The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “It was while I was reading the story of the Creation that it came to me like a vision. Genesis is not a book of revelation, but a book of prophecy. I think it foretells what will happen in the future, not what has happened in the past. And is it so difficult for those who’ve grown up by the Colleton River and known the beauty of the seasons and the marshes—is it so difficult for us to imagine that we are still in Paradise, that we have yet to be denied the Garden of Eden? That Adam and Eve are still waiting to be born and that you and I are living in Paradise without even knowing it?

  “You know that Jesus loved to speak in parables in the Bible. Is it possible that the Book of Genesis is simply another parable, God’s way of warning us of the dangers of the world by telling us a story? And if you can agree with me for just a moment that Genesis might be a parable, consider this: When Eve reaches up and touches the forbidden fruit and loses Paradise and is driven from the perfect happiness of Eden, is it possible that God is speaking to us today here in Colleton? What is it that will destroy our perfect home? What is it that will drive us out of Paradise and into unknown lands? What is it that will take away from us everything we have known and loved and thanked God for every single day of our lives?

  “I have read Genesis, my friends and neighbors, and I think I know the answer. I have prayed to God for wisdom and I think he has granted that wisdom to me.

  “Genesis is a parable and it is God trying to reach down through the ages to warn the people of Colleton and all the people of the world of the one thing that can destroy Paradise for all of us.

  “It was not an apple that Eve touched,” he said, and he paused. “I think that the forbidden fruit is plutonium.”

  Lucy Emerson, the bank teller, jumped to her feet at the top of the bleachers behind me and shouted, “Amen, brother.”

  And the crowd let out with a roar of solidarity.

  Patrick Flaherty walked up to the podium and tried to take the microphone from Luke. Luke’s words were picked up by the mike as he said, “Sit down, sciencehead. I ain’t finished yet.”

  The crowd was restless now, weightless in the sunlight and altered by the power of the spoken word.

  Luke continued: “I think that we have in Colleton what everyone else is looking for. I think it’s a town worth fighting for. I even think it’s a town worth dying for. I’ve been surprised, my friends, that we have let strangers into our midst who have promised to destroy our town, to remove our houses, to unbury our dead. I thought we were southerners and that our love of the land was what made us different from all other Americans. Then I remembered it was southerners and citizens of Colleton who were the ones who brought the strangers to our town and sold Colleton down the river for a fistful of money.”

  He turned and faced my mother and the politicians and the businessmen on the platform.

  He made a gesture of dismissal with his arm and said, “These are the new southerners whose hearts and souls are for sale, who can be bought with the money of strangers. They can go live in New Colleton or they can go straight to hell. They are not brothers and sisters of mine. They are not part of the South I love.

  “I have a single suggestion. I make it out of desperation because they are already clearing trees on the island where I was born. Let us remember who we are—the descendants of men who once shook the world because they would not surrender their rights to the federal government. Our forebears died at Bull Run and Antietam and Chancellorsville. I think they fought for a bad reason and I want no man as my slave. But neither do I wish to be a slave to any man, nor will I allow any man to banish me from the land that God gave me at birth. They tell me that Luke Wingo will have to be packed and out of Colleton County in one year or be subject to punishment by the law of the land.”

  He paused a moment, then said in an even, cold-blooded voice, “I promise you this: Luke Wingo ain’t going. And I promise you that they’ll have to come and throw me off this land and Luke Wingo promises that it ain’t gonna be easy.

  “I’ve talked with most of you and I know you don’t like it. But they’re playing with your thoughts and telling you it’s your patriotic duty to go like cringing dogs across the bridge into strange lands. They know you’re southern and they think you’re stupid, and you are stupid if you go without a fight. They tell you that these bombs and subs and missiles will be used to kill Russians. There isn’t one person in this gym who’s ever seen a Russian. What would you do if a damn Russian came to your house tonight and said, ‘We’re going to move every single person in this town forty miles up the road and tear down your schools and churches and divide your families and desecrate the graves of your loved ones.’ There would be dead Russians lying all over this county, and you and I know that with our hearts. They might as well send me to Russia as send me to New Colleton. I don’t know no New Colleton.”

  “Tell us what to do, Luke,” a voice called out.

  “Tell us, Luke,” other voices called.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said to the voices. “But I’ve got a few suggestions. I don’t know if they’d work or not, but we could try. Tomorrow, let’s get a petition going to recall every elected official in this county. Let’s throw the greedy bastards out. Then let’s pass a law forbidding all new federal construction in the county. They’ll have laws to counter our measures, of course. And the full weight of all the law of the land and the state will be brought to bear upon us.

  “If they persist, then I would like to suggest that Colleton County draw up a Bill of Secession from the state of South Carolina. And in the light of history, no state should understand the urge to secede any more than South Carolina. Let us take our destinies into our own hands and declare that Colleton County be free in perpetuity from the manufacture of plutonium. Let us proclaim, if necessary, that Colleton is a sovereign state. Let us give the federal government thirty days in which to cease and desist in the building of the Colleton River Project and the dispossession of the people from their land. Let us shout the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Let us shout those words as they come to our doors: ‘Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.’ If they refuse to listen to us, then I believe a state of war should be declared. We would be defeated easily. But we could walk away from our homes with some sense of honor. In a hundred years, they’d sing songs celebrating our courage. We’d teach them the power of saying no.

