The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  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. “You’re 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?�
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  “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 a 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.