by Pat Conroy
We stayed together on a six-hour layover in Cincinnati; I’ve always loved the city of Cincinnati because she was at my side as we wandered through the rough-and-tumble district around the central city train station. On the same night that we heard Martin Luther King talk about the sons and daughters of slaves holding hands with the sons and daughters of slave owners, this kind and brilliant and gorgeous woman took my hand in the darkness. I fell asleep wondering how you tell a girl like this you were in love with her.
When I woke the next morning, she had departed my life forever. In the middle of the night, when we crossed some invisible borderline of the harsh and ruthless South where I was raised, the conductor had led her away. The train had entered that zone where the racial codes were honored to the letter of the law. She was moved by the loutish white conductor to the string of “colored” cars at the rear of the train. He confronted me with the old nastiness and told me he knew what I was after. I tried to find her, but my way was blocked by another conductor who had all the panache of a moonlighting Klansman. He informed me that I’d be arrested at the next town and put off the train if I “set one foot in the colored section.” My shyness had prevented me from asking her name. Maddened, I patrolled the platforms whenever we reached a city in Virginia or the Carolinas, walking obsessively past the cars carrying hundreds of black passengers, praying to spot her pretty face looking out the window, trying to find me.
Now, as I remember her, she must’ve been shaken by her first encounter with that evil and embittering South that I’d first tasted in my mother’s milk. I hope my South did not harm her after that. With her vitality, ebullience, and a delight in her own prettiness, she could pollinate a room with an infectious sense of joy. She’d accomplished something no girl had done to that point; she had made me feel handsome, prized, fascinating. I lost her to Jim Crow, the bastard who had made my childhood South part inferno, part embarrassment, and all shame. She was the third girl who had ever held my hand.
SIXTY HOURS AFTER I LEFT MY FAMILY in Omaha, I stepped off the train in Charleston and found myself in the merciless embrace of The Citadel’s plebe system. When I first walked on campus, the plebe system held no fear because Mel Thompson had promised that athletes were protected from its cruelties and excesses. But the train was late and I arrived in Charleston five hours after Coach Thompson had asked us to meet him at the field house the day before the other cadets reported. On campus, I became disoriented when the guard at Lesesne Gate, the entrance to The Citadel, began screaming at me. After making a phone call, he ordered me over to Second Battalion where a group of his friends were waiting for me.
Since I was the only freshman in the barracks, ten or twenty sophomores got to practice their black arts on me. More and more cadets heard the noise and soon joined the pleasantries. It was the first time the pack would go after me, but it would not be the last. The screaming became louder as it began to grow dark. I did pushups until I dropped, ran the stairs until I dropped, held out a rifle until I almost dropped it (a crime beyond forgiveness in the world of a plebe). Then, suddenly, I was thrown out of the battalion and told to run for my life. I ran the mile to Highway 17 where I hitchhiked the seventy miles to Beaufort. A Marine corporal dropped me at The Shack, the place where teenagers gathered in the town I had left three months earlier, as innocent an American boy who has ever breathed southern air.
Someone greeted me as I walked along the line of cars with trays on their window and the smell of hamburgers and french fries in the air. I approached the car of my chemistry teacher, Walt Gnann, and two of my favorite English teachers, Gene Norris and Millen Ellis. Gene was the most important and necessary teacher of my life and one of the best friends I’ve ever had.
“What are you doing here, scalawag?” Gene said. “You’re supposed to be at The Citadel.”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Didn’t like what?” Gene said. “It hasn’t even started yet.”
“If it hasn’t started, I hate to see what it’s like when it does.”
“I wouldn’t go there on a bet,” Millen said.
“I ain’t talking to this boy,” Gene said, getting out of the car. “I don’t care if you quit, boy, but at least give the place a chance.”
Walt Gnann motioned for me to get into his car. “Come on over to my place, Pat. We’ll see how you feel about it in the morning.”
