The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  I called my mother and Savannah answered.

  “Hey, Savannah. How are you? This is Tom.”

  “Hello, college man,” she said, her voice still weak and raspy from her ordeal. “I’m fine, Tom. I’m getting better every day. Don’t worry. I’m going to make it.”

  “Is Mom there?” I asked.

  “She’s in the kitchen.”

  “I didn’t get into a fraternity, Savannah.”

  “Do you care, Tom?”

  “Yeah. I really care. I can’t help it, but I do. I liked everybody, Savannah, and thought they were all the nicest bunch of guys I ever met.”

  “They’re creeps, Tom. If they didn’t take you, they’re nothing but creeps,” she said, lowering her voice so my mother couldn’t hear.

  “I must have done something wrong. I can’t figure it out. A lot of guys I didn’t think had a chance received bids. College is strange, Savannah.”

  “I’m sorry. Do you want me to come up this weekend? The scars on my wrists have healed completely.”

  “No. I just want you to know how much I miss you and Luke, Savannah. I’m not as good without you. The world’s not as good.”

  “You’re not without me. Always remember that. Here’s Mom.”

  “I may not tell Mom, Savannah.”

  “I understand. I love you. Study hard.”

  “Tom,” my mother said. “This was the big day. You must be so excited.”

  “Well, Mom,” I said, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I’ve been up here and I’ve decided not to pledge a fraternity this year. I think I might wait a year or two.”

  “That doesn’t seem like such a good idea to me,” she said. “Remember, the boys you meet in your fraternity will be the ones who’ll be there to help you in the business world when you graduate.”

  “That’s just it. A fraternity really takes you away from your studies. I’ve been going to so many parties that I’ve really been neglecting my schoolwork.”

  “Now that sounds very mature. I don’t really approve, mind you. I think it’s better to get set right up in a fraternity the first year, but if you’re falling behind . . . ”

  “Yeah, I flunked a couple of tests last week and the coach called me in to talk about it.”

  “If you lose your scholarship, you know we can’t afford to send you through college, Tom.”

  “I know, Mom. That’s why I think the fraternity might have to wait. I think my studies will have to take priority over my social life for a while.”

  “Well, you’re a man now and can make those decisions for yourself. Savannah is doing so much better, Tom. But I want you to write her a letter and see if you can’t talk her out of going to New York. It’s too dangerous for a southern girl to walk those streets up there.”

  “No more dangerous than living on the island, Mom,” I said, coming as near to referring to the rape as I ever had with my mother.

  “Tell me all about your courses, Tom,” she said, changing the subject.

  When I hung up the phone I sat in the booth for a minute or two, wondering how I could again face the boys who had voted so overwhelmingly to exclude me. I thought about transferring to a smaller college closer to home. I tried to figure out when I could return to the dormitory so I would not have to face the pity of my classmates who would know I had not received a single bid.

  I did not see the girl walk past me and take her place in the phone booth behind mine. I heard her place the coin in the slot and ask the operator if she could make a collect call. Before I could leave the booth, I heard a cry of such pure anguish that it froze me to the spot and I did not move because I did not want the girl to know that anyone had overheard her moment of desolation.

  “Oh, Mama,” she wept, “not one of them wanted me. Not a single one of them asked me to be in a sorority.”

  She cried uncontrollably in that booth behind me and I laid my head back and listened to her sobbing.

  “They just didn’t like me, Mama. They just didn’t want me. No, you don’t understand, Mama. I didn’t do anything to any of them. I was nice, Mama. I was real nice. You know how I am. Oh, Mama, I feel so bad. I feel bad all over.”

  For ten minutes she talked and wept and listened to her mother trying to console her. When she hung up she leaned her head against the phone and continued to cry. I leaned around the booth and said, “The same thing happened to me today. You want to go get a Coke?”

  She looked up, startled, tears rolling down her cheeks, and said, “I didn’t know anybody was in here.”

  “I just called my mother to tell her the same thing. Only I lied. I didn’t have the guts to tell her I didn’t get into a single fraternity.”

  “You didn’t get in?” she said, looking at me. “But you’re so cute.”

  I blushed, surprised completely by her candor.

  “How about that Coke?” I stammered.

  “I’d like to. But I need to wash my face.”

  “My name’s Tom Wingo,” I said.

  “My name’s Sallie Pierson,” she said through her tears. “Awfully pleased to meet you.”

  And that is how I met my wife.

  We began our life together at a moment of natural self-pity and defeat that left an inimitable impression on both of us. The rejection chastened me and let me know my proper place in the grand scheme of things. It was the last time I would ever make a move that required boldness or a leap of the imagination. I became tentative, suspicious, and dull. I learned to hold my tongue and mark my trail behind me and to look to the future with a wary eye. Finally, I was robbed of a certain optimism, that reckless acceptance of the world and all it could hand my way that had always been my strength and deliverance. Despite my childhood and the rape, I thought the world was a wonderful place until SAE decided not to include me in its membership.

