The letter was written the second day of the school year. From that day forward, no one in the educational hierarchy of the county could plead ignorance concerning the school on the island. I had told them.
On the third day I despaired. Each time I broached a new subject, it revealed some astonishing gap in the kids’ knowledge. The realm of their experience was not only limited, it often seemed nonexistent. Some of them vaguely remembered having heard of Vietnam but were not aware that the United States was at war in that country. When I asked whom we were fighting there, Oscar’s hand shot up and he quickly said, “The Germans and the Japs.” The whole class solemnly agreed that we had to beat those Germans and Japs. Yamacraw Island was the largest of the nine planets. When I asked who was the greatest man that ever lived, Mary answered, “Jesus.” Everyone, of course, fervently agreed. When I asked who was the second greatest man who ever lived, her brother Lincoln answered, “Jesus Christ.” Once again the entire class unanimously consented to this second choice.
I could understand the class not knowing Richard Nixon, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, or Alexander the Great, but I could not see how black children living in the latter half of the twentieth century could fail to know Sidney Poitier, Wilt Chamberlain, or Willie Mays. They had never heard of Shakespeare or Aesop. They never heard of England or India. They had never been to a movie theater or to a ball game. They had never heard of democracy, governors or senators, capitals of states, or any oceans, or famous actors, or artists, or newspapers, or kinds of automobiles. They had never been to a museum, never looked at a work of art, never read a piece of good literature, never ridden a city bus, never taken a trip, never seen a hill, never seen a swift stream, never seen a superhighway, never learned to swim, and never done a thousand things that children of a similar age took for granted.
I learned all this on the third day. I had pulled up a chair in the middle of the class and all the kids had drawn up their desks in a semicircle around me. And we just talked. We spent the whole day talking. I told them about myself, about my mother and father, about my four brothers and two sisters, about teaching in Beaufort, about going to Europe, and about my coming to Yamacraw. They were thrilled to learn that my father flew jet planes. I also told them I drove a small yellow car called a Volkswagen when I was on the mainland. The car was manufactured in a country called Germany on a continent called Europe. I showed them the country and the continent on the map. They asked me about places I had been, and what New York looked like, and had I ever been on an airplane.
They then told me about hunting on the island, and the boys became extremely animated describing the number of squirrels to be found deep in the woods and how you had to be a great shot to pick out the gray tuft of fur high in the black oaks and bring it down with one shot of the .22. The further you went in the woods, they told me, the more tame the squirrels became, the closer they would come, and the easier they were to kill. The girls then told me in elaborate detail how to clean the squirrels. They called the process “scrinching.” You slit open the belly with a sharp knife, peeled the squirrel’s pelt off like the skin of a grape, then scraped the squirrel’s skin until it was white and smooth. Ethel said, “A lady in Savannah won’t eat squirrel ’cause she say after a squirrel been scrinched it look like little white baby.”
“How many in here like to eat squirrel?” I asked. Everyone loved squirrel, although there was one purist faction in the class that liked squirrel meat without any other embellishments and another who preferred their squirrel with a thick gravy and a heavy stew.
“I would have to be starving to death before I ate a squirrel,” I told the class. “A squirrel looks like a big hairy rat to me and since I would not eat a rat, I most probably would not eat a squirrel either.”
Lincoln asked incredulously, “You ain’t never eaten squirrel?”
I answered negatively.
“Gawd, that man never eaten squirrel,” said Cindy Lou.
“Squirrel ain’t no rat,” Saul said.
“You eat rat,” Lincoln said to Saul.
“No, I don’t eat rat. You eat crow.” The whole class roared when the puny Saul accused Lincoln of eating crow. Evidently, crow-eating had connotations on the island which were literal as well as metaphorical.
“You know what you eat, Saul. You eat buzzard.”
The class laughed wildly again.
“Fat man, you know what you eat.”
“What I eat, little man?”
“You know what you eat,” Saul answered menacingly, his tiny frame rigid with anger.
“Little man, better tell me what I eat.”
“Fat man eats shee-it.”
“Oh Gawd,” half the class exclaimed simultaneously. Someone shouted, “Little man told big man he eat shee-it. He curse. He curse. Lawd, Mr. Conrack gonna do some beating now.”
Saul had slumped into his seat after he had uttered the forbidden word and hidden his face in his hands, awaiting whatever punishment I would impose upon him. Why I had let the situation totally escape me, I did not know. I had been so interested in the downward progression of gourmet foods according to the island connoisseurs that I was totally unprepared for the final plunge to unpackaged feces. Lincoln, enraged at being called a shee-it eater, huffed and puffed triumphantly and waited impatiently for me to yank Saul from his seat and beat hell out of him. Meanwhile Saul had started to cry.
“Saul,” I intoned, trying to sound like a miniature Yahweh.
“Oh Gawd,” said Lincoln.
Saul looked up still sobbing. “Saul, do you know how I used to punish students who were bad when I taught high school?”
“No,” he answered.
“I used to scrinch ’em, son. I used to take a knife and cut open their bellies. Then I’d scrape their skin until they were ready for the pot.”
“No,” the whole class said.
