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The Water Is Wide (Paperback)
by Pat Conroy
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Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 108.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A novel that gets you fired up about the ills and wrongs of society and makes you want to change the world. |
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Author: Pat Conroy
Publisher: Bantam; Reissue edition
Pub. in: November, 1987
ISBN: 0553268937
Pages: 336
Measurements: 7.1 x 4.4 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00472
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- MSL Picks -
In Pat Conroy's first book, The Water is Wide, he writes of a universal theme: young idealistic man sets out to change the world and runs into a brick wall. But while this story has been told by other writers, nobody writes with the passion and emotion of Conroy.
The Water is Wide is based on Conroy's experiences of teaching on Daufuskie Island in the late 1960's (thinly disguised as Wamacraw Island in the book). After his application was turned down for the Peace Corps, Conroy applied for a job teaching black children on this isolated sea island off the South Carolina coast. His 18 charges were from the upper elementary grades. What he discovered was an unbelievable shock. These 18 students did not know what country they lived in, the name of their president, or what ocean lapped their beach. Some couldn't read or write, recognize the alphabet, write their names or count to ten. Also, none of these children who lived surrounded by water could swim. Everything Conroy had learned about teaching was obsolete on Daufuskie, and he had to be flexible in his methodology in teaching his students to learn. Unfortunately, he hits one roadblock after another from supervisors, the superintendent, the school board, his only colleague and even the parents (who liked what Conroy was doing, but didn't want their children leaving the island for trips). He also runs into hypocrisy, inertia, prejudice, and jealousy.
While Conroy is trying to teach his students, they are giving him an education as well. While the kids from nearby Beaufort are worrying about the homecoming dance, what costume to wear for Halloween, dating, and a host of other non-serious topics, the Daufuskie kids have to deal with poverty, substandard levels of education, alcoholic parents, violence and a host of very serious issues for children so young. Yet, his students are honest to a fault and very endearing. Conroy is amazed and enlightened to see the world through their eyes.
But Conroy wasn't fated to remain at Daufuskie very long, and not all endings are happy. He claims to have not made much of an impact on his students (most readers will disagree). Much of the pristine Daufuskie Island has been turned into a golfing resort. Many of the same problems still plague the islanders. Yet, his short-lived career as a teacher gave him the story that really began his literary career. Not many young writers can boast that their first commercial effort not only became a major bestseller, but also a major motion picture (Conrack with Jon Voight). Conroy's agent, Julian Bach, first read The Water is Wide and told him that he was a natural writer and would write many more successful books. Bach's crystal ball was certainly working well that day as Conroy has since published The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, My Losing Season and Beach Music. It doesn't get any better than that.
(From quoting Cynthia Robertson, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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- Better with -
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A Prayer for Owen Meany
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Pat Conroy is the bestselling author of The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, and My Losing Season. He lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina.
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From the Publisher:
A distant forgotten island, a kindhearted willing man, do the two mix together? Based on a true story, The Water is Wide is a wonderfully written story of Pat Conroy's fight to educate the impoverished children on an isolated island.
Although this island is off the coast of South Carolina, Yamacraw and its residents are completely oblivious to the outside world around them.
The author, a brilliant teacher, uses clever techniques to try and save the kids and the island itself. Giving a year of his life, he teaches the children in a way that is both fascinating and inspiring. While Conroy grows close to his students and learns more about the island, he allows the reader to as well. With his excellent descriptions, this incredible author creates a place that is unique and different for everyone. He lets the reader see this image perfectly, yet gives the reader room to imagine as well. For example, in the beginning of the book, Conroy describes the so-called "school" and classrooms where he teaches and lives. He talks about the tables, chairs, and chalkboard; however, he does not illustrate the size or shape of the classrooms, leaving this for the reader to fill in.
This is a very touching novel which makes the reader appreciate life and the privileges one has. Does Conroy succeed in achieving his goal of teaching? Well, read this extraordinary drama and find out!
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Chapter One
The southern school superintendent is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of a superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo. Beaufort, South Carolina's superintendent, Dr. Henry Piedmont, had been in Beaufort for only a year when I went to see him. He had a reputation of being tough, capable, and honest. A friend told me that Piedmont took crap from no man.
