by Pat Conroy
“I drive thirty miles to Bluffton, Doctor Piedmont. I pay for my gas until I hit water. Since I can’t walk on water, and since I can’t swim twenty miles, and since I teach on an island, I don’t think it extraordinary that the county pay for my transportation. Especially since I had a meeting with Mr. Bennington and Mr. Sedgwick to discuss the gas bill and they authorized it.”
“They did?” he said a bit incredulously.
“Of course, they did. Remember the meeting in January you were supposed to attend—when you sent Bennington in your place? Well, I got extremely mad when they told me the county would not foot the bill and was ready to stomp out when they calmed me down and told me a place to buy cheaper gas—and to keep charging it to the county.”
“They told me they had settled the matter. They didn’t say anything about approval of gas money.”
“That’s the old chain of command for you. You don’t think I’m stupid enough to go on using county funds after a principal and a deputy superintendent told me not to, do you? That was just a breakdown of communication between you guys. I should not be blamed for that.”
“It makes no difference. The county is not paying for your free ride to and from work every day. If you want to live on the island, that’s fine, but we aren’t footing your transportation bill any longer.”
“Then I’ll go to the board.”
“Go to the board, then. I’ve got the most democratic school system in this country. If you are not satisfied with a decision of mine, then I invite you to appear before the board.”
We talked and argued for an hour that day and I have only recorded the essence of the conversation. We talked again of his youth in the mill town, his journey toward the doctorate, his belief in education, and his allegiance to Jesus and country. The meeting was full of strange cross-currents: the nostalgic Piedmont, the religious Piedmont, the authoritarian Piedmont, the paternal Piedmont, and the one I would come to know most intimately—the vengeful Piedmont. He once again asserted that I reminded him of the young Henry Piedmont, but he also made apparent his desire for me to leave Yamacraw Island for good. Bennington had talked to him, that much I could tell, and I strongly suspected that they wished to dine on my teaching career.
And so it came to pass that there was a board meeting to decide whether I would return to Yamacraw Island the following year. The meeting would be extremely important for both Piedmont and me. I wanted to return to the island desperately, but I also felt a substantial obligation to bring the board out of shadow into the clear light of day. I felt it should know and understand the real problems of the island without the benefit of Piedmont or Bennington’s interpretation. Piedmont, on the other hand, smelled a rat in his system and wanted me exterminated as cleanly as possible.
Bernie and I went over to Yamacraw to tell the people what had happened. I traveled from door to door and explained to each parent what the situation was and what I was trying to do about it. Their response was to initiate a petition to get me back to the island. Every black on the island signed the petition, although many of them had to enlist the help of friends to write their names. The petition was a rambling, disjointed diatribe, almost more of a condemnation of Mrs. Brown than a vehicle to retain me as teacher. In part it said,
Our children do want Mr. Pat Conroy to come back and teach the childrens. But Mrs. Brown don’t do nothing for our childrens she believe in beating them and hollow at our childrens. But Mr. Conroy love both childrens white and color it doesn’t make any different with him. If we lose Mr. Conroy the island will go down … Mr. Conroy come to school in the rough whether sometime he fall overboard and come to school all wet up. But he still teach our childrens.
It was a very strange document filled with references to esoteric events that had occurred over the year. I could not guess the authorship until I came to the most telling line in the petition, which said, “Mrs. Brown told my childrens that they are so skinny and when March wind come they better put rock in their clothes so the wind wouldn’t pick them up.” Mary, still very sensitive about her height and weight, had never forgiven Mrs. Brown for making this unfeeling remark. Her anger burned and seethed across every page of this long, strangely eloquent communication with the other world. Three of the mothers also made plans to attend the board meeting and present the petition to the board.
It was a hot, sticky night when the board convened to hear my arguments about the price of gas and education in America, but the board room was new and air-conditioned, with yellow carpets surging along the floors and bright colors flaming along the newly erected walls. On a borrowed Ping-Pong table I placed thirty photographs of this island directly across from where the board members would sit. I wanted to suggest to them that the discussion tonight would concern a place without yellow carpets and pasteled walls. I wanted them to stare at a few rags, a few shacks, and a few skinny kids while they pondered the weighty decisions of the evening.
The board members came in singly and in pairs. They were mostly a lot of calories under gray suits, a lot of talk behind bright ties, and a lot of coarse laughter. Yet Beaufort had an eclectic and educated board. On it were a judge, a lawyer, a doctor, and a dentist. Two black women had been recently elected, but their votes meant little or nothing, since they were overwhelmingly outnumbered. A pretty lady from Hilton Head whose husband was an architect had been appointed to the board due to a vacancy in the last month. Overall, the board made a nice impression to the outsider: a lot of smiling, educated people serving their community in an enormously expensive building they had allocated money to build.
