“So very nice. So very nice. So pleased to make your ac quaintance. I am so pleased to tell you that the chillun seemed to think you are a fine gentleman. Yes, a fine gentleman. So very nice. So very pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said—very quickly, I should add. We talked a bit about the school, then I mentioned something about the thunderclouds that had rolled in from the east. “Oh yes. I believe there will be a storm. Yes, yes. The temperature is about ninety-three degrees and slightly falling. The rel’tive humid-aty is eighty- seven per cent and rising. Scattered thundershowers late in the afternoon. Winds out of the east at fifteen miles an hour. Small boat warnings out for small boat. Big boats O.K. and don’t have to worry about nothin’.”
I was listening to a Quick Fella special, his interpretation of the weather given over the Savannah radio. He often disagreed with this report and would alter the forecast according to his own studies of existing weather conditions. He was an astute observer of cloud formations and wind shifts. The people of the island generally believed in his reports and ignored those coming from Savannah. Of course, all people who live on islands become skillful at predicting the weather, but Quick Fella had transformed his skill into an art.
The other resident who provided a glimpse into island life was a powerfully muscled man called Sam. He did not tell me his name. I heard him called that by the other fishermen. He was a scowling, taciturn man who made no pretense of wishing to engage in small talk with me. He looked at me with a malevolent glance that could have melted a fishhook. Amicability was not Sam’s greatest virtue. His foot was crippled. He dragged it behind him like an old anchor. It was bent, gnarled, and stuffed into a correction shoe. He liked to sit on the dock with his fishing pole and swing his feet underneath the dock, so his deformity would not show. I would make attempts to talk to him.
“How’s it going today? You caught any big ones?” I would say.
He would answer me with one of his fishhook stares.
“Fish not biting today, eh? Well, some days are good. Some days are bad,” I would whine with infinite wisdom. “You just gotta stick with it when you’re fishing. Yes, sir, patience really pays off.”
Throughout this monologue, Sam has continued to stare at me. There is nothing human in his face. He is not amused or entertained by my intrusion. His crippled foot is swung out of sight under the dock. His stare is hollow, uncomprehending but hostile.
“Well, it’s been great talkin’ to you. I really enjoyed the conversation,” I say, as I walk away from him.
I learned about Sam from the kids at school. When he was an infant, his mother left him untended in a crib while she went to the nightclub to drink. While she was out, Sam slipped out of the crib but caught his left foot somehow in between two of the slats. The foot broke. He hung suspended from the crib for a long time screaming in agony. His mother came home finally and freed him. She never took her son to the doctor to have his foot set, and the bone healed itself at a grotesque, crooked angle that grew worse as Sam grew older. The kids said Sam didn’t smile much.
But I saw him smiling once. He owned the finest horse on the island, a graceful mare with a handsome head and a sleek, somewhat spare body. I saw Sam riding this horse down the main road at full gallop, the horse straining for acceleration, the man bent over the horse’s back shouting encouragement and smiling a full, evocative smile. The horse was swift and the man was intoxicated with the speed of his animal and the feel of the wind along his spine. Sam waved to me as he passed. I watched as the man and the horse grew smaller down the road and it made me glad there were horses in the world for people like Sam. When Sam was on his horse, then Sam, the cripple, sprouted wings and flew. Sam’s horse was a good foot and his horse made him smile.
Even though I was on Yamacraw, I was not of Yamacraw. My first overtures of friendship with the people on the island, although not rebuffed, failed to win me any friends with whom I felt completely comfortable. I thought constantly of my friends in Beaufort. Consciously I began to wish for a way to extricate myself from a job and a situation I felt incapable of handling. The loneliness was beginning to shred my nerves. I became distracted with myself and my vainglorious attempt to act as a symbolic bridge between the children of the Yamacraw and the outside world. I was impatient because I had failed to turn illiterates into lovers of the great classics in the span of a single month. I had tired of measuring victories in terms of whether Prophet had learned the alphabet or Sidney could spell his name. Nor could I shake the feeling that everything I taught or achieved was a worthless, needless effort that ultimately would not affect the quality of my students’ lives. What could I teach them or give them that would substantially alter the course of their lives? Nothing. Not a goddam thing. Each had come into the world imprisoned by a river and by a system which insured his destruction the moment he uttered his first cry by his mother’s side.
