And a blast we had. They proved to be wonderful students and eager to learn everything I could throw their way. When I discovered they had never heard of Halloween, I took them trick-or-treating in my town of Beaufort. After they told me they never heard of Washington, D.C., I organized a trip to the nation’s capital over the Easter holidays. Slowly, my students started displaying the confidence that comes from being smart. Each week, I brought visitors from the great bright world to them—actors, artists, musicians—and all came with the fire and enthusiasm I still associate with the sixties.
One of the great surprises awaiting me on Daufuskie Island was the presence of two young white men close to my age. I would see them walking on the unpaved roads of the island, and they would refuse to acknowledge me when I waved to them. One day after the school day ended, the two young men approached me. They asked me if they could hitch a ride to town in my boat. I refused, and Jim Ford asked me why.
“Because you don’t speak to me,” I said. “You haven’t even introduced yourselves. You pretend I don’t exist. So you can swim to the nearest town.”
“We’re not allowed to speak to you,” Joe Sanfort said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because you’re white,” he replied.
“You guys ever looked in the mirror?”
“Yes, but you’re a Southern white man,” Joe said. “We can only speak to you in emergencies.”
Jim Ford opened his address book and pointed to my telephone number in Beaufort. It was listed under “White Schoolteacher.”
The islanders called Jim Ford and Joe Sanfort “the California boys.” They were part of a sociology program at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Each quarter, two young men came to Daufuskie to perform fieldwork and interact with the isolated Gullah people. The school authorities banned them from the schoolhouse and tried to keep them away from the children as much as possible.
I took Jim and Joe to Beaufort that weekend, and for most of the weekends to follow. The great loneliness of the island weighed heavily on their spirits, and we struck up a friendship. In the late fall, they asked me to help them put on a community play for the Christmas season. They had chosen an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol. One rainy day, I read the entire play to the kids. I’ve always been a melodramatic, over-the-top reader, and Dickens can be counted on to bring out my worst rendering. When the ghosts made their mordant appearance in that rain-haunted classroom, they scared the daylights out of my eighteen students. Though Dickens was new to those island kids, ghosts were as common as sea oats or beggar’s lice, a part of their cultural vernacular. When I left them for the Christmas break, I was confident that the kids knew their parts and that the show would be a good one.
On December 22, I received a desperate phone call from the California boys begging me to return to the island. To call me, Jim and Joe had caught a ride to nearby Bluffton with a fisherman. They were in a panic. Their choice to play the role of Scrooge had always been the demure and ladylike Sarah Jenkins, the beloved midwife who had been present during the delivery of almost all the island residents. During the course of several long rehearsals, it became clear that Aunt Sarah could not read and had been too embarrassed to admit it to anyone. They told me Aunt Sarah suggested I take her place, and they begged me to come.
So go I did. In a candlelit church built on a foundation of tree stumps, its eaves papered with translucent wasps’ nests, I stormed about on a makeshift stage, my students around me, full of Dickensian phrases uttered in the purest of Gullah accents. The whole island was there. Though the production was unimaginably bad, I could feel the moment when the power of literature took hold, when the city of London came alive on a Carolina sea island, and a man in the middle of living a miserly life reaches out and grabs the only chance for redemption he has. My children, my students, were well prepared and beautiful to behold. I strutted ham-fisted and bombastic from one side of the stage to the other. I scared the little children, caused the fathers to howl with laughter and the mothers to tell me I should get a job acting on the soaps. The Christmas play would change my life among the island community. The black parents admitted that they had worried about the kind of white man a mean-spirited South would send to their island. Because I had crossed a wild river on a forbidding day for the sake of my students, they allowed me into the mainstream of their lives.
The following September I was fired, and Daufuskie Island was the last place I ever taught. Each Christmas since then, I watch the film A Christmas Carol. In my imagination, I see my students approaching me as ghosts who would show me the way to change my life. I find myself on a river in the Low Country, going back to an island I did not recognize as my destiny. And I see myself returning to the only stage role I ever performed, and to the last children I would ever teach. Those children left me with an inviolate gift, a ghost of Christmas past that burns like the North Star in remembrance.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE LIBRARIAN
I grew up a word-haunted boy. I felt words inside me and stored them wondrous as pearls. I mouthed them and fingered them and rolled them around my tongue. My mother filled my bedtime hour with poetry that rang like Sanctus bells as she praised the ineffable loveliness of the English language with her Georgia-scented voice. I found that hive of words beautiful beyond all conveyance. They clung to me and blistered my skin and made me happy to be alive in the land of crape myrtle, spot-tailed bass, and eastern diamondbacks. The precise naming of things served as my entryway into art. The whole world could be sounded out. I could arrange each day into a tear sheet of music composed of words as pretty as flutes or the tail feathers of peacocks.