  Of different stuff was Sallie Pierson made. She was the daughter of two mill workers from Pelzer, South Carolina, and her rejection was only one in a long series of social catastrophes that had befallen her since she was a small child. It was one measure of her social innocence that she thought a shrimping family was exotic and substantial. She had come to the university on a scholarship that her parents’ mill awarded each year to the child of a mill worker with the highest academic average. She had never made a single B in high school and would only make two of them in college. When Sallie Pierson studied, she heard the music of the looms in her head and saw the image of her parents, disfigured by years of exhausting labor so their only daughter would have chances denied to them. On the night we met she told me she wanted to become a medical doctor and then have three children. She had planned her life out like a battle campaign. On our second night together she told me that though she did not want to frighten me, she had decided to marry me. She did not frighten me.

  I had never met a girl like Sallie Pierson.

  Each night we met at the library and studied together. She took college seriously and passed this seriousness on to me. From seven to ten every evening except Saturdays, we worked at the same desks behind the literature section. She allowed me to write her one love note a night, but that was all. In high school she had learned that dedication to academics had its own special rewards and that they would accrue to us if we were diligent. She never wrote me love notes but she did write down long lists of things she expected from both of us.

  Dear Tom:

  You will be Phi Beta Kappa, Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, captain of the football team, and first in your class in the English Department.

  Love, Sallie

  Dear Sallie [I wrote back and passed the note across her desk]:

  What’s Phi Beta Kappa?

  Love, Tom

  Dear Tom:

  The only fraternity you can get into, country boy.

  Now study. No more notes.

  Love, Sallie

  Like Savannah, Sallie understood the power of writing things down. It was a night of astonishment when we were i
nducted into Phi Beta Kappa at the same time two years later. I had found, to my surprise, that I was the only boy in my freshman class who had heard of William Faulkner, much less read him. I loved my English courses with a passion and could not believe how lucky I was to be living a life where my job was to read the greatest books ever written. I began a long love affair with the English Department of the University of South Carolina, whose members could not believe a football player could write a standard English sentence without damaging the language. They did not know I had grown up in the same house as a sister who would become the best poet in the American South or that I studied each night for three hours with the girl who had written a single word down on her list of objectives: valedictorian.

  My mother was less than enchanted when she found out I was dating a mill town girl and did everything she could to discourage the relationship. She wrote me a series of letters about the kind of woman I should look for when I was shopping around for a wife. I read those letters to Sallie and she agreed with my mother.

  “You can’t wash a mill village out of your system, Tom,” Sallie said. “I’ll never be able to give you what some of these other girls can give you.”

  “And I can’t wash the shrimp off my deck either,” I answered.

  “I like shrimp,” she said.

  “And I like cotton.”

  “Let’s show them, Tom,” she said, kissing me. “Let’s you and Sallie show them all. We won’t have everything and there’ll be some stuff we’ll always be lacking, but our kids will have everything. Our kids will have everything in the world.”

  Those were the words I had been waiting my whole life to hear and I knew the right woman had entered that life.

  On the football field I struggled for three years with my own sense of inadequacy. I was surrounded by superb athletes who gave me daily lessons in deficiencies I brought to the game. But I lived in the weight room in the off-season and began building my body with deliberate intent. When I entered the university I weighed one hundred sixty-five pounds. When I left four years later I weighed two hundred ten pounds. As a freshman I bench-pressed one hundred twenty pounds; as a senior, I bench-pressed three hundred twenty. I blocked on the kickoff team and was a third-string defensive back in my sophomore and junior years until Everett Cooper, the kickoff returner, got hurt during the Clemson game my junior year.

  When Clemson scored, I heard Coach Bass call my name.

  And my years in college turned golden.

  When I went back to receive the kickoff, no one in the stands except Sallie and Luke and my parents knew my name.

  The Clemson kicker approached the ball and I saw that awesome movement of orange helmets downfield and the roar of sixty thousand voices as that ball lifted into pure Carolina sunshine and traveled sixty yards in the air, where I caught it in the end zone and took that son of a bitch where it was supposed to go. “The name, ladies and gentlemen, is Wingo,” I screamed as I tucked the ball under my arm and took off up the left-hand side of the field. I was hit on the twenty-five, but spun out of the arms of the tackier, and, cutting back across field, a Clemson player dove and missed me with an arm tackle. I put a move on a defensive back and leapt over two of my teammates who had taken down two Clemson boys. I angled across the entire field until I picked up the blocker I needed and saw the opening I had lofted a prayer to heaven for. When that opening came, I streaked for the open field and felt someone dive for me from behind; I tripped but balanced myself with my left hand, kept my feet, and saw the kicker at their thirty-yard line, the last Clemson player with a chance of keeping me out of their end zone.

  But there were sixty thousand people who did not know my name and four people I loved whose voices were urging me along in the stadium called Death Valley, and I had no plans to be tackled by a kicker. I lowered my head and my helmet caught him in the numbers and he melted like snow before the goddamn glance of the Lord, flattened by the only boy on that field who knew Byron’s name or a single line of his poetry. Two Clemson players caught me at the five and I gave them a free ride as we tumbled into the end zone at the end of the run that would change my life forever.