Many of my friends drew me aside in those early days, before I had defined myself in relation to the island, and told me they envied my opportunity for solitude, for reflection, and for time to assemble my thoughts and generate ideas. Almost every man dreams of a place where he can withdraw into himself, away from the roar of engines and squeal of tires, away from the push of crowds. Yet, by placing myself on Yamacraw, I was denying my natural gregariousness and my compulsive need for good friends. As a lover of conversation, I found myself strangely restless in the mute house, or the mute forest, or walking beside the mute ocean. I was an island within an island. And something far more profound and debilitating was occupying my mind in the month of September, long before I had conditioned myself to the isolation of the island and the frustration of the task at hand. In the midst of resolving the most traumatic adjustment I had ever made, I found myself struck with a new and foreign emotion that had not appeared in the prescribed blueprint of the year. On September 18, 1969, beknownst only to God, me, and one other person, I fell in love. On October 10, 1969, the unlikely triumvirate cooperated once again and I married Barbara Bolling Jones.
Barbara and I had been neighbors the previous year when I resided in a comfortably picturesque apartment in Beaufort. The house rested on the edge of a slough formed by the Beaufort River. It was behind one of the oldest houses in Beaufort and its many-windowed view of the river traffic of boat and fowl made the fifty dollars’ rent I paid seem like the most incredible bargain in Christendom. The neighborhood went by the name of The Point, a collection of splendid old houses with fine white columns and dreams sundered by a great war and changing times. It was a genuine remnant of the Old South, with rocking chairs on high verandahs and venerable octogenarians and their aristocratic progeny carrying on the myth and legend which ended reluctantly at Appomattox Courthouse. I liked The Point for many reasons: for the quietude of its shaded, narrow streets, the courtesy and refinement of its residents, the imposing presence of its history, and for its essential apartness from the pace and hustle of the earth—its eccentric removal from all things plastic, electric, neoned, cheap, contrived, or asphalted. A visitor from the North once told me that The Point was evil because its people were prejudiced against blacks. “Then leave,” I answered. I did not stop to explain my feelings for the place. I should have.
It was in a great yellow house on The Point, a house of exquisite proportions, that I can remember first feeling some compassion and insight into the condition of black people. I was sixteen, and in the prime of my nigger-baiting days, when I visited Gene Norris’ apartment on the second story of this yellow house. Gene dwelt in Beaufort as the prophet before the storm, an intense bespectacled man who preached love for all humanity at a time when it was physically dangerous to do so. He perpetuated the great blasphemy of having his students read the New York Times instead of the Charleston News and Courier. An inveterate radical, he assigned Catcher in the Rye to his students before the town could mobilize its committees of repression. He reigned as the village eight-ball, the left arm, the joker in the pile, the odd number in our even-numbe
red world. Like many students in Beaufort, I owe a great deal to Gene Norris. At any rate, one night in my junior year, he invited me and several other students to his house for dinner. The assembled group started teasing Gene about being a nigger-lover. Gene spat out a devastating reply, then asked us to listen to a record he had bought that day. He played “We Shall Overcome” by Pete Seeger. I remember that moment with crystal clarity and I comprehend it as a turning point in my life: a moment terrible in its illumination of a toad in my soul, an ugliness so pervasive that it seemed my insides were vomit. Of course, I remained a nigger-hater for many years afterward, but the journey at least had a beginning, a point of embarkation. And the beginning had happened in an ante-bellum house on The Point.
So, The Point, bedizened with moss and the memory of slavery, symbolized to me a place, not of evil and of minds anchored to a corrupt past, but a place where change was possible, even imminent. As soon as I graduated from The Citadel, I house-hunted in The Point area and there only. Here I was to live and here I planned to die. At twenty-two I had decided that it was best to live and grow old in a small town. The call of the city failed to capture me.
