The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  Through the years, the Snow had become a symbol of luck in the town. Colleton would prosper and flourish as long as the Snow honored these waters with her visitations. There were times when she disappeared for long periods and then suddenly would return to the waters of the Carolina sea islands. Even the paper noticed her comings and goings. Her entrance into the main channel and her slow, sensual passage through the town would bring the entire citizenry to the river’s banks. Commerce would cease and collectively the people of the town would stop what they were doing to acknowledge her return. She visited the main river rarely, and because of its rarity, her appearance was a precious town-stopping thing. She approached us always as a symbol, monarch, and gift; she approached us always alone, banished, and the people on the shore, calling her by name, shouting out in greeting, acknowledging her divine white passage, formed the only family she would ever know.

  Grandpa started the motor and headed the small boat out toward the channel. The Snow rose out of the river ahead of us, her back lilying in the dimming light.

  “She’s going our way,” Grandpa said, steering the boat toward her. “Now if that ain’t proof of a living God then nothing is. You’d think he’d be satisfied with just a plain porpoise. That’s as beautiful as any creature on earth. But no, he’s still up there dreaming up things even more beautiful to please man’s eye.”

  “I’ve never seen her this close,” Savannah said. “She’s pure white, like a tablecloth.”

  But it was not a pure white we were seeing when she surfaced twenty yards from us. Faint ores of colors shimmered across her back as she cut through the water, a brief silvering of her fins, evanescent color that could not be sustained. You knew she could never be the same color twice.

  We watched her as she circled the boat, saw her beneath us, and she flowed like milk through water. Rising, she hung suspended, concolorous with peaches and high-risen moons, then down as milk again.

  These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot recapture entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart. There is a river, the town, my grandfather steering a boat through the channel, my sister fixed in that suspended rapture she would later translate into her strongest poems, the metallic perfume of harvested oysters, the belling voices of children on the shore . . . When the white porpoise comes there is all this and transfiguration too. In dreams, the porpoise remains in memory’s waters, a pale divinity who nourishes the fire and deepest cold of all the black waters of my history. There were many things wrong with my childhood but the river was not one of them, nor can the inestimable riches it imparted be traded or sold.

  As we passed under the bridge I looked back and saw the shadows of people who had gathered to watch the Snow’s passage. Their heads appeared in clusters above the bridge’s cement railing, at intervals, like the beads of a damaged rosary. I heard the voice of a small girl begging the Snow to return beneath the bridge. Men and women began assembling on the floating docks, which bobbed in the moving tide; they were all pointing toward the last spot the porpoise had surfaced.

  When the white porpoise came, it was for my grandfather like seeing the white smile of God coming up at him from below.

  “Thank you, God,” my grandfather said behind us in one of those unrehearsed prayers that burst naturally from him when he was deeply moved by the external world. “Thank you so much for this.”

  I turned. My sister turned. And that good man smiled at us.

  Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the safe protectorate of his soft, uncritical maleness, I never wholly appreciated him. I did not know how to cherish sanctity; I had no way of honoring, of giving small voice to the praise of such natural innocence, such generous simplicity. Now I know that a part of me would like to have traveled the world as he traveled it, a jester of burning faith, a fool and a forest prince brimming with the love of God. I would like to have walked his southern world, thanking God for oysters and porpoises, praising God for birdsong and sheet lightning, and seeing God reflected in pools of creekwater and the eyes of stray cats. I would like to have talked to yard dogs and tanagers as if they were my friends and fellow travelers along the sun-tortured highways, intoxicated with a love of God, swollen with charity like a rainbow, in the thoughtless mingling of its hues, connecting two distant fields in its glorious arc. I would like to have seen the world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise.

  As the white porpoise began moving upriver in all the cut-off solitude of the outsider, I related to the aloneness of the creature. But my grandfather—ah! I always knew what my grandfather felt when he saw the Snow moving upriver. He watched the porpoise disappear, following the deep water around a dogleg in the channel, flashing once more before moving behind a green isthmus of land where the river goes to the right.

  Luke was standing on the dock waiting for us. With the sun to the west of him, he gazed at us facelessly, a remote chiaroscuro, a pillar of light and shadow. When Grandpa cut the motor, Luke guided the boat along the dock with his foot and caught the rope I threw to him.

  “Did you see Snow?” he asked.

  “She was frisky as a dog,” my grandfather answered.

  “Tolitha invited us all for dinner.”

  “We’ve got enough oysters,” I said.

  “Dad brought over five pounds of shrimp. Tolitha is going to fry them up.”

  “You looked like a giant standing on the dock when we were out on the river, Luke,” Savannah said. “I swear if I don’t think you’re still growing.”

  “I am, baby sister. And I don’t want no midgets scrambling up my beanstalk.”

  I began gathering the oysters and threw them up on the dock where Luke put them in a washtub. We tied up the boat and walked up to the house through the grass.

