The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

Conroy employs flags as a motif for exploring political ideologies. He notes that the “faded American flag” (79) that flies in Ted Stone’s garden “seem[s] to symbolize Stone’s allegiance to his country which [is] blind, uncompromising, unconditional, and […] almost Third Reich in its fervor and rigidity” (79). For Ted, the flag has deep meaning; he is enraged when he sees a “hippie with a flag sewed to his butt” and promises that “I’d cut if off his ass with a butcher knife if I was there. Take half of his ass with it” (79).

The symbolism of the Confederate flag is more complex. On one level, it is symbolic of racist ideologies. As Pat notes, he has “known a great many Confederate flag nuts in my life, rabid dreamers” in whom the “Confederate flag summons primitive emotions” (74). However, when he sees a “tattered” Confederate flag hanging at an abandoned house on Yamacraw Island, he notes, “Here on Yamacraw, fastened over the door of a peeling house, mute in its testimony to a defeated cause and expiring way of life, the flag [has] more dignity that I [have] ever noticed before” (74). In this instance, the flag comes to symbolize not the racist slavery system of the Old South, nor a longing to return to this way of life, but rather the death of this system and the fact that, as Conroy later observes, “That era of history [has] ended and will not come again” (286). Conroy makes this explicit when he speculates that, in this case, “Perhaps the dignity [is], in fact, that the flag [is] dead and the house [is] dead, and I [am] only passing by” (74).