by Pat Conroy
I could never place this dichotomy of attitude, could never understand it, could never be comfortable around such a casual, unself-conscious use of the word nigger, but ultimately came to accept it as the way Zeke and Ida were, no more and no less. They instinctively liked all people but had been conditioned to dislike and depreciate blacks. Several conversations with Ida were enough to convince me that all the sermonizing in the world could not shake the foundation of her thirty-three years in Bluffton.
I came from the river one day in the spring, and Ida said, “Pat, I just done a terrible thing today. Little Eddie has been havin’ trouble with his glands again, so I decided to call a specialist in Savannah to have a look.”
“It’s best to go to a specialist when you think somethin’s really the matter, Ida.”
“Yeh, that’s why I called. Well, this doctor gets on the phone and tells me to bring Eddie in on Thursday morning, ten o’clock sharp.”
“Nothin’ wrong with that, Ida.”
Then she lowered her voice and said, “Pat, I do believe I called me a nigger doctor.”
“No,” I said, shrinking back in mock horror.
“It ain’t funny. Wouldn’t make no difference to a stupid bastard like yourself, anyhow. But goddam it, I ain’t sending my young ’un to no nigger doctor.”
“Why do you think this doctor is black, Ida?”
“He talked like a nigger,” she answered. “You know that funny way niggers talk. You can tell a nigger a mile away when he opens his mouth. And I looked at his street in the phone book, and Pat, I ain’t never heard of no street by this name. Have you?”
I looked at the address and professed ignorance.
“Only a nigger doctor would have an address on a street no one’s ever heard of,” she continued. “I think the phone company should tell you who is and who isn’t a nigger doctor.”
“He’s probably as good as any of the white doctors, Ida.”
“Goddam it, Pat, if I don’t think you’re part nigger yourself sometimes. Now tell me quick what I kin do. Kin I call him down there, very polite and all, and say, Hello, I made an appointment with you the other day, but I didn’t know you were a nigger doctor. I meant no harm and I thank you for your kindness. I just feel that a person should go to his own kind.’ You think that’d do it?”
“That’d do it O.K., Ida. He’d probably tell you to get laid.”
“And I’d kick him in the goddam ass if he did,” she bristled.
Yet within her own family circle, Ida was considered an unregenerated liberal. Sometimes her mother, sisters, and in-laws would stop by her house to exchange gossip while I was still there. These exchanges always amazed me. The subject of race was a violent and recurrent theme.
“If one of them nigger teachers even lays a hand on my child, I’ll kill her deader than hell. I’ll kill her, I swear on a Bible, I’ll kill her,” one of Ida’s sisters would say.
“Shore you’d kill her,” someone would say.
“If one of them niggers even looks cross-eyed at my girl, she’s gonna have me sittin’ on her ass,” another voice of reason rang out.
“Shore you would, honey.”
In the midst of all this, Ida’s youngest sister would turn to her little girl and ask softly, “What are you, sugar?” And the little girl would reply dramatically, “I’m a sweet little Christian girl who loves the baby Jesus.” And everybody would answer chorally, “Sure you love Jesus, honey. We all love Jesus.” Except Ida. She would mouth the word bullshit and wink at me.
Then the harangue would continue on the other side of the kitchen table. “I mean if these niggers want to teach in white schools, they can’t go around knockin’ white children. Otherwise, I’m gonna have to knock their goddam heads off.”
“Shore you will, honey.”
Then Ida would shock the gathering by declaring, “Hell, I told Eddie’s teacher to beat the shit out of him if he gave her any sass. She’s a damn good teacher and a nice lady besides. I want her to hit my young ’un if he acts up. How else is she gonna teach ’im?”
“Why, Ida, sometimes you talk just plain trash.”
“You shore do, honey.”
“You’d let a nigger hit pore little Eddie?”
“Damn right, I would,” Ida answered.
