The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

Some of the older boys play basketball at recess. Pat’s attempts to organize things are ignored because they “[love] their game too passionately to allow me to ruin it with a flurry of rules” (204). When Pat hears that the Globetrotters will be playing in Charleston, he arranges to take five of the boys to watch the game. Leaving the stadium, one of the boys urinates on the side of the road. Pat realizes that this would be normal behavior on the island and that the boys must assume that it is just as acceptable in the city, so he says nothing. On the journey back to the island, he learns that Charleston is the furthest that any of the boys had been from the island.

Many of Pat’s friends are keen to visit the island. He decides that “any human that [has] not been entombed on Yamacraw since birth [has] a vast repository of experience to share in my classroom” (206). The first visitor is Dick Caristi, a friend of Barbara’s and an amateur photographer. Dick is from Boston, which gives Pat a chance to teach the children about another part of the country. He shows them Boston on the map, and Dick talks about its importance in the Revolutionary War. However, this almost immediately leads to “a staggering amount of new material” because the children know nothing about Boston, Massachusetts, the Revolutionary War, or England (207).

Pat’s sister also visits and performs poems and plays for the children, who sit “transfixed” because they have “never seen anything like it” (209). She delivers “the witches’ scene from Macbeth with such macabre passion and blood-chilling authenticity that the children without exception [grow] restless, wide-eyed and frightened” (209). They fail to understand that the scene was merely a performance; they believe that Pat’s sister is actually a witch.

Another visitor, a teacher named Peter, delights the kids with his “math games, word games, and geography games” (212), as well as with his captivating presence. Peter reassures the kids, “Everyone’s smart. They just need a chance to prove it. They need to find something they like” (212). He also introduces them to soccer, leading Mrs. Brown to go “crazy” when she sees the children on the playground “before the time designated in the sacred rule book” (213).

Yet another visitor, Richie Matta was a professional singer before being drafted to fight in Vietnam. He sings for the children and passes out his records.

Pat gradually becomes aware of “an underlying, pervasive fixation for violence among the people of the island” (219). He notes that violence is “part of the culture” (219) and observes that it affects the children’s performance in the classroom. He attributes much of the violence to alcohol. He reflects that “alcohol [brings] the same relief to poor farmers and crabbers that it [brings] to emperors; its particular, elusive magic [can] dull the cumulative effects of being poor, jobless, isolated, and frustrated. That it [can] cripple, ruin, and summon cruel demons from the darker side of a man’s soul [is] secondary” (220). When the violence occurs within the children’s families, Pat learns about the incidents “in scraps and tiny portions over the day” (221). The children seemingly want Pat to know about the violence but don’t want him to know the exact circumstances.

Barbara invites the students to a Valentine’s Day party, but only the girls decide to come. Pat decides to perform a practical joke at the party to convince the girls that ghosts are not real. He realizes that the joke was “very improper, very insensitive” when it terrifies the girls (228). From that point on, he does not try to convince the children to give up their superstitions, as it “would be like trying to convince a religious child that he worshiped a myth instead of a god” (229). He recognizes that he is “not dealing with nonsense but with a culture, a history, and something very kin to religion” (228).

When Apollo 12 launches astronauts on a mission to the moon, the children join in the countdown and cheer enthusiastically, bringing the ire of Mrs. Brown, who reminds Pat that “the state government [is] paying me good money to teach the children from the textbook” (234). Despite their enthusiasm, the children insist that the astronauts are not actually going to the moon: “They flyin’ off somewhere, messin’ around, then comin’ back and tell people they have done been to the moon” (235). When Pat tries to reason with them, one child says, “You believe anythin’ on radio. They ain’t goin’ nowhere” (235).

Pat feels that his time on the island is coming to an end; he grows “restless and impatient with the sluggish pace of learning in the classroom” (236). He tries to vary his methods, with a “constant shifting in emphasis, approach, and material” (236). The one consistent theme is “the world beyond the river” and the places the children will “drift when they [leave] Yamacraw, to the world of light and easy people, to the dark cities that [will] devour their innocence and harden their dreams” (237).

With the class trapped in “a kind of malcontented lethargy” in “the introspective, wood-burning days of winter,” Pat promises that they will take another trip in the Spring (238). He finds an old, unopened letter from a potential benefactor and replies, securing funding for a trip to Washington, D.C. Mrs. Brown again refuses to give permission, insisting that “those children have had their fun. Now it’s time to work” (239). Pat organizes the trip anyway, manages to “browbeat or beg the reluctant parents to allow their children to cross the water again” (240), and eventually secures permission from Dr. Piedmont himself.

They travel at the beginning of May. Pat realizes that he will “see through the eyes of children who [have] seen little, and who [have] never ventured away from the smell of salt marshes and the sound of incoming tides” (244). They visit monuments and museums, although the children are more delighted by the souvenir vendors; they are soon “glisten[ing] with cheap baubles, three or four necklaces, plastic Washington monuments, and Capitols of fake bronze” (245).

Local families host the children, and once again the hosts seem to have been “expecting a ragtag tribe of starving pickaninnies with loincloths and bones through their noses” (246). One lady asks, “Why are they so well dressed? I thought they were supposed to dress in rags,” leading Pat to explain that “the parents and relatives of these children spent a great deal of money so their children would not be ‘shame’ when they went to Washington” (246). Nevertheless, the hosts are welcoming, responding with “warmth and humanity” (246) and making the children lunches to take on their trips to the zoo and Great Falls.

Pat reflects that it is “difficult to calculate the value of an experience” (247). He also recalls that “it struck me that the trip was a good thing in itself and needed no defense” (247). On the way home, the children ask, “What those ol’ lines for?” (247), and Pat eventually understands that they have never seen paved highways before. For the rest of the journey, he and Barbara “[decode] road signs, billboards, and numbers painted on bridges and over-passes” (248). He finds that he is beginning to notice more, and he regrets that he cannot be “making this trip with the freshness of insight and beautiful innocence” of the children (248).