The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

“Of course some of you are even retarded, and that is even worse than being lazy. But we know you can’t help being retarded. That just means you have to work even harder than the lazy ones. Now those of you who are retarded know who you are. I don’t have to tell you. But retarded people need to be pushed and whipped harder than anyone.”

One of the ways in which Mrs. Brown’s internalized racism manifests is in a constant onslaught of disparaging comments to the children. Seemingly never considering the possibility that the children are being starved of appropriate education and opportunities, she instead places the blame on them, deriding them relentlessly.

“I then told them that they had to look upon themselves in a different light, that they had to be convinced of their basic worth, and that they could learn just as fast as anybody else.”

Pat attempts to undo the damage done to the children by a flawed educational system by incorporating a wide range of activities and approaches into their curriculum. He introduces them to classical music and allows them to develop a sound understanding of several key works. He uses this to encourage them to take pride in themselves and their abilities.

“And just as I had entered a new realm of experience on Yamacraw, I also walked on fresh territory each time I entered the door of Zeke and Ida’s house. My background did not expose me to white people who subsisted on $4000 a year, who did not have a set of china for special meals, who did not select a pattern of silver, and who had not graduated from high school.”

It is not only living among a predominantly black community that is new to Pat. When he befriends the Skimberrys, he grows close to poor white people for the first time.

“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.”

Driven by the arrogance of youth and, arguably, a “white savior complex,” Pat initially believes that he can bring about remarkable changes on Yamacraw. However, it is not long before he realizes how vast the issues are and how slow progress will be. He recognizes that his actions alone will not be sufficient to change the huge amount of damage caused by a culture that systematically marginalizes poor black children.

“So Big C’s question was the catalyst for a great and memorable afternoon, one of those rare moments generated by chance, planned by no one, spontaneous and joyful, transcending the need for a teacher or a classroom, and making me once more thinking of education as something alive and helpful, instead of as a withered dream in need of formaldehyde.”

Although Mrs. Brown does not approve of Pat showing movies in class, he finds that they stimulate the children’s interest, helping them to come out of their shells and engage creatively with learning. A discussion of The Wizard of Oz provides a great example of this as the children enthusiastically recount their own, slightly mangled versions of the story.

“I think the good people of Port Royal were expecting the Yamacrawans to paddle over in their dug-out canoes, chanting in the unknown tongue of the wind god. Several of the Port Royal sixth graders I talked to that day were disappointed because my children did not wear bones in their noses, or carry spears to drive away enemies on their journey back to the island.”

The white families that host Pat’s class when they come over to the mainland are welcoming, but their hospitality is shaped by paternalistic racism. Just as the children of Yamacraw know little of the outside world, the people of Port Royal know little of the lives of poor black communities and racist conditioning leads them to imagine stereotypical “savages.”

“I could naturalize the effect of Mrs. Brown’s speeches on the surface, but I could never be sure how much damage she was inflicting under the surface, where it counted most, in the soul. Nor could I forgive Mrs. Brown her little tirades. No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education.”

Initially, Pat does not take Mrs. Brown’s attacks on the children seriously, laughing them off and hoping that, in doing so, he can prevent them from upsetting the children. However, he soon begins to realize that they are having a profound effect on the children, undermining their senses of self-worth, something that he finds unconscionable.

“But because the society had corroded Mrs. Brown’s image of the black man, I did not feel sufficiently compelled to allow Mrs. Brown to infect my students with her malady.”

Although he disapproves of her methods, Pat does not initially challenge Mrs. Brown, his own white guilt preventing him from ever criticizing a woman of color. However, he eventually comes to realize that Mrs. Brown has internalized racist ideas of the inferiority of black people and is enacting this in her tirades against the children. With this, Pat feels able to intervene and try to prevent the damage she is causing.

“Yet all around me, in the grinning faces of my students, I could see a crime, so ugly that it could be interpreted as a condemnation of an entire society, a nation be damned, a history of wickedness – these children before me did not have a goddam chance of sharing in the incredible wealth and affluence of the country that claimed them, a country that failed them, a country that needed but did not deserve deliverance.”

Although he is perhaps initially motivated primarily by white guilt, Pat does genuinely care about the treatment of the children on Yamacraw. Likewise, his outrage at their neglect by the racist school system is genuine and strongly felt. His belief that they have been criminally neglected drives many of his later decisions and his refusal to bow to pressure from the county administration.

“Bennington agreed, but there was something in his eyes that told me I had earned the enmity of a man who would never forget my impertinence, a man who would not rest until the wolves cut my flanks from behind.”

After Pat refuses to compromise on his commute to the island, insisting that the administration should pay his gas bill, Sedgwick and Bennington eventually relent. Sedgwick says that it is good to see a teacher fired up about his work, and while Bennington agrees, it is apparent that he is furious that Pat would dare to challenge the administration’s established hierarchy or the racial status quo that it helps to maintain.

“I soon decided that any human that had not been entombed on Yamacraw since birth had a vast repository of experience to share in my classroom.”

Once he has realized just how little the children know about the outside world, Pat begins to consider any form of knowledge to be an important addition to their learning. He does not limit this to academic knowledge but instead considers it important that the children simply experience wider society either directly or through visitors coming in to talk about their lives.

“Then we went to the map to find Boston. Dick started to cite its preeminence in the Revolutionary War, but this quickly led to a staggering amount of new material. Since the kids knew nothing about Boston, or Massachusetts, or the Revolutionary War, or New England, or England, out of necessity we had to restrict the scope of conversation.”