  Savannah, Luke, and I stayed out on the back porch and opened the oysters. We placed them in a bowl my grandmother passed out the kitchen door. I opened a large single and sucked it out of its shell, held it for a moment in my mouth, tasted its liquor on my tongue, inhaled its perfume, and let it slide down my throat. Nothing is more perfect to me than the freshness and bouquet of a raw oyster. It is the taste of the ocean barely made flesh. We could hear the voices of my mother and grandmother in the kitchen, the timeless serious voices of women preparing food for their families. Venus, a nugget of mild silver, rose in the east. The cicadas began their lunatic parliament in the trees. Someone turned on the television in the house.

  “I talked with Coach Sams today,” Luke said, snapping an oyster open with one graceful flick of his wrist. “He told me the colored boy’s really coming to school.”

  “Who is it?” Savannah asked.

  “Benji Washington. The undertaker’s kid.”

  “I’ve seen him around,” Savannah said.

  “He’s a nigger,” I said.

  “Don’t say that word, Tom,” Savannah said, glaring at me. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it one little bit.”

  “I can say anything I want,” I retorted. “I don’t have to ask your permission to say anything I please. He’s just gonna cause trouble and ruin our senior year.”

  “It’s a nasty, disgusting word,” she said, “and it makes you sound mean when you use it.”

  “He doesn’t mean anything by it, Savannah,” Luke said softly in the darkness. “Tom always tries to be tougher than he really is.”

  “He’s a nigger. What’s wrong with me calling him a nigger,” I said, tougher than ever.

  “Because kind people don’t use that word, you son of a bitch,” she said.

  “Well, well,” I said angrily. “I guess real kind people use ‘son of a bitch’ as a term of endearment.”

  “It’s suppertime,” Luke said forlornly. “I guess it’s time for another fight. Jesus Christ, you two. Just drop it. I’m
sorry I brought the subject up.”

  “Don’t you say that word, Tom. I’m warning you,” Savannah said.

  “I didn’t see the exact moment you turned into a beauty queen for the NAACP.”

  “Let’s just shuck oysters and listen to frogs,” Luke entreated. “I hate it when you two fight like this.”

  “You don’t say that word around me, Tom. I’m warning you. I hate that word and I hate people who use it.”

  “Dad uses it all the time,” I said.

  “He has an excuse. He’s an idiot. You’re not.”

  “I’m not ashamed of being southern, Savannah,” I said. “Like some people I know who read The New Yorker every week.”

  “You ought to be ashamed of being that kind of southerner. That kind of low-rent scum.”

  “Excuse me, your royal highness.”

  “Hush up, you two,” Luke said, looking toward the kitchen window. My grandmother’s biscuits anointed the night air. “Mom doesn’t allow us to say that word, Tom, and you know it.”

  “You don’t have the right to think like the worst part of the South thinks. I won’t allow that kind of ugliness in you. I’ll slap it out of you if I have to,” Savannah said.

  “I can beat the shit out of you, Savannah,” I said, looking up at her defiantly, “and you know it.”

  “That’s right, rough guy. You can,” she sneered, “but if you lay a finger on me, Big Luke over there will break you in half. And you’re weaker than water compared to Luke.”

  I looked at my brother, who was smiling at both of us. He nodded his head.

  “That’s right, Tom. I can’t let you go around hurting my little sugar-peeps,” he said.

  “Hey, Luke. Admit it. She started this fight, didn’t she? I just innocently mumbled something about the niggers.”

  “Yep!” he agreed. “She started it and she’s winning it too, little brother,” he smiled.

  “You’re prejudiced,” I said.

  “I’m just big,” Luke replied.

  “A prince,” Savannah said, hugging Luke and kissing him on the lips. “My redneck linebacking prince.”

  “No physical stuff, Savannah,” he said, blushing. “The ol’ bod is off limits.”

  “Just supposing I hit Savannah,” I said. “Now this is only theoretical. Just supposing I tapped her on the cheek in self-defense, Luke. You wouldn’t do anything to me, would you? I mean you love me just as much as you love Savannah, don’t you?”

  “I love you so much it hurts me,” Luke said, snapping open an oyster. “You know that, Tom. But if you ever touch Savannah, I’ll break your ass. It’ll hurt me a lot worse than it’ll hurt you, but I’ll break every bone in your body.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, Luke,” I said.

  “Yes, you are, Tom,” he said lightly. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m a lot stronger than you.”

  “Do you remember when Mom read us The Diary of Anne Frank, Tom?” Savannah asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Remember how you cried when the book ended?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with what we’re talking about. There wasn’t a single nigger in all of Amsterdam, I’m sure.”

  “But the Nazis, Tom. There were Nazis that used the word Jew the same way you’re using the word nigger.”

  “Give me a break, Savannah.”

  “And when Benji Washington comes through that school door on the first day of school next year I want you to remember Anne Frank.”

  “Jesus Christ. Let me just shuck oysters in peace.”

  “She’s just whipped your ass, boy. I always love to listen to you two fight. You start out like you’re gonna take on the world, Tom. When it ends up, you can’t say a word.”