My friends flooded the board meeting that night. I had gathered them together for one grand assault in the board rooms. Board members, like all politicians, base their opinions on community response and support as much as any other factor. Neighbors control men and the way men act more than convictions do. Some of my friends were pillars of the community and others were barbs in the community’s behind. My friends were a strange conglomerate of long-hairs, Marines, and the attractive wives of powerful husbands. My mother, who had just moved to Beaufort while Dad went to Vietnam, sat by Bernie and Barbara. My brothers and sisters took up half a row of chairs. My friends had come to pressure the board and the superintendent. For this is the way of small towns.
Piedmont controlled the board as effectively as an organ grinder controls a chimp. Minor differences of opinion might arise, but generally Piedmont’s educational dogma was law before he had even opened his mouth. As Piedmont drifted among his board members before the start of the meeting, I was mildly impressed by his unctuous, lubricating manner. His etiquette of power had been honed over the years and he floated atop the waters of his dominion like a grease bubble.
For an hour the board shuffled figures dexterously. Piedmont, peering through his half-glasses, quoted prices for new schools, additions to schools, and wall-to-wall carpeting. I rested in a chair toward the back of the room, listening with a mild nausea rising, a combination of fear and anger repressed too long. As Piedmont’s voice droned over the crowd, I thought about the change in me since the beginning of the year. And the change had to do with the children of Yamacraw.
According to tradition I was supposed to speak in a quiet voice fresh with honey, shuffling, and humility. Piedmont had convinced me that an appearance before the board was a rare and unspeakably sacred privilege. In the hierarchy of schools, teachers are the most expendable of creatures, the fauna of classrooms who can be replaced as easily as light bulbs.
But I wanted to tell them about Yamacraw Island, the way it was and not as others saw it. I had spent a year hearing administrators telling people how cute the island was, how unusual and exotic it was, and ignoring the fact that it was a disgraceful depository of ignorance and a hundred years of neglect. The building was not bad, the materials were not bad, the food in the cafeteria was not bad, it was the single fact that the kids did not have a chance and no one seemed to care. I wanted to boot the board members in their ass
es and welcome them to the unhappy reality of the twentieth century. I wanted to stick their noses into the island sand and let them feel the hurt and sorrow of history. So despite my impulses for survival and despite my absolute knowledge that people do not like to be faced with the cold, ugly deathbed of truth, I abandoned myself to those passions that rumbled below the surface. On June 30, 1970, before mother, wife, and friends, Conrack let the bastards have it.
I started my speech by telling the board I had gotten a haircut for their edification and to insure that they would listen to what I had to say. In a voice rather creaky and unimpressive, I traced my background on the island very briefly. Then I told them:
“I am not here tonight for the love of the school board. I have been on the island and have seen the conditions there. You have been presiding over an educational desert. Children who grow up on that island don’t have a prayer of receiving an adequate education. They grow up without hope. They leave the island without hope. They drift into the big cities of the East Coast and rot in some tenement slum—without hope. They are not taught to read, to write, to speak, or to be proud of themselves or their race. Their parents are not influential, literate, or vocal, so this educational system is perpetuated. If these parents were white and important, their school would be as fine as any school in the county. If their parents were white, the question of a gas bill and maintenance bill would never come up—even if I were driving a battleship to work. But the school is black. The people on the island are black. And, my God, the hopelessness of teaching in a black school, cut off from society by water, is an agony few people have experienced. Yamacraw requires sweeping reform of your thinking. It demands for a brief moment that you forget about money and budgets and balanced books. Forget about your building plans, ordering new volleyballs for the high school, and how many tractors to purchase next year. Think instead about children. People. Human beings. Feel for once that education is about people—not figures.”
I then recited the litany of ignorance I found the first week.
“Six children who could not recite the alphabet. Eighteen children who did not know the President. Eighteen children who did not know what country they lived in …” I slammed twenty-three of these strange facts down their throats, hoping they would gag and choke on the knowledge. My voice grew tremulous and enraged, and it suddenly felt as if I were shouting from within a box with madmen surrounding me, ignoring me, and taunting me with their silence. My lips trembled convulsively as my speech turned into a harangue and the great secret I had nursed in my soul thundered into the open room.
“If you are not disturbed by all this,” I said, “then you should not be on the school board. Or perhaps you will be like one county administrator who told me, ’Don’t worry about the kids not being able to read. Lots of schools have that problem.’ Well, I worried about it and tried to do something about it.”
I then listed activities and trips the class had done. Once again I tried to crush them with a mountain of facts. I wanted to bury them under the weight of a single year. I ended the speech with a blustery declaration.
“And so we are here. I want to go back to Yamacraw next year. I cannot go if I have to assume transportation costs for the boat. The superintendent told me I was exactly like any other teacher in the county. That is nonsense. When I taught at Beaufort Hill School, I did not have to chop wood for the stove, haul seven hundred pounds of groceries, walk two miles to school, wash dishes during lunch time, spoon food into plates to help the cook, drive cows and pigs out of the schoolyard at recess time, send my students to the woods if the toilet broke, or fix soup when the cook was sick. Because of difficulties with the boat, I sometimes did not make it to school. But in the framework of an entire year, look around the county, talk to all of your teachers. Show me a better investment of county money—an investment that produced more significant human results—and I will quit.”
