“I will try like hell to get back to teaching you,” I said. “I promise I will try like hell.” And it was ironic to note that one of my most voluble supporters at the meeting was Iris Glover, the alleged root doctor and mistress of darkness whom I once had identified as the greatest threat to my survival on the island. It seemed like a good omen.
The next morning the yellow school bus drove the long dirt road that ran the length of the island without a single child in it. The Yamacraw Island boycott had begun.
But the people and I knew nothing of power and how it works. We were to have several swift and unforgettable lessons. The day after the boycott began a man appeared on the island and went from door to door delivering a stern message. If the children were not in school by Monday, the parents would face a thirty-day jail sentence and a fine of fifty dollars per day, in violation of the compulsory-attendance law. This plunged the island into a mild panic and many of the mothers feared that the man was the harbinger of the law. On Monday four children were back in school. It was interesting to note that the children who broke the boycott had parents who worked in the school and whose only income was derived from the school being open. A rumor spread that these two mothers had been threatened with the loss of their jobs. When I heard about this intimidation, I returned to the island to tell the people that the compulsory-attendance law had never been enforced in the state of South Carolina. Edna Graves was one of the first people I talked to that day.
“Did a man come to see you, Edna?” I asked.
“Yeh, he come to say some stuff.”
“What did he say?”
“He tell Edna that she go to jail if she don’t send no chillun back to that school. He tell me that I owe fifty dollar for ev’ry day my chillun not in no schoolhouse. I tell him to get his ass out my yard. I tell him he can put Edna under the jail for ninety-nine years. Her chillun ain’t goin’ to no schoolhouse.”
A group of mothers had gathered in Edna’s yard. I told them that they were going to have to play it tough from now on. They nodded their heads in solemn agreement. Lois, Ethel’s mother, said that another man had come to her house and said that her welfare checks would be cut off if she didn’t send her children back to school. I tried to calm her down and explain that some white people would say anything to get them to return their children to school. Then I asked the six mothers why they had all gathered together at Edna’s house. This was the largest congregation of mothers I had ever seen at a private home.
“We waitin’,” one of the ladies said.
“Waitin’ for what?” I asked.
“Waitin’ for Lizzie,” the lady replied, Lizzie was Mary’s mother.
“Why?”
“We gonna beat her up,” was the answer.
“Why are you gonna beat her up?”
“She break the strike. We say we beat up anyone who break the strike. She break it. So we beat her good.”
“Oh, that’s great. That is just great. Man, you cannot just go around beating up people who don’t agree with the strike. If Lizzie doesn’t want to keep her children out of school, then that’s her business.”
“We jes’ gonna hurt ’er a little bit.”
“No, I don’t want that to happen. Lizzie is probably worried she’s gonna lose her job. Don’t hold that against her.”
“You keep her girl, Mary, in your house, don’t you?” Edna said.
“Yes, Edna, you know I do.”
“The whites don’t like those colored chillun stayin’ wit’ you, do they? That’s why they tell you to leave Yamacraw. You got colored chillun in your house. They don’t want nobody who helps the colored. Nobody, I tell you. If I were you, I’d go home and t’row Mary into the street. If her mama cain’t keep her chillun out a no school, I wouldn’t keep her gull in my house in Beaufort.”
“Lizzie is just afraid, Edna. She isn’t doing this because she is against us. She is just afraid.”
“Edna ain’t afraid of nuttin’.”
“I know that, Edna. But you can’t beat up another person because they are.” Lizzie was not cudgeled that afternoon, though someone must have exerted a certain amount of pressure on her. For on the next day the boycott was total again. The next day was significant for another reason, for it marked the very first time that Henry Piedmont felt the compulsion to set foot on Yamacraw Island.
He came with Bennington and the truant officer. It was to be the classic show of force, the moving of the big guns into strategic position. They called for a meeting at the schoolhouse to begin at one o’clock. No one showed up. Bennington then went around the island, rounding people up, and telling them they were required to attend the meeting with the superintendent of schools. I watched the action around the school from the edge of the woods. Sidney and Samuel had led me from Edna’s house through the swamp and across the pond to a spot that gave us a commanding view of the entire scene. Six people eventually arrived for the meeting. Edna was one of them. I could hear her shouting for the rest of the afternoon.
Piedmont told the parents some interesting things. He told them I had not paid my rent when I lived on the island. He told them I had not paid my electric bills. He told them that many times I had left the landing at Bluffton and had never arrived on Yamacraw. It had also been reported that I spent a large amount of my time in the nightclub on Yamacraw. This Conrack was not an honorable lad. He was not worth following. Piedmont reiterated the threat of jail and fines, then left. I never found out how he liked his first trip to the island.
A reporter for a local Beaufort paper had come with me to the island. He was not allowed inside but listened at the door. By the time the meeting was over, he was ready to break the story to Beaufort. I had said nothing to the press prior to this day since I wanted to give Piedmont, the board, and the politicians time to reconsider their decision. After this, I was going to sing like a canary to anyone who would listen. But when I got home that day I heard that the draft board was reclassifying me 1-A. I was being outflanked again.
