At the writers’ conference, Rosemary introduced me to each of the other women as old friends of hers, saving Alice Walker for last. Alice possessed a studied but queenly carriage. Wendy Weil was her agent in New York, and Wendy had shepherded me though all my inelegant stumbling through the New York literary world. Rosemary was protective and sisterly about Alice, so I thought we had enough in common to make us friends. Alice had been born and raised in Eatonton, Georgia, fifty miles away from the place she and I were standing when we shook hands. Her hand was as limp as an altar cloth.
“I read your book, and I really like it,” I said as I handed her my copy of Meridian.
Alice Walker took the book, signed it, then returned it to me before turning away to open the back door of a nearby car. She had not spoken a single word to me. Her rudeness unnerved the other women with Rosemary.
“She has a thing about Southern white men, Pat,” Rosemary explained.
“Sure seems to,” I said.
Later, Rosemary Daniell would earn her own portion of wrath from Alice Walker. Though Rosemary was an early and articulate feminist, she riled the sisterhood with her groundbreaking book Sleeping with Soldiers. In it, Rosemary describes slumming on the wild side and sleeping with shrimpers, trailer trash, cowboys, tattooed soldiers, and anyone else she was attracted to on any given night. When I read it, I called Rosemary.
“Rosemary,” I said. “Thank the good Lord in heaven that we never slept together.”
I could tell I hurt her feelings when she responded, “I was good to my boys, Pat. No one’s called to complain.”
“It’s not that, Rosemary,” I said. “I’m thinking of what you might have written about me, something like, ‘Conroy not only had chipmunk-size genitalia, he whined and cried like a baby when we had sex. Afterward he asked to try on my panty hose and Maidenform bra.’ You’re way too honest for me, kid.”
“Honey, I bet we could’ve been famous in the sack. Famous!” Rosemary drawled.
Alice Walker’s response to Sleeping with Soldiers was to write Rosemary a vituperative letter accusing her of a betrayal of the feminist movement and a celebration of the darkest forces of the sheer animalism of male sexuality. Walker considered the book a defacement and defilement of all that women had fought for in the twentieth century. Rosemary survived that dispiriting encounter with Alice Walker, and she went on to establish a group for women whose voices have been heard around the world. The group is called Zona Rosa, and Rosemary travels all over the country to conduct workshops that change both the writings and the lives of women who cast their fate with this effervescent life force from Savannah, Georgia. I’ve spoken four times at Zona Rosa meetings, and I’m always invigorated by the powerful creative forces set loose when Rosemary and her group begin hurling ideas back and forth as though they were the shells of artillery fire. If forced to, I would say that Alice Walker was the better writer, but that Rosemary was the far better woman. In writing, in art, in everything, it always comes down to the condition of your own suffering, mortal heart. If my child were dying, I could put in a call to Rosemary and know she’d soon be in my house offering me words of comfort and bringing the spirit of Zona Rosa with her. But because she’s Rosemary Daniell, she is mischievous, devil-may-care, unfathomable, and who knows what else that wild child might choose to do. At my first writers’ conference, Rosemary burned like a new Southern flame while early success was in the process of butchering the kindly and commendable part of Alice Walker. She was as friendly as a cow turd on an altar step.
At the afternoon session the following day, I could barely contain my excitement over attending the poetry workshop of Adrienne Rich. She had won a National Book Award for her book Diving into the Wreck, which my sister Carol had recommended to me as both revolutionary and a work of art. In her all-star status, Rich had attracted the largest number of writers to her seminars, which were held in Callanwolde’s cavernous main hall. Before the session began, Betsy Scott asked me to get everyone around us a cup of coffee to drink during Rich’s lecture. Eight people stuck up their hands when I offered to make a coffee run to a rear kitchen on the other side of the mansion. I hurried off to get in line and return before things got started. A low hum of anticipation followed me as I took up position at the end of a long line and an inefficient team of coffee servers. Finally an attendant handed me my nine cups of coffee in a cardboard box loaded with packets of cream, Sweet’n Low, napkins, and spoons, and I began the slow, awkward balancing act back to the main hall.
The coffee cups in the thin box were lidless; hot coffee began spilling onto my wrists; and I almost tripped on an Oriental rug. A strange sound came from the lecture hall, both ominous and unsettling, but I couldn’t lift my eyes from the shifting cups. When I got close enough, I could hear the angry hissing of the workshop participants. They sounded like an a cappella choir of rat snakes. It was not just sibilance I heard; it was hatred in a very undistilled form. It did not occur to me that the strident, S-shaped noise could be directed at me. Betsy Scott hurried up to me, frightened and obviously unsure as to what she should do. She took the box from me, laid it on the floor, and whispered, “Run, Pat. Get the hell out of here. They’re hissing at you. At you. She kicked all the men out of her workshop—every one of them.”
