The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  DEAR MR. PIEDMONT,

  I did not like your letter. Since it is rather inconsequential whether a public school teacher agrees with a dictum passed down from his superintendent or not, my only recourse is to answer you without regard to our positions. First of all, if I was expected to come to Yamacraw Island to preside over the intellectual decimation of forty kids, you selected the wrong boy. If I was expected to remain silent when intolerable conditions presented themselves, then once again, I should not have been sent to the island. Even though these kids were unfortunate enough to be born on Yamacraw Island, it will take you and a team of varsity scholars to convince me they don’t deserve the same quality of education received by children in Beaufort itself. If you disagree with this, then I feel it is you who must question your suitability for the job of superintendent for the entire county.

  My letter went on to justify the extracurricular voyages of the boat.

  The boat has transported supplies, films, guest speakers, exchange students, groceries, and injured students to and from the island. The boat has brought the Sullivan Reading Program, an overhead projector, a tape recorder, a record player, and a film strip projector, thereby bringing Yamacraw into the audio-visual age. The boat took me to Beaufort five days in a row one week to arrange a Halloween trip for children who had never heard of trick or treat. The boat, Dr. Piedmont, … has opened vistas, horizons, and possibilities that never existed before.

  I ended the letter with a pronouncement that I am sure Piedmont interpreted as a threat, a gesture of incredible and unforgivable defiance.

  Neither Mrs. Brown nor I was pleased with the latest memorandum. We will be present at the next meeting of the Beaufort County Board of Education. I will give an introduction to the problems and tribulations of Yamacraw Island. I will also pay for the gas I use that night.

  Sincerely,

  PAT CONROY

  The letter was full of the usual bombast and fustian I reserved for my periods of anger, but I wanted to appear before the board of education very much. I felt it could not know the conditions on the island if it were dependent on Piedmont and Bennington for the information. The board was the one group that could initiate measures strong enough to reverse the hopelessness of the Yamacraw School. In it lay the Christ-powers to revive the prone Lazarus of education. And I wanted to ask it if the whole county stunk with ignorance and brain-rot; if Yamacraw was an isolated example of decay, or if this were an acceptable standard in schools with all black populations. Something was dawning on me then, an idea that seemed monstrous and unspeakable. I was beginning to think that the schools in Beaufort were glutted with black kids who did not know where to search for their behinds, who were so appallingly ignorant that their minds rotted in their skulls, and that the schools merely served as daytime detention camps for thousands of children who would never extract anything from a book, except a page to blow their noses or wipe their butts.

  I wanted the members of the board to tell me this. I wanted the board to know that I had graduated from one of their all white schools with an education I was proud of, with an education that prepared me well for any goddam thing life wanted to shove in my way. I required an explanation from them. What was it I had stumbled on, why was it, and what were they going to do about it? It was incomprehensible to me that a group could serve the public in such a capacity and not be frothing at the mouth when confronted with pure, crystalline evidence that a generation of Beaufort’s children lay slaughtered in the mortared recesses of her classrooms. I was very young then. I really thought people would care.

  I penned the letter on a Wednesday and planned to appear before the board at its monthly meeting the following Tuesday. Mrs. Brown dropped by Friday to tell me that she did not want to make any waves. I told her I understood. I jotted down notes and tried to write a speech with lean and muscular prose, prose without diplomatic accouterments, prose that was strong, masculine, and direct. Each day at lunch I planned what I would say to the board. I wanted to cause an explosion that would reverberate through the attics and cellars of its ivory tower. Every time I glanced at Sidney or Samuel, Fred or Prophet, Richard or Lincoln, I grew angrier. I had something to say. I planned to say it on a Tuesday night in the middle of November. But I was young.

  At ten o’clock on the Tuesday of my appearance before the board, I saw a car drive in front of the school. From the car emerged Ezra Bennington, Morgan Randel, the deputy superintendent of administration, and a bulky, bald-headed man I had never seen before.

  Mrs. Brown nearly blanched when she saw this august group emerge from the car. She fixed her hair, froze her students to silence by threatening death or worse if they misbehaved, then went out her door to act as welcoming committee. The bald man came into my room with Bennington and introduced himself.

  “I’m Charlie Miller,” he said. “I’m on the school board.”

  “I’m Pat Conroy. I’m going to talk to you guys tonight.”

  Miller flashed a quick glance to Bennington, whose eyes were roaming like water bugs over the classroom. The room was in its usual disarray: papers, books, magazines, and games littered the desks and tables and spilled over onto the floor. Miller motioned for me to follow him to the hallway, which I did. Bennington followed close behind me. They closed the door. Miller looked at me with what I interpreted at first as malevolence. Then his face sweetened into what might be mistaken in some circles for a smile. He leered, cleared his throat, and tried to arrange his bulldog features into something approaching amicability.

  “I talked with some of the board members about your visit, Conroy.”

  “Yes, sir?” I asked, a trifle intimidated at the show of power.

  “We decided not to let you appear. We got a lot of serious business to tend to on that there board. We can’t be listening to every teacher who thinks he’s got a gripe.”

  “Then you are refusing to let me appear.”

