The Water is Wide
Pat Conroy
Rosetta Books
0-7953-0076-X
en-us

Copyright

The Water Is Wide

Copyright © 1972 by Pat
Conroy

Cover art and e-Foreword to the
electronic edition copyright © 2000 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews.

For information address
Editor@RosettaBooks.com

First electronic edition published 2000
by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

ISBN 0-7953-0076-X

Contents

eForeword

Chapter

1

Chapter

2

Chapter

3

Chapter

4

Chapter

5

Chapter

6

Chapter

7

Chapter

8

Chapter

9

Chapter

10

Chapter

11

Chapter

12

Acknowledgments

eForeword

The South that is real to the novelist
Pat Conroy is a lush and seductive place, but one that is haunted by violence,
ignorance and oppression. The first of his books, The Water Is Wide
(1972), is an account his personal experience as an idealistic young man trying
to do the right thing in a forgotten corner of the South that is both beautiful
and sad. Having failed to secure a place in the Peace Corps, Conroy is left
having to accept an unlikely teaching job—on remote Yamacraw Island, just
off the South Carolina coast, a place lost in time to all but the small, poor
African-American community that lives and works there. The people’s
livelihood is threatened by the pollution of the modern world, and their own
poverty and illiteracy seems to doom them. “Conrack,” as the children
come to call him, risks everything to change their lives. The Water Is
Wide was the first success Pat Conroy (b. 1945) enjoyed, and the first of
his books that would draw on his own life and experience. His desire to write
about his unusual experience as a teacher launched a remarkable career that has
since taken him into the realm of fiction, in search of the ultimate truth
about the world that he knows. At the heart of all Conroy’s work, though,
is the mesmerizing gift of a great storyteller, a quality that was immediately
evident when The Water Is Wide was published. “A hell of a good
story,” The New York Times called it, and Newsweek described it as
“miraculous … an experience of joy.”

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Other Conroy titles available from
RosettaBooks include The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini and
The Lords of Discipline.

|
Go to Contents |

_________________________

This book is dedicated to my
wife,

Barbara Bolling
Conroy

_________________________

The water is wide,
I cannot get
o’er,
Neither have I wings to fly.
Get me a boat that can carry
two,
And both shall cross,
My true love and I.

-British folk song

The river is deep, the river is wide,
Milk and
honey on the other side.

-“Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”

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 de-structive?” 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.

| Go to
Contents |

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 absently, 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.

I am not certain what I expected the school to look like.
It was a very attractive and simply constructed white frame building. It looked
more like a house than a school. The trees around the purlieus of the
schoolyard were massive, imposing guardians whose mass added security or
mystery (depending on the looker’s point of view), to a scene rapidly
becoming uncommon in the American South. Bennington gestured to a house on our
right, across from the schoolhouse, and said conspiratorially, “Iris
Glover lives there. She has been teaching for thirty-nine years on this island.
The people are scared to death of her. She’s the island witch doctor.
She’s liable to put a spell on you if you take the job.”

“I thought she quit the job. I didn’t know
I’d be taking anyone’s place,” I answered.

“Oh, she’s retiring. At least the county is
retiring her. She’s passed the mandatory age. Should have been fired forty
years ago.”

Miss Glover’s house was immaculately white with bright
blue trim on her shutters and door. The blue paint was the universal symbol of
recognition of the voodoo people. The paint discouraged demons and spirits from
entering a house. Blue paint was to the voodoo people what garlic was to the
villagers of Transylvania or what holy water was to the early Christians. The
voodoo was a leftover from the African culture of the island blacks. Its modern
form is much diluted and infected by Christianity but still has sincere
adherents among some blacks in the lowcountry. Without being aware of it, I
subconsciously identified Miss Glover as being a prime enemy on the island.
This proved to be a false impression.

Bennington glowed like a Christmas bulb when he spoke of
the other teacher. She was his personal discovery. He had championed her
arrival on the island. Mrs. Brown appeared at the door of the schoolhouse and
welcomed us to Yamacraw Elementary School. A large woman, she had great
pendulous bosoms and huge sinewy arms and a handsome, expressive face. She was
light-skinned and laughed a great deal. Everything about her seemed exaggerated
and blown out of proportion. She treated Mr. Bennington like a nun would treat
a visiting bishop. Mrs. Brown greeted me cordially and welcomed me
“overseas.” She told me, “Things are tough overseas, Mr. Conroy.
I’m a missionary over here helping these poor people. Only Jesus and I
know how much they need help …” She spoke without a dialect and
obviously was not from the island. When I asked her about this, she confided
that she was from Georgia but was educated in a very fine private school where
the cruder forms of black dialects were frowned upon by the Presbyterian
educators who presided over the school. She was not from the island, she
assured me. She had come to the island at the insistence of Mr. Bennington.

“Mr. Bennington is the only one who understands the
problems of Yamacraw Island. He knows what’s wrong,” she said,
“and he knows what to do about them.” She spoke in rhythms. Her
speech was exaggerated, going up and down like a piano scale. It almost scanned
conversations in iambic pentameter; the words rolled off her tongue in
poems.

I tried to talk to some of the children, but they simply
gazed at me with shy amusement, then buried their faces in their hands. The
children were subdued, passive, and exceedingly polite. They had risen in
unison when we walked into the room. They chanted “good morning” on
cue from Mrs. Brown. They folded their hands and sat up straight at their
desks. In an effort to achieve the common touch, Bennington walked among the
children and cracked a few jokes. They looked at Mrs. Brown, saw that she was
laughing, then laughed like hell themselves. Bennington then put his hand on
one small boy’s head and whispered something in his ear. The boy smiled.
Bennington was a fish in water.

It was a yes-sir, no-sir world I had entered. Math and
spelling papers hung from the bulletin boards. Everything was Mickey-Mouse neat
and virgin clean in the classroom. A map of the world, contributed by a
Savannah bank, hung on one wall. Near it was a poster which read:
EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS. A picture of a
large key drove the point home. On Mrs. Brown’s desk was an item that
caught and held my eye. It was a leather strap, smooth and very thick. It lay
beneath a reading book.

The relationship between Brown and Bennington intrigued me.
Bennington represented a dying part of the South: the venerable, hoary-maned
administrator who tended his district with the same care and paternalism the
master once rendered to his plantation. As I watched him perform his classroom
routine, I also observed Mrs. Brown’s reaction, a black teacher who nodded
her head in agreement every time he opened his mouth to utter some memorable
profundity. I could not tell if this was a role she was playing or if she
actually believed that Bennington was the word made flesh. Anyway, they went
well together. Both of them hated Miss Glover. For some undisclosed reason,
Miss Glover was not at school on that day. Bennington and Brown cornered me and
proceeded to blame the educational inadequacies of the children on Miss
Glover.

“She had been here forty years and the children
didn’t even know how to use a fork,” said Mrs. Brown.

“Well, Ruth,” Bennington intoned slowly,
“that’s why I sent you out here. I knew you could lift these people
up.”

“I try, Mr. Bennington. You know I try. But these
people don’t want to better themselves. Why, Mr. Conroy,” she said,
turning to me, “the parents stay likkered up down there at the club and
take the children with them when they do it. Satan smiles at all the
sinnin’ going on at that club.”

We soon departed. On the trip back I tried to gather my
impressions together and come out with a final decision about teaching on the
island. Andy handed out encomiums to several productive fishing holes we passed
and indicated an osprey’s nest on top of a utility pole. Bennington talked
about farming. I sat in the back of the boat and decided once and for all to
take the job. Yamacraw was a universe of its own. The lushness of the island
pleased me and the remarkable isolation of the school appealed to the do-gooder
in me. Only a thoroughbred do-gooder can appreciate the feeling, the roseate,
dawnlike, and nauseating glow that enveloped me on the return trip that day. I
had found a place to absorb my wildest do-gooding tendency. Unhappy do-gooders
populate the world because they have not found a Yamacraw all their own. All my
apprehensive feelings disappeared. I had made a decision, The last statement I
remember that day came from Mr. Bennington.

“Did you notice how well I got along with those
children?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I’ve always been able to get along with colored
people. They’ve always loved me.”

My first night on Yamacraw Island was
spent in a sleeping bag on the schoolroom floor. The forest outside the
perimeter of the schoolyard was insane with insect voices and the dark seemed
darker than any place I had been before. No street-lamps, no traffic lights, no
squeal of brakes, nor any other evidence of city life presented itself that
night. Darkness in strange places is always fearful and, lying on the floor
that night, sweating from the armpits to the metatarsals from the heat, I felt
the fear that comes from being alone in a new environment. When I did get to
sleep, I was later awakened by a thunderstorm. Lightning flashed around the
island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the
shivering mortals on the earth below. Overall, the night seemed to augur
strange things.

But the morning was a time of renewal. The first morning
was incredibly bright and tranquil. I awoke, shaved without a mirror, lost
several pints of blood, and awaited the arrival of Mrs. Brown and the school
bus. Mrs. Brown came first.

“Welcome overseas,” she greeted me.

“Thank you, ma’am. It is great to be
here.”

“Ho, ho, ho. Don’t speak too quick. You are in a
snake pit, son. And them snakes are gonna start snappin’ at your toes.
You’re overseas now.”

She then delivered a rather ferocious homily about the
handling of colored children by a teacher so obviously white.

“You’ve got to treat them stern. Tough, you know.
You got the older babies. Grades five through eight. Keep them busy with work
all the time or they’ll run you right out of that there door,” she
said. “I know colored people better than you do. That’s because I am
one myself. You have to keep your foot on them all the time. Step on them. Step
on them every day and keep steppin’ on them when they gets out of line. If
you have any trouble, Mama Brown will be right next door. We got lots of trees
outside, and every tree gets lots of switches. I got some in that cabinet right
over there.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The kids arrived at 8 A.M. and
swarmed into the class, each of them pausing to murmur a dutiful good-morning.
One small fry climbed into a seat only to be accosted by a larger girl who said
that he was sitting in her seat. He said something unintelligible (to me). She
cuffed his head, he swung a fist, then she drifted into another seat while I
watched the whole scene. I think I said something profound like “now,
now.” After this everyone sat erect in his seat appraising me with
indirect glances, looking around at one another, then giggling and looking back
at me. I felt ludicrously white.

I gave them a little pep talk — one of the
rah-rah varieties that is a universal choice of teachers all over the world on
the first day of school. It was dull, rambling, and full of those
go-go-get-‘em-get-‘em epigrams concerning the critical need for every
human being to live up to his highest potential and to squeeze every possible
morsel of knowledge from the textbook. They expected it and nodded their heads
in solemn, collective assent.

Not one of them knew my name, but all of them had prior
knowledge that a white teacher would preside over them for the year. I printed
my name PAT CONROY on the board. I then said my name aloud. When I said
“Conroy” they laughed like hell. Since I saw nothing intrinsically
humorous in my last name, I asked them what was so damn funny. This seemed to
increase their laughter by several octaves. Several of the kids were trying to
pronounce my name. One girl got “Mr. Corning” out of it, and this was
the nearest approximation I heard.

Mama Brown ended my ruminations over the last-name syndrome
by trooping her first-through-fourth graders in for the first-day assembly.
They marched in single file like a well-drilled squad of soldiers. When all
were in their seats, Mama Brown delivered the memorable opening-day
address.

“Good morning, babies.”

A few hesitant good-mornings answered her.

“Well, now, babies, that isn’t much of an answer
for the first day of school. Let’s try it again. Good morning,
babies.”

“Good morning” came the still timorous reply.

“Now, babies, I know your voices didn’t dry up
like ole fruit over the summertime. Let’s use them vocal chords. Let me
hear you say good morning like you mean it.”

“Good morning!” they shouted loudly. The revival
of the educational spirit buried in the inertia of summer had begun, at least
for Mama Brown. She took a solid position behind the podium, which was placed
somewhat pretentiously in the front of the room for the occasion. She then
opened up with a fire-and-brimstone judgment-day sermon like an old circuit
preacher who knew well the wrath of an angry God. She exhorted the kids to
study hard and keep quiet or face the possibility of incurring the disfavor of
the teacher who ruled them.

“Most of you are slow,” she said. “All of us
know that. But there are two of you, Frank and Mary, who could take a test
right now and move up a grade or two. That’s because you got good brains
and use them. The rest of you can’t think as good. We know that and you
know that. Your brains are just slow. But you can learn if you work. You are
just lazy, lazy, and lazy people just can’t get ahead in life. Of course
some of you are even retarded, and that is even worse than being lazy. But we
know you can’t help being retarded. That just means you have to work even
harder than the lazy ones. Now those of you who are retarded know who you are.
I don’t have to tell you. But retarded people need to be pushed and
whipped harder than anyone.

Here she paused and eyeballed the entire congregation. She
then turned to me with an ingratiating smile. “I now have the privilege of
introducing Mr. Patroy to the class. Mr. Patroy will be our new principal this
year. He will teach the upper grades in the basics of language co-mmunication
and the new math. Mr. Patroy is so good to come over here this year and we are
thankful that the Lord brought Mr. Patroy to us. Now I am going to let Mr.
Patroy speak to us. Now I am going to let Mr. Patroy get the floor and tell you
babies what he has planned.”

I walked up to the podium and gave a brief self-conscious
talk about the joys of scholarship, then quickly relinquished the
speaker’s platform back to Mrs. Brown.

Mrs. Brown turned solemn. “We are now going to recite
the Lord’s Prayer,” she said. “Now the Soo-preme Court said we
couldn’t pray on Yamacraw, but I feel if the Lord ain’t on our side,
then who is. If the Lord ain’t with us, then who’s gonna be for us.
If the Lord decides to forget us, then there ain’t much use in
livin’. Don’t you agree, Mr. Patroy?”

Mr. Patroy nodded his head in solemn agreement.

We said the Lord’s Prayer, vilified the Soo-preme
Court once more, then broke up the meeting.

After the room had cleared of the underclasses, I put Plan
Number 1 into immediate effect. I asked the kids to write a paper briefly
describing themselves, telling me everything about themselves that they felt
was important, what they liked about themselves and what they didn’t like.
This seemed like a fairly reasonable request to me but most of the kids stared
at me as if I had ordered them to translate hieroglyphs from a pyramid wall. I
repeated the instructions and insisted that they make some attempt to follow
them. So they began.

As I walked around my new fiefdom, the kids earnestly
applying themselves to the task at hand, I had my first moment of panic. Some
of them could barely write. Half of them were incapable of expressiing even the
simplest thought on paper. Three quarters of them could barely spell even the
most elementary words. Three of them could not write their names. Sweet little
Jesus, I thought, as I weaved between the desks, these kids don’t know
crap. Most of them hid their papers as I came by, ashamed for me to see they
had written nothing. By not being able to tell me anything about themselves,
they were telling me everything.

Next I read them a story, a very simple story, I thought,
about a judge and a U.S. marshal in the Wild West. The story contained a
murder, a treacherous friend, and a happy ending. I asked the eighth graders
and the other kids who appeared the least bit literate to retell the story in
their own words on paper. Frank, the eighth grader and the boy Mrs. Brown had
introduced as the intellectual torch of the Yamacraw School, wrote the
following: “Jim was a ranch. Jim had horse thef. Mike father was short in
his back, Mike said Jim had shile his father.” A sixth grader wrote,
“There was a cowboy name Jim and Mike had a ranch when Mike father got
shoot in his barn. Mike did not no ho shoot him fadher one he fond out h.”
This was Cindy Lou, who proudly produced this composition after fifteen minutes
of laborious effort.

Oh, I thought, we have no accomplished essayists in the
class, so let us continue into other fields of endeavor. Perhaps some latent
Demosthenes was sitting before me awaiting the coming of some twentieth-century
Macedonia. I asked each child to tell me about his summer, what he did, what he
enjoyed the most, or what he disliked about it. Since there was an obvious
dearth of volunteers, I called on a diminutive boy named Saul, a seventh grader
who looked no older than six.

“Tell me about the summer, Saul, me hearty lad,”
I said, desperately trying to inject some life in the deadpan atmosphere of the
room.

Saul arose with paramount dignity, tugged on his belt, and
spoke with a musical prepubic voice. “I slop de hog. I feed de cow. I feed
two dog. I go to Savannah on the boat.”

The next orator arose and said, “I slop de hog. I feed
de cow. I feed three dog. I feed two cat. I go to Savannah in the
boat.”

The next brilliant innovator arose and said, quite
surprisingly, “I feed the hog. I feed the cow. I feed the horse. I feed
seven dogs. I go to Savannah in the boat.”

Every other child in the class stood up and without a trace
of expression or self-consciousness repeated Saul’s original speech
verbatim. A boy named Prophet gave the only variation of the theme when he
confided to the class with a grin that “I help poppa fick the poppa
hog.” The class roared.

After this failure to learn something about each of my new
students, I pulled an old trick of the trade out of the hat, one of those
tricks you find in a box in the middle of an elementary teacher’s magazine
under the heading What to Do on That First Day. A girl I had been dating
in Beaufort, herself an elementary teacher, suggested this to me. She promised
that the kids would enjoy it and that I would find it extremely informative. I
told the class to draw a portrait of me. They looked at me incredulously, jaws
agape, as if I had asked them to draw a picture of horse genitals.

“No lip, gang. No questions. Just draw a picture of
this handsome devil you see before you.”

“Humph, Conrack think he look good,” someone
whispered.

“Conrack don’t think he look good, honey,” I
shouted. “Conrack know he look good. Now you just draw how good he
looks.”

“Conrack look bad,” one of the twins
whispered.

“Hey, twin. Conrack has big fist which says he looks
good. Otherwise, fist crumples into little jaw of little twin and makes blood
come out of face,” I said menacingly, as I put my clenched fist up against
his face.

“Conrack still look bad,” the other twin said,
halfway across the room.

“Good, then make me look bad.”

Everyone then became serious about art. Oscar, a seventh
grader and the biggest boy in the class, gazed at my face with the intensity of
a Parisian artist studying the contours of a nude. They all scratched and
erased, hooted and squealed, and imprinted my image on their lined pieces of
notebook paper. My pug nose caught hell. So did my sideburns. One girl, Ethel,
was really very good. As I pinned them up on the bulletin board, I
couldn’t help but notice there was some correlation between those who
could not draw and those who could not write.

They then drew a picture of themselves. I had no particular
reason for doing this. The thought impulsively struck me that it might be
interesting to compare the drawings they made of themselves with the ones they
made of me. I was very glad I did this when I saw the results. Most of the boys
drew themselves to look exactly as they had drawn me. Several boys had made
what looked like duplicate copies. The girls saved themselves from exact
reproduction by the fact they had included long hair and dresses in their
self-portraits. No one had darkened his face or gave any indication that he or
she might be black.

Just before the arrival of the bus, we had an impromptu
geography lesson. A map of the world hung near the door. I asked for a
volunteer to come up and pinpoint the location of Yamacraw Island on the map.
Eight hands immediately shot up. This surprised me somewhat and for a moment I
thought I had expected too little from these kids, that they were more advanced
than I had given them credit for. I called on Mary, the eldest, tallest, and
supposedly the brightest girl in class. She strode confidently to the map and
without hesitation and without faltering an instant, she placed her finger on a
spot in the northeast corner of Outer Mongolia. When I told her this
wasn’t quite right, the rest of the class cackled and taunted Mary all the
way back to her seat. Fred prodded Mary’s arm with his finger and laughed
like hell, until Mary swung a thin, long, graceful hand against the side of
Fred’s face. A kid who identified himself as Big C walked up to the map
and immediately chose a place near Bombay, India; nor did Top Cat neglect the
portion of Russia that borders the Bering Sea.

Then the bus arrived. The kids filed out.

“Good-bye, Mr. Conrack,” they said.

“Good-bye, gang, see you tomorrow.”

Then Mrs. Brown poked her head in the door and asked me how
it went. “Crappy,” I answered, and she chuckled. “Your’e
overseas now.”

She then gave me about five hundred tons of paper, which I
would need as principal of Yamacraw Elementary.

“No one told me I was supposed to be principal, Mrs.
Brown. I thought you were the principal. In fact, I was told that you were the
principal.”

“Oh no, Mr. Patroy. You are the principal. Of course
you’re the principal.” A month and a half later Dr. Piedmont sent
word over to the island that Mrs. Brown was indeed the principal.

She laid the papers on my desk, then went back to her room.
It suddenly struck me that she took it for granted I was principal simply
because I was white.

Just as the first day of school was spent
getting to know the individual children in the class, the second day was spent
in an honest effort to find out what they knew. No one on the mainland could
tell me exactly what problems I would encounter. Everyone seemed to agree it
was bad, yet no one knew what diagnostic techniques to recommend. Several
administrators intimated that whatever I taught the Yamacraw children, it would
be infinitely superior to what they had learned before, regardless of what
methods I employed. Yamacraw was an enigma to the minions who gathered under
Piedmont’s protective wing. Bennington knew more than anyone, but his
major preoccupation was to erase his own trail of incompetence and his
contribution toward actually shoving the true portrait of the Yamacraw School
before my eyes was negligible. After the second day of school, however,
Bennington, Piedmont, and all the other king’s horses could come to me for
information about the quality and condition of education on the island. It
stunk.

It is important to realize that I had never taught in an
elementary school, that my experience had only been with high school students.
I had not the vaguest notion what body of knowledge a sixth or seventh grader
possessed. Nor did I really know what I was expected to teach them. So the
night after the first day of school, I prepared a list of questions, questions
that seemed to be the most basic units of information I could devise. I also
pulled eighteen books out of the two bookshelves that passed for the library.
These books ranged from the simplest I could find to one with a relatively
complex vocabulary.

In the morning the yellow school bus came into the yard at
promptly eight o’clock. The kids filed in, each one of them giving me an
obsequious good-morning as he passed through the front door. I swatted each one
of the boys on the shoulder as he entered, called him “chicken,” and
dared any of them to summon up the courage to fight back. Big C crept up behind
me and booted me in the rump. The class squealed and laughed approvingly. I
chased Big C into a corner and commenced to wrestle him to the schoolroom
floor. By this time the noise level had risen to an insect pitch. I was about
to put Big C into a full Nelson, when a funereal silence descended on the room;
I saw Mama Brown’s huge head staring disapprovingly into the window. She
beckoned me to the door with her finger. Her finger was the size of a small
blackjack. I went.

“Mr. Patroy,” she said, “you have already
lost the respect of these children. You have lowered yourself in their eyes.
They need discipline, not fun time. This school isn’t any fun time, you
know.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled, embarrassed as
hell.

“Remember what I told you about colored children. They
need the whip. They understand the whip. O.K. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“O.K., that’s good. Now, this is the day we hand
out books. In exactly one hour, I want you to send a child you trust to my
room. The state requires us to hand out these textbooks as soon as
possible.”

“Can the kids read these books?” I asked.
“They are supposed to read them. The state department requires them to
read them.”

“What if they can’t?”

“Then we must make them read them. Of course, some of
them are retarded and can’t read anything. You got to remember that we are
overseas, Mr. Patroy, and things are tough overseas.”

“I’ll remember.”

I returned to the classroom a chastened man. No more
half-Nelsons on that particular day. I winked at Big C. Then I began the
interrogation.

“O.K., gang, loosen up. Shake those hands and feet. We
are going to dust the cobwebs off those sweet little brains of ours. Prophet,
you are going to have the opportunity to prove that you are a genius before all
the world today. Carolina, you are going to shine like the sun. Everybody is
going to look good.”

One of the questionable themes developed in two years of
teaching was the necessity to put students at complete ease. It worked well in
Beaufort, but the Yamacraw kids looked at me as though I were a mentally
deficient clown.

“What country do we live in, gang? Everybody tell me
at once,” I exhorted.

No one said a word. Several of the kids looked at one
another and shrugged their shoulders.

“Gang,” I continued, “what is the name of
this grand old, red, white, and blue country of ours? The place where we live.
The land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Still there was silence.

I was struggling for the right words to simplify the
question even further. “Does anyone know what country we live in?” I
asked again.

No one answered. Each child sat before me with a pained and
embarrassed look.

“Have you ever heard of the United States of
America?” I asked.

“Oh, yeh,” Mary, one of the eighth-grade girls
said. “I heared it. I heared it in I pledge a legent to the flag of United
States of America.”

“The Pledge of Allegiance. Good, Mary. Then you knew
what country you live in.”

“No, just know pledge a legent.”

“All right, gang. Now the first golden nugget of
information we are going to learn this year is that all of us live in the
United States of America. Now the next thing I want someone to tell me is this:
who is President of the United States in this year of 1969?” Again there
was silence.

“Does anyone know?” I asked.

Everyone shook his head. Frank raised his hand. “John
F. Kennedy,” he said.

“Yeh,” the whole class answered, looking to me
for approval.

“Yeh,” I responded. “That’s great,
Frank. Why did you say Kennedy?”

“He good to colored man,” answered Frank.

“Yeh,” the class answered.

“Yeh,” I agreed.

“Can anyone tell me who the first President of the
United States was?”

Silence again.

“Ever hear of George Washington?” I asked.

Only a couple of students nodded their heads affirmatively.
The rest had not.

“Who can tell me who Willie Mays is?”

No one could.

“All right, gang, relax. We are going to get off these
goofy people for a while. I am sick and tired of talking about people.
Let’s talk about water. Who can name me an ocean?”

Fred looked at Top Cat and Top Cat looked at Fred, who was
staring intently at me. None of them had ever heard of any ocean.

“I’m going to give you a hint,” I said,
“one of the oceans washes up against the shore of Yamacraw
Island.”

Cindy Lou lit up and shouted, “Oh, he mean the
beach.”

“That’s right, Cindy. Now what is the name of the
beach?”

“The beach, man,” she answered indignantly.

“No, I mean the name given to that whole
ocean.”

“I tole you it was the beach,” she said
angrily.

“O.K. It’s the beach,” I agreed. “But
it also is called the Atlantic Ocean. Have any of you ever heard it called
that?”

All heads shook sadly and mournfully.

“Well, don’t worry about it,” I continued.
“That kind of stuff is easy to learn. Just by talking about it, without
even thinking real hard, you have learned what ocean is by Yamacraw. Mary, if I
were a stranger on this island and I met you on the beach and asked you what
body of water this was I was walking next to, what would you tell me?”

“Body?” she asked in a tone intimating that she
had incriminating evidence against my sanity.

“Yeh, body of water.”

“I don’t know about no bodies,” she
insisted.

“Forget about body. What ocean would you tell me I was
walking by?”

“Lantic Ocean.”

“Atlantic.”

“Atlantic,” she repeated.

“What ocean, everybody?”

“Atlantic Ocean,” they shouted in unison.

“Are you sure it’s the Atlantic Ocean?”

“Yeh,” they answered.

“Well, it’s not.”

They looked at me again like they had been placed under the
jurisdiction of a functioning cretin.

“The real name of the ocean is the Conroy
Ocean.”

“No,” they said.

“Yeh,” I said.

“No,” they said.

“Yeh, it’s the truth. My great-great grandfather
was Ferdinand Conroy, a Spanish soldier of fortune, who swam from Europe to
North America, a distance of fifteen million miles. Because of this singular
and extraordinary feat, they named this huge expanse of water after
him.”

“What you say?” one of the twins asked me.

“He didn’t say nothen,” Cindy Lou said.

“Anyway,” I continued undaunted, “from that
day forward, it has been called Conroy Ocean.”

“No,” George said.

“How do you know?” I challenged.

“Just ain’t. You said it is Atlantic.”

“I’m a liar.”

“You’s a teacher.”

“Teachers lie all the time.”

“Oh Gawd,” Lincoln said. I had been noticing
whenever Lincoln was surprised or ecstatic he would use the phrase Oh
Gawd.

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.

Each question I asked opened up a new lesion of ignorance
or misinformation. A stunned embarrassment gripped the class, as if I had
broken some unwritten law by prying into areas where I had no business, or
exposing linen of a very personal nature. No one would look me in the eye. Nor
would anyone talk to me. I had stumbled into another century. The job I had
taken to assuage the demon of do-gooderism was a bit more titanic than
anticipated. All around the room sat human beings of various sizes and hues who
were not aware that a world surrounded them, a world they would be forced to
enter, and enter soon.

I now knew the score of the ball game. Or at least thought
I did. The kids did not know crap.

I walked up to Prophet. I put up six fingers and asked him
how many fingers I had raised.

“Eight,” he answered.

“You only missed it by two, Prophet. Try it
again,” I said.

“Two,” he whispered.

“No, Prophet. Now start at this first finger and count
to the last one.”

“Five,” he whispered again. By this time his eyes
were begging me to cease the interrogation. His classmates laughed at him each
time he gave a wrong answer. I had humiliated him and his eyes carried the
message.

“Don’t worry about it, Prophet, we are going to
bust the hell out of those old numbers before this is over. O.K.?” He
nodded.

Prophet gave the general appearance that a thought never
entered his head, that his brain had never suffered from the painful malady of
an idea. Samuel and Sidney, the twins, by their appearance alone made Prophet
look like a candidate for the “College Bowl.” They were pitifully
skinny, unanimated, dull-eyed, and seemingly retarded. Whenever I got the other
children laughing by performing some insane act or saying some outrageous
thing, Sam and Sidney would laugh several seconds after the other kids, as if
they depended on the reaction of their peers for the proper responses. The
twins seemed hopeless. Prophet smiled often enough, with his bell-ringer grin,
to give me some faith that he was not completely oblivious to the world about
him.

This second day proved a hypothesis formulated quickly and
haphazardly on the first day. A huge, almost unbridgeable communication gap
existed in the room. When the kids were conversing normally, there was not a
tinker’s chance in hell that I could understand them. The island blacks of
South Carolina are famous among linguists for their Gullah dialect. Experts
have studied this patois for years and they have written several books on the
subject. It is a combination of an African dialect and English; some even claim
that remnants of Elizabethan English survive among the Gullah people. Whatever
the origin of the speech, I could not decipher the ordinary conversation of any
of the children in the class. They spoke like machine guns, rapidly or in
short, explosive spurts. Whenever I would stand off and listen to a group of
them conversing, it became impossible for me to follow what they said. I could
not grasp the syntax, nor could I follow any logical sentence pattern, nor
could I participate in their discussions by piecing together words I did catch
accidentally when one of them was sprinting through his version of a story.

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. I am embarrassed to talk on telephones for
the simple reason that operators cannot understand me. So the situation in the
classroom was desperate in more ways than one. I knew the kids didn’t know
very much and I knew that I could teach them a hell of a lot, but I could not
understand a word they were saying, nor could they understand a word I was
saying. With the help of Mary a compromise was reached. Mary seemed to
understand almost everything I said, and on occasion I could understand some of
what she said. I designated her as grand interpreter with illimitable powers of
life and death over all. When Prophet said something known only to God, Mary
would tell me what he said. Sometimes the whole class would help Mary out, and
seventeen voices would rise slowly in an unintelligible gibberish, grow louder
as each voice tried to be heard, and finally reach a deafening crescendo
à la Babel.

“Enough of this,” I’d yell. Then Mary would
proudly explain to me that Prophet wanted to take a piss.

That night I fired off a rather angry, self-righteous
letter to Dr. Piedmont telling him that his cute little schoolhouse on Yamacraw
was not worth a pound of cow dung. Looking back, I scoff at the bug-eyed
believer in the system I was then. There I sat in a small schoolroom, with a
sleeping bag unrolled on the floor beside me, a dinner of beef stew and
Gatorade digesting in my stomach, the smell of chalk dust and old textbooks in
my nostrils, the wild insect sounds of night rampant in the forest around me,
writing a brimstone letter to a man I had met only once, but whom I trusted
implicitly to understand, to sympathize, and to act. Because the situation was
so much worse than I anticipated, I was less diplomatic than I might have been.
I wanted to shock Piedmont as I had been shocked and wanted to shake the
plodding bureaucrats who plowed around the heavily carpeted county office
building into awareness of the disastrous education they were giving kids. Yeh,
I was a tough bastard in those early days. Piedmont learned that he had not
sent me to Yamacraw to preside over an intellectual wasteland with all due
acknowledgments to T. S. Eliot. The letter was written in a fit of Conroy
passion, the tiny bellicose Irishman residing in my genes and collective
unconscious urging me on and whispering to me that a great injustice was being
perpetrated and that it was up to me to expose this condition to the person
with the ability and training to do something about it.

The letter was written the second day of the school year.
From that day forward, no one in the educational hierarchy of the county could
plead ignorance concerning the school on the island. I had told them.

On the third day I despaired. Each time I broached a new
subject, it revealed some astonishing gap in the kids’ knowledge. The
realm of their experience was not only limited, it often seemed nonexistent.
Some of them vaguely remembered having heard of Vietnam but were not aware that
the United States was at war in that country. When I asked whom we were
fighting there, Oscar’s hand shot up and he quickly said, “The
Germans and the Japs.” The whole class solemnly agreed that we had to beat
those Germans and Japs. Yamacraw Island was the largest of the nine planets.
When I asked who was the greatest man that ever lived, Mary answered,
“Jesus.” Everyone, of course, fervently agreed. When I asked who was
the second greatest man who ever lived, her brother Lincoln answered,
“Jesus Christ.” Once again the entire class unanimously consented to
this second choice.

I could understand the class not knowing Richard Nixon,
Napoleon, Julius Caesar, or Alexander the Great, but I could not see how black
children living in the latter half of the twentieth century could fail to know
Sidney Poitier, Wilt Chamberlain, or Willie Mays. They had never heard of
Shakespeare or Aesop. They never heard of England or India. They had never been
to a movie theater or to a ball game. They had never heard of democracy,
governors or senators, capitals of states, or any oceans, or famous actors, or
artists, or newspapers, or kinds of automobiles. They had never been to a
museum, never looked at a work of art, never read a piece of good literature,
never ridden a city bus, never taken a trip, never seen a hill, never seen a
swift stream, never seen a super-highway, never learned to swim, and never done
a thousand things that children of a similar age took for granted.

I learned all this on the third day. I had pulled up a
chair in the middle of the class and all the kids had drawn up their desks in a
semicircle around me. And we just talked. We spent the whole day talking. I
told them about myself, about my mother and father, about my four brothers and
two sisters, about teaching in Beaufort, about going to Europe, and about my
coming to Yamacraw. They were thrilled to learn that my father flew jet planes.
I also told them I drove a small yellow car called a Volkswagen when I was on
the mainland. The car was manufactured in a country called Germany on a
continent called Europe. I showed them the country and the continent on the
map. They asked me about places I had been, and what New York looked like, and
had I ever been on an airplane.

They then told me about hunting on the island, and the boys
became extremely animated describing the number of squirrels to be found deep
in the woods and how you had to be a great shot to pick out the gray tuft of
fur high in the black oaks and bring it down with one shot of the .22. The
further you went in the woods, they told me, the more tame the squirrels
became, the closer they would come, and the easier they were to kill. The girls
then told me in elaborate detail how to clean the squirrels. They called the
process “scrinching.” You slit open the belly with a sharp knife,
peeled the squirrel’s pelt off like the skin of a grape, then scraped the
squirrel’s skin until it was white and smooth. Ethel said, “A lady in
Savannah won’t eat squirrel ’cause she say after a squirrel been
scrinched it look like little white baby.”

“How many in here like to eat squirrel?” I asked.
Everyone loved squirrel, although there was one purist faction in the class
that liked squirrel meat without any other embellishments and another who
preferred their squirrel with a thick gravy and a heavy stew.

“I would have to be starving to death before I ate a
squirrel,” I told the class. “A squirrel looks like a big hairy rat
to me and since I would not eat a rat, I most probably would not eat a squirrel
either.”

Lincoln asked incredulously, “You ain’t never
eaten squirrel?”

I answered negatively.

“Gawd, that man never eaten squirrel,” said Cindy
Lou.

“Squirrel ain’t no rat,” Saul said.

“You eat rat,” Lincoln said to Saul.

“No, I don’t eat rat. You eat crow.“ The
whole class roared when the puny Saul accused Lincoln of eating crow.
Evidently, crow-eating had connotations on the island which were literal as
well as metaphorical.

“You know what you eat, Saul. You eat
buzzard.”

The class laughed wildly again.

“Fat man, you know what you eat.”

“What I eat, little man?“

“You know what you eat,” Saul answered
menacingly, his tiny frame rigid with anger.

“Little man, better tell me what I eat.”

“Fat man eats shee-it.”

“Oh Gawd,” half the class exclaimed
simultaneously. Someone shouted, “Little man told big man he eat shee-it.
He curse. He curse. Lawd, Mr. Conrack gonna do some beating now.”

Saul had slumped into his seat after he had uttered the
forbidden word and hidden his face in his hands, awaiting whatever punishment I
would impose upon him. Why I had let the situation totally escape me, I did not
know. I had been so interested in the downward progression of gourmet foods
according to the island connoisseurs that I was totally unprepared for the
final plunge to unpackaged feces. Lincoln, enraged at being called a shee-it
eater, huffed and puffed triumphantly and waited impatiently for me to yank
Saul from his seat and beat hell out of him. Meanwhile Saul had started to
cry.

“Saul,” I intoned, trying to sound like a
miniature Yahweh.

“Oh Gawd,” said Lincoln.

Saul looked up still sobbing. “Saul, do you know how I
used to punish students who were bad when I taught high school?”

“No,” he answered.

“I used to scrinch ’em, son. I used to take a
knife and cut open their bellies. Then I’d scrape their skin until they
were ready for the pot.”

“No,” the whole class said.

“Yeah,” I, the wild-eyed scrincher, answered.

Then I’d try to sell them for people to eat, but no
one would eat them because them scrinched students looked too much like baby
squirrels.”

“White man crazy,” someone whispered.

“Now everyone shut up. ’cause I am about to
scrinch Saul.”

“No,“ the class shouted.

“Yeah,” I shouted back. “But I am going to
give him a chance. Now if I was Saul I would say, ‘Teacher, I said that
stinking word and I made a mistake. If you give me another chance, I promise I
won’t do it again.’ ”

“Teacher,” Saul said rather quickly, “give
me a chance and I won’t do nothin’ again.”

“O.K. Fair enough. Now, Lincoln, is it true the stuff
I hear about you?”

“What, man?”

“Is it true that you eat skunk?”

“Yeah, he eat skunk,” the rest of the class
shouted.

It was strange how I marveled about their
lack of knowledge concerning history and geography. On the third day, though
despairing, I wondered if they felt any pity for me for not having feasted on
squirrel stew or enjoyed the simple pleasures of scrinching. The boys were
hunters; the girls were expert in the preparation of the spoils of the hunt.
Oscar, the tallest and the blackest kid in class, told me he had shot a deer
the year before. Lincoln then told me that Frank had shot Oscar the year
before. With this statement the class lapsed into a profound, but uncertain
silence. Frank looked at Lincoln with eyes that danced with rage and fury.
Oscar looked as if he was sucking on a lemon. Finally Saul spoke up.

“Frank shot Oscar through the arm.”

“Where was this?” I asked.

“Down on Bloody Point on other side of island. They
hunt bird.”

Lincoln said, “Frank no have any guard on his trigger.
Walking along, Frank trip over root. Trigger catch in his sleeve and put hole
in Oscar’s arm.”

“Oscar bleed like hog,” Sidney, one of the twins,
said. It was obvious that Frank and Oscar still carried scars from that
particular day in the woods — Oscar impulsively holding his left arm,
Frank staring at his pencil, both of them thinking about the blood and
pain.

“That boy nearly bleed to death, Mr. Conrack,”
Ethel said.

“They walk to Mr. Stone’s house and a man take
him to the doctor in Savannah. Say he almost die on the way.”

“Shut up, girl,” Oscar said.

“Yeah, man. Let’s everyone be quiet.” The
bus was pulling up into the yard. “Tomorrow return and we will continue to
derive great pleasure from the joy of learning.”

“Oh Gawd, Conrack.”

When Friday afternoon came and the bus sucked the kids out
the school door and they bade farewell to Mr. Conrack for the weekend, it was a
matter of minutes before I was untying the boat at Stone’s dock and
heading for Bluffton, where Bernie was meeting me. We drove to his apartment in
Beaufort, where I took my first shower in a week. I luxuriated in the flow of
hot water. All the crud of the island fell off me like a skin. Then I turned my
attention to the mosquito bites, which were legion over the length and breadth
of my body. Pouring alcohol into cotton balls, I dabbed the red swellings until
they stung and glowed. One particular bite merited more detailed attention.
Under careful scrutiny, I saw that it was a tick. It was just sitting there
beneath my armpit, growing fat by sucking my lifeblood. He was in there deep;
his snout drilled far into my flesh enjoying the refreshment of the plasma
coursing through my veins. I grabbed him by his tiny behind and yanked. He
split in half. His straw still remained in me, sucking away. Bernie got a match
and after applying four first-degree burns to my arm, the tick shriveled and
came out easily. A spot check revealed that I was covered with the ravenous
fellows. They preferred the warmth and obscurity of the pubic region, where
they could hide and suck without detection. They were forest creatures and to
the forests they retreated, hiding like guerrillas in the dense foliage of arse
and scrotum. Taking a pair of tweezers, I extracted nine ticks from my
body.

“An occupational hazard, son,” Bernie sang.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 3

The school library would have been funny
if it had not been such a tragic commentary on administrative inefficiency and
stupidity. Each day we had a half-hour reading period during which the kids
could read anything they liked. Since a lot of them couldn’t read at all,
the period had become a time when I simply tried to get them interested in
books. Cindy Lou chose a book called Tommy the Telephone as her personal
favorite. Each time Cindy read to me about Tommy, the irony struck me: a girl
reading about telephones who has never used a telephone. Other books with
negligible relationship to life on the island populated the shelves. There were
books on Eskimos, Scandinavians, dairy farms in Wisconsin, and the Japanese
pearl divers, but I could find no books or information on rural blacks in the
Yamacraw school library. I brought a Sears, Roebuck catalogue to school and it
proved to be one of the most popular books. The girls perused the fashions,
while the boys lusted after the hunting and sports equipment. My group of
rock-hard nonreaders flipped through the encyclopedias, looking at the pictures
and asking me innumerable questions.

“What this here, Conrack?” Sidney would ask.

“That’s a pyramid, Sid. They used to bury kings
in those things thousands of years ago in a country called Egypt.”

“No.”

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Who this?” Prophet would ask then, thumbing
through another encyclopedia. “That’s Babe Ruth. One of the greatest
baseball players that ever lived. He used to play for the New York Yankees. He
hit 714 home runs in his career, more than anyone else in the history of
baseball.”

“He play now?” asked Richard.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“Yeah, stupid, he daid.” Sid grinned as he
punched Richard.

“That man dead?” Prophet asked again.

“Richard think that man ‘live,” Sid
continued. Richard slugged Sid and the discussion of the Sultan of Swat
ended.

One day as the guys pored over the musty tomes, which they
came to consider their personal property during the reading period, Jasper
stumbled on the section dealing with snakes. The whole class ran over to look
at the snakes.

“Snake bad,” Oscar said sagaciously.

“Yeah, bad,” everyone agreed.

“Snake good,” I interjected. “Gang, snakes
eat rats and other rodents which are pests around the yard.”

“Snake eat you, too,” Lincoln said. The class
howled.

“Just poisonous snakes will hurt you,” I said
defensively. Since Yamacraw contained some of the largest diamondback
rattlesnakes to be found anywhere, I could understand their fear of snakes, but
as an amateur herpetologist, I felt that I had to make an impassioned defense
of snakedom. “And snakes will not bother you unless you bother
them.”

“Lord, Mr. C‘roy, you just don’t know
snakes,” Ethel said. “We got a snake here on this island that wrap
himself around you and whip you to death.”

“Yeah,” everyone agreed.

“Bullcrap,” I said.

“He cuss,” Sam whispered.

“That is nonsense. That is what we call a myth.
Something that is not true. How many in here have ever seen a snake whipping a
man to death?”

Naturally, every hand in the room flew up.

“Who was the man you actually saw getting the hell
beat out of him by a snake?”

“He cuss one more time.” Old Sam was keeping
tabs.

“His name was Jacob Hudson, used to live here on the
island,” Ethel said.

“Did the snake kill him?” I asked.

“No. He run away. Have marks on his body,
though,” continued Ethel.

“Yeah. Have marks on his body.” The others
agreed.

“Did you actually see this man being
whipped?”

“No.”

“Then you do not know if the snake really whipped the
man.”

“Yeah. He have marks,” said Mary.

“Ever see a snake milk a cow, Mr. C‘roy?”
Big C asked.

“Oh, crap.”

“Yeah, he milk cow dry.”

“That is simply not true. These are all snake
myths,” I pleaded to an unconvinced audience. By the expressions on their
faces, I could tell they thought I was nuts.

“I seen plenty of snakes milk cows,” Big C
said.

“Do they put the milk in bottles?” I now resorted
to my last weapon, ridicule.

“No, they suck it up.”

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.

In one remote corner of the room, the dustiest and most
spider-controlled corner, sat several boxes full of books. A church had donated
the books in order to rid the island of illiteracy. Give them books and they
shall read. Earnest ladies and pious men had scurried around attics and unused
libraries in search of books for the unread natives of Yamacraw Island. Their
minister sometimes came to Yamacraw on Sundays to preach to the blacks on the
island, to exhort them to quit their evil likker-drinking ways. He was
enormously proud of the fact that he could summon up enough Christianity to
preach to the niggers, since he made it no secret on the mainland that he did
not think much of niggers. If a black had entered his church, the church would
have closed down automatically. That was the plan of the hallowed vestrymen
should a black foot cross the threshold. Christ must do a lot of puking when he
reflects upon the good works done in his name.

Anyway, the church gathered books in cardboard boxes and
shipped them to the island for use in the school. Looking at the books, I saw
little possibility of handing my students The Power of Positive Thinking
by Norman Vincent Peale. Nor did I think they could relish Gone with the
Wind. Several books on Christian doctrine seemed equally inappropriate. A
nice gesture and a good idea, but none of the books were on a level the kids
could handle.

By far the greatest travesty was the public library
established on the island by a concerned group of citizens who thought it
deplorable that the island did not have a library of its own. It was deplorable
and unthinkable that an island had no place to which a man could retire to mull
over his thoughts, to write great novels, to generate lofty ideas, or to lose
himself in scholarly pursuits. To solve this problem, the county decided to
establish a library to serve the intellectual needs of the islanders, most of
whom could neither read nor write. 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. Or, if he preferred the nineteenth century, this
same ox-cart driver could select Moby Dick by Herman Melville or The
Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. All of these books were available.
When no one checked out a book in three years, officials were noticeably
chagrined. “Stupid niggers. 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.

James Brown is the Yahweh substitute on
the island. The kids tingle every time his name is mentioned; they have
memorized his songs as though they were the Gospel according to Luke. Top Cat,
numero uno dispenser of good poop on Mr. Dynamite and his Famous Flames, shook
and gyrated his way around the room when he thought I was not looking. The
contorting moves he put his body through defy description and he is
acknowledged by his peers as being the finest dancer on the island. “That
Top Cat, crazy. Watch Top Cat shake that thing,” they say with profound
respect. Once in a while he felt the fire within him rage and, at that exact
moment, strutted and jerked up to my desk and asked to sing James Brown’s
latest song. We turned on the tape recorder (discovered in a corner in Mrs.
Brown’s room) and Top Cat lost himself in his art. The kids loved it. Of
course, Mrs. Brown hated it and delivered an impassioned lecture against
wasting valuable school time and ignoring the sacred laws of the state
government.

One day in late September Top Cat was studying the covers
of some long-playing albums beside my record player. Since I had not yet moved
into my house, all my earthly possessions stood in one corner of the
schoolroom. 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 Readers Digest series of records and
books designed to give cultural dimwits at least a surface knowledge of the
world’s finer things. Somehow I had confiscated the “Fifty
Favorites,” a collection that included brief but famous fragments of the
great composers. Top Cat asked me if James Brown, Mr. Dynamite and his Famous
Flames, sang any “tough” songs on this here record.

“Top Cat, James Brown and his Famous Flames were not
good enough to make this record. They tried but they just couldn’t make
it. The Reader’s Digest put this thing out. Ever heard of the
Reader’s Digest?”

“Nope.”

“Anybody ever heard of the Reader’s
Digest?”

Nobody had ever heard of it. Being an American and not
knowing the Reader’s Digest is like being English and not knowing
the queen.

“This little magazine put out this little record you
see here in my hands. This record is a treasure, an absolute delight. A
collection of greatness. Now the first great tune I am going to play for you
was written by a long-haired cat named Beethoven. Who was that?”

“Bay Cloven.”

“Close enough. Now old Bay Cloven loved music, and he
could write some pretty mean songs. He was the James Brown of Germany. What
continent is Germany in [pointing to the map]?”

“Europe.”

“Good. Now one of Beethoven’s most famous songs
was written about death. Death knocking at the door. Death, that grim, grim
reaper coming to the house and rapping at the door. Does death come to
everybody’s door sometime?”

“Yeah, death come knocking at Dooney’s door last
year,” Big C said.

“Well, Beethoven thought a little bit about death,
then decided that if death were really knocking at the door, he would sound
something like this: da-da-da-da. Now I am going to place this little
needle on this valuable record and we are going to hear death knocking at Bay
Cloven’s door.”

The first notes ripped out. 0l’ death, that son of a
bitch.

“Do you hear that rotten death?” I yelled.

“Don’t hear nuttin’,” said Prophet.

“Sound like music,” said Lincoln.

“Shut up and listen for that bloodsucker death,”
I yelled again.

“Yeah, I hear ’im,” Mary said.

“Me, too,” a couple of the others agreed.

Finally, everyone was hearing old death rapping at the
door. Once we labeled death and identified him for all time, I switched to the
Triumphal March from Aida. Rhapsodically explaining the glorious entry
into Rome, swelling with pride over the victories in the Egypt-Ethiopian
campaigns, I described Verdi’s panoramic vision of the coming home from
the wars. I impressed no one with the performance and discovered to my
unconcealed chagrin that I had played the Emperor Waltz instead.

“We want to hear Bay Cloven.”

“Shut up. You will listen to Verdi.”

“We want death,” Fred said.

“Then death you get.” Bay Cloven was definitely
the top tune of the day. When I played Brahms’s Lullaby, I whisked Sam out
of his seat, cuddled him like an infant, and rocked him asleep. He reacted
brilliantly, as only a natural performer could, throwing his head back in a
ludicrous imitation of sleep, his mouth open, his eyes closed.

The class also reacted well to “The Flight of the
Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov.

“You hear them bees?” I asked.

“Just like a honey tree,” Frank answered.

“Any honey trees on Yamacraw?”

“Yeah, they honey trees. Honey bees too.”

“Bee sting,” Prophet added.

“Bee sting bad,” someone else said.

“Who wrote this song?”

“Rinkey horsecup,” Jimmie Sue said
authoritatively.

“Gang, we are going to learn all the songs on this
record,” I said. “And I just thought of a good reason for doing it.
Because you are going to look like geniuses when you know these songs. People
are going to come to this island to revel in stupidity and poverty. I am going
to switch on the record player and you are going to look at these people and
exclaim with British accents, ‘Pahdon me, suh. Are you perchance familiar
with Rimsky-Korsakov?’ We can knock their behinds off. Now, an important
question: do you guys and gals think you can learn these songs and who wrote
them? You already know three of them. You know Beethoven’s Fifth,
‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Brahms’s
Lullaby. You learned three of them without even trying. Can you learn a whole
mess of them?”

“Yeah,” everyone shouted.

“I believe you.”

So we did it. That night I chose twenty of the most
impressive titles written by the most impressive composers. For the next two
months a portion of each day was set aside for the consumption, memorization,
and enjoyment of this top twenty. On a weekend I purchased a huge poster of
Beethoven, and hung his shaggy-maned visage on the bulletin board. It tickled
me to think of Big B’s reaction to his celebration on an island as remote
as Yamacraw. In a short time he became “Bay-Toven the Fifth” and no
matter how earnestly I tried to explain that the fifth was not an addendum to
his name, so it remained. It gave an incredible feeling to put the needle down,
to hear Tchaikovsky swell into the room, then watch the hands shoot up, or to
hear voices excitedly identify the piece without bothering with the raised-hand
crap.

Soon we derived a game out of it. I would skip all over the
record, trying to fool them into guessing wrong. When it was apparent that most
of them had developed an almost infallible expertise in the big twenty, I told
them that they were the most advanced scholars in classical music functioning
in the elementary schools of Beaufort County. Bay Cloven would be proud, I told
them, and so would James Brown. I then told them that they had to look upon
themselves in a different light, that they had to be convinced of their basic
worth, and that they could learn just as fast as anybody else. If they
didn’t believe it, they could get the hell out of my class.

The music eventually proved a great ego-inflater. When I
started bringing an influx of visitors in the spring, curious people who heard
about the island and who came basically to pity, to commiserate, and to poke
around, it gave me and the kids almost Satanic pleasure to flip on the record
player, challenge an unsuspecting guest to a contest in classical music, then
let the well-drilled students maul them. Oh, the joy. To see the misty-eyed
whites who had flagellated themselves with visions of worm-eaten cretins and
deprived idiots trounced in a head-on collision of wits was a banquet to be
savored again and again. On the way home, riding through the green marshes, I
would explain to the shell-shocked visitor that the children felt that Strauss
was overrated, you know, old chap, a little too mawkish and sugary. On the
other hand, they felt Brahms was not getting his due with the general public.
He had written some fine stuff that had remained unknown to the common run of
listeners. Those were such good and satisfying days.