Then, to heal the wounds opened by the argument, the youngest sister again would gaze worshipfully into the eyes of her child and say, “What are you, sugar?” And the fat, saccharine, little cherub would reply, “I’m a sweet little Christian girl who loves the baby Jesus.” And Ida would mouth the word bullshit again and wink.
At the end of September, a month which had assumed the dimensions of an eternity, I left my corner of the schoolroom for the more spacious quarters of the Buckner house. Taking all things in consideration, I had hated living in the school, shaving without a mirror with cold water, cooking in pots big enough to hold small cows, and sleeping on a cot sprinkled lightly with chalk dust. Chalk dust has a way of conquering a room, and I was faintly weary of waking up feeling like a butterfly wing or a powdered underarm. And I was tired of dwelling in the same place I worked. The whole situation was becoming unbearable.
A lot of frustration had to do with me. When I first envisioned myself on the island, a noble creature enshrined among the illiterate masses working in the primitive conditions that would have warmed the cockles of Henry Thoreau’s heart, I did not consider my compulsive need for friends and good conversation. I love people and collect friends like some people collect coins or exotic pipes. So far, the people of the island had “yassuhed” me to death. I was the white principal, a figure of authority, which in itself could not be trusted. The white people, without exception, were back-to-Africa advocates, believers in the small-brain theory, and as suspicious a bunch as I had ever met. To everybody I met, I flashed the toothy grin, the hearty salutation, and the slap-happy demeanor of someone desperately in need of friendship. But in the space of a month I had failed to establish any allegiances.
I had often fantasized myself as being the world’s greatest undiscovered poet, living in obscurity and biding my time until the seeds of greatness germinated and I would cast poems to the world. In the first month I tried to write these poems. In fact, I tried to write many things, but my mind was so boggled by the circumstances of my students and my own life was so uncertain and without direction that I found myself writing mawkish doggerel and prose of an extraordinary purplish tinge. The month of September was a ludicrous month and I was a ludicrous person.
There was another reason I wished to leave the schoolhouse. One night, as a storm gathered over the island, and the thunder rumbled menacingly above, I was lying in bed reading. The night was coal black except for brief intervals when lightning illuminated the sky. As I was reading, my head against the pillow, my bed underneath a window that afforded me a view of the playground, I felt a sudden strange and frightening sensation. I looked up and saw the face of a grinning black man wearing a beret, staring at me through the window. His face was less than two feet away from me. I was momentarily stunned with fright and shock. My face evidently reflected my emotions, for the man turned suddenly and raced off in a sprint toward the forest. As he ran, a maniacal, animalistic howl split the darkness. The howl grew fainter the farther away he ran. Massaging my heart, trying to get it beating again, I tried to make some move appropriate to the situation. The face had startled me; the noise had terrified me. The face, framed in the window, against the backdrop of night and storm, was a metaphor of lunacy, a blank and uncomprehending face with a smile devoid of feeling.
I was completely unnerved. I turned out the lights and tried to see if the creature still lurked around the school. I grabbed a baseball bat and went from window to window trying to catch a glimpse of my unnamed visitor. Since no shades hung from the windows, I had no way of preventing eyes from peering into my room, no way to shut myself off from the outside. Had I seen this stranger again, peeking in at me with those possessed eyes and d
emonic smile, I am certain I would have died of fright. The baseball bat slept with me that night, an uncomfortable but comforting bed partner. I slept miserably, fearing that whoever the guy was, there was always the chance he could break into the kitchen and gain access to my room. If he did, I promised myself, he would be facing an antagonist crazed with fear, a desire to live, and carrying a baseball bat that would remove heads if the occasion required. When the dawn finally arrived—oh blessed dawn, oh holy light, oh lovely sun—and I explained to Mrs. Brown what had happened, she told me that I had met face to face with Mad Billie.
