The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  I immediately wrote a long letter to Mrs. Hanst explaining how her letter had been unearthed from the elephant burial ground in my desk and how excited I was that someone near Washington had offered help. Then I splashed a few adjectives about the page describing the isolation and deprivation of the children, how they needed to have their horizons expanded, and how we would just love to hike our young arses to Washington. I designed my letter carefully, assuring myself that it was plaintive and rueful enough to pluck the heartstrings of every human residing on both sides of the Potomac. This was not necessary, for this magnificent discovery, Judy Hanst, sanctified herself in my eyes even further by replying a week later that she and her friends would be delighted to sponsor a trip.

  Mrs. Brown, whose primary job on the island seemed to be resident crapehanger, forbade all plans to leave the island for any reason. “Those children have had their fun. Now it’s time to work. Fun time is over. They need drill in readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic. They don’t need no Washington, D.C. The state department says we gotta get through the books. You aren’t even usin’ the books, Mr. Conroy. Not even usin’ the books.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered, “but I want you to know, Mrs. Brown, that I want to take the kids on this trip and will go higher if you insist on saying no.”

  “No,” she quickly insisted.

  The month of March was spent working out the innumerable details of the trip. Transportation was the most serious. Flying was out since I would have to flog the kids with a cattail and a bullwhip to get them into an airplane. A bus seemed like the most pragmatic form of transportation, but when I inquired about prices I was continually staggered by exorbitant figures. I eventually decided that automobile was the cheapest, most versatile, and most readily available form of transportation. The two new California boys, Frank Smith and John Richford, volunteered immediately to drive and chaperone. Father John Becker, a northern priest who had migrated south to labor in more temperate vineyards, offered me full use of a large station wagon. He also contributed $150 for the trip for gas, food, and incidental expenses. Barbara and I planned to pay for the trip insurance, which ran somewhere around $40. Barbara also informed me that she, Jessica, and Melissa were going to Washington if at all possible. It was about this time that Barbara told me that she was pregnant with an unknown creature, who would ultimately emerge as our third daughter, Megan. So her bargaining position was immeasurably strengthened.

  In April I drove around the island visiting the parents, describing the wonders of Washington in vivid, glowing, purple prose, and asked them to sign their names or marks on a form I placed before them. Expecting a cakewalk after the unqualified success of the Halloween trip, I was a bit surprised when every parent I approached refused to sign anything. When I asked the kids why in the hell their parents were playing the same game they played before the Halloween trip, as if on cue all eyes lowered balefully and Lincoln said, “We ain’t gonna go to no Washington.”

  “The hell we ain’t, my friends,” I answered.

  So each day I would depart at noon to browbeat or beg the reluctant parents to allow their children to cross the water again. Carolina’s father, Alvin Pinckney, wanted to talk more than argue. “Well, Mr. Conroy, I let my girl go ’cause she’s a good girl. Kinda like her momma was. Good with them books. Eat them books up. Myself, I do some travelin’. I born in All-Benny Joe-gia. Ever hear of it? Spen’ mos’ part of my life away from Yamacraw. Come back when money git poor. When fish come summer I make good money. A couple fish now. Not many. No fish come. They come, I catch ’em. Go to Savannah to git stamps. You know, food stamps. All that tape. Red tape. Shit. Me payin’ for the stamps and still got to run through shit. No mo’. Me and mine gonna tough it out. No mo’ shit. About that trip. Sho’ she can go. Ain’t got no money to give ’er. But she can go wit’ you.”

  Soon after this I had the signature and consent of every parent except Cindy Lou’s mother and the obstinate earth mother, Edna Graves. Edna was critical since her approval or disapproval controlled the destiny of Frank, Big C, and the twins. All of them dwelt under her roof and her word was law the moment it spilled from her lips. Cindy Lou’s mother was eight months pregnant and had taken up residence in Savannah to await the coming of her child. Since Aunt Ruth, the midwife, was forced to retire, the black women had to emigrate to the city to deliver their infants. Cindy Lou mournfully told me that she was “sittin’ ” for her brothers and sisters until her mother returned. When I asked if her grandmother could take over for a week, Cindy just said she didn’t know.