And the kids seemed genuinely to like the stuff. One
morning Top Cat leapt off the bus, ran into the classroom, and informed me that
“The Flight of the Bumblebee” was played on the “Andy Williams
Show.” Later, in the year Lincoln and Mary reported that they heard
“The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

When I brought Leonard Bernstein’s Children’s
Concert to the school, Leonard was a mild, if not overwhelming, success. His
orchestra played several of the movements we had memorized and when they played
these pieces, the kids would hoot and slap each other, then say.
“That’s old Shy-Koski.”

Every single film on music I could find in the county film
library and every one I could order from the state department made its way into
the classroom. We learned the instruments in the orchestra, then promptly
forgot them. We were cocky about our music. Me, the gang, Bay Cloven,
Shy-Koski, and the boys.

Each morning, as my students filed into the class, flipping
me a dutiful, lachrymose good-morning, I would turn on the radio to catch the
latest news. They showed great interest in the morning news.

“Oh Gawd,” Lincoln would lament, “here come
de mornin’ news again.”

“That man talk every mornin’ about
nothin’,” Oscar would add.

“Ah, the joys of learning,” I would pipe in,
“the tremendous interest you show in the happenings around the world is
gratifying to see. The world is out there.” I gesticulated rather
dramatically. “Wars are being fought, people are being killed, famines are
wiping out nations, and rulers are being assassinated. We can hear it all,
right here on the morning news.”

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
momentarily, of someone imprisoned in my classroom all day.

“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 must say
it is extremely gratifying that my students are sharing such a great concern
for the rest of mankind.”

I put the news on, as I would for the next four months. As
the announcer listed the deliriously happy events which occurred on the
preceding day, I would stand by the map of the world and pinpoint the countries
mentioned. Every time he named a country, a new dimension or a new frame of
reference was added to my class’s growing repertoire. They were
geographically illiterate. The world map, pinned on the same spot probably for
several years, could have been an anatomical chart of an earthworm for all they
knew. When the announcer told the world that terrorists had abducted the
American ambassador to Brazil, I put my finger on a big yellow blotch on the
map and whispered, “This hunk of yellow on the map is the country of
Brazil.” Tracing Brazil with my finger as the announcer gave the details,
I told them that Brazil produced most of the world’s coffee. Then we
learned of the latest border skirmishes between Egypt and Israel; Everett
Dirksen dying in Illinois; Korean students rioting in Seoul. After the news, I
showed them each country, gave them some juicy little fact about some of that
country, and informed them that they would know something about that country
from that time forward under pain of death.

“Now what bright young scholar can tell me what
product we drink from Brazil?”

No one answered, naturally.

“Some people drink it black. Some people drink it with
cream. Some people drink it with sugar. And some people don’t drink it at
all.”

“Coke,” Richard yelled.

“No,” I answered.

“Coffee!” some of them shouted.

“What is it?” I shouted back.

“Coffee,” all of them shouted.

“Where do they produce coffee?”

“Brazil,” some of them answered.

“Where is it?” I asked again.

“Brazil,” they shouted together.

And it was in this way that the pep-rally method of
education began on Yamacraw Island. For the next several weeks a certain part
of the morning was set aside for a daily chant or incantation to the gods of
basic knowledge. Eleven of the students displayed an interest in learning
little morsels or fragments of information for no other reason than just to
know them. I talked about rivers, the one that flowed by Yamacraw, rivers I had
seen in Europe, and then told them of the three great rivers of the world, the
Nile, the Amazon, and the Mississippi. I listed the continents, the planets,
and the oceans. I also gave them a brief outline of American history: Columbus
stumbling upon America, Magellan’s trip around the world, Balboa seeing
the great Pacific, George Washington and the boys giving the British hell.
Strange terms like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence (which one
of the kids kept calling the Decoration of Indianapolis), the Revolutionary
War, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation.

None of these subjects did I touch in depth; I only gave a
very general explanation of each one and tried to get the kids to look at
history as a flow of events that somehow affects every person on earth. We used
no books. It was oral history and oral geography. Nothing was written down. We
talked and learned by talking and, soon enough for me, our pep rallies had
evolved into wild chaotic exchanges of rote memory. I teased and cajoled them
and expected them to fire back, to take no crap from me, just as I took no crap
from them.

“All right, young cats. We are about to embark on a
journey of knowledge. Now, I am convinced I am going to ask certain questions
today so hard that you will not be able to answer any of them right.”

“No,” everyone murmured. They still thought I was
a madman.

“What is the longest stinking river in the whole wide
world?”

“The Nile,” all of them shouted, poking each
other with their fingers and exulting in the breadth of their education.

“What continent is it on?”

“Africa.”

“Who comes from Africa?”

“Black people.”

“I came from Africa.”

“No!”

“Yeh! I came from Africa because I am white with blue
eyes. Ireland is a country in Africa.”

“No. You lie. That ain’t right. He crazy,”
they retorted.

“James Brown came from Ireland.”

“No.”

“What’s the largest planet in the
universe?”

“Jupiter.”

“Second largest?”

“Saturn.”

“Nearest star?”

“The sun.”

“Largest country in the world?”

“Russia.”

“Country with the most people?”

“China.”

“James Brown comes from China.“

“No.”

“Who was the first President?”

“George Washington.”

“Second President was D. P. Conroy.”

“He crazy,” Sherman said.

“What country do we live in?”

“The United States of America.”

“What state do we live in?”

“South Carolina.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeh, we sure.”

“What ocean washes up against this island?”

“Atlantic.”

“Where are we fighting a war?”

“Vietnam.”

“Who is the President of North Vietnam?”

“Ho Chi Minh.”

“What is James Brown’s greatest song?”

“ ‘say
It Loud, “I’m Black and I’m Proud.”’ ”

“No, it’s not,” I would say on cue.
“His greatest song is ’say It Loud, “I’m White and I’m
Proud.”’ ”

“No, man. He’s colored,” Big C answered.

“No. White man crazy,” Prophet added.

“What state is below South Carolina?”

“Georgia.”

And on it went. Whenever we learned something new, it
became part of the pep rally. I would often go to the map and point to a
country, or a continent, or a river or ocean, and ask them to identify it. The
map itself became a center of class activity — the map, a symbol of
the world, where Yamacraw was not even a pinprick, not even represented by a
molecular dot when compared to the incomprehensible vastness of the world.

“Here is Asia and here is Yamacraw,” I would
chant, moving my finger along the map. “Here is California and here is
Yamacraw. Here is China and here is Yamacraw. Gang, do you realize the neat
things that are happening out there? The millions and millions of people
swarming all over the earth? We are going to learn great stuff this year. We
are going to stuff our brains with facts and ideas, and we are going to become
sharp as razors.”

It should be noted that seven of the students got very
little out of the pep rallies. But they shouted when everybody else was
shouting, and even though they were not saying anything, they loved being a
part of the successful whole. When I asked a question, they shouted a grunted
reply. Flushed by success, their whoops grew louder and louder. 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.

Complete illiteracy was an animal I had never encountered
before. While teaching at the high school I came across some students who were
not the brightest flames on the academic horizon, but none of them could
compare with the seven students who formed a kind of know-nothing fraternity at
the Yamacraw School. Of these seven, five were unbelievable. Richard, Prophet,
Jasper and the twins not only were untouched by the twenty-six letters of the
alphabet, they were appallingly lacking in other skills too.

“How many fingers on one hand, Prophet?” I asked
one day.

“Two,” he answered.

“Try it, Samuel.”

“Three.”

I put out the five fingers of my hand. “Count the
fingers, Sidney.”

“One,” said Sidney.

“How many fingers, Richard?”

“Four.”

“Sweet Jesus,” I said, regretting it instantly
when I saw the four very embarrassed faces. The other students, supposedly
working on their own projects, were giggling.

“Shut up, punks. We are in the process of education
and so do not have time to be disturbed.”

Then I carefully explained the five-fingered hand. They
could not count to ten. They could not add one and one, two and two, or
anything else. Mrs. Brown told me they were retarded and not to waste my time
on them. Someone obviously had not wasted a great deal of time trying to
educate them. If I held up basic-word cards for them, they stared at the cards
with blank, vacuous faces. The sum total of their education seemed to be
nothing. The word the was as foreign to them as the word
elephant. I found no area where they were remotely proficient.

Jasper tried like hell. He was nominally a sixth grader.
His lips moved subconsciously, fighting hard to piece the proper sounds
together. No sound emerged. Richard, his brother, reigned as master of the
nonsense guess. I held up the word rat and Richard said,
“Tree.” The other four nodded their heads seriously to show their
commitment and faith in Richard’s judgment. I held up the word cat
and Richard said, “Bread.” “Yep,” the others agreed,
“it bread, O.K.” The twins, Samuel and Sidney, sat there unruffled by
my efforts to get them to respond. They seemed to like me, probably because I
did not beat them. Whenever Mrs. Brown was beating one of her students and the
screams and the sound of leather on flesh drifted into the room, the twins
lifted their heads, their mouths slightly open, and listened until the screams
turned to sobs and the song of the belt was ended. I would bet my ass they had
known Mrs. Brown’s calling card.

Prophet, one of the five, could look like a clown and a
tragic character at the same time. His speech was absolutely unintelligible. He
did not have a speech impediment; he had five impediments. If he said anything
to me, one of the other kids had to translate it. He could neither talk, read,
nor write, yet he was as likable and affable as anyone in the class. His smile
was infectious, crafted by some supernatural mischief-maker. He played and
frolicked as a profession, not a hobby, and I was important in his life only
because I was constantly interfering in his fun-filled, puckish life. Every
time I asked Prophet a question, he answered me with an approximation of
“yes, ma’am.” No one ever told Prophet that teachers could be
male and that the phrase yes, ma’am is applied only to women. To
Prophet yes, ma’am was what you said to teachers. Perhaps it was
just as well, for many of the other children hit me constantly with the odious
yassuh. And no matter how diligently I tried to eradicate the phrase
from their vocabulary, they continued to use it.

After one month of anguish and labor all of them could
present a reasonable facsimile of the alphabet upon request, depending on their
mood and level of inspiration. They had also mastered the first ten numbers.
They also recognized with varying degrees of success approximately thirty
words. Sometimes we would have spelling tests to see how well the words had
actually found permanent soil. I liked to give spelling tests to this group for
no other reason than to watch the magnificent cheating which invariably took
place. Samuel and Sidney, whose tiny heads scanned the horizon constantly for
real or imagined enemies, cheated with real passion. They were inured to
failure and to school. And though they were cheaters of the first magnitude,
neither of them had developed any technique to avoid detection. In the middle
of the spelling test Samuel’s head would be practically lying on
Richard’s paper, while Sidney would simply move Jasper’s arm aside to
get an unencumbered view of his paper. The challenge of suppressing cheaters
who performed their dastardly deeds so openly and disingenuously and with so
much intellectual relish was immense. In fact I enjoyed the performances
greatly.

A game I begged from an administrator in the county office
proved very helpful with the five. It helped rescue them from total boredom in
the classroom. It’s called Play and Talk. It resembles a poor man’s
Parcheesi board, has a spinner, and the usual collection of rules. The game
forces the player to spell a word using the letter of the alphabet on which he
lands. When I first introduced the game, Sidney started first. He landed on the
letter D. “What sound does that letter make, Sid,” I
asked.

“Duh,” he answered correctly.

“Very good. Now spell a word that starts with the
letter D.”

“Dog,” he said hesitantly. “D-O-D.”

Hands shot up all around him. Samuel, his twin, giggled
like hell. Sidney leaned over and socked Samuel. Samuel leaned over and socked
Sidney. I leaped between them and demanded that they halt this nonsense
immediately. Sid leaned around my left and yanked Samuel’s ear. Samuel
screamed and told me that if Sid touched him one more time he was going to kick
his butt. Eventually I restored a semblance of peace and the game
continued.

As I watched them play on that day and on succeeding days,
it was apparent that this group played for blood and not for fun. If someone
missed a word the others screamed and fought to answer it correctly. So intense
was the competition that I could rarely drift too far away in another part of
the room without a pitched battle arising. One 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.

Yet nothing bothered Prophet. He was the clown at war with
a frowning world. When he found out that corporal punishment was not my trump
card, he spent his whole life improvising irritations to test my self-control.
He would walk up to me and make these ludicrous faces. Sticking out his tongue
or rolling his eyes, he followed me around making faces or stealing my wallet
from my back pocket. He loved games and this was why he adapted so well to the
Play and Talk game.

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.

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Contents |

Chapter 4

Each day when school was over, it became
my habit to set off in a new direction on the island, exploring, walking,
singing to myself, and generally enjoying the isolation and silences of
Yamacraw’s forests. These daily expeditions took me all over the island.
And though I enjoyed these walks, several characteristics of the island made
them uncomfortable and even painful.

The island swarmed with mosquitoes. Whenever a human being
left the front door of his house, legions of mosquitoes with their hypodermic
snouts would cover the wretch from head to foot. It is difficult to know
whether I am exaggerating or not, but I do know for certain that they made life
on the island extremely uncomfortable and that no matter how extensive
one’s precautions against them were, no matter how much repellent one
applied to his body, the mosquitoes still managed to get in their licks. They
buzzed around my head in squadrons during all my walks. One day Frank showed me
an island trick to keep them at their distance. He tore a leafy branch from a
small tree and waved it back and forth across his back. “You hear ‘e
m, you swat ‘em,” he told me. So armed with this surrogate cow’s
tail and covered with enough insect repellent to kill a dinosaur, I would troop
out toward the beach road, glistening like a Polynesian fresh from a coconut
bath.

The beach road began about a quarter of a mile from the
school. It cut through a black-water swamp where the deer and the moccasins
played. It was a dark and brooding part of the island, very wild and
uninhabited. Purple and yellow wildflowers grew in profusion. The first time I
walked the road I was shocked to find two odd-looking brick structures on a
curve in the road. There was a sign on one of the buildings that read
SILVER DEW WINERY 1953. A little further down the
road was a magnificent old house with wagon wheels in the yard and the forlorn
appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people. I went up to the
house and peered into the windows. The furniture was good and functional, yet
cobwebs and brown spiders had claimed the walls for themselves. At the back of
the house, above the back door, was a very large and tattered Confederate flag.
What the flag was doing there I never found out, but it was odd how the house
and the flag seemed to fit together in this silent tribute to a lost people and
a forgotten cause. I have known a great many Confederate flag nuts in my life,
rabid dreamers who dwell on the glory of Fort Sumter and Bull Run and repress
the reality of Appomattox. The Confederate flag summons primitive emotions in
these people. Recently it only disgusts me, although there was a time I revered
it as religiously as Christians revere the cross. Here on Yamacraw, fastened
over the door of a peeling house, mute in its testimony to a defeated cause and
an expiring way of life, the flag had more dignity than I had ever noticed
before. Perhaps the dignity was, in fact, that the flag was dead and the house
was dead, and I was only passing by.

I passed by the house each day in the month of September on
the way to the beach, for the beach was the best single place on the island.
Ten miles of beach front and not a damn person on it except me. I would come
out of the swamp and race full speed past the sand and sea oats. I would hit
the beach sprinting as hard as I could go. The beach breeze kept the five
million mosquitoes hovering in the forest behind me. I would run until I got
tired, then strip naked and swim in the surf. The water was shallow and very
warm, but the salt felt good on my mosquito bites, and there is something
undeniably salubrious for the soul about floating naked in the surf without
another human being in sight or sound, free from the encumbrances or worries of
the classroom.

After the swim, I would walk far down the beach, often to
Bloody Point, where the British once drove a tribe of Indians to the end of the
island and slaughtered them, men, women, and children, at the edge of the sea.
I used to walk and look at the dead horseshoe crabs, strange prehistoric
creatures who simply could not cope with the pollution of the Savannah River
and had washed ashore at Yamacraw by the hundred. The whole beach stunk of
death and decaying marine life. At the end of the island I could see the
factories belching and puking into the sky. The same factories that had killed
the Yamacraw oysters and the economy of the island had not spared the
defenseless, clumsy, and harmless horseshoe crabs. The legacy of the factories
was here on the beach.

After one week on the island, I knew that
Ted Stone was king. The reason I knew it is that Ted Stone told me so. I would
go down and pick up my mail every day at five o’clock. Invariably Ted
would come out to talk about the school, about the people of the island, and
about his position among them. He and his wife not only cornered every job
available on the island, but their home also contained the short-wave radio
that was the sole means of communication with the mainland. Piss off Ted Stone
and the possibility for a delay on the radio was certainly there.

Ted was also the quintessential outdoorsman. He hunted
religiously, fished expertly, and shrimped the waters off Yamacraw to
supplement his already sizable income. I would often come in his yard to find
the carcass of a deer strung from a tree, the carnage of the hunt in evidence
all around, guts littering the ground, and Ted sitting proudly on a lawn chair.
He could do things with his hands very well. He could plow a field, milk a cow,
gut a hog, cook a trout, clean a rifle — all the things that made us
such complete opposites.

His eyes were ice blue and suspicious. He was thickly built
with powerful arms and a great barrel of a chest. He was short with a
remarkable mane of gray hair and a handsome, weather-beaten face. Ted was a
fine-looking man. And not a few black residents of the island had stated in no
uncertain terms that Ted Stone was a son of a bitch. Yet, in the early days,
Ted went out of his way to be kind to me.

His wife, Lou, was an extremely proficient woman. A lover
of flowers and solitude, she seemed perfectly adapted to the Spartan existence
on Yamacraw. She drove the school bus as proudly and as competently as Junior
Johnson drives his stock cars. She delivered mail daily, depending upon the
weather and her mood. The post office was located in the back of their house.
It was a small clean room, which she kept securely padlocked because of the
“nigras.” She claimed to be extremely interested in the education of
the poor children I was teaching. All the educational deficiencies of the
children she blamed on Miss Glover, whom she — like everyone
else — believed to be the voodoo woman of the island. Mrs. Brown, on
the other hand, ranked in the major leagues as a savior of epic proportions;
she was teaching the children manners and one thing these children needed was
manners.

Both Stones worried about the morality of the nigras.
“They’re savages,” Ted exclaimed over and over. “They sleep
with one another’s wives and husbands. They sleep with anyone that comes
along. They are filthy savages who shouldn’t be allowed to have children.
They drink all night long while their children are starving. They all ought to
be shot.” Ted’s eyes would sparkle maniacally whenever he got
upset.

Lou would add, “There are a couple of good ones. Aunt
Ruth is just as sweet as she could be. And Mrs. Brown is part Indian, you know.
It’s the ones who are pure black who are really worthless.”

These were my kiss-ass days. I needed Ted and Lou. I kept
my boat at their dock; I would be renting a house through them as soon as
certain legal entanglements were straightened out; they brought my mail; they
sold me fresh eggs and milk; and they provided my transportation. According to
my early philosophy of survival on the island, I had to have Ted and Lou on my
side. They wielded enormous power — even the power of life and death.
One day during the second week Lou told me a very illuminating story. Her
youngest son had gone to school on the island. When I asked if Mrs. Brown or
Miss Glover had taught him, she quickly explained that he did not go to school
with the nigras but had gone to the white school.

“I didn’t know they had a white school,” I
said.

“They built one just for my son so he wouldn’t
have to go to school with the coloreds.”

“You’re kidding?” I asked incredulously.

“They built a one-room schoolhouse, hired a teacher to
come over here and live in the school, and she taught my son.”

“No one else went to the school? No other white
kids?” I questioned.

“No other white kids on the island,” she replied.
“Of course we wouldn’t send our child with the coloreds. George
deserved as good an education as any other white child. That’s what we
demanded and that’s what we got.”

“One teacher for one child! That’s not bad,”
I said.

“Mrs. Brown lives in the white schoolhouse now,”
Lou said. “My George got a good education there. A real fine
education.”

Despite my objections to Ted Stone’s theories of
apartheid, his paranoia about my long hair, and the new morality, I enjoyed
jogging down to his house, picking up my mail, and then swimming off his dock.
I also found Ted to be a fascinating raconteur. The stories he told had the
flavor of earth, blood, and the hunt. He had been a trapper, a professional
fisherman, a hunter of some repute, and a plasterer in Fort Lauderdale,
Florida. He killed deer for pleasure and for food, shot rattlesnakes as a
public service, and fished the waters off Yamacraw with religious regularity.
He had once run a restaurant on Yamacraw. His wife had cooked and served the
food; he had plied the customers with beer. The customers were fishermen from
Savannah and Bluffton. According to Mr. Stone, his restaurant did a thriving
business on weekends. When I asked why he didn’t still run the place, he
answered rather succinctly, “Niggers wanted to get served, just like
whites. Had to close it.” Of course if it hadn’t been the niggers,
then the hippies would probably have wanted to buy a beer under his roof, and
he would not have had any of that.

Yet his life was fascinating to me, in that it was so
different from my own. My father taught me how to shoot a hook shot, lead a
fast break, and feed off to the open man; he also instructed me how to throw a
cross-body block and how to field a ground ball skimming across a short-grassed
infield. To my father life offered no finer pleasures or more consummate
skills. Mr. Stone, in contrast, could skin and clean a deer in an hour, take
apart a boat motor and assemble it again, milk a cow, plant a garden, fix a
muffler, and drag a seine across a shallow inlet in preparation for a shrimp
dinner. My life was centered around academics and sports; Stone’s was
concerned with the arts of survival. I depended on supermarkets and theaters;
Stone frequented feed stores and garden-supply shops when he journeyed to
Savannah.

So I listened to Stone and was glad to be learning. He
loved to talk about himself and nothing could have been more instructive to me.
On a whim, he had once traveled to Florida with a group of friends, bought the
boat which Humphrey Bogart captained in the film The African Queen, and
brought it back to Yamacraw Island, where it survived a year then rotted slowly
into oblivion. It gave me an immense thrill to think that my boat docked in the
same spot which once harbored the African Queen. It fired the Irish
romanticism within me, as did Mr. Stone’s accounts of the hurricane of
‘59 that crushed boats and docks like playthings, that uprooted oak trees
as tall as towers, that incapacitated a town thirty miles from the island and
made it a national disaster area. As his house creaked ominously, Ted and Lou
sipped coffee and watched the gods of storm seize the wind and river for
several violent hours.

Stone’s powers of description were excellent. He spent
two hours one day relating his war experiences. He had landed on the third wave
during D-Day, fought his way across France, teamed up with a sharp-shooting
Texan, who together with Stone formed a murderously competent sniping team, and
eventually crossed into Germany when the armistice was signed. With eyes blue
and shimmering, yet serious and fatalistic, he described a German
soldier’s head rising above a roof-top ledge, how he waited until he could
see the German’s whole head, until he could see the face was young and
unlined. He aimed carefully and put a bullet between the eyes of his enemy. It
was a strange story, strangely told, and Ted Stone grew uncharacteristically
reflective and philosophical as he thought of the life he snuffed out somewhere
in France twenty-five years before. “Killing a man is different from
killing a deer.” Yet he was intensely proud that he had killed other men
in the defense of his country.

A faded American flag flew from a wooden pole in the
backyard of the Stone house. This was the symbol of the post office, yet also
seemed to symbolize Stone’s allegiance to his country which was blind,
uncompromising, unconditional, and though he would have fought me had he heard
me express the thought, almost Third Reich in its fervor and rigidity.

One night at the Stones’ is memorable. It was October
15, Moratorium Day, when the United States reverberated with the chants and
pleadings of those discontented with the war. I wanted desperately to watch the
news that night, to see how the Washington march went, and to see the reaction
of people around the country to the moratorium itself. I had a pretty good idea
about what Ted thought about the moratorium, but I did not realize that I would
be watching the greatest show on earth in Ted’s living room. As soon as
the news came on, Ted began a long monologue which continued unabated till I
excused myself an hour later.

“Look at those long-haired bastards. Can’t tell
if they’re boys or girls. Worse than Germans or Japs. Look at that hippie
with the flag sewed to his butt. I’d cut it off his ass with a butcher
knife if I was there. Take half of his ass with it. Lice. All they are is lice.
Huntley and Brinkley are lice, too. They aren’t supporting our boys in
Vietnam. Naw. They’re lice. Just like that nigger Martin Luther King. He
was a goddam Communist sure as hell. Ask J. Edgar Hoover. Now there’s a
man. Finest man in America. He calls a spade a spade. Look at them lice there
now. Cute, ain’t they? I wouldn’t give them a drink of piss if they
were dyin’ of thirst. There are some niggers. Every time you turn on TV
you see the niggers. They even got them brushin’ their teeth on TV.
Hippies. Goddam Communist hippies. Dirty, don’t take baths. We got some
hippies coming to this island now. Those California boys are just hippies that
get their hair cut before they come here. All of ’em’s lice.
Niggerlovin’ lice. There’s the White House. Where the President of
the United States lives. Where the President of the United States of America
leads his people. Wallace wouldn’t have had it. There would have been
bodies lyin’ all over the streets if he had gotten in. He’d of used
flame throwers and tanks.”

Stone talked and I listened. It was insane, ludicrous, and
frightening. His face curled in hatred. He forgot I was in the room. He smelled
blood and his whole personality was transfixed to the thought that the marchers
should die en masse on Constitution Avenue. He wanted them dead, he said,
“to give America a good name in the free world.” D. P. Conroy said
nothing. Stricken with fright, I saw the awesome display of weapons mounted in
Stone’s front room and did not wish to give Stone even the slightest
reason to identify me with the Washington marchers. When I left, Stone told me
to come watch the news with him anytime.

The next day I was swimming off Stone’s dock after
school. The water was growing colder, but its bracing chill seemed to clean out
the frustrations for a little while. Stone came down to the dock and started
talking. This time he talked of fishing.

“Good fishing off this dock here,” he said.
“Catch a whole string of winter trout, right now. Might even catch a sea
trout or two. My son caught a ten-foot shark off this dock a year
ago.”

In three strokes I covered about twenty yards of water. In
a flash of spray and spume and chilled blood, I stood upon the dock a scant
four seconds after Stone delivered the news about the shark.

“Are there lots of sharks out there?” I asked, my
voice squeaking and my knees filled with jelly.

“Oh, lots of them. They hang around the dock a
lot.”

“That’s great, Mr. Stone. That is really great.
You mean I have been swimming in shark-infested waters all this time and you
never told me!”

“You knew sharks lived in salt water.”

“I did not know they had a clubhouse under your dock,
or my young ass would never have hit water. Sharks eat people, Mr.
Stone.”

“Not around here. I’ve never heard of anyone
getting eaten around here.”

“Well, I sure don’t want to become a
precedent.” My afternoon swims ended for all time on that day.

Several friends of mine in Beaufort
warned me about forming any kind of relationship with Zeke Skimberry. Skimberry
was the maintenance man of the Bluffton district and because of a decree
emanating from the high echelons of the educational hierarchy, Zeke was
designated as the official guardian of my boat. Skimberry aroused suspicion in
many quarters because of his sycophantic allegiance to Ezra Bennington. Zeke
had survived many purges of personnel and many tumultuous years in the Bluffton
school system by affixing his fate to the more luminous and permanent star of
Bennington. He mowed Bennington’s grass, moved cumbersome early American
furniture around Mrs. Bennington’s plush antique shop, and acted as
Bennington’s chauffeur, valet, and servant when the occasion demanded it.
Behind his back, people hissed that Zeke was “Bennington’s
nigger” and nothing more. I found a lot more.

He was, on first meeting, one of the warmest, most
genuinely friendly people I had ever met. His large blue eyes danced and
flashed expressively, puckishly; a grin constantly played about his mouth. He
was lean but muscled by constant exposure to physical labor and his face
revealed an intelligence, an alertness, that both surprised and delighted me.
Zeke was a California transplant, a divorcé who drifted out of an
unhappy marriage in the West, wandered from job to job, drank good whiskey
under the skies of many states, until he met and fell in love with Ida McKee, a
striking young blonde hitting a cash register in a general store near Bluffton,
South Carolina. Zeke drove her to Georgia after a madcap courtship, married her
with the benediction of an itchy-palmed justice of the peace, and returned to
Bluffton to begin the second act of his life in completely new surroundings. In
fourteen years in Bluffton he had sired two sons and managed to worm his way so
completely into Bennington’s life and make himself so indispensable that
he sometimes seemed like Bennington’s third leg. When Bennington was in
power, Zeke’s position was enviable, but now that Bennington’s career
was in its eclipse, Zeke was beginning to feel the pressure of insecurity
again.

My relationship with Zeke Skimberry and his family started
slowly and inauspiciously but gathered momentum and intimacy as the year
passed. He was impossible to dislike. He loved to tease, to banter lightly with
all who crossed his path, and to mimic the supervisors who ruled him. At our
first meeting he told me, “People over here think you are crazy for
teachin’ at that school.”

“People over here are exactly right,” I
answered.

“Of course, all these people are crazy themselves, so
there’s no tellin’,” he said with his eyes dancing, mischievous,
and very blue. Then he said with great seriousness, “Course, the niggers
on Yamacraw have needed something for a damn long time. I sure hope you can
help those little nigger kids.”

The most fascinating thing about Zeke Skimberry, however,
was his irrepressible wife, Ida. She was a poetess of profanity, an oracle of
epithets who could outcuss a bathroom wall. Unlike most women I have known, she
placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility.
Her first words to me as I drove into her yard on a Sunday afternoon the first
week in September marked her as a person to be handled gently and with caution.
From the screened-in porch of her tiny house, she yelled, “What in the
hell are you looking for?”

“Ma’am, I’m looking for Zeke Skimberry, the
janitor.”

“He’s not a goddam janitor. He’s the
maintenance man. Everybody’s always calling him a janitor. Well, who in
the hell are you?” she asked with eyes ablazing.

“I’m Pat Conroy, ma’am. I teach over on
Yamacraw Island, and I was supposed to get in touch with your husband, Mrs.
Skimberry.”

“He ain’t here now. Come on inside and git
yourself a cup of coffee.” As I got out of the car, she startled me again
by saying, “Hot as a bitch, ain’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am, it certainly is.”

In no way had my mother with her air of gentility and fine
breeding prepared me for the Ida Skimberrys of the world. The coffeepot,
positioned in honorable perpetuity on the stove, was the center of the tiny
Skimberry universe, and over the year we consumed gallons of the steaming, hot
brew as Zeke rambled on about the idiosyncracies of his work or the insecurity
of his position. Or Ida would curse fluently at the lack of money, at her
husband’s lack of status, or at her inability to find a decent job.

During the week I parked my car in the Skimberrys’
yard under Ida’s vigilant eye. After my second week on the island, after
Zeke had picked me up at Alljoy Landing, and after consuming three cups of
coffee while describing the events of the week, I walked out to my car to
discover that Ida had washed the car and cleaned out the inside during the
week. She had also found a sack of dirty clothes in the backseat. She had
washed and ironed all the clothes and neatly folded them in a cardboard box. I
was overwhelmed by this kindness. I thanked her with genuine emotion, but all
she said was, “Shit, the goddam car needed washin’ and the goddam
clothes needed a good cleanin’.” Then her face, which could be hard
as a callus, softened into a magnificently warm smile and she said, “I
enjoy doin’ things for people.”

It did not take me long to warm to this kind of people. And
just as I had entered a new realm of experience on Yamacraw, I also walked on
fresh territory each time I entered the door to Zeke and Ida’s house. My
background did not expose me to white people who subsisted on $4000 a year, who
did not have a set of china for special meals, who did not select a pattern of
silver, and who had not graduated from high school. I had never dealt directly
with people who felt their lives enriched by weekly odysseys to wrestling
matches. The Skimberrys were of a different social class than I and one of the
year’s miracles was my introduction to their way of life, to their
complete and ingenuous acceptance of me as a friend, and to the perspective
they gave me of society and the men on top as viewed from the bottom.

I came to love the Skimberrys devotedly, for without
reason, they took me into their home, told me their dreams and disappointments,
shared with me the intimate secrets and compromises of their lives. They bared
their souls before me because of an elementary honesty that did not understand
guile or pretense. I was part of their life and it became important to the
Yamacraw story as events took place and circumstances shifted. And how many
mornings or afternoons do I remember Ida’s voice rasping, as I came
through the door, “Pat, you ol’ son of a bitch, git you some
coffee.”

I saw the town of Bluffton through the
eyes of Zeke Skimberry. In the early morning, before the insect noise had died
in the woods near his house, Zeke would sit in his favorite chair, sip hot
coffee from a thick, cream-colored mug, and talk about the town. He was one of
those men who were gifted storytellers, who could capture the spirit of a place
by recounting forgotten incidents, or by digging up skeletons the town might
have preferred to leave buried and untouched. Zeke knew the merchants, the
cheaters, the lonely, the schizophrenic, the lusty, the insane, the religious,
the hypocritical, the blacks, the rednecks, the generous. He knew them all and
could sketch an accurate biography of everyone who lived in town, He knew who
slept with whom, who wanted to sleep with whom, and who would sleep with whom.
He could list every murder that had occurred in the past ten years, how much
blood was lost, where the bullet or knife struck, and how stiff the body was
when discovered by authorities. He knew the authorities, too, with all their
frailties and flaws, with all their weaknesses and pretensions. It was over
coffee that I learned about Zeke and Ida and grew to love them. Their house was
alive with joy, laughter, and worry over money, derision of professionals and
hacks; their house was warm, good, and filled with coffee smells. And both of
them loved to talk of their town.

Bluffton perched above the winding, tide-ruled May River,
egrets fished its shores, and fleets of long bateaux explored the blind inlets
and creeks in search of productive oyster beds. Bluffton is a town of matchless
serenity, a town thick with glinting, towering magnolias, impressive oaks,
sloughs glutted with wildflowers, peeling but remarkably attractive houses. A
church built from cypress stands beside the river; a structure of elegant
simplicity and fine lines built by slaves, and presided over by the omnipresent
town pillar, the deacon of deacons, Ezra Bennington. 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.

There was the story of Thomas, a massive black man whom
Zeke and I often passed in the morning on our way to gas up. Thomas would sit
in the middle of a large group of animated black men on the steps of a
crumbling tenement. He was incredibly large, a redwood among the smaller
pines.

“That’s a damn big nigger, ain’t he,”
Zeke would say.

“Yep,” I would reply rurally.

“He’s had a tough life, ol’ Thomas. When he
was just a young boy, not more’n about fifteen or sixteen, he used to help
deliver ice door to door. Now those were the days when there wasn’t such
things as refrigerators. When you said icebox, you meant a damn box with a big
hunk of ice in it. So ol’ Thomas, being a big son of a bitch, could lift
them hunks of ice pretty easy and carry them door to door. One day he went up
to a house at Alljoy Beach and knocked on the door. A young white girl answered
his knock. Well, Thomas didn’t talk real good, anyway, so he got real
nervous and asked this white girl if she wanted a piece, meaning a piece of ice
for the icebox. Well, the girl misunderstood what Thomas was tryin’ to
say, you know, thought he was trying to give her a piece of his pecker. She
screamed and raised hell till every white man in town was running down to her.
Now you know how this town is, now. Can you imagine what those people were
thinkin’ then? This big ol’ Thomas trying to get into a little white
girl’s britches. He was lucky they didn’t lynch him and cut his balls
off. As it was, they tried him and sent him up for twenty-somethin’ years.
All the time, Thomas just stood there looking kind of dumb and muttering that
all he wanted was to sell her some ice. The bad thing about it, Pat, was that
this girl was crazy as hell, anyway. A month after the trial she went
completely nuts and spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital.”

“What a horrible, goddam story, Zeke.”

“Just goes to show you that people will shit on a
nigger and never think a thing about it. People around here are just prejudiced
against niggers. Want to see them all dead. Want to see them all shipped back
to Africa. All these good Christian people.”

“Good Christian people” was the most cynical
epithet in Zeke’s repertoire. He and Ida had been very active members of
the local Baptist church until the congregation voted to close the church if a
nigger ever tried to attend a service. Zeke and Ida simply never went back
after that.

“Can you imagine, Pat. A bunch of Christians keeping
another bunch of Christians from praying. Can you see Jesus sitting at the
front door of the church saying, ‘Hey, you shit-eatin’ niggers, you
can’t come in this here church. Go to your own nigger church.’ Yeh, I
can just see Jesus doing that.”

Zeke and Ida mouthed the regional prejudices against blacks
constantly, and believed implicitly in almost every stereotype ever concocted
against blacks in the South. Yet every black man or woman I brought to their
house was invited inside, offered coffee, and treated with dignity and warmth.
Later, Ida would tell me, “That was sure a nice nigger man you brought
here this morning. I hope you bring him back again real soon.”

I could never place this dichotomy of attitude, could never
understand it, could never be comfortable around such a casual,
unself-conscious use of the word nigger, but ultimately came to accept
it as the way Zeke and Ida were, no more and no less. They instinctively liked
all people but had been conditioned to dislike and depreciate blacks. Several
conversations with Ida were enough to convince me that all the sermonizing in
the world could not shake the foundation of her thirty-three years in
Bluffton.

I came from the river one day in the spring, and Ida said,
“Pat, I just done a terrible thing today. Little Eddie has been
havin’ trouble with his glands again, so I decided to call a specialist in
Savannah to have a look.”

“It’s best to go to a specialist when you think
somethin’s really the matter, Ida.”

“Yeh, that’s why I called. Well, this doctor gets
on the phone and tells me to bring Eddie in on Thursday morning, ten
o’clock sharp.“

“Nothin’ wrong with that, Ida.”

Then she lowered her voice and said, “Pat, I do
believe I called me a nigger doctor.”

“No,” I said, shrinking back in mock horror.

“It ain’t funny. Wouldn’t make no difference
to a stupid bastard like yourself, anyhow. But goddam it, I ain’t sending
my young ‘un to no nigger doctor.”

“Why do you think this doctor is black, Ida?”

“He talked like a nigger,” she answered.
“You know that funny way niggers talk. You can tell a nigger a mile away
when he opens his mouth. And I looked at his street in the phone book, and Pat,
I ain’t never heard of no street by this name. Have you?”

I looked at the address and professed ignorance.

“Only a nigger doctor would have an address on a
street no one’s ever heard of,” she continued. “I think the
phone company should tell you who is and who isn’t a nigger
doctor.”

“He’s probably as good as any of the white
doctors, Ida.”

“Goddam it, Pat, if I don’t think you’re part
nigger yourself sometimes. Now tell me quick what I kin do. Kin I call him down
there, very polite and all, and say, ‘Hello, I made an appointment with
you the other day, but I didn’t know you were a nigger doctor. I meant no
harm and I thank you for your kindness. I just feel that a person should go to
his own kind.’ You think that’d do it?”

“That’d do it O.K., Ida. He’d probably tell
you to get laid.”

“And I’d kick him in the goddam ass if he
did,” she bristled.

Yet within her own family circle, Ida was considered an
unregenerated liberal. Sometimes her mother, sisters, and in-laws would stop by
her house to exchange gossip while I was still there. These exchanges always
amazed me. The subject of race was a violent and recurrent theme.

“If one of them nigger teachers even lays a hand on my
child, I’ll kill her deader than hell. I’ll kill her, I swear on a
Bible, I’ll kill her,” one of Ida’s sisters would say.

“Shore you’d kill her,” someone would
say.

“If one of them niggers even looks cross-eyed at my
girl, she’s gonna have me sittin’ on her ass,” another voice of
reason rang out.

“Shore you would, honey.”

In the midst of all this, Ida’s youngest sister would
turn to her little girl and ask softly, “What are you, sugar?” And
the little girl would reply dramatically, “I’m a sweet little
Christian girl who loves the baby Jesus.” And everybody would answer
chorally, “Sure you love Jesus, honey. We all love Jesus.” Except
Ida. She would mouth the word bullshit and wink at me.

Then the harangue would continue on the other side of the
kitchen table. “I mean if these niggers want to teach in white schools,
they can’t go around knockin’ white children. Otherwise, I’m
gonna have to knock their goddam heads off.”

“Shore you will, honey.”

Then Ida would shock the gathering by declaring,
“Hell, I told Eddie’s teacher to beat the shit out of him if he gave
her any sass. She’s a damn good teacher and a nice lady besides. I want
her to hit my young ‘un if he acts up. How else is she gonna teach
’im?”

“Why, Ida, sometimes you talk just plain
trash.”

“You shore do, honey.”

“You‘d let a nigger hit pore little
Eddie?”

“Damn right, I would,” Ida answered.

Then, to heal the wounds opened by the argument, the
youngest sister again would gaze worshipfully into the eyes of her child and
say, “What are you, sugar?” And the fat, saccharine, little cherub
would reply, “I’m a sweet little Christian girl who loves the baby
Jesus.” And Ida would mouth the word bullshit again and wink.

At the end of September, a month which
had assumed the dimensions of an eternity, I left my corner of the schoolroom
for the more spacious quarters of the Buckner house. Taking all things in
consideration, I had hated living in the school, shaving without a mirror with
cold water, cooking in pots big enough to hold small cows, and sleeping on a
cot sprinkled lightly with chalk dust. Chalk dust has a way of conquering a
room, and I was faintly weary of waking up feeling like a butterfly wing or a
powdered underarm. And I was tired of dwelling in the same place I worked. The
whole situation was becoming unbearable.

A lot of frustration had to do with me. When I first
envisioned myself on the island, a noble creature enshrined among the
illiterate masses working in the primitive conditions that would have warmed
the cockles of Henry Thoreau’s heart, I did not consider my compulsive
need for friends and good conversation. I love people and collect friends like
some people collect coins or exotic pipes. So far, the people of the island had
“yassuhed” me to death. I was the white principal, a figure of
authority, which in itself could not be trusted. The white people, without
exception, were back-to-Africa advocates, believers in the small-brain theory,
and as suspicious a bunch as I had ever met. To everybody I met, I flashed the
toothy grin, the hearty salutation, and the slap-happy demeanor of someone
desperately in need of friendship. But in the space of a month I had failed to
establish any allegiances.

I had often fantasized myself as being the world’s
greatest undiscovered poet, living in obscurity and biding my time until the
seeds of greatness germinated and I would cast poems to the world. In the first
month I tried to write these poems. In fact, I tried to write many things, but
my mind was so boggled by the circumstances of my students and my own life was
so uncertain and without direction that I found myself writing mawkish doggerel
and prose of an extraordinary purplish tinge. The month of September was a
ludicrous month and I was a ludicrous person.

There was another reason I wished to leave the schoolhouse.
One night, as a storm gathered over the island, and the thunder rumbled
menacingly above, I was lying in bed reading. The night was coal black except
for brief intervals when lightning illuminated the sky. As I was reading, my
head against the pillow, my bed underneath a window that afforded me a view of
the playground, I felt a sudden strange and frightening sensation. I looked up
and saw the face of a grinning black man wearing a beret, staring at me through
the window. His face was less than two feet away from me. I was momentarily
stunned with fright and shock. My face evidently reflected my emotions, for the
man turned suddenly and raced off in a sprint toward the forest. As he ran, a
maniacal, animalistic howl split the darkness. The howl grew fainter the
farther away he ran. Massaging my heart, trying to get it beating again, I
tried to make some move appropriate to the situation. The face had startled me;
the noise had terrified me. The face, framed in the window, against the
backdrop of night and storm, was a metaphor of lunacy, a blank and
uncomprehending face with a smile devoid of feeling.

I was completely unnerved. I turned out the lights and
tried to see if the creature still lurked around the school. I grabbed a
baseball bat and went from window to window trying to catch a glimpse of my
unnamed visitor. Since no shades hung from the windows, I had no way of
preventing eyes from peering into my room, no way to shut myself off from the
outside. Had I seen this stranger again, peeking in at me with those possessed
eyes and demonic smile, I am certain I would have died of fright. The baseball
bat slept with me that night, an uncomfortable but comforting bed partner. I
slept miserably, fearing that whoever the guy was, there was always the chance
he could break into the kitchen and gain access to my room. If he did, I
promised myself, he would be facing an antagonist crazed with fear, a desire to
live, and carrying a baseball bat that would remove heads if the occasion
required. When the dawn finally arrived — oh blessed dawn, oh holy
light, oh lovely sun — and I explained to Mrs. Brown what had
happened, she told me that I had met face to face with Mad Billie.

I got to know Mad Billie well after the incident. He was
the resident crazy person on the island, the genuine Quasimodo who earned his
living and insured his survival by being considered crazy. Everyone called him
Mad Billie to his face and behind his back. He chopped wood, carried packages,
and delivered messages for people on the island, white and black alike. The
Stones told me authoritatively that Billie was crazy, but harmless and would
not hurt a fly. Mrs. Brown ran him off the school grounds every time he came
around, saying that he was “retarded” and liable to molest the girls.
Billie’s guise of craziness dropped whenever he spoke to me about Mrs.
Brown. He hated her guts and his most common epithet directed toward her was
“shitass.” Billie talked as if he were living a dream sequence, which
perhaps he was. He cursed with gusto, smiled constantly and vacuously, talked
strangely and vaguely and mostly to himself, and lived rather contentedly while
playing his role of island lunatic.

Billie always seemed to know what was going on. One would
find him all over the island — coming out of the woods carrying an
ax, or running full speed up one of the island roads. He was rabbit fast and
ran almost everywhere he went, often making the preternatural noise I heard on
that stormy night. The noise was his personal trademark, a kind of calling card
he carried with him. I walked with Billie to the beach one afternoon in
October. He suddenly broke into a run, emitted his patented hellish whine, and
disappeared into the forest. By now accustomed to Billie’s personal
flamboyancies, I continued toward the beach. As I walked along, Billie froze me
once more by making his noise from the branch of a tree I was walking under.
When he saw me jump, he threw back his head and laughed his registered crazy
laugh. Ol’ Billie was a weird guy.

Because of Billie I was glad to be moving out of the
school, but tragedy brought me to the house I was renting. Viola Buckner, an
island matriarch and an important bridge in the tenuous relationship between
blacks and whites on the island, left home during the summer for an operation.
She never returned to the island. When the doctors opened her stomach, they
found that cancer had established complete dominion. She died several days
later.

Her house was a neat, clapboard structure with a wilderness
of vines and plants running over the yard and field around the house. Inside,
the house was a patchwork of various woods, a gingerbread house of conflicting
colors and patterns, pasteboard and tile thrown together ar random. One
attribute made this house a palace on Yamacraw. It possessed a shiny,
glistening white commode, a treasure of inestimable value and an invention that
overshadows the wheel as necessary for man’s comfort and convenience.
Since I had sampled several of the Yamacraw privies, the presence of the toilet
delighted me. The smell of feces and urine-stained wood has never struck me as
a gratifying sensual experience and my middle-class background had not prepared
me for life without scented toilet paper.

This particular commode was a monument of sorts. Viola,
like the other black residents of the island, used the outhouse her entire
life. But Viola had had dreams. She had the toilet installed several months
before she died. She had told people that if she sat on her commode only one
time, it would have been worth the price to her. As I stared at Viola’s
toilet, I saluted her and her dream.

Some unknown hand had painted the bathroom walls a
passionate pink. A calendar hung on one wall advertising Black Draught Laxative
and Cardui Pills for women “who really want help on ‘those certain
days.’ ” The living room
was small and cramped with dark brown, squatty furniture. A picture of the
risen Christ with the attendant angels swarming like pigeons around him held
the place of honor above the oil heater. A great many framed photographs lined
the walls. Photographs have always made me very sad. Here in Viola’s
house, it seemed sacrilegious to stare at old photographs of nameless blacks,
many of whom had died years before. The scrubbed faces of smiling people were
beautifully captured by a lens that froze a brief, escaping moment, froze it
into a single, essential study; the moment having passed, those lives continued
and finally snuffed out. Age had faded the photographs.

One picture particularly caught and held my eye, not only
for its inappropriateness to the other memorabilia in the room but also because
of its haunting relationship to my own life. It was the picture of a Corsair, a
stubby black fighter plane whose vintage years were in the early 1950s. My
father, a career Marine, had often flown over our house when I was a first
grader, dipping his wings and otherwise making his presence known to the tiny
world assembled on the front yard below him. In my youth, when I looked to
planes as sources of illimitable power and freedom and looked to my father as
the tamer of the great black birds he controlled, the Corsair became a symbol
of the past. As a boy I worshiped the Marine Corps, her planes, and her pilots.
I built model airplanes and dreamed of the day when I would pilot a black plane
through the blue skies. But the 1960s and the turbulence of social change and
the ominous presence of the unholy Asian war killed my dreams of flight and
soldierdom. From the ashes of the Corsair rose the passionate do-gooder.

Here, on Viola’s wall, in odd juxtaposition with the
other artifacts of Viola’s house, flew a Corsair, the dark shadow of my
childhood. Why the Corsair? I would never find out.

My bedroom resembled a small cave. With the shutters closed
and the lights out, I could not see my five fingers in front of my face. I was
in. I was home. My depression had nothing to do with my house. It was me.

All of the people were fishermen. Good fishermen. They were
good because it was necessary to be good. The river was their supermarket,
their corner store, and their largest garden. In my afternoon walks I would
often come upon a silent group of men and women sitting on the edge of the
dock, studying the long and jointed cane poles that rested on the weathered
railings. A couple of men would always be crabbing, using the skinned corpse of
a possum for bait. In a tree near the river was the skeleton of an osprey who
had come too near the fishermen the previous summer. It must have been a large,
beautiful bird with magnificent plumage, but its skeleton, hung like a warning
to other fowl, was a portentous reminder that the fishermen were also hunters
who killed for pleasure as well as for food.

They fished in conjunction with the tides. They read the
message of the tides as easily as commuters read newspapers. I learned this
after a very short time on the island. I would sometimes go down and watch them
fish, although many times I would find no one on the dock. “The tides
ain’t right,” it was explained. If the tides were not right, then
there would be no fish, and if there were no fish, then there would be no
people. And I would sit on the dock alone with the osprey’s skeleton
behind me.

I tried to decipher the tides and what certain part of the
cycle marked the coming of the fish. One thing I knew for certain, the people
and the fish arrived together as though it had been arranged by a higher power
for a long time. After watching several times it seemed that the people fished
when the tide slowed somewhat and was beginning to consider a rest before the
great reversal and the heavy flow of salt water in the opposite direction. When
the water grew sluggish, relinquished its swiftness, rested against the
marshes, and waited for the moon to assert its power again, then the people
would appear with their shrimp and poles. They fished at the beginning and end
of the tides, never in the middle. The fish abided by these rules.

I met many of the black islanders in this manner. They
threw a thousand yassuhs in my direction, which made me uncomfortable,
but I met some of the island’s most colorful figures when I went down to
talk with the fishermen.

Aunt Ruth was one. She was eighty years old, in marvelous
physical condition, and possessed the face of a lost cherub. She loved
conversation and enjoyed talking about her life on the island.

“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.”

She would talk about her memories of the island in the past
before modern civilization had ruined it. She remembered the first car that had
driven on the island and the first plane that had flown overhead. She was a
kind of repository of history and island lore. She also made potent batches of
plum and blackberry wines at her house. She kept me supplied with both types
during the entire year.

Quick Fella was another. I saw him pass the school one day
on the way to the island church. The kids saw him at the same time and one of
them shouted, “Oh Gawd, that Quick Fella move so fast.” He moved fast
indeed. His gait was a modified sprint. He walked as though possessed by
demons, a jerky, mechanical walk with his head bobbing and his arms pumping to
keep time with his legs. He was lanky and thin and his stride was awesome. He
disappeared into the trees swiftly, an apparition, a passing thought.

“Quick Fella never slow up. He jes’ keep on
movin’ down the road so fast,“ Lincoln said.

I met Quick Fella while he was fishing one day. I
introduced myself and started a conversation. I learned two things about Quick
Fella during that first talk: that he spoke in a rich language that seemed
almost Elizabethan and that he gave an exceptionally detailed weather
report.

“So very nice. So very nice. So pleased to make your
acquaintance. I am so pleased to tell you that the chillun seemed to think you
are a fine gentleman. Yes, a fine gentleman. So very nice. So very pleased to
make your acquaintance,” he said — very quickly, I should add.
We talked a bit about the school, then I mentioned something about the
thunderclouds that had rolled in from the east. “Oh yes. I believe there
will be a storm. Yes, yes. The temperature is about ninety-three degrees and
slightly falling. The rel’tive humid-aty is eighty-seven per cent and
rising. Scattered thundershowers late in the afternoon. Winds out of the east
at fifteen miles an hour. Small boat warnings out for small boat. Big boats
O.K. and don’t have to worry about nothin’.”

I was listening to a Quick Fella special, his
interpretation of the weather given over the Savannah radio. He often disagreed
with this report and would alter the forecast according to his own studies of
existing weather conditions. He was an astute observer of cloud formations and
wind shifts. The people of the island generally believed in his reports and
ignored those coming from Savannah. Of course, all people who live on islands
become skillful at predicting the weather, but Quick Fella had transformed his
skill into an art.