I got to know Mad Billie well after the incident. He was the resident crazy person on the island, the genuine Quasimodo who earned his living and insured his survival by being considered crazy. Everyone called him Mad Billie to his face and behind his back. He chopped wood, carried packages, and delivered messages for people on the island, white and black alike. The Stones told me authoritatively that Billie was crazy, but harmless and would not hurt a fly. Mrs. Brown ran him off the school grounds every time he came around, saying that he was “retarded” and liable to molest the girls. Billie’s guise of craziness dropped whenever he spoke to me about Mrs. Brown. He hated her guts and his most common epithet directed toward her was “shitass.” Billie talked as if he were living a dream sequence, which perhaps he was. He cursed with gusto, smiled constantly and vacuously, talked strangely and vaguely and mostly to himself, and lived rather contentedly while playing his role of island lunatic.
Billie always seemed to know what was going on. One would find him all over the island—coming out of the woods carrying an ax, or running full speed up one of the island roads. He was rabbit fast and ran almost everywhere he went, often making the preternatural noise I heard on that stormy night. The noise was his personal trademark, a kind of calling card he carried with him. I walked with Billie to the beach one afternoon in October. He suddenly broke into a run, emitted his patented hellish whine, and disappeared into the forest. By now accustomed to Billie’s personal flamboyancies, I continued toward the beach. As I walked along, Billie froze me once more by making his noise from the branch of a tree I was walking under. When he saw me jump, he threw back his head and laughed his registered crazy laugh. Ol’ Billie was a weird guy.
Because of Billie I was glad to be moving out of the school, but tragedy brought me to the house I was renting. Viola Buckner, an island matriarch and an important bridge in the tenuous relationship between blacks and whites on the island, left home during the summer for an operation. She never returned to the island. When the doctors opened her stomach, they found that cancer had established complete dominion. She died several days later.
Her house was a neat, clapboard structure with a wilderness of vines and plants running over the yard and field around the house. Inside, the house was a patchwork of various woods, a gingerbread house of conflicting colors and patterns, pasteboard and tile thrown together at random. One attribute made this house a palace on Yamacraw. It possessed a shiny, glistening white commode, a treasure of inestimable value and an invention that overshadows the wheel as necessary for man’s comfort and convenience. Since I had sampled several of the Yamacraw privies, the presence of the toilet delighted me. The smell of feces and urine-stained wood has never struck me as a gratifying sensual experience and my middle-class background had not prepared me for life without scented toilet paper.
This particular commode was a monument of sorts. Viola, like the other black residents of the island, used the outhouse her entire life. But Viola had had dreams. She had the toilet installed several months before she died. She had told people that if she sat on her commode only one time, it would have been worth the price to her. As I stared at Viola’s toilet, I saluted her and her dream.
Some unknown hand had painted the bathroom walls a passionate pink. A calendar hung on one wall advertising Black Draught Laxative and Cardui Pills for women “who really want help on ‘those certain days.’ ” The living room was small and cramped with dark brown, squatty furniture. A picture of the risen Christ with the attendant angels swarming like pigeons around him held the place of honor above the oil heater. A great many framed photographs lined the walls. Photographs have always made me very sad. Here in Viola’s house, it seemed sacrilegious to stare at old photographs of nameless blacks, many of whom had died years before. The scrubbed faces of smiling people were beautifully captured by a lens that froze a brief, escaping moment, froze it into a single, essential study; the moment having passed, those lives continued and finally snuffed out. Age had faded the photographs.
One picture particularly caught and held my eye, not only for its inappropriateness to the other memorabilia in the room but also because of its haunting relationship to my own life. It was the picture of a Corsair, a stubby black fighter plane whose vintage years were in the early 1950s. My father, a career Marine, had often flown over our house when I was a first grader, dipping his wings and otherwise making his presence known to the tiny world assembled on the front yard below him. In my youth, when I looked to planes as sources of illimitable power and freedom and looked to my father as the tamer of the great black birds he controlled, the Corsair became a symbol of the past. As a boy I worshiped the Marine Corps, her planes, and her pilots. I built model airplanes and dreamed of the day when I would pilot a black plane through the blue skies. But the 1960s and the turbulence of social change and the ominous presence of the unholy Asian war killed my dreams of flight and soldierdom. From the ashes of the Corsair rose the passionate do-gooder.
