The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  “You know what Lincoln say to the white lady we stay with?” Oscar giggled.

  “You shut up, boy,” Lincoln shot back.

  “Oh, Gawd, it so funny what Lincoln say,” Top Cat said.

  “I bus’ some head good,” answered the angry or embarrassed Lincoln. (I could not distinguish which it was.)

  “The white lady she talk funny, kind of,” Oscar began.

  “I git yo’ ugly face,” said Lincoln.

  “Yo’ face too ugly to get my face ugly,” answered Oscar. “White lady talk funny and say, ’Lincoln, how did you enjoy the parade and carnival today at the Port Royal School?’ Now ol’ Lincoln’s fat, ugly self was eatin’ mashed potatoes and gravy when this lady do her talkin’ and he don’t look up no how. He just say, ’Yes, ma’am, I sho’ enjoy this dinner. It’s a fine dinner.’ Lord, Mr. Conrack, I laugh myself fool when I heard that. She ask him about the parade and he tell her he sho’ do like the dinner.”

  The entire class giggled and pointed their fingers at Lincoln, who squirmed uncomfortably, then broke into one of his patented, high-pitched laughs. “Oh Gawd, that lady talk so funny.”

  Jasper spoke up and said, “Saul made me laugh so hard. He walk up to this big ol’ white man readin’ a paper and say to him, ‘ ’Scuse me, but you gots a place I can wash my foot?’ That man look at him so funny.”

  “You tell lie,” yelled Saul.

  “You know what I say true,” retorted Jasper.

  Ethel said she wanted to tell the class what she and her group of girls saw at one particular house. “We see this man come up to the door. Only he look like woman. He dress himself up in fish-net stockings and a girl’s dress. He have a wig on his head and powder on his nose. He wear the bead and high-heel shoes.”

  “That so?” said Frank.

  “It so if I say it so, boy.”

  “Any complaints about the weekend besides the weather?” I asked. “Did everybody treat you all right?”

  “Everybody but that big fat boy at the school,” said Top Cat.

  “He bad,” said Saul.

  “He big and so bad. He tell us to keep away from him and his bike. I so scare,” said Top Cat.

  “Did you tell Bernie about the fat boy?”

  “No. I fraid that boy kill me if I say nuttin’ to anybody.”

  “That boy mean, C’roy.”

  “All the other children nice,” said Carolina.

  We spent the morning recounting our trip to Port Royal. I had the older children write down their impressions of the trip, then write thank-you notes to Bernie and the families who housed them. Then, to split the reverie of the mood, to shatter the spirit of exaltation over the successful crossing of the river and the return, Mrs. Brown poked her head in the doorway, saying “ ’Scuse me, I’d like to have a word with your babies, Mr. Conroy.”

  Sensing that Mrs. Brown was preparing to launch a verbal grenade but not knowing exactly how to divert the attack, I simply shrugged my shoulders and prepared for the worst.

  “Boys and girls, all of you know you are my babies, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” came the predictable, formulated reply.

  “Now you know when we slept in the elementary school the other night, one of you boys wet the wrestling mat.”

  The boys lowered their eyes and tightened their lips into thin lines. Mrs. Brown did not realize it at the time, but her inquisition ended before it started, and no amount of cajolery or intimidation on her part would wreak a confession or a betrayal from the brotherhood she now interrogated.

  “Now, babies, everybody had got to u-rin-ate. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the class replied again, dutifully but suspiciously.

  “And there is nothin’ wrong with a man u-rin-atin’, is there?”

  “No, ma’am.” The voices were getting lower, angrier.

  “But a man got to know when to urinate and when not to urinate. Isn’t that right, Mr. Conroy?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Spinelessly, I had joined the Greek chorus.