Piedmont had a look on his face as if the floor had caved in under him. The board members sat like old Buddhas with their hands resting on ponderous pot bellies; their mouths agape with disbelief or incredulity. My friends peeked back at me to see if I was frothing at the mouth. It was a very funny scene.
Piedmont counterattacked. I had been recalcitrant, had not gone through the chain of command, had cheated the county out of gas money, had obtained the gas fraudulently, had lied, broken promises, and failed to live up to obligations and commitments. If he had been armed I am sure he would have leaped across the table and we would have grappled on the floor until either he or I had succumbed. His face was red and veins stuck out of his neck and head. Bennington was sitting near Piedmont and shot me a few vituperative glances that could have turned back the angel of death. And Piedmont continued to cast accusations my way, which I caught on the first hop, if I could, and fired back at him. Both our jaws were rigidly set and we argued out of a sense of survival more than anything else.
The three Yamacraw mothers stood up during the middle of this backbiting war and delivered very eloquent pleas for my return to the island. They also handed out copies of the petition to all the board members. Piedmont considered their talks mere intrusions in the meeting, having no bearing on the matter at hand. He grew impatient as Mary’s mother tried to explain about the island and how much she wanted for her children. He tried to ignore Edna’s raised hand, but I could have told him that Edna’s elongated, work-sculpted hand would be in the air all night if need be. When Edna wanted to talk, it took more than a board of education to silence her.
Then the audience jumped in. There were catcalls and hisses, groans and gasps of disbelief. The whole scene was unruly and angry. My mother yelled at Piedmont several times, much to my keen embarrassment. (Mothers have no sense of restraint when it comes to the honor of their children.) People shouted, “How much is the gas bill?” and none of the administrators knew. “It’s too much,” Piedmont shouted in desperation. “How much?” the voices shouted back.
Finally Piedmont called for an executive session. The crowd moved outside, where loudly and profanely they attacked the stolid immovability of a system run amuck. I shook hands with happy, sweating people who had blown off enough steam to energize three revivals. It was a street circus loosened upon that alley behind the education building. Everyone hugged the Yamacraw ladies, who declared they had never met such wonderful people in their lives. Later that night I called one of the black members of the school board. She told me that the board had voted to give me the gas money. I had won.
But the victory, if one could call it that, was ephemeral and elusive, a brief and strident shout atop a mountain that was more noise than substance, more smoke than flames. Piedmont and I had locked horns in a furious encounter, separated by an insurmountable gap of thirty years. The victory strengthened my belief that a man could speak the truth to his elders, to the new scribes and pharisees, and not be crucified or vilified because of it. My faith in the democratic system was renewed by the puzzled, scowling cluster of men and women who composed the board of education.
But that was when I was young. I underestimated the dark part of mankind that is rarely seen in the light of day. I failed to reckon with the secret beasts that reside in the lightless forests of men’s souls. The beasts were watching me at the first board meeting, and in the flush of victory I failed to hear the baying of those hounds in the unlighted thickets ahead. The great unpardonable sin I had committed was this: I had embarrassed the superintendent of schools. It was Homer who had written again and again about the dangerous folly of mortals challenging the gods. I fought with words and youthful ardor. But Piedmont fought with thunderbolts. And time was his greatest ally.
September came and the new school year began almost too quickly, before the sediment of bitterness over the summer board meeting had time to settle. I saw Piedmont once, very briefly, and he conveyed the warmth and glowing good humor of a tundra during our fifteen-minute conversation. Whenever Bennington spied me, his face contorted into a wrinkled m
ask, as though staring at me was equivalent to chewing on cow chips. It looked as though my punishment was going to be a cavernous silence from those who ruled the kingdom. This I interpreted not as a punishment but as a blessing. And I had much to do during the year and did not wish to waste it wrangling with two crotchety administrators nursing their wounds.
I had written Piedmont a letter saying that I only wanted to spend one more year teaching on the island. I did not elaborate the reasons for this in my letter to him. I felt the reasons were personal but sound. When Bernie and I went to the island over the summer, I heard many of the people express an idea that was very disturbing to me. They constantly derided Mrs. Brown and said that she was a bad teacher simply because she was a “colored teacher.” When I tried to erase this thinking, the people would shake their heads and say, “It true. All dese colored teachers no good for the chillun.” I had unwittingly created a new stereotype among the island people and it seemed insidiously pervasive among the parents. The great danger of this thought lay in the fact that I might be tempted to establish myself as an educational Ted Stone on the island. I would try to be well meaning and dedicated, but would reinforce the myth of white supremacy in all things. Therefore I wrote to Piedmont, offered my resignation for the following June, and offered to help find a replacement. I wanted to find a sharp, young black couple who would live on the island as part of the community and provide a sound image with which the kids and parents could identify.