The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “We don’t like our white girls talking to niggers,” he said.

  “I’ll talk to anyone I please, Oscar, darling.”

  “You know you can’t tell Savannah anything,” I said to Oscar.

  “Come over here, Tom,” Savannah said.

  “I’m busy talking to my good friend Oscar,” I said, smiling at Oscar.

  “Come over here, Tom,” she repeated.

  I walked, without enthusiasm, toward her and shook hands with Benji Washington.

  “He touched it on the hand,” Lizzie Thompson wailed near the door. “I’d rather die than touch a nigger.”

  “You’d rather die than have a thought, Lizzie,” Savannah said to her. Then she turned to me. “Pull that seat up next to Benji, Tom. That’s where you’re going to sit.”

  “I’m sitting up front, Savannah. You’re not going to tell me where I have to sit. And I’m not going to take crap from every redneck in this school just because you read Anne Frank when you were a kid.”

  “Pull up that seat, Tom,” she whispered smugly. “I’m not fooling.”

  “I’m not sitting next to Benji, Savannah. And you can embarrass me all you want.”

  “Are you going out for football, Benji?” she asked, turning from me.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We’re going to kill you on that field, boy,” Oscar said.

  “Where’s the goddamn teacher?” I said, looking at the door.

  “You won’t kill him, Oscar,” Savannah sneered. “You may be strong, but I’ve heard Tom say you’re complete chickenshit on the football field.”

  “Did you say that, Wingo?”

  “No, of course not, Oscar,” I lied. Oscar was one of those overweight hoodlums who could not transfer their violent antisocial behavior well to the realm of sport. Southern schools were filled with street brawlers and knife fighters who could not block or tackle.

  “Tom will look out for you at practice,” Savannah said. “Won’t you, Tom?”

  “I’ll be too busy looking out for myself,” I said.

  Savannah grabbed my wrists and dug her nails in deep, drawing blood in four places: “Yes, you will, brother.”

  And then it happened—Oscar threw down the gauntlet. “She’s a twat, Wingo. Your sister is a nigger-loving twat.”

  “Take that back, Woodhead.”

  “Will not, Wingo, and if you want to do anything about it I’ll meet you behind the band room after school.”

  “He’ll be there,” Savannah said, “and he’ll kick the shit out of you, Oscar.”

  “Savannah!” I said.

  “There won’t be enough left of you to feed a fiddler crab,” she continued. “Hey, Lizzie, run out and call the hospital. Tell them Oscar’s gonna need emergency surgery on his face this afternoon.”

  “He’s no fighter. I can tell he’s scared shitless,” Oscar said, appraising me correctly.

  “He and Luke became karate masters this summer. And I mean black belt masters. He breaks boards in half with his hands, Oscar. Take a good look at those hands. They’re registered officially. That’s why he doesn’t want to fight. He goes to jail if he touches you with those hands.”

  I raised my deadly hands and studied them thoughtfully, as though I were appraising two dueling pistols.

  “Is that like judo?” Oscar asked suspiciously.

  “Judo maims,” Savannah said. “Karate kills. He learned it from a karate master in Savannah this summer. An Oriental karate master.”

  “Niggers and chinks. Do the Wingos ever hang around white folks anymore? See you behind the band room, Wingo. Bring your registered hands with you.”

  There was a huge celebratory crowd gathered behind the band room when I arrived with my registered hands that afternoon. I was concentrating on breathing and thinking how much I enjoyed it and how much I would miss it after Oscar killed me. When I made my cringing appearance, a sudden cheer broke through the crowd and I saw Savannah, leading the other nine cheerleaders, racing toward me. They surrounded me and I walked toward Oscar with ten pompoms fluttering around my head as they broke into the Colleton High victory song.

  Fight, fight, fight for Colleton,

  May victory make us bold.

  We’ll fight all night with all our might,

  We’ll fight for the green and gold.