On Friday I called off the boycott completely. Too many of the women were frightened by the economic and legal threats against them. When I talked to them, some of them would almost weep out of fear. The threats, spoken and unspoken, about reprisals against those who supported me increased each day. I finally decided that the boycott was more of a prop for my deflated ego than something that was doing the island and my students any good. It was not worth the suffering etched in the faces of these parents who were trying so hard and succeeding at being brave. Edna, however, would not send her grandchildren back to school. I pleaded with her and she shook her head firmly. Nor would Cindy Lou’s mother send her children back. Their personal boycott lasted a week longer than anyone else’s. Curiously enough, Edna did not receive her Social Security check for five months after the boycott.
The next act in the circus was my appeal before the board of education. I had enlisted the help of George Trask, a young Beaufort lawyer, to present my case before the board. George was astonished at the ferocity of the charges levied against me by Piedmont. He also told me that the law gave great powers to school boards and that all they needed to impale me was “good and sufficient cause.” In the parlance of lawyers, I could urinate on the wrong part of a commode and if the board of education decided that this was “good and sufficient” reason for dismissal, then the courts would automatically side with them. It looked rather bleak, but I had decided to fight it anyway.
When I walked into the board room on a tension-filled Tuesday night, I knew instantly that I would lose this phase of the appeal. The board members wore immovable, intransigent expressions, the unblinking faces of soldiers in a Greek tragedy. The dentist on the board sneered when he saw me. The doctor felt much too self-righteous to sneer. The entire board had all the more cheerful characteristics of a lynch mob. My friends had assembled again, a far more somber, truculent group than before. They had come to watch an execution and they saw no way to prevent it. The members of the boa
rd had already closed their minds to arguments on my behalf and all the laws of the world could not prevent them from rendering a decision against me. Yet the meeting brought out some emotional responses from the administrators that I will always treasure. Piedmont responded to a question from George Trask at the beginning of the meeting by saying, “I run the most democratic school system in the country. If a teacher doesn’t like something his principal does, then he can come to me with his complaint. If I do not give him a satisfactory answer, he can appeal to the board of education. Pat should know this better than anybody. He’s the only teacher I know of that has followed this chain to the top. Of course, Pat feels that teachers are afraid of me. I told him that no one should be afraid of me.” Nor did he sense the irony in his words as he addressed the assembled crowd. And Bennington later answered a question from a board member by saying, “Mr. Conroy does not communicate well with his elders. Communication is his major problem.”
After it had been proven that Mrs. Brown left the island for ten days without telling anyone, George Trask said to the board, “You’ve got a principal at your school who doesn’t inform anybody when she is absent on school days and doesn’t make any provisions for substitutes. You don’t do anything to her. You’ve got a teacher at your school who sends the authorized substitute with lesson plans and you fire him. As I say, the whole thing is absurd.”
My stomach crawled throughout the entire meeting; it felt ulcerous and dangerously acidic. The people who rose to defend me did so out of desperation. All of us knew what the final result would be. The talking was simply a showy preliminary to the final banishment. Eventually, however, George motioned for me to rise and give my farewell address.
The speech was not exactly my forte. I would have preferred to tell the board members to kiss my baby-pink behind. But the only chance I had was to crawl before the nine judges who stared at me. I traced my teaching career in the county. I told them how I had been offered the job of assistant principal at the high school but turned it down because I wanted to remain in the classroom. Then I told them that when I found out that school was a place of timeclocks and rules, of teachers more concerned with attendance reports than with students, and students praying for the day of graduation when their reprieve from the stale grip of public education would be granted, I tried to make my classes a stimulating experience for my students … life experiences, creative experiences. I tried to get them to drop prejudices and conditioned responses from their thinking. In essence, I tried to teach them to embrace life openly, to reflect upon its mysteries, rejoice in its surprises, and to reject its cruelties. Like other teachers, I failed. Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt. I dislike poor teachers. They are criminals to me. I’ve seen so much cruelty toward children. I’ve seen so many children not given the opportunity to live up to their potential as human beings. Before you fire me, ask yourselves these questions that I feel are most critical and essential in the analysis of any teacher who comes before you. Did he love his kids? Did he love the act of teaching? Did his kids love him? If you answer negatively to any of these questions, I deserve to be fired.
After this saccharine presentation, the doctor glared at me and asked, “Why are you trying to intimidate us?” George finally ended my defense by suggesting that the members of the board read a book that seemed to apply to the case, Catch-22.
The board voted to sustain my dismissal. But because they were exemplary men, they offered me the chance to resign with honor and without a blot on my record, if I did not take the case to court.
Two months later Judge Street ambled heavily into his courtroom. Everyone rose according to custom. Dr. Piedmont rose, as did Bennington, Mrs. Brown, Ted Stone, and several board members summoned to testify against me. All the major protagonists of the year stood reverently as Judge Street cleared his throat, shuffled a few papers, then brought the court to order. It would be convenient to report that Judge Street was a gum-chewing illiterate ex-Klansman elevated to the judgeship by decadent politicians who wished to preserve the status quo. On the contrary, he was a magnificent man with a stentorian voice and a gray, leonine head who gave the appearance that justice was a frail maiden whom he served with unswerving fidelity. He treated all the witnesses with paramount consideration, though I thought he treated all the lawyers in the court with a visible contempt.