  “I just don’t enjoy arguing very much,” I said. “That’s the major difference between Savannah and me.”

  “That’s not the major difference between us, Tom,” Savannah said, rising and going to the back door.

  “What is the main difference, then?” I said, turning toward her.

  “You really want to know? Not worrying about your feelings?”

  “You can’t hurt my feelings. I know everything you think anyway. We’re twins, remember?”

  “You don’t know this.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I’m a lot smarter than you, Tom Wingo.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen and left Luke and me to shuck the remaining oysters in the darkness. My brother’s laughter rumbled off the porch.

  “Whipped your ass, boy. Just whipped your poor country ass.”

  “I got in a couple of good lines.”

  “Not one. Not a single one.”

  “Anne Frank doesn’t have shit to do with it.”

  “She sure made it sound like she did.”

  At noon on Good Friday, my grandfather lifted the wooden cross and laid it upon his right shoulder. He was dressed in a white choir robe and he was wearing a pair of sandals he had bought at a K Mart in Charleston. Luke made last-minute adjustments on the wheel with a set of pliers.

  Mr. Fruit directed traffic and waited for my grandfather to signal that the walk was about to begin. Since Mr. Fruit directed traffic and led all parades, he always had to perform double duty on Good Friday. For reasons known only to him, Mr. Fruit considered my grandfather’s walk a parade. A small parade, and not much fun, but a parade nonetheless.

  Mr. Fruit put the whistle to his lips and my grandfather nodded his head. Mr. Fruit blew the whistle and strutted up the Street of Tides, high-stepping it like a drum major, his knees pumping as high as. his chin. My grandfather followed ten yards behind. I heard a couple of people laugh when they saw the wheel. Up by Baitery’s Pharmacy, I watched my father filming the first part of the walk.

  About halfway down the street, my grandfather fell for the first time. It was a spectacular fall and he hit the street hard, with the cross falling on him. He loved the falls best of anything in the three-hour walk. They always surprised the crowd, and besides, he was a good faller. My father was zooming in when my grandfather fell and it was evident that the two of them had worked out a system of signals whenever the highlights of the walk were coming up. Amos was also a good staggerer, and his knees buckled under him when he tried to rise. My grandfather knew nothing about the theater of the absurd, but he managed to invent it for himself year after year.

  After the first hour, the wheel broke and had to be discarded. Sheriff Lucas appeared at the traffic light by the bridge and wrote out the annual citation for obstruction of traffic. Mr. Fruit stopped marching and directed cars through the intersection as some of the crowd booed the sheriff. Mr. Kupcinet, a deacon at Grandpa’s church, read aloud from the Bible about the walk of Jesus through the streets of Jerusalem, his crucifixion on Calvary flanked by two thieves, the darkness over the city, the great cry of agony Eli, Eli lama sabachthani (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), and the centurion saying again as he would say for all the centuries that would pass, “Truly this is the Son of God.”

  And my grandfather would walk back and forth between stores that sold shoes and real estate and lingerie, sweat pouring from his face but his eyes serene, knowing he was serving his God as best as he knew how. Savannah and I sold lemonade in front of Sarah Poston’s dress shop and Luke had the job of stopping my grandfather in the middle of his walk and forcing a Dixie cup of vinegar between Amos’s lips. Then Luke played the part of Simon of Cyrene and helped bear the weight of the cross for one whole transit of the street. By the third hour, my grandfather would be staggering for real. When he fell the last time, he could not rise to his feet until Luke reached him and lifted the cross off his body. There was blood in a thin strip along the shoulder of the choir robe. He rose, smiled, and thanked Luke, promising to cut my brother’s hair later on in the day. Then he continued down the street, lurching and weaving from side to side.

  I did not know then and do not know now what to make of my grandfather’s awesome lo
ve of the Word of God. As a teenager I found his walk humiliating. But Savannah would write about his walk in poems of uncommon beauty. She would celebrate the “shy Oberammergau of. the itinerant barber.”

  And when Amos Wingo’s walk ended that day and we caught him as he fell and carried him to the lemonade stand, where we rubbed his face with ice and made him drink a cup of lemonade, I had a feeling that sainthood was the most frightening and incurable disease on earth.

  He was trembling and delirious as we laid him out on the sidewalk. People pressed forward to get Grandpa to sign their Bibles and my father filmed his collapse.

  Luke and I got him to his feet, and with his arms around our shoulders, we bore his weight and carried him home, with Luke saying the whole way: “You’re so beautiful, Grandpa. You’re so beautiful.”

  15

  The doorman who guarded the entrance to Dr. Lowenstein’s building watched my approach with mistrustful eyes. He observed me as though he knew I harbored criminal intentions, but it was his job to see the world in those terms. A powerful man, dressed in gaudily antiquated livery, he took my name with grave formality and called upstairs. The lobby was filled with cracked leather furniture, giving it the air of the dreary elegance of a men’s club whose membership had almost voted to admit women.