Looking up, I tried to take in the scene, get my bearings, and search for a route of escape all at once. Indeed, the hissing was meant for me alone. A hundred or so women were hissing at me as though I were some dormouse trying to crash a convention of feral cats. I sprinted toward a series of curtained portals that I thought were doors, but they turned out to be windows. I found myself flailing away at the window sashes and vermilion drapes and venetian blinds as the hissing grew louder behind me.
“This way, Pat!” Betsy yelled. “The door’s all the way to the right.”
She pulled me, and we were both running. When we reached the door, Betsy flung it open and pushed me through it as though I were the afternoon trash. Gasping for breath, I watched as a young man passed by me, heading toward the door Betsy held open that led to the forbidden hall. We watched this young man confront Adrienne Rich as she stood in regal attendance before her militant tribe. The hissing was as loud as a rookery of gannets while the angry young man faced down his detractors. Rich lifted a hand to silence them, and the man said, “I came to this conference because I love your poetry so much. I drove from Tampa, Florida. I brought all your books with me. This isn’t right … what you’ve done. It will never be right. We’re all Southerners here. We know what this is. Segregation. Nothing else. It’s awful.”
The great woman did not speak to him, but a cadre of her supporters surrounded him and eased him out of the hall toward where I watched the scene from the shadows. Betsy still held the doors open as the young man was pushed into the hallway next to me. It was not a violent moment, except that it was.
The other exiled men had gathered in a room on the second floor, and I found them to be a crestfallen group. John Stone and Gene Ellis, both Georgia poets, were among them, and my friend Cliff Graubart came over to greet me.
“Hey, Pat?” Cliff said. “When you didn’t make it up here I thought those whacked-out chicks had killed you.”
“It’s not right,” the man from Tampa repeated.
But the general mood of the men was one of broad-mindedness and resignation. John Stone summed it up best when he said, “Feminism is new. There’re going to be a lot of stages it has to go through. Our job is to be patient. We’re writers, so that’s easy to do.”
At the closing ceremony that night, I went to the poetry reading by Miller Williams. His was the last performance of the conference, but because of the chaos let loose by Adrienne Rich, the timetable of events got displaced. Miller Williams read his considerable poems to a smaller audience than he usually would expect. Though he was clearly exasperated by the events of the day, he was professional. He approached the podium and said, “This reading was supposed to have taken place two hour
s ago. I’m pleased that so many of you came back to hear my poetry. I’m happy to see that the young writer Pat Conroy came back for my reading. He thinks he’s been anonymous this weekend, but David Madden and I both knew he was here. I loved his book The Water Is Wide. I dedicate this reading to you tonight, Mr. Conroy.”
It was the first and last time a poet has dedicated a reading of poetry to me, and it stands as one of the great thrills of my career. Miller Williams’s poetry moved and astonished me. I listened to him with an ardent pride when he read a poem at President Clinton’s second inauguration in 1996.
In summing up my first writers’ conference, I got insulted by Alice Walker, thrown out of a poetry workshop by Adrienne Rich, and had a poetry reading dedicated to me by Miller Williams. All in all, I thought I was in the middle of leading a grand and possibly even a fascinating life.
CHAPTER NINE
ON BEING A MILITARY BRAT
I was born and raised on federal property. America itself paid all the costs for my birth and my mother’s long stay at the hospital. I was a military brat—one of America’s children in the profoundest sense—and I was guaranteed free medical care and subsidized food and housing until the day I finished college and had to turn in the ID card that granted me these rights and privileges. The sound of gunfire on rifle ranges strikes an authentic chord of home in me even now. My father was a fighter pilot in the United States Marine Corps and fought for his country in three wars. I grew up invisibly in the aviator’s house. We became quiet as bivalves at his approach and our lives were desperate and sad. But when the United States needed a fighter pilot, we did our best to provide one. Our contribution to the country was small, but so were we most of the time, and we gave all that we could.
I think being a military brat is one of the strangest and most interesting ways to spend an American childhood. The military brats of America are an invisible, unorganized tribe, a federation of brothers and sisters bound by common experience, by our uniformed fathers, by the movement of families being rotated through the American mainland and to military posts in foreign lands. We are an undiscovered nation living invisibly in the body politic of this country. There are millions of us scattered throughout America, but we have no special markings or passwords to identify one another when we move into a common field of vision. We grew up strangers to ourselves. We passed through our military childhoods unremembered. We were transients, billboards to be changed, body temperatures occupying school desks for a short time. We came and went like rented furniture, serviceable when you needed it, but unremarked upon after it was gone.
Who would have thought we were in the process of creating a brand-new culture in America? Several years ago, I discovered an extraordinary book called Military Brats, by Mary Edwards Wertsch. The book made me realize that military brats have done everything except tell our own stories. We’ve never stopped to honor ourselves, out loud, for our outstanding service to America. I come from a country that has no name, the one that Mary Edwards Wertsch describes in her book. No Carolinian, no Georgian, has ever been as close to me and what I am in my blood than those military brats who lived out their childhoods going from base to base.