I walked into his office, introduced myself, chatted briefly, then told him I wanted to teach on Yamacraw Island. He gave me a hard stare and said, "Son, you are a godsend." I sat in the chair rigidly analyzing my new status. "I have prayed at night," he continued, "for an answer to the problems confronting Yamacraw Island. I have worried myself almost sick. And to think you would walk right into my office and offer to teach those poor colored children on that island. It just goes to show you that God works in mysterious ways."
"I don't know if God had anything to do with it, Doctor. I applied for the Peace Corps and haven't heard. Yamacraw seemed like a viable alternative."
"Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it's very important to help Americans."
"So do I, Doctor."
We chatted on about the problems of the island. Then he said, "You mentioned that God had nothing to do with your decision to go to Yamacraw, Pat. You remind me of myself when I was your age. Of course, I came up the hard way. My folks worked in a mill. Good people, both of them. Simple people, but God-fearing. My mother was a saint. A saint on earth. I worked in the mill, too. Even after I graduated from college, I went back to the mill in a supervisory capacity. But I wasn't happy, Pat. Something was missing. One night I was working late at the mill. I stepped outside the mill and looked up at the stars. I went toward the edge of the forest and fell to my knees. I prayed to Jesus and asked him what he wanted me to do in my life. And do you know what?"
"No, sir, what?"
Then Dr. Piedmont leaned forward in his seat, his eyes transformed with spiritual intensity.
"He told me what to do that very night. He told me, 'Henry, leave the mill. Go into education and help boys to go to college. Help them to be something. Go back to school, Henry, and get an advanced degree.' So I went to Columbia University, one of the great universities of the world. I emerged with a doctorate. I was the first boy from my town who was ever called Doctor."
I added wittily, "That's nice, Doctor."
"You remind me of that boy I was, Pat. Do you know why you came to me today?"
"Yes, sir, I want to teach at Yamacraw."
"No, son. Do you know the real reason?"
"No, sir, I guess I don't."
"Jesus," he said, as if he just found out the stone had been rolled back from the tomb. "You're too young to realize it now, but Jesus made you come to me today."
I left his office soon afterward. He had been impressive. He was a powerful figure, very controlled, almost arrogantly confident in his abilities. He stared at me during our entire conversation. From experience I knew his breed. The mill-town kid who scratched his way to the top. Horatio Alger, who knew how to floor a man with a quick chop to the gonads. He was a product of the upcountry of South Carolina, the Bible Belt, sand-lot baseball, knife fights under the bleachers. His pride in his doctorate was almost religious. It was the badge that told the world that he was no longer a common man. Intellectually, he was a thoroughbred. Financially, he was secure. And Jesus was his backer. Jesus, with the grits-and-gravy voice, the shortstop on the mill team, liked ol' Henry Piedmont.
Yamacraw is an island off the South Carolina mainland not far from Savannah, Georgia. The island is fringed with the green, undulating marshes of the southern coast; shrimp boats ply the waters around her and fishermen cast their lines along her bountiful shores. Deer cut through her forests in small silent herds. The great southern oaks stand broodingly on her banks. The island and the waters around her teem with life. There is something eternal and indestructible about the tide-eroded shores and the dark, threatening silences of the swamps in the heart of the island. Yamacraw is beautiful because man has not yet had time to destroy this beauty.
The twentieth century has basically ignored the presence of Yamacraw. The island is populated with black people who depend on the sea and their small farms for a living. Several white families live on the island in a paternalistic, but in many ways symbiotic, relationship with their neighbors. Only one white family actively participates in island life to any perceptible degree. The other three couples have come to the island to enjoy their retirement in the obscurity of the island's remotest corners. Thus far, no bridge connects the island with the mainland, and anyone who sets foot on the island comes by water. The roads of the island are unpaved and rutted by the passage of ox carts, still a major form of transportation. The hand pump serves up questionable water to the black residents who live in their small familiar houses. Sears, Roebuck catalogues perform their classic function in the crudely built privies, which sit, half-hidden, in the tall grasses behind the shacks. Electricity came to the island several years ago.
There is something unquestionably moving about the line of utility poles coming across the marsh, moving perhaps because electricity is a bringer of miracles and the journey of the faceless utility poles is such a long one--and such a humane one. But there are no telephones (electricity is enough of a miracle for one century). To call the island you must go to the Beaufort Sheriff's Office and talk to the man who works the radio. Otherwise, Yamacraw remains aloof and apart from the world beyond the river.