The other resident who provided a glimpse into island life
was a powerfully muscled man called Sam. He did not tell me his name. I heard
him called that by the other fishermen. He was a scowling, taciturn man who
made no pretense of wishing to engage in small talk with me. He looked at me
with a malevolent glance that could have melted a fishhook. Amicability was not
Sam’s greatest virtue. His foot was crippled. He dragged it behind him
like an old anchor. It was bent, gnarled, and stuffed into a correction shoe.
He liked to sit on the dock with his fishing pole and swing his feet underneath
the dock, so his deformity would not show. I would make attempts to talk to
him.

“How’s it going today? You caught any big
ones?” I would say.

He would answer me with one of his fishhook stares.

“Fish not biting today, eh? Well, some days are good.
Some days are bad,” I would whine with infinite wisdom. “You just
gotta stick with it when you’re fishing. Yes, sir, patience really pays
off.”

Throughout this monologue, Sam has continued to stare at
me. There is nothing human in his face. He is not amused or entertained by my
intrusion. His crippled foot is swung out of sight under the dock. His stare is
hollow, uncomprehending but hostile.

“Well, it’s been great talkin’ to you. I
really enjoyed the conversation,” I say, as I walk away from him.

I learned about Sam from the kids at school. When he was an
infant, his mother left him untended in a crib while she went to the nightclub
to drink. While she was out, Sam slipped out of the crib but caught his left
foot somehow in between two of the slats. The foot broke. He hung suspended
from the crib for a long time screaming in agony. His mother came home finally
and freed him. She never took her son to the doctor to have his foot set, and
the bone healed itself at a grotesque, crooked angle that grew worse as Sam
grew older. The kids said Sam didn’t smile much.

But I saw him smiling once. He owned the finest horse on
the island, a graceful mare with a handsome head and a sleek, somewhat spare
body. I saw Sam riding this horse down the main road at full gallop, the horse
straining for acceleration, the man bent over the horse’s back shouting
encouragement and smiling a full, evocative smile. The horse was swift and the
man was intoxicated with the speed of his animal and the feel of the wind along
his spine. Sam waved to me as he passed.I watched as the man and the horse grew
smaller down the road and it made me glad there were horses in the world for
people like Sam. When Sam was on his horse, then Sam, the cripple, sprouted
wings and flew. Sam’s horse was a good foot and his horse made him
smile.

Even though I was on Yamacraw, I was not
of Yamacraw. My first overtures of friendship with the people on the island,
although not rebuffed, failed to win me any friends with whom I felt completely
comfortable. I thought constantly of my friends in Beaufort. Consciously I
began to wish for a way to extricate myself from a job and a situation I felt
incapable of handling. The loneliness was beginning to shred my nerves. I
became distracted with myself and my vainglorious attempt to act as a symbolic
bridge between the children of the Yamacraw and the outside world. I was
impatient because I had failed to turn illiterates into lovers of the great
classics in the span of a single month. I had tired of measuring victories in
terms of whether Prophet had learned the alphabet or Sidney could spell his
name. Nor could I shake the feeling that everything I taught or achieved was a
worthless, needless effort that ultimately would not affect the quality of my
students’ lives. What could I teach them or give them that would
substantially alter the course of their lives? Nothing. Not a goddam thing.
Each had come into the world imprisoned by a river and by a system which
insured his destruction the moment he uttered his first cry by his
mother’s side.

Many of my friends drew me aside in those early days,
before I had defined myself in relation to the island, and told me they envied
my opportunity for solitude, for reflection, and for time to assemble my
thoughts and generate ideas. Almost every man dreams of a place where he can
withdraw into himself, away from the roar of engines and squeal of tires, away
from the push of crowds. Yet, by placing myself on Yamacraw, I was denying my
natural gregariousness and my compulsive need for good friends. As a lover of
conversation, I found myself strangely restless in the mute house, or the mute
forest, or walking beside the mute ocean. I was an island within an island. And
something far more profound and debilitating was occupying my mind in the month
of September, long before I had conditioned myself to the isolation of the
island and the frustration of the task at hand. In the midst of resolving the
most traumatic adjustment I had ever made, I found myself struck with a new and
foreign emotion that had not appeared in the prescribed blueprint of the year.
On September 18, 1969, beknownst only to God, me, and one other person, I fell
in love. On October 10, 1969, the unlikely triumvirate cooperated once again
and I married Barbara Bolling Jones.

Barbara and I had been neighbors the previous year when I
resided in a comfortably picturesque apartment in Beaufort. The house rested on
the edge of a slough formed by the Beaufort River. It was behind one of the
oldest houses in Beaufort and its many-windowed view of the river traffic of
boat and fowl made the fifty dollars’ rent I paid seem like the most
incredible bargain in Christendom. The neighborhood went by the name of The
Point, a collection of splendid old houses with fine white columns and dreams
sundered by a great war and changing times. It was a genuine remnant of the Old
South, with rocking chairs on high verandahs and venerable octogenarians and
their aristocratic progeny carrying on the myth and legend which ended
reluctantly at Appomattox Courthouse. I liked The Point for many reasons: for
the quietude of its shaded, narrow streets, the courtesy and refinement of its
residents, the imposing presence of its history, and for its essential
apartness from the pace and hustle of the earth — its eccentric
removal from all things plastic, electric, neoned, cheap, contrived, or
asphalted. A visitor from the North once told me that The Point was evil
because its people were prejudiced against blacks. “Then leave,” I
answered. I did not stop to explain my feelings for the place. I should
have.

It was in a great yellow house on The Point, a house of
exquisite proportions, that I can remember first feeling some compassion and
insight into the condition of black people. I was sixteen, and in the prime of
my nigger-baiting days, when I visited Gene Norris’ apartment on the
second story of this yellow house. Gene dwelt in Beaufort as the prophet before
the storm, an intense bespectacled man who preached love for all humanity at a
time when it was physically dangerous to do so. He perpetuated the great
blasphemy of having his students read the New York Times instead of the
Charleston News and Courier. An inveterate radical, he assigned
Catcher in the Rye to his students before the town could mobilize its
committees of repression. He reigned as the village eight-ball, the left arm,
the joker in the pile, the odd number in our even-numbered world. Like many
students in Beaufort, I owe a great deal to Gene Norris. At any rate, one night
in my junior year, he invited me and several other students to his house for
dinner. The assembled group started teasing Gene about being a nigger-lover.
Gene spat out a devastating reply, then asked us to listen to a record he had
bought that day. He played “We Shall Overcome” by Pete Seeger. I
remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend 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, I
remained a nigger-hater for many years afterward, but the journey at least had
a beginning, a point of embarkation. And the beginning had happened in an
ante-bellum house on The Point.

So, The Point, bedizened with moss and the memory of
slavery, symbolized to me a place, not of evil and of minds anchored to a
corrupt past, but a place where change was possible, even imminent. As soon as
I graduated from The Citadel, I house-hunted in The Point area and there only.
Here I was to live and here I planned to die. At twenty-two I had decided that
it was best to live and grow old in a small town. The call of the city failed
to capture me.

Barbara lived next door to me, but the currents of our
lives did not cross. I once started her car on an unseasonably chilly October
morning when her profanity streamed into my bedroom window as I was shaving. I
walked out and started her car. She apologized profusely when I commended her
for the salt of her tongue. That was all. The first thing I noticed about her
was the wedding ring on her left hand. Bachelors reflexively study a strange
girl’s left hand. Without the formality of introducing ourselves, we
parted.

I heard of her again a month later. Her husband, a Marine
pilot, had been shot down and killed in Vietnam. A week later I heard through
Beaufort’s well-developed grapevine that Barbara was pregnant with her
second child.

We had few occasions to talk after that. I would often see
her in her yard as I drove to and from school. I watched the child grow within
her and measured time by the changes in her condition. Her second child,
Melissa, was born in April.

In May I met Barbara at a party. We talked. I went to her
house for a drink after the party. Initially, I felt uncomfortable around her.
Her husband had died in a war I considered immoral and unjustified. I could
sympathize with her loss but could not condone or defend the cause for which he
died. Teaching had preserved me from the draft and from facing the decision of
fighting in an ignoble war because my country decreed it. So I steered away
from talk about the war or the military. A week later she left to visit her
parents-in-law in Norway for the summer.

My falling in love was simply a gradual awareness that I
wanted to live with Barbara. When she returned to Beaufort in August, I was
there. The idea of assuming the role of father for two young children terrified
me, and the additional burden of entering a house where the shadow of a man I
never knew was imprinted in every corner seemed a legitimate reason for
hesitating on the brink of matrimony. And we were so different. Barbara cared
not one bit for the social issues of the day that were so important to me. Her
main interest in life was the ineluctable pursuit of the contented home and
happy family. Hers was a life of order, of cocktails served promptly before
dinner, of napkins and candlesticks, of military protocol, and attention to
form. Mine was chaotic, plebian, and disjointed. She voted for Nixon, while I
prayed for the elevation of McCarthy. Whatever the differences between us, none
of it made much difference on October 10.

Before a small crowd of friends, we were married in St.
Helena’s Church in Beaufort. Bernie was there poking me in the ribs and
grinning like hell. Big George Garbade towered above the guests, who were
whispering occasionally that now I’d have to get off that goddam island.
Gene Norris was there, a classic portrait of the tweedy English professor.
Yamacraw, far away and oblivious in the October sunshine, seemed mysteriously
remote and inaccessible, like a dream that lingered just beneath the surface of
memory, and not a part of me at all. I had invited everyone I knew on the
island to my wedding: the kids, the parents, Mrs. Brown, the Stones. All said
they would try to attend, and predictably, because of distance, inconvenience,
and the fact that none of them knew me very well, none of them showed.

We honeymooned on Yamacraw Island. For some reason, Niagara
Falls, the Virgin Islands, or any of the other meccas for the hordes of lusty
young couples checking into motels did not arouse any enthusiasm in me. Since
Barbara had not seen Yamacraw and since it was important she understand the
problems of the island and its isolation from the rest of the world, we decided
to spend our honeymoon on the island.

Zeke put the boat into the water, taunted me with the
ancient jokes directed at newly anointed husbands, and watched as we headed
toward Bull Creek. I drove the boat and pointed out the high spots of the trip:
the osprey’s nest atop the utility pole on Savage Island, the huge
crescent sandbar that blocked one whole section of navigable creek at low tide
on Bull Island, the thousands of brown oysters encrusted in the mud flats along
the shore. A porpoise fin broke like a green shaft in the water beside us, the
sun flashing off his body in brilliant knives of light. A great blue heron,
disturbed by the boat, flew patiently and majestically to another spot. The
boat was an intrusion. It always was.

We stayed for two days. My living quarters did not impress
Barbara to a great extent, but the weather cooperated and even the mosquitoes
seemed to diminish the fury of their attacks. We wandered about the island
exulting in the aloneness. Barbara picked ticks from her body and took
cold-water baths with Spartan determination. We had never considered her living
on the island. She did not want to bring her young children to a place without
doctors or telephones. I would live on the island, come home on the weekend,
and during the week when I was able. Thus, our marriage was planned for the
first year. Barbara would remain in Beaufort; I would live on the island.

How different my life would be had we followed this
original plan. I was young and surpassingly naïve at this juncture and I
saw no undue hardship resulting from this arrangement. Barbara had lived a year
without a husband and an absentee husband seemed infinitely better than no
husband at all. I was not about to quit my job on Yamacraw, nor was she going
to bring her children to live on the island. As I look back, it is surprising
we both did not tell each other to go to hell and forget the whole thing.

Anyway, it was a good honeymoon. I took my bride back to
Beaufort and deposited her in our Beaufort home. The house we had rented had
all the character of a hamburger stand: cyclone fence, picture window, carport,
and all the other accouterments of suburbia. I hated the house and the
neighborhood. The Point had nothing for rent or sale, so we were forced to join
the ranks of the red-brick people who drive station wagons and play bridge. I
lived on a remote island during the week and next to George Babbitt on the
weekend.

After October 10 I was not happy on the island. Separating
myself from Barbara only seemed to heighten my loneliness on the island. I
became rather irritable and impatient in dealing with the kids in class. Mrs.
Brown and her tirades seemed less amusing to me. Ted Stone began to fray my
nerves. I missed Barbara and wanted to be with her. I could not quit, yet I
wanted to quit. I was also starting to feel guilty about the two-year-old girl,
Jessica, who was now my responsibility. She thought of me simply as “that
man, Mommy” and had not realized that I was her father. Jessica needed a
father, not a weekend visitor. These things preyed on my mind in the middle of
October. I was a father and a teacher, yet I could not throw myself completely
into either project. It was not until December that I became a daily
commuter.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 5

On a reconnaissance foray into the bowels
of the great closet that harbored the jetsam and flotsam washed into the
schoolroom over the years, I unearthed a brand-new automatic movie projector.
When I queried Mrs. Brown, she told me that films were difficult to get to and
from the island; in fact, they were more trouble than they were worth.
Therefore the projector sat in permanent exile. I also found an SRA Reading Kit
and a fairly new record player gathering dust on one of the closet shelves.

I was ecstatic. I am a firm and uncompromising believer in
the audio-visual age. The projector was gold bullion. It became my habit from
that day forward to make damn sure that the room was filled with films on all
subjects. I raided the film library at the county office each month. Since the
difficulty of transporting films was so obvious, I was allowed to take as many
films as I wanted and to keep them for as long as I wanted. Though this
entailed a broken rule, the woman in charge of the films was very flexible.

The films were divided into three groups: boring films that
imparted a body of knowledge I felt the gang should have partial exposure to,
interesting films that I accidentally picked up with the boring films, and fun
films whose sole purpose was to provide entertainment. The class generally
liked films better than any other part of the day and voted to have at least
one film daily. They also insisted that when a film especially appealed to
them, they would be allowed to view it a second time. I acquiesced to the will
of the majority. A film on the Calgary Rodeo received three curtain calls. At
the third showine, the Gorgonian head of Mrs. Brown peered in through the glass
window, called me out into the hall, and gave me a splendid lecture.

“Every second of school time is important, Mr.
Conroy,” she intoned, “and we cannot afford to waste any time with
movin’ pictures. These children need the basics. The basics. If they get
the basics that’s all they need.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.

Several times during the year Mrs. Brown attempted to
sabotage the film program. She constantly derided the fact that I was wasting
valuable time, when I could be drilling the class on those good ole,
French-fried, batter-whipped basics. A couple of the kids watched movies as if
they were partaking of a sacrament, completely enthralled and religiously
attentive. Fred fidgeted through movies, but Fred would wiggle through his own
interment. Lincoln chattered throughout the movie, but much of his conversation
was directed toward characters on the screen. So, no matter how much the film
series offended Mrs. Brown, I was determined to keep it part of my program. On
one occasion, a film was the fuse for an explosion of enthusiasm for the whole
class in which eighteen children momentarily forgot the prison of the
classroom, forgot about the iron-clad rules of propriety, forgot about the
frowning Mrs. Brown in the next room, and danced maniacally in the pure joy of
group sharing and identification.

It started with Walter Cronkite. Walter, with his voice of
doomsday sincerity, came on a brief visit to Yamacraw via film. In the film
library I came across The Salem Witch Trials, part of the old “You
Are There” programs, which Cronkite narrated. The film launched me back
into a bucket of tears’ worth of nostalgia and reminiscing. I cannot
estimate how many times I watched the program as a child, but seeing young
Walter with his unlined face and dignified thinness was like welcoming an old
friend back into my life. I tried to tell the kids about the part Walter
Cronkite played in my childhood, when I sat transfixed before the television
set as my favorite shows flickered on and off. They seemed to understand.

The kids loved the resonant, stirring quality of the phrase
You are there. In the film, the alleged witches swear their innocence
before a noncompassionate judge. Their accusers moan and squeal in delightful
overacting. Soldiers drag people off to the gallows. The kids were going wild.
“Hang the judge,” they chanted. The supernatural held a macabre
fascination for the children; they discussed it frequently, and believed
implicitly in the existence of witches, warlocks, ghosts, and devils.

After the film, I extracted several hokey morals to discuss
the nature of justice and other such manure. The kids would have none of it.
They hadn’t had a good bull session about witches for a damn long
time — too long, they decided; let’s discuss them now.

Ethel Lee spoke first, “I know two witches in
Savannah — they mean.”

“Damn right, they mean,” Fred said to Big C, not
knowing I had heard.

“They ain’t as mean as the one in Bluffton,”
Cindy Lou added.

“Meanest witch in the world right here on
Yamacraw,” Frank concluded.

“How many of you ever seen a witch?” I asked.
Every hand flew up. Damn right they’d seen witches.

Big C screwed his face up into his question-mark look.
“It true if you throw water on a witch, she disappear?”

Suddenly every eye in the room was riveted on me. Only the
pigs grunting and rooting on the schoolyard disturbed the silence created by
this single question. And there was something about the question itself,
something ancient and primordial, something that disturbed the hidden and oft
lost mythology of my own youth; I felt something stir as I thought about the
wet witch, and knew that a feeling in my subconscious was rising like an air
bubble to the surface. Then I had it.

“Big C, you’ve seen the Wizard of
Oz.”

Eighteen voices shouted hosannas to the trembling faker of
Oz. Cindy Lou broke off into an impromptu rendition of “Over the
Rainbow.” Others pretended they were cowardly lions. Richard stood up and
walked like a scarecrow suspended from his stake. Each member of the class had
memorized the movie classic, had watched it religiously each time it appeared
on television and had added personal interpretations to the bizarre forces
rampant in the spirit-haunted land over the rainbow. And if the Yamacraw
children knew about Oz, then I was convinced a hell of a lot of other children
in America knew about it, too. My jeremiads against television since my first
days on the island had continued undiminished, fed with the plentiful food of
my students’ ignorance about people, events, and the world. Now, in a
single moment, I had to retract my sweeping indictment of TV: it had not failed
completely, only partially. Every child in the room knew the legend of Oz by
heart, the importance of the yellow-brick road, the incarnate evil of the
wicked Witch of the West, and the ultimate hypocrisy of the great wizard
himself. Oz, it seemed, had entered into the consciousness of American
children, and not just a selected few, but almost every child in every
situation. I considered Yamacraw a touchstone: if the Yamacraw children knew
about it, then the chances were excellent that the vast majority of American
children had been reached. The Wizard of Oz, through the medium of
television, had become part of American mythology as important and relevant to
the children of America as the Homeric legends were to the children of
Athens.

So Big C’s question was the catalyst for a great and
memorable afternoon, one of those rare moments generated by chance, planned by
no one, spontaneous and joyful, transcending the need for a teacher or a
classroom, and making me once more think of education as something alive and
helpful, instead of as a withered dream in need of formaldehyde. Oz took over
the rest of the day. For a couple of minutes it was utter pandemonium. Fred
introduced a moving argument in incomprehensible Fredese in favor of the
proposition that water could evaporate witches. Prophet thought this was crap.
He told Fred so. Fred told Prophet he would kick his butt if he continued to
think it was crap. Mary mumbled something into her left hand about fire being
better than water. Saul said that there ain’t no sure way to kill a
witch.

Cindy Lou’s voice finally broke through the general
upheaval of noise and offered to recite her King James Version of the
story.

“O.K.,” said I.

“There was this little girl who got blown away in a
rainstorm,” she started.

“That ain’t the way it was,” said Jimmy
Sue.

“How was it then, you old ugly self?” Cindy Lou
shot back.

“Ain’t no rainstorm, sister.”

“Damn right it was a rainstorm.”

“No, girl, it was a tor-nay-do.”

“Yeah,” the class agreed, “it was a
tornado.”

“Same thing,” claimed Cindy Lou.

”No, girl. Tor-nay-do take your head clean off,”
offered Mary.

“You tellin’ the story, girl?” Cindy
inquired menacingly of Jimmy Sue.

“No.”

“Then you keep your mout’ out of it.”

“This girl got blown away by a wind and the house she
was in hit a bad witch on the head and kill her dead. Then the girl and her
little dog go marchin’ down this yellow-brick road ‘til they meet
this chicken lion who try to act tough.”

“No,” a chorus of voices shouted.

“No, what?” Cindy Lou asked.

“That girl don’t meet no lion,” said Samuel,
in one of his first vocal contributions of the year.

“Sure she meets a lion.”

“No, girl, first she sees the scarecrow. Ain’t
got no brains.”

“Yeah, scarecrow first,” the class agreed, acting
out the chorus in this impromptu drama.

“You tell the story, cockeye.”

“Call me cockeye and I bust your head,” Samuel
shouts, clenching his fists.

“Don’t call Samuel cockeye, Cindy Lou.”

“He is cockeye.”

“Yeah, he cockeye,” the chorus agrees.

“No,” I say.

“I bust your head,” Samuel warns the whole
class.

“You cockeye,” the class chants.

“The scarecrow first,” says Richard. “Let me
tell the story.”

“Oh boy, Richard, give it to us.”

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.

Ethel, a purist in the group, strutted to the microphone
and began a long, precise, but monotonous epic, which was technically unflawed
and accurate except that everyone in the class believed she was making the
stuff up. In the middle of her story, Top Cat got up and started singing a new
song just released by swing-man James Brown. He hopped and swayed what he
called a “new jive” while the kids clapped their hands and tapped
their feet until the great head of Mrs. Brown appeared in the window, flashing
a look the Romans must have worn on their faces when turning thumbs down on
some prostrate Christian. But even though the kids quit responding and reverted
back to their classical pose of scholars erect in their desks and lusting for
knowledge, Top Cat gyrated on, a grin like a jack-o’-lantern carved on his
face and eyes raised in adoration of some muse deep within him.

When Top Cat finally subsided and sank back into his desk,
Prophet of the unknown tongue continued the interrupted marathon of Oz, an
untranslatable potpourri of grunts and monosyllables, punctuated only by
Prophet’s beautifully effusive smiles.

When the afternoon was over and the bus ambled into the
schoolyard, and the kids had filed out of the room, I had on tape the story of
Oz as it had never been told before — a new Oz, a land that Judy
Garland had never entered, but one especially created on a December afternoon
by children of an island ruled by a river, and possibly another wizard, with
perhaps a greater claim to credibility.

The first two California boys arrived on
the island in early October. They were part of an unusual college program
emanating from Cowell College, a part of the University of California at Santa
Cruz. The program had survived for a solid year. Herman Blake, a black
professor at the college who had been born on a sea island further up the
coast, was the mercurial, driving force behind the program; he devised it,
implemented it, and was the strong shaft that supported the experiment in the
early days and nurtured it past the stormy and vehement disapproval of the
island troll, Ted Stone.

Mr. Stone told me about Blake, about the California boys,
and about the program. “All of them are Communists trained in Havana. If
they keep comin’ to the island there is bound to be trouble. One of them
has already gone back to California and married a nigger girl. Another one
named Zach Sklar was a Russian Jew.” Stone considered the program an
insidious, corrosive threat to his domination of the island’s people and
politics.

“What exactly do they do, Mr. Stone?” I asked.
“You can tell me.”

He answered, “It don’t appear like they do
nothing.”

It seemed improbable that two Californians would travel
3000 miles for the experience of dwelling among black people on an unbridged
island solely for credit in a sociology class. Whatever the probability, I met
Jim Ford and Joe Sanfort the first week in October.

With all six of the California boys I worked with during
the year there was a period of aloofness, of deintoxification, before we could
communicate on a serious level with each other. The prime reason was my
background. I was a white southerner, a graduate of an all white male military
college, a nine-year resident of Beaufort, and the first white teacher
encountered in the Cowell College program. During the training sessions for
their journey to Yamacraw, Blake concentrated on prepping his missionaries well
in the psyche of the rural blacks, but he did not prepare them well at all for
dealing with the southern whites. In their simplistic assessment, all southern
whites were incorrigible racists who loved to eat grits, smell magnolias, and
lynch blacks. Blake told them to handle the Stones with oily diplomacy. In fact
the major command passed to them before they left the protected enclosure of
their campus was not to piss anybody off, white or black. Remember the program,
it must go on at all costs. So Jim and Joe approached me with extreme caution,
said nothing that would ruffle the white supremacist feathers that lay directly
beneath my bright red neck, and generally said nothing at all. They were the
first people I had met from an infamous California college. I am positive I was
the first person they had met who had worn a uniform to the latrine in his
college days. From the beginning it was a merger of opposites and a meeting of
two extraordinarily different worlds. After we thawed our suspicions, we became
good friends and they introduced me for the first time to that land gilded with
Sierras, pocked with surfers, and as strange and multifaceted as Yamacraw
itself — California.

Jim and Joe explained the program one night soon after my
marriage, as we drank beer and killed mosquitoes in the gloom of early evening
in my house. Each quarter Blake selected two people for the Yamacraw Island
Project. The twosome spent an entire quarter living among the people of the
island, talking to them, helping them in whatever service that they could
provide, and absorbing the atmosphere and culture of the island in the process.
One of the ultimate aims of the program was to get into the school and help the
teachers with the children. Thus far, Mrs. Brown had proved to be the major
obstacle. Jim and Joe ran a recreation program every day after school. More
aptly, they stood in the middle of a great surge of children racing wildly
about them, engaged in some unidentifiable game that had been brought to the
island as football and corrupted over the years.

Jim’s personality was such that he desired to see
order emerge from the chaos, form to somehow overpower the void, rules to tame
and dignify the surface appearance of his program. In fact, beneath his long
hair and mustache, Jim Ford was the quintessential organization man who was not
happy unless a football game spread across the playground with Lombardian
precision. To Jim a recreation program, or at least his recreation program, was
something sacred and if he had any say in the matter, his program on Yamacraw
would be a model for sea islands everywhere. So when Jim would clap his hands
and ask for order and the dust cloud of children kicking a ball and each other
would swirl past him oblivious to his command, and when he would clap his hands
again, this time louder and more peremptory, and the great cloud would nearly
trample him as it passed his spot again, I could only smile and thank God that
I had taught awhile and knew where I stood in the great chain of being among
the children of Yamacraw School. I knew Jim wanted to have a program he could
be proud of when he returned to California. Therefore, my heart saluted him
when I saw him standing alone, a sentinel waving frantically beneath the stand
of oaks beside the school, asking for quiet, for attention, for anything that
would let him assume command and control of a situation that he could not
control.

Joe, on the other hand, cared little for organization, for
achievements to boast upon, or anything else. Joe’s cynicism appealed to
me greatly; he would sit alone on the seesaw, deprecating the fact that a black
man would send two blue-eyed white boys bursting with bullshit and idealism to
an island that needed them like it needed two escalators. Every once in a while
guilt would cause Joe to make an attempt to organize a softball game or a
kickball game, but after his efforts had melted into mere remembrances of
things past, he returned to his seesaw and ruminated upon the folly of the
recreation program.

Of course, Mrs. Brown would watch the entire spectacle
shaking her head disgustedly, screaming at every child who raced past her that
this was no way to run a recreation program, that whoever was running this
recreation program sure didn’t know what in the hell they were doing, and
if she were running the program it would certainly be organized better. Jim
would hustle over to her side, they would huddle together in great seriousness,
Jim would then break from the huddle like a center from the Green Bay Packers,
trot to the middle of the playground, clap his hands, shout hopelessly to the
mass of kids racing in every conceivable direction, and the entire cycle would
begin anew.

God, did I sympathize with both Jim and Joe. About the
third recess at Yamacraw, I became momentarily inspired to teach the boys the
finer nuances of football. They knew nothing. They could not pass; they could
not block or kick the ball or line up in a semblance of a formation. Their
version of the game was pure, unsullied madness. Whoever held the ball at any
time was simply murdered by every other player on the field. Sometimes Top Cat
and Oscar, the two largest, would team up together while the frail youngsters
tried vainly to drag them to the ground. I had never seen such ferocity on the
field. Sam and Sidney, emaciated and puny, would fly into the churning legs of
Top Cat without losing a bit of momentum. Top Cat would shake them off as if
they were made from butterfly wings, then face Richard’s seventy-pound
charge into his stomach. Everyone growled, foamed, and grunted appropriately.
When someone hit the ground, all participants felt duty bound to leap on the
fallen prey; fists would pound heads, feet would kick any and every exposed
leg, thigh, or head. Curses flew from the pile in dangling, disjointed
clusters. I’d never seen anything so brutal, so dangerous, so insane in my
whole life.

So I decided to teach them rules, fair play, and
sportsmanship: the essence of the noble game, the proper manner in which
gentlemen and athletes conduct themselves on a field of honor. I taught them
huddles, the stance for blocking, the way to pass a spiral, the science of
plays, the beauty of the stiff arm. This took two whole recesses. After I was
convinced that I had given them enough theory, that they were well grounded in
the basics of the game, I flipped the ball to Lincoln and told him to kick off.
He was immediately buried under an avalanche of bodies kicking, gouging,
biting, and hitting at the unfortunate Lincoln, who howled at the bottom of the
pile. This was one of my last attempts to organize the time-honored version of
football on the island.

Jim and Joe were in a strange position on the island. They
were there conceivably to serve the people. If there was a fence to be mended,
a privy to be built, an errand to be run, or an itch to be scratched, the
islanders knew that all they had to do was ask the California boys. It did not
take long for the more savvy islanders to take more than full advantage of this
miraculous labor force from across the continent. Nor did it become unusual for
someone to see healthy black men sitting in the shade sipping Scotch and
watching Joe and Jim sweating in the broiling sun over a collection of nails
and boards that would soon be a new privy. I identified with Joe and Jim and
saw that they were merely putting their burning liberalism to the test of the
sword. Joe and Jim, archetypes of white, middle-class America, could come to
the thickets and backwaters of the Carolinas and master the art of shit-house
building. Dear Mom, Sallie May Toomer now craps in elegance and style, so my
life has not been in vain.

I once asked Mrs. Brown if the California boys could come
into the schoolhouse and work with some of the kids on remedial reading. It
seemed natural that two juniors in college would be moderately qualified to
help out in the scholarly environs of Yamacraw School. Not that I disparaged
their field work, for they were becoming so proficient in shit-house building
that they completed these structures with remarkable speed. But both of them
felt that they could accomplish far more if they could help the children in
school. I agreed. It was funny how we thought education to be the great gilded
key which would solve all problems, eliminate all poverty and disease,
eradicate differences between social classes, and bring the children of
okra-planters up to par with the children of emperors. A trinity of
white-toothed white boys, Joe, Jim, and I, entered into the stream of Yamacraw
life-style and felt all that was needed was a meteoric reading level, a couple
of shots of new math, and a high score on the college entrance exams. So the
guys wanted me to approach the unapproachable Mrs. Brown to see if she would
put her approval on their apprenticeship within the schoolhouse walls.

“Mr. Conroy, do you realize that these boys have no
credentials? The state requires all of its teachers to have the proper
credentials. What if the man from the state department comes walkin’ into
this here school, carrying his badge, and askin’ to see everybody’s
credentials? Now what we gonna do with these California boys? Hide ’em in
the ladies’ room? No, Mr. Conroy, we must abide by the rules of the
state.”

“Mrs. Brown, all these guys want to do is come in
during the day and help us out. Nothing else. It cannot hurt a single
thing.”

“It will hurt the reputation and cree-dentials of this
school.”

“This ain’t Harvard, Mrs. Brown.”

“Rules are rules, Mr. Conroy. The state makes the
rules.”

“There are no rules which say these guys cannot come
and help us every day.”

“I am the principal.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

So Joe and Jim remained the grand officiators of the
recreation program. I explained to them that I was relatively powerless to cope
with Mrs. Brown when she so adamantly refused to listen to reason. White guilt,
that nasty little creature who rested on my left shoulder, prevented me from
challenging Mrs. Brown on this or any other point. At this time of my life a
black man could probably have handed me a bucket of cow piss, commanded me to
drink it in order that I might rid my soul of the stench of racism, and I would
have only asked for a straw. Blacks who have gone through the civil rights
struggle have met a hundred white boys and girls who would dive head first in a
septic tank to prove their liberation from the sins of their fathers. I thought
Mrs. Brown was wrong, but did not have the moral courage to tell her so. In the
fantasy of the races conceived in my mind, all blacks were noble people who had
struggled against a repressive social order for years and who were finally
reaping the tangible rewards of this struggle. All whites, especially myself,
were guilty of heinous, extraordinarily brutal crimes against humanity. It
dawned on me that I came to Yamacraw for a fallacious reason: I needed to be
cleansed, born again, resurrected by good works and suffering, purified of the
dark cankers that grew like toadstools in my past. I was on the island for
expiation, and I think I liked to watch Joe and Jim struggle so patiently
because I saw in them a reflection of myself.

The word had passed. The California boys were banned from
the classroom. I thought credentials constituted the primary reason why they
were not allowed to enter the school. Then one day Mrs. Brown told me
conspiratorially, “We can’t let white boys and colored girls rub
elbows too much. Them boys are young bulls with no cows on this island ‘c
ept them colored cows. We can’t afford to have no half-breed cows on this
island.”

I had borrowed a tape recorder from Mrs.
Brown that I had noticed sitting in a corner of her room, virginal and unused.
She let me have it reluctantly, telling me some crap that it was too valuable a
piece of equipment to use with my “babies” around. I swore by the
whiskers of Jehovah that I would treat the priceless machine as I would a tiara
from Tiffany’s. Then I carried it into my room. Tape recorders are great
instruments, I knew this intuitively, though I had never used one in a
classroom environment and had no idea, at that particular moment, how exactly I
would utilize one in this class.

Since I am a virtual idiot when it comes to machines of any
kind, it took a good fifteen minutes to figure out how to operate this box full
of hidden levers and submerged screws. Finally, after incredible fumbling on my
part, the tape recorder whirred proudly and efficiently into action.

Mary told me the machine had sat idle the year before and
that Mrs. Brown had not played it at all. “Fine,” I said, “we
are going to play the hell out of it.”

I told everyone to come up to the tape recorder and give
name, address, and grade. Big C was first. He rolled his eyes, lowered his
head, then mumbled, “My name Charles Graves. I am in the seventh grade. I
live on Yamacraw.”

Then I replayed his performance. When Big C’s voice
came back into the room, I think I gained some insight into a magician’s
feeling of power when he pulls a rabbit from his hat before a roomful of
children. Lincoln yelled “God Almighty. Good gracious.” Whoops and
giggles spread around the room as each succeeding voice came stuttering
magically from the tape. Poor Prophet caught hell from the rest of the class
when his own version of the language rolled incomprehensibly forth, and his
brother Fred was so self-conscious about his inability to articulate that he
merely grunted into the microphone. Oscar, however, the completion of the
Simmons trinity, was so proud of the sound of his voice that he volunteered to
tell the story of the book he had just finished reading. So he launched into a
lengthy monologue about Moolak, an Eskimo salmon fisherman. Since Oscar was not
a proponent of brevity, he described in intricate detail how Moolak caught what
seemed to be a few million salmon. But while Oscar was droning on, a burst of
noise arose spontaneously around Top Cat.

“Top Cat gonna sing,” Mary trilled.

“That right. He sound better than Brother James
Brown,” Saul added.

Top Cat strutted and shimmied to the center of the room as
if possessed by an orchestra of demons. His whole body danced and shook, and
the class deferred to his assumption of an inalienable right to the microphone.
Something had moved Top Cat.

“Do you need any music. Top Cat?” I asked.

“All I need is that there mike,” he said, his
eyes closed and his lips already moving.

I gave him that there mike and sat down to enjoy the show.
Top Cat was a great showman. He threw his head back, threw out his arms,
wrinkled his face like an old raisin, and burst into a classic Otis Redding
number, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” The kid I had thought
nearly illiterate had memorized the words of a fairly complicated song and
developed a diction and sense of timing that was almost perfect. The class sat
respectfully silent while Top Cat performed. When he finished, they applauded
vigorously. Then came the flood.

Richard, who I knew damn well was illiterate, who could not
string the twenty-six letters of the alphabet together, who could not add two
and two, and who could not write his name, came striding manfully to the
microphone. Richard was terribly bashful in class and would hide his face in
his hands if I even looked in his direction. He also had developed an
infallible escape mechanism; if it looked as though I was going to involve him
in some class activity, Richard would raise his hand and ask to go to the
bathroom. On one day he had gone to the land of pee eleven times. I followed
him into the bathroom the last time and watched as Richard looked out the
window at the forest surrounding the school. He almost hemorrhaged when he saw
me looking at him. So Richard, striding to the microphone, smiling shyly and
mumbling incoherently to himself, was kind of a big thing. And old Richard
could sing like hell. His voice was high and clear, almost bell-like. He sang a
spiritual with style and emotion.

“Will the circle

Be unbroken?

By and by, Lord,

By and by.”

His brother Jasper grabbed the microphone
from Richard as soon as possible and launched into a song notable primarily for
its epic length. It was called “Alabama Moonshine.” The song went on
and on, an endless song not enhanced or flattered by Jasper’s flat,
monotonic voice or his uninspired delivery. He sang it like a Trappist chant
without life or humor, just a long, long ballad with piles and piles of
verses — like Moolak with piles and piles of salmon.

Lincoln quit crapping around long enough to sing “The
Birds and the Bees.” He was awful, but he enjoyed singing so much I
remained silent and appreciative. The class unanimously declared him to be a
lousy singer.

“Lincoln, you so bad,” shouted Big C.

“He sound like shee-t,” Saul said in a whisper,
but of course, every time Saul whispered, everyone within three miles heard
it.

“Saul cuss,” said Ethel.

“Shut up, girl,” Saul said murderously.

“I pinch your head, little man,” Ethel said
back.

“Don’t you call me little man,” Saul
warned.

“I call you little man, little man,” she
answered.

Saul started to cry. He was extremely sensitive about his
height and any mention of it would make him cry. Naturally, his classmates
taunted him unmercifully and with unrestrained cruelty.

“Little man crying.”

“Cry, little man.”

“Shut up, punks,” I yelled.

“You a punk, big man,” Samuel told me.

“Sam, I am going to pinch your head like a
pimple.” Sam talking was such a rare event that I would almost have let
him tell me to lunch on manure.

“Sam call Conrack a punk,” someone yelled.

“Sam die now.”

“Sam no die. Sam live,” said Sam, for some
reason. Meanwhile, Lincoln had not skipped a note and was finishing up his
mauled rendition of “The Birds and the Bees.”

“Want me sing ‘nother one, Conrack?”

“No, Lincoln, I can take only so much pure pleasure in
one day.”

“Pretty good, huh?”

“Great stuff, kid.”

Top Cat then gyrated to the center of the room again and
belted out another one called “Cloud Nine.” When he sat down, Ethel
and Anna teamed up for what was probably the worst duet in history. It was so
bad, and they knew it was so bad, that I did not even replay it when they were
finished. Then back to Richard, who sang eight brief words, then forgot the
rest of the song he was singing.

“You sing, Conrack?” Lincoln said.

“Doggone right, I sing. I’m a great singer. I
once worked my way through college dancing in a go-go cage and singing rock and
roll.”

“No,” the class yelled.

“Yeh,” I yelled back. “I’m such a good
singer, in fact, that I only sing for money.”

“How much?” Oscar asked.

“How much you got?” I answered.

“Three nickels,” he said.

“That ain’t enough, son. I’m used to singing
for hundreds of dollars.”

“You lie.”

“Darn right I lie.” I have a voice that sounds
like a flushing commode, and it is only under optimum circumstances that I
allow myself to be pilloried by the world for my lousy voice.

After school, Mrs. Brown rushed to my room and delivered a
long sermon.

“Singing is a waste of time, Mr. Conroy. Just a waste
of good school time. Those children love to sing. Lord, they’d sing all
day if you’d let them. They need readin’, writin’, and
arithmetic. The state requires it. If some big man from the state department
comes over here and finds your class singing, they gonna run you clean off this
island. They got textbooks. Otherwise, nobody in your room can be promoted.
Lord knows. Singing! Next thing, they’ll be dancin’ and cuttin’
up and drinking wine in school just like their parents. They gonna be just like
their parents if you don’t watch out. Drinkin’ and singin’ and
sinnin’ on Saturday night. Not going to visit the Lord on Sunday morning.
We run this school here for education’s sake. Give them seat work. Keep
them busy. We not here to have fun. We’re here to educate. We got rules to
follow.”

A major theme of mine during the year
resulted from observing the manner in which my students treated their pets and
animals in general. I was labeled squeamish when I found a toad minus his two
back legs crawling painfully along the front steps. One of the twins had
removed his back legs with two quick strokes of a knife before he entered the
school after recess. The portrait of the toad, trailing blood behind him on the
gritty steps, crawling off to die under the schoolhouse, made me mad as
hell.

“What d’you do that for, Sam?” I yelled.

“Kill ’im dead. Hee, hee, hee,” Sam
replied.

“How’d you feel if I ripped your legs
off?”

“I shoot you dead. Hee, hee, hee.”

“Man, you guys treat animals like crap. I have never
seen a bunch of people treat animals any worse in my whole life. I swear I
wouldn’t give you kids a dead flounder for a pet. You kick your dogs
around, you starve your cats, you torture squirrels, shoot songbirds, and maim
turtles. You treat animals with kindness or leave them the hell alone. If you
kill them to eat them that is fine. Killing an animal for fun is not right and
if I see it again there’s gonna be a fist fight.”

“Jes’ an ol’ frog,” someone
mumbled.

“You are jes’ an ol’ person,” I shouted
back.

“Frog ain’t good for nuttin’.”

“They’re good for eating insects,” I said.
“All animals are good for something.”

“Oscar shoot my pet dog daid,” Saul whispered
suddenly.

“No, boy. You lie.”

“No, you shoot ’im.”

“You shaddup, boy.”

“Oscar get his gun and put hole in that ol’
dog’s haid.”

“That one nasty ol’ dog.”

“Dog daid now.”

“That my dog,” cried Saul.

“That dog daid now. Ain’t nobody’s
dog,” Lincoln cackled.

“Oscar, that is a rotten, lousy thing to do. Shoot
someone’s dog.”

“Dog bad. He try to bite me.”

“I wish he’d bitten you on the throat.”

“Someone shoot all Oscar’s dogs too,” Ethel
said.

“Yeh. Two man dogs. One woman dog,” Prophet piped
up. “One dog, red dog. That my dog.”

“Who shot them, Prophet?”

“Someone shot’im daid in the head. Dog rot up in
the woods when Poppa find ’im. Ain’t got no dogs now.”

“And you shot Saul’s dog after someone shot your
dog, Oscar. That’s terrible.”

Oscar was feeling persecuted, refused to discuss the
subject further, and lowered his head as a sign that he had ended his
participation in the discussion. But this was not the only conversation I had
with the kids about their treatment of animals. Their overall treatment of
animals was deplorable or worse. Big C once picked up a large, bloated toad and
smashed it against the schoolhouse wall. One day some of the smaller kids in
Mrs. Brown’s class scoured the entire playground for insects. Whenever
they found a beetle or captured a dragonfly or grasshopper, they tore its wings
off and watched it buzz convulsively and helplessly on the ground.

I would launch into long-winded diatribes condemning
senseless violence perpetrated against helpless creatures while the class
nodded in solemn agreement. Then they would go home, chastened by the sharp
barbs of my logic, and kick the hell out of their dogs. The dogs of Yamacraw
were a special breed. Without question, they were the gauntest, mangiest,
slinkiest and most oppressed group I had ever laid eyes on. They had bred and
interbred time and again and the net result was an animal so lacking in
character or nobility that a possum looked like a racehorse in comparison. At
some houses the dogs were so drained of energy that they would bark at
strangers without lifting their heads. They were emaciated, undernourished, and
listless refuse who were alternately loved and abused by their masters. Only
Edna Graves’ dogs showed signs of enthusiasm and that was when the pack
decided to rend an unsuspecting visitor to shreds.

“You have to take better care of your dogs, gang. Most
of your dogs look like walking skeletons. You gotta fatten them up. Make them
happy. Make these miserable, wretched dogs proud and healthy.”

“My dog look a lot better than your dog, that ol’
ugly Beau,” Cindy Lou said indignantly. “Gawd, that a
funny-lookin’ dog.” She was referring to my pet dachshund I had
brought to school for a visit.

“Beau is a beautiful beast of great nobility,
Cindy,” I retorted.

“Gawd, Mr. Conrack, that dawg so skinny and long. That
dawg make me sick.”

“Beau is supposed to be skinny and long. Beau is a
dachshund.”

“I don’t know what that dawg is but he shore is
ugly.”

“You look like a dawg,” Jasper yelled at Cindy
Lou.

“Watch what you say, boy.”

“She look like dawg.” Sidney giggled.

“Watch yo’ mout’, boy.”

“Who you tell to watch yo’ mout’,
girl.”

“I tell you, that’s who, boy. You ain’t
deef.”

“Children, children, children. We must show love,
compassion, and understanding for each other,” I intoned.

“What that man say,” said Big C.

My be-kind-to-mongrel addresses usually degenerated into
these backbiting arguments with Cindy Lou making deprecating remarks about the
much-maligned Beau. I never could quite convince her that Beau was supposed to
look the way he did and was not a victim of abuse or starvation. It was Zeke
Skimberry who finally provided the means for me to carry out an experiment in
the proper treatment of pets. Two of his dogs gave birth almost simultaneously
and Zeke suddenly found himself the proud owner of not four, but sixteen dogs.
He asked me if any of my students would be interested in acquiring a new pet. I
told him I would check the following day.

“All right, gang. Very important news to give you.
Zeke Skimberry’s beloved dog Lady has sired ten lovely little puppies who
are whimpering for a good home. Now I told Zeke that none of you like dogs or
knew how to take care of them.”

“No. That not right. No, Conrack,” the cry
rose.

“I’ve seen the way you take care of dogs. Man,
I’d never give you a dog of mine.”

“No, I take good care of dawg,” shouted
Lincoln.

“Me too,” shouted Oscar.

“Since Saul’s dog was shot,” I said,
“I’m going to bring him the best dog in the litter to make up for the
one he lost. Now how many in here would take real good care of a dog if I
brought him one?” The air was full of uplifted, frantic arms. I spent
another twenty minutes defining what I meant by the proper care of dogs. Then
Mary made a list of who wanted dogs and what sex they preferred.

Oscar said, “Bring me a man dog.”

“Me too,” said Lincoln, “I want a little man
dog.”

“Don’t bring me no woman dog,” Jasper said,
“I need me a good man dawg to take huntin’.”

“What if I bring you a woman dog, Jasper?” I
asked.

“Den I shoot ’im,” he replied.

“That’s the wrong damn attitude, Jasper.
That’s exactly what I don’t want you to say.”

The next day I loaded seven man dogs and one woman dog into
a large cardboard box and delivered them to their new owners. All the
recipients seemed to take proper care of their animals and love them
passionately, and gave me progress reports from time to time. I felt that by
introducing these hardy, durable Skimberry hounds into the island strain, some
healthy, Darwinic principle would be served. Many months later I went by a
house and stopped to admire one of the dogs I had transported to the island. He
had acquired all the negative characteristics of his peers and his listlessness
and general appearance caused me to regret my condemning these dogs to such a
life. But, before my melancholy could reach epic proportions, the dog, in a
flash of former glory, shot out of his resting place under the house and bit me
on the boot.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 6

On a Friday afternoon just before three
o’clock and the arrival of the bus, I stood in the middle of the room
having a bull session with the class. Top Cat was telling me about Saturday
night on Yamacraw, when all the black people gathered in the boxlike building
on the West River, danced to the music of James Brown and his Famous Flames,
jumping a new type of jive until early in the morning. “It’s so much
fun, Mr. Conrack.” I promised to make it one Saturday night, but that my
new wife would not approve of my absence on a weekend just yet. Anna, the
small, delicately featured sister of Saul who rarely spoke but who possessed
one of the brightest, most inquisitive minds in the class, was copying a witch
out of a book. The witch, of course, instantly summoned up visions of Halloween
and those lost nights from my childhood when I would leave my house sporting
the casual work clothes of a ghost or Frankenstein monster. I was curious about
the traditions of Halloween on the island, and especially what modifications or
exaggerations had evolved over the years. Since the kids believed as fervently
in ghosts or witches as I believed in Chrysler motors, I imagined that
Halloween was a much more macabre and meaningful night to them than it was to
me. Imagine wandering out into the Yamacraw night, with the spirits and
graveyards astir with disinterred fury, and the witches congregating in wicked
clusters around the funeral sites of souls long dead and resurrected for a
single night. God, I was fired up to hear about Halloween on Yamacraw.

“What are you cats gonna be doin’ on October
thirty-first?” I asked satanically.

“Nuttin’,” Prophet answered without
flinching.

“C’mon, man. There is something going on October
thirty-first. A holiday where we go from door to door with bags in our grubby
little hands. Well. What holiday am I talking about?”

They all simply stared at me with their inscrutable
expressions that collectively said that they were in the hands of a madman who
asked impossible questions.

I became more animated. Every time they did not respond to
some obvious question I handed them, I always thought that it was simply
because I was not explaining it adequately or that I was not elaborating
properly on the given theme. Articulation was not a personal forte, and I often
had to backtrack, slow down, or repeat something again and again before they
caught the gist of what I said. Since it was inconceivable to me that Halloween
was not as much a part of their vocabulary as it was of mine, I felt that I had
obfuscated the high festival of witchcraft with a combination of too much talk
and too much bull. Finally I said, “What are you going to do on
Halloween?”

“Nuttin’,” said Prophet.

“Nuttin’,” said everyone else.

“What do you usually do on Halloween?”

“Nuttin’,” came the answer again.

“Wait a minute. You mean to tell me you have never
dressed up as a ghost and gone out trick-or-treating?”

“Man crazy,” Frank said.

“Triggertricking?” someone asked.

“I ain’t dress up no ghost clothes,” said
Cindy Lou,

“You have never gone out with a bag, dressed up in a
costume, knocked at people’s doors, said ‘trick or treat,’ and
had them give you candy?”

“Naw,” Top Cat replied.

“That is ridiculous.” I was amazed. “That is
un-American and is completely ridiculous. Halloween is one of the truly great
parts of being a kid. Running around a neighborhood, soaping up people’s
windows, collecting big bags of candy. Those are great memories.”

“What he say?” Ethel questioned Cindy Lou.

“He didn’t say nuttin’,” Cindy Lou
answered.

“Well, I’ll have to check into this stuff. No
life is complete without a little trick-or-treating in it.”

When I arrived home that evening, Bernie was sitting in the
living room talking with Barbara. Three teachers together, by definition, means
that the talk centers around events in the classroom and at school. I told them
that I had just learned that none of my students had participated in that great
celebration of life and after-life, Halloween.

“Why don’t you bring them over to Beaufort for
Halloween?” Barbara asked.

“Bring them over and they can come to the Halloween
party we’re having at my school. Hell, bring them over early and they can
go to the carnival, then ride on a float in the parade.” Bernie’s
voice grew louder.

“Where will they stay?” I asked.

“I’ll get them places to stay. My PTA is coming
along fine this year. They are ready to go. To do something. The kids can stay
in the houses of the parents.”

“Bernie, you are not living in Harlem. You are living
in Port Royal, South Carolina, an area where white people historically have,
shall we say, looked down upon black people.”

“You forget one thing, my boy. They love me. They
think that Bernie Schein is a genius. And do you know what, Conroy?” Here
he whispered low, intimately: “They are absolutely correct. I am a
genius.”

“You are an asshole,” I whispered back, “but
you have a great idea, my lad.”

On Monday, I unveiled the master plan to the kids. I told
them we would dress up in costumes, get bags with pictures of pumpkins on them,
and hit every house in Beaufort for candy. I related my own personal Halloween
history for them: two years as Casper, the friendly ghost, two years as a hobo,
one year as Frankenstein. I did not tell them that one year my best friend and
I put soot on our faces and went disguised as black minstrels.

Then I recounted the houses of the truly generous people of
the world who prepared for Halloween with a joyful spirit and vastness of
heart. When I lived in Florida, when Dad was shipped to the Mediterranean,
there were two elderly women with tiny hands and wrinkled faces who inhabited a
great white house with a shrub-choked garden. On Halloween, they made candy
apples and gave them out to children who came to their door. A man in Virginia,
who lived alone, gave out all-day suckers every Halloween — round,
multiflavored suckers. Halloween was a time of candy corn,
jack-o’-lanterns, candy kisses, peanut-butter cups, bubble gum, Fig
Newtons, soapy windows. I tried to tell about Halloween and what it represented
to me — a great ritual of childhood when the world for a single night
opened its doors and its coffers of candy and fun and happiness.

“Can you go to Beaufort for Halloween? It is this
Friday, and we are going to have to work fast.”

“Yeah.” everyone could go. There was no
problem.

“O.K. Everybody is going to have to get a note from
his parents that says, ‘I give my permission for so and so to go to
Beaufort for Halloween.’ The big shots demand that I get this note in case
any of you die at the shock of being under the Big Lights in Beaufort. Bring
your notes in tomorrow so we will be ready to go.”

“What boat you take us out?” Frank asked.

“I don’t have a boat yet. I am leaving the island
this afternoon to find a boat.”