  “That’s right, son.”

  Bennington hovered on the edge of this conversation, a hint of a smile etched into his face. I wanted to knock hell out of both of them, but the intimidation factor was too large. And besides, Mr. Randel had come with them.

  Morgan Randel was the deputy superintendent in charge of administration and personnel. He had once been in control of the Beaufort district until Piedmont had eclipsed his star along with Bennington’s during the consolidation of the county systems. Whoever sent him along merited a decoration for strategy, for Bennington and Miller could have no greater assurance that I would not erupt and tell them to kiss my fanny than Randel’s presence. He was my single ally in the administration.

  Our friendship had been sealed since March 14, 1962. On that day I played a baseball game against Wade Hampton High School from the next county. Mr. Randel’s son, Randy, was scheduled to pitch that day. Randy had become one of my best friends over the year. We had sat together in Gene Norris’ English class, had both played football and basketball, and had planned to go to his grandmother’s house in Newberry to play golf the weekend following the Wade Hampton game. We were incurable jocks.

  Randy was a brash, witty kid, fifteen years old and six feet four inches tall. He joked incessantly, mimicked his teachers and classmates, and took infinite pleasure in teasing Gene Norris during class. Randy was also an extremely gifted athlete. He could throw a football fifty yards, sink a ten-foot hook shot with monotonous regularity, and throw one of the finest curve balls I had ever seen. The general consensus was that baseball was Randy’s finest sport. It was widely assumed that the tall, gangly Randy would one day pitch in the major leagues. He was that good.

  The day we played Hampton was cloudy and threatening. It was a day between seasons, bizarre and somehow portentous, strange with gray clouds and eerie patches of light. But Randy pitched well. His fast ball looked untouchable from my vantage point and no one came near the curve. He struck out five of the first seven batters who faced him. Not one Hampton player had succeeded in reaching first base. On
this day, Randy looked serious as he rocked forward in his long, patient wind-up, then flung the ball with impressive speed toward the catcher’s mitt. An opening-day crowd cheered him on and grew more excited each time another Hampton player struck out. His father shouted encouragement to him from the stands.

  In the fourth inning Randy threw a hard, fast ball and the umpire called it a strike. Then, suddenly, Randy lurched forward on the mound and fell to the earth. In that moment—though none of us knew it, and though all of us would try to deny it, and though none of us would ever understand it—Randy was dead. There was a confused rush of coaches toward the mound. The coach of Wade Hampton became hysterical and, in a voice that was ancient, haunting, and terrified, began screaming, “The boy’s dying.”

  At this moment, I saw Mr. Randel coming over the fence, striding toward his fallen son. He was a strong, handsome man with a stern, capable face. I cannot remember if Mr. Randel ran to his son, because, somewhere in the panic, everything slowed down for me and the world softened into a nameless, agonizing dance that dulled the screams of women and the pain of men who could not bring the boy back to life. I watched Mr. Randel as he looked into his son’s face and felt his son’s heart and held his son’s hand. And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times. I saw Mr. Randel’s strong face loosen up at the seams and melt from strength to horror. I saw his face at the moment he surrendered his son to the earth, when his loss was driven like a nail into his soul, when he understood that his oldest son was dead and that nothing would ever be the same again. The sinew of Mr. Randel’s face relaxed, his jaw grew slack, and grief spread along his face like a rash. It was like watching a second death.

  An ambulance came and a doctor emerged, took one look and drove a needle full of adrenaline directly into Randy’s heart, but there was no heart, no soul, no movement, no laugh, no smile. Mr. Randel turned his head away from his son as though tomorrow was too painful to face or want to face. The ambulance left the infield in slow motion. Randy’s feet dangled from the back window. As I watched his feet through my fog, I prayed on my knees that Randy would somehow be spared. But the dangling feet of my friend—that was the looseness, the complete looseness of death.

  So I could not argue with Bennington and Miller when Mr. Randel was with them. I had gone to Randy’s funeral and seen his mother and father paralyzed with grief among the flowers encircling the casket. I went to see them soon after the funeral to give them a poem I had written about Randy. My first poem. A poem that offered Randy to God when I secretly could not envision the necessity for any god to strike such sorrow in the midst of a family.

  Years passed and I became a part of the Randel family and subliminally tried to become a substitute for the lost Randy. Julia, his lovely, soft mother, for years after Randy’s death would cry whenever I came over, and I would cry with her. When I went to The Citadel, the Randels paid for most of the first year with a scholarship established in Randy’s memory. We wrote frequently during those years at college and I saw them often on vacations. They came to see me on Parents’ Day at The Citadel.

  So when Mr. Randel accompanied Bennington and Miller to Yamacraw that day, there was no way I could tell the group what I was thinking. Mr. Randel and I had an unwritten, unspoken law that we would never cross swords professionally, that our friendship was too intense and personal to be tarnished in some abortive, temporal crusade concerning our jobs. He did not want me to be on the damn island. It embarrassed him to be a part of this mission. He winked at me when he passed and we later talked basketball in front of the school.