Barbara lived next door to me, but the currents of our lives did not cross. I once started her car on an unseasonably chilly October morning when her profanity streamed into my bedroom window as I was shaving. I walked out and started her car. She apologized profusely when I commended her for the salt of her tongue. That was all. The first thing I noticed about her was the wedding ring on her left hand. Bachelors reflexively study a strange girl’s left hand. Without the formality of introducing ourselves, we parted.
I heard of her again a month later. Her husband, a Marine pilot, had been shot down and killed in Vietnam. A week later I heard through Beaufort’s well-developed grapevine that Barbara was pregnant with her second child.
We had few occasions to talk after that. I would often see her in her yard as I drove to and from school. I watched the child grow within her and measured time by the changes in her condition. Her second child, Melissa, was born in April.
In May I met Barbara at a party. We talked. I went to her house for a drink after the party. Initially, I felt uncomfortable around her. Her husband had died in a war I considered immoral and unjustified. I could sympathize with her loss but could not condone or defend the cause for which he died. Teaching had preserved me from the draft and from facing the decision of fighting in an ignoble war because my country decreed it. So I steered away from talk about the war or the military. A week later she left to visit her parents-in-law in Norway for the summer.
My falling in love was simply a gradual awareness that I wanted to live with Barbara. When she returned to Beaufort in August, I was there. The idea of assuming the role of father for two young children terrified me, and the additional burden of entering a house where the shadow of a man I never knew was imprinted in every corner seemed a legitimate reason for hesitating on the brink of matrimony. And we were so different. Barbara cared not one bit for the social issues of the day that were so important to me. Her main interest in life was the ineluctable pursuit of the contented home and happy family. Hers was a life of order, of cocktails served promptly before dinner, of napkins and candlesticks, of military protocol, and attention to form. Mine was chaotic, plebian, and disjointed. She voted for Nixon, while I prayed for the elevation of McCarthy. Whatever the differences between us, none of it made much difference on October 10.
Before a small crowd of friends, we were married in St. Helena’s Church in Beaufort. Bernie was there poking me in the ribs and grinning like hell. Big George Garbade towered above the guests, who were whispering occasionally that now I’d have to get off that goddam island. Gene Norris was there, a classic portrait of the tweedy English professor. Yamacraw, far away and oblivious in the October sunshine, seemed mysteriously remote and inaccessible, like a dream that lingered just beneath the surface of memory, and not a part of me at all. I had invited everyone I knew on the island to my wedding: the kids, the parents, Mrs. Brown, the Stones. All said they would try to attend, and predictably, because of distance, inconvenience, and the fact that none of them knew me very well, none of them showed.
We honeymooned on Yamacraw Island. For some reason, Niagara Falls, the Virgin Islands, or any of the other meccas for the hordes of lusty young couples checking into motels did not arouse any enthusiasm in me. Since Barbara had not seen Yamacraw and since it was important she understand the problems of the island and its isolation from the rest of the world, we decided to spend our honeymoon on the island.
Zeke put the boat into the water, taunted me with the ancient jokes directed at newly anointed husbands, and watched as we headed toward Bull Creek. I drove the boat and pointed out the high spots of the trip: the osprey’s nest atop the utility pole on Savage Island, the huge crescent sandbar that blocked one whole section of navigable creek at low tide on Bull Island, the thousands of brown oysters encrusted in the mud flats along the shore. A porpoise fin broke like a green shaft in the water beside us, the sun flashing off his body in brilliant knives of light. A great blue heron, disturbed by the boat, flew patiently and majestically to another spot. The boat was an intrusion. It always was.
We stayed for two days. My living quarters did not impress Barbara to a great extent, but the weather cooperated and even the mosquitoes seemed to diminish the fury of their attacks. We wandered about the island exulting in the aloneness. Barbara picked ticks from her body and took cold-water baths with Spartan determination. We had never considered her living on the island. She did not want to bring her young children to a place without doctors or telephones. I would live on the island, come home on the weekend, and during the week when I was able. Thus, our marriage was planned for the first year. Barbara would remain in Beaufort; I would live on the island.
