In one of the great mysteries of my universe, I only encountered this book, originally published in 1972, quite recently. Despite the fact that Pat Conroy is obviously a well-known author, despite the fact that I’ve read some of his other works, despite the fact that he is, like me, a former high school teacher, and despite the fact that this book chronicles his teaching experience on a Carolina island, I was unaware of its existence until I read his book My Reading Life, where he references The Water is Wide.
In his memoir, Conroy chronicles how, in the late 1960s, with two years of experience teaching high school in Beaufort, South Carolina under his belt, he decided to take a position teaching 18 fifth through eighth graders on Yamacraw Island. Yamacraw is in fact Daufuskie Island, a small, fairly remote island located off the coast of South Carolina near Hilton Head Island.
Before taking the position, he was warned about some of the difficulties he would encounter there. On the second day of school, after assessing the students himself, he learned in particular just how limited their education was. “At the end of the day I had compiled an impressive ledger of achievement. Seven of my students could not recite the alphabet. Three children could not spell their names. Eighteen children thought Savannah, Georgia was the largest city in the world. Savannah was the only city any of the kids could name. Eighteen children had never seen a hill – eighteen children had never heard the words, integration and segregation. Four children could not add two plus two,†he explains.
Traveling by boat each day to Daufuskie amid sometimes treacherous winter weather, he spent the year teaching many of his students basic reading and math skills, as well as many other things. He introduced the students to the world news, to the Atlantic Ocean (not one student knew the name of the ocean surrounding the island), to Halloween, to Charleston, to Macbeth. To me, it sounds like a horribly frustrating and completely glorious experience. I’ve sometimes had to scramble for months to find something my non-reading students will read, but oh, that moment when I finally find it, the book they never knew they were dying to read – there’s just no other high quite like it. I can only imagine what it would be like to, in one very real sense, introduce students to the world.
Unfortunately, Conroy was teaching at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was still met with great resistance in many circles, and some of his choices related to that movement ultimately led to his termination at the beginning of his second year of teaching on Daufuskie. Instead, he spent that year reflecting and writing about his experience.
Given my background and my unquenchable fascination with Carolina islands, Conroy’s account is naturally of great interest to me, but undoubtedly, this boy knows his way around a good story. He is quick to pull his readers into a world few have experienced. If I still had the life I had 10 years ago, sans children and the wonderful interruptions that come with them, this would have been a one-sitting book for me.