by Pat Conroy
This was the first time that I realized how seriously the kids took the supernatural. During the planning sessions for the Halloween trip, we talked about ghosts, witches, and warlocks, but had done so in a lighthearted vein. We had also talked about these things in daylight. The Valentine’s Day experience told me that the mythology of my childhood was the frightening reality for Yamacraw children and that they were actually spirit-haunted and aware of silent demons lurking on deserted trails and behind fallen trees. We would talk about these beliefs in class. A bit wiser after the dwarf-ghost fiasco, I listened to the children recite story after story of ghosts who walked the island by night. Nor did I try to ridicule the stories or make the children renounce their fears as superstitions. It would be like trying to convince a religious child that he worshiped a myth instead of a god.
Everyone had seen a ghost or knew someone who had.
The ghosts were often the spirits of people who had recently died on the island. A spirit would roam the island for three to six months after its body was buried. Then the spirit would tire of wandering and return to the grave. Mary told of her cousin who had seen a ghost.
“He walk down road in dark. He alone when he walk by fence at Cooper River end. He look in front of him and see a man walk through the fence to him. The ghost have his head in his hands and it walk straight through the fence. My cousin be so scare. He scream but the ghost keep comin’ at him. The head make awful noise like dead man in the ghost’s hand. Cousin run all the way to his house. He scream so much. Then he git sick. Stay sick for days and almost die.”
Then Saul told of a ghost his mother had seen on the road to the club. “She be walkin’ to the club. She look over at some tree. She see sumpin’ move a bit. Then she see a ghost. Jes’ the ghost’s legs though. Nuttin’ else but two legs. Legs start walkin’ to my mama. She scream and run. Legs come to get her, but she run too fast.”
“Did she ever find out whose legs they were, Saul?” I asked.
“Legs of a dead man,” he answered with authority.
“Then I’d have run like hell too.”
Top Cat lowered his voice to relate his story of the underworld. “I be out one night walkin’. I so scare. It dark and I able to see nuttin’. I hurry fast to git home ’cause I know there be ghosts around. Then I see it. Ghost come fast ridin’ on a horse. It Adam. Man what been drowned a couple days befo’. He ride fast and I be scare. I fall down and wait for him to be past. He go by and not stop for nuttin’. He ride until he be gone. I run home so fast.”
Everyone in the room had felt the presence of the supernatural and every child believed implicitly in the presence of ghosts. No one doubted a single story and all listened with an intensity and fascination difficult to describe. Ghosts without heads, without bodies, without hands, without feet; ghosts dressed in white, black, or naked; ghosts of all sizes and descriptions; ghosts who floated, who walked, who ran, who rode cows or horses. Frank had once felt a ghost sitting beside him on a wagon. His horse had stopped suddenly and refused to go farther. He looked to his left and the ghost was seated beside him—a strange, eerie figure who remained rigid and silent even when Frank yelled. The horse was frozen with fear and stood motionless in his tracks. Frank very prudently fled.
When the kids finished telling about the ghosts who dwelt on the island, I tried to tell about the dwarf ghost who lived in my house but was hooted down.
In March there was a death on the island. Like most deaths on Yamacraw, it came with unforeshadowed swiftness; there was no lingering or gradual wasting away or bedside farewells. A heart attack felled Blossom Smith on a Saturday, an islander raced to Ted Stone’s house, Stone immediately radioed for a rescue helicopter from Savannah. Blossom was carried to an open field near the nightclub, where half the island gathered around her wailing and praying. The helicopter appeared, landed rapidly and efficiently, received the motionless Blossom into the dark angel with the rotating wings, lifted into the sky in a maelstrom of debris and air, then disappeared over the top of the trees. It was all very quick, very impressive, and very futile. Blossom died that night in Savannah surrounded by strangers and the ammonia smells of a death ward.
Death meant the cessation of all activity on the island and, though school was in session, no children appeared at the door on the day of the funeral. Though it was a time of intense emotional sorrow, a funeral was also an important social event. Relatives in Savannah and Hilton Head hired an excursion boat to transport mourners to the island. The immediate family was fed and consoled. The old women of the island sat around and reminisced about their girlhood. They also wondered out loud who was going to be called to the Lord’s bosom next.