  Cindy’s grandmother was a squat, whimsical old woman who offered me a beer soon after I sat down in her kitchen. I accepted. As I sipped it she asked, “How’s Calyfornya?”

  “Pardon me, ma’am?”

  “How’s Calyfornya doin’?”

  “I am not a California boy. I teach Cindy.”

  “Oh Gawd. You the white teacher. Oh Gawd, give me that beer.”

  “Why? I want to drink it.”

  “You the white teacher. I thought you one of the boys.” Then she paused. “You gonna drink it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Teachers drink?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s good. Oh Gawd, that’s so good. I got some gin in that there paper bag when you finish.”

  Mrs. Barnwell and I became instant friends. She agreed to babysit for Cindy Lou’s brothers and sisters and to intercede with Cindy’s mother for me. She said I might have to take a trip to Savannah to reassure Cindy’s mother (which I did), but she was sure that everything could be worked out. “That chile needs to be in that Washington,” she added.

  Edna Graves was much more formidable and contrary. Her wolf pack treed me for the second time when I entered her domain and, as she swept the dogs out of the way with vicious blows from a scraggly broom, she shouted, “You might as well head on down that same road you come up ’cause I ain’t lettin’ none of my children go. Ain’t none of ’em goin’ to no Washington. You hear me, mahn. You hear Edna talkin’. Once is once too many time and they done be off this island for Halloveen and they ain’t goin’ no hunnert mile to no Washington. Those are my grands and ain’t nobody takin’ them cross no river to go a hunnert mile up the road.”

  Nimbly keeping away from the multifanged pack, I egg-shelled my way into Edna’s kitchen. Her finger wagged at me like an old and oft-remembered friend. She towered over me and her voice grew louder and more volcanic the longer she spoke. “Gawd, these chillun pester me all day sayin’, ’Cain’t we go to Washington, cain’t we go with Mr. Conroy on a trip up the road?’ And I say, ‘Hell no, ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere wit’ nobody.’ You hear Edna talkin’. You hear what I say.” By this time she was veritably screaming.

  “I can’t hear you, Edna,” I whispered.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” she thundered. “Ha-ha-ha.” Then she paused and said, according to her standard formula, “Gawd, you is a good-lookin’ teacher. A good-lookin’ white teacher.”

  “Jesus, Edna. Not this stuff again. You told me you wouldn’t start that anymore.”

  “Yes, you is a fine-lookin’ man. A fine-lookin’ teacher.” She grinned, her eyes twinkling devilishly.

  “When I was in college, Edna, someone once told me that I had a nose like a pig’s.”

  “No,” she cried, “you got a boo-tiful nose. Gawd, a pig nose look so bad.”

  “He said my nose looked exactly like a pig’s nose.”

  That man crazy. If I see that man I tell him he crazy.”

  “Can the kids go to Washington, Edna?” I asked abruptly.

  “Ha-ha-ha. Hell, no. I tell you straight. I ain’t gonna let ’em go cause I don’t wanna lose my grands. Gawd, if anything happen to Frank. Oh Gawd, I don’t know what I do. He’s my boy, you know. I have him since he was a tiny baby. He’s my boy. Anything happen to Frank, you know I might have to use Betsy on you. Gawd, I don’t want to use no Betsy on a nice-lookin’ teacher like you.”

 
; “I got a nose like a pig.”

  “No, Gawd. Now let me talk. Edna feels like talkin’ and I want you to hear what Edna say. The trip on Halloween was nice. So nice and my chillun talk about it so much. They need to see things. You take ’em off the island to places I ain’t never seen. So I might let them go.”

  “That’s great, Edna. I promise nothing will happen to the kids.”

  “Nuttin’ better happen to my grands. ’Cause I still got Betsy when you gets back.”

  “You are a magnificent creature, Edna. A queen. A saint.”

  “Oh Gawd.”