  A look of the coldest, most brutal fury had settled in Oscar’s eyes. He was surrounded by a covey of shrimpers’ sons, boys I had known my whole life, whose sleeves were rolled up high on their arms and who stood watching me in a betrayed, lipless circle of solidarity. Luke was standing in front of Oscar. I walked toward Luke, the pompoms moving with me like a sea of restless chrysanthemums. I had hoped to be massacred in the presence of only a few skinny river boys and had not counted on Savannah turning my assassination into a pep rally.

  I heard Luke say: “I hear you called my sister a twat, Woodhead.”

  “She was talking to the nigger, Luke,” Oscar answered, looking over Luke’s shoulder toward me.

  “She don’t need your permission to talk to anyone. Now apologize to my sister, Woodhead.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do, Luke,” Oscar said, and I noticed how gingerly and deferential he was toward Luke. “You’re trying to pick a fight with me so your little pansy brother doesn’t have to fight me.”

  “No. Tom’s gonna whip you himself. If for some reason you hurt my little brother, then you will have to fight me, and that’s gonna ruin your whole afternoon, Woodhead. I want you to apologize to my little sister for calling her a twat.”

  “I’m sorry I called you a nigger-loving twat, Savannah,” he called out above the crowd. The pompoms stilled and the river boys laughed nervously.

  “I want a nice apology, Woodhead. A sincere apology. If it doesn’t sound sincere, I’m gonna tear your head off.”

  “I’m sorry I said that, Savannah,” Oscar said in a chastened voice. “I really am.”

  “That didn’t sound so sincere to me, Luke,” I said. My voice was a pitiful thing.

  “You just don’t want to fight,” Oscar said.

  “Do you want me to fight him, Tom?” Luke asked, staring into Oscar’s eyes.

  “Well, I can always wait my turn,” I said.

  “It’s your fight, Wingo,” Artie Florence, one of the shrimpers’ kids, said to me.

  “Let me talk to Tom for a minute,” Luke said. “Then he’ll cut your butt.”

  Luke walked me away from the others with his arm around my right shoulder as Savannah led the cheerleaders through their routines, wanning up the crowd.

  “Tom,” Luke said, “do you know how fast you are?”

  “You want me to run away?” I said incredulously.

  “No, I mean your hands. Do you know how fast your hands are?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He can’t hit you unless you make a mistake. He’s strong but he’s slow. You keep away from him. Dance around. Have fun. Don’t get near him. Pop him when you see an opening, then get the hell out of there. When you can, punch his arms.”

  “His arms?”

  “Yeah. When his arms tire, they’ll drop. He’ll have trouble lifting them. When you see that, move in.”

  “I’m scared, Luke.”

  “Everyone is always scared in a fight. He’s scared too.”

  “He ain’t half as scared as I am. Where’s Earl Fucking Warren now that I need him?”

  “You’re too fast to lose to him. Don’t let him charge you and get you onto the ground. He’ll pin your arms and start beating your face in.”

  “Oh, God. Can I punch Savannah just once before the fight starts? She’s the one who got me into this. Why do I have to come from the only family in Colleton that loves niggers?”

  “Do that later. Punch Woodhead for the time being. Keep away from him. He swings wild.”

  The crowd pulled back to give us room as I stepped forward on the grass to face Oscar Woodhead. I was going to get beat up becaus
e of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, because of integration, because of Benji Washington, and because of my big-mouthed sister. Oscar, smiling, put up his fists and moved toward me. His first punch caught me off guard. It was a roundhouse right that almost connected to my jaw, and I lost my balance. He came after me, throwing punch after ferocious punch, an animal wail rising out of him as he stalked me across the grass.

  “Dance,” Luke commanded.

  I moved to his left, away from his terrible right hand. One punch glanced off my head. I blocked another with my arm. I circled and moved away from him. For three minutes I moved and dodged and could see his mounting frustration as he pursued me. Then, unconsciously, I began to watch him. Following his body closely, watching his eyes, I knew when he was going to throw a punch. Conversely, he had no idea when I would throw one, since I had not even attempted an ineffectual jab thus far.

  “Stand still and fight, you chickenshit,” he said, panting.

