The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  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 Reader’s 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. Ol’ 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 sugar
y. 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.