  When they left, I realized that Piedmont’s empire was not going to be assaulted easily. I also knew that I was too young to handle the blitzkrieg that had just rolled over me. I had accepted Miller’s ultimatum without a fight. I, along with the school, was just being shoved under another part of the rug.

  Piedmont was a firm believer in that ancient, time-destroying remnant of the Paleolithic era, the chain of command. The greatest of all sins in his administrative lexicon was for someone far beneath him in rank to catapult over a series of links in the sacred chain to confront him or even worse, unspeakably, to present a complaint to the school board. This is why I was honored with the show of power, the flexing of the administrative biceps, the flashing of the talons when I wrote Piedmont that I was going to appear before the board. According to the stone tablet of administrative procedure, I should first have presented a complaint to Mrs. Brown, who would refer it to Mr. Sedgwick, who would mull over it for several weeks, then submit it for perusal by the antique Bennington, who would eventually and very timorously lay it on the tabernacle of Piedmont’s desk. Piedmont thought the chain of command was the next best thing to organized religion. I thought it was the most inefficient thing since the stone wheel. It simply did not work. In November I asked Mrs. Brown if I could take my class on a field trip in the spring. She said no. I asked that she pass my request to Mr. Sedgwick for approval. She said no again. End of chain of command. But Piedmont had studied several books on administrative procedure from the groves of Columbia University. All of these books concurred that the successful superintendent demanded strict adherence to the chain. In my chain Brown was terrified of Sedgwick, who trembled at the wrath of the unforgiving Bennington, who trembled at the thought of annoying Piedmont. Piedmont did not realize that his staff reserved the same affection for him that Russian peasants held for Ivan the Terrible. Nor did Piedmont ever quite understand or forgive my writing him letters instead of writing to the three other frail and rusty links in the chain. Piedmont, regardless of his ruthlessness or the fact that he could be a genuine son of a bitch, got things done. He could deal in facts, figures, numerals, air conditioners, pencil sharpeners, chalk, water pumps, and groceries. He could relate to people.

  Piedmont wrote me in the middle of December and asked me to meet with him and Mr. Sedgwick. In this meeting we would discuss the “exorbitant” gas bill. I looked forward to this meeting, especially since I felt I had chickened out of a confrontation with the board of education. Face to face, I thought I could challenge Piedmont to come to the school, visit with the parents, and decide for himself what the school needed. Sedgwick had fulfilled his obligations as administrative head with a mercurial visit to the island at the end of November. He flitted through the school building in a five-minute sprint, congratulated me on using the Sullivan and SRA reading programs, and left as quickly as he could. An officious man, Sedgwick now could look Piedmont in the eye and declare he had analyzed the Yamacraw situation firsthand by braving the river brine for an eyewitness visit. He never returned to the school as long as I was there. He also infuriated Mrs. Brown by completely ignoring her presence. Nor did I wish to be the one to explain to her that ol’ Sedgwick had this thing about niggers.

  So Piedmont, Sedgwick, and I would form a strangely diverse triad when we assembled to discuss the future of the Yamacraw School. Sedgwick selected a Friday in January for the conclave to meet in his Bluffton office. The Friday happened to coincide with the last day of my endurance test in the river, the terrible week of cold along the coast. I was in no mood to pander to the tender sensibilities of administrators who needed to flex their biceps for my benefit. Nor did I feel like waging war about my commuting. In my mind, I was not wedded to the island, nor would I be guilty of bigamy if I went home to Barbara each night. I had never heard of a school board in America with the authority to force a teacher to live in a certain place. I planned to fight Piedmont tooth and claw for the right to commute.

  Only Piedmont did not show. He sent Bennington in his place. Bennington and Sedgwick were to conduct the meeting and report its results to Piedmont—all praise to the chain of command. I walked into Sedgwick’s office garbed in my winter splendor, boots dripping, gloves sticking out of my jacket, and hat arranged haphazardly over tousled hair. Zeke had informed me that Bennington would preside at the meeting instea
d of Piedmont. Zeke also told me that he had heard they were going to make me pay for the upkeep of the boat.

  “Wanna bet, Zeke, me fine man,” I said.

  “Just telling you what I heard. I’d quit that job so fast it’d make their eyes open, if I were you.”

  Bennington greeted me effusively when I came in, grinning his cunning, endearing grin and asking me how I had withstood the cold that week. This, evidently, was a big moment in Sedgwick’s life, a chance to impress his superiors with his ability to handle the niggling problems that arose on his end of the plantation. He was nervous and plucked absently at his chin while he stared intently at a piece of paper on his desk. He shook his head negatively, painfully, as if the piece of paper were a moist dung sample deposited before him for reluctant analysis. But Bennington, the lead mule in the odd pack, began the discussion by apologizing for Dr. Piedmont’s absence. He blamed the absence on the ubiquitous whipping boy of southern education—the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

  “Doctor Piedmont has asked me to take his place and to let his feelings in this matter be known. ”

  “Now, Mr. Conroy,” Sedgwick started, clearing his throat impressively, “this gas bill is out of the question. It is entirely too much money. Thirty-four dollars, I believe. We cannot be expected to pay for the gas you use to get yourself to work each morning.”