“How big?”

“Look, gang, it ain’t going to be no aircraft
carrier or battleship.”

Later I went in and told Mrs. Brown about this superb
brainstorm. I expected her to praise me profusely, tell me what an outstanding
job I was doing, and offer to help me in any way possible. I would blush
modestly, shuffle my right foot back and forth over an imaginary mark on the
floor, lower my head, and say, “Aw, shucks,” or something as
appropriate.

“No, you cannot go,” she said simply.

“Why the hell not?” I asked incredulously.

“These children don’t need trips. They need
fundamentals. They need drill and more drill.”

“Mrs. Brown, that is what you think they need.
It is not what I think they need. It is not what I think they need and since
those eighteen children are my responsibility and since it is up to me to
decide how best to educate them, I am going to take them to Beaufort for
Halloween.”

“I am the principal.”

“I was the principal for a while in this school. And
did you notice, Mrs. Brown, that I did not interfere with the way you conducted
your classes or how you treated your kids? I did not constantly remind you,
‘I am the principal.’ I acted as if neither of us was in charge, but
as if we were equals trying to get a job done under very trying circumstances.
I admire you very much for having taught on this God-forsaken island, but I am
going to give these kids the experience of spending Halloween the way the rest
of the kids in America spend it. If you want to file a complaint, then file it.
We are heading off this island Friday. If you want to come along and chaperone
this trip, then that is just dandy. If not, then that’s dandy
too.”

“I am the principal and I am in charge of this
school.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

That afternoon I left the island by boat. I had told Zeke
to meet me at four o’clock. I also told him to wrack his brain to figure
out where I could find a boat large enough to transport twenty people off
Yamacraw. Had the government boat been functional, no problem would have
existed for me. But since it was going on the second month in drydock, it did
not look as though Yamacraw was to have daily transportation for several more
weeks.

When I reached Alljoy Landing, Zeke awaited me with his
truck and the boat trailer. On the way to his house, he told me that Ed
Samuels, a black man who headed up the local Office of Economic Opportunity,
owned a boat large enough for my purposes. I drove to Beaufort, talked with Mr.
Samuels, begged for charity and cooperation, got the boat after only a little
bit of cajolery, then went to see Bernie.

“How are you doing with the parents?”

“Two ladies have already offered to house four of the
kids. There are three more solid possibilities. Leave it to Bernie Schein, my
good man. I also called an assembly of all the kids in the school, told them
about the island, its problems, and then informed them that the Yamacraw kids
are coming for Halloween.”

“Good man, Bernie. Did you mention to the parents the
minor fact that these kids are black?”

“No, I do that tomorrow.”

“Bernie, you are an idiot.”

“Of course I told them they’re black. That was
the first thing I told them. Then I shot them the bill of goods, the patented
sales pitch that once made me the ‘Top Tiger’ salesman of the
Southeast when I sold sewing machines one summer. I just remembered what the
district manager of Singer sewing machines used to tell me: ‘B ernie,
throw enough shit against the wall and some of it’s bound to stick.’
Well, it stuck today when I talked to those ladies.”

“So you think housing is no problem?”

“None whatsoever. Did you get the boat?”

“It’s picking the kids up at eight o’clock
in the morning this Friday. Can you arrange for people to pick them
up?”

“Already done. A group of VISTA workers are going to
meet them.”

“Great. Now, Bernie, if anything goes wrong I’m
going to be forced to become physically violent with you.”

“You won’t lift a finger, because you know I can
whip your ass.”

All was proceeding well. The major problems seemed solved
by Tuesday morning. I walked into class, a jubilant and triumphant conqueror of
obstacles.

“We got houses to stay in and we got a boat to ride
in,” I shouted, as I walked in the front door. “We are heading for
the big city on Friday for a weekend of witchcraft and candy-chomping. Now,
everybody, hand in your permission slips from your parents.”

Naturally no one moved.

“If you forgot your permission slips, I am going to
strangle every damn one of you.”

All eyes turned downward. No one looked at me, no one
smiled at me, and no one hinted that they might be moved to talk to me.

“What is wrong, gang? Before I start beating heads, I
want to know what’s wrong.”

“Ain’t goin’,” said Frank.

“What do you mean, ‘ain’t goin? Of course
you’re goin’. We are all goin’. We are going to have fun and
learn things and is just goin’ to be great.”

“Not goin’ nowhere,” Mary said.

“Be right here,” Cindy Lou mourned.

“All right, gang. Listen up.” Here, they at least
raised their eyes a little bit. “As you know I am not used to the way
things work around this goofy island. Right?” They nodded. “Yesterday
everyone was keyed up to stash up on candy in Beaufort. I mean, you were going
wild, going absolutely ape-crap about going to town, about spending the night
of the island. Now everyone looks like they buried their mother last night.
What happened?”

“Can’t go,” Sallie Ann finally said.

“Can’t go,” Saul said.

“Can’t go,” Cindy Lou said.

“What in the hell do you mean ‘can’t
go’? Of course you can go. We are going. You mean to tell me that none of
your parents are going to let you go trick-or-treating? I just think
that’s crap.”

“Conrack curse,” Sidney said.

“My grandma just laugh when I say we goin’,”
Frank said.

“My momma just say no,” Saul said.

“Your momma is the cook, Saul. She likes me. I wash
dishes for her.”

Like an avenging angel, I dashed for the kitchen and
confronted Mrs. Wyler with the accusation that she was holding back the
relentless pace of education; that it was criminal for her to prevent Saul and
Anna from benefiting from the fruits of travel and experience.

“Yassuh,” she said, “they can go.”

“Please don’t call me yassuh, Mrs. Wyler. Call me
Pat.”

“Yassuh, Mr. Pat.”

“Jesus, Mrs. Wyler. Just Pat.”

“O.K., Pat.”

I ran back to tell Saul and Anna that I had won permission
from their mother.

“No,” said Saul. “She just tell you that.
She not let us go.”

“She just told me you could go.”

“She tell you that so you not bodder her.”

I zipped back to the kitchen again, breathing like a
dragon, unable to fathom the game I was playing, unable to figure out what
exactly was happening.

“Mrs. Wyler, Saul just told me that you agreed to let
him go just to get me off your back. Is that true?”

“Yassuh.”

“Pat, Mrs. Wyler, please. Can Saul and Anna come with
me to Beaufort?”

“No, suh.”

“Of course, they can come to Beaufort. They’ll
have a ball. It’ll be good for them. There is no reason on earth why they
can’t go.”

“They can’t go because I say they can’t
go.”

“A good reason,” I agreed. I paused, trying to
approach the argument from a different perspective. “What if I told you,
Mrs. Wyler, that I was going to kick the hell out of you if you didn’t let
them go?”

“Then my husband shoot you dead.”

“Ah! An excellent response. Then you can be assured I
will not lay a single pinky on you. Let me just ask you one question, Mrs.
Wyler. What can I say to you or how can I convince you to let your children
cross the river for Halloween?”

“Nothin’. They ain’t goin’. None of the
chillun on the island goin’.”

“I am going to hound the hell out of you people, Mrs.
Wyler. I am going to get those kids off this island. We are going to Beaufort
for Halloween.”

Angry and frustrated, I went back to the classroom and told
Saul that he was going to go home, sit in the middle of the kitchen, beat his
fists against the floor, scream, rant, and weep hysterically until his mother
granted permission for him to go to Beaufort. I told every child who sat before
me that one plan and one plan only was in effect: they were going to make the
lives of their parents so miserable and unbearable that the parents would throw
them on the boat on Friday in utter desperation.

“Your parents might beat you to bloody pulps,” I
raved. “They may stomp on you and swat you with hickory sticks. They may
put you outside with the chickens and the hogs, but we are going to Beaufort
for Halloween. Now, Mary, tell me what you’re gonna do when you bust in
your door tonight.”

“Ain’t gonna do nothin’,” she
answered.

“My momma kill me if I say sumpin’,” Jasper
said.

“You tell ’em, Conrack. Not me tell
nothin’,” said Ethel.

“O.K. I will tell them. At lunch time I am going to
every house on this island and talking to every parent on this
island.”

Then I paused and reflected on what Ted Stone and Mrs.
Brown had told me about the people. Mrs. Brown had pictured the people as a
savage, blood-thirsty leftover from African tribes. Ted put his distrust of the
island blacks into an epigram: “Can’t trust a nigger when your
back’s turned” I did not put much stock in either source, but both of
them had had far more extensive dealings with the people than I had. In fact, I
had met very few of the parents, much to my discredit. I do not have genuine
self-confidence in walking up to a stranger and carrying on a conversation. And
every time I attempted to make a friend among the adult blacks, I was put of by
an unassailable barrage of the unremitting yassuhs.

I asked, “Now, gang. If I go running up to your house
real fast . . . No, let me say it differently. If I walk to your home
unannounced and uninvited … No. There ain’t no chance hat I am
going to get shot, is there?”

“No, Conrack,” Frank said with mild disgust.
“My grandma shoot Brown dead. But she no shoot you.”

“No,” the class agreed.

“O.K. I believe you. But if I end up picking buckshot
out of my behind, I may have to whip some fanny.”

At twelve the kids rushed out to the playground. I informed
Mrs. Brown as gently as possible that I needed to see a few of the parents
during recess.

“Do you have written permission from the
superintendent of schools?” she asked majestically.

“No, ma’am.”

“You are being paid by the state of South Carolina for
recess time and class time. You are required to be present on the school
grounds at all times.”

“Yes, ma’am. I would hate to jeopardize that big
salary I’m getting, but I really have to see some of the
parents.”

She shook her head negatively and kept repeating over and
over that she could not grant authority for me to leave the school rounds
without written permission from a loftier source.

“See you, Mrs. Brown. Let’s argue
later.”

I went out to the car, started it up, then headed for the
house where Frank, Big C, Samuel, and Sidney resided under the iron rule of
their grandmother, Edna Graves. Edna’s reputation went before her. I heard
her grandchildren talk about her with deference, almost adoration. She was
reputed to have the best garden on the island, and other residents went to her
or advice about the best time for planting and harvesting. A rumor, persistent
and enlightening, said that she and her husband made some of the best moonshine
in lowcountry during the bootleggers’ heyday. I went to Edna first because
I knew if I could sway her, I would have won half the island.

Her house was gray and neatly situated beneath a tall oak.
Pigs rooted behind her house and chickens fluttered nervously as I entered the
yard. I fluttered nervously as I saw a pack of foaming hounds emerge from under
the house to challenge my entry into the yard. There were a lot of teeth
showing in that yard. I was muttering, “Here, boy. Nice doggie. Good boy.
Don’t you bite me, you goddam son of a bitch.” I then started yelling
at the dog to keep away from me. A clothesline pole stood in the middle of the
yard, a couple of feet away from where I stood. With a frantic bound, I leaped
up on that pole and sat perched precariously as the pack closed around me,
jumping and snapping at my dancing heels.

Then I heard Edna coming down the steps, swinging a broom
over her head, shouting at the dogs and scattering them in six directions. She
looked at me on the pole and in a voluminous voice — powerful,
masculine, and incredibly loud — she bellowed, “What’ch you
doin’ up on that pole, man?” Then she bent double laughing. “Ha,
ha, ha! Lord, you look funny up on that pole.”

My dignity was more than a little ruffled. I dropped from
the pole and tried to assume a more professional air.

“Your dogs chased me up here,” I said with
solemnity.

“Well what you want from Edna?”

“I would like to talk to you about your grandchildren
who are in my class at school.”

“Oh Gawd,” she said loudly.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh Gawd. Oh Gawd Almighty. You is Mr.
Conrack.”

“My name is Pat Conroy.”

“Oh Gawd, Mr. Conrack. My grands talk about you all de
time. They come home and say to me, ‘Mama, you know what Mr. Conrack say
today.’ Oh Gawd, my grands love Mr. Conrack. So that’s who you are.
The white schoolteacher.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh Gawd. O-o-oh-h Gawd. I been wantin’ to dress
up and meet you at the schoolhouse. People say you is a wonnerful teacher.
Lord, I hear some mighty nice words about you from a lot of people.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Graves. I appreciate that. I really
do. But I have come to talk to you about …”

“Oh Gawd, what we doin’ talkin’ out here.
Come into my house and I fix you some coffee whiles we talk.”

“I don’t have time, Mrs. Graves.”

“Call me Edna Mr. Conrack.”

“Call me Pat, Edna.”

“Pat is a boo-tiful name, Mr. Conrack.”

“Thank you, Ms. Graves.”

“Now,” she said, appraising me closely,
scrutinizing every feature on my face. Hers was a beautiful, strong, wrinkled
face with warm, powerful eyes. “Now, what you want, Mr. Conrack?”

“Mrs. Graves, I want to take your grandchildren to
Beaufort for Halloween. I have a boat to take them over in; I have places for
them to stay. Everything is set up and taken care of. The children will be well
chaperoned. They will have a great time. It will be an educational experience
for them that will do them a lot of good. I have the whole trip set up and now
the only thing I need from the parents and grandparents is permission. If
y’all don’t give me permission to take the kids, it’s just going
to ruin everything.”

Edna continued to study me intently as I talked. Her stare
was penetrating and a slight smile played on her lips. She did not seem to be
listening to a word I said.

Finally she spoke. “Gawd, you is a nice-lookin’
teacher.”

“What did you say?”

“You is a fine-lookin’ teacher, a
fine-lookin’ man. Ain’t you just a fine-lookin’ man,
now.”

“Edna, I swear this is one of the strangest moments in
my life. I am askin’ you about the Halloween trip.”

“Gracious, those chillun didn’t tell me what a
fine-lookin’ white teacher. You look like a man I see on television. He
come on ‘Love of Life,’ and Lawd, do I love dat man. I watch
‘Love of Life’ ever single day, Mr. Conrack.”

“That’s nice, Mrs. Graves.”

“You watch it too?”

“No, ma’am. I’m teaching then.”

“Oh Gawd. Well now, Linda had gone way from Edward.
Left him clean to go with that doctor fella, Steve. Steve is so nice. Gawd, he
is a nice man. Edward been drinkin’ a little too much and runnin’
around with Betty. Betty’s man done die the year befo’ in a bad
wreck. Steve tried to fick him up, but he too far dead to get fick. Oh Lawd,
those people all in a mess. Linda got something bad wrong with her
too.”

I looked at Edna as she related the soap-bubbly plot of her
favorite program and it suddenly struck me that a hell of a lot more people
derived dramatic pleasure from the plight of Linda and Doctor Steve than ever
derived it from Hamlet and Ophelia. The idea intrigued me so much that
“Love of Life” was the Shakespeare of the late twentieth-century
masses that I lost the momentum and indignation which was with me when I
charged into the yard. Finally, I got her back on the subject.

“Mrs. Graves, will you just tell me why you won’t
let your grandchildren go to Beaufort with me?”

Her eyes hardened suddenly and she shifted her weight from
one foot to the other and raised a long, callused index finger toward me.

“ ’cause I know the river. I lose three
fam’bly in the river. They drop in the water and sink like rock to the
bottom. When they come up, they swell like toadfish. I been libbin’ on
Yamacraw for seventy plus seven more years and I ain’t gonna lose no
grands to that river. You young and you don’t know the river. I is old and
see what it can do. Dat river can eat a man. None of my chillun goin’
along wit’ you.”

“I finally understand what the problem is, Mrs.
Graves. And I am glad you told me. What I have to convince you of is this.
Nothing is going to happen to the children. I promise you that. I give you my
word that nothing is gonna happen. They will be with me and they will be my
responsibility. I am going to take care of them. We are going to have the best
time these children have ever had.”

“What kind of boat you got? They ain’t going on
your boat.”

“I’ve got a big boat and a shrimp-boat captain to
drive it.”

“Oh Gawd, that’s good.”

“Can they go?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” she said, with a certain perceptible degree
of finality in her tone.

Then she smiled again, a mysterious, enigmatic smile that
was full of wisdom, “Love of Life,” and perhaps pain. “Gawd, you
is a good-lookin’ teacher.”

“Don’t say that, Edna. It’s not true. You
are just saying that.”

“You got such a nice face for a white
teacher.”

“For God’s sakes, Edna, please cut it out. I feel
like a fool.”

“Lawd, Lawd. Well, mebbe I let the oldest go. Frank
and Charles.”

“What about Sidney and Samuel?”

“No, great Lawd, no.” She stamped her foot on the
floor. “Those is bad chillun. They too bad to go on trip.”

“Why?”

“Because they is bad.”

“But Frank and Charles can go.”

“If the weather be good.”

“It will be great. Could you write a permission
slip?”

“What dat you say?”

“Could you sign a piece of paper for me that I can
show to Mrs. Brown?”

“That debbil woman.”

“Pardon me.”

“That damn colored woman at the schoolhouse. She the
debbil herself.”

“Mrs. Brown is a pretty nice woman, Edna. You just
gotta get to know her.” I was not expecting this vehement denunciation of
my colleague, nor did I know exactly how to change the subject tactfully.

“You don’t know that debbil woman. She know. She
never set one foot in this yard ’cause she know that I’ll use Betsy
if I have to.” Edna had suddenly turned into a madwoman.

“Ah, who is Betsy, if I may ask?”

“Betsy my good friend, Mr. Conrack. She do a lot of
talkin’ when Edna get riled.”

“Well, I don’t think we need Betsy, Edna. Give
her my love when you see her. And think about letting the twins go. They’d
really enjoy it.”

“No, the too bad. Gawd, you is a good-lookin’
white man.”

This phrase was making me extremely uncomfortable, so I
finally retorted with, “Gawd, you are a good-looking woman, Edna. A real
nice-lookin’ woman.”

“Lawd, you is too much. You is too much, Mr.
Conrack.”

The snarling pack closed in for the kill again, so Edna
waded through them with broom aflying once more and cleared a path to the
car.

I had taken the better part of an hour to convince Edna
that she should let her grandson, at least two of them, make the trip to
Beaufort. By winning Edna, I had won the island. Every parent I talked to was
hesitant, dubious, unconvinced by my protestations and plans, but all of them
eventually decided that their chillun could go “if the weather be
good.”

Naturally, the weather was horrendous. On Friday morning,
the last-minute preparations with Bernie completed, Zeke put me into the water
just before seven in the morning. It was already drizzling slightly, the sky
was overcast and foreboding, and tiny whitecaps were forming on the river
surface. “Suck,” I said to myself a the boat headed into Bull Creek.
I looked toward the sky and demanded fairness from the Great Weatherman. The
nearer I got to Yamacraw the worse the weather became. Barbara and I had spent
the previous evening in a five-and-dime store picking out Halloween masks for
my students. I had worked them into a frenzy in the days preceding our exodus
from the island. Halloween was going to be the greatest event in the history of
the world; we were going to have more twenty-four-carat fun than any group in
the long history of mankind. The masks Barbara picked out ranged from the
ludicrous to the macabre. Some were vampires, others were monstermen, and still
others mad scientists and ghouls. Barbara also selected eighteen heavy-duty,
witch-inspected, certified Halloween bags to put the candy in. Everything was
planned to perfection. As much logistics went into this trip as went into the
planning of D-Day, or so I thought. As I rode over that morning, I thought the
goddam weather was sabotaging me.

As I pulled in sight of the public landing, I saw the whole
class huddled under an oak tree near the row of sheds where the islanders
stored their fishing and shrimping paraphernalia. Joe and Jim came down to help
me tie up the boat. Mrs. Brown, who relented the day before the trip by
canceling her classes and declaring it a state law that the principal of the
school must accompany every school-sponsored trip, stood ponderously on the
bank herding the children together as if she were shepherding a flock of
recalcitrant sheep. Miss Glover, the crippled teacher of forty years, had asked
me on Tuesday if she could come along as a chaperone. I told her I would be
delighted if she would come. We were becoming very good friends despite the
warnings that she would use her powers of darkness on me before the year was
over. As I walked up the dock, I saw Miss Glover lowering at Mrs. Brown, her
avowed and eternal enemy.

A few of the parents were milling around the ring of
children, looking at the sky and shaking their heads negatively. The weather
seemed to worsen as each moment passed. One of the parents said to his child,
“Don’t think you should make this trip. Weather no good.”

“The weather is fine,” I broke in. “The
weather is going to be perfect. Listened to the weather repot this morning and
it said hat the sun was going to break out about ten o’clock this morning.
Relative humidity about fifty-eight per cent. Temperature a very nice and
satisfying seventy degrees. Looks like it is going to be perfect weather for
the trip. Things clearing up already.”

I then passed out masks and bags to all the kids. Before I
finished meting out the bags, Richard was poking Lincoln in the belly because
Lincoln had coveted Richard’s vampire mask and subsequently absconded with
it. A few other minor skirmishes broke out over the masks but peace eventually
reigned over all.

Only three of the kids were not present. Samuel, Sidney,
and Prophet were not among the ones chosen by the elders of the island to cross
the waters with me, but I could not mourn over the fate of those who remained.
I was damned nervous about the boat that was to transport us to the mainland.
The captain promised that his craft would be moored to the Yamacraw dock at
eight o’clock.

At nine o’clock he boat puttered into sight at the
edge of Ramshorn Creek. The entire congregation around me groaned when they saw
the boat; it looked as if it had been designed and constructed during the
Peloponnesian War. It creaked and lurched up to the dock like an arthritic old
man, wheezing and coughing a diesel asthma that appeared incurable. The boat
looked like part of a ghost fleet, a mothballed potpourri of poor design. The
captain, whom I had not met, stared confidently down at all of us. Then he
commanded that we lead the kids into the ship’s hold. He made no pretense
of hiding the fact that he would rather be doing other things and that this
trip was an infringement on his valuable time. I led the gang quickly into the
greasy, noxious hold and prayed silently that none of them would die of carbon
monoxide on the trip over. Mrs. Brown shouted at them, tugged at their ears,
and crammed them into the narrow passageway leading to the bowels of the boat.
The hold could comfortably seat four people. Mrs. Brown crammed fifteen
students into it.

“Ain’t no air down here, Conrack,” Lincoln
cried.

“Gonna puke, Conrack,” another shouted.

“Lord, we all gonna die,” Mary shouted.

Joe and Miss Glover went aboard. Jim and I jumped into my
boat and headed for Bluffton, where Zeke Skimberry was waiting to pull the boat
out of the water. I was driving a load of kids in my car and I wanted to be
damn sure that the VISTA workers were at the appointed rendezvous point on
Hilton Head.

So far, things were running fairly smoothly, I thought. I
wanted perfection, for I knew if there was any accident or mishap connected
with this voyage, then I never again would be able to convince the parents to
let me take their children from the protected embrace of the island. I looked
back, saw the boat leave the dock and the parents waving, and realized that I
had succeeded in the first major step of the operation: my students were no
longer bound to the island and had begun what was perhaps the greatest
adventure of their lives.

Then my great drama, directed brilliantly for a time,
lapsed into farce. The first thing Zeke said to me when I got to Bluffton made
me realize that the supreme allied commanders in the county office knew all
about the trip.

“Bennington has a bus ready to take the kids to
Beaufort. He’s sending the bus down here to the landing.”

“Why is he doing that, Zeke?”

“I think Ted Stone called him up on the radio and said
that you didn’t have any transportation for the kids.”

“Did he think we were going to walk the thirty miles
to Beaufort?” I asked.

“Don’t know, Pat. Just know that old Foxy is
sending a bus down here in about ten minutes.”

“We gotta stop that damn bus, Zeke.”

We loaded the boat on the trailer hurriedly. Zeke gunned
the blue pickup down Alljoy Road.

“I’ve had ’er up to a hundred on this road
before,” Zeke said matter of factly.

“That’s great, Zeke.”

We skidded in front of Bluffton High School. 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. Anyway, the kid told me that
“Mr. Ezra” had called his school (the black high school) and ordered
the principal to have a kid out of class for the purpose of delivering the
Yamacraw children to their proper destination in Beaufort. In a towering rage I
told the driver to tell Bennington to stick it up his behind, to attend to his
business as supervisor of instruction, and to keep his nose out of my life.

My car was parked at the Skimberrys’ house. Ida fixed
Jim and me a hot cup of coffee while Zeke told a few Bennington stories. Jim
and I departed soon and drove rather quickly over to the marina on Hilton Head
where the VISTA workers had promised to meet die boat. As I rounded the curve
to the marina, I saw in one swift glance that the boat had landed precisely on
schedule, that the children and chaperones were safely grounded, and that no
one had been drowned, lost, or fumigated on the way over. I saw in another
glance that no VISTA workers were there to meet the boat.

Mrs. Brown perceptive analyzed the situation by saying,
“We don’t have no wheels on our feet, son.”

I put in a phone call to my dear, steadfast friend, Bernie
Schein. In a calm, constrained, rational tone I asked Bernie a single question,
“Where the hell are those VISTA workers, you goddam son of a
bitch?”

Bernie, the acknowledged master of all situations, whose
coolness and vision under pressure brought him admiration from all quarters,
said in a quiet, modulated tone, “Those stupid bastards promised me
they’d be there.”

Somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, four government cars
driven by idealistic young VISTAs stood in formation facing the rising tides
and looking for the boat from Yamacraw Island. So in the prodigious planning
and mapping out of strategy during the past week, the one breakdown of
logistics came in transportation overland.

Mrs. Brown said, “It don’t look like very much
planning went into this trip.”

I leaped back into the car and drove furiously back to the
black high school from whence the rejected driver had come. I arrived at the
high school, sprinted into the principal’s office, and demanded to know
why a bus was not waiting for the poor children a Yamacraw Island. No less a
person than Ezra Bennington himself, the grand patriarch of Bluffton, had
requested a bus to meet the boat from Yamacraw. Why, I demanded, was this bus
not forthcoming?

“You sent him back,” the secretary, nonplussed,
answered me.

“A monumental mistake. My fault, of course, but I have
got to have that driver.”

“I will get him for you, sir.”

The secretary was flashing me one of those looks I
sometimes notice I get from strangers. By nature I am high-strung and animated,
but when frustration confronts me head on, I degenerate into a demoniac. It is
harmless and only a little schizoid, but often intimidates people.

When the driver, the beautiful, enchanted prince of a
driver, arrived in the principal’s office, I rushed him to his bus and
told him to follow me. Once again I was airborne between Bluffton and Hilton
Head Island. The driver, whose name was Robert, seemed to grasp the urgency of
the situation and headed for the marina as quickly as his regulator would
allow.

At the marina everybody mobbed my car, shouting, chanting,
wailing about something that I could not fathom amidst the gibberish. Finally,
Joe Sanfort got across to me that Mary had hurt her knee by falling on the
asphalt. I got out of the car and ran over to where Mary was sitting.

“Little skinned knee never hurt anybody, Mary. You
just been living on that island where there ain’t no cement,” I said,
walking over to her. She was covering her knee with her hand, and dark, red
blood oozed between her fingers. I asked her to move her hand so I could see
how badly she was hurt. She moved her hand and I was jarred by the sight of
Mary’s bloodstained but ivory white kneecap. A flap of skin lay smashed
against the right side of her bone.

“That girl just don’t have any meat on her bones,
that’s why the cut looks so bad,” Mrs. Brown intoned. “Lawd, if
a high wind come along, we’d have to put rocks in that girl’s pockets
to keep her from blowin’ away.”

I knew that Mary was extremely sensitive about her weight.
She had grown tall quickly and her body had not filled out proportionately to
her height. Almost as tall as I, she had a beautiful face and one day would be
a stunning woman. A shy thirteen, she hated being teased about her weight. She
gave Mrs. Brown a look that would have melted a submarine.

The bus drove up and all the kids and chaperones piled on,
the kids wearing their masks and clutching their bags. I gave the driver
instructions on how to get to Bernie’s school. Then Mary and I lit out for
the doctor’s office. Her knee merited immediate treatment and it took no
specialist to realize that her wound would require quite a few stitches. For
the sixth time that day, I was thundering down the Bluffton road.

We headed for Dr. Wohlert’s office. Mary knew and
trusted him. He was the only doctor around for thirty miles. He was also the
most controversial figure in South Carolina at that time. The previous year,
Dr. Wohlert had publicized the fact that many of the lowcounty blacks he
treated were worm-ridden and dying of malnutrition. Immediately after this
announcement, national magazines came out with stories about intestinal
parasites and hunger in Beaufort County. National attention was focused on
Beaufort, and her white citizens smouldered in self-righteous fury as more and
more statistics were made available, proving the doctor to be correct. He was
vilified unmercifully by the local press and residents. I had never met the
man, but many of my white friends had pictured him as a malignant tumor,
demented, loco, a drug addict, an incompetent, a carpetbagger, an unregenerated
liar who should have his gonads cut off and hung like two trophies in the
chamber of commerce building. Therefore, with all of this Ango-Saxon wrath
directed at him from the good solid citizens of the county, who thought blacks
and chimpanzees were somehow parallel in evolutionary development, there was an
excellent chance that Wohlert was a damn good guy.

The blacks from Yamacraw loved him. Ted Stone called him
“a Communist trained in Havana.” Whatever he was, I found it
extraordinary that he could still be functioning in a county that had done so
much to torture and discredit him. The community pressure levied against him
would have sent me to an asylum. There was, in fact, another rumor that he was
bouncing from one crazy house to another.

Dr. Wohlert’s waiting room was filled not with
patients but with unsmiling young men and women who reacted strangely when I
broke through the door and asked if Wohlert was in. The men were long-hairs;
the women were sallow-faced, with hard eyes and yellowish lips. I realized
after a moment that they acted as bodyguards for the doctor; no one passed them
without going through a security check.

“Who are you?” one of the guys asked me.

“Who are you?” I asked back. “Look, man, I
teach on Yamacraw Island and one of my students cracked her knee open. It needs
some stitches.”

A nurse appeared from behind me, a very pleasant woman with
an amicable smile.

“Bring her in. The doctor will see her in a
moment.”

I went to the car and helped Mary into the office. The
guards loosened up when they saw Mary’s knee bone sticking out. The nurse
led us to a back room, where I sat Mary on a table. I joked with Mary a little
bit. She was beginning to worry me, since she had not uttered a single word
since her accident.

“Mary, I have seen many cases like this before when I
worked as a doctor’s aide during the Punic Wars.” I stared at her
wound with professional detachment.

“It is my opinion that Doctor Wohlert will have to cut
your leg off.”

Mary looked horror-stricken.

“It’s a joke, May. It’s just a joke,” I
quickly amended. Mary, with a majestic silence, let me know that she was not
amused.

Presently Dr. Wohlert entered the room. He moved
frenetically, eyes darting and bloodshot, hands quick and nervous, gestures
sudden and unplanned. He was a small man with a birdlike fragility about him.
His glasses were thick, is hair was disheveled and wildly amassed on a narrow,
strikingly intelligent head. His eyes caught me. The toll of martyrdom weighed
heavily on him, and the wrath of the citizen had taken a considerable toll on
his physical appearance. Without asking a single question, I could discern that
the good doctor had been through hell.

He shook my hand as if I had handed him a two-week-old
herring — no warmth, no firmness, a noncommittal handshake. I could
see that he could not make the connection between Mary and me. As briefly as
possible I explained that I was teaching on Yamacraw Island, was in the midst
of an abortive field tip, and that Mary’s knee bone had screwed things up
by popping out of her knee. Mary, meanwhile, still looked dazed and resigned to
a silent, unflinching suffering. When the doctor asked her if she was hurting,
she merely nodded her head affirmatively. His office was not a model of order,
but he found what he needed, pumped the knee full of Novocain, and began to tie
the flesh together.

When he was almost finished, he asked me a question which I
thought strange and troubling. “Have the rednecks tried to get you
yet?”

“Not yet Doctor.”

“That’s good. I hope they don’t.”

I thanked him, helped Mary off the table, and walked out to
the lobby, where I asked the nurse to send the bill to the Beaufort County
Board of Education. I figured they had more money than Mary’s parents.

We now traveled the thirty miles from Bluffton to Port
Royal in record time. The bus carrying the others had arrived a half-hour
before. An air of excitement had descended over the playground beside the
school. Each Yamacraw child was surrounded by five smiling, peppy white kids
from Bernie’s remarkable school of Port Royal.

Bernie’s school was entrenched in a white neighborhood
pocked with trailer parks and residents who had given George Wallace a heavy
chunk of support in the 1968 presidential election, but somehow, he sold the
idea of the Yamacraw expedition to the entire community. I think the good
people of Port Royal were expecting the Yamacrawans to paddle over in their
dug-out canoes, chanting in the unknown tongue to the wind god. Several of the
Port Royal sixth graders I talked to that day were disappointed because my
students did not wear bones in their noses, or carry spears to drive away enemy
warriors that might attack them on their journey back to the island. Yet the
year was 1969, and Bernie had mesmerized white parents sufficiently so that
they were accepting fifteen black children into their homes.

Bernie emerged from a cluster of giggling girls when he saw
me, raised his cigar in salute, then ran over to my car.

“You missed it, boy. You missed the greatest welcome
since Caesar returned to Rome.”

“What happened, Bernard?”

“I was in class, trying to teach, and worrying that
your ass would never show up. Then the bus drove up in front of the school. A
kid came running into my class and said, ‘They’re here!’ Well,
boy, when that kid said that, every goddam kid in this school, every single
child in this whole school, ran out of their classrooms, trampled down their
teachers, and surrounded the bus, cheering and clapping and raising hell. They
were so glad your kids made it. The Yamacraw kids peeked out their windows on
the bus, looking like the world had gone crazy. I walked through the crowd, you
know how I am, like a god among men, and got on the bus and gave the official
welcoming speech. I escorted Mrs. Brown off the bus, then Miss Glover, got my
sixth grade to lead the Yamacraw kids of and into the lunchroom. I just want to
tell you one thing, son. It was the greatest, the most spontaneous
demonstration of excitement I have ever seen.”

Evidently my students had been completely won over by their
peers from Port Royal. I saw Oscar and Big C riding around the basketball court
on brand-new bicycles. A couple of the other boys were teaching the mainland
kids the island’s perverted version of basketball. The girls were busy
decorating the floats that would be used in Bernie’s second annual
Halloween parade. A spirit of good-will seemed to reign over the proceedings, a
shrill, Fat Tuesday drone of voices and cries of children pierced the air. PTA
mothers with soft rumps and good smiles manned carnival booths. Saul came
strutting up to me carrying a yo-yo.

“I pop two b’loons to get it,” he
bragged.

“You couldn’t pop a paper bag, Saul.”

“Yah! I pop two b’loons with two darts.”

Lincoln breezed up with a plastic Jesus he had won by
knocking milk bottles down with a baseball. Cindy Lou ran up to tell me,
“That man Bernie is crazy man. Lawd, he so crazy. He stick his ol’
ugly tongue out at me.”

“Stick your ol’ ugly tongue back at
him.”

So there was this great carnival. Bernie had drilled his
students well. They treated the Yamacraw kids like visiting royalty. I thought
later that perhaps Bernie and I had concocted a shallow arena for the
betterment of race relations, that what we had done was better for us (some
crowning achievement we could point to and say, “Look what we have done
for the improvement of mankind”) than for the people of Port Royal or the
children of Yamacraw. We wanted to do so much, wanted to be small catalysts in
the transformation of the disfigured sacramental body of the South, which had
sired us. I was a cynic who needed desperately to believe in the salvation of
mankind or at least in the potential salvation. Bernie was an optimist who
needed proof that his philosophy of joy and the resurrection of the spirit was
not the delusion of a grinning Pollyanna. God, we were concerned about things:
war, prejudice, injustice, education. Together we were insufferable,
pontifical, self-righteous voices of the Eucharist, pipelines to the Almighty.
We could not be wrong, because we were young, humanistic, and full of shit.

But on this day it seemed that Bernie and I had stumbled on
something that transcended our personal preoccupations. Frank, Top Cat, Jasper,
Ethel, Richard, Lincoln, Jimmy Sue, and all the rest of the insular,
world-protected crowd that came across the river that day were having a ball. I
could see it and they told me.

When I revved up the pickup truck, decorated with red and
purple streamers and with a boat hooked onto the back, at the start of the Port
Royal Halloween parade, every one of my students clambered all over the tuck
and boat, faces hidden in soggy masks, bags saturated by the light drizzle that
had fallen all day, Top Cat leaning in the window saying hi to Barbara, Mrs.
Conrack, the strut of majorettes, the roll of drums, the lines of spectators
braving the rain, Jessica sitting in my lap, Oscar blowing his noisemaker
constantly, vigorously, and without end. All of it was surrealistic,
gray-misted, a spoof of never-never land that had little to do with Yamacraw
Island.

After the parade, I had a brief meeting with the gang, told
them to enjoy trick-or-treating, to be kind to their hosts, to remember that I
would casually kick the hell out of them if they got scratched, hurt, or
injured, and that I would meet them in front of the school the following
morning at nine o’clock. I also told them that each one of them would give
me exactly half of the candy they collected on Halloween night.

“No, Conrack. You no get nuttin’,” said
Cindy Lou.

The next morning a straight line of five cars met in front
of Port Royal Elementary School. Everyone assembled rather slowly. The weather
was not good. To avoid complete hyperbole and to describe with a fair amount of
accuracy the kind of weather the gods saw fit to plague the sea islands with on
this critical day of November the first, I would have to say that Beaufort was
experiencing a mild hurricane. Torrential rains flooded the streets and driving
winds swept though trees bent like old men. The weather will clear up, I told
everyone.

When we arrived at the dock at Hilton Head, the weather had
gotten worse. I heard Oscar, who was riding with me, lean over to Frank and
whisper, “Shee-ut, waves so big!” The boat captain had to be roused
from his house, which was near the dock. He started talking about the storm of
‘59 and the shrimp boat that had sunk and taken six men with it. Then he
mentioned the great storm of ‘52, which had splintered ships of iron and
littered a fifty-mile stretch of beach with debris. “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 the water to their
homes.

I called Bennington, told him the situation, and asked
where I could house those kids. I had to fight back an urge to ask him if we
could bring the entire group over to snooze in the luxury of his
walnut-paneled, many-columned house by the river. He was ingratiating on the
phone and said we could sleep on mats in the Hilton Head Elementary School. He
would see to it personally. I then called the sheriff and asked him to radio
Ted Stone, so he could let the parents know that the children were safe and
would be home, hopefully, the following day.

The gang bedded down in the school. A few noisemakers
sounded. Everyone ate a lot of Halloween candy. Mary sat by herself in
considerable pain. I vowed to myself that this was the last transriver venture
of which I would be a part. And the rain came down.

All of my doubts about parental
retribution for the extra day spent away from the island were dispelled when I
walked into school Monday morning. Almost every mouth in the room chomped on
pieces of Double Bubble gum, candy corn, or caramel squares. The wet sounds of
eating and chewing filled the air.

“Did you have a good time, Halloween?” I
asked.

“Oh, Gawd. We have so much fun,” Lincoln answered
first.

“That town the nicest place in de world,” Ethel
added. “All you do is knock on door and people pop their head out d’
door to give you some sweets.”

“That is sho’ a fine town,” said
Carolina.

“People so nice. Feed us so good and treat us just
fine.”

“You know what Lincoln say to the white lady we stay
with?” Oscar giggled.

“You shut up, boy,” Lincoln shot back.

“Oh, Gawd, it so funny what Lincoln say,” Top Cat
said.

“I bus’ some head good,” answered the angry
or embarrassed Lincoln. (I could not distinguish which it was.)

“The white lady she talk funny, kind of,” Oscar
began.

“I git yo’ ugly face,” said Lincoln.

“Yo’ face too ugly to get my face ugly,”
answered Oscar. “White lady talk funny and say, ‘Lincoln, how did you
enjoy the parade and carnival today at the Port Royal School?’ Now
ol’ Lincoln’s fat, ugly self was eatin’ mashed potatoes and
gravy when this lady do her talkin’ and he don’t look up no how. He
just say, ‘Yes, ma’am, I sho’ enjoy this dinner. It’s a
fine dinner.’ Lord, Mr. Conrack, I laugh myself fool when I heard that.
She ask him about the parade and he tell her he sho’ do like the
dinner.”

The entire class giggled and pointed their fingers at
Lincoln, who squirmed uncomfortably, then broke into one of his patented,
high-pitched laughs. “Oh Gawd, that lady talk so funny.”

Jasper spoke up and said, “Saul made me laugh so hard.
He walk up to this big ol’ white man readin’ a paper and say to
him,’ ‘scuse me, but you gots a place I can wash my foot?’ That
man look at him so funny.”

“You tell lie,” yelled Saul.

“You know what I say true,” retorted Jasper.

Ethel said she wanted to tell the class what she and her
group of girls saw at one particular house. “We see this man come up to
the door. Only he look like woman. He dress himself up in fish-net stockings
and a girl’s dress. He have a wig on his head and powder on his nose. He
wear the bead and high-heel shoes.”

“That so?” said Frank.

“It so if I say it so, boy.”

“Any complaints about the weekend besides the
weather?” I asked. “Did everybody treat you all right?”

“Everybody but that big fat boy at the school,”
said Top Cat.

“He bad,” said Saul.

“He big and so bad. He tell us to keep away from him
and his bike. I so scare,” said Top Cat.

“Did you tell Bernie about the fat boy?”

“No. I ‘fraid that boy kill me if I say
nuttin’ to anybody.”

“That boy mean, C’roy.”

“All the other children nice,” said Carolina.

We spent the morning recounting our trip to Port Royal. I
had the older children write down their impressions of the trip, then write
thank-you notes to Bernie and the families who housed them. Then, to split the
reverie of the mood, to shatter the spirit of exaltation over the successful
crossing of the river and the return, Mrs. Brown poked her head in the doorway,
saying “’scuse me, I’d like to have a word with your babies, Mr.
Conroy.”

Sensing that Mrs. Brown was preparing to launch a verbal
grenade but not knowing exactly how to divert the attack, I simply shrugged my
shoulders and prepared for the worst.

“Boys and girls, all of you know you are my babies,
isn’t that right?”

“Yes, mam,” came the predictable, formulated
reply.

“Now you know when we slept in the elementary school
the other night, one of you boys wet the wrestling mat.”

The boys lowered their eyes and tightened their lips into
thin lines. Mrs. Brown did not realize it at the time, but her inquisition
ended before it started, and no amount of cajolery or intimidation on her part
would wreak a confession or a betrayal from the brotherhood she now
interrogated.

“Now, babies, everybody had got to u-rin-ate.
Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the class replied again,
dutifully but suspiciously.

“And there is nothin’ wrong with a man
u-rin-atin’, is there?”

“No, ma’am.” The voices were getting lower,
angrier.

“But a man got to know when to urinate and when not to
urinate. Isn’t that right, Mr. Conroy?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Spinelessly, I had joined the
Greek chorus.

“Now, that somebody who wet the wrestlin’ mat
most prob’ly wet the bed he slept on the night before. Now mattresses in
white folks’ homes cost sometimes between fifty and one hunnert dollars.
Sometimes one hunnert-fifty dollars and sometimes even two hunnert dollars. You
can ruin a mattress by urinatin’ on it. A of us know that urine is made
out of acid. And you can imagine what aid can do to a two-hunnert-dollar
mattress. Eat right through it. Whoever it was has no reason to be ashamed.
There are plenty of weak bladders in the world. A bladder’s just like a
muscle. Some weak. Some strong. Lots of people wets the bed. Whoever that
person is, and he knows who it is, should come up to me and say, ‘Mrs.
Brown, I have a weak bladder and I’m very sorry.’ Isn’t that
right, class?”

Only this time silence reigned where there had once been
the peremptory “yes, ma’ams.” She grew angry and threatened to
flunk the child for the year if he did not confess the dire crime of bladder
weakness to her immediately. The scene was unbearable. From the reaction of the
children, I could tell who the acid-spiller was. All their heads and eyes were
directed away from Saul. So obviously protecting him by their complete
obliviousness to his presence, they were singling him out as infallibly as
though everyone in the room had stood up and shouted his name to the world.
Mrs. Brown was too absorbed in her anger to notice this. She had grown
accustomed to a system of stool pigeons whereby she retained a godlike
omniscience through her pampered, spoiled informers. Since I had forbidden
anyone in my class from going to her with information that could get another
classmate in trouble, her intelligence system had been crippled badly. Only one
student in my class fed her hot poop with any amount of regularity, and
unfortunately for Mrs. Brown, in this particular case, her most reliable
informant had also been the heinous monster who had wet the white folks’
two-hunnert-dollar mattress. Saul, to add to his innumerable problems, was not
only Mrs. Brown’s major supplier of facts concerning the strange,
incomprehensible machinations of my class, he was also a bed-wetter. When she
saw that no one was going to tell her what she desired to know, she huffed out
of my class muttering something to the effect that I had been the ruination of
discipline at Yamacraw School.

The next hour was spent attempting to stem the indignation
and rage that invariably erupted after one of Mrs. Brown’s visits. I
thanked them for not telling Mrs. Brown that it was me who wet the wrestling
mat, but even jokes failed to soothe them. I then told them that I once had a
real problem with wetting the bed and that my mother had sworn that I would wet
the bed until I was fifty years old. I described my being afraid to accept
invitations away from my house for fear of some friend waking up in the middle
of the night to find that I had sprayed his leg.

This seemed to revive them a little bit. Frank asked me how
old I was when I quit wetting the bed.

“I quit last night, Frank.”

“What you say?” asked Frank.

“I quit last night when Barbara told me she just
bought a two-hunnert-dollar mattress. I’ll tell you, gang, if you’re
gonna live with these white folks you gotta cut the flow of acid.”

“Hee, hee,” giggled Cindy Lou. “Conrack so
much a fool.”

I could neutralize the effect of Ms. Brown’s speeches
on the surface, but I could never be sure how much damage she was inflicting
under the surface, where it counted most, in the gut of one’s being, in
the soul. Nor could I forgive Mrs. Brown her little tirades. No man or woman
has the right to humiliate children, eve in the sacrosanct name of education.
No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the
sacred auspices of all school boards in the world.

I knew that the high noon between Mrs. Brown and myself was
just around the corner. The old demon, white guilt, could control me for a
while, but one factor in the composition of Mrs. Brown’s personality was
beginning to come clear in my mind, and the more clear it became, the nearer I
was to establishing a liberating, important universal truth: because a person
is black does not mean that he or she thinks black or is proud to be black. She
wished she were white, which one could interpret as an indictment of our
society. That was fine. But because the society had corroded Mrs. Brown’s
image of the black man, I did not feel sufficiently compelled to allow Mrs.
Brown to infect my students with her malady. In her own eyes Mrs. Brown felt as
though she was instilling values into the children that their likker-swilling,
devil-dancing, illiterate parents could never do. In my eyes she was the
unflinching, strong-armed proponent of white values, mores, and attitudes. It
now was breaking down into a war of eyesight.

My assimilation into the mainstream of
island life quickened after the Halloween trip, although I was not aware of it
that time. Even though one of the children suffered a relatively serious injury
and I failed by twenty-four hours to transport the group back to the island on
time, the power of the children’s unanimous, animated support of the
venture erased any reluctance the parents might have experienced. For days my
class could talk of nothing else but Port Royal.

“I sure do like that town over yonder, Mr.
Conrack,” said Jasper. “All you do is rap the door and some man pop
his head out to give you the candy.”

“I wouldn’t try it every day of the year, Jasper.
Especially in that neighborhood you were in.”

When the letters from the Port Royal kids started pouring
in, each child who received a letter would read it in class (if he could).
Carolina, Ethel, and Cindy Lou convinced me that they had won the undying love
and admiration of the family who had housed them.

“Lawd, those people sho’ loved me, Conrack. They
thought I was so fine.”

“That’s because they don’t know any better,
Cindy.”

“That’s ’cause you don’t know
nuttin’,” she flashed back at me.

“The lady you stayed with told me that if that girl,
Cindy Lou, didn’t shut up soon, she was going to he to flush her down the
commode.”

“That not true.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Oh Gawd, man gonna drop dead.”

The residue of the entire trip left a good taste and it
proved a pungent stimulant to class activity and awareness for many months. But
I still did not really know how the parents reacted to the whole concept of
field trips as an educational experience. I knew for a fact that Mrs. Brown and
Miss Glover both believed that education was best served in the cramped
environs of the classroom, that both of them made a vast distinction between
learning and recreation, that both of them felt that education and the leather
strap went together like whiskers and catfish, and that both of them thought
the trip was a welcome vacation, but not an experience that could be counted as
having furthered the name of education.

I was yet uncertain about my own philosophy of education as
applied to the Yamacraw kids. They were not going to be candidates for a Rhodes
scholarship after having served an apprenticeship under my vigilant tutelage;
none of them would write significantly or make any conspicuous contribution to
the arts, as far as I knew. The five illiterates who were served to me like
hors d’oeuvres at the beginning of the year would still qualify for
membership in that august classification. I was slowly learning to measure the
importance of small victories. In fact, I was coming to the painful conclusion
that all my victories would seem minuscule and trivial compared to my
expectations at the beginning of the year. I was proud of Sidney and Samuel,
who could now scratch their names legibly on a piece of paper, proud of
Prophet, who could count to ten, proud of Richard, who could read the simplest
preprimer, and proud of Saul, who had learned not to cry at every taunt thrown
at him. Slowly, the awareness came to me that no matter what happened, my
struggles and efforts could not eradicate the weight and inalienable supremacy
of two hundred years: the children of slaves could not converse or compete with
the offspring of planters, the descendants of London barristers, the progeny of
sprawling, upward-climbing white America. And slavery was still a reality,
considering that none of my students grew up in homes where books flourished,
where ideas fluttered, and theories dwelt comfortably in dinner-table
discussions.

How could I compare or relate my childhood to growing up on
Yamacraw? My mother’s reading to me each night was a celebration of
language and tradition, a world of Mother Goose and lyric poetry, where Bobby
Shaftoe goes to sea and intrepid, prepubic heroes stand on burning decks. My
youth was a glut of words, a circus of ideas nurtured by parents dedicated to
diplomas and the production of professionals from the tribe of children they
sired. My youth sang the glory of books, the psalms of travel, of new faces, of
the universe of Disney animation, of Popsicle sticks and county fairs, of
parables of war spoken by a flight-jacketed father, of parables of love and
Jesus sung by a blue-eyed mother, a renegade Baptist, a converted Catholic, a
soldier of the Lord. And all the memories I had of the travels: the two-lane
highways connecting Marine bases through the swamps and cypress shadows, the
station wagon clogged with children (and a black, mongrel dog) rolling into
parochial villages past midnight, beneath the hulk of a many-columned,
stem-mouthed courthouse — a traffic light, the changing gears, the
hum of a restless engine, the pressure of Dad’s foot on the accelerator,
the children sleeping and the radio shifting night announcers and easy songs
until distance and static overcame station after station.

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
Yamacraw 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. If I let my students
leave me without altering the conditions of their existence substantially, I
knew a concrete, sightless ghetto of some city without hope would devour them
quickly, irretrievably, and hopelessly. 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.

These were the deep, serious thoughts I sometimes had to
drive from my head like flocks of pesky starlings. I was too pragmatic and
impatient to let such thoughts flog me into impotence, yet I sincerely needed a
working philosophy on which to hang my hat. After the Halloween trip, one began
to form and crystallize without my knowledge, and when I finally acknowledged
its presence, it was already a part of me: simply, that life was good, but it
was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the
preparation.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 7

That the children hated Mrs. Brown’s
guts with their complete power of hating was not readily apparent to me in the
first two months of school. The awareness came slowly, and when it finally
came, I realized they were not merely venting their frustration on a figure of
authority, but that they hated with reason and justification. At first I did
not take her speeches to the children seriously, whether she was telling them
that they smelled bad, that they were retarded, or that they would end up
alcoholics or wastrels like their parents. I did not take them seriously until
I realized how seriously the kids took them, how they suffered under this
constant humiliation, and how powerless they felt to cope with her attacks on
their basic worth and dignity. They hated her and they feared her. Because of
her size she could physically overcome any challenge raised by them. She
carried two leather straps with her. One of them she called Dr. Discipline; the
other she called Professor Medicine. The beatings she administered were not
funny.

I heard her beating her students regularly in the class
next door. Mrs. Brown’s major teaching technique was the extended scream.
Her voice constantly yelled out commands to her charges; it would rise in tempo
and volume, until finally, an adjunct to her voice, the strap against flesh
would sound, followed by the scream of the child. I heard this every day. Every
time it occurred I saw my students stiffen in their seats and listen intently
to the drama played in the next room.

I do not believe in corporal punishment, yet I did not feel
it was my place to admonish Mrs. Brown about her corrective actions. Then
through a series of events, it finally dawned on me that my students loathed
the woman. It was not long before I was caught directly in the middle of this
war, and it was not long before I had to choose sides.

