enough, but he was aloof and suspicious. According to Bennington, he ruled Yamacraw Island. He had expropriated every job on Yamacraw Island for himself. He was the Game Warden, the Magistrate, the Director of Economic Opportunity, Warden of the Roads, Civil Defense Director, and held countless smaller titles, His wife, Lou, held every job not claimed by her husband. Lou was in her fifties but still had dark brown hair. She was the island postmaster and school-bus driver. Bennington described her as a “portrait of efficiency.”

  We borrowed the civil defense jeep from Mr. Stone. The island had few vehicles and the Stones kept all government transportation nestled under the large shed attached to their house. We drove down the dirt road leaving the Stones’ house. Trees, curtained with moss, dipped over the road. Only one car could traverse the road at a time. Andy spoke enthusiastically about hunting on the island. Deer populated the island in sizable herds. We took a left-hand turn at what could be described loosely as an intersection. Four weathered signs nailed to a pine log pointed toward the island’s four claims to notoriety: BEACH, SCHOOLHOUSE, LIBRARY, and COOPER RIVER LANDING. We drove past several small shacks. They were in seemingly good repair. One man stood in a field, hoeing his garden. He looked up, waved abse
ntly, then returned to his work. Bennington delivered a homily based on this scene.

  “These are good people,” he said, “but they are suspicious of strangers. I’ve worked with these people for Lord knows how many years. They respect me and trust me. They have never seen you, Mr. Conroy, so they will look upon this entire expedition with suspicion. For all they know you might be a revenuer coming to check on their stills.”

  Since I had never entered any community where strangers were greeted as affably as old friends, this information did not disturb me to any perceptible degree.

  “Do they bootleg?” I asked.

  “They used to,” he replied. “In fact they used to make right good corn likker, isn’t that right, Andy?”

  “Damn right,” said Andy. “No likker ever tasted as good to me as Yamacraw likker. They made the stuff with copper tubing, too. You didn’t get your ass blinded if you drank the stuff. ’Course, the revenuers have put most of them out of business.”

  “It sounds like a good industry,” I said.

  “Yeh, it was,” answered Andy. “Of course, they did a little drinking themselves. Ain’t nobody get drunk as a nigger. ’Specially on Saturday night.”

  A pack of skeletal hounds intercepted us at the next house, snapped at the wheels of the jeep, then retreated to their shady refuge under the house. A woman appeared at the door. A small, dark woman. But only for a moment. She did not wave. Bennington then repeated the stranger formula verbatim.