by Pat Conroy
“Quarterbacks don’t cry,” she said, hugging me.
“This one does,” I answered.
Then she showed me the latest issue of The New Yorker, dated March 7, 1972, which carried the title poem of her book on page thirty-seven. We were both screaming madly at each other when Luke returned to the apartment. Then Luke started screaming. He opened the window, crept nimbly out to the fire escape, and shouted to everyone on Grove Street, “My little sister’s in The New Yorker, you Yankee motherfuckers.”
That night we attended her first major reading, which was given at a deconsecreated Anglican church in the West Village. It was sponsored by Women United to Stamp Out Penises or one of those other maniacal splinter groups Savannah had gravitated toward. Savannah’s earliest and dearest friends in the Village belonged to a feminist study group, and they all memorized Virginia Woolf, wore black belts, lifted weights for definition, and cleaned out bars of longshoremen on holiday weekends. “Linemen. Defensive tacklers,” Luke whispered as we approached the dimly lit church and saw the grim phalanx of women-warriors fanned out along the rear vestibule, collecting tickets. They looked as if they spent their time translating Sappho and drinking the blood of flies. But these were strange times in the history of the sexes and Savannah had trained both Luke and me to tread lightly among the two-fisted Brown Shirts of the women’s liberation movement. Savannah herself was in the middle of a politically militant phase of her own development and there were times her bulky southern brothers were an embarrassment to her. She coached us in how to appear androgynous and benign, and we perfected an obsequious shuffle when we found ourselves surrounded by her more hostile friends. Among this terrifying group, we feigned a state of penislessness that we thought would decrease Savannah’s anxiety when we were thrown together with her friends. “All of them have been damaged by males,” Savannah had explained. “Especially by fathers and brothers. You don’t understand how horrible it is to be a woman in America.”
Judging from the appearance of the ticket collectors, it must nave been dreadful, indeed. But these were private random thoughts and ones we had learned never to express aloud to Savannah, who was known to scream at us if we seemed impervious to her new philosophy or too unregenerately male in our pronunciamentos. Our maleness irradiated unconsciously through Savannah’s world and troubled us greatly, because at that time we were too thick and too innocent to understand the nature of our sister’s problem with the world of men.
As we entered the church, Luke made a thoughtless mistake when he held the door open for a pretty, scholarly woman who was entering the church behind us. As southern boys, we were vaccinated with the oily serums of an instinctive politesse, and it would have been unthinkable at that time for either of us not to hold a door open for a lady. The lady reacted to different serums. In a surprisingly swift move, she grabbed Luke by the throat with one hand, then stuck two brilliantly sharpened nails beneath his eyeballs.
“You ever do that again, asshole, I’ll poke both your fucking eyeballs out,” she said.
Luke answered quietly, respectful of those two menacing fingers. “I assure you, madam, I will not open a door again for a single lady in New York City.”
“Woman, asshole,” the woman hissed. “Woman. Not lady.”
“Woman,” Luke corrected himself, and the woman, releasing him, swept triumphantly into the church.
. Rubbing his throat, Luke watched her disappear into the crowd. Then he said in a whisper, “I ain’t gonna open the door for a fucking grizzly bear in this town, Tom. She must not have known I was a Vietnam vet.”
“It didn’t look like she gave much of a shit, either, boy.”
“But we learned something, Tom. When a door opens, you just got to kick ass and run on through. That’s how it’s done in New York City.”
The church was almost full when Savannah walked out of the vestibule. She was introduced by a supercilious bearded male who wore a poncho, a beret, and leather-thonged sandals. According to the program, he was a leading spokesman of the New York School and taught a course called “Poetry, Revolution, and Orgasm” at Hunter College. I hated him on sight but changed my mind instantly when his introduction of Savannah proved so heartfelt and generous. He talked of Savannah’s background: her childhood on the island, her father the shrimp boat captain, her mother the mountain beauty, the family tiger, her grandfather who barbered hair and who sold Bibles on the side, and her grandmother who visited the Colleton cemetery and delivered soliloquies to dead relatives. Then he praised her work: the passionate lyricism of her hymns to nature, her technical virtuosity, and her celebration of the spirit of women. All of this, he concluded, was astonishing to discover in a woman who had spent almost her entire life on a sea island in the American South. Then, he surrendered the floor to Savannah.
The applause was sedate and polite except for one single bone-chilling, foot-stomping rebel yell, which exploded naturally from Luke as he saw his small sister rise like a flame in that church, blonde and shy and ethereal, her hair brushed severely back but moving along her shoulders in luxuriant waves.
I have always loved my sister’s voice. It is clear and light, a voice without seasons, like bells over a green city or snowfall on the roots of orchids. Her voice is a greening thing, an enemy of storm and dark and winter. She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.
