The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

“Yes, you can,” I answered, pleasantly, I hoped.

  “We don’t pay any other teacher to get to work,” said Sedgwick.

  “How many teachers go to work in a boat?” I asked.

  “That’s beside the point. The county has no travel allowances for teachers to get to school. You are no different from anyone else,” said Bennington.

  “That’s crap,” I answered. It was about this time during the exchange that I felt the great, ancient Conroy temper rising like an air bubble to the surface. Whenever I am going to lose control, whenever I am about to assume the emotional and psychological responses of the Peking man, my upper lip quivers reflexively and I find it very difficult to enunciate even the simplest of words.

  When Bennington said, “We have come here to tell you that we will pay for your gas to the island on Monday and from the island on Friday. No more, no less. Nor will we pay for the upkeep on the boat if you continue to commute.” My upper lip fluttered like a butterfly wing.

  “O.K., guys,” I said. “Thanks a lot for the meeting. I’ll see you around. I’m going to have to talk to Piedmont if I’m going to get anything solved.”

  “You can’t just walk out,” gasped Bennington, as if I had urinated in the holy grail.

  “Like I am leaving, man. This week has been too damn cold and this year has been too damn long to give it up because of this lousy gas. Eventually Piedmont and I are going to have to fight it out anyway. You guys are just doing what he told you to do. You really don’t have any power to compromise at all.” And I headed for the door. Sedgwick sputtered incoherently and Bennington made an abortive attempt to block the door.

  “You can’t leave. You can’t just leave.” Ol’ Bennington really was concerned about me leaving. “You are the most unreasonable young man I have ever dealt with in my life.”

  “I’m not unreasonable,” I fired back, lip aquivering. “I just ain’t going along with what you guys say, so I’m taking off.”

  “You can’t just walk out of this office while we have things to discuss,” said Sedgwick.

  “Sure I can.”

  “Sit down, young man,” Bennington said. “Please sit down. I’ve never had a meeting end like this. It’s not proper.”

  “We can work something out,” said Sedgwick.

  “Good, that’s all I wanted to hear.” So I returned to my seat and sat down. “Gentlemen, all I am asking is you to continue to pay for my gas and upkeep of the boat this year. I will continue to act as stevedore, guide, ferryboat captain, and anything else the county might want to use me for in relation to the boat. I would like you to think of the boat as a lifeline to the island. Five days a week in the morning and afternoon, I will be coming to and from the island. Mr. Skimberry has also suggested that I start carrying fresh milk for the children of the island so they won’t have to drink that crappy powdered milk.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Sedgwick.

  “I know where we can get cheaper gas,” said Bennington.

  So the discussion progressed and got more detailed. It was decided that I could indeed commute, that it was an excellent way to serve the needs of the island, and that a fresh-milk program should be initiated immediately. As I left the office, I shook hands with Bennington and Sedgwick, apologized for losing my temper, and told them that the cold weather had frayed my nerves somewhat. Sedgwick intimated that he liked to see teachers fired up about their jobs. Bennington agreed, but there was something in his eyes that told me I had earned the enmity of a man who would never forget my impertinence, a man who would not rest until the wolves cut my flanks from behind. He smiled at me and it was the first time I ever knew that a smile could communicate hatred. I also realized that neither of them would have had the guts to report to Piedmont that I had simply walked out on them.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE OLDER BOYS PLAYED basketball almost every day at recess. The basket was only eight feet high and the playing area was pure sand. But the games themselves served as emotion-cleansing rituals where the strong and tall waged war against the fiercely determined small and weak. Oscar was the acknowledged prima donna of the group, the golden boy of island athletics, who used his height and weight effectively under the boards to shove out any lilliputian who challenged his right to that domain. I have mentioned the competitiveness of these children before. These basketball games at recess were serious business that sometimes degenerated into violence, one player sitting on top of another player pounding his head. Yamacraw basketball had several variations and modifications.