  When Edna relented, the last major bulwark of opposition or doubt among the parents tumbled to the ground. Once the decision was reached the parents shared in the general excitement of the children’s crusade to the nation’s capital. Now, with the trivial details of finances and travel arranged, with the full and supporting consent of the parents, the most difficult and vital hurdle stretched across Henry Piedmont’s door.

  “Why, Pat, it’s a pleasure to see you. I sweahr it’s a pleasure,” said Dr. Piedmont, as I entered his office. “To what do I owe this privilege of your visit? I’ve been meanin’ to get out to the island to pay y’all a visit, but HEW keeps me so tied up I’m lucky to be able to go home at night. How’s everything goin’?”

  I then explained very quickly why I had come to waste his priceless time, that Mrs. Brown refused to authorize the trip, that the trip was being paid for by private resources, that the children would benefit from this trip a hundredfold, and that God and man considered it peremptory that he grant his approval. He leaned back in his leather chair, placed one hand on his massive, brown desk, and said, “Pat Conroy, you are the spittin’ image of Henry Piedmont years ago. Young, brash, idealistic, always trying to help people out. I look at you and see myself and think of young Henry Piedmont wantin’ to do good in the world with the help of Jesus.”

  Oh God, I thought, here comes the second variation on the sacrosanct theme of Henry Piedmont. From my first meeting with him I knew there would be a comparison of him and me, followed by a biography of his days of suffering and self-denial in his mill town, and finally a rousing testimony of faith in Jesus. A few sentences or paragraphs later he said, “After I served my country proudly in the United States Army, I went back to my hometown to help poor kids like myself who just didn’t have a prayer. I taught just like you’re doin’ now, Pat. Only I taught mill kids where you’re teachin’ colored children. I was a mill kid myself. These colored people think they know prejudice. I knew prejudice, too. I was called lint head. And being called lint head is just as bad as being called nigger, believe me.”

  After retracing his career as a company boss, teacher, administrator, and finally, the holy of holies, a doctorate from Columbia University, he croaked the secret of his success to me for a second time. “I don’t know how you feel about religion. But I can tell you that faith in the Lord has put me where I am. He has guided me along the way. He has brought me success and more money than I ever dreamed of making. His hand has led me down the path He chooses. I just fall to my knees each night and ask His guidance.”

  Like some purifying ritual, he repeated his life story to me, the Protestant ethic, the unassailable formula of the American dream, Horatio Alger in the cotton mills, Henry Piedmont, child of poverty, man of paramount success, a golfing buddy of Jesus, had given me the green light to go to Washington. But something else came out of that meeting. For some reason, I realized that I really liked Henry Piedmont.

  The odyssey began just after dawn on the first Monday in May. The kids were well primed for the journey. The previous two weeks had been a time of brochures, pictures, facts, history, art, and trivia about Washington, D.C. I had brought road maps to school and we traced our route north on Interstate 95, listed the towns we would pass, and charted the mileage. I told the kids about the first time I saw Washington during the magic, impressionable season of my tenth year, when I first reached the summit of a Virginia hill above the Pentagon and looked down to the Potomac River and the majestic city growing on her banks. “When I was ten, gang, I didn’t think anything could ever be so beautiful or fine,” I told them.

  So it was early morning when we left Beaufort. During the trip I would see through the eyes of children who had seen little, and who had never ventured away from the smell of salt marshes and the sound of incoming tides. I do not need to describe in painstaking detail what we did in Washington. We made the endless treks to the proper monuments to pay homage to the proper Presidents. We gasped appropriately at the bones of dinosaurs, at the plaster-of-Paris blue whale, and at the unfortunate elephant set in perpetuity to welcome visitors to the Smithsonian Institution. The kids registered most of the proper responses, said the predictable things, and marveled at the incredible herds of bleating Fords and Chevies during the morning and afternoon cattle drive to and from the city. They liked the statue of Lincoln, because he “freed the colored folk and did the Mancey Pation Decoration,” and they looked upon the Jefferson Memorial as a worthy thing because he, too, had issued some famous “decoration.” At the art museum I marched them to a painting of a man being attacked by a great white shark. They dutifully followed me around trying to feign interest in exhibits that would strike my eye but bored them to extinction. They salivated heavily as we walked over the ramp at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing and gazed upon the acres of currency being churned out below us.