But, at first, I could not hear her and I could tell she was aware of her audience, intimidated by it. But slowly, the language seized her; her language, her poems, and her voice lifted, steadied, and grew confident. And when it did, Savannah Wingo took that audience, that West Village audience, that cultured, jaded, city-hardened New York audience, by storm. I knew all the poems by heart and my mouth moved in congruence with hers and I told the stories of our life as she told them and I felt the supernatural power of poetry subjugate the crowd as Savannah’s voice lifted up toward the choir loft, lifted up toward the shining battlements of the Empire State Building, toward the. stars above the Hudson, and took us all back to the lowcountry of South Carolina where this beautiful sister was born to grief and sadness, and where all these poems, collected in fragments and images, grew in darkness like sharp pieces of coral, and awaited the annunciation of the poet, awaited this night, the collective breath of this audience, as she shared the poems of the heart by making the language sing and bleed at the same time.
Halfway through the reading, Savannah looked up and studied the audience. She sighted Luke and me sitting in the fifteenth row, conspicuous in our coats and ties. She smiled and waved and Luke called out, “Hey, Savannah. Doing good, sweetheart,” and the audience laughed.
“My two brothers, Luke and Tom, drove up from South Carolina to attend this reading and I’d like to dedicate this next poem to them.”
The woman who had threatened to put Luke’s eyes out at the front door was sitting unnoticed in the pew directly in front of us to the left. We spotted her when Savannah made us rise so the audience could see us. There was some restrained, serviceable applause. Luke put his hands over his head and waved to the crowd, then leaned down to the woman and said, “Thought I was a nothing, didn’t you, shithead?”
I pulled him back down into his seat and warned, “Shield your eyes when you insult that woman. Or we’ll be investing in Seeing Eye dogs.”
Then we returned to Savannah’s voice. She read for over an hour and there was a story to it all. A girl had been born to poor parents in South Carolina, had grown up barefooted and brown beside the marshes of Colleton, had learned to measure the seasons by the migration of shrimp and wildfowl and the harvesting of tomatoes, had seized onto the light of her grand, unnamable singularity, had nourished that light, had willed herself to be different, and had felt the language stir in her as she heard the owls moaning in the barn eaves and the buoys chanting in the waterway. Then the world struck back as the world always does and the child, unarmed and sullen,
began contending with all the wildness and cruelty of that world. In her last poems, Savannah spoke of her breakdowns, her demons, her insanity. She spoke of them with astonishment and respect and a heartbreaking sadness. But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention. There were no gargoyles in her work, only defiled angels crying for home. It was all new to New York, but it wasn’t new to me and Luke. We were witnesses at the creation. In our house by the river we had watched a poet grow.
As I listened to her read her final poem, I thought of a dream I used to have of Savannah and me in the womb, floating side by side in our mother’s inland sea—hearts forming together, fingers moving, the patient blue coloring of four sightless eyes in darkness, the blond hair flowing like underwater grass, the half-formed brains sensing the presence of the other, gathering comfort from that nameless communion which sprang up between us before we were born. In the life before life, in the breathless womb and wordless safety of bloodstreams, I dreamed that something special happened to us, that there was a moment of divine sight known only to twins, of recognition when we turned toward each other in a roll that took weeks and she said, “Hello, Tom,” and I, who would grow accustomed to miracles, who would always believe in magic, would cry out, “Hello, Savannah,” and then happily, transcendentally, we would await our birth so the lifelong dialogue could begin. I first knew of my sister’s light in the darkness. What I didn’t know was how much of the darkness she would bring along on the voyage. I believe in the ties of Gemini, the perfect, superhuman connection of twins.
When Savannah finished, there was thunderous applause from that audience who stood and cheered for minutes. I had to talk fast to prevent Luke from racing up to the front of the church and bearing Savannah down the middle aisle on his shoulders. He contented himself with a few ear-splitting rebel yells in praise of his sister. I, secure in my role of the family sentimentalist, bent down between the pews to tie my shoe and dry the tears with my tie.
Later, we were always glad that we had been present on the March evening when Savannah made her triumphant debut in that dog-eat-dog subculture of the New York Poetry World. Much of what is perfectly wonderful about the city of New York was contained in that night, and after dinner at the Coach House, we stayed up late, watching the moon traverse the skyline, fueled by Savannah’s triumph, talking and drinking with her friends, exhilarated by how easy and predestined it all seemed, amazed that a girl from South Carolina could deliver a message that could illuminate the hearts of these people born to stone.
If I had left the next day, I might well have come to love the city. But Luke and I lingered and Savannah wanted to show us why she loved the city and why she could never follow us home again. So we shopped at Macy’s, went to a Yankees game, took the Circle Line tour, and had a picnic lunch on top of the Empire State Building. She drilled us well in all that was pleasurable and definitive in the New York way of life. But there were other definitions of New York, dark and unpredictable, that she did not take into account as she force-marched us around Manhattan.
