His draft board status was changed to intimidate him.
When the superintendent eventually fired him for his radical views that children, including poor black children, should get an adequate education and not be beaten and screamed at (as a fellow teacher did) the school board upheld his firing, and so did a court. Several couldn’t count or spell their own names. Conroy relates that when he took over his class of 18 children, 6 didn’t know the alphabet.
The Water Is Wide is shocking and anger inducing in some ways. Not that racism is uncommon today - it’s still alive and well, it’s just hidden behind politer language. Being virulently, openly racist was common. Much of South Carolina, and the South in general, was still reeling from the end of Jim Crow and the relatively recent integration of schools.
It’s the story of his time – just over a year around 1969 – teaching at the island’s small school.Īt the time almost the entire island was black, except for an older white couple he describes as having both a “paternalistic” and a “symbiotic” relationship with the islanders. I’ve seen The Water Is Wide described as a novel and as a memoir, but other than changing the name of the island I’m not sure what else Conroy fictionalized. I have family in South Carolina and while visiting got to talking about Dafuskie island and when we saw thus book they explained that what Pat Conroy calls “Yamacraw” in the book is really Dafuskie. I actually got The Water Is Wide a year ago at a library book sale.
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