How different my life would be had we followed this original plan. I was young and surpassingly naive at this juncture and I saw no undue hardship resulting from this arrangement. Barbara had lived a year without a husband and an absentee husband seemed infinitely better than no husband at all. I was not about to quit my job on Yamacraw, nor was she going to bring her children to live on the island. As I look back, it is surprising we both did not tell each other to go to hell and forget the whole thing.
Anyway, it was a good honeymoon. I took my bride back to Beaufort and deposited her in our Beaufort home. The house we had rented had all the character of a hamburger stand: cyclone fence, picture window, carport, and all the other accouterments of suburbia. I hated the house and the neighborhood. The Point had nothing for rent or sale, so we were forced to join the ranks of the red-brick people who drive station wagons and play bridge. I lived on a remote island during the week and next to George Babbitt on the weekend.
After October 10 I was not happy on the island. Separating myself from Barbara only seemed to heighten my loneliness on the island. I became rather irritable and impatient in dealing with the kids in class. Mrs. Brown and her tirades seemed less amusing to me. Ted Stone began to fray my nerves. I missed Barbara and wanted to be with her. I could not quit, yet I wanted to quit. I was also starting to feel guilty about the two-year-old girl, Jessica, who was now my responsibility. She thought of me simply as “that man, Mommy” and had not realized that I was her father. Jessica needed a father, not a weekend visitor. These things preyed on my mind in the middle of October. I was a father and a teacher, yet I could not throw myself completely into either project. It was not until December that I became a daily commuter.
CHAPTER 5
ON A RECONNAISSANCE FORAY into the bowels of the great closet that harbored the jetsam and flotsam washed into the schoolroom over the years, I unearthed a brand-new automatic movie projector. When I queried Mrs. Brown, she told me that films were difficult to get to and from the island; in fact, they were more trouble than they were worth. Therefore the projector sat in permanent exile. I also found an SRA Reading Kit and a fairly new record player gathering
dust on one of the closet shelves.
I was ecstatic. I am a firm and uncompromising believer in the audio-visual age. The projector was gold bullion. It became my habit from that day forward to make damn sure that the room was filled with films on all subjects. I raided the film library at the county office each month. Since the difficulty of transporting films was so obvious, I was allowed to take as many films as I wanted and to keep them for as long as I wanted. Though this entailed a broken rule, the woman in charge of the films was very flexible.
The films were divided into three groups: boring films that imparted a body of knowledge I felt the gang should have partial exposure to, interesting films that I accidentally picked up with the boring films, and fun films whose sole purpose was to provide entertainment. The class generally liked films better than any other part of the day and voted to have at least one film daily. They also insisted that when a film especially appealed to them, they would be allowed to view it a second time. I acquiesced to the will of the majority. A film on the Calgary Rodeo received three curtain calls. At the third showing, the Gorgonian head of Mrs. Brown peered in through the glass window, called me out into the hall, and gave me a splendid lecture.
“Every second of school time is important, Mr. Conroy,” she intoned, “and we cannot afford to waste any time with movin’ pictures. These children need the basics. The basics. If they get the basics that’s all they need.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.
Several times during the year Mrs. Brown attempted to sabotage the film program. She constantly derided the fact that I was wasting valuable time, when I could be drilling the class on those good ole, French-fried, batter-whipped basics. A couple of the kids watched movies as if they were partaking of a sacrament, completely enthralled and religiously attentive. Fred fidgeted through movies, but Fred would wiggle through his own interment. Lincoln chattered throughout the movie, but much of his conversation was directed toward characters on the screen. So, no matter how much the film series offended Mrs. Brown, I was determined to keep it part of my program. On one occasion, a film was the fuse for an explosion of enthusiasm for the whole class in which eighteen children momentarily forgot the prison of the classroom, forgot about the iron-clad rules of propriety, forgot about the frowning Mrs. Brown in the next room, and danced maniacally in the pure joy of group sharing and identification.