It is not a large island, nor an important one, but it represents an era and a segment of history that is rapidly dying in America. The people of the island have changed very little since the Emancipation Proclamation. Indeed, many of them have never heard of this proclamation. They love their island with genuine affection but have watched the young people move to the city, to the lands far away and far removed from Yamacraw. The island is dying, and the people know it.
In the parable of Yamacraw there was a time when the black people supported themselves well, worked hard, and lived up to the sacred tenets laid down in the Protestant ethic. Each morning the strong young men would take to their bateaux and search the shores and inlets for the large clusters of oysters, which the women and old men in the factory shucked into large jars. Yamacraw oysters were world famous. An island legend claims that a czar of Russia once ordered Yamacraw oysters for an imperial banquet. The white people propagate this rumor. The blacks, for the most part, would not know a czar from a fiddler crab, but the oysters were good, and the oyster factories operating on the island provided a substantial living for all the people. Everyone worked and everyone made money.
Then a villain appeared. It was an industrial factory situated on a knoll above the Savannah River many miles away from Yamacraw. The villain spewed its excrement into the river, infected the creeks, and as silently as the pull of the tides, the filth crept to the shores of Yamacraw. As every good health inspector knows, the unfortunate consumer who lets an infected oyster slide down his throat is flirting with hepatitis. Someone took samples of the water around Yamacraw, analyzed them under a microscope, and reported the results to the proper officials. Soon after this, little white signs were placed by the oyster banks forbidding anyone to gather the oysters. Ten thousand oysters were now as worthless as grains of sand. No czar would order Yamacraw oysters again. The muddy creatures that had provided the people of the island with a way to keep their families alive were placed under permanent quarantine.
Since a factory is soulless and faceless, it could not be moved to understand the destruction its coming had wrought. When the oysters became contaminated, the island's only industry folded almost immediately. The great migration began. A steady flow of people faced with starvation moved toward the cities. They left in search of jobs. Few cities had any intemperate demand for professional oyster- shuckers, but the people were somehow assimilated. The population of the island diminished considerably. Houses surrendered their tenants to the city and signs of sudden departure were rife in the interiors of deserted homes. Over 300 people left the island. They left reluctantly, but left permanently and returned only on sporadic visits to pay homage to the relatives too old or too stubborn to leave. As the oysters died, so did the people.
My neck has lightened several shades since former times, or at least I like to think it has. My early years, darkened by the shadows and regional superstitions of a bona fide cracker boy, act as a sobering agent during the execrable periods of self-righteousness that I inflict on those around me. Sometimes it is good for me to reflect on the Neanderthal period of my youth, when I rode in the backseat of a '57 Chevrolet along a night-blackened Carolina road hunting for blacks to hit with rotten watermelons tossed from the window of the speeding car
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Houston Chronicle (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
Reading PAT CONROY is like watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel. |
The New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
A hell of a good story. |
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
I knew this would be the perfect book to read this summer. I first caught a glimpse of "Conrack" playing one morning on AMC, then I found this book on the shelves by some kind of kismet. As I perused the pages, I was immediately drawn into the humid, lush island environment that Conroy deftly describes. There's a paragraph in the beginning of the book that I read over and over, it was such a wonderfully and lovingly written homage to the beauty and wonder of this magical place. The rest of the book was equally great, and was a wonderful learning experience for me. It taught me many things, but most of all it taught me how great storytellers tell great stories. The lessons that the writer and the reader learn together in the telling of the tale are fairly self evident, and don't need to be retold here. It is a brave book, told by a courageous and extraordinary writer and man. I didn't take a vacation this summer, but I read The Water is Wide. And it was one of the finest trips I've ever taken. |
Charles Harrell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
As usual, Pat Conroy spins a good yarn that will keep you riveted to the book. As a son of the South, he tells his story of the challenges of overcoming the prejudices of the day to educate black children. He does a masterful job of letting the reader know that one of the greatest challenges is culture. His portrayal of the Gullah speaking island inhabitants is a fair one based on fact rather than myth. Great book, one of his best. |
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