I spent the night in my chemistry teacher’s house. I was a terrible chemistry student but that night, Walt and Millen folded kindness over me like a shawl. The next morning, Gene had arranged a ride back to The Citadel with Ray Williams, a Beaufort boy who was a senior and a cadet officer. Ray dropped me off in front of Second Battalion where I walked through the gates to begin the seminal year of my young manhood.
I SUFFERED GRIEVOUSLY UNDER THE SPELL and sway of the plebe system. It left me terrified, brutalized, altered, and introduced me to a coward that lay deep inside of me. I was afraid the moment the plebe system began until it ended. I displayed no courage because I found none to offer. To me, it was mind-numbing, savage, unrelenting, and base. It broke me a thousand times and then a thousand more, then expertly glued me back together and sent me out to be broken again. After my eighteen-year trial by father, the last thing I needed was a long exposure to the most vaunted plebe system in the country. They called the first week “Hell Week,” and Dante Alighieri could not have coined a more accurate nomenclature.
Because I had failed to connect with the freshman basketball team the night before the plebes reported, the athletic department assigned a senior named Bud Aston, a member of the Fourth Battalion Staff, to deliver me to my team. It was Mr. Aston who taught me to salute, the proper way to do a right, left, and about-face, and how to march in step. He marched me across the parade ground to Mark Clark Hall and straight into the barbershop where Mr. Rampey sheared my scalp like a Highland sheep. I didn’t recognize the boy who stared back with his raw, gleaming skull.
As he took me to be measured for uniforms and to collect the paraphernalia for the next four years as a Citadel cadet, Bud Aston gave me advice I’d need to survive. After I’d been screamed at by two sophomores who measured me for shirts, Mr. Aston whispered, “Remember this, Mr. Conroy. I was exactly where you are three years ago. It’s terrifying. It’s supposed to be. Most of you won’t be able to stand it. But the best of you will. Don’t take it seriously. Laugh at it. Those two sophomores who just racked you? They were knobs last year, just like you. Do what they say. Be enthusiastic about it. The year’ll pass quickly.”
During the two days he spent with me, Mr. Aston passed on hundreds of tips for surviving the acid probation of the plebe system. Because I had missed the hour-long instruction in rifle manual, Mr. Aston taught me to handle my M-1 with dispatch and expertise. When I failed to snap the rifle into my left hand properly at his command, “Left shoulder arms,” he corrected me with great economy.
The barracks was a vessel of pure noise, the constant screaming of the upperclassmen unnerving, but Mr. Aston constantly reassured me. “Don’t let the noise bother you. That’s all it is, noise. Hell Night’s tonight. That’s when you’ll find out what you’re made of. They’ll teach you how to brace in the corner alcove room of R Company. Big R is the most military of all the companies in the Corps. They take this shit seriously. Go along with them. Anyone who fights the system gets run out. Remember that, Mr. Conroy. I’ll check on you tonight. Good luck.”
Hell Night still burns through the scaffolding of both my fate and my history like a pillar of flame. Even my eighteen fearful years spent quaking beneath my father’s frightful gaze did little to prepare me for this lunatic attack on the souls of boys. It was a night that my own soul felt like an acre of Omaha Beach on D-day. I was still recovering from the trauma of it a year later. Those were the last years of General Mark Clark’s tenure at The Citadel, and he’d vowed that the school would have the toughest plebe system in the world. I personally attest that he succeeded admirably.
When I wrote the section called “The Taming” in The Lords of Discipline I said everything I wanted to say about The Citadel’s plebe system. It surprised me when older graduates of the school read my account and thought I’d made it up to harm my college. Over a period of time, the system had evolved into the extreme form of mob violence my classmates and I experienced. Because so many American soldiers had broken under torture and duress during the Korean War, The Citadel’s system was to be so horrific that Citadel men could be counted on, no matter how inhumane the conditions or cunning the abuse. Citadel men were expected to provide an unshakable bulwark against the rise of Communism in the Western Hemisphere. I have yet to meet the Communist who has treated me as abominably as the cadre of R Company did my plebe year.