I thought Mrs. Brown had one of the greatest natural senses
of humor I had yet encountered. Her manner of phrasing and inflection often
left me convulsed with laughter. I had never worked with a black teacher
before, and I appreciated her view of the white man and his world. “Gotta
go by the man,” she would say. “Gotta please the man and see him
smile. Then everything rolls along just fine.” For the first sixty days we
were real, if reluctant, allies. I did not like the strap, nor her dehumanizing
speeches to the kids, nor her constant derision of my teaching approach. But I
liked peace and I liked tranquillity to reign in a situation where only two of
us had to get along. When I told her she was principal, that a misunderstanding
on her part had projected me as the titular head of the school, the change
which came over Mrs. Brown was as noticeable as the first freeze. She now did
not make recommendations to me; she issued ultimatums. She did not give
opinions; she threw out commands, orders, and laws with the signature of
“the man” on them. Most of these I could ignore by joking about them.
I still refused to use a strap, race through textbooks the kids couldn’t
read, or give the kids hours of homework. Nor was I about to stop playing
music, showing movies, or just talking things over with my students. I had a
history of not responding well to lousy or pernicious administration, and
though I tried to tell myself that she was the boss and I would have to obey
her instructions, I would be goddamned if she was going to turn me into an
overseer instead of a teacher. As she pressured me more and more, I knew that
sometime during the year I would crack open like an egg. Time worked against
me.

One speech she delivered to the children was so nasty that
they started answering her back. She threw venom in their direction and they
spit fire back at her.

“May I have a word with your class, Mr.
Conroy?”

“Of course, Mrs. Brown.”

“It has come to my attention that some individuals
have not been brushing their teeth. Now filthy teeth smell bad and when we
don’t wash our hair or our bodies either, the smell would drive a preacher
out of church. Smelling bad at school will not be tolerated. I’m tired of
people stinkin’ in this school.”

“Better not talk so loud,” Cindy Lou said.

“What’d you say, girl?” Mrs. Brown asked
menacingly.

“She say watch out,” Mary said, almost
inaudibly.

“Don’t whisper under your breath. Shout it out so
Mr. Conroy and I can hear what’s on your mind.”

“You don’t wanna know what’s on my
mind,” someone said. They talked low and everyone kept their eyes down on
their desks, so I could not tell who was talking. Nor could Mrs. Brown.

I steered Mrs. Brown toward the door, thanked her for her
ingratiating speech, and promised her I would severely punish the whisperers in
the class. Then I launched into a speech.

“Gang, we have been getting these talks from Mrs.
Brown all year. You get too damn upset by them. Just don’t listen to what
she’s saying. Think about something else. If she wants to be a big talker,
let her talk, just don’t get involved with snapping back at her.”

“She ain’t talkin’ to you,” Frank said.
Frank’s temper was volcanic, and he was hornet-mad at this latest sermon
of Mrs. Brown.

“That’s a good point, Frank. She isn’t
talking to me, but she is talking about you and it hurts me to see you get your
feelings hurt. You may not believe me yet. You may not trust me yet. But you
can damn well believe that it pisses me off to hear Mrs. Brown talk to you like
that. There might be nothing I can do about it, but I’ll try to keep her
out of this room.”

“She ain’t got no right to say things like
that,” Cindy Lou said.

“Bitch woman,” Richard said.

“Yeah! Bitch woman.” The echo passed around the
room.

“I bet you call me bitch man behind my back,” I
said, trying to cut through the ominous, murderous atmosphere building in the
room.

“No, Conrack,” Fred said.

“I call you bitches and bastards when I get mad at you
sometimes.”

“God Almighty Jesus!” Lincoln exclaimed.

“Everyone gets mad, gang. But we have to learn when
not to show our anger. That could get you killed.”

“Get Brown killed,” Ethel warned.

“Get Brown killed tonight,” Sidney said.

“Get Conroy killed this afternoon,” I added.

“How?” Ethel asked.

“If Brown hears you cats talking …” I
began.

“She run her mout’ too loud,” Mary said.

Sure enough Mrs. Brown was ranting about something to her
kids. This provided enough comic relief to enable me to change the subject, but
that day I saw the seed of an enmity so profound that I did not realize the
nature and magnitude of the beast until it was almost too late. This was the
first day I decided to study Mrs. Brown, her relationship to the people of the
island, and her relationship with the children.

That afternoon I asked Mrs. Brown to be less abrasive when
addressing the kids, to be a wee more diplomatic, and to have a greater concern
about their feelings. Her answer was long, rambling, antagonistic, and evasive.
She ended the barrage by saying twice, “I am the principal. I am the
principal.”

I answered her by saying sarcastically, “Then I am the
assistant principal. I am the assistant principal.”

Despite all this Mrs. Brown possessed an unflinching sense
of humor that often fractured me. It was her way of saying things more than
anything else. I don’t know if she was conscious of being witty. If not,
then she had her finer moments as the greatest natural comic I had met.

One day I walked into the boys’ bathroom and found
Prophet hanging from the tank which held water for the boys’ urinal. The
tank was eight feet above the floor. At first I just saw a single black arm
suspended from this tank for no particular reason. I walked around the divider
and faced Prophet. He looked at me, grinned, and remained hanging from the tank
I stared at him with my stern, ineffectual glance, not knowing what a proper
response would be. Mrs. Brown passed the door, saw Prophet’s arm, and
ended any necessity for me to respond at all. She roared into the bathroom and
jerked Prophet down from his tank. Since she thought I lacked toughness in
situations like these, I could tell she was going to make an object lesson out
of Prophet to help me deal with crises in the future.

“Boy, what you doin’ hangin’ from the urinal
up there? You think we got candy hidden up there?”

“No, ma’am,” Prophet answered. He was
terrified.

“Boy, you think we put Christmas packages in that
there tank for some monkey like you to find?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, boy, there must be some reason for you holding
on to the pot every time you tinkle, son. What’s the matter, boy? Is your
pinky so big that you have to hold the bowl ’cause you are afraid you
might fall in?”

For a moment I thought she had asked Prophet if his pinky
was so big that he had to hold the bowl for fear of falling in. Then she
repeated her question.

“Prophet. You answer me, boy. Is your pinky that big?
Are you top-heavy because of that big ol’ pinky between your legs? I
haven’t noticed you stumbling around the schoolyard when you walk. And I
ain’t heard none of the boys talking about Prophet using his pinky as a
baseball bat.”

By this time, I was on the verge of hysteria. My face had
reddened like a blood clot trying to keep from laughing. For her part, Mrs.
Brown remained as serious and stoical as a cigar-store Indian. This was no
laughing matter to her.

“That urinal is state property, boy. If it gets broke,
Mr. Conroy and I are required by state law to pay for it.”

By this time Prophet was crying, great tears rolling out of
his eyes and down his face. Mrs. Brown continued, “Mr. Conroy, I am going
to leave this room. I want you to check Prophet’s pinky to see if it is so
big that he needs to lean on the pot to piddle.”

She left the room. Prophet unzipped his pants to give me a
shot of his pinky. I grabbed him, told him to go no further, and waited a few
salient moments. As I walked out of the latrine, I informed Mrs. Brown that
according to my calculations the young lad, Prophet, did not possess a
gargantuan pinky but a pinky of normal proportions. This is the most ludicrous
scene I’ve ever been involved in, I was telling myself. After I delivered
this factual information, Mrs. Brown grabbed Professor Medicine, her favorite
strap, stormed into the bathroom, and beat the hell out of Prophet. I never did
find out why Prophet hung from the urinal tank. Probably, like Everest, because
it was there.

I believe Mrs. Brown sincerely believed that a child needed
a beating every once in a while if he was to respect authority, do his lessons,
and grow up to make a contribution to his community. She whipped children out
of a sense of duty. We probably would never have crossed swords if she had let
me work out my own system in the classroom and left my kids alone. For six
months we worked together in an uneasy truce. Then total war raged through he
two-room schoolhouse on the island.

Several events early in the school year told me that
something was wrong between Mrs. Brown and the other black people on the
island. One night I had left my set of school keys in Beaufort. I was still
living in the schoolhouse and I needed the keys to get into the kitchen where I
kept my food. It was already dark when I drove over to the “white
schoolhouse” where Mrs. Brown lived. The lights on the car swung into her
yard. I parked under a tree and walked up the steps and knocked on her
door.

A voice roared out defiantly, “Who are you? I got a
gun pointed at your head.”

A little bit startled, I shouted, “It’s me, Mrs.
Brown, Pat. Goddam it, don’t shoot me.”

She opened the door a crack, looked me over with one, great
eye, then told me, “Son, a man could get killed comin’ up to
somebody’s house at night.”

“It will not happen again, I promise you. I just came
up to get the keys to the kitchen. I need to eat, Mrs. Brown.”

“What happened to your keys?”

“I left them in Beaufort.”

“That’s no place for your keys. That’s state
property.”

“I know, I am sorry. But I’ve got to
eat.”

“Yes, sir. A man’s got to eat.” She still
had let me glimpse no more than her one eye peering out into the shadows at
me.

“There are some people on this island, Mr. Conroy, who
will shoot you deader than a door nail for coming up to their house.”

“White people?”

“No, colored people. There are some of the meanest,
dirtiest people in the world on this island. That’s why I carry fire in my
pocketbook all the time. These people know that ‘Mr. Thirty-Eight’ is
always right near in case I need him. If you are smart, you’ll get some
fire too.”

“I would just like the keys, Mrs. Brown, if you
please, ma’am.”

The door shut again, and Mrs. Brown disappeared from view.
The door opened again and a large brown arm with keys dangling from two fingers
was pushed under my nose.

“I would not advise sneaking up on someone in the
middle of the night like that again, Mr. Conroy.”

“Don’t worry, Ms. Brown.”

I never saw Mr. .38 but the idea of a loaded gun being
pointed at my head by a woman who thought the Yamacraw people were out to get
her made my stomach do handstands and somersaults. And I could not figure out
why Mrs. Brown seemed to hate the people of the island, at least the black
people. She thought Ted Stone was hot porridge, and that Ezra Bennington was
conceived without original sin. There was something very wrong in the fact that
a black woman in 1969 cast her lot with white men whose thoughts and actions
dated back to 1869. Mrs. Brown, the principal, was showing signs that a blow-up
between us was imminent. Small signal fires broke out for a long while, but the
war would begin much later.

I left school early one day in November, for the supreme
commanders in the educational hierarchy were clamoring for some form or
document from Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown, unbelievably, was more inefficient than I
was in compiling the drivel and trivia demanded by the higher administrators.
Whenever they saw me in the county office building, they would curse Mrs. Brown
with red faces and swear to the forces that ruled the underworld that she was
personally responsible for sabotaging a hundred different sets of statistics in
her tenure on Yamacraw Island. And it was strange. For Mrs. Brown studied every
document which she received from the top cats with religious zeal, as if she
had just received the Ten Commandments from the burning bush. She would work
all of a school day fiddling with figures and shuffling names, crying out that
she was overworked and that the burden of teaching was too heavy a load. She
was very cranky on these days and I kept my distance. Yet I could not help but
wonder how she could botch them up when she spent so much time compiling
them.

Anyway, she called me into her room one day, gave me an
official-looking envelope, and commissioned me to take it across turbulent
waters to the powers in Beaufort. Meek servant that I was, I consented to go. I
left the gang an assignment on the board that I thought they would enjoy. We
had talked about making a collage on the bulletin board. After going over with
them what a collage was, and how you went about making one, and all the other
rot, I brought out a stack of magazines. I told them to find pictures or
portions of pictures that appealed to them or meant something to them. Art for
art’s sake. The joy of living. I wanted to return the next day to find a
collage of such surpassing brilliance and shocking significance that it would
knock my eyes out. O.K.? O.K., they murmured, each kid with a pair of those
crummy elementary-school scissors that couldn’t cut a fly wing. As I
scooted out the door, each one of my scholars was thumbing seriously through
the old editions of magazines I had brought to the island. The twin with the
wart on his nose was meticulously excising a picture of a large, green
Cadillac. He saw me watching him and said, “I’m going to get me a big
car.” Mary was snipping away at a model in a wedding gown.

The next day Mrs. Brown met me at the door. She was wearing
one of those do-I-have-something-to-tell-you looks and her arms were folded
beefily across her chest. Since Mrs. Brown took every action of my class as a
sign of imminent conspiracy or revolution, I strongly suspected, and was
correct in believing, that the kids had somehow blown it, in Mrs. Brown’s
eyes, the day before. As I walked in the door, I looked to the bulletin board
to see how the collage turned out. The bulletin board was blank. Mrs. Brown had
retreated to the hall by then and was beckoning me with a seven-pound index
finger. Like a well-trained spaniel, I trotted to the door.

“Mr. Conroy,” she intoned heavily, “do you
know what your babies did yesterday?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, I am about to tell you what they did.”
Here she sighed loudly as if what she had to tell me was too painful to be
divulged. “They tacked up pictures of naked wimmin all over the room.
Naked wimmin, Mr. Conroy, naked wimmin. They tacked up pictures of white wimmin
naked a jaybirds.”

“I don’t understand, Mrs. Brown. I didn’t
give them any girlie magazines in the stack,” I said, fearing for my life
that a stray Playboy might have found its evil way into my
stockpile.

“Don’t know about any magazines. Just know that I
walked in that room and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. There was a
woman’s bare va-gyna on that board. Bare va-gyna. I had to do some
beatin’ in there yesterday. I found out who done it and I set some fanny
on fire.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have done that, Mrs. Brown.
I gave the kids the assignment and it was my fault if they screwed it
up.”

“They knew it was sinful. They knew it was against the
Lord’s will.”

“They’re just kids, Mrs. Brown,” I said.

“Man, you are lucky the preacher didn’t walk in
this room. He would have thought it was Jezebel teaching in this
school.”

“Hell, Mrs. Brown, he’d probably have gone out
and bought the magazine.”

“Oh, I would be ashamed to talk about the preacher
like that. The preacher is so good to come bring us the word of
Jesus.”

“Yeah, he is a swell guy.”

“And what if some administrator had surprised us with
a visit? I am the principal and in charge of this school.”

“None of those guys are going to come over here, I
assure you, Mrs. Brown. It is getting cold on the river and I assure you we
will see no one until the weather is pluperfect.”

“But wimmin butt-naked. Naked women. Naked
women,” she repeated over and over. She paused, looked furtively around to
see if any administrators were hiding in trees, then fished several pages from
a hidden compartment in her pocketbook. She lifted the pages as if she were
handling a tray of radioactive material. I looked at the pictures, then threw
my head back and laughed like hell. Some esthetic student had discovered an
article on Pablo Picasso in Life magazine. Indeed there were pictures of
naked women.

“This is Picasso, Mrs. Brown.”

“It’s naked women, Mr. Conroy.”

“If these were the originals, we’d be
rich.”

“What would the preacher say. But the babies
won’t be playing with dirty pictures again. They got the belt
yesterday.”

I left Mrs. Brown to her fulminations and returned to
class. The kids were not amused. The singing belt of Mrs. Brown had found a
sizable number of fannies the previous day. When I asked them about it, they
would not talk. Somehow they felt I had set them up for the slaughter.

“How many of you guys like to look at naked
women?” I asked.

No one raised his hand, nor did anyone speak a word.

“I bet I have a few guys in here that just love to
look at naked women.”

“No,” a few of the boys answered.

“Well, you guys know what? I’d rather look at
naked women than do anything. I love looking at naked women.”

“Conrack likes to look at naked wimmin,” Richard
said.

“You know why I like to look at them?”

“No.”

“ ’cause they’re naked.”

“Yeah,” the boys said.

“No,” the girls said.

Then the boys told me it was the girls who had hung the
pictures on the board.

My own disciplinary philosophy, a frail
and skeletal animal to begin with, never acquired the health or bulk I wanted
during the year. The year became a search for what was right or the Yamacraw
children: a magic formula to rescue minds stunted through disuse, a formula
that would raise reading levels to Appalachian heights. The search was a
failure because I did not and could not know how irrevocably my ideas about
education, those sacred and pontifical utterances, would be battered, bullied,
disproven, and changed. Like my bleeding-heart theory of discipline. Although I
still maintain my right to claim bleeding heartship for myself, I had to modify
my theory that a teacher does not have the right to lay a single digit on the
body of a child. That notion worked fine at Beaufort High School, where my
students had more or less reached the age of reason and could be dealt with and
reached by words. Not so at Yamacraw. These children had known the leather
strap too long to be controlled by the threatening modulation of the vocal
chords. So when Lincoln would lean over his desk and slap the hell out of Fred,
and Fred would turn around, blame Saul for the unseen blow, and hit Saul across
the side of the head, and Saul, wailing pitifully, would pick up his ruler and
log Fred with it while Jasper was throwing a pencil at Cindy Lou, I would feel
compelled to take some type of action.

“All right, gang. Now enough of this,” the
bleeding heart would begin. “Now, Fred, it’s not right for you to
pick on Saul. He’s smaller than you.” This would cause Saul to cry
more vehement since he was more sensitive about his height than about Fred
slapping his head. “Come on, Saul. Relax. Take it easy. Head for the
bathroom, wash your face, forget your troubles.”

Now at this point, Fred has discovered that it was Lincoln
who socked him instead of Saul. Fred jumps out of his desk and plants five of
his toes into Lincoln’s ass, who is busy defending himself from the
enraged and formidable Cindy Lou. Lincoln wheels and chases the fleeing Fred,
who bumps into four desks on the way back to his seat, causing every occupant
of a bumped seat to slap or poke at Fred as he passes by. Then each one slaps
and pokes Lincoln as he pursues Fred. Then Cindy Lou races after Lincoln and
pinches him on the back. Oscar tries vainly to trip Fred, Lincoln, and Cindy
Lou in succession. The noise level in the room has risen 5000 decibels,
everyone is shouting and cheering on the gladiators as they battle their way
around the arena, and the bleeding heart pirouettes about the room after them,
armed with his theories about humanity.

Soon Mrs. Brown, whose ears are as sensitive to horseplay
as American radar to a MIG, appears at the door, leather strap wrapped around
one iron fist, death etched in her cold, brown eyes, and silences the room with
a single, arctic glance. She then majestically turns her eyes to me after the
waters have been stilled and says, “You can’t control these children
without a strap. I know ’em. I know the only thing they listen to is
Doctor Medicine.” After she leaves room, I confront my class with the fury
of one who has just been humiliated.

“Now, my friends, I am going to find out why you do
not listen to me when I ask you to sit down and shut up, but you do listen to
Mrs. Brown when she bops in the room with her strap.”

Pregnant, inscrutable silence reigns over all. Bleeding
heart continues his soliloquy. “I have never liked hitting kids or belting
kids or slapping the hell out of kids in class. I don’t believe in it. I
am not going to do it. You are not going to make me do it. Does anyone want me
to buy a belt and use it to keep you quiet?”

“No,” came the unanimous reply.

“Now, Lincoln, I would like to know why you hit
Fred.”

“I didn’t hit that boy, C’roy.”

“I saw you hit him, Lincoln.”

“No, C’roy. That boy hit me first.”

“What you say, boy?” Fred says angrily. “You
watch your mout’, boy.”

“Who you tell to watch his mout’?”

“I tell you, boy.” Then Fred socks Lincoln and
the whole festival of violence begins anew.

These small classroom brush fires occurred almost every day
during the first three months of school. For a while I simply arm wrestled any
boy who caused a major disturbance in the room. The idea was if he could beat
me in arm wrestling, he could continue fighting, talking, and disrupting. This
took a great deal of guts and virility on my part since I outweighed every boy
in the class by at least seventy pounds. All the boys took the arm wrestling
very seriously, however, and all of them grunted and strained to slap my arm
down on the desk. Oscar and Top Cat, the two largest guys in the room, would
grimace painfully and breathe convulsively trying to bring the only white arm
in the room to a state of humility. The only person I let beat me was Saul.
Saul would take my hand, place his elbow firmly on his desk top, bend his wrist
slightly, and drive my hand fiercely to the left. As my hand bit wood, Saul
would turn to the much larger boys with a look of faint disgust in his eyes and
say, “I beat ’im.” The boys would shout foul and I would swear
that Saul had the most powerful arms on Yamacraw Island. Of course, Oscar would
then arm wrestle Saul and nearly break his hand driving it down upon the
desk.

The arm-wrestling method was a great energy release, but it
was not a foolproof method for putting down the skirmishes that raged through
the class once or twice a day. The girls could be adequately controlled by
simply appealing to their conception of womanhood, usually, that is. An enraged
Mary or Cindy Lou could not be stopped, only contained or controlled by gentle
proddings or removal to the kitchen. With all of the kids, though, I knew that
I could never hit them with a belt, stick, or anything else. This was against
my nature, philosophy notwithstanding. Yet with Mrs. Brown constantly lecturing
me about the efficacy of leather on flesh and interfering when the fights did
break out, I needed some way to control the kids instantly and silently. It was
sometime in December that I remembered how to milk a rat.

Milking the rat was an art among my childhood friends. The
best rat-milker of the group had the same status as the best marble-shooter,
the best hitter, or the fastest runner. The boy who could milk a rat well could
bring a bully whimpering to his knees in a matter of seconds. He could render
Samson hairless or Goliath helpless. Nations have been conquered by notable
rat-milkers. To milk a rat, you simply press the fingernail of an
opponent’s finger with your thumb. Your index finger squeezes the back of
the bottom joint of the finger. Your thumb mashes the fingernail against the
second joint of your opponent’s finger. All three joints of your
opponent’s finger are brought into action against him. Milking the rat is
an almost impossible maneuver to describe in words. It is extremely painful,
but the level of pain can be controlled by modulating the pressure exerted by
your thumb.

When I remembered this childhood protection from
neighborhood toughs, I shouted aloud and announced to the class, “My
friends, I have got it. I can stop your stinking fights without bloodshed or
raising my voice. C’mon. One of you guys make some noise or do something
terrible.” I walked over to Oscar, who was sitting minding his own
business pursuing his scholarly studies, when I suddenly grabbed his hand and
milked his rat. He screamed, got out of his seat, fell on his knees, rolled his
eyes, stood up, and then went to his knees again. I let Oscar go. Then I showed
everybody in class how to milk a rat and explained as well as I could what an
incredibly effective method of control it could be. All the boys practiced on
each other after I demonstrated the basics. “Press up with the thumb,
Frank. Hold the back of his finger with your forefinger. That’s it, right
where the finger goes into the hand. Learn how to milk a rat and the world is
yours.” Then I went around to every boy in the class, milked his rat,
explained the physics of the maneuver, and how I was going to use it to break
up fights, rebellions, or mutinies in the class. They loved it. Anything
connected with violence, fighting, or the improvement of their skills as
potential street fighters was always acclaimed by the boys. The rest of the day
was spent with me milking the rats of boys causing a disturbance by milking
other rats.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 8

I gave up my house on the island at the
end of October for three reasons. I wanted to live with my family, it seemed
folly to pay rent for two houses, and my fear of rats. The last reason deserves
some explanation. The Bucker house at night was quiet and dark as a mausoleum.
Whenever I turned the lights out to go to sleep, the degree of darkness always
startled me somewhat. It was the darkness of the womb, the prenatal darkness of
embryos in that house, which was a little disconcerting but made for deep and
luxuriant sleeping.

In the middle of October the man designated as official
grass-cutter on the island rode down on the island’s lone tractor and
plowed up the field outside the house, which had become choked with weeds and
high grass. This pleased me since I still maintained a healthy respect for the
diamondback rattlers that flourished on the island. What I did not realize was
that the grass afforded cover or a multitude — nay, a
plague — of mice who had settled permanently in this field. When the
plow had ripped furrows into the land and destroyed scores of mouse homes,
these mice, with infinite practicality, moved into my spacious quarters. Now
mice, however small or harmless, are rats to me — snarling,
needle-fanged wharf inhabitants whose fleas carry the black death and whose
bite is rabid. Rats are dealers in death and ol’ Conrack is scared to
death of them.

After they had moved their belongings and their children in
with me, I knew that my days in the house were numbered unless by some miracle
of Hamelin I could lead them out of my residence and coax them, lemminglike,
into the sea. Ted Stone recommended poisons virulent enough to kill a herd of
mastodons and it seemed to clear out most of the rat population. But several
hardy ones still crept around at night leaving their droppings as reminders
that they had no intention of moving on such short notice. The little round
turds were challenges, like glove slaps across my face.

I might have won this battle had it not been for an
extraordinary and strategic move on the part of one of my tormentors. Whether
or not he sensed my phobia about his breed I will never know, but he acted in a
drama convincing enough to draw me to the brink of coronary failure.

I was sleeping soundly on a fairly chilly night. The room
was black as pitch, silent, with the vestigial odor of mildew left from the
days of non-inhabitation. I felt something on my foot, something palpable and
heavy, something alive, something present, something breathing, but most
seriously of all, something on my foot. Without moving, I tried to think of
some rational course of action. I could not see my five fingers if I placed my
hand against my nose, so very slowly I reached up and pulled the chain on my
lamp — and saw a flash of movement and watched as the rat moved like
bald-tailed lightning across the room and out the door. “The rat was in
bed with me,” I called aloud. “The goddam rat was on my foot in my
own bed!” Then I reasoned further that the rat could have just as easily
been on my head — then a flashback to a scene from Orwell’s
1984, where there is a description of a starved rat chewing through the
eyeball of the protagonist. A rat had bedded down with me. I had shared my
pillow with the animal I feared most.

That was my last night in the house. Ted Stone was
disturbed, probably because he would no longer receive his percentage of the
rent. I did not tell him about the rat incident, since he was the kind of
rugged frontiersman who would not cringe even if he found himself sleeping with
a boa constrictor. My fear of mice would reflect on my manhood.

He came to check the house over a few days after I informed
him of my decision to withdraw. I had moved all of my essential belongings back
into the school; the avoirdupois crossed the river to Beaufort. There were
still a few pictures on the wall and a couple of posters scattered in odd
places about the house. As Ted inspected the house with an opprobrious tilt to
his nose and something vaguely militaristic in his inspection tour of the damp
bedrooms, he stopped suddenly in front of a poster and stared at it. The poster
elicited nothing in me, not a single, controversial thought. It simply pictured
Steve McQueen astride a German motorcycle he had stolen from the Germans in the
movie The Great Escape.

“What are you doin’ with a picture of this
Nazi?” Stone hissed.

“What Nazi?” I asked.

“This Nazi here. I ought to know a Nazi when I see
one. I killed enough of ’em.”

“Mr. Stone, that happens to be Steve
McQueen.”

“I don’t care who he is, he’s ridin’ a
Nazi motorcycle.”

“It’s a movie, Mr. Stone. In the movie, Steve
McQueen steals a Nazi motorcycle and tries to get away from the
Germans.”

“He look like a Nazi to me. He got blond hair like a
Nazi.”

“He is as American as hominy grits. That is Steve
McQueen, Mr. Stone. He is a movie star. He is an American movie star in a
America movie who steals a German motorcycle.”

“I fought Nazis from D-Day all the way into Germany.
Killed a lot of Nazis. I don’t like Nazis or Nazi motorcycles.”

“Mr. Stone, I’m glad it isn’t a poster of
the creature of the Black Lagoon. You’d probably go crazy.”

“I just don’t like Nazis.”

“I got your point. I honestly did.”

Two weeks later, I became a commuter.

The boat ride to Yamacraw became a
celebration of sorts. It was a time when I became aware of tides ebbing and
flooding in accordance with the transcendental clockwork of the universe; a
time of the pale, wafer-thin moon in the early morning sky and of the last star
to vanish with the coming of the sun over the green waters. It was a time when
I measured days by the flocks of birds winging south or by the number of
porpoises that performed fluid and solitary ballet beside the boat. I would
watch the egrets and herons, frozen in slender, graceful statues on the shores,
and regret my intrusion when they flushed at the sound of the boat and passed
over me in quiet, majestic flight in search of more private feeding
grounds.

It was a good time, for I had never followed the hunters
into the woods or the fishermen up the river. Nor had I ever been part of the
enormous, grass-prevailing silences of the ever shifting marsh. In winter mine
was the only boat on the river, the sole craft desecrating the steel gray
waters. In January and February the whine of my boat was heresy to the silence
of the grasses. In winter, the marsh was anchoritic, reflective, and brooding;
the presence of man was strange and unwanted. Yet I liked the feeling of being
the only person in a vast stretch of water, the only index of civilization in
the tenuous, light-flecked darkness of seven o’clock in the morning.

Each day Zeke would launch me, his every breath a short,
swift cloud; his hands blue and copiously veined, his face as gaunt and weary
as a tundra, his voice the only voice in a village unawakened. On days when the
tide was sufficiently high, I would turn the boat toward Cannon Creek, a
sinuous, narrow shortcut that wound through the heart of the marsh. Once in the
creek among the brown, floating islands of dead reeds, I would watch the
gradual coming of the sun, the swift resurrection in obedience to an eternal
cycle, and the flooding of the land with the rich, incredible colors of early
morning.

In this world of boat and river, I huddled low to escape
the cold air that cut above the windshield like a blade. But I prized the
aloneness of the trip, the beautiful isolation, and the knowledge that I was
afforded a glimpse of the marsh at ease, a glimpse of the land at rest from the
penetration and mindless barbarisms of man. But even then on clear days I could
see the smoke towering above the Savannah skies. Tall columns of white smoke,
graceful and almost feminine, rose like false gods on the horizons and from my
boat they were salacious and impure reminders of the absolute insistence of man
that he defile all that he touches. Man excreting, straight up, through the
phallic smokestack of Savannah. Still, the factories could not dull the
sharpness of the air or despoil the natural sanctuary along the creek.

Often the river would be rough and the boat would fight
through heavy swells and bitter winds on the way to Yamacraw. Other times, the
water would be glass, hard, green and opalescent in the early light. I was
always alone during the cold months. The winter ordained a cessation of motors,
shrimp nets, and fishing lines. More than any other time, it emphasized the
inaccessibility of the island and the isolation of the residents.

Because I was commuting and because I wished to prove
conclusively that it was possible to commute, I never took a day off or failed
to make the crossing on account of the prevailing weather conditions. Barbara
went on an extravagant shopping spree in early November and returned home with
enough winter clothes to melt a glacier. She bought insulated socks, jackets,
gloves, and boots. She also bought a multicolored wool mask, which covered my
entire head except for green-rimmed holes for my eyes, nose, and mouth. This
wardrobe seemed adequate for even the worst conditions a South Carolina winter
could offer. In the full majesty of my winter plumage, I felt that I could
follow penguins to their homes. All through December I remained comfortable in
the mild morning chill, but in the first week of January the most severe cold
spell since 1952, according to Ted Stone, gripped the South Carolina coast. In
this single week, my respect for the river turned into awe, and maybe a bit of
fear. For in that week I met the father of cold, the grand cold, the inquisitor
of cold, and the pope of cold, all huddled in my boat to supervise my trip to
Yamacraw.

It began, as it always did, at Zeke’s. The smell of
coffee filled the yard outside his house. Zeke was siting in his easy chair
smoking a cigarette and listening to a nasal, twangy sound on the country-music
station out of Savannah. Ida, cold-natured and crotchety when the thermometer
dipped below fifty degrees, had her heater turned up high enough to simulate
high noon on the Sahara Desert. In the bedroom I could hear the heavy, regular
breathing of the two boys. The hounds whined and scratched at the front
door.

“Cold as witch’s titty,” Zeke said, as I
entered the room. “Weatherman sas it’s goin’ down to thirteen
degrees this morning.” I peeled off several layers of clothes to insure my
survival in Ida’s makeshift steam bath. Momentarily, Ida shuffled into the
kithen, reached blindly for her mug, poured her coffee, then sat shivering on
the sofa, claiming she was freezing to death.

“I’m sweatin’ my balls off, Ida,” Zeke
would say, winking at me.

“You would sweat, you son of a bitch. You’d live
in a goddam icebox if I’d let you,” Ida would snap back.

Then Zeke looked at me and said, “You’re gonna be
able to tell if you’re a man this week. I wouldn’t get on that
river.”

“Be careful, Pat,” Ida would add, “I get
real worried about you on that river. You don’t know your ass about
boats.”

We drove to the landing. Zeke pushed the boat off the
trailer. The wind whipped malignantly from the river and the waves crashed over
the trailer to wash and numb his feet. It was this week more than any other
that I ceased to like Zeke Skimberry and came to love him. He put me into the
water at sunrise and met me at the lowering sun at four in the afternoon. The
last thing I saw as I lowered the mask over my face was Zeke smiling in the
back of the blue pickup. “See you at four,” he would shout.
“Don’t get sunburned.”

I would start the motor and press my face against the
windshield to protect myself from the terrible flow of air that swept over the
boat. The water was choppy and a sharp, stinging spray covered me before I
reached the first protected creek. The salt water soon froze on the windshield,
making visibility very difficult. My breath came in frosty, labored clouds.
Every drop of water was a fang, a single tooth of cold. My ears ached, my hands
throbbed, and my feet deadened in the boots. As the boat passed the familiar
landmarks of the journey, the sandbars and leafless islands, I noticed the
absence of birds in the shallows and of life on the shore. The world was dead,
soundless, and frozen. Nothing moved except the boat.

I also grew fond of the Stones that week. Each time I came
to their dock, I tied the boat on the run despite fingers as supple as fence
posts. I then sprinted for their house as quickly as my booted, frozen feet
would carry me. I would have struck a stranger watching this ludicrous,
quasi-athletic event dumb. At full tilt, arms pumping like crooked pistons, my
breath steaming like an old engine, my face masked in orange and brown, I would
charge up the ramp and race over the broken, rotted boards of the Stones’
dock. Ted would see me coming and throw extra logs into the stove. Lou would
have a cup of hot coffee steaming and ready for me as I broke through the door.
It is moments such as these that my belief in man’s basic worth and
goodness comes forth. I have cursed Ted Stone a thousand times before and
since, but I will never forget how kind and concerned he was during those five
January days. I would nearly embrace the stove in gratitude for its warmth,
while Ted would discourse rather wistfully about the last time in his memory
the edge of the river froze solid.

On one of these five days I cut my engine as I knifed
toward the dock, grabbed the stern line, and jumped from the boat to the dock.
I did not see the ice that glazed the dock in a thin, transparent sheet until I
was in midair. I hit the dock and immediately went sliding across it toward the
water on the other side. I grabbed for a piling, but could not prevent my legs
from dipping into the water. Ted Stone clothed me in his son’s leftovers
when he saw what had happened.

I grew closer to my students that week. They huddled around
the windows waiting for my car to pull into view. When they saw me, Fred would
go to the woodpile and stuff small logs into the stove until he could stuff no
more. I would come into the room and head immediately to the stove to warm up.
I would pull my boots off and hang the wet socks near the stove to dry.

Then Richard would ask, “You cold, Conroy?”

“No, man. Went swimmin’ on the trip over. Just
like taking a hot bath.”

“No.”

“You get wet up?” Mary would ask.

“You always get wet up when you go
swimmin’.”

“You no swim, Conroy.”

Then I would spot Samuel and Sidney slapping their knees
and giggling uncontrollably. “White man got the blue feet,” Sam would
cry.

The class would laugh and I would move my feet nearer the
fire and admire their magnificent blueness. Blue feet were an occupational
hazard of Caucasians. Blue feet remained with me until Friday afternoon. But
when Friday came, Conrack also knew that he could take the river. And that
seemed very important.

The river remained temperamental and full of surprises.
When I was certain that the cold was my most formidable enemy, 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 confuse, and the more panicked.

I went from bank to bank, blind as a shorn Samson,
searching for landmarks that would set my course aright. I felt the presence of
Yamacraw for a moment, then lost it. I looked at my watch and saw that I had
been circling and searching for the island for over an hour and a half. My
eyelashes were sodden and flooded with moisture condensed from this earthbound
cloud, this ghost born of warm air and cold water. Then I was paralyzed by the
booming voice of an ocean freighter somewhere in the fog, though I could not
tell if the foghorn had sounded miles or feet away. I thought for a moment that
I had ventured into the shipping lanes of the Savannah River or, even worse,
into the Atlantic. But I saw land again and I drove the boat almost onto the
shore, lit a fire, and waited till the fog lifted and Yamacraw revealed itself.
When the fog did lift, I found myself five miles away from the island and very
near the Savannah River. In the contest of the elements, fog was more
frightening than the cold. Later, in the spring of course, I was introduced to
the winds and thunderstorms and the fog seemed almost maternal in
comparison.

In early spring Bennington finally chose
a contractor to come to Yamacraw to install the air conditioners for which the
board of education had appropriated money the previous summer. Piedmont
evidently wanted the air conditioners installed quickly, for the coming of warm
weather brought with it an influx of the concerned and the committed who
journeyed to Yamacraw to see firsthand the victims of southern society.
Piedmont shrewdly moved at the end of February to insure the credibility of his
boast that Yamacraw Island was “one of the two climate-controlled schools
in the county.” Since I no longer trusted any of these people, and no
longer believed in them as educators or as human beings, it delighted me to see
the intensity involved in their efforts to glamorize the two-room schoolhouse
on the island. They were dressing up their most obvious wart. After the
air-conditioning unit was in place, Piedmont and Bennington could say with
utter conviction that they had done their best and had offered the island
buckets of sweat and an ulcer’s worth of concern to make sure those little
nigras had air conditioning.

Zeke was ordered to go out to the island with the
contractor and do whatever he could to help them. My boat was loaded with
tools, wire, and insulation. Zeke rode with me across the river. The sun had
risen completely and its white light coming off the perfectly smooth water
blinded both of us as I rounded the first sandbar and headed directly into the
sun. I was talking distractedly to Zeke about something, when both of us felt
the motor bouncing off solid land.

“It’s the goddam sandbar,” Zeke cried. Zeke
was absolutely correct. The sandbar I had passed safely and without error one
hundred times in a moment of carelessness claimed me for its own. We were not
on the edge of the sandbar, we were squarely in the middle of it. There was no
way Zeke and I could rock the boat into deeper water. She was weighed down with
equipment and too firmly entrenched in the sand to offer ay hope, except for
the coming of the high tide.

I was furious with myself and embarrassed as hell. The
electricians, following us in another boat, sniggered convulsively as they
circled around the bar. They tried to pull us off with a rope but to no avail.
I finally put Zeke on my back, carried him across the sandbar à la St.
Christopher, and deposited him with the electricians. He offered to stay with
the boat, but unsullied guilt forbade me to do anything but suffer in the early
morning cold with my wet, frozen feet, and wait or the water’s coming. The
giggling electricians soon disappeared down the creek.

My feet felt like the definition of frostbite. The bitter
cold of winter was over for the most part, but the water still had not accepted
the coming of spring. I removed my tennis shoes and the heavy wool socks
Barbara had bought me at the beginning of winter. My feet were blue, and
somehow pathetic and vulnerable, as I tried, first, to wrap them in old
newspaper. That did not work, so I took off my insulated green jacket and
wrapped it tightly around my feet. This was the best I could do under the
existing circumstances. The tide inched outward, slowly, imperceptibly, outward
toward the sea, the eternal rendezvous, inexorably flowing with the tilt of the
earth. For about thirty seconds it was nice reflecting on the ebb and flow of
the tide over centuries, and how its progress had been marked and studied by
Nelson at Trafalgar, Drake, and Leif Ericson. Soon the sandbar exposed its
presence completely, and a Zeke and I both suspected, I had driven to the very
middle of it before I cut the motor. The bar extended for a quarter of a mile
down the right flank of the river. The salt marsh was still winter-brown,
although if you looked carefully, you could spot a promise of green flavoring
the dead, crisp grasses along the shore.

The spring tides had not come in full force, the great
flood tides that would inundate the marshes completely, washing away tons of
the Spartina grasses that had finished the life cycle, bringing the dead
grasses in clumps from the inner marsh, and carrying it out to sea. Already
clumps of grass had become a minor irritant while driving to the island, and
often I had to weave between these tiny, floating islands like a downhill racer
weaves between slalom poles. Once I hit one of these piles, and the propeller
was instantly clogged and overwhelmed. I had to lift the propeller and clear
it.

So I had time to study the swamp in transition. I even
wavered on the edge of thinking deeper thoughts, of time and timelessness, of
now and eternity, of my own impermanence as compared to the marshes, the river,
and the tides. In fifty years I would be seventy-four, an old curmudgeon with a
hairless, toothless head; the geriatric remnant of the forties, whose blood had
dried, whose youth had withered, whose dreams had died like the grasses and
washed out on a spring tide.

But the deeper thoughts became vestigial as my feet once
more started to ache from the cold. I looked to the Bluffton shore and saw a
man with a blue coat standing beside his car looking at me in the boat. I
looked for something to read — the backs of oil cans, the
instructions for starting the motor manually, the ingredients used in the
composition of the stale potato chips I had bought a few days before. Heavy
stuff. After I had exhausted all reading matter and had tended to the
defrosting of my feet once again, I decided that the most prudent and
intelligent thing to do at this particular moment of time would simply be to
drop of in a deep sleep; no, a coma, a state of suspension that would eliminate
the tedium of waiting for the earth to tilt the other way and the waters to
reverse their flow and race inland toward the fresher waters and the brighter
rivers upstate. So I rewrapped my mummified feet, hung my socks on the
windshield to dry, lay down among the oil cans, and used one of the boat
cushions a pillow. At fist I thought I would never sleep because of the cold,
but as soon as I started thinking that and consciously worrying about it, I
slept.

I awoke some time later, alarmed at an engine roar above
me. I had slept soundly ad perhaps for a fairly long time, for I could hear a
slight rhythm of water against the bottom of the boat. The roar grew louder,
until I saw a helicopter hovering just above me, then circling in a long arc
over the boat. The pilot’s head craned over the edge of the cockpit, and
he tilted his craft as he swerved by the boat again. He looked worried.

It must have been boredom, or some unforgivable streak of
black humor that took over from there. I knew that this pilot was probably a
young warrant officer being trained in nearby Savanna, was on maneuvers, ad had
spotted my prone, seemingly lifeless body in the boat below. I had often waved
to these guys as I went to work and on occasion they had come low enough for me
to see them waving back. Anyway, I did not move from the bottom of the boat but
lay there squinting maliciously through slitted eyes, contorting my body into a
grotesque posture of death. The helicopter came lower and lower: the concern of
the pilot grew, the closer he drew to my beleaguered craft. I chortled to
myself that this was a mighty fine joke, but that I had better rise from the
dead and wave to the pilot that I was alive and well, though stranded and
helpless. As this thought was being bandied about in my head, the pilot headed
his helicopter to the west. I heard the great propeller turning, but it was now
a distant sound, and the pilot no longer was sweeping low for a firsthand look
at my body. Yet he had not left the scene. I could hear him. My curiosity
finally bested whatever impulses I had to remain horizontal, and very slowly,
snaking my way across the bottom of the boat, I lifted my head just over the
side of the boat. I could hear the helicopter. My eyes glanced first to the
right, then my eyes met the eyes of the helicopter pilot who had landed on the
far shore and was looking straight at me.

It shocked both of us. I immediately rose and stretched
like I had been asleep in a back-yard hammock. I beat on my chest a couple of
times and exulted in the crisp, cool air of late morning. I waved to the pilot.
He had not shut down his engine, and the prop whirred above him. He was pissed.
He shouted something at me that was lost in the tumult of the rotating blades.
He then shot me the universal American symbol of derision and
contempt — his middle finger stood isolated and defiantly raised on
his right hand. He shouted something again, then clambered back aboard his
craft and took off angrily, sort of like a teen-age dragster laying rubber in
front of his girl friend’s house after a spat. I quickly checked the water
level and decided that, with luck, I could extricate myself from this throne of
sand. I took my paddle, drove it into the sand, and pushed according to
Newton’s law. The boat moved. In a couple of minutes I had paddled into
deep water, pulled the rope, started the engine, and headed barefoot for
Yamacraw. The helicopter followed me for a while, buzzing over my head like an
angry mosquito, then roared off toward Savannah. I waved cheerfully.

It is hard to pinpoint accurately the
precise moment when I lost favor with the administrative juggernaut of Beaufort
County. This disintegration was a gradual, progressive awareness on both sides
that gained momentum every time we dealt with each other on a professional or
personal basis. I have mentioned the letter of fire I sent to Piedmont after a
couple of days on the island. I learned later that Piedmont liked his
subordinates to grovel a bit before they presented a proposal, shuffle a bit
before they offered a suggestion, and lie prone on their faces before they
dared proffer a bit of advice. Therefore, my first letter, written with the sap
and arrogance of youth offended, put Piedmont on the defensive. Piedmont had
told me that his first job as a boss man in an upstate mill had imparted to him
a virulent distaste for labor problems. With my first letter I was
instantaneously transformed from a number on a teacher-ratio chart to a labor
problem. It was many months later before I learned how Piedmont had probably
handled vexing problems with the semiliterate though obstinate workers who
greased looms on the midnight shift and rocked the vessel of obedience in
defiance of the invisible of the capitalists who ruled the mills from far away.
These same capitalists hired the gravelly voiced, production-conscious Piedmont
to keep the occasional sparks of resentment extinguished. I learned this much
later, this was still the period of innocence.

And my innocence continued ad nauseam during the
year. Piedmont had told me in that first meeting that he worshiped truth and
“dealt in facts.” I took his word for this and each time I saw him
during the year, hunched behind his desk, peering at me over the thin horizon
of his half-glasses, I told him firmly, forcefully, and with conviction that I
considered the Yamacraw School a tragedy, a mockery of education, a
condemnation of our county, and a situation that called for desperate, radical
ideas and methods. Almost always he nodded his head affirmatively, delivered an
oily, ingratiating, and hollow sermon about the good job I was doing and how
much he appreciated the letters I was writing him and how I reminded him of the
young Henry Piedmont — idealistic, capable of sacrifice, and sweating
for the improvement of mankind. Yet his office was filled with ghosts and
unnamed spirits of resentment. His name struck fear in the soul of all his
employees and his hand ruled the passages of his carpeted bailiwick with the
subtlety of a sword. Bennington quivered when Piedmont’s name was
mentioned. I was warned again and again that he did not tolerate criticism
under any guise; woe to him who entered Piedmont’s tabernacle with the
bitter tongue. Yet each time I spoke with him during the year, the good Dr.
Piedmont told me, “I have the most democratic school system in the
country.”

Our initial dispute was fought over the boat’s
gasoline bill for the month of October. By this time, I had relinquished the
principalship to Mrs. Brown and the figure-shufflers at the county office had
discovered that Mrs. Brown was incapable of shuffling figures to their
satisfaction. So Piedmont had appointed an administrative head to supervise the
questionable reports submitted by Mrs. Brown and to act as a buffer between
Piedmont and me. By November Piedmont had evidently tired of my carping and
unrelenting bitching about conditions at the school. The man appointed
administrative head of the Yamacraw School, like Piedmont, had never set eyes
on the Yamacraw School. His name was Howard Sedgwick and he was the principal
of Bluffton High School. He had recently moved to Bluffton to assume dominion
over the high school. I had once heard him talk about blacks to a group of
white teachers; ideologically he was somewhere between a backwoods Baptist and
a Klansman. Every time I saw him, he was yelling about something or at
somebody. Piedmont had appointed him as the titular head of a school he had
never seen. I now had to deal with a principal who acted as though she wanted
to be white and an administrative head who was sorry there were blacks.

The gas bill for October was the first shot fired in a long
embittering war. Piedmont addressed his letter to Sedgwick, following the
prescribed rungs of the ladder of command, and asked him to look into an
“exorbitant” gas bill and to make recommendations and regulations
binding the use of the boat. Sedgwick dutifully composed a letter that ruled
that I could use the boat on Mondays and Fridays only and that I must incur the
expense of any additional trips. In his letter his sycophantic inclinations
bubbled to the surface a couple of times, as did his complete ignorance about
the island. Mrs. Brown by this time was concerned about the dilution of her
authority by an unseen white man and told me so. I agreed that the positioning
of Sedgwick over her had “strange symbolic value” and I promised to
lodge a complaint. I began my second letter to Piedmont in prototypical Conrack
style — self-righteous, angry, undiplomatic, unapologetic, and
flaming. Colonel Conroy, the chieftain of my clan, issued a hard-shell rule in
my youth that the most unforgivable of sins was for a Conroy to beat around the
bush, put garlands of roses around his thoughts or ideas, or — horror
of horrors — for a Conroy to drop to his knees, pucker his
potato-famined lips, and kiss somebody’s rosy red behind. Dad did not
admire the ass-kissers of the world and he passed this prejudice on to his
offspring. So I will quote the first paragraphs of my second letter to
Piedmont. Notice the youth, naiveté, and indignation of the young
Conrack enraged. Dressed in green, insulated boots, and a torn, red sweater,
eyes afire with self-righteous piety and wrath, I wrote Piedmont a letter with
his epigram “I deal in truth” lighting my path.

Dear Mr. Piedmont,

I did not like your letter. Since it is rather
inconsequential whether a public school teacher agrees with a dictum passed
down from his superintendent or not, my only recourse is to answer you without
regard to our positions. First of all, if I was expected to come to Yamacraw
Island to preside over the intellectual decimation of forty kids, you selected
the wrong boy. If I was expected to remain silent when intolerable conditions
presented themselves, then once again, I should not have been sent to the
island. Even though these kids were unfortunate enough to be born on Yamacraw
Island, it will take you and a team of varsity scholars to convince me they
don’t deserve the same quality of education received by children in
Beaufort itself. If you disagree with this, then I feel it is you who must
question your suitability for the job of superintendent for the entire
county.

My letter went on to justify the
extracurricular voyages of the boat.

The boat has transported supplies,
films, guest speakers, exchange students, groceries, and injured students to
and from the island. The boat has brought the Sullivan Reading Program, an
overhead projector, a tape recorder, a record player, and a film strip
projector, thereby bringing Yamacraw into the audio-visual age. The boat took
me to Beaufort five days in a row one week to arrange a Halloween trip for
children who had never heard of trick or treat. The boat, Dr.
Piedmont, … has opened vistas, horizons, and possibilities that never
existed before.

I ended the letter with a pronouncement
that I am sure Piedmont interpreted as a threat, a gesture of incredible and
unforgivable defiance.

Neither Mrs. Brown nor I was pleased with the latest
memorandum. We will be present at the next meeting of the Beaufort County Board
of Education. I will give an introduction to the problems and tribulations of
Yamacraw Island. I will also pay for the gas I use that night.

Sincerely,

PAT
CONROY

The letter was full of the usual bombast
and fustian I reserved for my periods of anger, but I wanted to appear before
the board of education very much. I felt it could not know the conditions on
the island if it were dependent on Piedmont and Bennington for the information.
The board was the one group that could initiate measures strong enough to
reverse the hopelessness of the Yamacraw School. In it lay the Christ-powers to
revive the prone Lazarus of education. And I wanted to ask it if the whole
county stunk with ignorance and brain-rot; if Yamacraw was an isolated example
of decay, or if this were an acceptable standard in schools with all black
populations. Something was dawning on me then, an idea that seemed monstrous
and unspeakable. I was beginning to think that the schools in Beaufort were
glutted with black kids who did not know where to search for their behinds, who
were so appallingly ignorant that their minds rotted in their skulls, and that
the schools merely served as daytime detention camps for thousands of children
who would never extract anything from a book, except a page to blow their noses
or wipe their butts.

I wanted the members of the board to tell me this. I wanted
the board to know that I had graduated from one of their all white schools with
an education I was proud of, with an education that prepared me well for any
goddam thing life wanted to shove in my way. I required an explanation from
them. What was it I had stumbled on, why was it, and what were they going to do
about it? It was incomprehensible to me that a group could serve the public in
such a capacity and not be frothing at the mouth when confronted with pure,
crystalline evidence that a generation of Beaufort’s children lay
slaughtered in the mortared recesses of her classroom. I was very young then. I
really thought people would care.

I penned the letter on a Wednesday and planned to appear
before the board at its monthly meeting the following Tuesday. Mrs. Brown
dropped by Friday to tell me that she did not want to make any waves. I told
her I understood. I jotted down notes and tried to write a speech with lean and
muscular prose, prose without diplomatic accouterments, prose that was strong,
masculine, and direct. Each day at lunch I planned what I would say to the
board. I wanted to cause an explosion that would reverberate through the attics
and cellars of its ivory tower. Every time I glanced at Sidney or Samuel, Fred
or Prophet, Richard or Lincoln, I grew angrier. I had something to say. I
planned to say it on a Tuesday night in the middle of November. But I was
young.

At ten o’clock on the Tuesday of my appearance before
the board, I saw a car drive in front of the school. From the car emerged Ezra
Bennington, Morgan Randel, the deputy superintendent of administration, and a
bulky, bald-headed man I had never seen before.

Mrs. Brown nearly blanched when she saw this august group
emerge from the car. She fixed her hair froze her students to silence by
threatening death or worse if they misbehaved, then went out her door to act as
welcoming committee. The bald man came into my room with Bennington and
introduced himself.

“I’m Charlie Miller,” he said.
“I’m on the school board.”

“I’m Pat Conroy. I’m going to talk to you
guys tonight.”

Miller flashed a quick glance to Bennington, whose eyes
were roaming like water bugs over the classroom. The room was in its usual
disarray: papers, books, magazines, and games littered the desks and tables and
spilled over onto the floor. Miller motioned for me to follow him to the
hallway, which I did. Bennington followed close behind me. They closed the
door. Miller looked at me with what I interpreted at first as malevolence. Then
his face sweetened into what might be mistaken in some circles for a smile. He
leered, cleared his throat, and tried to arrange his bulldog features into
something approaching amicability.