  I stood still and he charged. When he charged, he changed sports and entered a province I understood and excelled in far more than he. Linemen on opposing teams had been moving toward me in disciplined sweeps for three years. I dodged out of his way, and as he passed me, I stunned myself by delivering a solid punch to his ear. His momentum brought him to the ground and the crowd exploded and the cheerleaders, led by an exultant Savannah, broke into the Colleton fight song again.

  But Oscar was back on his feet in an instant, furious, and he stalked me again. I could hear him breathing hard and could feel his need to end the fight quickly. I dodged six more punches, or, more accurately, I simply moved out of their way, circling and backpedaling. Then I began punching his arms, hard jabs against his wrists and biceps. I moved in suddenly and the movement toward him surprised him and he moved back. He swung another wild, fruitless salvo at my face and I retreated into the noise of the crowd as I kept working on his arms.

  Then he settled down and tried to maneuver me against the schoolhouse wall. He began to select his punches with greater care. He hit me with a jab above the eye that numbed the right side of my face.

  “Dance,” Luke shouted, and I faked left, moved to the right, and as I moved I came in with a right hand that caught him on the side of the face and I saw him stumble backward and his hands come down from his face.

  “Now,” Luke commanded.

  I moved toward him and started hitting him with left jabs. He tried to pull his arms up to protect his face, but he could not lift or control them and they dropped down to his chest and the blood began to run out of his lips and nose. The person who was hitting him was me but it did not feel like me, had no relationship to me at all, though I felt the movement of my left hand, its steadiness as it damaged the flesh before it. Then Luke stepped into my field of vision and stopped the fight.

  I dropped to my knees and wept from sheer relief, from fear, and from the numbing pain over my left eye.

  “You did good, baby brother,” Luke whispered.

  “I’m never gonna do that again,” I said, tears flooding out of my eyes. “I hated it. J absolutely hated it. Tell Oscar I’m sorry.”

  “You can tell him later. We’ve got to get to practice. I told you you were fast.”

  Savannah rattled a frayed pompom in my face and said, “What is the matter for godsakes, Tom? You won the fight.”

  “I’ve known Oscar since I was a baby.”

  “He was a creep even then,” Savannah said.

  “I didn’t like it,” I said and then felt suddenly embarrassed when I realized sixty people were watching me cry.

  “Quarterbacks don’t cry,” Luke said. “C’mon, we’ve got to get to practice.”

  The first practice ended that day, as it always did with Coach Sams, with forty-yard wind sprints. The guards and centers went first, bursting out of the end zone in clumsy gaits and running toward the coach, who blew the whistle downfield. Then the tackles lined up and I watched as Luke easily outsprinted his large, ill-made tribe.

  I lined up with the backs and found myself beside Benji Washington.

  “I hear you’re fast,” I said. “I was the fastest man on the team last year.”

  “Was,” he said.

  The whistle blew and I took off running downfield. I had gotten a good start and pulled out ahead, hearing the cleats plowing the earth behind me. I was running as fast as I could, with all the confidence of a boy who has been the fastest kid in his class since the first day of first grade, when Benji Washington passed me on my left and won the sprint going away by five yards.

  In the next sprint of the backs, I ran with all the confidence of one who knows he’s only the second-fastest boy in his class. I saw Coach Sams check his stopwatch again. Last year he had been the most vociferous and intransigent member of the staff against integration. His stopwatch was broadening his social horizons. Benji was running the forty-yard dash in 4.6 seconds. My best time was 4.9, and that was with hurricane winds behind me. The whistle sounded across the field again and once more I sprinted toward the coach and once more saw Benji pass me with extraordinary effortless grace as he flew past the hash marks toward the coach.

  “That coon can fly,” I heard one of the backs say, but it was a statement more of admiration than of malice.

  We ran ten sprints and Benji won ten of them. I finished second in ten of them. By the time Coach Sams blew the whistle and the team raced toward the locker room, the tenor and complexion of our season had changed. We were going to have a good football team just with the veterans returning from last year’s team. But now, we had added the South’s fastest human being to the backfield and I was thinking of the state championship.

