It was so easy before. Segregation was such an easy thing. The dichotomy of color in the schools made administration so pleasant. The black schools were reservations where the sons and daughters of cotton pickers were herded together for the sake of form and convenience. Piedmont and Bennington, in turn, presided over student-council elections at the white schools, sat in a place of honor at football games, chaperoned school dances, and kissed the comely blonde elected homecoming queen. No more. That era of history had ended and will not come again. Now the homecoming queen might be named Ruby, Rosa Lee, or Jemima. There are very few school dances because of that omnipresent southern fear that a sinister black male with an elongated, elephantine gland might approach a honey-vaginaed white maiden with a twinkle in his eye. Even the football games and elections seem different and potentially explosive.
It was once so much nicer. They controlled black principals who shuffled properly, who played the role of downcast eyes and easy niggers, and who sold their own children and brothers on the trading block of their own security. These men helped grease the path of the South’s Benningtons and Piedmonts as they slid through the years. The important things were order, control, obedience, and smooth sailing. As long as a school looked good and children behaved properly and troublemakers were rooted out, the system held up and perpetuated itself. As long as blacks and whites remained apart—with the whites singing “Dixie” and the blacks singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” with the whites getting scholarships and the blacks getting jobs picking cotton and tomatoes, with the whites going to college and the blacks eating moon pies and drinking Doctor Pepper—the Piedmonts and the Benningtons could weather any storm or surmount any threat. All of this ended with the coming of integration to the South.
During the entire period of my banishment and trial, I wanted to tell Piedmont and Bennington that what was happening between us was not confined to Beaufort, South Carolina. I wanted to tell them about the river that was rising quickly, flooding the marshes and threatening the dry land. I wanted them to know that their day was ending. When I saw them at the trial, I knew that they were soldiers of the rear guard, captains of a doomed army retreating through the snow and praying that the shadows of the quick, dark wolves, waiting in the cold, would come no closer. They were old men and could not accept the new sun rising out of the strange waters. The world was very different now.
Mrs. Brown was perhaps the most tragic of all the protagonists in the masque of Yamacraw. She was a woman victimized by her own insecurity. She wanted so badly to be accepted by whites. She luxuriated in the praise freely heaped upon her by Ezra Bennington. She emphasized over and over the fact that she was part Cherokee Indian, educated in a private school, and in no way related to the blacks who inhabited Yamacraw Island. She learned to hate me because I did not agree with her opinion of the island people. I imagine it was a liberating and purifying experience for her to be able to hate a white man. Mrs. Brown, I discovered, had nothing to do with my being fired. In fact she was not told of this action until after it happened. She was used as a pawn at the trial. The whole affair frightened and confused her. She once had talked to me about moving to Columbia and opening a pie shop behind her house there. I hope she does it and I hope she sells a million pies. I do not hope that she continues to teach children, but I do hope that she is happy the rest of her life.
Ted and Lou Stone will remain on Yamacraw until they die. They are permanently rooted in the island’s history and soil. Though their attitudes would fit more comfortably in an earlier period of American history, their relationship to the people is a symbiotic one. Despite their paternalism, they help the people who need help and are the most stable institution on the island. I was the troublemaker they always feared and they exulted when I was permanently exiled, yet they were often kind to me and did me many favors that were unsolicited and spontaneous. They see a terrible world about to storm the fortress of their island and they cannot quite understand why it must come so soon. They are just people trying to fend off the apocalypse from their shores.
The town of Beaufort continues to undergo change, not revolutionary change, but gradual and slow change, like the erosion of a high bluff during spring tides. A kind of brotherhood hides beneath the shadows of columns and the mute verandahs—unspoken, inchoate, but present nevertheless. There is no widespread denunciation of the old values, but the erosion of these same values is already irreparable. For ten years I have been part of the town and have seen her grow more human and her people grow more tolerant as the past has crumbled and the old dreams burned out in a final paroxysm of sputtering paralysis and rage. The South of humanity and goodness is slowly rising out of the fallen temple of hatred and white man’s nationalism. The town retains her die-hards and nigger-haters and always will. Yet they grow older and crankier with each passing day. When Beaufort digs another four hundred holes in her plentiful graveyards, deposits there the rouged and elderly corpses, and covers them with the sandy, lowcountry soil, then another whole army of the Old South will be silenced and not heard from again. The religion of the Confederacy and apartheid will one day be subdued by the passage of years. The land will be the final arbiter of human conflict; no matter how intense the conflict, the victory of earth and grave will be undeniable and complete. The eyes of the town are turning with excruciating reluctance toward the new flow and the new era. The eyes seem a bit brighter and less clouded with hate.