  “If the agents of the federal government continue to come to your houses and continue the forced removal of all the citizens of Colleton, then I say to all of you, the friends and neighbors I have known all my life: Fight them. Fight them.

  “When they come to your door, wear a green armband to let them know you’re one of us. This’ll be the uniform of our discontent. Ask them kindly to leave your property. If they refuse, put a gun in their faces. Then ask them again. If they still refuse, put a bullet through their foot.

  “I once read that when the concept of common law first began in England, the king himself was not allowed to cross the threshold of the poorest peasant’s house without permission. I’m claiming for all of us that the king shall not cross our thresholds. The son of a bitch just wasn’t invited.”

  Sheriff Lucas approached Luke from the rear and snapped a handcuff around Luke’s wrist. The sheriff and two deputies pushed Luke roughly toward the door and the meeting adjourned without a sound from the thousand people who had packed the gymnasium. There was bad blood and sedition rising in the silence, but not enough.

  Luke was booked and fingerprinted and charged with making terroristic threats against federal and state officials. He was also charged with urging seditious acts against the state of South Carolina. Luke said that he no longer recognized the authority of the state or federal government and considered himself a prisoner of war in the current hostilities between Colleton and the Un
ited States. He gave his name, rank, and serial number and, citing the treaties of the Geneva Convention concerning the handling of prisoners of war, refused to answer all other questions.

  The Charleston News and Courier printed an ironic article the next day, reporting that the Colleton sheriff had to break up the first secessionist meeting in South Carolina in over a hundred years. There were no recall petitions passed in the shops along the Street of Tides and there were no green armbands worn in defiance of the Colleton River Project. Only one man had taken Luke’s words to heart and he was already imprisoned in a cell overlooking the river.

  Luke’s war had begun.

  With some reluctance, I accompanied my mother when she went to visit Luke in jail the following evening. She took my arm as we walked toward town with the pale lights blooming in the dining room windows. The mansions that had once seemed eternal to me now seemed as fragile and effaceable as love letters written in snow. A bulldozer was parked beneath a streetlight, articulating the fate of Colleton in its hunched, stubby silence. It seemed part insect, part samurai, and it had the dirt of my town bleeding along its gums. As my mother and I walked in silence, I could feel the soft linens of my family unraveling in my hands. The streets were rain-sweetened and we could smell the gardens burning with long streamers of wisteria and disciplined medallions of roses, and I thought, What will happen to these gardens? I ached with a sense of ineffable loss. I hurt because I could not say a single kind word to my mother. If I had been enough of a man, I would have taken my mother in my arms and told her I understood completely. But when you are dealing with Tom Wingo, it is a given that he will always find a way to cheapen and debase any virtues a confident manhood might provide. There was a spurious shine to my manhood, like the gleaming artillery of a county that surrendered without a fight.

  Before we walked into the jail, my mother squeezed my hand and said, “Please support me on this, Tom. I know you’re mad with me now, but I’m afraid of what Luke might do. I know him better than anyone, Tom. Luke has been looking for a cause he could die for his whole life, and I’m afraid he thinks he’s found it. If we don’t stop him now, we’re going to lose him.”

  The room was divided into eight equal parts as it flowed into Luke’s cell. Luke was staring out toward the river when the sheriff left us to talk outside his cell door. The moon rummaged through his hair and the light and the shadow of the bars turned his face into something as deliberately spaced as an octave of a piano. The light housed itself in the muscles along his neck and shoulders and as I studied him, I knew that I would never see a more beautiful body on a man. His muscles were long and fine and layered along his bones in perfect articulation and symmetry. His aura was one of cold substantiality. You could smell his fury or you could read it in the graffiti of his stressed shoulders. He did not look around to greet us.

  “Hello, Luke,” my mother said uncertainly.

  “Hey, Mama,” he said, his eyes affixed on the shining river.

  “You’re awfully mad at me, aren’t you, Luke?” she said, trying to make light of it.

  “Yeah, Mama,” he said. “How long did you know about it? When did Newbury let you in on the big piece of news? When did you plan to steal the only thing Dad ever owned?”

  “I earned the right to own that island,” she said. “I bled for that piece of land.”

  “You stole it fair and square,” Luke said. “Just don’t expect your children to love you for it.”

  “There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said. “The island’s gone. Colleton’s gone. We’ve all got to start over.”

  “How do you start over, Mama?” he said to the river. “How do you start over when you can’t look back? What happens to a man when he looks back over his shoulder to see where he came from, to see what he is, and all he sees is a sign that says, ‘Keep Out’?”

  “Who wrote that speech for you?” my mother asked. “The one you gave last night.”

  “I did,” he said. “No one else thinks like I do.”

  “Thank God that other people have more sense,” she said. “But who helped you write it? You can tell me.”

