The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  It started with Walter Cronkite. Walter, with his voice of doomsday sincerity, came on a brief visit to Yamacraw via film. In the film library I came across The Salem Witch Trials, part of the old “You Are There” programs, which Cronkite narrated. The film launched me back into a bucket of tears’ worth of nostalgia and reminiscing. I cannot estimate how many times I watched the program as a child, but seeing young Walter with his unlined face and dignified thinness was like welcoming an old friend back into my life. I tried to tell the kids about the part Walter Cronkite played in my childhood, when I sat transfixed before the television set as my favorite shows flickered on and off. They seemed to understand.

  The kids loved the resonant, stirring quality of the phrase You are there. In the film, the alleged witches swear their innocence before a noncompassionate judge. Their accusers moan and squeal in delightful overacting. Soldiers drag people off to the gallows. The kids were going wild. “Hang the judge,” they chanted. The supernatural held a macabre fascination for the children; they discussed it frequently, and believed implicitly in the existence of witches, warlocks, ghosts, and devils.

  After the film, I extracted several hokey morals to discuss the nature of justice and other such manure. The kids would have none of it. They hadn’t had a good bull session about witches for a damn long time—too long, they decided; let’s discuss them now.

  Ethel Lee spoke first, “I know two witches in Savannah—they mean.”

  “Damn right, they mean,” Fred said to Big C, not knowing I had heard.

  “They ain’t as mean as the one in Bluffton,” Cindy Lou added.

  “Meanest witch in the world right here on Yamacraw,” Frank concluded.

  “How many of you ever seen a witch?” I asked. Every hand flew up. Damn right they’d seen witches.

  Big C screwed his face up into his question-mark look. “It true if you throw water on a witch, she disappear?”

  Suddenly every eye in the room was riveted on me. Only the pigs grunting and rooting on the schoolyard disturbed the silence created by this single question. And there was something about the question itself, something ancient and primordial, something that disturbed the hidden and oft lost mythology of my own youth; I felt something stir as I thought about the wet witch, and knew that a feeling in my subconscious was rising like an air bubble to the surface. Then I had it.

  “Big C, you’ve seen the Wizard of Oz.”

  Eighteen voices shouted hosannas to the trembling faker of Oz. Cindy Lou broke off into an impromptu rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Others pretended they were cowardly lions. Richard stood up and walked like a scarecrow suspended from his stake. Each member of the class had memorized the movie classic, had watched it religiously each time it appeared on television and had added personal interpretations to the bizarre forces rampant in the spirit-haunted land over the rainbow. And if the Yamacraw children knew about Oz, then I was convinced a hell of a lot of other children in America knew about it, too. My jeremiads against television since my first days on the island had continued undiminished, fed with the plentiful food of my students’ ignorance about people, events, and the world. Now, in a single moment, I had to retract my sweeping indictment of TV: it had not failed completely, only partially. Every child in the room knew the legend of Oz by heart, the importance of the yellow-brick road, the incarnate evil of the wicked Witch of the West, and the ultimate hypocrisy of the great wizard himself. Oz, it seemed, had entered into the consciousness of American children, and not just a selected few, but almost every child in every situation. I considered Yamacraw a touchstone: if the Yamacraw children knew about it, then the chances were excellent that the vast majority of American children had been reached. The Wizard of Oz, through the medium of television, had become part of American mythology as important and relevant to the children of America as the Homeric legends were to the children of Athens.

  So Big C’s question was the catalyst for a great and memorable afternoon, one of those rare moments generated by chance, planned by no one, spontaneous and joyful, transcending the need for a teacher or a classroom, and making me once more think of education as something alive and helpful, instead of as a withered dream in need of formaldehyde. Oz took over the rest of the day. For a couple of minutes it was utter pandemonium. Fred introduced a moving argument in incomprehensible Fredese in favor of the proposition that water could evaporate witches. Prophet thought this was crap. He told Fred so. Fred told Prophet he would kick his butt if he continued to think it was crap. Mary mumbled something into her left hand about fire being better than water. Saul said that there ain’t no sure way to kill a witch.

  Cindy Lou’s voice finally broke through the general upheaval of noise and offered to recite her King James Version of the story.

  “O.K.,” said I.

  “There was this little girl who got blown away in a rainstorm,” she started.

  “That ain’t the way it was,” said Jimmy Sue.

  “How was it then, you old ugly self?” Cindy Lou shot back.

  “Ain’t no rainstorm, sister.”

  “Damn right it was a rainstorm.”

  “No, girl, it was a tor-nay-do.”

  “Yeah,” the class agreed, “it was a tornado.”

  “Same thing,” claimed Cindy Lou.

  “No, girl. Tor-nay-do take your head clean off,” offered Mary.

  “You tellin’ the story, girl?” Cindy inquired menacingly of Jimmy Sue.

  “No.”

  “Then you keep your mout’ out of it.”

  “This girl got blown away by a wind and the house she was in hit a bad witch on the head and kill her dead. Then the girl and her little dog go marchin’ down this yellow-brick road ’til they meet this chicken lion who try to act tough.”

  “No,” a chorus of voices shouted.

