not worth a pound of cow dung. Looking back, I scoff at the bug-eyed believer in the system I was then. There I sat in a small schoolroom, with a sleeping bag unrolled on the floor beside me, a dinner of beef stew and Gatorade digesting in my stomach, the smell of chalk dust and old textbooks in my nostrils, the wild insect sounds of night rampant in the forest around me, writing a brimstone letter to a man I had met only once, but whom I trusted implicitly to understand, to sympathize, and to act. Because the situation was so much worse than I anticipated, I was less diplomatic than I might have been. I wanted to shock Piedmont as I had been shocked and wanted to shake the plodding bureaucrats who plowed around the heavily carpeted county office building into awareness of the disastrous education they were giving kids. Yeh, I was a tough bastard in those early days. Piedmont learned that he had not sent me to Yamacraw to preside over an intellectual wasteland with all due acknowledgments to T. S. Eliot. The letter was written in a fit of Conroy passion, the tiny bellicose Irishman residing in my genes and collective unconscious urging me on and whispering to me that a great injustice was being perpetrated and that it was up to me to expose this condition to the person with the ability and training to do something about it.
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 kidsâ 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, Oscarâs hand shot up and he quickly said, âThe Germans and the Japs.â 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, âJesus.â Everyone, of course, fervently agreed. When I asked who was the second greatest man who ever lived, her brother Lincoln answered, âJesus Christ.â 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
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 kidsâ 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, Oscarâs hand shot up and he quickly said, âThe Germans and the Japs.â 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, âJesus.â Everyone, of course, fervently agreed. When I asked who was the second greatest man who ever lived, her brother Lincoln answered, âJesus Christ.â 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
Similar Books