  “Now, that somebody who wet the wrestlin’ mat most prob’ly wet the bed he slept on the night before. Now mattresses in white folks’ homes cost sometimes between fifty and one hunnert dollars. Sometimes one hunnert-fifty dollars and sometimes even two hunnert dollars. You can ruin a mattress by urinatin’ on it. All of us know that urine is made out of acid. And you can imagine what acid can do to a two-hunnert-dollar mattress. Eat right through it. Whoever it was has no reason to be ashamed. There are plenty of weak bladders in the world. A bladder’s just like a muscle. Some weak. Some strong. Lots of people wets the bed. Whoever that person is, and he knows who it is, should come up to me and say, ‘Mrs. Brown, I have a weak bladder and I’m very sorry.’ Isn’t that right, class?”

  Only this time silence reigned where there had once been the peremptory “yes, ma’ams.” She grew angry and threatened to flunk the child for the year if he did not confess the dire crime of bladder weakness to her immediately. The scene was unbearable. From the reaction of the children, I could tell who the acid-spiller was. All their heads and eyes were directed away from Saul. So obviously protecting him by their complete obliviousness to his presence, they were singling him out as infallibly as though everyone in the room had stood up and shouted his name to the world. Mrs. Brown was too absorbed in her anger to notice this. She had grown accustomed to a system of stool pigeons whereby she retained a godlike omniscience through her pampered, spoiled informers. Since I had forbidden anyone in my class from going to her with information that could get another classmate in trouble, her intelligence system had been crippled badly. Only one student in my class fed her hot poop with any amount of regularity, and unfortunately for Mrs. Brown, in this particular case, her most reliable informant had also been the heinous monster who had wet the white folks’ two-hunnert-dollar mattress. Saul, to add to his innumerable problems, was not only Mrs. Brown’s major supplier of facts concerning the strange, incomprehensible machinations of my class, he was also a bed-wetter. When she saw that no one was going to tell her what she desired to know, she huffed out of my class muttering something to the effect that I had been the ruination of discipline at Yamacraw School.

  The next hour was spent attempting to stem the indignation and rage that invariably erupted after one of Mrs. Brown’s visits. I thanked them for not telling Mrs. Brown that it was me who wet the wrestling mat, but even jokes failed to soothe them. I then told them that I once had a real problem with wetting the bed and that my mother had sworn that I would wet the bed until I was fifty years old. I described my being afraid to accept invitations away from my house for fear of some friend waking up in the middle of the night to find that I had sprayed his leg.

  This seemed to revive them a little bit. Frank asked me how old I was when I quit wetting the bed.

  “I quit last night, Frank.”

  “What you say?” asked Frank.

  “I quit last night when Barbara told me she just bought a two-hunnert-dollar mattress. I’ll tell you, gang, if you’re gonna live with these white folks you gotta cut the flow of acid.”

  “Hee, hee,” giggled Cindy Lou. “Conrack so much a fool.”

  I could neutralize the effect of Mrs. Brown’s speeches on the surface, but I could never be sure how much damage she was inflicting under the surface, where it counted most, in the gut of one’s being, in the soul. Nor could I forgive Mrs. Brown her little tirades. No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education. No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school boards in the world.

  I knew that the high noon between Mrs. Brown and myself was just around the corner. The old demon, white guilt, could control me for a while, but one factor in the composition of Mrs. Brown’s personality was beginning to come clear in my mind, and the more clear it became, the nearer I was to establishing a liberating, important universal truth: because a p
erson is black does not mean that he or she thinks black or is proud to be black. She wished she were white, which one could interpret as an indictment of our society. That was fine. But because the society had corroded Mrs. Brown’s image of the black man, I did not feel sufficiently compelled to allow Mrs. Brown to infect my students with her malady. In her own eyes Mrs. Brown felt as though she was instilling values into the children that their likker-swilling, devil-dancing, illiterate parents could never do. In my eyes she was the unflinching, strong-armed proponent of white values, mores, and attitudes. It now was breaking down into a war of eyesight.

  My assimilation into the mainstream of island life quickened after the Halloween trip, although I was not aware of it at that time. Even though one of the children suffered a relatively serious injury and I failed by twenty-four hours to transport the group back to the island on time, the power of the children’s unanimous, animated support of the venture erased any reluctance the parents might have experienced. For days my class could talk of nothing else but Port Royal.

