The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

Ezra Bennington, the region’s “elderly deputy superintendent,” was once in charge of the school district that includes Yamacraw island. He tells Pat about the difficulties he’s had in providing an education for the children of Yamacraw. He describes the other teacher at the school, Mrs. Brown, as “the first decent teacher [he] could get” (27).

On his first visit to the island, Pat meets the “leading personalities.” Chief among these is Ted Stone, “a powerfully built man with steel gray hair and ice blue eyes” who “rule[s] Yamacraw Island” (28), serving as the game warden, the magistrate, the director of economic opportunity, the warden of the roads, and the civil defense director.

Pat also meets Mrs. Brown. She is a large, “light-skinned” black woman. She assures Pat that she is not from the island and “was educated in a very fine private school where the cruder forms of black dialects were frowned upon” (31). Whenever Bennington speaks, Mrs. Brown nods in agreement, but Pat can’t tell whether “this [is] a role she [is] playing or if she actually believe[s] that Bennington [is] the word made flesh” (32). Although Pat has been told that Mrs. Brown is principal of the school (which is later confirmed), Mrs. Brown thinks that Pat is being made principal because he is white (40).

Mrs. Brown holds a low opinion of the students at the school. Discussing the school’s problems, Mrs. Brown says, “You know I try. But these people don’t want to better themselves” (32). She warns Pat to treat the children sternly: “I know colored people better than you do. That’s because I am one myself. You have to keep your foot on them all the time. Step on them. Step on them every day and keep steppin’ on them when they gets out of line” (34). She tells him that they have a cabinet of switches for beating the children.

Pat is assigned to teach grades 5 through 8. When he meets the students, “they simply [gaze] at me with shy amusement, then [bury] their faces in their hands” (31). They are “subdued, passive, and exceedingly polite,” and everything in the classroom is “Mickey-Mouse neat and virgin clean” (31). Mrs. Brown comes in and speaks to the class. She tells the children that two of them have “good brains,” but “the rest of you can’t think as good” because “your brains are just slow” (35). She insists, “You can learn if you work. You are just lazy, lazy, and lazy people just can’t get ahead in life,” adding that “some of you are even retarded, and that is even worse than being lazy […] [R]etarded people need to be pushed and whipped harder than anyone” (35).

Pat is surprised by the children’s lack of education. He discovers that some of them are can barely write or can’t write at all. When he asks them to point to Yamacraw Island on the map, they don’t know where it is located; they point to Russia, India, and Outer Mongolia. He is further shocked to learn that they do not know that they live in the United States of America, have never heard of George Washington, and do not know the names of the oceans—even though they live on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the children can’t count to 10, while others don’t know their own birth dates. Pat gets “closer and closer to the children” and “madder and madder at the people responsible for the condition of these kids” (45). He notes that the children have “never taken a trip, never seen a hill, never seen a swift stream, never seen a super-highway, never learned to swim, and never done a thousand things that children of a similar age [take] for granted” (49). He writes to Dr. Piedmont, “telling him that his cute little schoolhouse on Yamacraw [is] not worth a pound of cow dung” (48).

Each day at the school includes 30 minutes of free reading time. However, because many of the children are illiterate, Pat uses the time to try to get them interested in books. Unfortunately, the school’s library doesn’t have any books that would be of interest to the children or on their reading level.

Pat describes the island’s public library as “the greatest travesty” because it offers only classic literary texts and nothing relevant to the islanders. He derides this as another project by “concerned white folks” that assumes that “by a miraculous process of osmosis, the oyster-pickers will become Shakespearean scholars. All dem nigras need is book and little tad of education” (58).

Music is important on the island, and Pat enjoys letting the children sing and dance, although Mrs. Brown believes doing so wastes school time and “ignor[es] the sacred laws of the state government” (58). Pat introduces his students to classical music, and soon most of the children “[develop] an almost infallible expertise.” He and the children take “almost Satanic pleasure” from challenging visitors to contests in classical music, then watching “the misty-eyed whites who had flagellated themselves with visions of worm-eaten cretins and deprived idiots trounced in a head-on collision of wits” (62). Pat uses these experiences to try to get the children to believe in their own self-worth.

Pat continues to find new ways to keep the children interested and engaged. For four months, they listen to the news every morning, using it as a platform for exploring foreign countries and other topics. Because the children can’t read, they don’t use textbooks, but rather learn orally. They begin a game of call-and-response around the topics of the day, so that every morning contains “a daily chant or incantation to the gods of basic knowledge” (65).

Although when Pat arrived the children were “untouched by the twenty-six letters of the alphabet” (68) and unable to perform basic math, “[a]fter one month of anguish and labor” (69) all of them know their letters and can count to 10.