The trial was interesting. Most of my witnesses were from the island. The O.E.O. boat was making a special trip at seven o’clock in the morning to bring the seven parents who were testifying in my behalf. When the captain tried to start the engine, he discovered that the ignition system, which had worked perfectly the night before, did not even turn the engine over. At precisely the same time, the people saw Ted Stone’s boat pass their stranded boat on the way to the trial. The people later told me that a part was missing from the engine. I did not have any witnesses from the island, but I learned still another lesson in the exercise of power.
The trial was a necessary, but masochistic, ritual. People from my past paraded to the witness stand to prove that I was really Jack Armstrong and not Godzilla. The administration paraded witnesses to the stand to show that I was a lousy teacher, a liar, an impudent troublemaker, and a discredit to the hallowed profession of teaching. I also had tried to politicize my students by letting them draw black power posters on the bulletin board. During the trial Piedmont did discover that Bennington and Sedgwick had authorized the use of the gas. His arguments that I did not follow the chain of command were a bit tepid after that. The judge discovered that the only punishment that existed in Piedmont’s democratic kingdom was instant dismissal.
“Doctor Piedmont, what other punishment could you have levied against this young man besides firing him?”
“We have no other punishment, Your Honor.”
“You have no lesser punishment than dismissal? You mean if he is late to school a couple of times, you have no punishment like docking his pay or reducing his leave time?”
“Our teachers all obey the rules. We never have to discipline them.”
“You have certainly disciplined this young man, Doctor Piedmont. You fired him. That is a form of discipline, isn’t it?”
Dr. Piedmont came down from the witness stand nervous and shaking. He was the final witness in the two-day trial. I walked up and shook his hand, and told him that I hoped the ordeal had not been too painful. He responded by saying that I must always do what I thought was right, no matter what the consequences might be. After all the crap, Piedmont and I still grudgingly liked each other. Of course, I have to admit of a momentary desire to milk his rat as we stood there talking.
The lawyers, my friends, and I thought we had won the trial. The rest of that week was a celebration; the smoke had finally cleared and the villains had been exposed. Naturally we lost. When the judge delivered his opinion, he stated that the board of education was invested with the power to fire any teacher it considered undesirable. That was the law. It was very, very simple.
CHAPTER 12
SO CONRACK, defrocked and slightly dishonored, retired to his room to write about his year on Yamacraw. It was a strange year, a kind of seasoning among the marshes, the migrating fowl, and the people of the island. I had to write this book to explain what happened and how it affected me. When I was severed from the school, I knew I had lost a relationship of infinite and timeless value, and one that I would never know again. For no matter how many accusations or charges the administration could summon up, it did not alter the fact that the kids and I really liked each other. In fact, it did not alter anything.
At first there was the time of great bitterness when I prowled about my room trying to fathom why I represented such a threat to Piedmont and Bennington and why they felt compelled to extricate me from the island school. During this period they appeared, in my eyes, as evil incarnate. That they would fire me so insensitively was one thing, but that they would try to destroy my personal reputation was anoth
er. What they did was not simply a removal from office, it was a blood vendetta and for many months I could not talk about either man without becoming enraged.
But just as time heals the marsh grasses that wither and perish in the winter cold, so does it quell the storms that often threaten the human soul. And as time passed, so did my anger. When the anger subsided, I could see the message in the chaotic flow of events that had conquered me. The eye could focus clearly when it was not clouded with personal indignation. And eventually I gained a distance and could look back at people and places of the past year, frozen in event and memory, calcified and motionless in a grand chronology that began and ended in the month of September. When I finally reached the summit of this metaphorical hill, it was then and only then that I could come to some truce or understanding about myself and the people of Yamacraw Island.
I saw the necessity of living and accepting bullcrap in my midst. It was everywhere. In teachers’ manuals, in the platitudes muttered by educators, in school boards, in the community, and most significantly, in myself. I could be so self-righteous, so inflexible when I thought that I was right or that the children had been wronged. I lacked diplomacy and would not compromise. To survive in the future I would have to learn the complex art of ass-kissing, that honorable American custom that makes the world go ’round. Survival is the most important thing. As a bona fide ass-kisser, I might lose a measure of self-respect, but I could be teaching and helping kids. As it is, I have enough self-respect to fertilize Yankee Stadium, but I am not doing a thing for anybody. I could probably still be with the Yamacraw kids had I conquered my ego.
I also saw that Piedmont and Bennington were not evil men. They were just predictably mediocre. Their dreams and aspirations had the grandeur, scope, and breadth of postage stamps. They had rule books and Bibles and golf clubs and nice homes on rivers. They were deacons in their churches, had read to their congregations from the Good Book, and had delivered the message of Jesus in Sunday school. They quoted the Bible liberally and authoritatively and felt the presence of the Savior in their lives. They did not feel the need for redemption, because they had already been redeemed. The only thing they could not control was their fear.