  “I sure do like that town over yonder, Mr. Conrack,” said Jasper. “All you do is rap the door and some man pop his head out to give you the candy.”

  “I wouldn’t try it every day of the year, Jasper. Especially in that neighborhood you were in.”

  When the letters from the Port Royal kids started pouring in, each child who received a letter would read it in class (if he could). Carolina, Ethel, and Cindy Lou convinced me that they had won the undying love and admiration of the family who had housed them.

  “Lawd, those people sho’ loved me, Conrack. They thought I was so fine.”

  “That’s because they don’t know any better, Cindy.”

  “That’s ’cause you don’t know nuttin’,” she flashed back at me.

  “The lady you stayed with told me that if that girl, Cindy Lou, didn’t shut up soon, she was going to have to flush her down the commode.”

  “That not true.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Oh Gawd, man gonna drop dead.”

  The residue of the entire trip left a good taste and it proved a pungent stimulant to class activity and awareness for many months. But I still did not really know how the parents reacted to the whole concept of field trips as an educational experience. I knew for a fact that Mrs. Brown and Miss Glover both believed that education was best served in the cramped environs of the classroom, that both of them made a vast distinction between learning and recreation, that both of them felt that education and the leather strap went together like whiskers and catfish, and that both of them thought the trip was a welcome vacation, but not an experience that could be counted as having furthered the name of education.

  I was yet uncertain about my own philosophy of education as applied to the Yamacraw kids. They were not going to be candidates for a Rhodes scholarship after having served an apprenticeship under my vigilant tutelage; none of them would write significantly or make any conspicuous contribution to the arts, as far as I knew. The five illiterates who were served to me like hors d’oeuvres at the beginning of the year would still qualify for membership in that august classification. I was slowly learning to measure the importance of small victories. In fact, I was coming to the painful conclusion that all my victories would seem minuscule and trivial compared to my expectations at the beginning of the year. I was proud of Sidney and Samuel, who could now scratch their names legibly on a piece of paper, proud of Prophet, who could count to ten, proud of Richard, who could read the simplest preprimer, and proud of Saul, who had learned not to cry at every taunt thrown at him. Slowly, the awareness came to me that no matter what happened, my struggles and efforts could not eradicate the weight and inalienable supremacy of two hundred years: the children of slaves could not converse or compete with the offspring of planters, the descendants of London barristers, the progeny of sprawling, upward-climbing white America. And slavery was still a reality, considering that none of my students grew up in homes where books flourished, where ideas fluttered, and theories dwelt comfortably in dinner-table discussions.

  How could I compare or relate my childhood to growing up on Yamacraw? My mother’s reading to me each night was a celebration of language and tradition, a world of Mother Goose and lyric poetry, where Bobby Shaftoe goes to sea and intrepid, prepubic heroes stand on burning decks. My youth was a glut of words, a circus of ideas nurtured by parents dedicated to diplomas and the production of professionals from the tribe of children they sired. My youth sang the glory of books, the psalms of travel, of new faces, of the universe of Disney animation, of Popsicle sticks and county fairs, of parables of war spoken by a flight-jacketed father, of parables of love and Jesus sung by a blue-eyed mother, a renegade Baptist, a converted Catholic, a soldier of the Lord. And all the memories I had of the travels: the two-lane highways connecting Marine bases through the swamps and cypress shadows, the station wagon clogged with children (and a black, mongrel dog) rolling into parochial villages past midnight, beneath the hulk of a many-columned, stern-mouthed courthouse—a traffic light, the changing gears, the hum of a restless engine, the pressure of Dad’s foot on the accelerator, the children sleeping, and the radio shifting night announcers and easy songs until distance and static overcame station after station.

