The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  Complete illiteracy was an animal I had never encountered before. While teaching at the high school I came across some students who were not the brightest flames on the academic horizon, but none of them could compare with the seven students who formed a kind of know-nothing fraternity at the Yamacraw School. Of these seven, five were unbelievable. Richard, Prophet, Jasper and the twins not only were untouched by the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, they were appallingly lacking in other skills too.

  “How many fingers on one hand, Prophet?” I asked one day.

  “Two,” he answered.

  “Try it, Samuel.”

  “Three.”

  I put out the five fingers of my hand. “Count the fingers, Sidney.”

  “One,” said Sidney.

  “How many fingers, Richard?”

  “Four.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said, regretting it instantly when I saw the four very embarrassed faces. The other students, supposedly working on their own projects, were giggling.

  “Shut up, punks. We are in the process of education and so do not have time to be disturbed.”

  Then I carefully explained the five-fingered hand. They could not count to ten. They could not add one and one, two and two, or anything else. Mrs. Brown told me they were retarded and not to waste my time on them. Someone obviously had not wasted a great deal of time trying to educate them. If I held up basic-word cards for them, they stared at the cards with blank, vacuous faces. The sum total of their education seemed to be nothing. The word the was as foreign to them as the word elephant. I found no area where they were remotely proficient.

  Jasper tried like hell. He was nominally a sixth grader. His lips moved subconsciously, fighting hard to piece the proper sounds together. No sound emerged. Richard, his brother, reigned as master of the nonsense guess. I held up the word rat and Richard said, “Tree.” The other four nodded their heads seriously to show their commitment and faith in Richard’s judgment. I held up the word cat and Richard said, “Bread.” “Yep,” the others agreed, “it bread, O.K.” The twins, Samuel and Sidney, sat there unruffled by my efforts to get them to respond. They seemed to like me, probably because I did not beat them. Whenever Mrs. Brown was beating one of her students and the screams and the sound of leather on flesh drifted into the room, the twins lifted their heads, their mouths slightly open, and listened until the screams turned to sobs and the song of the belt was ended. I would bet my ass they had known Mrs. Brown’s calling card.

  Prophet, one of the five, could look like a clown and a tragic character at the same time. His speech was absolutely unintelligible. He did not have a speech impediment; he had five impediments. If he said anything to me, one of the other kids had to translate it. He could neither talk, read, nor write, yet he was as likable and affable as anyone in the class. His smile was infectious, crafted by some supernatural mischief-maker. He played and frolicked as a profession, not a hobby, and I was important in his life only because I was constantly interfering in his fun-filled, puckish life. Every time I asked Prophet a question, he answered me with an approximation of “yes, ma’am.” No one ever told Prophet that teachers could be male and that the phrase yes, ma’am is applied only to women. To Prophet yes, ma’am was what you said to teachers. Perhaps it was just as well, for many of the other children hit me constantly with the odious yassuh. And no matter how diligently I tried to eradicate the phrase from their vocabulary, they continued to use it.

  After one month of anguish and labor all of them could present a reasonable facsimile of the alphabet upon request, depending on their mood and level of inspiration. They had also mastered the first ten numbers. They also recognized with varying degrees of success approximately thirty words. Sometimes we would have spelling tests to see how well the words had actually found permanent soil. I liked to give spelling tests to this group for no other reason than to watch the magnificent cheating which invariably took place. Samuel and Sidney, whose tiny heads scanned the horizon constantly for real or imagined enemies, cheated with real passion. They were inured to failure and to school. And though they were cheaters of the first magnitude, neither of them had developed any technique to avoid detection. In the middle of the spelling test Samuel’s head would be practically lying on Richard’s paper, while Sidney would simply move Jasper’s arm aside to get an unencumbered view of his paper. The challenge of suppressing cheaters who performed their dastardly deeds so openly and disingenuously and with so much intellectual relish was immense. In fact I enjoyed the performances greatly.

  A game I begged from an administrator in the county office proved very helpful with the five. It helped rescue them from total boredom in the classroom. It’s called Play and Talk. It resembles a poor man’s Parcheesi board, has a spinner, and the usual collection of rules. The game forces the player to spell a word using the letter of the alphabet on which he lands. When I first introduced the game, Sidney started first. He landed on the letter D. “What sound does that letter make, Sid,” I asked.

  “Duh,” he answered correctly.

  “Very good. Now spell a word that starts with the letter D.”

  “Dog,” he said hesitantly. “D-O-D.”

  Hands shot up all around him. Samuel, his twin, giggled like hell. Sidney leaned over and socked Samuel. Samuel leaned over and socked Sidney. I leaped between them and demanded that they halt this nonsense immediately. Sid leaned around my left and yanked Samuel’s ear. Samuel screamed and told me that if Sid touched him one more time he was going to kick his butt. Eventually I restored a semblance of peace and the game continued.