Here, on Viola’s wall, in odd juxtaposition with the other artifacts of Viola’s house, flew a Corsair, the dark shadow of my childhood. Why the Corsair? I would never find out.
My bedroom resembled a small cave. With the shutters closed and the lights out, I could not see my five fingers in front of my face. I was in. I was home. My depression had nothing to do with my house. It was me.
All of the people were fishermen. Good fishermen. They were good because it was necessary to be good. The river was their supermarket, their corner store, and their largest garden. In my afternoon walks I would often come upon a silent group of men and women sitting on the edge of the dock, studying the long and jointed cane poles that rested on the weathered railings. A couple of men would always be crabbing, using the skinned corpse of a possum for bait. In a tree near the river was the skeleton of an osprey who had come too near the fishermen the previous summer. It must have been a large, beautiful bird with magnificent plumage, but its skeleton, hung like a warning to other fowl, was a portentous reminder that the fishermen were also hunters who killed for pleasure as well as for food.
They fished in conjunction with the tides. They read the message of the tides as easily as commuters read newspapers. I learned this after a very short time on the island. I would sometimes go down and watch them fish, although many times I would find no one on the dock. “The tides ain’t right,” it was explained. If the tides were not right, then there would be no fish, and if there were no fish, then there would be no people. And I would sit on the dock alone with the osprey’s skeleton behind me.
I tried to decipher the tides and what certain part of the cycle marked the coming of the fish. One thing I knew for certain, the people and the fish arrived together as though it had been arranged by a higher power for a long time. After watching several times it seemed that the people fished when the tide slowed somewhat and was beginning to consider a rest before the great reversal and the heavy flow of salt water in the opposite direction. When the water grew sluggish, relinquished its swiftness, rested against the marshes, and waited for the moon to assert its power again, then the people would appear with their shrimp and poles. They fished at the beginning and end of the tides, never in the middle. The fish abided by these rules.
I met many of the black islanders in this manner. They threw a thousand yassuhs in my direction, which made me uncomfortable, but I met some of the island’s most colorful figures when
I went down to talk with the fishermen.
Aunt Ruth was one. She was eighty years old, in marvelous physical condition, and possessed the face of a lost cherub. She loved conversation and enjoyed talking about her life on the island.
“I be on this island plenty long time. I the midwife over here. All these chillun on this island my chillun. I take them out of their mothers. I see ’em when they first be born. I deliver so many chillun. Over one hunnert. All those chillun you teach yonder schoolhouse. They all my chillun. My husband be the undertaker befo’ he die. I bring the people into the eart’. He put ’em back in.”
She would talk about her memories of the island in the past before modern civilization had ruined it. She remembered the first car that had driven on the island and the first plane that had flown overhead. She was a kind of repository of history and island lore. She also made potent batches of plum and blackberry wines at her house. She kept me supplied with both types during the entire year.
Quick Fella was another. I saw him pass the school one day on the way to the island church. The kids saw him at the same time and one of them shouted, “Oh Gawd, that Quick Fella move so fast.” He moved fast indeed. His gait was a modified sprint. He walked as though possessed by demons, a jerky, mechanical walk with his head bobbing and his arms pumping to keep time with his legs. He was lanky and thin and his stride was awesome. He disappeared into the trees swiftly, an apparition, a passing thought.
“Quick Fella never slow up. He jes’ keep on movin’ down the road so fast,” Lincoln said.
I met Quick Fella while he was fishing one day. I introduced myself and started a conversation. I learned two things about Quick Fella during that first talk: that he spoke in a rich language that seemed almost Elizabethan and that he gave an exceptionally detailed weather report.