“I talked with some of the board members about your
visit, Conroy.”

“Yes, sir?” I asked, a trifle intimidated at the
show of power.

“We decided not to let you appear. We got a lot of
serious business to tend to on that there board. We can’t be listening to
every teacher who thinks he’s got a gripe.”

“Then you are refusing to let me appear.”

“That’s right, son.”

Bennington hovered on the edge of this conversation, a hint
of a smile etched into his face. I wanted to knock hell out of both of them,
but the intimidation factor was too large. And besides, Mr. Randel had come
with them.

Morgan Randel was the deputy superintendent in charge of
administration and personnel. He had once been in control of the Beaufort
district until Piedmont had eclipsed his star along with Bennington’s
during the consolidation of the county systems. Whoever sent him along merited
a decoration for strategy, for Bennington and Miller could have no greater
assurance that I would not erupt and tell them to kiss my fanny than
Randel’s presence. He was my single ally in the administration.

Our friendship had been sealed since March 14, 1962. On
that day I played a baseball game against Wade Hampton High School from the
next county. Mr. Randel’s son, Randy, was scheduled to pitch that day.
Randy had become one of my best friends over the year. We had sat together in
Gene Norris’ English class, had both played football and basketball, and
had planned to go to his grandmother’s house in Newberry to play golf the
weekend following the Wade Hampton game. We were incurable jocks.

Randy was a brash, witty kid, fifteen years old and six
feet four inches tall. He joked incessantly, mimicked his teachers and
classmates, and took infinite pleasure in teasing Gene Norris during class.
Randy was also an extremely gifted athlete. He could throw a football fifty
yards, sink a ten-foot hook shot with monotonous regularity, and throw one of
the finest curve balls I had ever seen. The general consensus was that baseball
was Randy’s finest sport. It was widely assumed that the tall, gangly
Randy would one day pitch in the major leagues. He was that good.

The day we played Hampton was cloudy and threatening. It
was a day between seasons, bizarre and somehow portentous, strange with gray
clouds and eerie patches of light. But Randy pitched well. His fast ball looked
untouchable from my vantage point and no one came near the curve. He struck out
five of the first seven batters who faced him. Not one Hampton player had
succeeded in reaching first base. On this day, Randy looked serious as he
rocked forward in his long, patient windup, then flung the ball with impressive
speed toward the catcher’s mitt. An opening-day crowd cheered him on and
grew more excited each time another Hampton player struck out. His father
shouted encouragement to him from the stands.

In the fourth inning Randy threw a hard, fast ball and the
umpire called it a strike. Then, suddenly, Randy lurched forward on the mound
and fell to the earth. In that moment — though none of us knew it,
and though all of us would try to deny it, and though none of us would ever
understand it — Randy was dead. There was a confused rush of coaches
toward the mound. The coach of Wade Hampton became hysterical and, in a voice
that was ancient, haunting, and terrified, began screaming, “The
boy’s dying.”

At this moment, I saw Mr. Randel coming over the fence,
striding toward his fallen son. He was a strong, handsome man with a stern,
capable face. I cannot remember if Mr. Randel ran to his son, because,
somewhere in the panic, everything slowed down for me and the world softened
into a nameless, agonizing dance that dulled the screams of women and the pain
of men who could not bring the boy back to life. I watched Mr. Randel as he
looked into his son’s face and felt his son’s heart and held his
son’s hand. And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life
eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times. I saw
Mr. Randel’s strong face loosen up at the seams and melt from strength to
horror. I saw his face at the moment he surrendered his son to the earth, when
his loss was driven like a nail into his soul, when he understood that his
oldest son was dead and that nothing would ever be the same again. The sinew of
Mr. Randel’s face relaxed, his jaw grew slack, and grief spread along his
face like a rash. It was like watching a second death.

An ambulance came and a doctor emerged, took one look and
drove a needle full of adrenaline directly into Randy’s heart, but there
was no heart, no soul, no movement, no laugh, no smile. Mr. Randel turned his
head away from his son as though tomorrow was too painful to face or want to
face. The ambulance left the infield in slow motion. Randy’s feet dangled
from the back window. As I watched his feet through my fog, I prayed on my
knees that Randy would somehow be spared. But the dangling feet of my
friend — that was the looseness, the complete looseness of death.

So I could not argue with Bennington and Miller when Mr.
Randel was with them. I had gone to Randy’s funeral and seen his mother
and father paralyzed with grief among the flowers encircling the casket. I went
to see them soon after the funeral to give them a poem I had written about
Randy. My first poem. A poem that offered Randy to God when I secretly could
not envision the necessity for any god to strike such sorrow in the midst of a
family.

Year passed and I became a part of the Randel family and
subliminally tried to become a substitute for the lost Randy. Julia, his
lovely, soft mother, for years after Randy’s death would cry whenever I
came over, and I would cry with her. When I went to The Citadel, the Randels
paid for most of the first year with a scholarship established in Randy’s
memory. We wrote frequently during those years at college and I saw them often
on vacations. They came to see me on Parents’ Day at The Citadel.

So when Mr. Randel accompanied Bennington and Miller to
Yamacraw that day, there was no way I could tell the group what I was thinking.
Mr. Randel and I had an unwritten, unspoken law that we would never cross
swords professionally, that our friendship was too intense and personal to be
tarnished in some abortive, temporal crusade concerning our jobs. He did not
want me to be on the damn island. It embarrassed him to be a part of this
mission. He winked at me when he passed and we later talked basketball in front
of the school.

When they left, I realized that Piedmont’s empire was
not going to be assaulted easily. I also knew that I was too young to handle
the blitzkrieg that had just rolled over me. I had accepted Miller’s
ultimatum without a fight. I, along with the school, was just being shoved
under another part of the rug.

Piedmont was a firm believer in that
ancient, time-destroying remnant of the Paleolithic era, the chain of command.
The greatest of all sins in his administrative lexicon was for someone far
beneath him in rank to catapult over a series of links in the sacred chain to
confront him or even worse, unspeakably, to present a complaint to the school
board. This is why I was honored with the show of power, the flexing of the
administrative biceps, the flashing of the talons when I wrote Piedmont that I
was going to appear before the board. According to the stone tablet of
administrative procedure, I should first have presented a complaint to Mrs.
Brown, who would refer it to Mr. Sedgwick, who would mull over it for several
weeks, then submit it for perusal by the antique Bennington, who would
eventually and very timorously lay it on the tabernacle of Piedmont’s
desk. Piedmont thought the chain of command was the next best thing to
organized religion. I thought it was the most inefficient thing since the stone
wheel. It simply did not work. In November I asked Mrs. Brown if I could take
my class on a field trip in the spring. She said no. I asked that she pass my
request to Mr. Sedgwick for approval. She said no again. End of chain of
command. But Piedmont had studied several books on administrative procedure
from the groves of Columbia University. All of these books concurred that the
successful superintendent demanded strict adherence to the chain. In my chain
Brown was terrified of Sedgwick, who trembled at the wrath of the unforgiving
Bennington, who trembled at the thought of annoying Piedmont. Piedmont did not
realize that his staff reserved the same affection for him that Russian
peasants held for Ivan the Terrible. Nor did Piedmont ever quite understand or
forgive my writing him letters instead of writing to the three other frail and
rusty links in the chain. Piedmont regardless of his ruthlessness or the fact
that he could be a genuine son of a bitch, got things done. He could deal in
facts, figures, numerals, air conditioners, pencil sharpeners, chalk, water
pumps, and groceries. He could relate to people.

Piedmont wrote me in the middle of December and asked me to
meet with him and Mr. Sedgwick. In this meeting we would discuss the
“exorbitant” gas bill. I looked forward to this meeting, especially
since I felt I had chickened out of a confrontation with the board of
education. Face to face, I thought I could challenge Piedmont to come to the
school, visit with the parents, and decide for himself what the school needed.
Sedgwick had fulfilled his obligations as administrative head with a mercurial
visit to the island at the end of November. He flitted through the school
building in a five-minute sprint, congratulated me on using the Sullivan and
SRA reading programs, and left as quickly as he could. An officious man,
Sedgwick now could look Piedmont in the eye and declare he had analyzed the
Yamacraw situation firsthand by braving the river brine for an eyewitness
visit. He never returned to the school as long as I was there. He also
infuriated Mrs. Brown by completely ignoring her presence. Nor did I wish to be
the one to explain to her that ol’ Sedgwick had this thing about
niggers.

So Piedmont, Sedgwick, and I would form a strangely diverse
triad when we assembled to discuss the future of the Yamacraw School. Sedgwick
selected a Friday in January for the conclave to meet in his Bluffton office.
The Friday happened to coincide with the last day of my endurance test in the
river, the terrible week of cold along the coast. I was in no mood to pander to
the tender sensibilities of administrators who needed to flex their biceps for
my benefit. Nor did I feel like waging war about my commuting. In my mind, I
was not wedded to the island, nor would I be guilty of bigamy if I went home to
Barbara each night. I had never heard of a school board in America with the
authority to force a teacher to live in a certain place. I planned to fight
Piedmont tooth and claw for the right to commute.

Only Piedmont did not show. He sent Bennington in his
place. Bennington and Sedgwick were to conduct the meeting and report its
results to Piedmont — a praise to the chain of command. I walked into
Sedgwick’s office garbed in my winter splendor, boots dripping, gloves
sticking out of my jacket, and hat arranged haphazardly over tousled hair. Zeke
had informed me that Bennington would preside at the meeting instead of
Piedmont. Zeke also told me that he had heard they were going to make me pay
for the upkeep of the boat.

“Wanna bet, Zeke, me fine man,” I said.

“Just telling you what I heard. I’d quit that job
so fast it’d make their eyes open, if I were you.”

Bennington greeted me effusively when I came in, grinning
his cunning, endearing grin and asking me how I had withstood the cold that
week. This, evidently, as a big moment in Sedgwick’s life, a chance to
impress his superiors with his ability to handle the niggling problems that
arose on his end of the plantation. He was nervous and plucked absently at his
chin while he stared intently at a piece of paper on his desk. He shook his
head negatively, painfully, as if the piece of paper were a moist dung sample
deposited before him for reluctant analysis. But Bennington, the lead mule in
the odd pack, began the discussion by apologizing for Dr. Piedmont’s
absence. He blamed the absence on the ubiquitous whipping boy of southern
education — the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

“Doctor Piedmont has asked me to take his place and to
let his feelings in this matter be known.”

“Now, Mr. Conroy,” Sedgwick started, clearing his
throat impressively, “this gas bill is out of the question. It is entirely
too much money. Thirty-four dollars, I believe. We cannot be expected to pay
for the gas you use to get yourself to work each morning.”

“Yes, you can,” I answered, pleasantly, I
hoped.

“We don’t pay any other teacher to get to
work,” said Sedgwick.

“How many teachers go to work in a boat?” I
asked.

“That’s beside the point. The county has no
travel allowances for teachers to get to school. You are no different from
anyone else,” said Bennington.

“That’s crap,” I answered. It was about this
time during the exchange that I felt the great, ancient Conroy temper rising
like an air bubble to the surface. Whenever I am going to lose control,
whenever I am about to assume the emotional and psychological response of the
Peking man, my upper lip quivers reflexively and I find it very difficult to
enunciate even the simplest of words.

When Bennington said, “We have come here to tell you
that we will pay for your gas to the island on Monday and from the island on
Friday. No more, no less. Nor will we pay for the upkeep on the boat if you
continue to commute.” My upper lip fluttered like a butterfly wing.

“O.K., guys,” I said. “Thanks a lot for the
meeting. I’ll see you around. I’m going to have to talk to Piedmont
if I’m going to get anything solved.”

“You can’t just walk out,” gasped
Bennington, as if I had urinated in the holy grail.

“Like I am leaving, man. This week has been too damn
cold and this year has been too damn long to give it up because of this lousy
gas. Eventually Piedmont and I are going to have to fight it out anyway. You
guys are just doing what he told you to do. You really don’t have any
power to compromise at all.” And I headed for the door. Sedgwick sputtered
incoherently and Bennington made an abortive attempt to block the door.

“You can’t leave. You can’t just
leave.” Ol’ Bennington really was concerned about me leaving
“You are the most unreasonable young man I have ever dealt with in my
life.”

“I’m not unreasonable,” I fired back, lip
aquivering. “I just ain’t going along with what you guys say, so
I’m taking off.”

“You can’t just walk out of this office while we
have things to discuss,” said Sedgwick.

“Sure I can.”

“Sit down, young man,” Bennington said.
“Please sit down. I’ve never had a meeting end like this. It’s
not proper.”

“We can work something out,” said Sedgwick.

“Good, that’s all I wanted to hear.” So I
returned to my seat and sat down. “Gentlemen, all I am asking is you to
continue to pay for my gas and upkeep of the boat this year. I will continue to
act as stevedore, guide, ferryboat captain, and anything else the county might
want to use me for in relation to the boat. I would like you to think of the
boat as a lifeline to the island. Five days a week in the morning and
afternoon, I will be coming to and from the island. Mr. Skimberry has also
suggested that I start carrying fresh milk for the children of the island so
they won’t have to drink that crappy powdered milk.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” said
Sedgwick.

“I know where we can get cheaper gas,” said
Bennington.

So the discussion progressed and got more detailed. It was
decided that I could indeed commute, that it was an excellent way to serve the
needs of the island, and that a fresh-milk program should be initiated
immediately. As I left the office, I shook hands with Bennington and Sedgwick,
apologized for losing my temper, and told them that the cold weather had frayed
my nerves somewhat. Sedgwick intimated that he liked to see teachers fired up
about their jobs. Bennington agreed, but there was something in his eyes that
told me I had earned the enmity of a man who would never forget my
impertinence, a man who would not rest until the wolves cut my flanks from
behind. He smiled at me and it was the first time I ever knew that a smile
could communicate hatred. I also realized that neither of them would have had
the guts to report to Piedmont that I had simply walked out on them.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 9

The older boys played basketball almost
every day at recess. The basket was only eight feet high and the playing area
was pure sand. But the games themselves served as emotion-cleansing rituals
where the strong and tall waged war against the fiercely determined small and
weak. Oscar was the acknowledged prima donna of the group, the golden boy of
island athletics, who used his height and weight effectively under the boards
to shove out any lilliputian who challenged his right to that domain. I have
mentioned the competitiveness of these children before. These basketball games
at recess were serious business that sometimes degenerated into violence, one
player sitting on top of another player pounding his head. Yamacraw basketball
had several variations and modifications.

Since Oscar was the tallest and the game naturally centered
around him, he was the number-one target for the hatchet men who swarmed all
over him like angry bees. It was not unusual to see Oscar under the basket
preparing to shoot with Frank punching away at his stomach and Fred, directly
behind him, punching away at his kidneys. Oscar would generally manage to get
the shot away, then he would lean down and punch both Frank and Fred.

Saul was the out-man. Since he was the smallest and
frailest of the players, he hung far outside the brawl under the basket. If a
ball accidentally was flung in his direction, he would scurry over to intercept
it, then feed it to one of his teammates before the thundering herd engulfed
him. If he held the ball a fraction of a second too long, he would be pounced
upon, relieved of the basketball, then cast aside like a troublesome fly on a
cow’s tail.

Since the court was sand, the game was a mixture of
football and basketball. The flying tackle was a main stratagem of defense, as
was the cross-body block and the flying wedge. To dribble was to suffer the
loss of the ball, so the skilled player developed fakes, feints, and a stiff
arm that carried him near enough the basket to shoot. Of course, if he could
not get close enough to the basket, he shot anyway. The kinds of shots
staggered the imagination. Fred had developed the most interesting and
versatile repertoire. To arch the ball over arms outstretched to block his
shot, Fred would fall to the ground while at the same time hooking the ball
high into the air. If this failed to score — and it almost always
did — on the next occasion he would turn his back to the basket and
simply hurl the ball over his head toward the goal. Fred almost never scored,
but he was hell to watch.

When I first attempted to put a little form and rules into
this madness, the kids listened respectfully, but continued to play the way
they always had. Whenever I tried to inject a little order into their chaotic
interpretation of the game, they looked at me as though I had lost my mind.
They loved their game too passionately to allow me to ruin it with a flurry of
rules.

In March I read in the paper that the Globetrotters were
coming to Charleston and I thought it would be fun to take my noontime stars to
see them. I asked the boys if they had seen the Trotters on television. Man,
they loved the Globetrotters; they worshiped the Globetrotters. Since it would
not be a school-sponsored trip and since I would not have to go through the
crap of asking Mrs. Brown’s permission or collecting written slips from
the parents, I told the boys to fight with their parents and talk them into
allowing the Globetrotter trip. I told them I would not enter this battle with
the parents but save my energies for the great campaigns that lay ahead. (The
parents trusted me for the most part; some kids were even allowed to spend
weekends at our house.)

Top Cat was going, along with Oscar the Large, Fred the
Hooker, Saul the Small, and Lincoln the Dirty. Frank told me of his gallant
attempt to talk Edna into giving him permission, but her fear of the water
prevailed. On the appointed day, eight of us piled into the boat —
five boys plus Chuck and Al, the two new California boys, and I — and
started the long, tortuous journey to Bluffton. My poor boat poked along the
waterway with the blinding speed of a manatee. It took an hour and a half to
get to Bluffton, twice the usual length of time.

We drove to Beaufort. Chuck and Al took one group in one
car; Bernie, Barbara, and I took the rest. We stopped off once we got to
Charleston for a quick hamburger at McDonald’s. It tickled the hell out of
me to see the guys fumbling with their change and trying to act like big-time
operators accustomed to dining out in the big city. They bought enough food to
feed half the city of Charleston.

The Globetrotters were playing in County Hall in
Charleston, a large, sterile arena that looked like a throwback to the
declining years of the Roman Empire. Most of the crowd were seated when we
arrived. The crowd itself was a wide mixture of people. More white people than
blacks sat in the arena, but at four dollars a ticket that formed no real
enigma. Fat cops ambled up and down the aisles chewing gum and looking bored.
Women with the faint aura of high society sat rigidly erect, trying to look
chic in an atmosphere of stale popcorn and jock smells.

We had a hell of a time finding seats and finally stood
near the Globetrotter dressing room, where we had a fair view of the court.
Bernie and Saul had managed to inch up to a spot that afforded them a good view
of the game. The rest of us were standing on our tiptoes and seeing as best we
could.

A roar from the crowd told us that the Globetrotters were
emerging from the locker room. They ran right past us on the way to the court
and one of them, the greatest Globetrotter of all, Meadowlark Lemon, won a
place of honor in my heart for all time. When he ran past Bernie and Saul, he
reached out and patted Saul on the behind. With that simple gesture, Meadowlark
immortalized Saul’s fanny — at least for a week.

Eventually we clambered up on a bandstand and had an
excellent view of the entire game. The boys loved every stinking minute of
play. They watched in amazement as Curly Neal performed his classic dribbling
exhibition and gasped as these huge, black athletes went high into the air to
jam the basketball into the hoop. They laughed at every joke and whooped it up
at every gimmick. Sometimes they would just look at each other and grin in
disbelief. They learned many tricks which they would utilize in their blood
games on the island. From this night forward the behind-the-back pass and the
between-the-leg pass became staples of the island brand of ball. This was
basketball, man, and it was good.

As we left that night, walking to the car through the
milling crowd, all of us talking about the Trotters and relating firsthand our
favorite parts, Saul paused on the side of the road, people walking all around
him, and took a piss. Bernie watched in shock, and I tried to figure out a
proper response. None came. When Saul had finished, he zipped up his pants and
continued to walk toward the car. It struck me then that the boys probably jus
let fly on the island when the occasion demanded it and Saul saw no reason not
to follow his urges on a Charleston street just as naturally. I said nothing.
On the way home I learned that this great journey to Charleston was the
farthest any of the guys had ever been from Yamacraw Island.

Once I started teaching on the island, a
great many of my friends clamored for a trip to Yamacraw. At first, I
entertained no thoughts about running a ferry service between the island and
the mainland, but I swiftly changed my mind after the first few cataclysmic
days that I spent exploring the void that gripped my eighteen students. I soon
decided that any human that had not been entombed on Yamacraw since birth had a
vast repository of experience to share in my classroom. I reasoned further that
if my friends were coming to the island to learn something about the culture of
the Sea Island Negro, then they, in return, could impart some measure of their
own existence to the children of the island.

When I first started dating Barbara seriously during
September, I met two friends of hers at dinner one night, Dick and Marie
Caristi. Dick was a dentist in the navy, stationed in Beaufort. He was also an
avid amateur photographer, and my descriptions of the island instantly caused
some Nikon gland deep within him to salivate. A week later he became my first
official visitor in what was to become the favorite part of my program. Dick
was successful in breaking down the incorporeal barriers that separated the
children from strangers in the early days. He provided an excellent opportunity
to introduce another part of the country to them. Dick was from Boston and his
accent was as thick as Bunker Hill. I gave him the tape recorder, let him talk
about himself, his work as a dentist, healthy teeth, and the city of Boston. We
replayed his voice and analyzed his speech, the silent rs, the
articulation, and finally, the speed of his presentation. Then I played a
speech Cindy Lou had given the previous day with her island dialect racing with
jackrabbit speed from the first word to the last.

“Lawd, that girl talk so fast,” laughed
Ethel.

“You shut yo’ mout’, girl,” cautioned
Cindy Lou.

Then we went to the map to find Boston. Dick started to
cite its preeminence in the Revolutionary War, but this quickly led to a
staggering amount of new material. Since the kids knew nothing about Boston, or
Massachusetts, or the Revolutionary War, or New England, or England, out of
necessity we had to restrict the scope of conversation. Compared to the
Yamacraw children, everyone I brought to the island was a compendium of ideas
and experience, and the one transcendent problem of all who came to the
classroom was the intelligent condensation and control of the material they
wished to present. This was my own greatest problem. How much did the kids know
and what should I teach them that they didn’t know?

Dick was the first in a long procession of visitors. His
success that first day convinced me that associations with a multitude of
people would be beneficial and instructive to my students. Before the year
ended, forty people made the voyage to Yamacraw. Some of them were only mildly
successful in leaving part of themselves in the classroom and some simply could
not relate to children and made little imprint on them. One man, not a friend,
patronized the kids badly and spoke to them as though he were addressing an
assembly of cretins. But of the forty or so who came to the island, there were
several who implanted their names and personalities forever in the memory of
eighteen very impressionable children.

My sister was one. Carol Ann was a senior in college then
and decided to come down for a week to get to know Barbara and the children
better. She also wanted to see the island. When Zeke put us in the river it was
a cold, wind-driven Friday in December. Before we hit deep water I watched as
Carol delivered a vigorous incantation against the shark gods who ruled salt
water unchallenged. Carol was always a kind of high priestess in our family
circle, a wry and demonstrative oracle who read eastern philosophy with
sophomoric intensity and who tried to implement the lessons she derived from
her readings in our household. Carol had difficulty enlisting Dad’s
interest while she lectured about the teachings of Vishnu, as he watched the
White Sox games on television.

I relished the thought of introducing Carol to my students.
Nor did she disappoint me. Along with my father, she is one of the world’s
great undiscovered actors. Whatever she does or says is burnished with an
almost vaudevillian touch. She longs to write and act in a play where the
heroine combines the pragmatism of Scarlett O’Hara, the wit of Falstaff,
and the destiny of Ophelia. Until she does, only her family and friends will
benefit from her dramatic gifts.

She entered the classroom when we got to the island, moved
about the room talking to the kids and making herself comfortable. Then she
told me she was ready to perform. Her performance that day was superb. She
recited poems from our childhood, poems of adventure, and scenes from plays.
She did this with typical Carolian flourish. Her eyes gleamed, her voice
ranted, then whispered, then rasped, then quivered. The kids sat transfixed.
They neither smiled, nor cheered, or moved. They had never seen anything like
it.

Pleased by her reception, she delivered her rendition of
the witches’ scene from Macbeth with such macabre passion and
blood-chilling authenticity that the children without exception grew restless,
wide-eyed, and frightened. Carol sat in the middle of the floor, her eyes
blazing at an imaginary cauldron, her lips quivering as she summoned double the
toil and stinking trouble, and her hands worked diabolically as she bent over
her fire on the schoolroom floor. It was a good act; she had performed it
frequently for an appreciative family when we gathered for the holidays. But
the students did not fathom the relatively important fact that it was a
performance and not the utterances of a madwoman I had imported for the
occasion. To further complicate matters, Carol had performed a few magic tricks
just to loosen things up a bit.

She was delighted to discover what she had wrought. It
pleased her to think that her performance had been so dazzling, credible, and
convincing. I pointed out that she had not played before the most sophisticated
audience in the western hemisphere, but the actress in her was undaunted and
her ego soared.

The kids bombarded me with questions the following
Monday.

“Your sister really a witch, Conroy?” Lincoln
asked.

“Of course not. She was just acting,” I
answered.

“No,” other voices interjected.

“She bad,” said Samuel.

“She tell me she turn me into a hoppy-toad,” said
Sidney.

“She was just kidding. She was pretending to be a
witch.”

“How you know?”

“Because she’s my sister.”

“Witch gotta be someone’s sister,” Ethel
reasoned.

“Witch bad.”

“She tell me shark get ’um if I fall in
river,” Lincoln said.

“For Chrissake, she’s been talking about sharks
since she was a little girl.”

“That girl was a witch,” Jasper said with
finality.

So my sister literally and figuratively left the classroom
with her witchdom intact, nor could I ever mention my family again without
conjuring up visions of boiling pots and Carol’s bent shoulders crouching
over toad-filled concoctions. The aura of Carol’s performance lingered
long after she left the island. She had fired the imagination of my students
and brought the magic of theater into the classroom. She had mesmerized the
kids by simply tossing around a few lines by Shakespeare. She opened up a
wonder in the art of pretense, the fantasy world of drama, where witches and
teachers’ sisters can be the same people.

One of the more memorable visitors came by accident. Mrs.
Brown dismissed school early one chilly day in March when the water pump
inexplicably quit working. She commissioned me to go to Bluffton for the sole
purpose of eliciting help from the long-suffering Zeke Skimberry. Whenever the
pump froze, it suited me fine, since there was something rather melodramatic in
the endless procession of small boys heading for the pissing tree in the woods.
Whenever the pump broke, Mrs. Brown would come in the room, heave her shoulders
dramatically and say, “Tell your babies to put on the brakes, Mr. Conroy.
The commode will not flush, so just tell everybody to put on the brakes.”
At noon, I pointed the boat toward Cannon Creek and the public dock in
Bluffton.

As I pulled in view of the dock and was making the final
elaborate preparations for landing, I spotted George Westerfield, a teacher at
the high school and a solid regular in the Skimberry bull sessions. He was
sitting with his feet dangling over the dock, chewing tobacco and periodically
spitting into the river. On his left sat a startling, exotic man, slender and
well over six feet tall, who was staring intently at my boat. The man did not
have a single hair on his head.

They helped me tie the boat up and George introduced me to
his college friend, Peter Walter. I learned in the ensuing conversation that
Peter and George had anchored a strong soccer team at the University of the
South during their undergraduate days. Peter was on a break from a private
school where he taught in New England and had brought several of his students
with him on a leisurely tour of the South. He spoke rapidly, a machine-gun
patter of words and phrases that flew out of his mouth like small, harmless
cartridges. I liked him immediately. He professed a genuine interest in the
island and the children I was teaching and asked me what methods I was using to
improve the kids’ reading ability. When I had carefully explained the
cabalistic ritual of my teaching secrets, he affably informed me that those
methods were all wrong.

“Pat, I teach with his fabulous man who has developed
a foolproof method for teaching kids to read. He takes kids who can’t read
a word and has them reading on a third- or fourth-grade level by the end of one
year,” Peter said.

“Come to the island tomorrow and show me your
stuff,” I said.

“You’ll take me to the island? That’s great.
That’s simply fantastic. Can I take the kids I brought with me? They would
love it.”

The next morning the boat was filled with Peter and his
three students. Zeke Skimberry, who had also fallen under Peter’s spell,
went along with us to fix the inscrutable water pump. Peter talked incessantly
during the entire trip. He had joined the Peace Corps but dropped out during
the training sessions because he could not tolerate authority figures
controlling his life. He switched to the Teachers Corps, but opted out once
again during the training sessions for the same reason. To make the cycle
complete he planned to join the Job Corps and the Marines, wash out during both
preliminary trainings, retire to the wilderness, and write a definite
confession on life in the America Corps. His enthusiasm infected everything he
touched, magnified life about him; his students worshiped him openly and
laughed convulsively whenever he cracked a joke, no matter how corny.

When we entered the classroom, Peters hairless head and
tall form striding gracefully to the center of the room froze my critical bunch
for several moments. I waited for Prophet to utter some endearing salutation
like, “Man ain’t got no hair on his haid,” but the gang
contented themselves with staring and whispering when Peter first made his
entrance. One of Peter’s students was from Hong Kong, so I had him go to
the map, pick out his country, then let Peter tell about the country. (The boy
from Hong Kong spoke English about as well as I spoke Cantonese.)

It did not take Peter long to capture the attention of my
entire class. He had a way of talking, gesturing and bouncing along —
hypnotism by words and movement — that fascinated my group even
though, at first, the nudged each other with their elbows and flashed each
other amused glances. Peter remained oblivious. He gathered everyone in the
room around him, including me, and initiated math games, word games, and
geography games.

“Take the number five. Add seven. Subtract two, and
multiply times three. What do you get? Think now. We have to learn to think
fast on our feet. We have to be quick and bright. We’ve got to enjoy
learning. Enjoy doing. I’ll do it again. Slower this time, but not too
slow. Take the number five. Add seven. Subtract two and multiply times three.
What do you get?”

“Don’t get nothin’,” whispered
Richard.

“Get thirty,” said Frank.

“Great. That’s right. This is great. Who are
you?”

“Frank.”

“You are really smart, Frank. Any other smart kids
around? Sure, everybody’s smart. Everybody’s smart. They just need a
chance to prove it. They need to find something they like.”

Peter worked these games for half an hour. The kids never
took their eyes off him during his entire, spirited performance. His hands
moved beautifully as he spoke and his hands were very important to his
teaching. They were like twin batons controlling the mood and tempo of an
orchestra. When he tired of this, he called for a volleyball. Oscar retrieved
one from the closet, a spongy, deflated ball, which Peter claimed would be good
enough. He then launched into the history of soccer, told us how it was the
world’s most popular game, how its popularity was limited in the United
States, and how the game could be played with ease in the Yamacraw
schoolyard.

“Soccer is a game played with the feet,” he said,
controlling the ball expertly on the floor. “All of us are so conditioned
to use our hands when we play sports that it is very difficult for us to use
our feet only. It takes lots of practice. Now get these desks out of the center
of the room and I’ll show you some real footwork.”

We shoved the desks to the corners of the room, leaving the
center entirely bare except for the wood stove.

“Now, some of you boys and girls try to steal the ball
from me using only your feet.”

Naturally all eighteen of my students surged forward,
kicking and booting their feet at the ball. Peter took about thirteen direct
hits on his shins as he maneuvered the ball through the gauntlet of shod feet.
After his legs could take no more punishment, Peter led the thundering herd to
the playground.

Mrs. Brown went crazy when she saw my babies swarming over
the playground before the time designated in the sacred rule book. I convinced
her that Peter was a scholar of some renown, a gifted wanderer who traveled the
country demonstrating the joys of soccer to rural children. He would even teach
her class if she so desired — but she insisted indignantly that her
class studied more important things than games. “You don’t learn a
thing by having fun. You gotta work. You gotta work.”

By this time Peter had miraculously divided the class into
two opposing squads, put Lincoln as goalie at one end of the field, Ethel at
the other, and was leading a hopelessly chaotic pack of soccer neophytes up and
down the field. Saul kicked at the ball, missed by two feet, fell to the earth,
and was immediately trampled by Sidney and Richard. Cindy Lou tried to boot the
ball and kicked Anna instead. Samuel and Sidney chased after the ball, kicking
conscientiously, until finally they stood on the perimeter of the field,
kicking the hell out of each other.

“Cut it out, man,” I yelled.

“Boy kicked me,” whined Sidney.

“Who you call boy, boy?” answered Samuel.

They resumed kicking each other. Meanwhile, Peter broke
loose from the crowd and was heading expertly toward Lincoln’s goal.
Lincoln, a passionate defender of his imaginary net, saw Peter approaching
formidably and decided that it was better to retreat than to face Peter’s
kick with resolution and courage. Lincoln fled from his position and Peter
rolled one home. The game lasted a half-hour. Peter then rallied the entire
troupe, marched them into the classroom, and demonstrated his control of the
ball. Without using his hands, he bounced the ball off his shining head fifty
straight times, then repeated the performance with each of his feet.

His soccer was excellent, but what impressed me more was
his communication with the kids, so natural and spontaneous. They followed him
around the entire day, pawing at him, talking to him, laughing at his jokes,
and trying to hold his hand. He listened to their stories, laughed at their
jokes, and answered every question they directed to him, carefully and with
enthusiasm. This guy Peter was a natural teacher, I thought later, one of those
rare human beings who loved and responded to children more than to adults and
who could draw children to him as effortlessly as a magnet gathering iron
filings. It rained on the trip back, a slashing, driving rain that limited
visibility to a few feet, and it was interesting to note that Peter entertained
the entire miserable boatful of us the whole way back. Soaking wet and
shivering, we pulled the boat up and Peter said, “Wasn’t that a
magnificent ride?”

By far the most successful visitor, according to my
students, was Richie Matta. Richie was a stocky, powerful, and irrepressible
Italian who had entered my life with a flourish the last year I taught at
Beaufort High School. He crashed a party at my house during the middle of
winter, made friends with everyone there the first hour, then took over the
whole party during the second. When one nostalgic group commenced to sing old
rock-and-roll favorites from the fifties, Richie startled the entire burping,
beer-sodden chorus by stepping back from the record player and singing like a
deep-voiced seraph. He was a songbird amidst insects and frogs. We eventually
gravitated next door, where Tim Belk, another friend, banged away at a piano
while Richie traced the history of rock and roll in the previous decade. His
repertoire seemed unlimited, his energy seemed boundless, and he sang for three
hours.

Richie’s life history was revealed to me after we
became friends that night. He came over frequently to talk. He was raised in
New Orleans in a fragmented, rather chaotic childhood. He had sung
professionally on Bourbon Street. He had gotten a good break in music, cut a
few records in Memphis, and become a minor rock sensation in the Delta region.
Then the Marine Corps intervened, drafted him, and sent him to Vietnam. His
musical career had died the moment his draft notice arrived. He had come to
Beaufort with the Marine Corps and planned to get a college degree when he was
discharged. He envied Bernie, Tim Belk, and me because we had been to college,
received degrees, and spoke with phony authority about the contents of a
sophomore literature book. Richie, a lesser man, could tune a car, tear a motor
boat apart, plaster a ceiling, build a house, and sing an aria from
Carmen. But Richie wanted to be a teacher. He was a boat mechanic for
his last year as a Marine and he had tired of a life whose trademark was grease
under the fingernails. He longed for a life of scholarship and contemplation of
Greek urns and things. Bernie and I used to gag when we considered the
possibility of the hairy, swarthy Richie, sipping sherry from a fragile glass,
dressed in rumpled tweeds, reciting poetry from a frail leather volume. The
vision was so out of character — like Attila the Hun wearing
ballerina shoes. We preferred our own mythology of Richie Matta.

I brought Richie and his new bride, Aldie, to Yamacraw in
early spring during the season of the fog. Richie held to the common theory
that I could not zip my pants, much less navigate a boat, and I wanted to
demonstrate the skills of boatsmanship acquired over the year. I wore my
official winter wardrobe with the flashy scarf and impressive boots, and the
wool hat tilted rakishly on my seasoned head. I coveted Richie’s respect
and played the Admiral Nelson role during the preparation for landing. I even
dismissed the fog, which was starting to rise thickly and ominously, as a minor
irritant and one that would not deter a master seaman. We left Zeke and entered
into that strange world of swamp and fog Nelson at the wheel, Aldie sitting
prettily on the passenger seat, and Richie asking me if I was sure I knew where
I was going or what I was doing.

“Of course, Richie. Just shut your big mouth and let
Admiral Conroy do the driving. I know this run like the palm of my
hand.”

Midway we were hopelessly lost. We crossed the widest
stretch of water on the trip, turned when we reached a familiar oyster bank,
and hit a sandbar that was not supposed to be there. Richie pulled us off the
bar, I retraced my path, figured out what I had done wrong, embarked on a new
direction, and hit the same sandbar again.

“Hey, Admiral Conroy,” Richie said mockingly.

“O.K., Rich. Do not say a word. Promise? Don’t
ever bring this up to Bernie and wipe it out of your own mind, son. It’s
all a mistake.”

We finally found the right shore line and followed it
unerringly to Ted Stone’s dock. Driving to the school, I asked Richie what
songs he would sing.

“Any song they want to hear, son. I know them
all.”

His performance that day was indeed notable. Top Cat
whispered, “Oh Gawd,” when Richie warmed up with Otis Reddings
“Dock of the Bay” and ended with “Proud Mary.” He sang for
a solid hour, singing soul and folk, traditional and rock. He told the kids
about New Orleans, about singing in the clubs, about the underworld and crooks.
He briefly described his experiences in Vietnam. But mostly he sang. When he
discovered their love of church and gospel music, he lit into “Down by the
Riverside.” Ethel responded by singing “Blue Burying Ground”
accompanied by Anna and Cindy Lou. Soon the whole class erupted in sounds of
feet clapping and feet stamping and voices singing. Mrs. Brown poked her head
in the window, her face a portrait of disapproval, and grimaced in displeasure.
Richie did not see her and at the precise moment she appeared, he roared out
his highest glass-shattering note of the day, which caused Mrs. Brown to jump,
the kids to go into convulsions, and me to scurry into the hall with apologies
to the highly offended principal. Later on in the day, Richie distributed
records he had made in Memphis to every kid in the class. I put one of them on
the record player and we listened to a much younger Richie crooning the top
song of his aborted career, “Time Out for Love.” Each day at recess,
after Richie’s appearance, the girls gathered by the record player and
danced to the voice of Richie Matta. One of the California boys, on first
arriving at the school, asked one of the girls if she had heard of James
Brown.

She replied, “Yeh. You hear of Richie Matta?”

“No.”

“He sing ‘Time Out for Love,’ ” she explained.

I also taped Richie’s performance that day and
periodically when boredom settled in, I would flick on one of Richie’s
brighter moments.

“Lawd, that man sing good.”

“Not as good as me, Saul,” I said.

“Shoot, mahn,” said Oscar. “You sing like a
frog.”

“Oh, that boy say Conrack sing like frog,” cooed
Ethel.

“I sing good,” I insisted.

“You sing so bad, Conrack! I laugh so hard when you
sing.”

“Man hurt my ears,” someone said.

“ ‘Time
out, time out for love,’ ”
I crooned.

“Gawd, stop.”

“Gawd, that sound so bad. Man dyin’,” said
Cindy Lou.

“I taught Richie to sing.”

“That not so,” said Frank seriously.

Then we would settle down to listen seriously to
Richie’s legacy to the classroom for one of the world’s most
appreciative audiences. Richie Matta, whose career sparked brightly then faded
like memory when he left the Delta, made his comeback and made it big with
eighteen kids on Yamacraw Island.

Lincoln forced me back onto the
kindness-to-mute-animals platform when he told me he hog-tied his dog every
summer to pick ticks off him. I once more railed against cruel bastards owning
animals, and if he could not treat a dog right, why in the hell did he have one
anyway? Lincoln giggled and said he was going to tie the dog up again next
summer and do the same thing. There were many times when my sermons fell on
ears of stone. The kids could not understand my concern for animals. They loved
their dogs and cats, but treated them with far more cruelty than I thought was
necessary. Ethel gave me the clue that this attitude toward animals was a
pervasive part of the island culture when she told me about her uncle. Her
uncle’s name was Charlie and was rather well known around the island or
his prodigious drinking. Ethel told this story about Charlie and her aunt.

“They had this ole cat, Mr. Conroy. Lawd, that cat
could ate anything. Anything you put out that cat snatch ’em up before you
could look around. One night Uncle Charlie say, ‘Man, this liver I buy
sure look good. So red and fine. Honey, fick this here liver up tonight so I
can eat it tomorrow at lunch.’ So my aunt fick up the liver with salt and
leave it on the table. In the morning she wake up and look fo the liver and
around it nowhere in the room. She look all around and never could see that
liver. So she say, ‘charlie, did you eat that liver? I don’t find it
nowhere,’ and Charlie say, ‘I don’t know. That goddam cat musta
eat it during the night.’ So he say, ‘Here, kitty. Here, little
kitty, you want some good food.’ The kitty hear Charlie callin’ and
comes runnin’ out from under the bed. Then the kitty follow Charlie out
the door and Charlie grab a hoe and chop kitty’s head clean off.”

With this magnificent punchline, the class laughed
hysterically. I stood there hoping that an appropriate sermon would form on my
lips.

Then Ethel said, “But Gawd, that cat sho’ could
eat.”

And Oscar said, “Cat don’t eat when it ain’t
got no head.”

Spurred by the success of her story about kitty’s
decapitation, Ethel continued in the same vein. “One time Charlie
didn’t like this little chicken-eatin’ dog. Dog pop chain many times
and gobble up one, two, maybe three biddies before we catch ’im and chain
’im up again. Once he get himself four biddies before we see ’im.
Charlie go get ’im but dog see ’im comin’ and run under the
house. He peek his head out a few minutes later and Charlie grabs him around
the neck. He gets the chiken-eatin’ dog by the tail, and swings him
‘round and ‘round and then breaks dog’s head against tree. Eye
pop out and brains bust. Dog dead when Charlie let ’im go.”

“What a nice story, Ethel,” I intoned.

“Dog bad,” Prophet said. “He eat
biddie.”

“Would you kill a dog that ate biddies, Prophet?”
I asked.

“I shoot ’im daid,” he replied.

“I shoot ’im in the haid,” Oscar added.

“Dog that suck egg is bad, too. I shoot ’em
daid,” Jasper said.

“Oh Gawd, egg-suckin’ dog suck all egg up. Gotta
kill ’im or you don’t get no eggs,” Lincoln said.

“Egg be suck dry,” said Cindy.

It took me a long time but I soon became aware of an
underlying, pervasive fixation for violence among the people of the island.
Violence was part of the culture and it erupted periodically during the year
and affected the children in my class. I had only superficial knowledge about
their homes and families and it took me a very long time to realize that
classroom depression or exhaustion usually indicated that fathers were drinking
too much or mothers were down at the club too late, or worse.

To begin with, the island was a small arsenal. Every home,
black and white, contained enough firearms and weaponry to hold off a platoon
of Marines for a fortnight. The people supplemented their food supply with
squirrel, possum, and an occasional deer, and the boys in my room continually
bragged about their marksmanship. Guns were as necessary and vital to the
island as fishing poles or crab traps.

The most impressive collection of rifles on the island
belonged to Ted Stone. In one of his rambling dissertations on what’s good
and what’s bad for Yamacraw, he intimated that his formidable array of
hardware was added insurance that the natives would never venture into his
compound uninvited. His gun rack was antlered with high-powered carbines and
short, heavy shotguns. “I can handle any trouble on this island. My only
worry is outside agitators. Communists trained in Havana. Nigger-lovers
comin’ to make trouble.” I thought at the time he was referring to
the California boys, but I later realized he cold have been saying this as a
warning to me.

Alcohol always precipitated the violence. Drinking was a
way of life on the island. Both the men and women consumed great quantities of
liquor and beer, drinking themselves into a stumbling, muttering limbo from
time to time. Of course, I understood very well why people drank on the island.
It was the single form of entertainment, the social medium that bound the
island together, the only sport, the only recreation, the focal point of island
activity. And alcohol brought the same relief to poor farmers and crabbers that
it brought to emperors; its particular, elusive magic could dull the cumulative
effects of being poor, jobless, isolated and frustrate. That it could cripple,
ruin, and summon cruel demons from the darker side of a man’s soul was
secondary. On Yamacraw its most important function was to bring joy, relief,
and euphoria; it desensitized a person into not caring whether he had a job,
clothes for his children, or money for food.

One of the younger kids whispered to me one morning that
Anna’s grandmother had been shot the night before. When I asked how it
happened, all I got for an answer was a grin and a silent tongue. Whenever some
crisis welled up on the island, I had learned that the children would never
come to me directly and narrate the story as it happened. They would drop
hints, let me overhear conversations, give me fragments of the story, until I
more or less knew what had happened.

It was through this piecemeal gathering of bits and pieces
that I learned an unnamed man had gotten drunk, come to Anna’s house,
swaggered and stumbled about the house brandishing a pistol and
“talkin’ big.” The end result was a bullet entering her
grandmother’s side. Whether the shooting was accidental or attempted
murder I never learned or was meant to learn. A woman had been shot, the kids
wanted me to know, but they did not want me to know the circumstances
surrounding the shooting or the name of the dark stranger who wielded the gun.
I asked Anna if she needed any help or if there was anything I could do to help
her or her grandmother. I did not mention the shooting. Anna simply shook her
head negatively and smiled her beautiful, inscrutable, proudly silent
smile.

Several months later I entered the classroom one morning to
find the kids uncharacteristically silent. I was very unaccustomed to
introspective, confessional silences any time during the day, but I was
especially suspicious of morning quiet. It generally meant that Mrs. Brown had
set a fanny afire. But this morning was different. I saw three of the guys with
their heads on their desks crying — Oscar, Fred, and Prophet. I
walked over to them and asked, “Did she hit you?” Everyone else shook
their heads. “Then what in the hell happened?” Still no answer, and
by this time I had realized that there would be no answer for right now. I knew
that the story would be revealed in scraps and tiny portions over the day. I
also knew that the story would not come from Oscar, Fred, or Prophet, but from
the others. And it did.

At recess I heard one of the kids whisper too loudly about
“their momma gittin’ shoot up.” Then someone mentioned that she
was shot in the foot. Lincoln walked up behind me and said she would be all
right. One of the girls said that Oscar’s father had done the shooting.
Carolina said he had been drinking. Through this random method of
communication, the full story evolved and took form. The father had gotten very
drunk and abusive; the mother had gotten very drunk and acrimonious. A pitched,
screaming battle ensued with the boys cowering in the back bedroom until they
heard a shot, ran to the kitchen, and found their mother bleeding. The scene
must have been terrifying. I know it was traumatic. It took several weeks or
the shock of the event to wear off the boys. They cried easily and pitifully
for many days after the shooting took place. Fred seemed to be particularly
affected. His attention span, normally short, became almost nonexistent. During
a phonics rally, Fred suddenly started crying when Jasper teased him about his
speech impediment. He ran to the bathroom, where I followed him. He put his
head on the sink and wept as if something was breaking up deep inside him. I
rested my arm on his shoulder and told him to cry all he wanted, that sometimes
a man just felt like crying and it made him feel better in the end. He cried
for an hour.

The shooting incident made me take a closer look at
Prophet. The kids had told me that no one messed with Prophet, even the boys in
the class much larger than him. It was said that Prophet went crazy when he got
angry and would kill anyone who crossed him during his smoldering rages. A
fifth grader who killed, I thought? The smiling, mischievous Prophet I knew in
class did not seem capable of the violence attributed to him by his peers. He
was a tough kid, very scrappy, but not a killer. Oscar, his brother, however
traced the history of Prophet eruptions one day after school. On one occasion,
Oscar had beaten Prophet up, the birthright of every older brother. Later in
the day Oscar was running down the hall, when Prophet stepped out from a room
and flattened Oscar with a brick slapped against his forehead. A man, it
seemed, should exercise discretion when bullying Prophet. At another time
Prophet reduced a much older brother to weeping and begging for his life.
Prophet led him all over the house with a loaded pistol at his head,
threatening to blow his head off at any second. Frank told me, “That boy
go wild when he gits hold of a gun.” I do not think I even looked harshly
at Prophet for the remainder of the year.

The final paroxysm of violence involved me and the class
directly. It was in the spring when the fringe of rest around the school
celebrated the renewal of leaf and bud and the wildflowers began to color the
edges of the dirt roads. It was late in the morning. A knock sounded on the
schoolhouse door. It was Ethel’s mother, Lois.

“May I please see Ethel, Pat?” she asked.

“Sure, Lois,” I answered, sensing that something
was wrong. “What’s wrong? You look like you’re
hurting.”

“Oh Gawd, that damn husband of mine. Oh Gawd, he hurt
me bad.”

“What’s wrong, Lois? Where did he hurt
you?”

“On my back. He hit me on my back,” she answered,
leaning against the door. “He nearly kill me.”

“What did he hit you with?”

“A chair, Pat. He break a chair over my back. He try
to kill me. Chair break up when he hit me. I think my back break when he
hit.”

“You wouldn’t be walking around with a broken
back.”

“Oh, somethin’ break. I know somethin’
break,” she wailed. By this time Ethel was standing beside her mother with
an expression of complete stoicism on her face. Not a flicker of emotion
crossed her eyes or moved her lips. Whatever storm she felt thundered in a
place neither I nor the world could see.

“You O.K., Mama,” she said quietly.

“Oh, Ethel, I hurt so bad. He hit me with a chair. He
break the chair on me.”

“We git ’im back, Mama,” Ethel said
impassively.

“Pat, will you drive me to my house? I got some money
hid that I don’t want him to git hold of.”

“I don’t know, Lois. If John is still down there,
he’s liable to break a chair over my damn head.”

“Oh, he go ’way. Go down to the club to get drunk
up. He ain’t in the house no mo’.”

“Are you sure, Lois? Are you damn sure?”

“I pretty sure.”

It was lunch time, so Ethel, Lois, and I got in the car and
drove over to Edna Graves’ house. Edna was Frank’s grandmother and
the first lady I approached about the Halloween trip. She was also, I found
out, Lois’s mother. Lois wanted me to drive her to Edna’s house so
she could narrate her latest domestic misadventure to a sympathetic ear.
Edna’s ear was far more murderous than sympathetic. When she heard how
John had demolished a chair over her daughter’s back, she went insane.

“You tell that dirty son of a bitch that if he ever
comes here again that ol’ Edna gonna shoot him daid. Daid, I say. Did
everybody hear me? I mean I am gonna git Betsy out of the house, load her up,
point Betsy at his head, and put him in the ground. He ain’t gonna mess
with me and Betsy. And I ain’t gonna talk to that son of a bitch no
mo’. I done through talkin’. Bety’s gonna do all my talkin’
now on. And when Betsy done do the talkin’, that son of a bitch ain’t
gonna be doin’ no mo’ list’nin’,” ranted Edna, her
body bent and trembling in anger, her index finger slashing the air for
emphasis. “He hit my daughter. Beat my daughter. Make my daughter cry.
Make her bleed. Now I’m gonna make him bleed. Edna and Betsy are gonna git
his ass. You hear me? Git his ass and git it good.”

“Oh, Mama,” Lois said.

“Don’t you ‘oh, Mama’ me, girl. Go git
your stuff and your chillun and git up to this house and leave that son of a
bitch. Leave him. You hear me. Leave him ‘fore he kills you or Betsy kill
him.”

To a do-gooding, bleeding-hearted Pollyanna, the whole
scene seemed incredible, exotic, savage, and ritualistic to me. From
Ethel’s reaction I could tell that this was not the first time her
grandmother had delivered this same speech, nor was it the first time her
mother and father had waged war against each other. I had heard from the island
grapevine that John and Lois were alcoholics and that their battles under the
influence were epic in their turbulence and fury. The family had an impressive
history of broken heads and cauliflower ears. John, in fact, had been blinded
in one eye during a fight. As he was beating his wife with a club, she threw a
potful of potash into his eye, and darkness instantly ruled his left side. It
was a very physical family.

After Edna’s long soliloquy ended, we continued down
the road to Lois’s house. All the way down, the thought that John might
still be in the house, inebriated and feeling his Schlitz, caused me a great
deal of anxiety. He was lame in one foot, but I knew that my swiftness would be
as the wind if John made a threatening move toward me. I also knew that bullets
had been known to travel a bit faster than feet. So with these cheerful
thoughts I steered the car toward the house. Ethel sat beside me in the front
seat. Her mother occupied the back seat, chattering about leaving her husband
for good, and how much her back pained her. I looked over to say something
reassuring to Ethel and saw her fiddling with a shining object in her hand. It
was a razor blade.

“What in the hell are you doing with that thing,
Ethel?” I demanded to know.

“Jes’ for a little protection.”

“You don’t need it. Put it away.”

“No.”

“Ethel, I am your teacher. Other kids at other schools
listen to their teachers and do what they say.”

This seemed to tickle her and she smiled. Then she said,
“I’ll put it away, but I’ll take it out if he’s
there.”

“You don’t have to worry, man. I’m
here,” I said heroically.

“He may git you too,” she said, confirming my
worst fears.

“Well, what are you gonna do with that thing if
he’s there?” I asked.