  Since Oscar was the tallest and the game naturally centered around him, he was the number-one target for the hatchet men who swarmed all over him like angry bees. It was not unusual to see Oscar under the basket preparing to shoot with Frank punching away at his stomach and Fred, directly behind him, punching away at his kidneys. Oscar would generally manage to get the shot away, then he would lean down and punch both Frank and Fred.

  Saul was the out-man. Since he was the smallest and frailest of the players, he hung far outside the brawl under the basket. If a ball accidentally was flung in his direction, he would scurry over to intercept it, then feed it to one of his teammates before the thundering herd engulfed him. If he held the ball a fraction of a second too long, he would be pounced upon, relieved of the basketball, then cast aside like a troublesome fly on a cow’s tail.

  Since the court was sand, the game was a mixture of football and basketball. The flying tackle was a main stratagem of defense, as was the cross-body block and the flying wedge. To dribble was to suffer the loss of the ball, so the skilled player developed fakes, feints, and a stiff arm that carried him near enough the basket to shoot. Of course, if he could not get close enough to the basket, he shot anyway. The kinds of shots staggered the imagination. Fred had developed the most interesting and versatile repertoire. To arch the ball over arms outstretched to block his shot, Fred would fall to the ground while at the same time hooking the ball high into the air. If this failed to score—and it almost always did—on the next occasion he would turn his back to the basket and simply hurl the ball over his head toward the goal. Fred almost never scored, but he was hell to watch.

  When I first attempted to put a little form and rules into this madness, the kids listened respectfully, but continued to play the way they always had. Whenever I tried to inject a little order into their chaotic interpretation of the game, they looked at me as though I had lost my mind. They loved their game too passionately to allow me to ruin it with a flurry of rules.

  In March I read in the paper that the Globetrotters were coming to Charleston and I thought it would be fun to take my noontime stars to see them. I asked the boys if they had seen the Trotters on television. Man, they loved the Globetrotters; they worshiped the Globetrotters. Since it would not be a school-sponsored trip and since I would not have to go through the crap of asking Mrs. Brown’s permission or collecting written slips from the parents, I told the boys to fight with their parents and talk them into allowing the Globetrotter trip. I told them I would not enter this battle with the parents but save my energies for the great campaigns that lay ahead. (The parents trusted me for the most part; some kids were even allowed to spend weekends at our house.)

  Top Cat was going, along with Oscar the Large, Fred the Hooker, Saul the Small, and Lincoln the Dirty. Frank told me of his gallant attempt to talk Edna into giving him permission, but her fear of the water prevailed. On the appointed day, eight of us piled into the boat—five boys plus Chuck and Al, the two new California boys, and I—and started the long, tortuous journey to Bluffton. My poor boat poked along the waterway with the blinding speed of a manatee. It took an hour and a half to get to Bluffton, twice the usual length of time.

  We drove to Beaufort. Chuck and Al took one group in one car; Bernie, Barbara, and I took the rest. We stopped off once we got to Charleston for a quick hamburger at McDonald’s. It tickled the hell out of me to see the guys fumbling with their change and trying to a
ct like big-time operators accustomed to dining out in the big city. They bought enough food to feed half the city of Charleston.

  The Globetrotters were playing in County Hall in Charleston, a large, sterile arena that looked like a throwback to the declining years of the Roman Empire. Most of the crowd were seated when we arrived. The crowd itself was a wide mixture of people. More white people than blacks sat in the arena, but at four dollars a ticket that formed no real enigma. Fat cops ambled up and down the aisles chewing gum and looking bored. Women with the faint aura of high society sat rigidly erect, trying to look chic in an atmosphere of stale popcorn and jock smells.

  We had a hell of a time finding seats and finally stood near the Globetrotter dressing room, where we had a fair view of the court. Bernie and Saul had managed to inch up to a spot that afforded them a good view of the game. The rest of us were standing on our tiptoes and seeing as best we could.

  A roar from the crowd told us that the Globetrotters were emerging from the locker room. They ran right past us on the way to the court and one of them, the greatest Globetrotter of all, Meadowlark Lemon, won a place of honor in my heart for all time. When he ran past Bernie and Saul, he reached out and patted Saul on the behind. With that simple gesture, Meadowlark immortalized Saul’s fanny—at least for a week.

