The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son by Pat Conroy Page B

movies, it wasn’t difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys when the fire hoses were turned on black people in Alabama who were singing songs about freedom. A different kind of white Southerner was forming all over the South, but we were young and our own voices had not been heard yet and would not be fully voiced until the elections of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Though I wanted to be part of this momentous change, I arrived a bit late to the dance.
    My firing became a small news item across the state. When Joe Cummings of
Newsweek
came to file a story about the incident, it became a syndicated item in papers across the nation. Hollywood began calling, and Beau Bridges, the actor, came and spent the night at our house and fed my new daughter, Melissa, her two-o’clock bottle. A telegram to the selective service bureau in Washington slowed my induction until an inspection could be done by the South Carolina selective services director. Neighbors began writing letters to the draft board protesting that Barbara Conroy had already lost one husband to Vietnam and now was in danger of losing a second. Our house was in an uproar from morning until night, filled with friends who came upto help in whatever way they could—the scene was hip, inspirational, argumentative, and fast-talking, the nearest thing to the sixties revolution that ever happened to the white folks of Beaufort.
    Then I lost the trial to get my job back, and the sixties were over for me. My first book,
The Boo
, was published the same week of the trial, and my mother planned an elegant party for me at her house on the Point. As my teaching life began to fade into the distance, the secret life of writing began to assert itself once more in my aggrieved psyche. I had begun to write about my year on the island and how that year had transformed me by demonstrating the shameful atrocities committed against black children in the South. “Separate but equal” is the most contemptible line ever spoken by a Southern tongue, and it was spoken a million times by a million liars all over the Southern states. With my time on Daufuskie, I thought I’d discovered some lost island made backward because of its isolation from the mainland. By accident, I’d discovered America, and the great tragedy would soon be clear to all, that America turned its hateful eye on the poor kids in the country—from sea to shining sea. I wrote
The Water Is Wide
in a white-hot fever, letting my rage pour out in burning funnels of lava. I wrote both day and night as I tried to re-create a magical year where I steered my boat, happy as a river otter, through weeds and rivers and vast miles of emerald marsh as I taught eighteen kids eager to learn about the world I set before them. Now my task was to tell the world about those kids, and I kept filling up page after page with words.
    But I was a young man with no idea what being young meant. When I began to write
The Water Is Wide
, I was twenty-five years old and could not yet write about all the things I felt in my heart. I found my own voice elusive, and I harbored the melancholy dread of the amateur writer that every word I put down on paper was worthless and of no interest to anyone else. Still, I persisted, and the manuscript began to grow, and the yellow legal pages began to pile up on my desk. Somewhere in the middle of the passage, I realized that I had a story to tell, and one that had never been written by a white boy in my part of the world. Though I’m sure they were terrified doing so, Barbara and my mother were like lionesses protecting me from intrusions from the outside world.
    In January, the selective service in Columbia requested my presence for a meeting at state headquarters. A friend named Zach Sklar prepared me for the meeting with exquisite care. I had met Zach because he had been one of the “California boys” who had spent a semester on Daufuskie for the sociology program. His father was a novelist and