“I’m gonna cut ’im,” she answered
without smiling.

“Oh, that’s nice,” I replied, wanting to
fling myself under the wheel of the car.

The house finally came into view. I rolled the car easily
into the front yard, got out, and with a voice that tried to be virile, but
came out with a squeak of axle and a squawk of poultry, I said, “John.
John. It’s me, your good friend Pat.” When I discovered that he
wasn’t home, Lois went into the house, extracted her money from a secret
place, and returned to the car.

I took Lois to Bluffton to see Dr. Wohlert. He x-rayed her
back, discovered that it was just badly bruised, and gave her some medicine.
She spent that night with Barbara and me, returned to the island and her mother
for a few days, then went back to her husband. The strange thing was that John
and Lois really liked each other.

Barbara invited my whole class to our
house for a Valentine’s Day party. Her class at Beaufort Elementary was
coming over and she thought it would be a nice gesture to bring the two groups
together. Barbara crafted an ornate, lacy valentine for me to pin on my
bulletin board inviting the class for the holiday weekend. Only the girls
decided to come. The boys glanced suspiciously at the lace and the enormous red
heart, then decided there was something intrinsically feminine about this
gathering at the Conracks’. They said they would rather hunt and kill in
the deep woods. The girls bounded in joy when they discovered they would be
going on the trip without those nasty boys. So on Friday of Valentine’s
week, four of the girls and I laboriously fluttered and putted in choppy waters
toward the landing in Bluffton.

This was the first time the girls had stayed at our new
house. We had recently bought a two-story, seventy-year-old home on The Point.
We put them in the downstairs bedroom to sleep. They demanded they be allowed
to sleep together. I later learned why. Mary had felt the presence of ghosts in
the house from the moment she saw it. She spread this notion to the other
girls, and by nightfall the four of them had clustered in the living room,
clucking about imagined noises, footsteps on the dark stairs, and faces pressed
against windowpanes. I had not realized how real and palpable the spirit world
was to them, and even when I heard them voicing their fears, I was more
delighted than alarmed.

“You got a ghost in this big ol’ house, Mr.
Conroy,” Mary muttered.

“We hear ’im in the stairs,” said Jimmy
Sue.

“I ain’t stayin’ in this ol’ scarey
house,” said Cindy Lou.

“Oh, Gawd, I so scare. I don’t want no ghost to
git me,” said Carolina.

So then I did a very foolish thing. “Girls, I
didn’t want to tell you this. But you’re right. We’ve got a
ghost in this house. Barbara and I just didn’t want to scare
you.”

“Oh Gawd, I knew it. I feel it. I feel it all the
time,” wailed Mary.

“It’s not a big ghost. It’s a dwarf ghost, a
little fellow. He murdered his wife with an ax and was hung by the neck until
he was dead. He walks around this house at night now, looking for his murdered
wife. I saw him once. He had long fingernails, more like the claws you would
find on an eagle. His teeth were long and white and sharp. Some people claim he
drinks blood, but only a certain type of blood. The blood of young girls who
live on Yamacraw Island.”

“Oh Jesus!”

“Oh, Gawd, I leave this house now.”

“I’m just joking, gang,” I said.
“It’s just a big joke. There’s no such thing as a
ghost.”

“You crazy. I see ghost on Yamacraw.”

“You ain’t never seen a ghost befo’?”
asked Cindy Lou.

“No,” I answered. That’s because
there’s no such thing as ghosts. They do not exist. There is no such
thing. Never was and never will be.”

“If you ain’t never seen no ghost, how do you
know there ain’t no ghosts around?” Cindy Lou asked.

“Do you believe a dwarf ghost lives in this
house?” I asked.

“Yeh,” they agreed.

“Do you know where he lives?” I asked macabrely.
They shook their heads negatively. “In your bedroom,” I uttered with
the voice of a gravedigger.

They screamed, ran about like beheaded poultry, then
huddled on the couch.

I was still not taking their phobia seriously and was
trying to think of a way to eliminate this nonsense once and for all. I did not
realize that I was not dealing with nonsense but with a culture, a history, and
something very kin to religion. I was determined to laugh them out of their
belief in the otherworldly. To do this I chose to perform a very improper, very
insensitive, but very typical Conroy drama.

“I am going into your room right now to see if I can
find the dwarf ghost. I am going to prove that he does not exist and that no
ghosts exist in this house. I will not turn on any lights but will go in alone
in the dark,” I said, going into the hallway that led to the haunted
bedroom. I closed the bedroom door and remained absolutely quiet. The girls
grew fidgety as the minutes passed by. Finally they started calling my name and
pleading with me to come out. I remained silent. They became more agitated and
the entire group gathered in the darkness of the hall, huddling together,
half-smiling, half-whimpering. When they got near the door, I crashed through
it and fell to the rug like a dead man. I lay on the floor moaning that the
dwarf ghost had done me wrong by sucking on my jugular vein. Of course, by then
I was talking to myself, for the group had shot through the doors, screaming
and yelling for Barbara.

Mary was half-delirious with terror. The others were hiding
their heads under pillows by the couch or cowering behind living room chairs.
It took several hours to restore equilibrium to the scene. I had not only
traumatized the four girls, but Jessica, my three-year-old daughter, had also
been in the hall when my limp body had plummeted to the floor. She was
hysterical and would not let me within three feet of her. As Barbara, who had
rushed into the living room as soon as she heard the Armageddon erupt, shot me
disapproving glances, I tried to explain how I was simply attempting to dispel
this superstitious belief in ghosts. Nowhere in the frantic, fear-ravaged room
could I find a sympathetic eye.

This was the first time that I realized how seriously the
kids took the supernatural. During the planning sessions for the Halloween
trip, we talked about ghosts, witches, and warlocks, but had done so in a
lighthearted vein. We had also talked about these things in daylight. The
Valentine’s Day experience told me that the mythology of my childhood was
the frightening reality for Yamacraw children and that they were actually
spirit-haunted and aware of silent demons lurking on deserted trails and behind
fallen trees. We would talk about these beliefs in class. A bit wiser after the
dwarf-ghost fiasco, I listened to the children recite story after story of
ghosts who walked the island by night. Nor did I try to ridicule the stories or
make the children renounce their fears as superstitions. It would be like
trying to convince a religious child that he worshiped a myth instead of a
god.

Everyone had seen a ghost or knew someone who had.

The ghosts were often the spirits of people who had
recently died on the island. A spirit would roam the island for three to six
months after its body was buried. Then the spirit would tire of wandering and
return to the grave. Mary told of her cousin who had seen a ghost.

“He walk down road in dark. He alone when he walk by
fence at Cooper River end. He look in front of him and see a man walk through
the fence to him. The ghost have his head in his hands and it walk straight
through the fence. My cousin be so scare. He scream but the ghost keep
comin’ at him. The head make awful noise like dead man in the ghost’s
hand. Cousin run all the way to his house. He scream so much. Then he git sick.
Stay sick for days and almost die.”

Then Saul told of a ghost his mother had seen on the road
to the club. “She be walkin’ to the club. She look over at some tree.
She see sumpin’ move a bit. Then she see a ghost. Jes’ the
ghost’s legs though. Nuttin’ else but two legs. Legs start
walkin’ to my mama. She scream and run. Legs come to get her, but she run
too fast.”

“Did she ever find out whose legs they were,
Saul?” I asked.

“Legs of a dead man,” he answered with
authority.

“Then I’d have run like hell too.”

Top Cat lowered his voice to relate his story of the
underworld. “I be out one night walkin’. I so scare. It dark and I
able to see nuttin’. I hurry fast to git home ’cause I know there be
ghosts around. Then I see it. Ghost come fast ridin’ on a horse. It Adam.
Man what been drowned a couple days befo’. He ride fast and I be scare. I
fall down and wait for him to be past. He go by and not stop for nuttin’.
He ride until he be gone. I run home so fast.”

Everyone in the room had felt the presence of the
supernatural and every child believed implicitly in the presence of ghosts. No
one doubted a single story and all listened with an intensity and fascination
difficult to describe. Ghosts without heads, without bodies, without hands,
without feet; ghosts dressed in white, black, or naked; ghosts of all sizes and
descriptions; ghosts who floated, who walked, who ran, who rode cows or horses.
Frank had once felt a ghost sitting beside him on a wagon. His horse had
stopped suddenly and refused to go farther. He looked to his left and the ghost
was seated beside him — a strange, eerie figure who remained rigid
and silent even when Frank yelled. The horse was frozen with fear and stood
motionless in his tracks. Frank very prudently fled.

When the kids finished telling about the ghosts who dwelt
on the island, I tried to tell about the dwarf ghost who lived in my house but
was hooted down.

In March there was a death on the island.
Like most deaths on Yamacraw, it came with unforeshadowed swiftness; there was
no lingering or gradual wasting away or bedside farewells. A heart attack
felled Blossom Smith on a Saturday, an islander raced to Ted Stone’s
house, Stone immediately radioed for a rescue helicopter from Savannah. Blossom
was carried to an open field near the nightclub, where half the island gathered
around her wailing and praying. The helicopter appeared, landed rapidly and
efficiently, received the motionless Blossom into the dark angel with the
rotating wings, lifted into the sky in a maelstrom of debris and air, then
disappeared over the top of the trees. It was all very quick, very impressive,
and very futile. Blossom died that night in Savannah surrounded by strangers
and the ammonia smells of a death ward.

Death meant the cessation of all activity on the island
and, though school was in session, no children appeared at the door on the day
of the funeral. Though it was a time of intense emotional sorrow, a funeral was
also an important social event. Relatives in Savannah and Hilton Head hired an
excursion boat to transport mourners to the island. The immediate family was
fed and consoled. The old women of the island sat around and reminisced about
their girlhood. They also wondered out loud who was going to be called to the
Lord’s bosom next.

Early Tuesday morning a contingent of island men went to
the “colored cemetery” to dig a grave. Two dapper undertakers
accompanied the body from Savannah on the excursion boat. The whole proceeding
exuded the air of a ritual performed so many times that everyone knew exactly
what was expected and everyone had a part to play. As I drove to the cemetery,
I was taken aback by the number of mourners who had come to the island. The
road leading to the cemetery was thick with well-dressed black people slowly
walking toward the open hole that would serve as Blossom’s final resting
place.

Many of my students were already at the gravesite when I
arrived. They looked faintly bewildered by the fuss and rising sadness. The
procession of people continued unbroken through the woods. Most of them talked
animatedly, laughed with mild restraint, and seemed to be enjoying the festival
beneath the trees. Several relatives threw their arms around each other in
greeting. But all grew rather silent as they neared the deep, rooted scar
gouged out of the earth near a large, straight pine tree in the cemetery. Three
saplings, freshly cut, lay perpendicular across the open grave. Beside the
grave, her face powdered and rouged in death, her body neatly dressed, her
hands folded across her small bosom, her casket decorated with ludicrous
frills, lay Blossom Smith.

Behind the big pine trees, a vast and greening marsh
stretched for a mile before it paused for the river. Magnolia trees towered and
presided over the ceremony. The cemetery was hauntingly beautiful.
Yamacraw’s lone deacon, a bespectacled man named William Brown, bowed his
head reverently to begin the ceremony. “Jesus took you from us. He took
you to be with him.” His voice was plaintive, immensely evocative, and
profoundly sad. His sermon was almost a cry, a lament from one who did not
understand death, but who accepted it as calling of man by his creator, a
manifestation of a larger, unfathomable, mysterious, yet loving presence in the
universe.

Then everyone present walked beside the open coffin and
viewed Blossom for the last time. A chorus of older women sang a spiritual with
voices of ancient, incomparable sorrow. The column moved slowly, laboriously,
as each mourner paused to look deeply into the image of death. Some reached out
and lightly touched Blossom’s face. Others looked at her, then covered
their eyes and wept. Some spoke to her aloud and bade farewell as though she
would be gone for only a short time. Some became slightly hysterical and had to
be comforted by a team of women who seemed to be present for that purpose. Some
spoke the name of Jesus aloud. Some stared at Blossom, then joined the grieving
chorus that rallied new voices with every breath.

Flowers abounded beside the casket, carefully tended by the
two undertakers, who seemed to encourage the atmosphere of sorrow and hysteria
by their dramatic presentation of each new part of the ceremony. Most of the
flowers were plastic, a vivid example of a twentieth-century incursion of
Yamacraw. Aunt Ruth’s husband had been the island undertaker before his
death. He had fashioned pine coffins in a shed near his house. He would have
none of the tacky death chambers wrought by factories and peddled by the oily
undertakers of Savannah. Death on the island was cleaner and less packaged when
he was alive. The plastic flowers, with their senseless bid for immortality,
added an ugliness to the ceremony hard to define.

As I mused upon the plastic flowers, an attractive black
man darted from the viewing line, grabbed a handful of plastic flowers from
Blossom’s stockpile, and walked swiftly to a grave fifty yards away. This
caused an audible rumble from the crowd and for a few dramatic moments it
looked as though a band of men were going to pursue the brash thief through the
graveyard. Then the man with the flowers stopped abruptly and placed the
flowers gingerly on the grave. “That’s his mama,” someone
whispered. “He still loves his mama and miss her so much.” Everyone
was visibly moved by this show of filial devotion, except one man who uttered,
“Why don’t that boy buy his own flowers?”

After every single person filed by the open casket and
responded appropriately to the sight of Blossom’s lifeless body, an old
lady stepped out of the crowd holding a small girl not more than three years
old. To my utter disbelief, the woman very slowly passed the girl over the
casket into the arms of a waiting man. The little girl looked down and saw
Blossom’s dead face and became hysterical. Three times the girl was passed
over Blossom’s body, and her screaming grew louder each time. I was
horrified but did not feel that it would be enthusiastically applauded if I
rushed in and rescued the girl. I seemed to be the only one upset by this
ritual. I learned later that the little girl was Blossom’s granddaughter,
who had lived with Blossom before she died. To protect the girl from
Blossom’s spirit returning from the grave to haunt her, the girl had to be
passed over Blossom’s body three times. Thus freed, the girl disappeared
into the crowd still screaming.

A little while later, the singing having subsided and the
weeping having become softer, the two undertakers gave a signal to the six men
who acted as pallbearers. The six men lifted the casket and placed it on the
saplings that lay across the grave. They then looped ropes around the casket
and lifted it slightly into the air. Several other men slid the saplings out of
the way. The casket was then lowered into the hole. Four men started shoveling
dirt. At this time there was a stirring among the crowd. A palmetto tree near
the marsh was rattling and shaking as though a powerful wind was blowing
through it. Only there was no wind blowing and no other trees around it were
affected. A few women screamed and the entire crowd shrank back to size up the
significance of the event. I tried to scientifically explain what I was
witnessing and found no ready or easy explanation. The palmetto then grew still
again, and I heard someone behind me say, as in a prayer, “That’s
Blossom tellin’ us she still around.”

When Conrad, Gordon, and Bean blasted off
from Cape Kennedy, amidst the swirl of thoughts that passed swiftly through
their minds, the hundreds of fragmental recollections that flashed before them
at the instant of takeoff, the one that never occurred to them was that
eighteen children and one teacher on Yamacraw Island shouted the last ten
digits of the countdown and cheered as the rocket lifted off the launch pad on
the first step of the journey to the moon. After we cheered, Mrs. Brown popped
her large head in the doorway and informed me that the state government was
paying me good money to teach the children from the textbook.

“We are required by law to finish the textbook, Mr.
Conroy. Required by law. If we don’t do it, no tellin’ if we get paid
or not at the end of the year.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am just getting ready to rip
through the textbook. All you punks haul out your textbooks,” I
shouted.

The kids dutifully reached into their desks, knocked the
layers of dust off these neglected tomes, and spread them officially on their
desks. This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Brown, and she retreated back to her side of
the cave.

“Now take those dusty books, those worthless pieces of
garbage, and put them back in your desks.” I had yet to find a single
textbook that I felt could be utilized in the class. All of them were too
difficult or too irrelevant to force on students already killed by a system
that demanded certain progress through textbooks. To keep Mrs. Brown off my
back, though, I would go to extensive trouble.

“Now my dear Yamacrawans, we have three brave men
going to the moon to walk around looking for big rocks. Conrad, Gordon, and
Bean are their names.”

“They not gone to moon,” Frank told me.

“Of course they are. We just heard them blast
off.”

“They ain’t goin’,” Oscar agreed with
Frank.

“Didn’t you guys watch Armstrong and Collins on
the moon this summer?”

“Yeah.” They all nodded their heads.

“Didn’t you see the pictures of the moon on
television?”

“Yeah,” they agreed again.

“Well, then you know people have been to the
moon.”

“No,” Lincoln said. “They ain’t
goin’ to the moon. They burn up if they go to the moon.”

“That’s the sun you’re talking about. The
moon isn’t hot,” I said.

“They still ain’t goin’ to the moon,”
Ethel said.

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“They just ain’t,” Ethel said.

“They flyin’ off somewhere, messin’ around,
then comin’ back and tell people they have done been to the moon,”
explained Big C.

“Gang, as your teacher, as the person responsible for
stuffing knowledge into your porous little brains, I am ordering you to believe
that those men are going to the moon.”

“No, Conrack,” said Sidney.

“Men just foolin’,” added his twin,
Samuel.

“Moon too far, Mr. Conroy.”

“Moon too hot.”

“Moon too cold, girl. Not hot.”

“Shut yo’ mout’. I say moon hot.”

“Moon got man,” Prophet said.

“The man in the moon, Prophet?” I asked.

“See ’um at night,” Prophet went on.

“There are really going to be some men on the moon
tomorrow night.”

“Oh, Conrack,” Cindy Lou said, “you believe
anythin’ on radio. They ain’t goin’ nowheres.”

“Why, Cindy?”

“Just ain’t. Don’t ask me no questions no
mo’.”

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 10

Somehow my days on the island seemed
numbered and I grew restless and impatient with the sluggish pace of learning
in the classroom. I wanted the twins to become brilliant readers and writers
and my stomach knotted each time I heard them stuttering and wrestling with the
incomprehensible mysteries of one-syllable words. I wanted Richard to leap and
bound ahead of his peers in other schools in other places, wanted him to devour
books, write witty letters to congressmen, speak to rotary clubs, and shine
like a fallen star on his abandoned, lovely island. I wanted to remove the
tongues from Prophet and Fred, replace them with silver and brass, and assure
them that they never would have to cower before strangers again, that their
speech would never humiliate or embarrass them again. I wanted to give Saul the
gift of height and Lincoln the gift of slimness. I wanted Mary to be aware and
proud of her aloof, unspoken beauty and Anna to somehow fathom the wonder of
her smile.

I have read a number of books by teachers who had brilliant
success by using certain methods. I would stumble upon an idea in the morning
that seemed surpassingly clever and relevant, then find it foolish and absurd
by afternoon. Or what appeared ordained by the gods in the autumn seemed
commonplace and senseless by spring. What fired the imagination of my students
one week bored and stultified them the next. So there was constant shifting in
emphasis, approach, and material. The one great knave that I hunted was
boredom, and if I caught him lurking anywhere in the room, in corners, by
blackboards, behind the covers of books, or in glazed, anesthetized eyes, we
went to something else quickly, shifted in midstream, danced, sang, fought, or
milked rats. But always we spoke of the world beyond the river. The cities with
their stables of cars, their flow of people, their massive stores, their
baseball teams, and their hidden dangers. The kids would ask questions
(“Tell us ’bout New York?”) and I would tell of my first trip to
the City of Stone and they would tell me of letters from cousins, of the hard
living, big drinking, music-loving city where the lucky relatives had migrated.
Always we turned outward to where they would drift when they left Yamacraw, to
the world of lights and easy people, to the dark cities that would devour their
innocence and harden their dreams.

The one goal I developed the first week that never changed
was to prepare the kids for the day when they would leave the island for the
other side. Their experience in driving oxen, cleaning fish, and catching crabs
could not be classified as excellent preparation for the streets of large
cities. Anything that I could construe as relevant to the day when they would
leave the island had a place in the classroom. Thus Jimmy Sue could look
through the Sears Roebuck catalogue without encountering too much lip from her
teacher. And Saul could practice tapping his desk with two pencils because he
dreamed of playing drums in a jazz band. Yet I worried that I did things more
by instinct than by logic and would be hard-pressed to explain why I let the
twins mold clay when their literacy was questionable, except that they seemed
to enjoy it.

During the winter these thoughts flowed about the classroom
like uninvited birds. We were prisoners during the cold months, for the parents
would not entrust their children to any man to cross the waters in the bad
season. So we created a world in the classroom, chained to seats and the same
walls, looking out the window at the same trees, waiting for the time to move
and travel again. In discussions I found that the kids liked the idea of
leaving the island for other places among other people. I promised them that we
would hit the road again when the weather warmed. It was during the
introspective, wood-burning days of winter, when a kind of malcontented
lethargy gripped us, that I found the letter that would provide the means to
the grandest, most improbable voyage of all.

The letter was from a lady in Falls Church, Virginia, named
Judy Hanst. It was a year old and was addressed to Mrs. Brown. The letter lay
fallow on the bottom of a Himalayan stack of catalogues and debris that Mrs.
Brown had thrust upon me during my interregnum as principal. Mrs. Hanst had
heard about the island during Senate subcommittee meetings on hunger in
America. She was moved to write a letter to Mrs. Brown and offer to help her in
any way she could, with books or supplies, money or food. The letter reflected
a sincere author. She said she had friends who would help financially and
spiritually. The letter was a passport, a ticket, a commitment of the soul.
Something about the phrasing of the letter convinced me that the unseen,
unsung, and unanswered Judy Hanst would not have forgotten the island and still
would want to help. Looking up from my desk, I said, “Gang, listen up. A
hot-dog announcement: we are going to Washington, D.C.”

I immediately wrote a long letter to Mrs. Hanst explaining
how her letter had been unearthed from the elephant burial ground in my desk
and how excited I was that someone near Washington had offered help. Then I
splashed a few adjectives about the page describing the isolation and
deprivation of the children, how they needed to have their horizons expanded,
and how we would just love to hike our young arses to Washington. I designed my
letter carefully, assuring myself that it was plaintive and rueful enough to
pluck the heartstrings of every human residing on both sides of the Potomac.
This was not necessary, for this magnificent discovery, Judy Hanst, sanctified
herself in my eyes even further by replying a week later that she and her
friends would be delighted to sponsor a trip.

Mrs. Brown, whose primary job on the island seemed to be
resident crapehanger, forbade all plans to leave the island for any reason.
“Those children have had their fun. Now it’s time to work. Fun time
is over. They need drill in readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic.
They don’t need no Washington, D.C. The state department says we gotta get
through the books. You aren’t even usin’ the books, Mr. Conroy. Not
even usin’ the books.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, “but I want
you to know, Mrs. Brown, that I want to take the kids on this trip and will go
higher if you insist on saying no.”

“No,” she quickly insisted.

The month of March was spent working out the innumerable
details of the trip. Transportation was the most serious. Flying was out since
I would have to flog the kids with a cattail and a bullwhip to get them into an
airplane. A bus seemed like the most pragmatic form of transportation, but when
I inquired about prices I was continually staggered by exorbitant figures. I
eventually decided that automobile was the cheapest, most versatile, and most
readily available form of transportation. The two new California boys, Frank
Smith and John Richford, volunteered immediately to drive and chaperone. Father
John Becker, a northern priest who had migrated south to labor in more
temperate vineyards, offered me full use of a large station wagon. He also
contributed $150 for the trip for gas, food, and incidental expenses. Barbara
and I planned to pay for the trip insurance, which ran somewhere around $40.
Barbara also informed me that she, Jessica, and Melissa were going to
Washington if at all possible. It was about this time that Barbara told me that
she was pregnant with an unknown creature, who would ultimately emerge as our
third daughter, Megan. So her bargaining position was immeasurably
strengthened.

In April I drove around the island visiting the parents,
describing the wonders of Washington in vivid, glowing, purple prose, and asked
them to sign their names or marks on a form I placed before them. Expecting a
cakewalk after the unqualified success of the Halloween trip, I was a bit
surprised when every parent I approached refused to sign anything. When I asked
the kids why in the hell their parents were playing the same game they played
before the Halloween trip, as if on cue all eyes lowered balefully and Lincoln
said, “We ain’t gonna go to no Washing-ton.”

“The hell we ain’t, my friends,” I
answered.

So each day I would depart at noon to browbeat or beg the
reluctant parents to allow their children to cross the water again.
Carolina’s father, Alvin Pinckney, wanted to talk more than argue.
“Well, Mr. Con-roy, I let my girl go ’cause she’s a good girl.
Kinda like her momma was. Good with them books. Eat them books up. Myself, I do
some travelin’. I born in All-Benny Joe-gia. Ever hear of it? Spen’
mos’ part of my life away from Yamacraw. Come back when money git poor.
When fish come summer I make good money. A couple fish now. Not many. No fish
come. They come, I catch ’em. Go to Savannah to git stamps. You know, food
stamps. All that tape. Red tape. Shit. Me payin’ for the stamps and still
got to run through shit. No mo’. Me and mine gonna tough it out. No
mo’ shit. About that trip. Sho’ she can go. Ain’t got no money
to give ’er. But she can go wit’ you.”

Soon after this I had the signature and consent of every
parent except Cindy Lou’s mother and the obstinate earth mother, Edna
Graves. Edna was critical since her approval or disapproval controlled the
destiny of Frank, Big C, and the twins. All of them dwelt under her roof and
her word was law the moment it spilled from her lips. Cindy Lou’s mother
was eight months pregnant and had taken up residence in Savannah to await the
coming of her child. Since Aunt Ruth, the midwife, was forced to retire, the
black women had to emigrate to the city to deliver their infants. Cindy Lou
mournfully told me that she was “sittin’ ” for her brothers and sisters until
her mother returned. When I asked if her grandmother could take over for a
week, Cindy just said she didn’t know.

Cindy’s grandmother was a squat, whimsical old woman
who offered me a beer soon after I sat down in her kitchen. I accepted. As I
sipped it she asked, “How’s Calyfornya?”

“Pardon me, ma’am?”

“How’s Calyfornya doin’?”

“I am not a California boy. I teach Cindy.”

“Oh Gawd. You the white teacher. Oh Gawd, give me that
beer.”

“Why? I want to drink it.”

“You the white teacher. I thought you one of the
boys.” Then she paused. “You gonna drink it?”

“Yep.”

“Teachers drink?”

“Yep.”

“That’s good. Oh Gawd, that’s so good. I got
some gin in that there paper bag when you finish.”

Mrs. Barnwell and I became instant friends. She agreed to
babysit for Cindy Lou’s brothers and sisters and to intercede with
Cindy’s mother for me. She said I might have to take a trip to Savannah to
reassure Cindy’s mother (which I did), but she was sure that everything
could be worked out. “That chile needs to be in that Washington,” she
added.

Edna Graves was much more formidable and contrary. Her wolf
pack treed me for the second time when I entered her domain and, as she swept
the dogs out of the way with vicious blows from a scraggly broom, she shouted,
“You might as well head on down that same road you come up ’cause I
ain’t lettin’ none of my children go. Ain’t none of ’em
goin’ to no Washington. You hear me, mahn. You hear Edna talkin’.
Once is onct too many time and they done be off this island for Halloveen and
they ain’t goin’ no hunnert mile to no Washington. Those are my
grands and ain’t nobody takin’ them cross no river to go a hunnert
mile up the road.”

Nimbly keeping away from the multifanged pack, I
egg-shelled my way into Edna’s kitchen. Her finger wagged at me like an
old and oft-remembered friend. She towered over me and her voice grew louder
and more volcanic the longer she spoke. “Gawd, these chillun pester me all
day sayin’, ‘Cain’t we go to Washing-ton, cain’t we go with
Mr. Con-roy on a trip up the road?’ And I say, ‘Hell no, ain’t
nobody goin’ nowhere wit’ nobody.’ You hear Edna talkin’.
You hear what I say.” By this time she was veritably screaming.

“I can’t hear you, Edna” I whispered.

“Ha-ha-ha,” she thundered. “Ha-ha-ha.”
Then she paused and said, according to her standard formula, “Gawd, you is
a good-lookin’ teacher. A good-lookin’ white teacher.”

“Jesus, Edna. Not this stuff again. You told me you
wouldn’t start that anymore.”

“Yes, you is a fine-lookin’ man. A
fine-lookin’ teacher.” She grinned, her eyes twinkling
devilishly.

“When I was in college, Edna, someone once told me
that I had a nose like a pig’s.”

“No,” she cried, “you got a boo-tiful nose.
Gawd, a pig nose look so bad.”

“He said my nose looked exactly like a pig’s
nose.”

“That man crazy. If I see that man I tell him he
crazy.”

“Can the kids go to Washington, Edna?” I asked
abruptly.

“Ha-ha-ha. Hell, no. I tell you straight. I ain’t
gonna let ‘em go cause I don’t wanna lose my grands. Gawd, if
anything happen to Frank. Oh Gawd, I don’t know what I do. He’s my
boy, you know. I have him since he was a tiny baby. He’s my boy. Anything
happen to Frank, you know I might have to use Betsy on you. Gawd, I don’t
want to use no Betsy on a nice-lookin’ teacher like you.”

“I got a nose like a pig.”

“No, Gawd. Now let me talk. Edna feels like
talkin’ and I want you to hear what Edna say. The trip on Halloween was
nice. So nice and my chillun talk about it so much. They need to see things.
You take ’em off the island to places I ain’t never seen. So I might
let them go.”

“That’s great, Edna. I promise nothing will
happen to the kids.”

“Nuttin’ better happen to my grands. ’cause
I still got Betsy when you gets back.”

“You are a magnificent creature, Edna. A queen. A
saint.”

“Oh Gawd.”

When Edna relented, the last major bulwark of opposition or
doubt among the parents tumbled to the ground. Once the decision was reached
the parents shared in the general excitement of the children’s crusade to
the nation’s capital. Now, with the trivial details of finances and travel
arranged, with the full and supporting consent of the parents, the most
difficult and vital hurdle stretched across Henry Piedmont’s door.

“Why, Pat, it’s a pleasure to see you. I sweahr
it’s a pleasure,” said Dr. Piedmont, as I entered his office.
“To what do I owe this privilege of your visit? I’ve been
meanin’ to get out to the island to pay y’all a visit, but HEW keeps
me so tied up I’m lucky to be able to go home at night. How’s
everything goin’?”

I then explained very quickly why I had come to waste his
priceless time, that Mrs. Brown refused to authorize the trip, that the trip
was being paid or by private resources, that the children would benefit from
this trip a hundredfold, and that God and man considered it peremptory that he
grant his approval. He leaned back in his leather chair, placed one hand on his
massive, brown desk, and said, “Pat Conoy, you are the spittin’ image
of Henry Piedmont years ago. Young, brash, idealistic, always trying to help
people out. I look at you and see myself and think of young Henry Piedmont
wantin’ to do good in the world with the help of Jesus.”

Oh God, I thought, here comes the second variation on the
sacrosanct theme of Henry Piedmont. From my first meeting with him I knew there
would be a comparison of him and me, followed by a biography of his days of
suffering and self-denial in his mill town, and finally a rousing testimony of
faith in Jesus. A few sentences or paragraphs later he said, “After I
served my country proudly in the United States Army, I went back to my hometown
to help poor kids like myself who just didn’t have a prayer. I taught just
like you’re doin’ now, Pat. Only I taught mill kids where you’re
teachin’ colored children. I was a mill kid myself. These colored people
think they know prejudice. I knew prejudice, too. I was called lint head. And
being called lint head in just as bad as being called nigger, believe
me.”

After retracing his career as a company boss, teacher,
administrator, and finally, the holy of holies, a doctorate from Columbia
University, he croaked the secret of his success to me for a second time.
“I don’t know how you feel about religion. But I can tell you that
faith in the Lord has put me where I am. He has guided me along the way. He has
brought me success and more money than I ever dreamed of making. His hand has
led me down the path He chooses. I just fall to my knees each night and ask His
guidance.”

Like some purifying ritual, he repeated his life story to
me, the Protestant ethic, the unassailable formula of the American dream,
Horatio Alger in the cotton mills, Henry Piedmont, child of poverty, man of
paramount success, a golfing buddy of Jesus, had given me the green light to go
to Washington. But something else came out of that meeting. For some reason, I
realized that I really liked Henry Piedmont.

The odyssey began just after dawn on the
first Monday in May. The kids were well primed for the journey. The previous
two weeks had been a time of brochures, pictures, facts, history, art, and
trivia about Washington, D.C. I had brought road maps to school and we traced
our route north on Interstate 95, listed the towns we would pass, and charted
the mileage. I told the kids about the first time I saw Washington during the
magic, impressionable season of my tenth year, when I first reached the summit
of a Virginia hill above the Pentagon and looked down to the Potomac River and
the majestic city growing on her banks. “When I was ten, gang, I
didn’t think anything could ever be so beautiful or fine,” I told
them.

So it was early morning when we left Beaufort. During the
trip I would see through the eyes of children who had seen little, and who had
never ventured away from the smell of salt marshes and the sound of incoming
tides. I do not need to describe in painstaking detail what we did in
Washington. We made the endless treks to the proper monuments to pay homage to
the proper Presidents. We gasped appropriately at the bones of dinosaurs, at
the plaster-of-Paris blue whale, and at the unfortunate elephant set in
perpetuity to welcome visitors to the Smithsonian Institution. The kids
registered most of the proper responses, said the predictable things, and
marveled at the incredible herds of bleating Fords and Chevies during the
morning and afternoon cattle drive to and from the city. They liked the statue
of Lincoln, because he “freed the colored folk and did the Mancey Pation
Decoration,” and they looked upon the Jefferson Memorial as a worthy thing
because he, too, had issued some famous “decoration.” At the art
museum I marched them to a painting of a man being attacked by a great white
shark. They dutifully followed me around trying to feign interest in exhibits
that would strike my eye but bored them to extinction. They salivated heavily
as we walked over the ramp at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing and
gazed upon the acres of currency being churned out below us.

The museums and monuments were nice, but other things made
the trip memorable and significant to the kids. My terrible instincts of
wanting the kids to learn potfuls of knowledge, to absorb the entire culture of
the city in a single week like dry sponges were ridiculous and generally
ignored by the kids. Their pleasures were simple. Neither Barbara, nor Frank,
nor John, nor I could keep the gang away from the souvenir vendors that
flourished on every corner. “Don’t buy that crap, Saul,” I would
shout, and the next moment Saul would appear bejeweled with peace medallions,
Kennedy buttons, and rings with pictures of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Cindy Lou soon sported enough junk jewelry to start a shop of her own. Before
long, each child glistened with cheap baubles, three or fur necklaces, plastic
Washington Monuments, and Capitols of fake bronze. Beside the junk salesmen
stood the peddlers of hot dogs and Popsicles hawking their wares and spotting
easy prey in the wide-eyed Yamacraw contingent, who did not wish to insult
anyone and therefore bought almost everything. After the first day of
extravagant spending, the kids took inventory of their finances and discovered
to their chagrin that the trinkets for which they had bartered so generously
that day were priced like crown jewels.

The kids also really liked the neighborhood where Ken and
Judy Hanst lived. It was a suburban neighborhood with manicured lawns and
sloping hills, a neighborhood where ladies played bridge, frequented shopping
centers, and had their hair done once a week. Judy was an attractive, shapely
brunette who had convinced her neighbors to participate in housing the visitors
from Yamacraw. The neighbors had responded enthusiastically. So the kids went
in pairs to houses all along Judy’s street. Throughout the week they
played with the neighborhood children, spent the rest of their money buying
candy and other trinkets at the large drugstore up the street, and rode
bicycles for the first luxurious time in their lives down a paved hill.
“Oh, Gawd, I ride bike so fast down a hill. I sho’ like ridin’
on a hill,” they would say excitedly.

Meanwhile, all of us honored with the title of chaperones
would answer the questions of Judy’s neighbors, who seemingly were
expecting a ragtag tribe of starving pickaninnies with loincloths and bones
through their noses. “These kids look well fed to me. I was led to believe
these kids are poor,” one man said. “Why are they so well dressed? I
thought they were supposed to dress in rags,” a lady said. “They
won’t carry on a conversation at dinnertime. They just look at us,”
another lady said, very distressed. So we would try to explain to the
distraught suburbanites that things were not always what they seemed, that the
parents and relatives of these children spent a great deal of money so their
children would not be “shame” when they went to Washington, and that
the children were often taciturn and remote with strangers. It was during this
same week that I read about students in a Washington ghetto school who had
never seen the Potomac River.

Yet the neighborhood responded with warmth and humanity to
the kids. The ladies made lunches for our sightseeing expeditions and held
cookouts in the evening. Most of the kids made a point of telling me that
“these sho’ is fine people. They so nice, Mr. Conroy.”

On the final day, we took the kids to the zoo, where, as I
expected, they went berserk. We had studied every picture of every animal we
could find in encyclopedias, books, and magazines. We had watched every film on
wildlife I could lay my hand upon, but nothing could equal the drama of seeing
the great cats, the animated bears, the pool of seals, the elephants, and
reptiles alive and moving before their eyes.

“That monkey look just like ol’ Conrack,”
Cindy Lou squealed, as I walked up to the chimpanzee cage.

“That snake made out of rubber. Too big to be real. He
just lay still ’cause he not real. Rubber snake. I tell you that right,
boy. Oh, Gawd, snake move. He ’live,” Richard said, a he lurched back
from the glass enclosing the boa constrictor. The zoo won all plaudits when
compared to bloodless visits to all the notable monuments put together. Animals
were alive, breathing, being fed, bellowing, roaring, and among the animals, no
matter how exotic, the Yamacraw children felt at ease.

After the zoo we went to Great Falls. I wanted the kids to
get the feel of a hill, the sensation of height in nature, and wanted them to
know the joy of clambering among rocks and hearing water rushing through narrow
gorges and leaping over impediments on the way to the sea. For two hours we
climbed up hills and looked down at the water below. We maneuvered along cliffs
which bordered the rapids, played silly games, took pictures, made plans to
live in Washington, then headed back to Virginia in the full spring tide of
afternoon traffic.

It is difficult to calculate the value of an experience. I
never created a test to evaluate the trip, nor did the thought ever occur to
me. On the way to Washington, it struck me that the trip was a good thing in
itself and needed no defense. Barbara and I were riding in the front seat of
the station wagon, not far outside of Beaufort, when Jasper leaned up and asked
me, “What those ol’ lines for?”

“What ol’ lines?” I asked.

“Those ol’ lines all over the road.”

I still didn’t know what he was talking about. “I
don’t see any lines on the road, Jasper.”

“Yeh, they all over on the road,” he
answered.

Then Barbara said, “You mean the lines that divide the
highway, Jasper. They tell the driver which side of the road to stay on. The
yellow lines tell the driver if he can pass another car or not.”

“Oh,” said Jasper.

I sat there trying to comprehend what had just happened. I
had seen the lines so often that they had disappeared from sight and were no
longer part of my consciousness. To Jasper, who was accustomed to unpaved
roads, they represented something strange, unexplained, and beyond his
framework of experience. For the rest of the trip Barbara and I decoded road
signs, billboards, and numbers painted on bridges and overpasses. Things I had
not noticed for ten years now assumed great significance. I regretted that I
could not be making this trip with the freshness of insight and beautiful
innocence of Jasper and the others. I regretted that I was old, that I could no
longer appreciate the education afforded by an American highway, and that I
could not grasp the mystery of a single line painted down a road going
north.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 11

Graduation was on a lovely June morning
before the sun removed the dew from the ground. The two male graduates, Frank
and Top Cat, had bought flashy dark blue suits for the occasion. The girls,
Mary and Jimmy Sue, were dressed in the traditional white. The parents trudged
up the dirt road to the school. Everyone was dressed in their
“Sunday-go-to-meetin’s,” as one of the mothers said.

The graduation was held under the oak trees in the
schoolyard. A ceremonial white picket fence was pulled from the hall closet by
Mrs. Brown and placed in front of the speaker’s podium, where the
graduates would deliver their farewell addresses. The guest speaker of the day
was the ubiquitous Ezra Bennington, whom Mrs. Brown introduced as “the
best friend Yamacraw ever had.” Ezra delivered his speech in his slow,
avuncular manner.

“I think Yamacraw is as fine as any school in the
county, despite what some people say. We’ve got problems here, but
we’ve got problems in all the schools.” He then related several
stories that reflected his concern over the island and its children. “When
I was in charge of this district, there was one year, around Christmas time,
when all the schools were going to have turkey for the last meal before the
holidays. All except Yamacraw, of course. It seems the luncheon supervisor had
decided it was too much trouble to send a turkey over to the island. So I went
to the freezer and got two big turkeys out and sent them over to the children.
Some people might call that stealing, but I felt that what was good enough for
the mainland was good enough for Yamacraw.” Ezra was smooth as good
bourbon, the consummate politician who could talk honey as well as he could act
vinegar. He did not realize what the people who listened to his speech were
thinking.

I had taken up a small collection among the kids who wanted
to contribute to buy Zeke Skimberry a gift. I walked up to the podium after
Bennington’s speech and said I wanted to present a gift to the man who had
done more to help me than anyone else this year. Then I called Zeke up and
presented him a copy of The Family of Man signed by all of my students.
Zeke got choked up. His blue eyes glistened as he accepted the book. He then
gave a small speech. “I just want to say thanks for this wonderful gift
and that I’ve worked on this island for a long time and have got to know
the people and they have got to know me. I think the people of this island are
some of the finest people in the world. This year I’ve gotten to know the
children in Pat’s class real well and I’ve learned to love them. I
love all kids. I just want to say if any of you ever need me in Bluffton, for
anything — for anything at all — just come to my house and
I’ll be glad to help you. This gift means a lot to me. An awful lot.”
It was the speech of the day.

On Monday after graduation seven of the kids took the
island boat to Bluffton. Barbara and I met them there and drove them to camp at
St. Mary’s. Father Becker, the northern priest who had contributed to the
Washington trip, had given me full use of the camp and swimming pool for one
week. In this week I hoped to accomplish another dream. I wanted to teach the
kids how to swim. It had astounded me that the people who lived on an island,
exposed constantly to the perils of storm and rough sea, did not know how to
swim. None of the kids in my room knew how to swim and their fear of the water
was so pronounced that I felt gratified when I was able to talk seven of them
into accompanying me to the camp. I could not find a place on the island to
serve as a place for swimming instruction, since the kids refused to enter the
ocean because of the currents and the fresh water, because of the water
moccasins and alligators. I wanted them to learn how to swim and swim well.
Throughout the year while talking with the adults, I had heard the islanders
recite litanies of their friends and relatives who had fallen into the water
and sunk like stone. The bodies would generally resurface later bloated and
discolored, salt water pouring from the ears, nostrils, and mouth. One source
of drowning was the “snowbirds.”

Anyone familiar with the inland waterway that runs along
the East Coast of the United States knows of the great white yachts, driven by
the captains of industry and their wrinkled ladies, that point their bows
southward toward Miami when the first breath of winter is manifested on Fifth
Avenue. The shrimpers around Bluffton and Hilton Head call these boats the
snowbirds, for like the migrating fowl from northern skies, those boats, too,
seek refuge from the bitterness of the cold. The people of Yamacraw Island fear
these boats with good reason. Several times in the history of the island, a
snowbird has passed an islander crabbing or fishing in the river, failed to cut
its engine to a lesser speed, and capsized the bateau with a huge and dangerous
wake. The result is nearly always the same: an islander is dead. The captain of
the snowbird does not see the bateau overturned, for he is looking to the next
channel marker and does not witness the drowning of the sometime crabber behind
him.

So the snowbirds, if nothing else, made it important that I
try to teach my students to swim. There was another reason. It also occurred to
me that the people of Yamacraw spent an inordinate amount of time on docks
fishing, socializing, and waiting for boats. Falling off a dock is not the most
uncommon accident on riverfronts nor the most serious. But it is fatal to the
nonswimmer. I learned from Edna Graves that she had lost a close relative the
previous summer in this manner. He had gotten drunk in Savannah, fallen off a
dock while trying to board a boat, and was fished out three hours
later — which brought me back to the original premise that people who
lived near the sea should not have to perish in the sea.

Of course Barbara and I soon discovered that simply because
we had succeeded in getting seven kids to come to the camp was no guarantee
that seven kids would enter the water. The three boys who came, Lincoln, Frank,
and Top Cat, entered the water quickly, if not eagerly. They splashed about the
shallow end of the pool an arm’s length from the edge, nervously daring
each other to go deeper. The four girls lingered beside the fence surrounding
the pool, chattering like parakeets, shrieking wildly whenever I implored them
to come near the pool.

“I ain’t comin’ near that ol’
pool,” Mary screamed. “Git away from me, Mr. C’roy. Git away
now. I ain’t playin’. I ain’t gonna drown. Don’t you play
no games with me.”

The upshot of the whole scene was that the girls never
overcame their fear of the water during the entire week, nor could I coax them
into even the most basic discussion of swimming. They would have none of it.
Barbara talked to them and other people who came to the camp to help talked,
cajoled, and pleaded with them to moisten a toe or two in the water. All to no
avail. Toward the end of the week they would sit by the edge of the pool when
no one was around, cool their feet, put their hair up in curlers, and listen to
soul music. I would lecture to them about the critical necessity for at least
mastering the art of dog paddling.

“Man, you girls are going to fall into that water
around the island and sink like bricks. Mary, you will go straight down
swallowing about eighty gallons of water before you hit bottom. You are gonna
swell up like a toad, float back up all blue and purple, and they are going to
stick you in the ground.” Even with this macabre vision I could not
convince Mary that swimming was for her. She and the others had developed a
phobia about water so strong that it would take several weeks just to get them
to enter the pool. All of them had attended funerals of relatives killed by
falling into the same medium that I wanted them to enter voluntarily, They
would have none of it.

The three boys came to the camp wanting to learn to swim.
They fished the island waters during the summer, lifted crabpots into the tiny
bateaux, and played around the docks or on the beach all day. They saw the need
for swimming and understood that it could conceivably save their lives. They
entered the water hesitantly, but it did not take long for them to put their
heads under the water, dive off the side of the pool head first, and after the
third day, to dog paddle formlessly and desperately across the breadth of the
pool. By the end of the week I could take them into deep water and let them
swim to the safety of the shallow end. On Friday they bragged to the girls
about their miraculous, Christlike powers to stay above the water. Though they
could hardly endure a twenty-yard test, they were convinced that they could
swim and referred to themselves as “the three man swimmers.”

During the week we played softball, hide and seek, freeze
tag, and went crabbing. The kids loved their crabmeat savagely peppered and
stoked with hot sauce. On Wednesday afternoon I took all of them into Beaufort
to hear my good friend Tim Belk play the piano. Tim was a teacher at the
university extension in town, a distant relative of the Belk department-store
clan, and a very fine pianist. I had wanted him to come to the school during
the year to give a concert for the whole island, but Tim suggested that it
would be easier to raise the dead than to transport a piano to the island.

So after failing to bring Tim to the island, I was very
pleased to bring some of the kids to Tim’s house in Beaufort. Tim was a
master of style and I was glad the kids could see him in his own domain,
against the dark woodwork and faint whiff of southern decadence he loved to
cultivate and discuss. He had peanuts in bowls and cheese and crackers set out
for the kids to eat. I had given him a list of the “great works” that
we had played during the year. I asked the gang to see if they recognized any
of the songs Tim played. As soon as I said this, Tim suddenly and with the
timing of an experienced ham, let loose with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Naturally, Lincoln, Top Cat, and Frank nearly catapulted off the couch, over
the peanuts and cheese and onto Tim’s keys to shout, “Bay Toven the
Fifth!” Soon Tim’s fingers moved again; his audience shouted and
screamed the names of the identified pieces.

After exhausting the list they knew, Tim gave a brief,
impromptu concert. He would first introduce the composer with a brief
biography, tell something about the music, then play something from his works.
Tim had an incredible ability to tailor his performance to his audience. After
a bit of classical music, he played songs from Porgy and Bess, rock and
roll classics, and even a little soul. Then he rose majestically from the bench
and sat each child down and taught him to pick out a song. Then, ever the
cordial, impeccably mannered host, Tim winked at me, discoursed on Mozart,
congratulated the kids on their knowledge of music, and passed the peanuts and
cheese. It was a good afternoon. Mary told me later that she “just loved
ol’ Timbelks!”

On Friday, just before we drove the kids to the boat, I
received a phone call from Howard Sedgwick in Bluffton. “Hello, Pat. This
is the axman. Doctor Piedmont gave me the dirty job. He doesn’t want you
back on the island next year. He’s not paying for your gas bills.
He’s also had a lot of complaints about you.”

“You mean I’m fired, Mr. Sedgwick?” I asked,
a trifle stunned.

“Well, let’s say you are expendable.”

“Thanks for the call,” I said. Then I told
Barbara and the kids.

The next day I entered Piedmont’s
office on the run. We shook hands like two gunfighters about to draw back
thirty paces at high noon. I wanted him to explain the phone call from the
axman, what had prompted it, and why he had not called me himself. He stared at
me with malevolent, falcon-yellow eyes burning behind his brown half-glasses.
He made no effort to be civil, or his normal unctuous, ingratiating self. For
some reason he had assumed the role of the terrible godhead of authority
wronged or authority challenged. He crouched in his seat, bent and misshapen,
staring at me with a contempt born over a long and trying year. His stare was
calculated to wither me and Piedmont had risen to minuscule greatness by his
uncanny ability to melt underlings or other prey with his rapacious glance. I
sat in a chair across from him staring back. And in that single moment I
realized something very important. Piedmont could not scare me. Nor could
Bennington. Nor could the assembled board of education in all its measly glory.
For in crossing the river twice daily I had come closer to more basic things. I
had come to know the singular power of a river advancing toward the open sea
and the power of tides regulating that advance. I had seen how fog could change
the whole world into its own image. The river, the tides, and the fog were part
of a great flow and a fitting together of harmonious parts.

Because I had seen this for the first time over the year, I
could not be intimidated by guys who wore expensive shoes and flashy ties.
Piedmont could fire me, bawl me out, abuse me, put it on my record that I was
an incorrigible son of a bitch, make sure I never taught in South Carolina
again, or cut off my teacher’s pension. That was all he could do. His
power was economic and emotional, not spiritual or supernatural. Compared to
the river that flowed even as we stared sullenly at each other, Piedmont was a
nothing and so was I. Soon though, the great doctor commenced to handle an
irritating labor problem.

“Pat, I’ve been informed that you have been late
to class this year.”

“Who informed you, Doctor?”

“Let’s just say I’ve been informed and leave
it like that.”

“No, just tell me who informed you and we’ll
leave it like that.”

“Have you been late?”

“Yes sir. I was lost in the fog three times, late
because of rain four times, and I walked to school from the dock for the last
three weeks because Ted Stone took the use of the car away from me.”

“We simply can’t have our teachers bein’
late to school.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s against the rules. In my school
system I treat all teachers alike. All teachers keep the same rules. No
exceptions. You’ve been tryin’ to make an exception of yourself all
year. You are no different than any other teacher in this school system,”
he said, leaning forward across his desk to emphasize the point.

“You’re wrong Doc,” I answered, the blood
rising like hot sap to my head. “If you think teachin’ on your little
island is exactly the same as teachin’ anywhere else in this county,
you’re crazy. That is so ridiculous that I can’t even figure out a
good answer for it. It just shows that you have been sitting in this office so
long that you have forgotten what the world is like.”

“I know an awful lot about what goes on over at your
schoolhouse. A lot more than you think I know,” he said defensively.

“Sure. You get your information from Bennington, who
gets his from letters from Mrs. Brown, his hired stool pigeon. Bennington
whispers in your ear that I am an impudent punk who’s going to make
trouble. Bennington is the same guy who was in charge of that island for forty
years, Doctor Piedmont. Forty stinking years he was the king of the dump. And
he didn’t do crap, but let those kids rot over there.”

“Mr. Bennington worried himself sick over the Yamacraw
School. He worried about those children as much as I have.”

“If you are so worried about the kids, Doctor
Piedmont, why haven’t you been over to the island?”

“I haven’t had time. HEW has kept me so busy I
have barely had time enough to go home at night.” (I badly wanted to ask
him how he had had time to win the golf championship at his county club, but
prudence held me back.) “I’ve been meaning to get over to see the
school and meet Mrs. Brown, but things keep coming up. Anyway, this is beside
the point. You’ve been late to school. I’ve been receiving all kinds
of complaints about your long hair and your appearance.”

“I do not have long hair.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You better be glad you live in South Carolina if you
think this hair is long.”

“Young people don’t realize how important
personal appearance is. If you’re neat and well groomed you can go
anywhere and talk to anybody. People will listen to you and respect
you.”

“Young people know that some real sons o’ bitches
hide behind coats and ties.”

“This is all beside the point. You were late to
school. You didn’t work with the chain of command. You commuted against my
orders. And you charged the gas to the county. We can’t afford to pay for
your personal transportation to and from school. That’s not fair to the
other teachers. What if they ask me about my payin’ your gas bill to
school? How could I look them in the eye?”