My roommate and I had barely spoken to each other when we finally shook hands on the day of Hell Night. His name was Bob Patterson, and he was from Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I knew immediately that Bob, nice looking and soft-spoken, would survive this test by fire. “This place sucks, doesn’t it?” were the first words he spoke to me. I couldn’t have agreed more.
“Let’s show the fucks. Let’s you and me make it,” Bob said, and I could see he meant it. By accident The Citadel had hooked me up with the right guy.
It was nightfall when they stood me in the first squad of the first platoon of R Company in the utter silence of a blacked-out barracks. The cadre had withdrawn into the shadows of the stairwell and had left us alone, bracing for the first time, our chins racked in uncomfortably against our throats. Dressed in bathrobes, field caps, and flip-flops, the plebes prepared themselves for the onslaught.
A harmonica played a haunting, aching version of “Home, Sweet Home” as the guards made an elaborate ceremony of slamming and locking the metal gates with keys as long as a man’s hands. I’d grown so accustomed to their screaming and profanity that the silence felt malignant in the tropical, tide-scented air. Mosquitoes siphoned blood out of the back of my knees, my ears, my forearms. The speechless fear of boys scented the air like the charged ions after a thunderstorm. For me, standing in the darkness waiting for Hell Night to break over me felt like a fitting exclamation to a childhood I’d hated from the time of first consciousness. Two hundred forty plebes awaited their fate and destiny with me in Fourth Battalion. Eighty-three of them would survive until graduation.
The regimental commander, William Sansom, spoke into the intercom in a clear, loud voice. “Gentlemen, the plebe system for the class of 1967 is now in effect.”
The lights flooded on, and the four cadres of N, O, R, and T companies roared into sudden life and poured like liquid flame through the shocked, overwhelmed ranks of plebes. In the sheer force of their assault, they blew us out like candles, one by one. The barracks turned into containers of overripe noise and chaos. Someone screamed in my right ear, “Right face, smackhead.” But at the same time, the scream came into my left ear, “About face, maggot.” A face materialized in front of me, feral and out of control. “Left face, douche bag! You better do what I order you to do, wad-waste.”
Paralysis set in quickly. The uproar was so cataclysmic that I just held on in the first ten minutes until I adjusted to the pure maelstrom. The cadre overwhelmed us and seemed thousand-voiced and ubiquitous as they cut wide swaths through us. When I executed a left-face, I was a foot away from the terrified face of a chinless boy who could not stop trembling. When I did an about-face, I was inches away from an overweight boy who had begun to cry. The trembling and the tears attracted swarms of upperclassmen who sensed the fragility of both boys, frothing with pleasure when the boys came apart. I never saw either boy after that night, and they made up part of the lost wreckage of my torn-apart class.
I was grateful when ordered to do twenty-five pushups because that generally meant the cadre man was going on down the line to scream at someone else. “One sir, two sir, three sir, four sir,” I’d shout. When I leapt back up, bracing again, someone else would appear and the games would begin anew. The cadre wanted you to memorize their names and do it quickly. I screamed those names back in a plague of words, discordant as a broken hive of killer bees—those debased names cut through the air around my ears. Before the night was over, I knew the cadets who were just doing their jobs and the ones I’d learn to fear. The Citadel was a crucible of authentic leadership, and to a much lesser degree, a hothouse where sadists perfected their grim arts. Nothing has surprised me so much or lingered in memory so long as Hell Night, and, until I endured it, I’d never understood what an overfearful, shakable boy I was. I still wear that night as wound and rite of passage, and the hour where I watched my boyhood die in tears. What I couldn’t stand was not my own suffering, which was bad enough, but the suffering of the nameless plebes around me, the acne-scarred, the oversensitive, the nervous nellies, and the mama’s boys forced into The Citadel by undermining fathers. It wasn’t pretty but it was effective. I saw boys lining up at the gates of Stevens Barracks trembling, desperate to remove themselves from this sanctioned madness. Eight freshmen left R Company that night. Seven more would not survive Hell Week. I would have joined them cheerfully had I not feared my father far more than the wrath of the cadre.