  “No, what?” Cindy Lou asked.

  “That girl don’t meet no lion,” said Samuel, in one of his first vocal contributions of the year.

  “Sure she meets a lion.”

  “No, girl, first she sees the scarecrow. Ain’t got no brains.”

  “Yeah, scarecrow first,” the class agreed, acting out the chorus in this impromptu drama.

  “You tell the story, cockeye.”

  “Call me cockeye and I bust your head,” Samuel shouts, clenching his fists.

  “Don’t call Samuel cockeye, Cindy Lou.”

  “He is cockeye.”

  “Yeah, he cockeye,” the chorus agrees.

  “No,” I say.

  “I bust your head,” Samuel warns the whole class.

  “You cockeye,” the class chants.

  “The scarecrow first,” says Richard. “Let me tell the story.”

  “Oh boy, Richard, give it to us.”

  So Richard rendered his version of Oz. Then Oscar, then Frank, then Mary, then Sidney, each adding their own peculiar interpretations, each emphasizing a different part of the story, and each feeling perfectly free to combine incidents from the Wizard of Oz with incidents that occurred in other television programs. Sidney got Oz confused with an episode from “Bonanza.” Hoss Cartwright battling the witches of the Purple Sage. According to Oscar, Oz and Disneyland were somehow related. Richard somehow got Captain Kangaroo confused with the wizard, and Mr. Greenjeans confused with the scarecrow.

  Ethel, a purist in the group, strutted to the microphone and began a long, precise, but monotonous epic, which was technically unflawed and accurate except that everyone in the class believed she was making the stuff up. In the middle of her story, Top Cat got up and started singing a new song just released by swing-man James Brown. He hopped and swayed what he called a “new jive” while the kids clapped their hands and tapped their feet until the great head of Mrs. Brown appeared in the window, flashing a look the Romans must have worn on their faces when turning thumbs down on some prostrate Christian. But even though the kids quit responding and reverted back to their classical pose of scholars erect in their desks and lusting f
or knowledge, Top Cat gyrated on, a grin like a jack-o’-lantern carved on his face and eyes raised in adoration of some muse deep within him.

  When Top Cat finally subsided and sank back into his desk, Prophet of the unknown tongue continued the interrupted marathon of Oz, an untranslatable potpourri of grunts and monosyllables, punctuated only by Prophet’s beautifully effusive smiles.

  When the afternoon was over and the bus ambled into the schoolyard, and the kids had filed out of the room, I had on tape the story of Oz as it had never been told before—a new Oz, a land that Judy Garland had never entered, but one especially created on a December afternoon by children of an island ruled by a river, and possibly another wizard, with perhaps a greater claim to credibility.

  The first two California boys arrived on the island in early October. They were part of an unusual college program emanating from Cowell College, a part of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The program had survived for a solid year. Herman Blake, a black professor at the college who had been born on a sea island further up the coast, was the mercurial, driving force behind the program; he devised it, implemented it, and was the strong shaft that supported the experiment in the early days and nurtured it past the stormy and vehement disapproval of the island troll, Ted Stone.

  Mr. Stone told me about Blake, about the California boys, and about the program. “All of them are Communists trained in Havana. If they keep comin’ to the island there is bound to be trouble. One of them has already gone back to California and married a nigger girl. Another one named Zach Sklar was a Russian Jew.” Stone considered the program an insidious, corrosive threat to his domination of the island’s people and politics.

  “What exactly do they do, Mr. Stone?” I asked. “You can tell me.”

  He answered, “It don’t appear like they do nothing.”

  It seemed improbable that two Californians would travel 3000 miles for the experience of dwelling among black people on an unbridged island solely for credit in a sociology class. Whatever the probability, I met Jim Ford and Joe Sanfort the first week in October.

  With all six of the California boys I worked with during the year there was a period of aloofness, of deintoxification, before we could communicate on a serious level with each other. The prime reason was my background. I was a white southerner, a graduate of an all white male military college, a nine-year resident of Beaufort, and the first white teacher encountered in the Cowell College program. During the training sessions for their journey to Yamacraw, Blake concentrated on prepping his missionaries well in the psyche of the rural blacks, but he did not prepare them well at all for dealing with the southern whites. In their simplistic assessment, all southern whites were incorrigible racists who loved to eat grits, smell magnolias, and lynch blacks. Blake told them to handle the Stones with oily diplomacy. In fact the major command passed to them before they left the protected enclosure of their campus was not to piss anybody off, white or black. Remember the program, it must go on at all costs. So Jim and Joe approached me with extreme caution, said nothing that would ruffle the white supremacist feathers that lay directly beneath my bright red neck, and generally said nothing at all. They were the first people I had met from an infamous California college. I am positive I was the first person they had met who had worn a uniform to the latrine in his college days. From the beginning it was a merger of opposites and a meeting of two extraordinarily different worlds. After we thawed our suspicions, we became good friends and they introduced me for the first time to that land gilded with Sierras, pocked with surfers, and as strange and multifaceted as Yamacraw itself—California.