From my earliest memories, I felt impelled to form a unique relationship with the English language. I used words to fashion a world that made sense to me. Because we seemed to move every year, I lacked the childhood friends who would offer that invaluable commentary on the progress I was making while drifting through the sun-shot days as a fighter pilot’s son. The South gave me stories; the Marine Corps provided me with the flyover of squadrons; and the Roman Catholic Church offered me a language whose comfort zone included both sweetness and majesty. The Mass lined my Sundays with the underground rhythms of the early Christians who had chosen to adore the flogged, broken Christ. I studied to become an altar boy because I wanted a speaking part in that drama when the murder of Christ transformed itself into the deathlessness of God carried aloft by immensity of faith. Father James Howard instructed me in the Latin prayers and I served my first Mass in the fourth grade at the Annunciation church outside the gates of Cherry Point. When the priest said the words: “Introibo ad altare Dei: I will go to the altar of God,” I replied by rote, “Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam: To God, the joy of my youth.” The goose bumps spread down the keyboard of my spine and I was as caught up with the artfulness and glory of the Mass as was any altar boy who ever wore a surplice and cassock.
Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: “introit,” “offertory,” “liturgy,” “movable feast,” “the minor elevation,” “the lavabo,” “the apparition of Lourdes,” and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I’ve ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. I’ve never met a word I was afraid of, just ones that left me indifferent or that I knew I wouldn’t ever put to use. When reading a book, I’ll encounter words that please me, goad me into action, make me want to sing a song. I dislike pretentious words, those highfalutin ones with a trust fund and an Ivy League education. Often they were stillborn in the minds of academics, critics, scientists. They have a tendency to flash their warning lights in the middle of a good sentence. In literary criticism my eye has fallen on such gelatinous pi
les as “antonomasia,” “litotes,” or “enallage.”
I’ve no idea what those words mean nor how to pronounce them nor any desire to look them up. But whenever I read I’ll encounter forgotten words that come back to me like old friends who’ve returned from long voyages to bring me news of the world. Often, I’ll begin my writing day by reading those words in the notebooks I keep with such haphazard consistency. Though I’m an erratic journal keeper, I admire the art form well enough to wish I’d had the discipline to master that sideshow of the writer’s craft. I lose most of the world around me when I fail to record entries in those notebooks that line my shelves.
I could build a castle from the words I steal from books I cherish. Here’s a list I culled from a book I read long ago—“sanction,” “outlaw,” “suburbia,” “lamentations,” “corolla,” “debris,” and “periodic table.” I can shake that fistful of words and jump-start a sentence that could send me on my way toward a new book. But if I go forward a single page I can listen to a different reading self who cherry-picked words from another book and recorded “atlas,” “villainy,” “candelabra,” “tango.” Each file of words seems outfitted for a different story or novel. I hunt down words that have my initials branded on their flanks. If I take the time to write one down I want to get it right every time I form a sentence. I’ve known dozens of writers who fear the pitfalls and fastnesses of the language they write in and the glossy mess of the humanity they describe. Yes, humanity is a mess and it takes the immensity of a coiled and supple language to do it justice. Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself. I’ve amassed a stockpile of books in vaults and storage bins in attics and unfinished basements and tortoiseshell-colored boxes that I raid with willful abandon when I try to fix a sentence on a page. Words call out my name when I need them to make something worthy out of language.
Whenever I sit to write, I never allow myself the benefit of a Sabbath or day off; nor do I give myself time off for good behavior. Good writing is one of the forms that hard labor takes. It is neither roadhouse nor weigh station, but much more like some unnameable station of the cross. It is taking the nothingness of air and turning it into a pleasure palace built on a foundation of words. From the time I could talk I took an immense pleasure in running down words, shagging them like fly balls in some spacious field. Though I failed to notice it at the time, my childhood was a long, patient apprenticeship of finding my comfort zone in the ocean of words that rushed through me each day. I was drifting toward novels that would one day capture me with the unanswerable power of their rawness, and the sheer need to be told.
The veneration of books carries its own rewards. When I was seven years old, I was picking through the refuse and castaways in a Cherry Point Dumpster the day after Christmas. Digging through piles of garbage, I came to a heavy box that was bound tightly with cord and tape. The weight of the box was so great that I came close to abandoning the project; then a friend named Gary Snyder came along to lend a hand. Gary was a sweet, wiry kid whose father’s fighter plane would crash while on maneuvers near Camp Lejeune. Though it was a struggle, Gary and I lifted the box up out of the Dumpster and heard it fall heavily to the ground. I remember Gary’s audible disappointment and my pleasure when we discovered a box full of books. Since Gary had fantasized a chest of doubloons, he wandered away as I inspected a handsome set of the complete works of William Makepeace Thackeray. Of course, I didn’t have a clue about Thackeray’s identity, but the set was well made and distinguished-looking and there was a silhouette of the author’s face embossed on the spine of each book. Two by two, I marched them up to our apartment in “A” building and felt amply rewarded when my mother squealed with pleasure. It was the first set of books Mom had ever owned, and though I’m not certain that she had ever heard of Thackeray, I know for a fact that she devoured his work in the next year of her life. After Scarlett O’Hara, Becky Sharp began to inch her way up the scale of formidable women who made up a glittery all-star team of crinolines and estrogen in Peg Conroy’s fictional world. Mom thought the fluttering eyelash and the well-turned ankle could overthrow a kingdom ruled by the brute tyranny of any lawless male. A woman disguised the presence of her own battalions with the timely smile or the modest display of décolletage. In literature, Mom always hungered for the Guineveres who shook the fate of empires out of wantonness or even carelessness. I grew up counseled by Lady Macbeth and Gertrude, advised by Goneril and Regan, and taught to despise the weaklings Ophelia and Cordelia. My mother preferred her heroines to glory in their claws. Once in a forest near Lake Lure, Mom and I watched as two praying mantises mated on an oleander bush and the female began to devour the male’s head in the middle of coitus. Though I was embarrassed and horrified to be observing such an intimate act in the presence of my own mother, her reaction to it shocked me even more.