  As I watched them play on that day and on succeeding days, it was apparent that this group played for blood and not for fun. If someone missed a word the others screamed and fought to answer it correctly. So intense was the competition that I could rarely drift too far away in another part of the room without a pitched battle arising. One occasion, I looked over to find Jasper and Richard sitting nose to nose, glaring virulently at each other, saying nothing, pinching each other’s arms. Their faces were twisted in anger. Jasper pinched Richard. Then Richard pinched Jasper. And so on. When the great two-hundred-pound mediator stumbled over to intervene, I was told, “Richard cheats,” by Jasper and then, “Jasper cheats,” by Richard. Both of them proved their cases conclusively. Indeed, both of them undeniably had cheated. When Prophet said that he had seen it all and that both were wrong, I nodded my head sagaciously, delivered an impromptu sermon on the need for honesty, and left them to continue the game in peace. When I looked around again, Richard and Jasper were pinching Prophet.

  Yet nothing bothered Prophet. He was the clown at war with a frowning world. When he found out that corporal punishment was not my trump card, he spent his whole life improvising irritations to test my self-control. He would walk up to me and make these ludicrous faces. Sticking out his tongue or rolling his eyes, he followed me around making faces or stealing my wallet from my back pocket. He loved games and this was why he adapted so well to the Play and Talk game.

  It was during a session of this game that Prophet electrified the class and held it unwittingly in the palm of his hand for several staggering moments. He spun the dial and landed on the letter F. He properly identified the letter and its sound. But naming a word that started with F proved a considerable challenge. Finally, after long and tortured deliberation, he came out with a word.

  “Fuck,” he said rather smugly. The class and the teacher of the class were stunned. Prophet grinned.

  “What did you say, Prophet?” I asked inanely.

  “Fuck,” he repeated, with bell-like clarity for Prophet.

  “Would you please spell that word, Prophet?” I asked, praying for deliverance.

  “F-U-X,” he spelled.

  “Do you mean ‘fox,’ Prophet?”

  “Yas’m. Look like dawg.”

  The class erupted. Prophet smiled broadly, amazed and pleased by his ability to evoke laughter from the elder section of Yamacraw sc
holars.

  CHAPTER 4

  EACH DAY WHEN SCHOOL was over, it became my habit to set off in a new direction on the island, exploring, walking, singing to myself, and generally enjoying the isolation and silences of Yamacraw’s forests. These daily expeditions took me all over the island. And though I enjoyed these walks, several characteristics of the island made them uncomfortable and even painful.

  The island swarmed with mosquitoes. Whenever a human being left the front door of his house, legions of mosquitoes with their hypodermic snouts would cover the wretch from head to foot. It is difficult to know whether I am exaggerating or not, but I do know for certain that they made life on the island extremely uncomfortable and that no matter how extensive one’s precautions against them were, no matter how much repellent one applied to his body, the mosquitoes still managed to get in their licks. They buzzed around my head in squadrons during all my walks. One day Frank showed me an island trick to keep them at their distance. He tore a leafy branch from a small tree and waved it back and forth across his back. “You hear ’em, you swat ’em,” he told me. So armed with this surrogate cow’s tail and covered with enough insect repellent to kill a dinosaur, I would troop out toward the beach road, glistening like a Polynesian fresh from a coconut bath.

  The beach road began about a quarter of a mile from the school. It cut through a black-water swamp where the deer and the moccasins played. It was a dark and brooding part of the island, very wild and uninhabited. Purple and yellow wild-flowers grew in profusion. The first time I walked the road I was shocked to find two odd-looking brick structures on a curve in the road. There was a sign on one of the buildings that read SILVER DEW WINERY 1953. A little further down the road was a magnificent old house with wagon wheels in the yard and the forlorn appearance assumed by all houses that have lost their people. I went up to the house and peered into the windows. The furniture was good and functional, yet cobwebs and brown spiders had claimed the walls for themselves. At the back of the house, above the back door, was a very large and tattered Confederate flag. What the flag was doing there I never found out, but it was odd how the house and the flag seemed to fit together in this silent tribute to a lost people and a forgotten cause. I have known a great many Confederate flag nuts in my life, rabid dreamers who dwell on the glory of Fort Sumter and Bull Run and repress the reality of Appomattox. The Confederate flag summons primitive emotions in these people. Recently it only disgusts me, although there was a time I revered it as religiously as Christians revere the cross. Here on Yamacraw, fastened over the door of a peeling house, mute in its testimony to a defeated cause and an expiring way of life, the flag had more dignity than I had ever noticed before. Perhaps the dignity was, in fact, that the flag was dead and the house was dead, and I was only passing by.

  I passed by the house each day in the month of September on the way to the beach, for the beach was the best single place on the island. Ten miles of beach front and not a damn person on it except me. I would come out of the swamp and race full speed past the sand and sea oats. I would hit the beach sprinting as hard as I could go. The beach breeze kept the five million mosquitoes hovering in the forest behind me. I would run until I got tired, then strip naked and swim in the surf. The water was shallow and very warm, but the salt felt good on my mosquito bites, and there is something undeniably salubrious for the soul about floating naked in the surf without another human being in sight or sound, free from the encumbrances or worries of the classroom.