  My past had no relationship to my present except that I saw a direct connection between the education of my parents and the education of their children, the dreams of my parents and the dreams of their children, just as there existed a link, straight and uncomplicated, between the parents of Yamaeraw and their children. Everything occurred in cycles, fanged and implacable cycles. Somehow I had to interfere with the cycle or interrupt it, interject my own past into the present of my students. If I let my students leave me without altering the conditions of their existence substantially, I knew a concrete, sightless ghetto of some city without hope would devour them quickly, irretrievably, and hopelessly. I could hear some white voice coming from some collective unconscious deep within me saying, “They don’t know any better. They are happy this way.” Yet all around me, in the grinning faces of my students, I could see a crime, so ugly that it could be interpreted as a condemnation of an entire society, a nation be damned, a history of wickedness—these children before me did not have a goddam chance of sharing in the incredible wealth and affluence of the country that claimed them, a country that failed them, a country that needed but did not deserve deliverance.

  These were the deep, serious thoughts I sometimes had to drive from my head like flocks of pesky starlings. I was too pragmatic and impatient to let such thoughts flog me into impotence, yet I sincerely needed a working philosophy on which to hang my hat. After the Halloween trip, one began to form and crystallize without my knowledge, and when I finally acknowledged its presence, it was already a part of me: simply, that life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation.

  CHAPTER 7

  THAT THE CHILDREN HATED Mrs. Brown’s guts with their complete power of hating was not readily apparent to me in the first two months of school. The awareness came slowly, and when it finally came, I realized they were not merely venting their frustration on a figure of authority, but that they hated with reason and justification. At first I did not take her speeches to the children seriously, whether she was telling them that they smelled bad, that they were retarded, or that they would end up alcoholics or wastrels like their parents. I did not take them seriously until I realized how seriously the kids took them, how they suffered under this constant humiliation, and how powerless they felt to cope with her attacks on their basic worth and dignity. They hated her and they feared her. Because of her size she could physically overcome any challenge raised by them. She carried two leather straps with her. One of them she called Dr. Discipline; the other she called Professor Medicine. The beatings she administered were not funny.

  I heard her beating her students regularly in the class next door. Mrs.
Brown’s major teaching technique was the extended scream. Her voice constantly yelled out commands to her charges; it would rise in tempo and volume, until finally, as an adjunct to her voice, the strap against flesh would sound, followed by the scream of the child. I heard this every day. Every time it occurred I saw my students stiffen in their seats and listen intently to the drama played in the next room.

  I do not believe in corporal punishment, yet I did not feel it was my place to admonish Mrs. Brown about her corrective actions. Then through a series of events, it finally dawned on me that my students loathed the woman. It was not long before I was caught directly in the middle of this war, and it was not long before I had to choose sides.

  I thought Mrs. Brown had one of the greatest natural senses of humor I had yet encountered. Her manner of phrasing and inflection often left me convulsed with laughter. I had never worked with a black teacher before, and I appreciated her view of the white man and his world. “Gotta go by the man,” she would say. “Gotta please the man and see him smile. Then everything rolls along just fine.” For the first sixty days we were real, if reluctant, allies. I did not like the strap, nor her dehumanizing speeches to the kids, nor her constant derision of my teaching approach. But I liked peace and I liked tranquility to reign in a situation where only two of us had to get along. When I told her she was principal, that a misunderstanding on her part had projected me as the titular head of the school, the change which came over Mrs. Brown was as noticeable as the first freeze. She now did not make recommendations to me; she issued ultimatums. She did not give opinions; she threw out commands, orders, and laws with the signature of “the man” on them. Most of these I could ignore by joking about them. I still refused to use a strap, race through textbooks the kids couldn’t read, or give the kids hours of homework. Nor was I about to stop playing music, showing movies, or just talking things over with my students. I had a history of not responding well to lousy or pernicious administration, and though I tried to tell myself that she was the boss and I would have to obey her instructions, I would be goddamned if she was going to turn me into an overseer instead of a teacher. As she pressured me more and more, I knew that sometime during the year I would crack open like an egg. Time worked against me.