  18

  It is September of 1961 on Melrose Island in the most deeply lived-in year of our lives. The shrimp are running well and my father’s boat approaches the docks each evening with its bins brimming with fish and shrimp. It is his finest season since 1956 and my father’s buoyant, high-stepping gaiety pays wordless homage to the sea’s generosity. The price of shrimp is holding at a dollar a pound and he acts like a rich man when he checks the groaning scales at the shrimp dock. At night, he talks about owning a fleet of shrimp boats. He tells my mother that he saw Reese Newbury at the bank and that Reese had told a group of men that Henry Wingo was married to the prettiest woman in Colleton County. My mother blushes, pleased, and says that she’s just a middle-aged woman who does the best she can with what God gave her.

  Savannah emerges from her bedroom dressed in her cheerleader costume for the first game. She cannot quite hide her pleasure. She creates a field of vibrancy and disturbance with her pale beauty. Her off-beat prettiness impinges softly as we turn to watch her entry. Our applause lies in the margins of our silence, the delicacy of our awe. She has unfolded before us, a secret ripening, and as she stands in the living room awaiting our approval, she spins in a slow circle, lovely in the places where a woman is lovely, her complexion immaculate as first fruit, her hair brushed and shining and blonde as a palomino’s mane. Luke rises from his chair and begins clapping his hands and I rise, joining him, and together we begin to cheer. She lifts her arms and approaches us, thinking we are making fun of her, but stops when she realizes we are praising her. Her eyes fill up with tears. She is the girl of dreams but she had never dared dream that she would one day be beautiful. There is a perfect economy of feeling between us. Again, I am overwhelmed with the love of my sister and brother, and of their love for me. My mother looks up from the stove and knows she is not part of this moment. My father does not know enough to want to be a part of it. It is the beginning of a long and uncanny season in the house of Wingo. There will be honor and decency and the testing of the qualities of our humanity, or the lack of them. There will be a single hour of horror that will change our lives forever. There will be carnage and murder and ruin. When it is over, we will all think that we have survived the worst day of our lives, endured the most grisly scenario the world could have prepared for us. We will be wrong. But it begins wi
th my sister spinning in a charming pirouette for her brothers. It begins with a moment of ingenuous beauty. In three hours we will play our first football game and it is September again on Melrose Island.

  My father was the first to make the connection between the Colleton High Tigers and the Bengal tiger who roared outside our house each night. He rented Caesar out to the school’s Booster Club at ten dollars a game, a paltry sum that barely covered the price of chicken necks for a week, but the deal encouraged my father to think that he could turn Caesar into a money-making operation.

  “How about it, kids?” he said before we left for the game. “I could rent Caesar out at birthday parties. Halloween parties. I could take pictures of Caesar eating a piece of birthday cake. Or a picture of a kid riding Caesar on his birthday. We could build a saddle.”

  “Caesar doesn’t eat cake,” Luke said.

  “He likes kids, though. We could take pictures of Caesar eating a kid at his last birthday party. Then we could take pictures of the hysterical mother trying to pull the tiger off her only child. Then we could take pictures of Caesar devouring the mother,” I said.

  “The nicest thing we could do to Caesar would be to put him to sleep,” my mother said. The whole subject of Caesar infuriated her. “We can barely afford a goldfish, much less a tiger.”

  “Ha! Caesar got ten bucks a game out of the Booster Club, didn’t he? Six home games times ten and that’s an extra sixty dollars of pure profit. You add that to the twenty-five bucks I’m paid to film the game and you got real money rolling in.”

  “Why don’t you ride Caesar, Dad?” I suggested.

  “I’m the idea man,” Dad said, offended at the thought. “Besides, I’d break that poor creature’s back. I ain’t built like no jockey. You know, come to think of it, Savannah’s the lightest member of the family.”

  “Forget it, Dad,” Savannah said. “I’ll ride the elephant. Let Tom ride the tiger.”

  “What elephant?” Mom asked.

  “I’m sure Dad will buy an elephant soon,” Savannah explained. “You know, for Republican fund raisers. That kind of thing.”