Toward the end of that night, a cadet first lieutenant came to me from the side and said, “Relax your knees, Mr. Conroy. That’s it. Your classmates are fainting because they’ve locked their knees. It’s almost over. You’re doing well. You’ve survived Hell Night. I think you’re going to make it.”
It was Bud Aston, his voice brotherly and humane. “Sir, yes, sir,” I said, almost blind in my own sweat.
Bud Aston moved out of sight and out of my life as a cadet. When the bugle sounded a merciful end to Hell Night, I heard the shouts of “Get to your rooms, dumbheads. Move, smacks.” I took one step and fell to my knees. With most of my fellow plebes, I crawled to my room. An upperclassman mounted me and rode me like a pony all the way to my doorway. I remembered his high-pitched laughter as he slapped me on the ass to make me go faster.
In the room, I was on my hands and knees gasping for breath when Bob Patterson crawled in beside me. We spent a long minute gasping, then Bob reached over and touched my shoulder. “You okay, Pat?”
“I don’t know, Bob. How ’bout you?”
“Jesus Christ. Can you believe that shit?”
“I might have made a slight error in my choice of colleges,” I said.
When Bob spoke to me with such great tenderness and when we laughed together in that darkened room, the brotherhood had begun its deft, healing work. When they began screaming for us to get to the shower room, Bob and I helped each other rise to our feet. I was terrified to go out on the galleries to face them again, and I paused at the door. Bob pushed me and whispered, “Let’s show the fucks,” and we headed out toward them.
In the bathroom, the screaming was nightmarish as they ran us into a hot shower, had us soap ourselves down, then sent us back to our rooms before we could wash the soap off. Bob and I stood by our sink and washed off as well as we could. Because I’d done so many pushups, I couldn’t climb into the top bunk until Bob let me step on his back. I lay awake long enough to hear him breathing easily in his sleep, but before I fell into a troubled, exhausted sleep, I swore to myself, “I’ll never raise my voice to a plebe.” And I never did, not once, during my four-year test at The Citadel.
The following Sunday, which marked the official end of Hell Week, the rest of the Corps returned to join up with the cadre that had trained us in the art of becoming cadets. After mess that night and the evening ritual of the sweat party, my roommate and I were summoned into the alcove room of the four senior privates who had moved in next door. Bob and I came in bracing and fearful, expecting the worse.
The four seniors were as relaxed as the cadre were bubonic. They laughed good-naturedly when they saw us bracing and red-faced.
“At ease, dumbheads,” one of them said. Since no one had given that command to us before, Bob and I had no idea what t
o do, so we remained locked into our braces.
“It means relax, boys,” a red-haired senior said. “We come in peace. You’ve nothing to fear from us.”
“Do you believe in slavery, dumbheads?” the first guy said, apple-cheeked, his eyes glittering with humor. “Pop off.”
“Sir no sir,” Bob and I said.
“You’ve been assigned to us,” Jim Plunkett said. “I personally don’t believe in slavery, but it exists here at The Citadel. Right, guys?”
“It’s terrible,” Dave Keyser said. “I’m a man of God, dumbheads. I’ll be entering the seminary next year with slavery on my conscience.”
“I’m going to like having slaves,” Mr. Hough said.
“You’ll clean our room every morning, smacks. You’ll make our beds, clean our sinks, sweep our floors. This room will be shipshape before you leave for class. You’ll shine our shoes, clean our brass—just normal practices common to slaves everywhere. Do you understand, dumb squats?” Plunkett said.
“Sir yes sir!”
“Except for me,” he continued. “I’m an exceptional case. I’m famous for running shit on the system here. I’m a special kind of senior private, right, guys?”
“A pig,” LaBianco said.
“A disgrace to The Citadel,” Hough added.
“He sets a new low for senior privates,” Keyser agreed.
“I’m a slob. A legend among my classmates. I’m allergic to shoe polish. Brasso makes me gag. You shine for these guys. You let me decay at my own speed.”
Then Gary LaBianco said, “Gentlemen, you help us and we’ll help you get through this fucking shithole. You lucked out, boys. We’re very nice guys.”
“Sweethearts,” Keyser agreed.