Although the inclusion of visitors in the classroom is beneficial for the children’s learning, it is quickly apparent that there is a difficulty in this approach. Because the children’s knowledge of the world is so incredibly limited, even relatively basic discussions soon reveal vast areas of contextual information of which the children are entirely ignorant.

“And alcohol brought the same relief to poor farmers and crabbers that it brought to emperors; its particular, elusive magic could dull the cumulative effects of being poor, jobless, isolated, and frustrated. That it could cripple, ruin, and summon cruel demons from the darker side of a man’s soul was secondary.”

As Pat spends more time on the island, he witnesses some of the other results of the marginalization experienced by the community. One of the most significant manifestations of this is a heavy drinking culture, which often leads to violence that directly and indirectly affects the children in his class.

“I was still not taking their phobia seriously and was trying to think of a way to eliminate this nonsense once and for all. I did not realize that I was not dealing with nonsense but with a culture, a history, and something very kin to religion.”

Initially, Pat sees the children’s belief in ghosts as nothing but a superstition and another reflection of their ignorance. As such, he attempts to “cure” them of it by “educating” them. However, he eventually realizes that this is actually a cultural difference that he should respect, rather than belittling it from a position of assumed superiority.

“Always we turned outward to where they would drift when they left Yamacraw, to the world of light and easy people, to the dark cities that would devour their innocence and harden their dreams.”

Pat recognizes that, with the island’s economy doomed, the children will inevitably migrate to the cities of the mainland. Accordingly, a key reason why he includes so many non-academic topics in his classes is that he is attempting to include anything that might help the children when they have to make this difficult transition.

“‘Why are they so well dressed? I thought they were supposed to dress in rags,’ a lady said.”

The white hosts for the Washington, D.C., trip are, like those in Port Royal, paternalistic and racist in their assumptions about the Yamacraw children. Pat has to explain to them why the children do not meet their expectations of how poor black children should look, clarifying that the families paid a relatively large amount of money in order to maintain appearances so that the children will not be shamed or shame their families.

“It is difficult to calculate the value of an experience. I never created a test to evaluate the trip, nor did the thought ever occur to me. On the way to Washington, it struck me that the trip was a good thing in itself and needed no defense.”

The children’s lives include very few of even the most basic experiences that children throughout the nation take for granted. As such, Pat is keen to expand their horizons and allow them to see and engage with the wider world. He believes that trips that enable this are inherently worthwhile and do not need to be explained and justified.

“For the rest of the trip Barbara and I decoded road signs, billboards, and numbers painted on bridges and over-passes. Things I had not noticed for ten years now assumed great significance. I regretted that I could not be making this trip with the freshness of insight and beautiful innocence of Jasper and the others.”

On the trip back from Washington, D.C., Pat is once again struck by the children’s lack of knowledge of the wider world. It is not simply the case that they have never seen the monuments to past presidents or have not been to a museum. Rather, he realizes that they have never even seen paved roads before and are experiencing for the first time countless things that he takes for granted.

“I wanted to return to the island desperately, but I also felt a substantial obligation to bring the board out of the shadow into the clear light day. I felt it should know and understand the real problems of the island without the benefit of Piedmont’s or Bennington’s interpretations. Piedmont, on the other hand, smelled a rat in his system and wanted me exterminated as cleanly as possible.”

The clash between Pat and Piedmont represents deeply opposed views on the functions of the school administration and the rights of the children of Yamacraw. The decision to allow Pat to speak before the school board is important to both of them because Pat wants to show the board how much the children are being neglected while Piedmont is desperate to dispose of what he sees as a troublemaker committed to challenging the status quo.

“You have been presiding over an educational desert. Children who grow up on that island don’t have a prayer of receiving an adequate education. They grow up without hope. They drift into the big cities of the East Coast and rot in some tenement slum – without hope.”

Pat knows that he is expected to be humble and grateful in his address to the school board. However, his time on the island has changed him, giving him the confidence to speak his mind and making him angry enough to flout the board’s protocols. As a result, he tells them exactly how much they are failing the children of Yamacraw.

“If these parents were white and important, their school would be as fine as any school in the county. If their parents were white, the question of a gas bill and maintenance bill would never come up – even if I were driving a battleship to work.”

A key aspect of Pat’s criticism of the board’s treatment of Yamacraw and their decision to dismiss him from his job is his determination to highlight the racial dynamics of the case. He reminds them, in no uncertain terms, that they would never get away with such neglect, nor consider the gas bill to be extravagant, if the residents of Yamacraw were not poor and black.

“When I tried to erase this thinking, the people would shake their heads and say, ‘It true. All dese colored teachers no good for the chillun.’ I had unwittingly created a new stereotype among the island people and it seemed insidiously pervasive among the parents.”

In an ironic mirroring of Mrs. Brown’s internalized racism, the people of Yamacraw compare her to Pat and conclude that her failings as a teacher are the result of her race. Pat recognizes that he could be tempted into a paternalistic role, benefiting from this internalized racism, and so takes a stand and hands in his notice, offering to help find young black teachers to take his place and challenge this stereotype.

“It looked as though the Old South was alive and well, a little more subtle, with the sheets and night riders, but a force that still tolerated little deviation from the norm.”

After Pat allows three of the recent graduates from Yamacraw to stay in his home while they attend high school on the mainland, it quickly becomes apparent that this infuriates many in his all-white neighborhood. As he loses community support in his appeal against the board’s decision to fire him, he reflects on the degree to which old ideologies of white supremacy still shapes much of the South.