Early Tuesday morning a contingent of island men went to the “colored cemetery” to dig a grave. Two dapper undertakers accompanied the body from Savannah on the excursion boat. The whole proceeding exuded the air of a ritual performed so many times that everyone knew exactly what was expected and everyone had a part to play. As I drove to the cemetery, I was taken aback by the number of mourners who had come to the island. The road leading to the cemetery was thick with well-dressed black people slowly walking toward the open hole that would serve as Blossom’s final resting place.
Many of my students were already at the gravesite when I arrived. They looked faintly bewildered by the fuss and rising sadness. The procession of people continued unbroken through the woods. Most of them talked animatedly, laughed with mild restraint, and seemed to be enjoying the festival beneath the trees. Several relatives threw their arms around each other in greeting. But all grew rather silent as they neared the deep, rooted scar gouged out of the earth near a large, straight pine tree in the cemetery. Three saplings, freshly cut, lay perpendicular across the open grave. Beside the grave, her face powdered and rouged in death, her body neatly dressed, her hands folded across her small bosom, her casket decorated with ludicrous frills, lay Blossom Smith.
Behind the big pine trees, a vast and greening marsh stretched for a mile before it paused for the river. Magnolia trees towered and presided over the ceremony. The cemetery was hauntingly beautiful. Yamacraw’s lone deacon, a bespectacled man named William Brown, bowed his head reverently to begin the ceremony. “Jesus took you from us. He took you to be with him.” His voice was plaintive, immensely evocative, and profoundly sad. His sermon was almost a cry, a lament from one who did not understand death, but who accepted it as a calling of man by his creator, a manifestation of a larger, unfathomable, mysterious, yet loving presence in the universe.
Then everyone present walked beside the open coffin and viewed Blossom for the last time. A chorus of older women sang a spiritual with voices of ancient, incomparable sorrow. The column moved slowly, laboriously, as each mourner paused to look deeply into the image of death. Some reached out and lightly touched Blossom’s face. Others looked at her, then covered their eyes and wept. Some spoke to her aloud and bade farewell as though she would be gone for only a short time. Some became slightly hysterical and had to be comforted by a team of women who seemed to be present for that purpose. Some spoke the name of Jesus aloud. Some stared at Blossom, then joined the grieving chorus that rallied new voices with every breath.
Flowers abounded beside the casket, carefully tended by the two undertakers, who seemed to encourage the atmosphere of sorrow and hysteria by their dramatic presentation of each new part of the ceremony. Most of the flowers were plastic, a vivid example of a twentieth-century incursion of Yamacraw. Aunt Ruth’s husband had been the island undertaker before his death. He had fashioned pine coffins in a shed near his house. He would have none of the tacky death chambers wrought by factories and peddled by the oily undertakers of Savannah. Death on the island was cleaner and less packaged when he was alive. The plastic flowers, with their senseless bid for immortality, added an ugliness to the ceremony hard to define.
As I mused upon the plastic flowers, an attractive black man darted from the viewing line, grabbed a handful of plastic flowers fr
om Blossom’s stockpile, and walked swiftly to a grave fifty yards away. This caused an audible rumble from the crowd and for a few dramatic moments it looked as though a band of men were going to pursue the brash thief through the graveyard. Then the man with the flowers stopped abruptly and placed the flowers gingerly on the grave. “That’s his mama,” someone whispered. “He still loves his mama and miss her so much.” Everyone was visibly moved by this show of filial devotion, except one man who uttered, “Why don’t that boy buy his own flowers?”
After every single person filed by the open casket and responded appropriately to the sight of Blossom’s lifeless body, an old lady stepped out of the crowd holding a small girl not more than three years old. To my utter disbelief, the woman very slowly passed the girl over the casket into the arms of a waiting man. The little girl looked down and saw Blossom’s dead face and became hysterical. Three times the girl was passed over Blossom’s body, and her screaming grew louder each time. I was horrified but did not feel that it would be enthusiastically applauded if I rushed in and rescued the girl. I seemed to be the only one upset by this ritual. I learned later that the little girl was Blossom’s granddaughter, who had lived with Blossom before she died. To protect the girl from Blossom’s spirit returning from the grave to haunt her, the girl had to be passed over Blossom’s body three times. Thus freed, the girl disappeared into the crowd still screaming.