It was on West Twelfth Street in the Village that we received a more treacherous, but no less definitive, view of the city. From far down the street we watched an old woman hobble down the stairs of her brownstone, pausing on each step to wait for her senescent, barely ambulatory French poodle to follow her. There was an imperturbable dignity to the slow descent of both the woman and the dog. The poodle and the lady were of the same general coloring and their walks revealed that they had aged harmoniously by developing the same generous limps. When she reached the sidewalk, she did not see the man appear suddenly behind her and we did not have time to scream out a warning. He was fast and professional and knew exactly what he wanted. He snatched her two gold earrings off her pierced ears, bringing the woman to her knees and tearing the flesh of her ear lobes as she came down hard on the sidewalk. Then he grabbed the gold necklace around her neck and ripped it violently until it broke. The woman began screaming and bleeding from the ears. The man punched her in the face and stopped the screaming. Then, he began walking away from the woman with a studied nonchalance, unhurried and calm. But he had made one serious tactical error. His avenue of escape took him in a direct line toward the Wingo kids of South Carolina.
There were many terrible things about our upbringing in the South, but we were unanimous in how to treat young men who mutilated the ears of old women with poodles. He crossed the street and broke into a run when he saw us move up to challenge him and heard Savannah blowing the hell out of a police whistle. Luke fanned out wide, moving low and fast, as I cut off his line of retreat. I heard a bottle break behind me. The mugger pulled a knife and I heard the small click and saw the flash of the blade as I made my approach.
“I’ll cut you, motherfucker,” the mugger screamed as he turned and ran straight for me, the knife pushed out before him. I stopped dead in the middle of the street and removed my belt in a single motion, wrapped it around my wrist until a foot of leather and the buckle swung free. He lunged for my throat with the knife, but I stepped back and swung the belt. The buckle snapped against his cheekbone and opened a cut below his eye. He screamed, dropped the knife, looked at me once, then was flattened by the blind-side charge of a consensus All-American high school linebacker who smashed into the mugger’s spine and drove him face down onto the hood of a Thunderbird. Luke held the man’s hair in one hand and punched the back of his head with the other, breaking the man’s nose on the crumpling hood of the car. Then the crowd engulfed us, screaming neighbors, gray-haired vigilantes who poked at the man with their weapons and made known their desire to dismember him before the police arrived. Savannah had placed a broken Coke bottle against his jugular and we could hear police sirens in the distance. The old woman, attended to by neighbors, wept softly on her stoop, the poodle licking her bleeding ears.
“Nice city you got here, Savannah,” Luke said, giving the mugger another shake. “Nice fucking city.”
“It could happen anywhere,” Savannah said defensively. “It’s still the greatest city in the history of the world.”
“Ask that old lady if it’s the greatest city in the world.”
But New York never quite finishes testing either its devotees or its citizens. On every corner, a thousand facets of that city’s infinite variety present themselves in various aspects of the hideous and the sublime. It is a city with too many stories and too many strangers. Throughout that long memorable week, Savannah and I could not stop Luke from helping every wino he encountered. Luke was constitutionally incapable of ignoring these helpless sodden strangers he discovered slumped against doorways, smelling of vomit and wine. He would prop them up, clean them off, lecture them about taking better care of their bodies, then slip a dollar into their pockets, assuring them, Savannah informed him, of a new bottle of wine when they awoke to sunlight and found the miraculous dollar.
“They’re perfectly happy,” Savannah explained. “A policeman told me that when I first came here and tried to help one of them.”
But Luke remained undeterred and continued to offer assistance to every drunk we passed, until one day in a small park on Seventh Avenue, he came upon a young teenage boy, supine on a wooden bench, who did not respond to his soft ministrations at all. When Luke moved him, all of us could see that rigor mortis had set in hours before. There was a hypodermic needle in his coat pocket and a driver’s license listing his address as Raleigh, North Carolina.
“He’s perfectly happy, Savannah,” Luke said as the ambulance crew carried the boy away.
The boy haunted Luke because of his southernness, and he thought it unnatural that any southerner could flourish between the Hudson and East rivers after growing up in the softer, more forgiving zones of the South. A southerner had to change too dramatically to become a New Yorker, Luke thought. He explained his newly conceived theory to Savannah and me over croissants and French coffee at breakfast one morning.
“It�
�s like a trout trying to become a streetcar, Savannah,” Luke said, pointing at her with his croissant. “It just wasn’t meant to be. You’ll see. You may pretend you’re a New Yorker, but you’re southern to the bone, Savannah. It don’t wash out.”
“My brother, the redneck philosopher,” Savannah said, pouring more coffee.
“I don’t mind being a redneck,” Luke said. “The only thing wrong with rednecks is that they hate niggers and most everything else. I don’t hate anybody. Except New Yorkers. I’m learning to hate eight million of these scumbags because they let kids curl up and die on benches and old men rot in doorways. I can’t understand people like that.”
“Don’t you like my friends, Luke?”
“They’re okay, Savannah. Not great, mind you, just okay. I want to be perfectly honest. I see the way they look at Tom and me. I mean, they were actually surprised that we could talk, coming from South Carolina and all. That one critter that introduced you at the reading laughed every time I opened my mouth.”
“He loved your southern accent. He told me so later. He said it was like being at the movies.”
“No movie. He was talking to Luke Wingo and I could tell that boy never caught a fish in his life except if it was wrapped and frozen in the A & P.”
“He’s a poet and an intellectual, Luke,” Savannah said, growing exasperated. “It’s not his job to catch fish.”