I was drafted into the Marine Corps on October 26, 1945, and I served the corps faithfully and proudly for twenty-one years. I moved more than twenty times and I attended eleven schools in twelve years. My job was to be a stranger, to know no one’s name on the first day of school, to be ignorant of all history and flow and that familial sense of relationship and proportion that makes a town safe for a child.
By necessity, I made my own private treaty with rootlessness and spent my whole life trying to fake or invent a sense of place. Home is a foreign word in my vocabulary and always will be. At each new base and fresh assignment, I suffered through long months of trying to catch up and learning the steps required of those outsiders condemned to inhabit the airless margins of a child’s world. My family drifted in and out of that archipelago of marine bases that begins with the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and stretches down the coast to Parris Island in the South. I spent most of my childhood in North Carolina and few people in North Carolina know that salient fact. I’ve been claimed as native son by more than a few Southern states, but not by the one I spent the most time in as a child.
My mother, the loveliest of marine wives, always claimed to her seven children that we were in the middle of a wonderful, free-flowing life. Since it was the only life I’d ever lived, I had no choice but to believe her. She also provided me with the raw material for the protective shell I built for myself. As excuse or rationalization, it gave me comfort in the great solitude I was born into as a military brat. My mother explained that my loneliness was an act of patriotism. She knew how much the constant moving bothered me, but she convinced me that my country was somehow safer because my formidable, blue-eyed father practiced his deadly art at air stations around the South. We moved almost every year preparing for that existential moment (“This is no drill, son”) when my violent father would take to the air against enemies fiercer than his wife or children.
That was a darker part of my service to my country. I grew up thinking my father would one day kill me. I never remember a time when I was not afraid of my father’s hands except for those bright, palmy years when Dad was waging war or serving in carrier-based squadrons overseas. I used to pray that America would go to war or for Dad to get overseas assignments that would take him to Asian cities I’d never heard of. Ironically, a time of war for the United States became both respite and separate peace for my family. When my father was off killing the enemy, his family slept securely, and not because he was making the world safe for democracy.
Mom would not let us tell anyone that Dad was knocking us around. My silence was simply another facet of my patriotism. My youth filled up with the ancient shame of a son who cannot protect his mother. It would begin with an argument and the colonel’s temper would rise (one did not argue with the colonel or the major or the captain or the lieutenant). He would backhand my mother, and her pitiful weeping would fill the room. Her seven children, quiet as Spartans, would lower their eyes and say nothing.
Later, my mother would recover and tell us that we had not seen what we had just seen. She turned us into unwitnesses of our own history. I breathed not a word of these troubling scenes to my teachers, coaches, relatives, or friends of the family. If asked, I think I’d have denied under torture that my father ever laid a hand on me. If the provost marshal had arrested my father for child abuse, his career in the Marine Corps would have ended at that moment. So my mother took her beatings and I took mine. My brothers and sisters, too, did their part for the corps. We did not squeal and we earned our wings in our father’s dark and high-geared squadron.
To his dying day, my father always thought I exaggerated the terror of my childhood. I exaggerated nothing. Mine was a forced march of blood and tears and I was always afraid in my father’s house. But I did it because I had no choice and because I was a military brat conscripted at birth who had a strong and unshakable sense of mission. I was in the middle of a long and honorable service to my country, and part of that service included letting my father practice the art of warfare against me and the rest of the family.
The military life marked me out as one of its own. I’m accustomed to order, to a chain of command, to a list of rules at poolside, a spit-shined guard at the gate, retreat at sunset, reveille at dawn, and everyone in my world must be on time. Being late was unimaginable in the world I grew up in, so I always arrive at appointments early and find it difficult to tolerate lateness in others. I always know what time it is even when I don’t carry a watch.
Because of the military life, I’m a stranger everywhere and a stranger nowhere. I can engage anyone in a conversation, become well liked in a matter of seconds, yet there is a distance I can never recover, a slight shiver of alienation, of not belonging, and an eye on the nearest door. The word “good-bye” will always be a killing thing
to me, but so is the word “hello.” I’m pathetic in my attempts to make friends with everyone I meet, from cabdrivers to bellhops to store clerks. When I was a child, my heart used to sink at every new move or new set of orders. By necessity, I became an expert at spotting outsiders. All through my youth, I was grateful for unpopular children. In their unhappiness, I saw my chance for rescue and I always leaped at it. When Mary Edwards Wertsch writes of military brats offering emotional blank checks to everyone in the world, she’s writing the first line in my biography.
Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There’s something about my soul that’s always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspection’s done and the civilians are asleep and the open road is calling to the marine and his family again. I left twenty towns at night singing the Marine Corps hymn and it’s that hymn that sets my blood on fire each time I hear it and takes me back to my ruined and magnificent childhood.
I brought so few gifts to the task of being a military brat. You learn who you are by testing and measuring yourself against the friends you grow up with. The military brat lacks those young, fixed critics who form opinions about your character over long, unhurried years or who pass judgment on your behavior as your personality waxes and wanes during the insoluble dilemma that is childhood. But I do know the raw artlessness of being an outsider.