A little while later, the singing having subsided and the weeping having become softer, the two undertakers gave a signal to the six men who acted as pallbearers. The six men lifted the casket and placed it on the saplings that lay across the grave. They then looped ropes around the casket and lifted it slightly into the air. Several other men slid the saplings out of the way. The casket was then lowered into the hole. Four men started shoveling dirt. At this time there was a stirring among the crowd. A palmetto tree near the marsh was rattling and shaking as though a powerful wind was blowing through it. Only there was no wind blowing and no other trees around it were affected. A few women screamed and the entire crowd shrank back to size up the significance of the event. I tried to scientifically explain what I was witnessing and found no ready or easy explanation. The palmetto then grew still again, and I heard someone behind me say, as in a prayer, “That’s Blossom tellin’ us she still around.”
When Conrad, Gordon, and Bean blasted off from Cape Kennedy, amidst the swirl of thoughts that passed swiftly through their minds, the hundreds of fragmental recollections that flashed before them at the instant of takeoff, the one that never occurred to them was that eighteen children and one teacher on Yamacraw Island shouted the last ten digits of the countdown and cheered as the rocket lifted off the launch pad on the first step of the journey to the moon. After we cheered, Mrs. Brown popped her large head in the doorway and informed me that the state government was paying me good money to teach the children from the textbook.
“We are required by law to finish the textbook, Mr. Conroy. Required by law. If we don’t do it, no tellin’ if we get paid or not at the end of the year.”
“Yes, ma’am, I am just getting ready to rip through the textbook. All you punks haul out your textbooks,” I shouted.
The kids dutifully reached into their desks, knocked the layers of dust off these neglected tomes, and spread them officially on their desks. This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Brown, and she retreated back to her side of the cave.
“Now take those dusty books, those worthless pieces of garbage, and put them back in your desks.” I had yet to find a single textbook that I felt could be utilized in the class. All of them were too difficult or too irrelevant to force on students already killed by a system that demanded certain progress through textbooks. To keep Mrs. Brown off my back, though, I would go to extensive trouble.
“Now my dear Yamacrawans, we have three brave men going to the moon to walk around looking for big rocks. Conrad, Gordon, and Bean are their names.”
“They not gone to moon,” Frank told me.
“Of course they are. We just heard them blast off.”
“They ain’t goin’,” Oscar agreed with Frank.
“Didn’t you guys watch Armstrong and Collins on the moon this summer?”
“Yeah.” They all nodded their heads.
“Didn’t you see the pictures of the moon on television?”
“Yeah,” they agreed again.
“Well, then you know people have been to the moon.”
“No,” Lincoln said. “They ain’t goin’ to the moon. They burn up if they go to the moon.”
“That’s the sun you’re talking about. The moon isn’t hot,” I said.
“They still ain’t goin’ to the moon,” Ethel said.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“They just ain’t,” Ethel said.
“They flyin’ off somewhere, messin’ around, then comin’ back and tell people they have done been to the moon,” explained Big C.
“Gang, as your teacher, as the person responsible for stuffing knowledge into your porous little brains, I am ordering you to believe that those men are going to the moon.”
“No, Conrack,” said Sidney.
“Men just foolin’,” added his twin, Samuel.
“Moon too far, Mr. Conroy.”
“Moon too hot.”
“Moon too cold, girl. Not hot.”
“Shut yo’ mout’. I say moon hot.”
“Moon got man,” Prophet said.
“The man in the moon, Prophet?” I asked.
“See ’um at night,” Prophet went on.
“There are really going to be some men on the moon tomorrow night.”
“Oh, Conrack,” Cindy Lou said, “you believe anythin” on radio. They ain’t goin’ nowheres.”
“Why, Cindy?”