  “Mom, all my life you’ve thought I was stupid,” he said. “I’ve never understood it. You convinced me of it, too. I always felt dumb in school and dumb when I was around Tom and Savannah. I just see things differently from most folks. I’ve got a different angle of vision. Most people are smart about a hundred things. I’m just smart about four or five things. You’re right about one thing. I didn’t make up that part about Genesis being a book of prophecy. I heard Amos give that sermon in that little church of his before he died. I liked that sermon a lot.”

  “And you’re telling me that Amos thought that plutonium was the forbidden fruit?” my mother asked in an acidulous voice.

  “Naw, I changed that part,” Luke said. “Amos thought air conditioning was the forbidden fruit. It just didn’t fit with what I wanted to say.”

  “The government knows best,” my mother said, softening. “It needs this plant for national defense.”

  “Since when does the government know best, Mama?” Luke said in a tired and daunted voice. “Knows best about what? You told me that when I went to Vietnam. The same damn thing. So, I went around killing peasants, Mama, nothing but peasants so poor it would make you cry. I killed their buffalo, their wives and kids—I killed anything that moved in front of me. I even killed a couple of soldiers, Mama, but not many. I did it all because my government knew best. I’m standing here before you, Mama, to tell you that government don’t know shit. Government is mean. No matter what kind it is. I’ve figured it out for myself. If they feed a poor man it’s because they think that poor man might rise up and cut their throats. All this talk about Russia. You know what I think about Russia? I think it’s shit. I think America is shit, too. The government in Nam I helped defend was shit. The North Vietnamese is shit. You know why I fought in Vietnam, Mama? Because if I didn’t, they’da put me in jail. That’s a hell of a choice, isn’t it? That’s why I pay taxes, too. Because if I don’t, they’ll throw me in jail. And now if I want to go back to the place I was born, my wonderful government will throw my ass in jail. And yesterday, I speak words from the Declaration of Independence, and my fabulous government tosses me in jail.”

  “You can’t fight the law, son,” my mother said.

  “Who says I can’t? I fought the Viet Cong. Tell me why I can’t fight the law.”

  “Luke, you assume that you can make the world exactly as you want it to be,” my mother said, her head leaning against the bars of his cell. “You’re so rigid and stubborn and . . . ”

  “Stupid, Mama?” he said, walking over to face us through the bars. “I know that’s what you think.”

  “No, stupid isn’t the word I was hunting for, Luke,” she said. “The word is pure. But your purity never leads to wisdom. It only makes you fall in love with lost causes.”

  “I don’t consider this a lost cause,” he said. “I’m just saying no. I’ve got a right to say no. I’m a goddamn American. I fought a war so I could say no. I earned that simple right. My country fought a shitty war in a shitty country and I said yes to that. But the reason they told us we were fighting was to preserve the rights of people to choose how they wanted to live. They told us that over and over again. Of course, they were lying. But I chose to believe it. I didn’t fight that war thinking my own government would then take my own home away from me. I would have fought for the Viet Cong if I ever once thought that. Savannah and Tom said no to the war. I fought so they could say that. Because, Mama, you’re right. I’m stupid. I believed everything I was taught about America. There’s no one who loves this country more than me. Nobody. Only it’s not the whole country. I don’t give a shit about Idaho or South Dakota. Never been there. My county is my home. It’s what I can see from this window. It’s only about forty square miles of the planet Earth. But it’s what I love and what I fought for.”

  “And it’s what you
’ll leave, Luke,” my mother said. “Did you hear about poor Mr. Eustis? He refused to let the agents look at his farm today up by the Kiawah River. It seems he took your speech seriously last night. Old man Jones tried the same thing and he just lives in a trailer. They’ve both got warrants out for their arrest now.”

  “Mama, I ain’t leaving my house when I get out of here,” Luke said fiercely.

  “You’re just talking to hear yourself talk, Luke,” she said. “If you try to remain on the island, they’ll just come and take you like they’re going to do to Eustis and Jones.”

  “I ain’t poor Eustis and I ain’t old Jones,” Luke said.

  “You were raised to be a law-abiding citizen,” my mother said.

  “Where I was raised doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “Your husband and the goddamn politicians conspired to give my home away.”

  “Reese did not conspire to do anything and I resent your implying that about my husband,” she said.

  “He’s been buying up land for years, Mama,” said Luke, “and forcing poor farmers out of the county. He knew about this a long time ago. The county population has been dropping for ten years because he’s been pushing people off their land. He married you so he could have the last large piece of land he couldn’t buy outright.”

  My mother put her hand through the bars and slapped Luke hard across the face.

  “He married me because he worships the ground I walk on,” she said, enraged. “And even if my children haven’t noticed, I’m worth every bit of that worship.”

  “You are, Mama,” Luke said quietly. “I’ve always believed that. I’ve always believed that you were wonderful and was always sorry that you and Daddy were so unhappy. I’m glad that you’re happy now and I understand that you just did what you had to do. Now I want you to understand that I’ve got to do things my own way too. I’ve thought this all out very carefully. I ain’t thought about nothing else since the announcement.”