“That’s it, girl,” Mom said. “That’s how to do it!”
The set of Thackeray became emblematic and definitive to my mother. She would point it out to guests and pepper her conversations with references to Vanity Fair and The History of Henry Esmond. I was in ninth grade when I read both these novels, and both seemed like old acquaintances. Mom had long since passed into different realms of cultural showing off—Dickens, Jane Austen, and a long stretch she spent riding through the vast, formless steppes during her fruitful engagement with the great Russian writers.
My precocious sister Carol was always in hot pursuit of our mother’s reading list. She read Vanity Fair by the end of sixth grade. Carol’s memory for visual detail was amazing, and she seemed to be able to appropriate the language of nineteenth-century novels into her own daily speech. Until I got around to reading Vanity Fair I had no idea that Carol was dazzling me with jokes and phrases she had cadged from Becky Sharp. Always, there was a brilliance to Carol’s gift for mimicry. She ran rings around me that year and tortured me with the voices of Fagin and the Artful Dodger in the year Mom brought Oliver Twist home. The world of books was set for me by the intellectual hunger of my mother and the pure, exhilarating genius of Carol’s use of the language. She could handle words I had never heard of with such naturalness that it seemed as if you were present at the creation of a language minted for your own pleasure. If I said that a sky was a pretty shade of blue, she would correct me, saying that it was lapis lazuli and only a simpleton would call it blue. She was ten when she pointed this out.
Among librarians, I was popular in every town I landed in until I got to Beaufort, South Carolina. It was another hellish year in my relationship with my father; his slaps would often bring me to my knees or knock me to the floor. My eyes were now dead giveaways, and nothing I could do could camouflage my visceral hatred of him. When I enrolled at Beaufort High School, it was my first sojourn into the world of public schools and neither of my parents liked the situation a single bit. Both acted as though my year among the infidels would cause a spiritual cataclysm that no sacrament or catechism could cure. My great problem was an incurable loneliness that had come to seem like a given. I didn’t know a single soul when I walked into Beaufort High School, and I had no clear idea of what to do during the lunch break and recess in the middle of the day. At Catholic school, I could always wander into the church and pray. Beaufort High School convinced me that no church would provide me refuge during that particular year. On the breezeway separating the two wings of the school, there was an ominous gathering of the toughs and ruffians and popular kids. It looked dangerous as I passed through a ring of hostility and the mean laughter of teenagers who could send any strange new kid running for the hills. On that first day, not one kid said hello to me. By chance, I stumbled onto the library and I felt the deep pull of a homecoming as I walked into its silences. It was empty, abandoned. I now had a place to hide during lunchtime.
I looked around for a librarian but found myself in wondrous isolation. Moving toward the back of the room, I found a seat. Among newspapers and periodicals I took out the Washington Post and found
out that Gonzaga High School had won its first football game that season. I’d have been a member of that team had my father remained stationed at the Pentagon. I wandered through the fiction section and pulled out Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. It was listed in the hundred books my English teacher at Gonzaga, Joseph Monte, had suggested we read before we went off to college. My mother, sister, and I were hard at work checking off titles from that sublime list. I entered the world of Jean Valjean and did not look up until the bell rang and the halls swarmed with students again. For two weeks I read Les Misérables without being noticed or discovered. Then Eileen Hunter stormed into my life.
In the halls of Beaufort High School, I’d heard rumors of Miss Hunter. She was famous among both teachers and students for her legendary temper and her need for absolute control of her book-lined fiefdom. Among students, the mere mention of her name inspired a sense of terror. She was known to be allergic to Juicy Fruit chewing gum, which inspired a certain breed of mischievous boy to plant wads of gum under tables and chairs throughout the library. If the chewed gum was fresh enough, Miss Hunter could be watched sprinting toward the teachers’ lounge, where she would vomit in the sink. Trained as a teacher of home economics, she found herself recruited to be a librarian when there was a surprise resignation in the middle of the school year. When I encountered her wrathful gaze, she had served as the librarian for more than twenty years. Her disposition was troll-like and her demeanor combative. She seemed agitated every time a student disturbed the airspace of her private domain. When she spotted me reading Hugo she reacted as though I’d taken a box of Crayolas to the Book of Kells.
“What on earth are you doing here?” she said.