“Yeah,” I, the wild-eyed scrincher, answered.
Then I’d try to sell them for people to eat, but no one would eat them because them scrinched students looked too much like baby squirrels.”
“White man crazy,” someone whispered.
“Now everyone shut up. ’Cause I am about to scrinch Saul.”
“No,” the class shouted.
“Yeah,” I shouted back. “But I am going to give him a chance. Now if I was Saul I would say, ‘Teacher, I said that stinking word and I made a mistake. If you give me another chance, I promise I won’t do it again.’ ”
“Teacher,” Saul said rather quickly, “give me a chance and I won’t do nothin’ again.”
“O.K. Fair enough. Now, Lincoln, is it true the stuff I hear about you?”
“What, man?”
“Is it true that you eat skunk?”
“Yeah, he eat skunk,” the rest of the class shouted.
It was strange how I marveled about their lack of knowledge concerning history and geography. On the third day, though despairing, I wondered if they felt any pity for me for not having feasted on squirrel stew or enjoyed the simple pleasures of scrinching. The boys were hunters; the girls were expert in the preparation of the spoils of the hunt. Oscar, the tallest and the blackest kid in class, told me he had shot a deer the year before. Lincoln then told me that Frank had shot Oscar the year before. With this statement the class lapsed into a profound, but uncertain silence. Frank looked at Lincoln with eyes that danced with rage and fury. Oscar looked as if he was sucking on a lemon. Finally Saul spoke up.
“Frank shot Oscar through the arm.”
“Where was this?” I asked.
“Down on Bloody Point on other side of island. They hunt bird.”
Lincoln said, “Frank no have any guard on his trigger. Walking along, Frank trip over root. Trigger catch in his sleeve and put hole in Oscar’s arm.”
“Oscar bleed like hog,” Sidney, one of the twins, said. It was obvious that Frank and Oscar still carried scars from that particular day in the woods—Oscar impulsively holding his left arm, Frank sta
ring at his pencil, both of them thinking about the blood and pain.
“That boy nearly bleed to death, Mr. Conrack,” Ethel said.
“They walk to Mr. Stone’s house and a man take him to the doctor in Savannah. Say he almost die on the way.”
“Shut up, girl,” Oscar said.
“Yeah, man. Let’s everyone be quiet.” The bus was pulling up into the yard. “Tomorrow return and we will continue to derive great pleasure from the joy of learning.”
“Oh Gawd, Conrack.”
When Friday afternoon came and the bus sucked the kids out the school door and they bade farewell to Mr. Conrack for the weekend, it was a matter of minutes before I was untying the boat at Stone’s dock and heading for Bluffton, where Bernie was meeting me. We drove to his apartment in Beaufort, where I took my first shower in a week. I luxuriated in the flow of hot water. All the crud of the island fell off me like a skin. Then I turned my attention to the mosquito bites, which were legion over the length and breadth of my body. Pouring alcohol into cotton balls, I dabbed the red swellings until they stung and glowed. One particular bite merited more detailed attention. Under careful scrutiny, I saw that it was a tick. It was just sitting there beneath my armpit, growing fat by sucking my lifeblood. He was in there deep; his snout drilled far into my flesh enjoying the refreshment of the plasma coursing through my veins. I grabbed him by his tiny behind and yanked. He split in half. His straw still remained in me, sucking away. Bernie got a match and after applying four first-degree burns to my arm, the tick shriveled and came out easily. A spot check revealed that I was covered with the ravenous fellows. They preferred the warmth and obscurity of the pubic region, where they could hide and suck without detection. They were forest creatures and to the forests they retreated, hiding like guerrillas in the dense foliage of arse and scrotum. Taking a pair of tweezers, I extracted nine ticks from my body.
“An occupational hazard, son,” Bernie sang.
CHAPTER 3
THE SCHOOL LIBRARY would have been funny if it had not been such a tragic commentary on administrative inefficiency and stupidity. Each day we had a half-hour reading period during which the kids could read anything they liked. Since a lot of them couldn’t read at all, the period had become a time when I simply tried to get them interested in books. Cindy Lou chose a book called Tommy the Telephone as her personal favorite. Each time Cindy read to me about Tommy, the irony struck me: a girl reading about telephones who has never used a telephone. Other books with negligible relationship to life on the island populated the shelves. There were books on Eskimos, Scandinavians, dairy farms in Wisconsin, and the Japanese pearl divers, but I could find no books or information on rural blacks in the Yamacraw school library. I brought a Sears, Roebuck catalogue to school and it proved to be one of the most popular books. The girls perused the fashions, while the boys lusted after the hunting and sports equipment. My group of rock-hard nonreaders flipped through the encyclopedias, looking at the pictures and asking me innumerable questions.
“What this here, Conrack?” Sidney would ask.
“That’s a pyramid, Sid. They used to bury kings in those things thousands of years ago in a country called Egypt.”
“No.”
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Who this?” Prophet would ask then, thumbing through another encyclopedia. “That’s Babe Ruth. One of the greatest baseball players that ever lived. He used to play for the New York Yankees. He hit 714 home runs in his career, more than anyone else in the history of baseball.”