  Eventually we clambered up on a bandstand and had an excellent view of the entire game. The boys loved every stinking minute of play. They watched in amazement as Curly Neal performed his classic dribbling exhibition and gasped as these huge, black athletes went high into the air to jam the basketball into the hoop. They laughed at every joke and whooped it up at every gimmick. Sometimes they would just look at each other and grin in disbelief. They learned many tricks which they would utilize in their blood games on the island. From this night forward the behind-the-back pass and the between-the-leg pass became staples of the island brand of ball. This was basketball, man, and it was good.

  As we left that night, walking to the car through the milling crowd, all of us talking about the Trotters and relating firsthand our favorite parts, Saul paused on the side of the road, people walking all around him, and took a piss. Bernie watched in shock, and I tried to figure out a proper response. None came. When Saul had finished, he zipped up his pants and continued to walk toward the car. It struck me then that the boys probably just let fly on the island when the occasion demanded it and Saul saw no reason not to follow his urges on a Charleston street just as naturally. I said nothing. On the way home I learned that this great journey to Charleston was the farthest any of the guys had ever been from Yamacraw Island.

  Once I started teaching on the island, a great many of my friends clamored for a trip to Yamacraw. At first, I entertained no thoughts about running a ferry service between the island and the mainland, but I swiftly changed my mind after the first few cataclysmic days that I spent exploring the void that gripped my eighteen students. I soon decided that any human that had not been entombed on Yamacraw since birth had a vast repository of experience to share in my classroom. I reasoned further that if my friends were coming to the island to learn something about the culture of the Sea Island Negro, then they, in return, could impart some measure of their own existence to the children of the island.

  When I first started dating Barbara seriously during September, I met two friends of hers at dinner one night, Dick and Marie Caristi. Dick was a dentist in the navy, stationed in Beaufort. He was also an avid amateur photographer, and my descriptions of the island instantly caused some Nikon gland deep within him to salivate. A week later he became my first official visitor in what was to become the favorite part of my program. Dick was successful in breaking down the incorporeal barriers that separated the children from strangers in the early days. He provided an excellent opportunity to introduce another part of the country to them. Dick was from Boston and his accent was as thick as Bunker Hill. I gave him the tape recorder, let him talk about himself, his work as a dentist, healthy teeth, and the city of Boston. We replayed his voice and analyzed his speech, the silent rs, the articulation, and finally, the speed of his presentation. Then I played a speech Cindy Lou had given the previous day with her island dialect racing with jackrabbit speed from the first word to the last.

  “Lawd, that girl talk so fast,” laughed Ethel.

  “You shut yo’ mout’, girl,” cautioned Cindy Lou.

  Then we went to the map to find Boston. Dick started to cite its preeminence in the Revolutionary War, but this quickly led to a staggering amount of new material. Since the kids knew nothing about Boston, or Massachusetts, or the Revolutionary War, or New England, or England, out of necessity we had to restrict the scope of conversation. Compared to the Yamacraw children, everyone I brought to the island was a compendium of ideas and experience, and the one transcendent problem of all who came to the classroom was the intelligent condensation and control of the material they wished to present. This was my own greatest problem. How much did the kids know and what should I teach them that they didn’t know?

  Dick was the first in a long procession of visitors. His success that first day convinced me that associations with a multitude of people would be beneficial and instructive to my students. Before the year ended, forty people made the voyage to Yamacraw. Some of them were only mildly successful in leaving part of themselves in the classroom and some simply could not relate to children and made little imprint on them. One man, not a friend, patronized the kids badly and spoke to them as though he were addressing an assembly of cretins. But of the forty or so who came to the island, there were several who implanted their names and personalities forever in the memory of eighteen very impressionable children.