“I drive thirty miles to Bluffton, Doctor Piedmont. I
pay for my gas until I hit water. Since I can’t walk on water, and since I
can’t swim twenty miles, and since I teach on an island, I don’t
think it extraordinary that the county pay for my transportation. Especially
since I had a meeting with Mr. Bennington and Mr. Sedgwick to discuss the gas
bill and they authorized it.”

“They did?” he said a bit incredulously.

“Of course, they did. Remember the meeting in January
you were supposed to attend — when you sent Bennington in your place?
Well, I got extremely mad when they told me the county would not foot the bill
and was ready to stomp out when they calmed me down and told me a place to buy
cheaper gas — and to keep charging it to the county.”

“They told me they had settled the matter. They
didn’t say anything about approval of gas money.”

“That’s the old chain of command for you. You
don’t think I’m stupid enough to go on using county funds after a
principal and a deputy superintendent told me not to, do you? That was just a
breakdown of communication between you guys. I should not be blamed for
that.”

“It makes no difference. The county is not paying for
your free ride to and from work every day. If you want to live on the island,
that’s fine, but we aren’t footing your transportation bill any
longer.”

“Then I’ll go to the board.”

“Go to the board, then. I’ve got the most
democratic school system in this country. If you are not satisfied with a
decision of mine, then I invite you to appear before the board.”

We talked and argued for an hour that day and I have only
recorded the essence of the conversation. We talked again of his youth in the
mill town, his journey toward the doctorate, his belief education and his
allegiance to Jesus and country. The meeting was full of strange
cross-currents: the nostalgic Piedmont, the religious Piedmont, the
authoritarian Piedmont, the paternal Piedmont, and the one I would come to know
most intimately — the vengeful Piedmont. He once again asserted that
I reminded him of the young Henry Piedmont, but he also made apparent his
desire for me to leave Yamacraw Island for good. Bennington had talked to him,
that much I could tell, and I strongly suspected that they wished to dine on my
teaching career.

And so it came to pass that there was a board meeting to
decide whether I would return to Yamacraw Island the following year. The
meeting would be extremely important for both Piedmont and me. I wanted to
return to the island desperately, but I also felt a substantial obligation to
bring the board out of shadow into the clear light of day. I felt it should
know and understand the real problems of the island without the benefit of
Piedmont or Bennington’s interpretation. Piedmont, on the other hand,
smelled a rat in his system and wanted me exterminated as cleanly as
possible.

Bernie and I went over to Yamacraw to tell the people what
had happened. I traveled from door to door and explained to each parent what
the situation was and what I was trying to do about it. Their response was to
initiate a petition to get me back to the island. Every black on the island
signed the petition, although many of them had to enlist the help of friends to
write their names. The petition was a rambling, disjointed diatribe, almost
more of a condemnation of Mrs. Brown than a vehicle to retain me as teacher. In
part it said,

Our children do want Mr. Pat Conroy to
come back and teach the childrens. But Mrs. Brown don’t do nothing for our
childrens she believe in beating them and hollow at our childrens. But Mr.
Conroy love both childrens white and color it doesn’t make any different
with him. If we lose Mr. Conroy the island will go down … Mr. Conroy
come to school in the rough whether sometime he fall overboard and come to
school all wet up. But he still teach our childrens.

It was a very strange document filled
with references to esoteric events that had occurred over the year. I could not
guess the authorship until I came to the most telling line in the petition,
which said, “Mrs. Brown told my childrens that they are so skinny and when
March wind come they better put rock in their clothes so the wind wouldn’t
pick them up.” Mary, still very sensitive about her height and weight, had
never forgiven Mrs. Brown for making this unfeeling remark. Her anger burned
and seethed across every page of this long, strangely eloquent communication
with the other world. Three of the mothers also made plans to attend the board
meeting and present the petition to the board.

It was a hot, sticky night when the board convened to hear
my arguments about the price of gas and education in America, but the board
room was new and air-conditioned, with yellow carpets surging along the floors
and bright colors flaming along the newly erected walls. On a borrowed
Ping-Pong table I placed thirty photographs of this island directly across from
where the board members would sit. I wanted to suggest to them that the
discussion tonight would concern a place without yellow carpets and pasteled
walls. I wanted them to stare at a few rags, a few shacks, and a few skinny
kids while they pondered the weighty decisions of the evening.

The board members came in singly and in pairs. They were
mostly a lot of calories under gray suits, a lot of talk behind bright ties,
and a lot of coarse laughter. Yet Beaufort had an eclectic and educated board.
On it were a judge, a lawyer, a doctor, and a dentist. Two black women had been
recently elected, but their votes meant little or nothing, since they were
overwhelmingly outnumbered. A pretty lady from Hilton Head whose husband was an
architect had been appointed to the board due to a vacancy in the last month.
Overall, the board made a nice impression to the outsider: a lot of smiling,
educated people serving their community in an enormously expensive building
they had allocated money to build.

My friends flooded the board meeting that night. I had
gathered them together for one grand assault in the board rooms. Board member,
like all politicians, base their opinions on community response and support as
much as any other factor. Neighbors control men and the way men act more than
convictions do. Some of my friends were pillars of the community and others
were barbs in the community’s behind. My friends were a strange
conglomerate of long-hairs, Marines, and the attractive wives of powerful
husbands. My mother, who had just moved to Beaufort while Dad went to Vietnam,
sat by Bernie and Barbara. My brothers and sisters took up half a row of
chairs. My friends had come to pressure the board and the superintendent. For
this is the way of small towns.

Piedmont controlled the board as effectively as an organ
grinder controls a chimp. Minor differences of opinion might arise, but
generally Piedmont’s educational dogma was law before he had even opened
his mouth. As Piedmont drifted among his board members before the start of the
meeting, I was mildly impressed by his unctuous, lubricating manner. His
etiquette of power had been honed over the years and he floated atop the waters
of his dominion like a grease bubble.

For an hour the board shuffled figures dexterously.
Piedmont, peering through his half-glasses, quoted prices for new schools,
additions to schools, and wall-to-wall carpeting. I rested in a chair toward
the back of the room, listening with a mild nausea rising, a combination of
fear and anger repressed too long. As Piedmont’s voice droned over the
crowd, I thought about the change in me since the beginning of the year. And
the change had to do with the children of Yamacraw.

According to tradition I was supposed to speak in a quiet
voice fresh with honey, shuffling, and humility. Piedmont had convinced me that
an appearance before the board was a rare and unspeakably sacred privilege. In
the hierarchy of schools, teachers are the most expendable of creatures, the
fauna of classrooms who can be replaced as easily as light bulbs.

But I wanted to tell them about Yamacraw Island, the way it
was and not as others saw it. I had spent a year hearing administrators telling
people how cute the island was, how unusual and exotic it was, and ignoring the
fact that it was a disgraceful depository of ignorance and a hundred years of
neglect. The building was not bad, the materials were not bad, the food in the
cafeteria was not bad, it was the single fact that the kids did not have a
chance and no one seemed to care. I wanted to boot the board members in their
asses and welcome them to the unhappy reality of the twentieth century. I
wanted to stick their noses in the island sand and let them feel the hurt and
sorrow of history. So despite my impulses or survival and despite my absolute
knowledge that people do not like to be faced with the cold, ugly deathbed of
truth, I abandoned myself to those passions that rumbled below the surface. On
June 30, 1970, before mother, wife, and friends, Conrack let the bastards have
it.

I started my speech by telling the board I had gotten a
haircut for their edification and to insure that they would listen to what I
had to say. In a voice rather creaky and unimpressive, I traced my background
on the island very briefly. Then I told them:

“I am not here tonight for the love of the school
board. I have been on the island and have seen the conditions there. You have
been presiding over an educational desert. Children who grow up on that island
don’t have a prayer of receiving an adequate education. They grow up
without hope. They leave the island without hope. They drift into the big
cities of the East Coast and rot in some tenement slum — without
hope. They are not taught to read, to write, to speak, or to be proud of
themselves or their race. Their parents are not influential, literate, or
vocal, so this educational system is perpetuated. If these parents were white
and important, their school would be as fine as any school in the county. If
their parents were white, the question of a gas bill and maintenance bill would
never come up — even if I were driving a battleship to work. But the
school is black. The people on the island are black. And, my God, the
hopelessness of teaching in a black school, cut off from society by water, is
an agony few people have experienced. Yamacraw requires sweeping reform of your
thinking. It demands for a brief moment that you forget about money and budgets
and balanced books. Forget about your building plans, ordering new volleyballs
for the high school, and how many tractors to purchase next year. Think instead
about children. People. Human beings. Feel for once that education is about
people — not figures.”

I then recited the litany of ignorance I found the first
week.

“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 suddedly 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.

“If you are not disturbed by all this,” I said,
“then you should not be on the school board. Or perhaps you will be like
one county administrator who told me, ‘Don’t worry about the kids not
being able to read. Lots of schools have that problem.’ Well, I worried
about it and tried to do something about it.”

I then listed activities and trips the class had done. Once
again I tried to crush them with a mountain of acts. I wanted to bury them
under the weight of a single year. I ended the speech with a blustery
declaration.

“And so we are here. I want to go back to Yamacraw
next year. I cannot go if I have to assume transportation cost for the boat.
The superintendent told me I was exactly like any other teacher in the county.
That is nonsense. When I taught at Beaufort Hill School, I did not have to chop
wood for the stove, haul seven hundred pounds of groceries, walk two miles to
school, wash dishes during lunch time, spoon food into plates to help the cook,
drive cows and pigs out of the schoolyard at recess time, send my students to
the woods if the toilet broke, or fix soup when he cook was sick. Because of
difficulties with the boat, I sometimes did not make it to school. But in the
framework of an entire year, look around the county, talk to all of your
teachers. Show me a better investment of county money — an investment
that produced more significant human results — and I will
quit.”

Piedmont had a look on his face as if the floor had caved
in under him. The board members sat like old Buddhas with their hands resting
on ponderous pot bellies; their mouths agape with disbelief or incredulity. My
friends peeked back at me to see if I was frothing at the mouth. It was a very
funny scene.

Piedmont counterattacked. I had been recalcitrant, had not
gone through the chain of command, had cheated the county out of gas money, had
obtained the gas fraudulently, had lied, broken promises, and failed to live up
to obligations and commitments. If he had been armed I am sure he would have
leaped across the table and we would have grappled on the floor until either he
or I had succumbed. His face was red and veins stuck out of his neck and head.
Bennington was sitting near Piedmont and shot me a few vituperative glances
that could have turned back the angel of death. And Piedmont continued to cast
accusations my way, which I caught on the first hop, if I could, and fired back
at him. Both our jaws were rigidly set and we argued out of a sense of survival
more than anything else.

The three Yamacraw mothers stood up during the middle of
this backbiting war and delivered very eloquent pleas for my return to the
island. They also handed out copies of the petition to all the board members.
Piedmont considered their talks mere intrusions in the meeting, having no
bearing on the matter at hand. He grew impatient as Mary’s mother tried to
explain about the island and how much she wanted for her children. He tried to
ignore Edna’s raised hand, but I could have told him that Edna’s
elongated, work-sculpted hand would be in the air all night if need be. When
Edna wanted to talk, it took more than a board of education to silence her.

Then the audience jumped in. There were catcalls and
hisses, groans and gasps of disbelief. The whole scene was unruly and angry. My
mother yelled at Piedmont several times, much to my keen embarrassment.
(Mothers have no sense of restraint when it comes to the honor of their
children.) People shouted, “How much is the gas bill?” and none of
the administrators knew. “It’s too much,” Piedmont shouted in
desperation. “How much?” the voices shouted back.

Finally Piedmont called for an executive session. The crowd
moved outside, where loudly and profanely they attacked the stolid immovability
of a system run amuck. I shook hands with happy, sweating people who had blown
of enough steam to energize three revivals. It was a street circus loosened
upon that alley behind the education building. Everyone hugged the Yamacraw
ladies, who declared they had never met such wonderful people in their lives.
Later that night I called one of the black members of the school board. She
told me that the board had voted to give me the gas money. I had won.

But the victory, if one could call it
that, was ephemeral and elusive, a brief and strident shout atop a mountain
that was more noise than substance, more smoke than flames. Piedmont and I had
locked horns in a furious encounter, separated by an insurmountable gap of
thirty years. The victory strengthened my belief that a man could speak the
truth to his elders, to the new scribes and pharisees, and not be crucified or
vilified because of it. My faith in the democratic system was renewed by the
puzzled, scowling cluster of men and women who composed the board of
education.

But that was when I was young. I underestimated the dark
part of mankind that is rarely seen in the light of day. I failed to reckon
with the secret beats that reside in the lightless forests of men’s souls.
The beasts were watching me at the first board meeting, and in the flush of
victory I failed to hear the baying of those hounds in the unlighted thickets
ahead. The great unpardonable sin I had committed was this: I had embarrassed
the superintendent of schools. It was Homer who had written again and again
about the dangerous folly of mortals challenging the gods. I fought with words
and youthful ardor. But Piedmont fought with thunderbolts. And time was his
greatest ally.

September came and the new school year began almost too
quickly, before the sediment of bitterness over the summer board meeting had
time to settle. I saw Piedmont once, very briefly, and he conveyed the warmth
and glowing good humor of a tundra during our fifteen-minute conversation.
Whenever Bennington spied me, his face contorted into a wrinkled mask, as
though staring at me was equivalent to chewing on cow chips. It looked as
though my punishment was going to be a cavernous silence from those who ruled
the kingdom. This I interpreted not as a punishment but as a blessing. And I
had much to do during the year and did not wish to waste it wrangling with two
crotchety administrators nursing their wounds.

I had written Piedmont a letter saying that I only wanted
to spend one more year teaching on the island. I did not elaborate the reasons
for this in my letter to him. I felt the reasons were personal but sound. When
Bernie and I went to the island over the summer, I heard many of the people
express an idea that was very disturbing to me. They constantly derided Mrs.
Brown and said that she was a bad teacher simply because she was a
“colored teacher.” When I tried to erase this thinking, the people
would shake their heads and say, “It true. All dese colored teachers no
good for the chillun.” I had unwittingly created a new stereotype among
the island people and it seemed insidiously pervasive among the parents. The
great danger of this thought lay in the fact that I might be tempted to
establish myself as an educational Ted Stone on the island. I would try to be
well meaning and dedicated, but would reinforce the myth of white supremacy in
all things. Therefore I wrote to Piedmont, offered my resignation for the
following June, and offered to help find a replacement. I wanted to find a
sharp, young black couple who would live on the island as part of the community
and provide a sound image with which the kids and parents could identify.

But this lay in the distant future, and my brain teemed
with ideas for the present. I wanted the final year to be a great carnival to
the children filled with the magic and beauty of their own island. The year
before I had concentrated too much on opening a window to the outside world and
had failed to illuminate and sanctify the island around them.

So in the first weeks of school we began a zoo in the
classroom, scoured the forest for various types of flora and fauna, planted a
garden that would eventually be a cooperative, and took a deliriously happy
walk through the woods to the beach, where we gathered sea animals washed
ashore and swam fully clothed in the afternoon surf. We made plans to raise
pigs and chickens in an ambitious extension of our fledgling cooperative. We
would draw, paint, laugh, and read like hell. The first few weeks of school
passed joyously, as in a dream.

Mrs. Brown seemed more subdued. She was quieter, more
brooding and reflective than she had been the year before. She seemed to have
conditioned herself to a laissez-faire policy concerning me and my
ill-disciplined class. And in the second week she disappeared without a trace
or a single word of farewell. She was in class on a Friday morning, then,
without a word, she got in her car and left school. She did not return to the
island or ten days. She did not offer an explanation for this absence, nor did
I demand one. Her absence had provoked the most stimulating week of teaching I
had ever enjoyed.

And the kids were responding well to the presence of Jim
and Vivian Strand. Jim and Vivian were VISTA volunteers who had been assigned
to Yamacraw Island. They were both from Detroit, Michigan, and both of them got
along with kids exceptionally well. Jim was a skilled guitarist who had once
earned plaudits singing in the smoke-filled environs of coffee houses at the
University of Michigan. I envisioned him being an afternoon troubadour in the
school, telling the history of America and the black experience through songs,
ballads, and spirituals. I could also see him putting the multiplication tables
to music and giving guitar lessons to interested students.

Vivian was a sprightly, attractive Italian girl who had
majored in special education at Michigan This made her about ten times more
qualified to teach the Yamacraw students than I was. She bubbled with ideas to
help the twins read and Jasper add. In fact, their coming to the island
instilled a hope that many of the children’s problems could be solved by a
saturation of fresh ideas and faces.

I had also made plans for three long tips. The first would
begin in the middle October. Dale Hryharrow, a childhood friend, was attending
Emory University in Atlanta. She had solicited room and board for the kids for
a week from Emory professors. She had planned to enlist a noted instructor in
survival swimming to teach the kids this pragmatic art in the early part of the
morning. We had talked about the trip all summer and Dale had already made the
preliminary arrangements by the middle of September.

In the spring Bernie and I had planned to take the kids to
Boston. Bernie had left Beaufort and the principality in Port Royal in order to
obtain an advanced and blue-blooded degree from the holy of holies, Harvard
University. He phoned several times during his first week in Cambridge to tell
me he thought we could get a federal grant for a trip to Boston. He even
thought we could combine it with a visit to New York, if I could convince the
authorities to go along with the plans.

The last trip was by far the most ambitious. When school
was out I wanted to load a couple of Volkswagen buses full of Yamacraw kids and
head for California. The California boys promised to meet the caravan when we
arrived on the West Coast and take charge of showing the kids their state:
camping trips in the Sierras, visits to Disneyland, classes at Santa Cruz, wine
vineyards, Hollywood, and Death Valley. I did not know how I would finance this
expedition, but I did know that I could and would finance it. If I could carry
the kids 600 miles, then I could carry them 3000. It was all a matter of
geography, good automobiles, and greenback dollars. Nothing more. And Cowell
College people had promised to help with the money.

My first major problem of the year was to find money to
finance the trip to Atlanta. The school board would not pay for it, nor would
Dr. Piedmont be inclined to siphon funds from another project for the trip.
Indeed, it started to look as though the Conroy bank account would be a bit
pale and wan when November rolled around. Then Bill Dufford called.

Bill was my high-school principal, a handsome, athletic man
who was an extremely capable administrator and one of the finest men I had ever
met. I probably chose teaching as a career because of him. To him education was
as holy a profession as the priesthood. It was one of his greatest gifts that
he could convey his sense of mission about education to the kids who came under
his jurisdiction. A whole tribe of us went into teaching because of his
influence. Some, like Bernie Schein, even became principals.

Yet Bill was required to undergo the same transitions we
faced during the 1960s. He had once made the statement that he would never be
principal at a school that had a nigger in it. When he was a segregationist, he
was a rabid defender of white supremacy and all it stood for. He had been my
principal during the years of total segregation, those mindlessly happy years
of my dead youth when Beaufort High School was a beleaguered Camelot, still
white but troubled by rumblings from the Supreme Court. Those were joyous
years, though. Bill walked the halls laughing, speaking to every kid he saw,
and creating a sense of community and belonging that I had never known before.
Two years later, Roland Washington, a slender black, walked into Beaufort High
School in an act of singular bravery. He probably did not hear the walls of
Jericho crumble behind him.

Bill left the year after Roland integrated the high school.
He went to the University of Florida to pursue his doctorate. I wrote him
frequently while he was there and visited him several times during the summer
months. Though forty years old, Bill Dufford was undergoing a miraculous
change. The change was similar to what was happening to tens of thousands of
other people around the South, but with Bill the change was not enough. It
became a religion and the religion had ultimately to lead to action. He
eventually became the principal of a high school in Sumter, South Carolina. In
a single year he transformed a plodding school rife with racial tension to the
finest school in the state. His sideburns were a little long, though, and he
was known to be openly sympathetic to the problems of the black students. The
board of education pressured him constantly and decided it would be best if he
pursued his career elsewhere. Bill accepted this setback as a wound in a holy
war.

He then took a job with the Desegregation Center of South
Carolina. This rather controversial group was composed of South Carolinians
dedicated to easing the strain of total integration in the state. They would go
to a school district, talk to the teachers reluctant to accept change, talk to
students, and initiate programs to aid the district in the transition to the
unitary school system. It was in his capacity as assistant director of the
Desegregation Center that he called and offered me a job at Ridgeland, South
Carolina, as a consultant. The job paid sixty-five dollars a day, lasted five
days, and would provide enough money to get my kids to Atlanta. I jumped at the
chance.

I could not tell Dr. Piedmont about the job, since he
associated the Desegregation Center with the bubonic plague. He had made his
feelings known during the preschool teacher conferences, when he blasted the
center as a bunch of “outside agitators.” I planned to teach until
noon, make an excuse to Mrs. Brown, turn my class over to Vivian, and get to
Ridgeland by three o’clock. Mrs. Brown would become apoplectic if she
discovered what I was doing, but I was determined to follow this schedule. If I
could not follow it, I planned to take five days of personal leave to earn the
money. In Beaufort County teachers are entitled to ten days of leave a
year.

But before I could initiate this plan of action, Vivian
went to see Dr. Piedmont and Mr. Bennington to talk about her own plans for the
school on the island. When she got back to my house, she told me that Piedmont
and Bennington did not hide the fact that they despised me and were out to get
me. She was afraid that I would be fired if I left school at noon to go to
Ridgeland. She was worried that the administrators would find out.

This was a serious blow to my plans. I did not wish to
fight Piedmont again. Nor did I wish to give him an excuse to drive his foot up
my behind. So I decide to take the second plan of action. I drove Vivian and
Jim to the dock where I had put the boat in Bluffton. I gave Vivian lesson
plans for the week, told Jim how to run the boat, and told Vivian to tell Mrs.
Brown that I was taking personal leave. I would be back the following Monday.
“Tell the kids we are going to Atlanta,” I shouted to them, as they
pulled away from the dock.

The week proved fascinating. The Desegregation Center was
the first I had ever seen of a coalition of blacks and whites operating
together for the same purpose. The group was southern, well educated, and
articulate. The town of Ridgeland had considerable trouble acclimating itself
to total integration. A few boycotts of white students soon led to a boycott of
black students. Parents of both races were screaming that the school system
could not survive unless desperate measures were initiated. Thus, the
invitation to the Desegregation Center.

The week was full of meetings, sensitivity groups, films,
and conversation. Many of the white teachers parted with the old ways
reluctantly, but there was a certain magnificence in seeing white-haired old
ladies sincerely attempt to understand the coming of the new age. Black
teachers told the whites of the old days, when a glance at a white girl meant
the flow of blood. The week was a poignant ceremony of opposing forces trying
to find common ground for the good of the community’s youth. In all it was
an emotional week, not a miraculous one but one in which I was glad to have
been a part. And including expenses and travel, I had earned over $400 for the
trip to Atlanta.

That Sunday night I recounted several scenes of the week in
Ridgeland to Barbara. I had just finished taking a bath with Jessica and
Melissa, when the phone rang.

A familiar voice on the other end of the phone said,
“Hello, Pat, this is Doctor Piedmont. Where have you been this
week?”

“Working for the Desegregation Center of South
Carolina,” I answered.

“Well, I don’t want you goin’ back to the
island. You hear me? I don’t want you to go back there.”

Then the receiver clicked on the other end of the phone. My
first reaction was to reflect momentarily on Piedmont’s tone of voice. I
had never heard such raw, physical hatred emanate from a human voice before.
His tone was malignant. It shocked me that I could inspire such hared from
another human being. Only a little later did I realize that I had been
fired.

Then it was war. My days of walking the streets as the
golden-haired jock returned to the community to teach were officially over with
that phone call. Piedmont was not just making idle threats on a Sunday night;
he meant to destroy my teaching career and drive me out of town. The day after
the phone call I received a letter from Piedmont. In the letter he specified
the reasons I had been fired: disobeying instructions, insubordination, conduct
unbecoming a professional educator, and gross neglect of duty. Along with the
letter was a severance check, which would be my final remuneration from
Beaufort County. The cold precision and organization of the death blow were
extremely impressive. On the following night, the board met and
enthusiastically concurred with Piedmont’s decision. In a span of
forty-eight hours, I had been exorcised from Yamacraw Island.

I do not react well to crisis. My first thought was to race
over to Piedmont’s house, knock at his door, and put a fist against his
jaw. I never function with dignity when a crisis confronts me, but rather with
a terrible emotionalism that is childish and soon regretted. But after my
initial volcanic sputtering and railing against the demons who plotted my
downfall, I took stock of the weapons I had at my command.

I had been in Beaufort longer than Piedmont, seven years
longer, and I considered that a great psychological advantage. Friends that I
had gone to school with now ran gas stations, fixed air conditioners, sold
dresses, and cut hair around the county. I could turn to them, ask them for
their help, and be assured that their bitching would be loud enough to reach
the sensitive ears of the board members. I could turn to old students and ask
for their help. I could go to local politicians. And finally, I could go to the
newspapers. Before I could be officially fired, I had a chance to appeal before
the board. It took no towering intelligence to conclude that this appeal would
be crucial to my career as a teacher. I wanted public opinion to be stirred up,
whether for me or against me.

There was an excellent chance that it would be against. In
this eleventh hour, there was but one fact that stacked the deck against me,
and I knew it well. In the previous spring Barbara had received a letter from
Mary’s mother. The letter was barely literate, but its message was clearly
elaborated and needed no translation. She asked if Mary could live with Barbara
and me the next year when she had to leave the island for high school. Mrs.
Toomer said that Mary loved our home, felt comfortable there, and wanted to
live with us. Evidently Mrs. Toomer had managed to live in twentieth-century
America and retain a starting innocence about the relationship between blacks
and whites. Or perhaps she thought that since Barbara had frequently invited
the children over for weekends, that it was only a natural extension of these
visits for Mary to stay the entire year. Whatever her thoughts, she put the
dilemma into Barbara’s hands.

We discussed the request in depth. Both of us feared the
reaction of the neighbors. We were sure The Point would not exactly embrace the
idea of an integrated household. Yet we both felt that Mary had a fighting
chance to make it in the world if she received the proper encouragement. The
pregnancy rate was quite high among girls leaving the island and the
supervision of their parents. So Barbara wrote back to Mrs. Toomer and said we
would be delighted to welcome Mary into our home and family the following
year.

Of course we immediately received letters from the mothers
of Frank and Top Cat asking if their sons could live with us the next year too.
When the smoke had finally cleared away and the school term began, we had three
black ninth graders living in our spacious white home on the historic Point. I
had a theory that if you did something quietly and without fanfare, you could
get away with it, but the presence of three black kids irritated some people
with far more power and influence than I wielded. Some ugly talk circulated
behind our backs and some felt this ugly talk encouraged Piedmont to place my
head on the chopping block. Indeed I had trouble choosing my most heinous
crime. I had embarrassed Piedmont in front of his board, and I had brought
niggers into my home. It looked as though the Old South was still alive and
well, a little more subtle, without the sheets and night riders, but a force
that still tolerated little deviation from the norm.

On Tuesday I went to see one of the local politicians to
enlist his help. I recited the entire story to him from the beginning, let him
know I had voted for him in the last election, and finally, received a valuable
lesson in survival from him. I learned that politicians are not supposed to
help people. They simply listen to people, nod their heads painfully,
commiserate at proper intervals, promise to do all they can, and then do
nothing. It was very instructive. I could probably have enlisted more action
from a bleached jellyfish washed ashore in a seasonal storm.

The great powers of Beaufort would not help me. So, in
desperation, I turned over my only trump card. I went to the people of
Yamacraw. I called a meeting at the community house on Wednesday afternoon. I
sent word that I wanted to talk to all of the people about my dismissal. Richie
Matta, my singing friend, offered his boat and we went to the island for the
meeting. Edna Graves met us at the dock in her ox cart, looking far younger
than her seventy years. Her eyes were afire when she saw us. As I walked up the
dock, she shouted, “We gonna strike the school. We gonna strike the
school.”

It was an odd meeting that day. The Yamacraw people were
not a political people. They tended to be passive during crises and concurred
with the unwritten law that the bad times would pass after a while. Throughout
their history, they had found it easier and safe to ride the waves no matter
how savage or dangerous it became to do so. The white man made the decisions
and enforced the rules; the black man paid lip service to these rules then
lived according to his own tradition. The purpose of the meeting was to let the
islanders know what exactly happened and why it happened. I wanted them to know
that white men sometimes played dirty with white men, too.

About fifty people had assembled in the community house.
All my students were there looking puzzled and disquieted by the recent chain
of events. I began talking rapidly and angrily. It was not a speech I gave that
day, but a harangue. Conrack discovered that afternoon, much to his dismay,
that he had a bit of demagogue in him. I told them exactly what I thought about
the administration, the island school, and the education their children were
receiving. In the middle of my delivery, one lady shouted, “Let’s get
a petition.”

“Petitions were fine this summer, but they ain’t
worth a damn now,” I answered. “The time for petitions is
over.”

Then Edna the Beautiful said majestically, “Only one
thing to do. We gonna strike the school. Ain’t no chillun gonna go to that
schoolhouse door.”

Then all the mothers were shouting, “We gonna strike
the school. Strike it startin’ tomorrow.”

I issued a warning about the danger of a boycott. “If
you strike the school, you are going to have men coming out here threatening to
put you in jail. Bennington’s gonna come to your doors wit a carful of
white men and say you’ve gotta get your kids back in school. The sheriff
will come out here and say it against the law. It is gonna take more guts to
strike the school than anything you’ve ever done.”

“Man, that ol’ empty school bus gonna look so
sweet ridin’ by my house with no chillun in it,” said Cindy
Lou’s grandmother.

“Anybody send their chillun to school, they git beat
up bad by the other parents,” Edna said.

“Beat ’em with sticks,” cried another
voice.

I turned to my students right before they left the room.
Richard and Saul were crying. The other kids still looked puzzled.

“I will try like hell to get back to teaching
you,” I said. “I promise I will try like hell.” And it was
ironic to note that one of my most voluble supporters at the meeting was Iris
Glover, the alleged root doctor and mistress of darkness whom I once had
identified as the greatest threat to my survival on the island. It seemed like
a good omen.

The next morning the yellow school bus drove the long dirt
road that ran the length of the island without a single child in it. The
Yamacraw Island boycott had begun.

But the people and I knew nothing of
power and how it works. We were to have several swift and unforgettable
lessons. The day after the boycott began a man appeared on the island and went
from door to door delivering a stern message. If the children were not in
school by Monday, the parents would face a thirty-day jail sentence and a fine
of fifty dollars per day, in violation of the compulsory-attendance law. This
plunged the island into a mild panic and many of the mothers feared that the
man was the harbinger of the law. On Monday four children were back in school.
It was interesting to note that the children who broke the boycott had parents
who worked in the school and whose only income was derived from the school
being open. A rumor spread that these two mothers had been threatened with the
loss of their jobs. When I heard about this intimidation, I returned to the
island to tell the people that the compulsory-attendance law had never been
enforced in the state of South Carolina. Edna Graves was one of the first
people I talked to that day.

“Did a man come to see you, Edna?” I asked.

“Yeh, he come to say some stuff.”

“What did he say?”

“He tell Edna that she go to jail if she don’t
send no chillun back to that school. He tell me that I owe fifty dollar for
ev’ry day my chillun not in no schoolhouse. I tell him to get his ass out
my yard. I tell him he can put Edna under the jail for ninety-nine years. Her
chillun ain’t goin’ to no schoolhouse.”

A group of mothers had gathered in Edna’s yard. I told
them that they were going to have to play it tough from now on. They nodded
their heads in solemn agreement. Lois, Ethel’s mother, said that another
man had come to her house and said that her welfare checks would be cut off if
she didn’t send her children back to school. I tried to calm her down and
explain that some white people would say anything to get them to return their
children to school. Then I asked the six mothers why they had all gathered
together at Edna’s house. This was the largest congregation of mothers I
had ever seen at a private home.

“We waitin’,” one of the ladies said.

“Waitin’ for what?” I asked.

“Waitin’ for Lizzie,” the lady replied.
Lizzie was Mary’s mother.

“Why?”

“We gonna beat her up,” was the answer.

“Why are you gonna beat her up?”

“She break the strike. We say we beat up anyone who
break the strike. She break it. So we beat her good.”

“Oh, that’s great. That is just great. Man, you
cannot just go around beating up people who don’t agree with the strike.
If Lizzie doesn’t want to keep her children out of school, then
that’s her business.”

“We jes’ gonna hurt ’er a little
bit.”

“No I don’t want that to happen. Lizzie is
probably worried she’s gonna lose her job. Don’t hold that against
her.”

“You keep her girl, Mary, in your house, don’t
you?” Edna said.

“Yes, Edna, you know I do.”

“The whites don’t like those colored chillun
stayin’ wit’ you, do they? That’s why they tell you to leave
Yamacraw. You got colored chillun in your house. They don’t want nobody
who helps the colored. Nobody, I tell you. If I were you, I’d go home and
t’row Mary into the street. If her mama cain’t keep her chillun out a
no school, I wouldn’t keep her gull in my house in Beaufort.”

“Lizzie is just afraid, Edna. She isn’t doing
this because she is against us. She is just afraid.”

“Edna ain’t afraid of nuttin’.”

“I know that, Edna. But you can’t beat up another
person because they are.” Lizzie was not cudgeled that afternoon, though
someone must have exerted a certain amount of pressure on her. For on the next
day the boycott was total again. The next day was significant for another
reason, for it marked the very first time that Henry Piedmont felt the
compulsion to set foot on Yamacraw Island.

He came with Bennington and the truant officer. It was to
be the classic show of force, the moving of the big guns into strategic
position. They called for a meeting at the schoolhouse to begin at one
o’clock. No one showed up. Bennington then went around the island,
rounding people up, and telling them they were required to attend the meeting
with the superintendent of school. I watched the action around the school from
the edge of the woods. Sidney and Samuel had led me from Edna’s house
through the swamp and across the pond to a spot that gave us a commanding view
of the entire scene. Six people eventually arrived for the meeting. Edna was
one of them. I could hear her shouting for the rest of the afternoon.

Piedmont told the parents some interesting things. He told
them I had not paid my rent when I lived on the island. He told them I had not
paid my electric bills. He told them that many times I had left the landing at
Bluffton and had never arrived on Yamacraw. It had also been reported that I
spent a large amount of my time in the nightclub on Yamacraw. This Conrack was
not an honorable lad. He was not worth following. Piedmont reiterated the
threat of jail and fines, then left. I never found out how he liked his first
trip to the island.

A reporter for a local Beaufort paper had come with me to
the island. He was not allowed inside but listened at the door. By the time the
meeting was over, he was ready to break the story to Beaufort. I had said
nothing to the press prior to this day since I wanted to give Piedmont, the
board, and the politicians time to reconsider their decision. After this, I was
going to sing like a canary to anyone who would listen. But when I got home
that day I heard that the draft board was reclassifying me 1-A. I was being
outflanked again.

On Friday I called off the boycott complete. Too many of
the women were frightened by the economic and legal threats against them. When
I talked to them, some of them would almost weep out of fear. The threats,
spoken and unspoken, about reprisals against those who supported me increased
each day. I finally decided that the boycott was more of a prop for my deflated
ego than something that was doing the island and my students any good. It was
not worth the suffering etched in the faces of these parents who were trying so
hard and succeeding at being brave. Edna, however, would not send her
grandchildren back to school. I pleaded with her and she shook her head firmly.
Nor would Cindy Lou’s mother send her children back. Their personal
boycott lasted a week longer than anyone else’s. Curiously enough, Edna
did not receive her Social Security check for five months after the
boycott.

The next act in the circus was my appeal before the board
of education. I had enlisted the help of George Trask, a young Beaufort lawyer,
to present my case before the board. George was astonished at the ferocity of
the charges levied against me by Piedmont. He also told me that the law gave
great powers to school boards and that all they needed to impale me was
“good and sufficient cause.” In the parlance of lawyers, I could
urinate on he wrong part of a commode and if the board of education decided
that this was “good and sufficient” reason for dismissal, then the
courts would automatically side with them. It looked rather bleak, but I had
decided to fight it anyway.

When I walked into the board room on a tension-filled
Tuesday night, I knew instantly that I would lose this phase of the appeal. The
board members wore immovable, intransigent expressions, the unblinking faces of
soldiers in a Greek tragedy. The dentist on the board sneered when he saw me.
The doctor felt much too self-righteous to sneer. The entire board had all the
more cheerful characteristics of a lynch mob. My friends had assembled again, a
far more somber, truculent group than before. They had come to watch an
execution and they saw no way to prevent it. The members of the board had
already closed their minds to arguments on my behalf and all the laws of the
world could not prevent them from rendering a decision against me. Yet the
meeting brought out some emotional responses from the administrators that I
will always treasure. Piedmont responded to a question from George Trask at the
beginning of the meeting by saying, “I run the most democratic school
system in the country. If a teacher doesn’t like something his principal
does, then he can come to me with his complaint. If I do not give him a
satisfactory answer, he can appeal to the board of education. Pat should know
this better than anybody. He’s the only teacher I know of that has
followed this chain to the top. Of course, Pat feels that teachers are afraid
of me. I told him that no one should be afraid of me.” Nor did he sense
the irony in his words as he addressed the assembled crowd. And Bennington
later answered a question from a board member by saying, “Mr. Conroy does
not communicate well with his elders. Communication is his major
problem.”

After it had been proven that Mrs. Brown left the island
for ten days without telling anyone, George Trask said to the board,
“You’ve got a principal at your school who doesn’t inform
anybody when she is absent on school days and doesn’t make any provisions
for substitutes. You don’t do anything to her. You’ve got a teacher
at your school who sends the authorized substitute with lesson plans and you
fire him. As I say, the whole thing is absurd.”

My stomach crawled throughout the entire meeting; it felt
ulcerous and dangerously acidic. The people who rose to defend me did so out of
desperation. All of us knew what the final result would be. The talking was
simply a showy preliminary to the final banishment. Eventually, however, George
motioned for me to rise and give my farewell address.

The speech was not exactly my forte. I
would have preferred to tell the board members to kiss my baby-pink behind. But
the only chance I had was to crawl before the nine judges who stared at me. I
traced my teaching career in the county. I told them how I had been offered the
job of assistant principal at the high school but turned it down because I
wanted to remain in the classroom. Then I told them that when I found out that
school was a place of timeclocks and rules, of teachers more concerned with
attendance reports than with students, and students praying for the day of
graduation when their reprieve from the stale grip of public education would be
granted, I tried to make my classes a stimulating experience for my
students … life experiences, creative experiences. I tried to get
them to drop prejudices and conditioned responses from their thinking. In
essence, I tried to teach them to embrace life openly, to reflect upon its
mysteries, rejoice in its surprises, and to reject its cruelties. Like other
teachers, I failed. Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching
is in the attempt. I dislike poor teachers. They are criminals to me. I’ve
seen so much cruelty toward children. I’ve seen so many children not given
the opportunity to live up to their potential as human beings. Before you fire
me, ask yourselves these questions that I feel are most critical and essential
in the analysis of any teacher who comes before you. Did he love his kids? Did
he love the act of teaching? Did his kid love him? If you answer negatively to
any of these questions, I deserve to be fired.

After this saccharine presentation, the
doctor glared at me and asked, “Why are you trying to intimidate us?”
George finally ended my defense by suggesting that the members of the board
read a book that seemed to apply to the case, Catch-22.

The board voted to sustain my dismissal. But because they
were exemplary men, they offered me the chance to resign with honor and without
a blot on my record, if I did not take the case to court.

Two months later Judge Street ambled heavily into his
courtroom. Everyone rose according to custom. Dr. Piedmont rose, as did
Bennington, Mrs. Brown, Ted Stone, and several board members summoned to
testify against me. All the major protagonists of the year stood reverently as
Judge Street cleared his throat, shuffled a few papers, then brought the court
to order. It would be convenient to report that Judge Street was a gum-chewing
illiterate ex-Klansman elevated to the judgeship by decadent politicians who
wished to preserve the status quo. On the contrary, he was a magnificent man
with a stentorian voice and a gray, leonine head who gave the appearance that
justice was a frail maiden whom he served with unswerving fidelity. He treated
all the witnesses with paramount consideration, though I thought he treated all
the lawyers in the court with a visible contempt.

The trial was interesting. Most of my witnesses were from
the island. The O.E.O. boat was making a special trip at seven o’clock in
the morning to bring the seven parents who were testifying in my behalf. When
the captain tried to start the engine, he discovered that the ignition system,
which had worked perfectly the night before, did not even turn the engine over.
At precisely the same time, the people saw Ted Stone’s boat pass their
stranded boat on the way to the trial. The people later told me that a part was
missing from the engine. I did not have any witnesses from the island, but I
learned still another lesson in the exercise of power.

The trial was a necessary, but masochistic, ritual. People
from my past paraded to the witness stand to prove that I was really Jack
Armstrong and not Godzilla. The administration paraded witnesses to the stand
to show that I was a lousy teacher, a liar, an impudent troublemaker, and a
discredit to the hallowed profession of teaching. I also had tried to
politicize my students by letting them draw black power posters on the bulletin
board. During the trial Piedmont did discover that Bennington and Sedgwick had
authorized the use of the gas. His arguments that I did not follow the chain of
command were a bit tepid after that. The judge discovered that the only
punishment that existed in Piedmont’s democratic kingdom was instant
dismissal.

“Doctor Piedmont, what other punishment could you have
levied against this young man besides firing him?”

“We have no other punishment, Your Honor.”

“You have no lesser punishment than dismissal? You
mean if he is late to school a couple of times, you have no punishment like
docking his pay or reducing his leave time?”

“Our teachers all obey the rules. We never have to
discipline them.”

“You have certainly disciplined this young man, Doctor
Piedmont. You fired him. That is a form of discipline, isn’t it?”

Dr. Piedmont came down from the witness stand nervous and
shaking. He was the final witness in the two-day trial. I walked up and shook
his hand, and told him that I hoped the ordeal had not been too painful. He
responded by saying that I must always do what I thought was right, no matter
what the consequences might be. After all the crap, Piedmont and I still
grudgingly liked each other. Of course, I have to admit of a momentary desire
to milk his rat as we stood there talking.

The lawyers, my friends, and I thought we had won the
trial. The rest of that week was a celebration; the smoke had finally cleared
and the villains had been exposed. Naturally we lost. When the judge delivered
his opinion, he stated that the board of education was invested with the power
to fire any teacher it considered undesirable. That was the law. It was very,
very simple.

| Go to
Contents |

Chapter 12

So, Conrack, defrocked and slightly
dishonored, retired to his room to write about his year on Yamacraw. It was a
strange year, a kind of seasoning among the marshes, the migrating fowl, and
the people of the island. I had to write this book to explain what happened and
how it affected me. When I was severed from the school, I knew I had lost a
relationship of infinite and timeless value, and one that I would never know
again. For no matter how many accusations or charges the administration could
summon up, it did not alter the fact that the kids and I really liked each
other. In fact, it did not alter anything.

At first there was the time of great bitterness when I
prowled about my room trying to fathom why I represented such a threat to
Piedmont and Bennington and why they felt compelled to extricate me from the
island school. During this period they appeared, in my eyes, as evil incarnate.
That they would fire me so insensitively was one thing, but that they would try
to destroy my personal reputation was another. What they did was not simply a
removal from office, it was a blood vendetta and for many months I could not
talk about either man without becoming enraged.

But just as time heals the marsh grasses that wither and
perish in the winter cold, so does it quell the storms that often threaten the
human soul. And as time passed, so did my anger. When the anger subsided, I
could see the message in the chaotic flow of events that had conquered me. The
eye could focus clearly when it was not clouded with personal indignation. And
eventually I gained a distance and could look back at people and places of the
past year, frozen in event and memory, calcified and motionless in a grand
chronology that began and ended in the month of September. When I finally
reached the summit of this metaphorical hill, it was then and only then that I
could come to some truce or understanding about myself and the people of
Yamacraw Island.

I saw the necessity of living and accepting bullcrap in my
midst. It was everywhere. In teachers’ manuals, in the platitudes muttered
by educators, in school boards, in the community, and most significantly, in
myself. I could be so self-righteous, so inflexible when I thought that I was
right or that the children had been wronged. I lacked diplomacy and would not
compromise. To survive in the future I would have to learn the complex art of
ass-kissing, that honorable American custom that makes the world go
’round. Survival is the most important thing. As a bona fide ass-kisser, I
might lose a measure of self-respect, but I could be teaching and helping kids.
As it is, I have enough self-respect to fertilize Yankee Stadium, but I am not
doing a thing for anybody. I could probably still be with the Yamacraw kids had
I conquered my ego.

I also saw that Piedmont and Bennington were not evil men.
They were just predictably mediocre. Their dreams and aspirations had the
grandeur, scope, and breadth of postage stamps. They had rule books and Bibles
and golf clubs and nice homes on rivers. They were deacons in their churches,
had read to their congregations from the Good Book, and had delivered the
message of Jesus in Sunday school. They quoted the Bible liberally and
authoritatively and felt the presence of the Savior in their lives. They did
not feel the need for redemption, because they had already been redeemed. The
only thing they could not control was their fear.

It was so easy before. Segregation was such an easy thing.
The dichotomy of color in the schools made administration so pleasant. The
black schools were reservations where the sons and daughters of cotton pickers
were herded together for the sake of form and convenience. Piedmont and
Bennington, in turn, presided over student-council elections at the white
schools, sat in a place of honor at football games, chaperoned school dances,
and kissed the comely blonde elected homecoming queen. No more. That era of
history had ended and will not come again. Now the homecoming queen might be
named Ruby, Rosa Lee, or Jemima. There are very few school dances because of
that omnipresent southern fear that a sinister black male with an elongated,
elephantine gland might approach a honey-vaginaed white maiden with a twinkle
in his eye. Even the football games and elections seem different and
potentially explosive.

It was once so much nicer. They controlled black principals
who shuffled properly, who played the role of downcast eyes and easy niggers,
and who sold their own children and brothers on the trading block of their own
security. These men helped grease the path of the South’s Benningtons and
Piedmonts as they slid through the years. The important things were order,
control, obedience, and smooth sailing. As long as a school looked good and
children behaved properly and troublemakers were rooted out, the system held up
and perpetuated itself. As long as blacks and whites remained apart —
with the whites singing “Dixie” and the blacks singing “Lift
Every Voice and Sing,” with the whites getting scholarships and the blacks
getting jobs picking cotton and tomatoes, with the whites going to college and
the blacks eating moon pies and drinking Doctor Pepper — the
Piedmonts and the Benningtons could weather any storm or surmount any threat.
All of this ended with the coming of integration to the South.

During the entire period of my banishment and trial, I
wanted to tell Piedmont and Bennington that what was happening between us was
not confined to Beaufort, South Carolina. I wanted to tell them about the river
that was rising quickly, flooding the marshes and threatening the dry land. I
wanted them to know that their day was ending. When I saw them at the trial, I
knew that they were soldiers of the rear guard, captains of a doomed army
retreating through the snow and praying that the shadows of the quick, dark
wolves, waiting in the cold, would come no closer. They were old men and could
not accept the new sun rising out of the strange waters. The world was very
different now.

Mrs. Brown was perhaps the most tragic of all the
protagonists in the masque of Yamacraw. She was a woman victimized by her own
insecurity. She wanted so badly to be accepted by whites. She luxuriated in the
praise freely heaped upon her by Ezra Bennington. She emphasized over and over
the fact that she was part Cherokee Indian, educated in a private school, and
in no way related to the blacks who inhabited Yamacraw Island. She learned to
hate me because I did not agree with her opinion of the island people. I
imagine it was a liberating and purifying experience for her to be able to hate
a white man. Mrs. Brown, I discovered, had nothing to do with my being fired.
In fact she was not told of this action until after it happened. She was used
as a pawn at the trial. The whole affair frightened and confused her. She once
had talked to me about moving to Columbia and opening a pie shop behind her
house there. I hope she does it and I hope she sells a million pies. I do not
hope that she continues to teach children, but I do hope that she is happy the
rest of her life.

Ted and Lou Stone will remain on Yamacraw until they die.
They are permanently rooted in the island’s history and soil. Though their
attitudes would fit more comfortably in an earlier period of American history,
their relationship to the people is a symbiotic one. Despite their paternalism,
they help the people who need help and are the most stable institution on the
island. I was the troublemaker they always feared and they exulted when I was
permanently exiled, yet they were often kind to me and did me many favors that
were unsolicited and spontaneous. They see a terrible world about to storm the
fortress of their island and they cannot quite understand why it must come so
soon. They are just people trying to fend off the apocalypse from their shores.

The town of Beaufort continues to undergo change, not
revolutionary change, but gradual and slow change, like the erosion of a high
bluff during spring tides. A kind of brotherhood hides beneath the shadows of
columns and the mute verandahs — unspoken, inchoate, but present
nevertheless. There is no widespread denunciation of the old values, but the
erosion of these same values is already irreparable. For ten years I have been
part of the town and have seen her grow more human and her people grow more
tolerant as the past has crumbled and the old dreams burned out in a final
paroxysm of sputtering paralysis and rage. The South of humanity and goodness
is slowly rising out of the fallen temple of hatred and white man’s
nationalism. The town retains her die-hards and nigger-haters and always will.
Yet they grow older and crankier with each passing day. When Beaufort digs
another four hundred holes in her plentiful graveyards, deposits there the
rouged and elderly corpses, and covers them with the sandy, lowcountry soil,
then another whole army of the Old South will be silenced and not heard from
again. The religion of the Confederacy and apartheid will one day be subdued by
the passage of years. The land will be the final arbiter of human conflict; no
matter how intense the conflict, the victory of earth and grave will be
undeniable and complete. The eyes of the town are turning with excruciating
reluctance toward the new flow and the new era. The eyes seem a bit brighter
and less clouded with hate.

Of the Yamacraw children I can say little. I don’t
think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the
inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their
birth. I felt much beauty my year with them. It hurt very badly to leave them.
For them I leave a single prayer: that the river is good to them in the
crossing.

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Contents |

Acknowledgments

To Peg and Don Conroy, Carol, Mike,
Kathy, Jim, Tim, and Tom for their dedication under fire. Also Margaret
Stanton, my grandmother, and my daughters, Jessica, Melissa, and Megan.

To my following friends in Beaufort: Tut, Sarah Ellen,
Bruce, and Melinda Harper; John, Ruby Ellis, Dale, Jan, Danner, and Betty
Hryharrow; Papa and Mama Wall; Bucky Wall; Connie and Larry Rowland; John and
Nip Cook; Freddie and Lindsay Task; George and Connie Trask; the Scheins; Tim
and Diane Belk; George and Jane Garbade; Lucy and Ridge Hall; Mike and Beth
Jones; Herbert, Harriet, Billy, and Paul Keyserling; Richie and Aldie Matta; Ev
and Ann Cooper; Jeff Greene; Henry Burke; Millen Ellis; Charles and Juanita
Washington; Courtney and Elizabeth Siceloff; John Gadsden; Roy and Rose Lee;
Mike McEachern; Frenchie Dawes; Miracyl Damon; Gady Lights; Pat Youngblood; Jet
Ragsdale; the Ficklings; the Combses; the Delgados; the Dowlings; Marian
Etheridge; Shep Trask.

Also thanks to Bernie and Martha Schein, Bill Dufford, Gene
Norris, Betsy Geddes, George and Miriam Sklar; Jim and Vivian Strand; Jim and
Annie Roe; Nugent and Elizabeth Courvoisie; Luke and Mary Brown; John and
Clarissa Doyle; Linda Williams; K. Z. Chavis; Roy Bohon and Dot Routh; Susan
Cooler; Jan and Ted Nichols; Brue and Carol Fader; Stanley Kravit; Betsy
Fancher; Joe Cumming; Carl and Nancy Turner; Herman Blake; Jim Ford; Joe
Sanfort; Chuck Haffly; Allen Carlson; Frank Smith; John Rickford; Tim
Biancalana; Dave Morrison; Ed Flaherty; Jeff Hershey; Jeff Pomerantz; Dave
Cannon; Allen Minor; Beau and Julie Bridges; Beppie and Marschall Smith; Dick
and Carol Larsen; Dick and Marie Caristi.

Ernest Hollings, Henry Chambers, the Colquhouns; the
Samses; the Aimars; Ann and Rick Pollitzer; the Hendricks brothers; the Becks;
the Parkers; the Randels; the Zachowskis; George Westerfield; Harrison
Drinkwater; Joe Golden; Joe and Jean Jones.

Julian Bach, Wendy Weil, Shannon Purves, Anne Barrett,
Anita McClellan.

The Southern Regional Council; The N. E. A. DuShane Fund,
and the Leadership Development Program of the Ford Foundation.

Special thanks to Richie Matta, Zack Sklar, Bob and Emma
Lee Criddle, and the people and children of the island.

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Contents |

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eBook Info

Title:

The Water is Wide

Creator:

Pat Conroy

Publisher:

Rosetta Books

Identifier:

0-7953-0076-X

Language:

en-us