  Jim and Joe explained the program one night soon after my marriage, as we drank beer and killed mosquitoes in the gloom of early evening in my house. Each quarter Blake selected two people for the Yamacraw Island Project. The twosome spent an entire quarter living among the people of the island, talking to them, helping them in whatever service that they could provide, and absorbing the atmosphere and culture of the island in the process. One of the ultimate aims of the program was to get into the school and help the teachers with the children. Thus far, Mrs. Brown had proved to be the major obstacle. Jim and Joe ran a recreation program every day after school. More aptly, they stood in the middle of a great surge of children racing wildly about them, engaged in some unidentifiable game that had been brought to the island as football and corrupted over the years.

  Jim’s personality was such that he desired to see order emerge from the chaos, form to somehow overpower the void, rules to tame and dignify the surface appearance of his program. In fact, beneath his long hair and mustache, Jim Ford was the quintessential organization man who was not happy unless a football game spread across the playground with Lombardian precision. To Jim a recreation program, or at least his recreation program, was something sacred and if he had any say in the matter, his program on Yamacraw would be a model for sea islands everywhere. So when Jim would clap his hands and ask for order and the dust cloud of children kicking a ball and each other would swirl past him oblivious to his command, and when he would clap his hands again, this time louder and more peremptory, and the great cloud would nearly trample him as it passed his spot again, I could only smile and thank God that I had taught awhile and knew where I stood in the great chain of being among the children of Yamacraw School. I knew Jim wanted to have a program he could be proud of when he returned to California. Therefore, my heart saluted him when I saw him standing alone, a sentinel waving frantically beneath the stand of oaks beside the school, asking for quiet, for attention, for anything that would let him assume command and control of a situation that he could not control.

  Joe, on the other hand, cared little for organization, for achievements to boast upon, or anything else. Joe’s cynicism appealed to me greatly; he would sit alone on the seesaw, deprecating the fact that a black man would send two blue-eyed white boys bursting with bullshit and idealism to an island that needed them like it needed two escalators. Every once in a while guilt would cause Joe to make an attempt to organize a softball game or a kickball game, but after his efforts had melted into mere remembrances of things past, he returned to his seesaw and ruminated upon the folly of the recreation program.

  Of course, Mrs. Brown would watch the entire spectacle shaking her head disgustedly, screaming at every child who raced past her that this was no way to run a recreation program, that whoever was running this recreation program sure didn’t know what in the hell they were doing, and if she were running the program it would certainly be organized better. Jim would hustle over to her side, they would huddle together in great seriousness, Jim would then break from the huddle like a center from the Green Bay Packers, trot to the middle of the playground, clap his hands, shout hopelessly to the mass of kids racing in every conceivable direction, and the entire cycle would begin anew.

  God, did I sympathize with both Jim and Joe. About the third recess at Yamacraw, I became momentarily inspired to teach the boys the finer nuances of football. They knew nothing. They could not pass; they could not block or kick the ball or line up in a semblance of a formation. Their version of the game was pure, unsullied madness. Whoever held the ball at any time was simply murdered by every other player on the field. Sometimes Top Cat and Oscar, the two largest, would team up together while the frail youngsters tried vainly to drag them to the ground. I had never seen such ferocity on the field. Sam and Sidney, emaciated and puny, would fly into the churning legs of Top Cat without losing a bit of momentum. Top Cat would shake them off as if they were made from butterfly wings, then face Richard’s seventy-pound charge into his stomach. Everyone growled, foamed, and grunted appropriately. When someone hit the ground, all participants felt duty bound to leap on the fallen prey; fists would pound heads, feet would kick any and every exposed leg, thigh, or head. Curses flew from the pile in dangling, disjointed clusters. I’d never seen anything so brutal, so dangerous, so insane in my whole life.

  So I decided to teach
them rules, fair play, and sportsmanship: the essence of the noble game, the proper manner in which gentlemen and athletes conduct themselves on a field of honor. I taught them huddles, the stance for blocking, the way to pass a spiral, the science of plays, the beauty of the stiff arm. This took two whole recesses. After I was convinced that I had given them enough theory, that they were well grounded in the basics of the game, I flipped the ball to Lincoln and told him to kick off. He was immediately buried under an avalanche of bodies kicking, gouging, biting, and hitting at the unfortunate Lincoln, who howled at the bottom of the pile. This was one of my last attempts to organize the time-honored version of football on the island.

  Jim and Joe were in a strange position on the island. They were there conceivably to serve the people. If there was a fence to be mended, a privy to be built, an errand to be run, or an itch to be scratched, the islanders knew that all they had to do was ask the California boys. It did not take long for the more savvy islanders to take more than full advantage of this miraculous labor force from across the continent. Nor did it become unusual for someone to see healthy black men sitting in the shade sipping Scotch and watching Joe and Jim sweating in the broiling sun over a collection of nails and boards that would soon be a new privy. I identified with Joe and Jim and saw that they were merely putting their burning liberalism to the test of the sword. Joe and Jim, archetypes of white, middle-class America, could come to the thickets and backwaters of the Carolinas and master the art of shit-house building. Dear Mom, Sallie May Toomer now craps in elegance and style, so my life has not been in vain.