  The score was thirteen-six and there was a quarter of football left to play when I heard those sweet words spoken by the announcer. “The run by number forty-three, Tom Wingo, covered one hundred and three yards and sets a new Atlantic Coast Conference record.”

  I returned to the sidelines and was engulfed by my teammates and coaches. I went past the bench and stood waving like a madman at the place high in the stands where I knew Sallie and Luke and my parents were on their feet cheering for me.

  George Lanier kicked the extra point and we were six points behind the Clemson Tigers when we took the field in the fourth quarter.

  With two minutes left in the game, we stopped Clemson at their own twenty-yard line. And I heard one of the assistant coaches yell to Coach Bass, “Let Wingo take this punt.”

  “Wingo,” Coach Bass screamed, and I ran up to him.

  “Wingo,” he said as I adjusted my helmet, “do it again.”

  I had turned golden that day and Coach Bass had uttered magical, incantatory words and I tried to remember where in my life I had heard that phrase before as I took a position on our thirty-five-yard line, shutting out the extraordinary noise of the crowd. As I watched the center snap the ball to the punter, I remembered that distant sunset when I was three and my mother had walked us out on the dock and brought the moon spinning out from beneath the trees of our island and my sister cried out in a small ecstatic voice, “Oh, Mama, do it again!”

  “Do it again,” I said as I watched the spiral tower far above the field begin its long descent into the arms of a boy turned golden for a single day in his life.

  As I caught the ball I looked upfield.

  I took the first marvelous step of the run that would make me the most famous football player in South Carolina for a year I will cherish as long as I live. I caught the ball on our forty-yard line and raced up the right sideline, but all I could see was a movable garden of orange heading my way. Three Clemson players were moving in for the tackle from my left side when I stopped dead and began running the other way, back toward our own goal line, trying to make it to the other side of the field. One Clemson lineman almost caught me at the seventeen but was cut in half by a vicious block by one of our linebackers, Jim Landon. Two of them were matching me stride for stride when I turned upfield. When I looked up the far sidelines, I saw something amazing happening in front of my eyes. Our blocking had broken down completely after the punt, but each of my teammates trailing the play had watched me reverse my field with eleven Clemson players in healthy pursuit. I was looking down a lane of blockers that stretched for fifty yards downfield. A Clemson player would be about to catch me; then I would see a South Carolina player step between me and the tackler and cut him down at the knees. It was like running inside a colonnade. It was a fine life I was leading that day and I felt like the fastest, sweetest, dandiest boy who ever breathed the clean air of Clemson. When I hit their thirty-yard line running faster than I ever thought I could run, there was not a Clemson player left standing on the field. When I crossed the goal line, I fell to my knees and thanked the God who made me swift for the privilege of feeling like the king of the world for one glorious, unrepeatable day of my young life.

  After George Lanier made the extra point and we stopped Clemson’s drive on our own twenty-three-yard line and the final whistle blew, I thought I would be killed by the rush of Carolina fans onto the field. I would have died in perfect rapture. A photographer caught the exact moment when Sallie found me in the crowd, leapt into my arms, and kissed me on the mouth while screaming at the same time. That picture was on the front page of every sports section in the state the following morning, even in Pelzer.

  At midnight that night, I walked outside Yesterday’s restaurant in Five Points where my parents had taken us to dinner and felt diminished when that marvelous day was over.
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  The following week, bumper stickers appeared on automobiles the length and breadth of South Carolina saying, “Kick it to Wingo, Clemson.” Herman Weems of the Columbia State newspaper wrote a column about me the following Sunday, calling me the scholar-athlete and the greatest secret weapon in the history of South Carolina football. “He’s not that good a football player,” Coach Bass was quoted in the article, “but I’ll never convince anybody down at Clemson of that fact.”

  In the last paragraph, Herman mentioned that I was dating the girl with the highest academic ranking in our class and that she was pretty as a picture to boot. That was Sallie’s favorite part of the article.

  It was only a few weeks later that I was approached by a contingent of SAEs, including Bo Gailliard, who asked if I would be interested in joining their fraternity. I politely declined, as I did when I was solicited by seven other fraternities that same year. Never has the word no held such ethereal beauty for me. The Tri Delts sent a contingent of some of the prettiest and most popular girls in the school to enlist Sallie in their sorority. In a phrase that I loved, Sallie told them they could kiss her mill-town ass.

  I would never again have a day of such complete transfiguration. I played good football for the rest of my career at Carolina but I would learn that nature is uncommonly cheap in its allocation of gold. If I had been abundantly talented I would have had many such days. But I knew I was a special and lucky man to have been granted even one. At the lowest point in my college career, I had met the girl I would love for the rest of my life; at the highest, I had scaled the heights of my talent as an athlete and knew for a single day what it felt like to be famous. It didn’t feel like much at all and that surprised me.

  After graduation, Sallie and I were married in Pelzer with Luke as my best man and Savannah as Sallie’s maid of honor. We honeymooned on Melrose Island in the small two-room house that Luke had built for himself on two acres Dad had given him on a point of land near the bridge. Savannah stayed with Mom and Dad for a week and Luke lived on his shrimp boat as I showed Sallie everything I knew about life in the lowcountry.