“Just ain’t. Don’t ask me no questions no mo’.”
CHAPTER 10
SOMEHOW MY DAYS on the island seemed numbered and I grew restless and impatient with the sluggish pace of learning in the classroom. I wanted the twins to become brilliant readers and writers and my stomach knotted each time I heard them stuttering and wrestling with the incomprehensible mysteries of one-syllable words. I wanted Richard to leap and bound ahead of his peers in other schools in other places, wanted him to devour books, write witty letters to congressmen, speak to rotary clubs, and shine like a fallen star on his abandoned, lovely island. I wanted to remove the tongues from Prophet and Fred, replace them with silver and brass, and assure them that they never would have to cower before strangers again, that their speech would never humiliate or embarrass them again. I wanted to give Saul the gift of height and Lincoln the gift of slimness. I wanted Mary to be aware and proud of her aloof, unspoken beauty and Anna to somehow fathom the wonder of her smile.
I have read a number of books by teachers who had brilliant success by using certain methods. I would stumble upon an idea in the morning that seemed surpassingly clever and relevant, then find it foolish and absurd by afternoon. Or what appeared ordained by the gods in the autumn seemed commonplace and senseless by spring. What fired the imagination of my students one week bored and stultified them the next. So there was constant shifting in emphasis, approach, and material. The one great knave that I hunted was boredom, and if I caught him lurking anywhere in the room, in corners, by blackboards, behind the covers of books, or in glazed, anesthetized eyes, we went to something else quickly, shifted in midstream, danced, sang, fought, or milked rats. But always we spoke of the world beyond the river. The cities with their stables of cars, their flow of people, their massive stores, their baseball teams, and their hidden dangers. The kids would ask questions (“Tell us ’bout New York?”) and I would tell of my first trip to the City of Stone and they would tell me of letters from cousins, of the hard living, big drinking, music-loving city where the lucky relatives had migrated. Always we turned outward to where they would drift when they left Yamacraw, to the world of lights and easy people, to the dark cities that would devour
their innocence and harden their dreams.
The one goal I developed the first week that never changed was to prepare the kids for the day when they would leave the island for the other side. Their experience in driving oxen, cleaning fish, and catching crabs could not be classified as excellent preparation for the streets of large cities. Anything that I could construe as relevant to the day when they would leave the island had a place in the classroom. Thus Jimmy Sue could look through the Sears Roebuck catalogue without encountering too much lip from her teacher. And Saul could practice tapping his desk with two pencils because he dreamed of playing drums in a jazz band. Yet I worried that I did things more by instinct than by logic and would be hard-pressed to explain why I let the twins mold clay when their literacy was questionable, except that they seemed to enjoy it.
During the winter these thoughts flowed about the classroom like uninvited birds. We were prisoners during the cold months, for the parents would not entrust their children to any man to cross the waters in the bad season. So we created a world in the classroom, chained to seats and the same walls, looking out the window at the same trees, waiting for the time to move and travel again. In discussions I found that the kids liked the idea of leaving the island for other places among other people. I promised them that we would hit the road again when the weather warmed. It was during the introspective, wood-burning days of winter, when a kind of malcontented lethargy gripped us, that I found the letter that would provide the means to the grandest, most improbable voyage of all.
The letter was from a lady in Falls Church, Virginia, named Judy Hanst. It was a year old and was addressed to Mrs. Brown. The letter lay fallow on the bottom of a Himalayan stack of catalogues and debris that Mrs. Brown had thrust upon me during my interregnum as principal. Mrs. Hanst had heard about the island during Senate subcommittee meetings on hunger in America. She was moved to write a letter to Mrs. Brown and offer to help her in any way she could, with books or supplies, money or food. The letter reflected a sincere author. She said she had friends who would help financially and spiritually. The letter was a passport, a ticket, a commitment of the soul. Something about the phrasing of the letter convinced me that the unseen, unsung, and unanswered Judy Hanst would not have forgotten the island and still would want to help. Looking up from my desk, I said, “Gang, listen up. A hot-dog announcement: we are going to Washington, D.C.”