“He play now?” asked Richard.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“Yeah, stupid, he daid.” Sid grinned as he punched Richard.
“That man dead?” Prophet asked again.
“Richard think that man ’live,” Sid continued. Richard slugged Sid and the discussion of the Sultan of Swat ended.
One day as the guys pored over the musty tomes, which they came to consider their personal property during the reading period, Jasper stumbled on the section dealing with snakes. The whole class ran over to look at the snakes.
“Snake bad,” Oscar said sagaciously.
“Yeah, bad,” everyone agreed.
“Snake good,” I interjected. “Gang, snakes eat rats and other rodents which are pests around the yard.”
“Snake eat you, too,” Lincoln said. The class howled.
“Just poisonous snakes will hurt you,” I said defensively. Since Yamacraw contained some of the largest diamondback rattlesnakes to be found anywhere, I could understand their fear of snakes, but as an amateur herpetologist, I felt that I had to make an impassioned defense of snakedom. “And snakes will not bother you unless you bother them.”
“Lord, Mr. C’roy, you just don’t know snakes,” Ethel said. “We got a snake here on this island that wrap himself around you and whip you to death.”
“Yeah,” everyone agreed.
“Bullcrap,” I said.
“He cuss,” Sam whispered.
“That is nonsense. That is what we call a myth. Something that is not true. How many in here have ever seen a snake whipping a man to death?”
Naturally, every hand in the room flew up.
“Who was the man you actually saw getting the hell beat out of him by a snake?”
“He cuss one more time.” Old Sam was keeping tabs.
“His name was Jacob Hudson, used to live here on the island,” Ethel said.
“Did the snake kill him?” I asked.
“No. He run away. Have marks on his body, though,” continued Ethel.
“Yeah. Have marks on his body.” The others agreed.
“Did you actually see this man being whipped?”
“No.”
“Then you do not know if the snake really whipped the man.”
“Yeah. He have marks,” said Mary.
“Ever see a snake milk a cow, Mr. C’roy?” Big C asked.
“Oh, crap.”
“Yeah, he milk cow dry.”
“That is simply not true. These are all snake myths,” I pleaded to an unconvinced audience. By the expressions on their faces, I could tell they thought I was nuts.
“I seen plenty of snakes milk cows,” Big C said.
“Do they put the milk in bottles?” I now resorted to my last weapon, ridicule.
“No, they suck it up.”
Mr. Conroy, ever see how snake eat egg?” Lincoln asked.
“No, Lincoln, but I’m afraid to ask.”
“He swallow the egg whole. Then he climb up tree, jump off branch, land on ground, and pop egg in belly.”
“That’s how I eat eggs, too, Lincoln.”
I returned to the serpent mythology on numerous occasions during the year, exhorting the students to look truth in the eye and to understand that the things we learn in our youth are not always literally correct. With brilliant logic they argued that what I had learned in the city about snakes was not any better than what they learned while living on the island. They had lived with snakes all their lives; I had merely read about them.
In one remote corner of the room, the dustiest and most spider-controlled corner, sat several boxes full of books. A church had donated the books in order to rid the island of illiteracy. Give them books and they shall read. Earnest ladies and pious men had scurried around attics and unused libraries in search of books for the unread natives of Yamacraw Island. Their minister sometimes came to Yamacraw on Sundays to preach to the blacks on the island, to exhort them to quit their evil likker-drinking ways. He was enormously proud of the fact that he could summon up enough Christianity to preach to the niggers, since he made it no secret on the mainland that he did not think much of niggers. If a black had entered his church, the church would have closed down automatically. That was the plan of the hallowed vestrymen should a black foot cross the threshold. Christ must do a lot of puking when he reflects upon the good works done in his name.
Anyway, the church gathered books in cardboard boxes and shipped t
hem to the island for use in the school. Looking at the books, I saw little possibility of handing my students The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. Nor did I think they could relish Gone with the Wind. Several books on Christian doctrine seemed equally inappropriate. A nice gesture and a good idea, but none of the books were on a level the kids could handle.
By far the greatest travesty was the public library established on the island by a concerned group of citizens who thought it deplorable that the island did not have a library of its own. It was deplorable and unthinkable that an island had no place to which a man could retire to mull over his thoughts, to write great novels, to generate lofty ideas, or to lose himself in scholarly pursuits. To solve this problem, the county decided to establish a library to serve the intellectual needs of the islanders, most of whom could neither read nor write. So the county transported 2000 books out to the island, put them in the community center, and hired a part-time librarian as custodian of the books. The books, of course, reflected the great trends of literature; the selection was vast and represented all the eminent authors. Here an old oyster-shucker could find Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Or, if he preferred the nineteenth century, this same ox-cart driver could select Moby Dick by Herman Melville or The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. All of these books were available. When no one checked out a book in three years, officials were noticeably chagrined. “Stupid niggers. You bust your ass to help them, and they don’t even check out a book.” Good intentions flourish on Yamacraw Island. The projects of concerned white folks are evident everywhere. Supply books and by a miraculous process of osmosis, the oyster-pickers will become Shakespearean scholars. All dem nigras need is books and a little tad of education.