  My sister was one. Carol Ann was a senior in college then and decided to come down for a week to get to know Barbara and the children better. She also wanted to see the island. When Zeke put us in the river it was a cold, wind-driven Friday in December. Before we hit deep water I watched as Carol delivered a vigorous incantation against the shark gods who ruled salt water unchallenged. Carol was always a kind of high priestess in our family circle, a wry and demonstrative oracle who read eastern philosophy with sophomoric intensity and who tried to implement the lessons she derived from her readings in our household. Carol had difficulty enlisting Dad’s interest while she lectured about the teachings of Vishnu, as he watched the White Sox games on television.

  I relished the thought of introducing Carol to my students. Nor did she disappoint me. Along with my father, she is one of the world’s great undiscovered actors. Whatever she does or says is burnished with an almost vaudevillian touch. She longs to write and act in a play where the heroine combines the pragmatism of Scarlett O’Hara, the wit of Falstaff, and the destiny of Ophelia. Until she does, only her family and friends will benefit from her dramatic gifts.

  She entered the classroom when we got to the island, moved about the room talking to the kids and making herself comfortable. Then she told me she was ready to perform. Her performance that day was superb. She recited poems from our childhood, poems of adventure, and scenes from plays. She did this with typical Carolian flourish. Her eyes gleamed, her voice ranted, then whispered, then rasped, then quivered. The kids sat transfixed. They neither smiled, nor cheered, or moved. They had never seen anything like it.

  Pleased by her reception, she delivered her rendition of the witches’ scene from Macbeth with such macabre passion and blood-chilling authenticity that the children without exception grew restless, wide-eyed, and frightened. Carol sat in the middle of the floor, her eyes blazing at an imaginary cauldron, her lips quivering as she summoned double the toil and stinking trouble, and her hands worked diabolically as she bent over her fire on the schoolroom floor. It was a good act; she had performed it frequently for an appreciative family when we gathered for the holidays. But the students did not fathom the relatively important fact that it was a performance and not the utterances of a madwoman I had imported for the occasion. To further complicate matters
, Carol had performed a few magic tricks just to loosen things up a bit.

  She was delighted to discover what she had wrought. It pleased her to think that her performance had been so dazzling, credible, and convincing. I pointed out that she had not played before the most sophisticated audience in the western hemisphere, but the actress in her was undaunted and her ego soared.

  The kids bombarded me with questions the following Monday.

  “Your sister really a witch, Conroy?” Lincoln asked.

  “Of course not. She was just acting,” I answered.

  “No,” other voices interjected.

  “She bad,” said Samuel.

  “She tell me she turn me into a hoppy-toad,” said Sidney.

  “She was just kidding. She was pretending to be a witch.”

  “How you know?”

  “Because she’s my sister.”

  “Witch gotta be someone’s sister,” Ethel reasoned.

  “Witch bad.”

  “She tell me shark get ’um if I fall in river,” Lincoln said.

  “For Chrissake, she’s been talking about sharks since she was a little girl.”

  “That girl was a witch,” Jasper said with finality.

  So my sister literally and figuratively left the classroom with her witchdom intact, nor could I ever mention my family again without conjuring up visions of boiling pots and Carol’s bent shoulders crouching over toad-filled concoctions. The aura of Carol’s performance lingered long after she left the island. She had fired the imagination of my students and brought the magic of theater into the classroom. She had mesmerized the kids by simply tossing around a few lines by Shakespeare. She opened up a wonder in the art of pretense, the fantasy world of drama, where witches and teachers’ sisters can be the same people.

  One of the more memorable visitors came by accident. Mrs. Brown dismissed school early one chilly day in March when the water pump inexplicably quit working. She commissioned me to go to Bluffton for the sole purpose of eliciting help from the long-suffering Zeke Skimberry. Whenever the pump froze, it suited me fine, since there was something rather melodramatic in the endless procession of small boys heading for the pissing tree in the woods. Whenever the pump broke, Mrs. Brown would come in the room, heave her shoulders dramatically and say, “Tell your babies to put on the brakes, Mr. Conroy. The commode will not flush, so just tell everybody to put on the brakes.” At noon, I pointed the boat toward Cannon Creek and the public dock in Bluffton.