Of the Yamacraw children I can say little. I don’t think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth. I felt much beauty in my year with them. It hurt very badly to leave them. For them I leave a single prayer: that the river is good to them in the crossing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Peg and Don Conroy, Carol, Mike, Kathy, Jim, Tim, and Tom for their dedication under fire. Also Margaret Stanton, my grandmother, and my daughters, Jessica, Melissa, and Megan.
To my following friends in Beaufort: Tut, Sarah Ellen, Bruce, and Melinda Harper; John, Ruby Ellis, Dale, Jan, Danner, and Betty Hryharrow; Papa and Mama Wall; Bucky Wall; Connie and Larry Rowland; John and Nip Cook; Freddie and Lindsay Trask; George and Connie Trask; the Scheins; Tim and Diane Belk; George and Jane Garbade; Lucy and Ridge Hall; Mike and Beth Jones; Herbert, Harriet, Billy, and Paul Keyserling; Richie and Aldie Matta; Ev and Ann Cooper; Jeff Greene; Henry Burke; Millen Ellis; Charles and Juanita Washington; Courtney and Elizabeth Siceloff; John Gadsden; Roy and Rose Lee; Mike McEachern; Frenchie Dawes; Miracyl Damon; Grady Lights; Pat Youngblood; Jet Ragsdale; the Ficklings; the Combses; the Delgados; the Dowlings; Marian Etheridge; Shep Trask.
Also thanks to Bernie and Martha Schein, Bill Dufford, Gene Norris, Betsy Geddes, George and Miriam Sklar; Jim and Vivian Strand; Jim and Annie Roe; Nugent and Elizabeth Courvoisie; Luke and Mary Brown; John and Clarissa Doyle; Linda Williams; K. Z. Chavis; Roy Bohon and Dot Routh; Susan Cooler; Jan and Ted Nichols; Bruce and Carol Fader; Stanley Kravit; Betsy Fancher; Joe Cumming; Carl and Nancy Turner; Herman Blake; Jim Ford; Joe Sanfort; Chuck Haffly; Allen Carlson; Frank Smith; John Rickford; Tim Biancalana; Dave Morrison; Ed Flaherty; Jeff Hershey; Jeff Pomerantz; Dave Cannon; Allen Minor; Beau and Julie Bridges; Beppie and Marschall Smith; Dick and Carol Larsen; Dick and Marie Caristi.
Ernest Hollings, Henry Chambers, the Colquhouns; the Samses; the Aimars; Ann and Rick Pollitzer; the Hendricks brothers; the Becks; the Parkers; the Randels; the Zachowskis; George Westerfield; Harrison Drinkwater; Joe Golden; Joe and Jean Jones.
Julian Bach, Wendy Weil, Shannon Purves, Anne Barrett, Anita McClellan.
The Southern Regional Council; The N. E. A. DuShane Fund, and the Leadership Development Program of the Ford Foundation.
Special thanks to Richie Matta, Zack Sklar, Bob and Emma Lee Criddle, and the people and children of the island.
A Biography of Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy (b. 1945) is one of America’s most acclaimed and widel
y read authors and the New York Times bestselling writer of ten novels and memoirs, including The Water Is Wide, The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, and South of Broad.
Conroy was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Growing up as the first of seven children in a military family, Conroy moved twenty-three times before he turned eighteen, constantly switching schools as a result. His father, a Chicago-born pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, was physically and emotionally abusive to his children, an experience that colored much of Conroy’s writing. The Great Santini (1976) in particular drew from many painful elements of Conroy’s childhood, a fact that caused friction within his family and played a role in his parents’ divorce as well as in Conroy’s own divorce from his first wife, Barbara.