  The museums and monuments were nice, but other things made the trip memorable and significant to the kids. My terrible instincts of wanting the kids to learn potfuls of knowledge, to absorb the entire culture of the city in a single week like dry sponges were ridiculous and generally ignored by the kids. Their pleasures were simple. Neither Barbara, nor Frank, nor John, nor I could keep the gang away from the souvenir vendors that flourished on every corner. “Don’t buy that crap, Saul,” I would shout, and the next moment Saul would appear be-jeweled with peace medallions, Kennedy buttons, and rings with pictures of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Cindy Lou soon sported enough junk jewelry to start a shop of her own. Before long, each child glistened with cheap baubles, three or four necklaces, plastic Washington Monuments, and Capitols of fake bronze. Beside the junk salesmen stood the peddlers of hot dogs and Popsicles hawking their wares and spotting easy prey in the wide-eyed Yamacraw contingent, who did not wish to insult anyone and therefore bought almost everything. After the first day of extravagant spending, the kids took inventory of their finances and discovered to their chagrin that the trinkets for which they had bartered so generously that day were priced like crown jewels.

  The kids also really liked the neighborhood where Ken and Judy Hanst lived. It was a suburban neighborhood with manicured lawns and sloping hills, a neighborhood where ladies played bridge, frequented shopping centers, and had their hair done once a week. Judy was an attractive, shapely brunette who had convinced her neighbors to participate in housing the visitors from Yamacraw. The neighbors had responded enthusiastically. So the kids went in pairs to houses all along Judy’s street. Throughout the week they played with the neighborhood children, spent the rest of their money buying candy and other trinkets at the large drugstore up the street, and rode bicycles for the first luxurious time in their lives down a paved hill. “Oh, Gawd, I ride bike so fast down a hill. I sho’ like ridin’ on a hill,” they would say excitedly.

  Meanwhile, all of us honored with the title of chaperones would answer the questions of Judy’s neighbors, who seemingly were expecting a ragtag tribe of starving pickaninnies with loincloths and bones through their noses. “These kids look well fed to me. I was led to believe these kids are poor,” one man said. “Why are they so well dressed? I thought they were supposed to dress in rags,” a lady said. “They won’t carry on a conversation at dinnertime. They just look at us,” another lady said, very distressed. So we would try to explain to the distraught suburbanites that things were not always what they seemed, that the parents
and relatives of these children spent a great deal of money so their children would not be “shame” when they went to Washington, and that the children were often taciturn and remote with strangers. It was during this same week that I read about students in a Washington ghetto school who had never seen the Potomac River.

  Yet the neighborhood responded with warmth and humanity to the kids. The ladies made lunches for our sightseeing expeditions and held cookouts in the evening. Most of the kids made a point of telling me that “these sho’ is fine people. They so nice, Mr. Conroy.”

  On the final day, we took the kids to the zoo, where, as I expected, they went berserk. We had studied every picture of every animal we could find in encyclopedias, books, and magazines. We had watched every film on wildlife I could lay my hand upon, but nothing could equal the drama of seeing the great cats, the animated bears, the pool of seals, the elephants, and reptiles alive and moving before their eyes.

  “That monkey look just like ol’ Conrack,” Cindy Lou squealed, as I walked up to the chimpanzee cage.

  “That snake made out of rubber. Too big to be real. He just lay still ’cause he not real. Rubber snake. I tell you that right, boy. Oh, Gawd, snake move. He ’live,” Richard said, as he lurched back from the glass enclosing the boa constrictor. The zoo won all plaudits when compared to bloodless visits to all the notable monuments put together. Animals were alive, breathing, being fed, bellowing, roaring, and among the animals, no matter how exotic, the Yamacraw children felt at ease.