  After the swim, I would walk far down the beach, often to Bloody Point, where the British once drove a tribe of Indians to the end of the island and slaughtered them, men, women, and children, at the edge of the sea. I used to walk and look at the dead horseshoe crabs, strange prehistoric creatures who simply could not cope with the pollution of the Savannah River and had washed ashore at Yamacraw by the hundred. The whole beach stunk of death and decaying marine life. At the end of the island I could see the factories belching and puking into the sky. The same factories that had killed the Yamacraw oysters and the economy of the island had not spared the defenseless, clumsy, and harmless horseshoe crabs. The legacy of the factories was here on the beach.

  After one week on the island, I knew that Ted Stone was king. The reason I knew it is that Ted Stone told me so. I would go down and pick up my mail every day at five o’clock. Invariably Ted would come out to talk about the school, about the people of the island, and about his position among them. He and his wife not only cornered every job available on the island, but their home also contained the short-wave radio that was the sole means of communication with the mainland. Piss off Ted Stone and the possibility for a delay on the radio was certainly there.

  Ted was also the quintessential outdoorsman. He hunted religiously, fished expertly, and shrimped the waters off Yamacraw to supplement his already sizable income. I would often come in his yard to find the carcass of a deer strung from a tree, the carnage of the hunt in evidence all around, guts littering the ground, and Ted sitting proudly on a lawn chair. He could do things with his hands very well. He could plow a field, milk a cow, gut a hog, cook a trout, clean a rifle—all the things that made us such complete opposites.

  His eyes were ice blue and suspicious. He was thickly built with powerful arms and a great barrel of a chest. He was short with a remarkable mane of gray hair and a handsome, weather-beaten face. Ted was a fine-looking man. And not a few black residents of the island had stated in no uncertain terms that Ted Stone was a son of a bitch. Yet, in the early days, Ted went out of his way to be kind to me.

  His wife, Lou, was an extremely proficient woman. A lover of flowers and solitude, she seemed perfectly adapted to the Spartan existence on Yamacraw. She drove the school bus as proudly and as competently as Junior Johnson drives his stock cars. She delivered mail daily, depending upon the weather and her mood. The post office was located in the back of their house. It was a small clean room, which she kept securely padlocked because of the “nigras.” She claimed to be extremely interested in the education of the poor children I was teaching. All the educational deficiencies of the children she blamed on Miss Glover, whom she—like everyone else—believed to be the voodoo woman of the island. Mrs. Brown, on the other hand, ranked in the major leagues as a savior of epic proportions; she was teaching the children manners and one thing these children needed was manners.

  Both Stones worried about the morality of the nigras. “They’re savages,” Ted exclaimed over and over. “They sleep with one another’s wives and husbands. They sleep with anyone that comes along. They are filthy savages who shouldn’t be allowed to have children. They drink all night long while their children are starving. They all ought to be shot.” Ted’s eyes would sparkle maniacally whenever he got upset.

  Lou would add, “There are a couple of good ones. Aunt Ruth is just as sweet as she could be. And Mrs. Brown is part Indian, you know. It’s the ones who are pure black who are really worthless.”

  These were my kiss-ass days. I needed Ted and Lou. I kept my boat at their dock; I would be renting a house through them as soon as certain legal entanglements were straightened out; they brought my mail; they sold me fresh eggs and milk; and they provided my transportation. According to my early philosophy of survival on the island, I had to have Ted and Lou on my side. They wielded enormous power—even the power of life and death. One day during the second week Lou told me a very illuminating story. Her youngest son had gone to school on the island. When I asked if Mrs. Brown or Miss Glover had taught him, she quickly explained that he did not go to school with the nigras but had gone to the white school.

  “I didn’t know they had a white school,” I said.

  “They built one just for my son so he wouldn’t have to go to school with the coloreds.”

  “You’re kidding?” I asked incredulously.

  “They built a one-room schoolhouse, hired a teacher to come over here and live in the school, and she taught my son.”

  “No one else
went to the school? No other white kids?” I questioned.

  “No other white kids on the island,” she replied. “Of course we wouldn’t send our child with the coloreds. George deserved as good an education as any other white child. That’s what we demanded and that’s what we got.”

  “One teacher for one child! That’s not bad,” I said.

  “Mrs. Brown lives in the white schoolhouse now,” Lou said. “My George got a good education there. A real fine education.”

  Despite my objections to Ted Stone’s theories of apartheid, his paranoia about my long hair, and the new morality, I enjoyed jogging down to his house, picking up my mail, and then swimming off his dock. I also found Ted to be a fascinating raconteur. The stories he told had the flavor of earth, blood, and the hunt. He had been a trapper, a professional fisherman, a hunter of some repute, and a plasterer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He killed deer for pleasure and for food, shot rattlesnakes as a public service, and fished the waters off Yamacraw with religious regularity. He had once run a restaurant on Yamacraw. His wife had cooked and served the food; he had plied the customers with beer. The customers were fishermen from Savannah and Bluffton. According to Mr. Stone, his restaurant did a thriving business on weekends. When I asked why he didn’t still run the place, he answered rather succinctly, “Niggers wanted to get served, just like whites. Had to close it.” Of course if it hadn’t been the niggers, then the hippies would probably have wanted to buy a beer under his roof, and he would not have had any of that.