In 1963, after graduating high school, Conroy enrolled in the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. His experience at the Citadel provided the basis for his first book, The Boo (1970), as well as his novel The Lords of Discipline (1980) and his memoir My Losing Season (2002). The Lords of Discipline stirred up controversy for exposing incidents of racism and sexism at the Citadel, though the resulting rift between Conroy and the school would later heal. The Citadel awarded Conroy an honorary degree and he delivered its commencement address in 2001.
After graduating from the Citadel, Conroy took a job as a school teacher in an impoverished community on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina. He was fired after one year for personal differences with the school’s administration, including his refusal to abide by the school’s practice of corporal punishment. His book The Water Is Wide (1972), which was honored by the National Education Association, was largely based on his experiences.
In the 1980s, Conroy moved from South Carolina to Atlanta, and then to Rome, Italy, after marrying his second wife, Lenore. While living in Rome, he wrote The Prince of Tides (1986), about a former football player’s tragic upbringing and its effect on his family. The novel, which has sold more than five million copies worldwide, drove a wedge between Conroy and his sister, Carol, on whom many sections of the novel were based. In 1991, the book was made into a major motion picture starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte that was nominated for seven Academy Awards. After publishing his fourth novel, Beach Music, in 1997, Conroy married his third wife, Cassandra King, who is the author of four novels. Since their marriage, he has written the memoir My Losing Season (2002), The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life (2004) with Suzanne Williamson Pollak, South of Broad (2009), and the collection of essays My Life in Books (2010).
Conroy was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2004 and won the Outstanding Author Award from the Southeast Library Association in 2006. He currently lives on Fripp Island, South Carolina.
The wedding photo of Don and Peg Conroy (nËe Peek), taken in 1945. Pat was born later that year, the first of seven children.
Conroy feeding birds with his mother, Peg, in San Juan Capistrano, California, in 1948. He would later credit her with inspiring his love of language.
Pat, Peg, and Pat’s younger sister Carol, around 1950. The Prince of Tides featured a character, the poet Savannah Wingo, which was based on Carol.
Conroy’s 1957 school picture, taken when he was about twelve years old. Because his father was in the military, Conroy changed schools often as a child.
In 1963, Conroy captained the basketball team as a senior at Beaufort High School in Beaufort, South Carolina. Conroy’s high school English teacher, Eugene Norris, introduced him to the author Thomas Wolfe, who would later serve as a literary inspiration for Conroy.
Conroy’s 1964 semester report card from the Citadel. His only A for the semester was in comparative literature—a grade that foreshadowed his considerable skill as an author.
Conroy’s school picture from 1967 while studying at the Citadel. In The Lords of Discipline he wrote candidly about the authoritarianism of military school.
The Conroy family in the summer of 1969. Front row: Peg, Tim, Tom, Donald. Back row: Jim, Kathy, Pat, Carol Ann, Mike.
The schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, where Pat taught for a year, an experience that inspired his book The Water Is Wide.
Conroy’s mother, Peg, and the actor Jon Voight on the set of Conrack, the 1974 feature film adapted from The Water Is Wide. The movie opened to wide critical acclaim.
Conroy and his first wife, Barbara, delivering copies of The Water Is Wide to children on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, in the mid- to late-1970s. The book was based on Conroy’s experience teaching elementary school students on the island for a year after graduating from college.
Conroy with his daughters in the 1980s.
Conroy with his mentor and former high school English teacher, Eugene Norris, in 1990. Norris introduced Conroy to The Catcher in the Rye, to this day one of his favorite books. The two remained close for years and Conroy delivered a eulogy at Norris’s funeral.
Pat and Cassandra King on the day of their wedding in 1998. Cassandra is a bestselling author of four novels, including Queen of Broken Hearts and The Same Sweet Girls.
Pat and Cassandra look over a scrapbook documenting his life and career in June 2010.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1972 by Pat Conroy
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0390-3
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