The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (8 page)

When the book was published in 1972, it caused a firestorm in South Carolina. It produced such a furor in Beaufort that I knew I would soon be moving from the prettiest town on earth. While a student at Beaufort High School, my sister Kathy was called “the nigger lover’s sister,” and Jim, also a student there, was called “the nigger lover’s brother.” I didn’t care what anyone on earth thought about me, but I didn’t want my family suffering for it. My mother was getting into fusses all the time with citizens who accosted her on the streets. Mom was articulate and polite, but she was a warhorse in her spirited, fiery defense of her oldest son. But Beaufort had hurt me deeply, and no longer seemed like the place I could spend the rest of my life. The city of my birth, a more liberal place, began to call out to me. Barbara and I sold our home to my mother and father, who planned to make it their retirement home. We moved to Atlanta in 1973 and toward the disastrous motions of the rest of my life.

When the book was published, I traveled with friends and family over to Daufuskie for the last time. I took four cartons of my book to my kids and their parents. Ricky Pollitzer and Larry Rowland sat in the wheelhouse of their shrimp boat. They had let me work as a striker on this same shrimping boat when I’d lost my job teaching. A crowd had gathered on the public dock to meet us. The men were piling shovelfuls of blue crab and boiled shrimp onto newspaper covering weathered picnic tables. There was a lot of hugging and kissing and laughter as we all ate lunch—there is nothing that tastes better than fresh crab and shrimp just taken from a salt creek that morning.

After lunch, I started to open the boxes of books and give them out to the children and other islanders. The day was both emotionally exhausting and bittersweet for me. There were times I could barely speak as I said good-bye to my kids. When the shrimp boat pulled away from the dock and the people of Daufuskie waved farewell, I teared up and thought I was saying good-bye to something of infinite value, to a job that had meant something to me, to kids I’d fallen in love with, and to a youth and a bright take on life that was darkening fast behind me. As I waved to my kids for the last time, I felt great loss, but also an immense joy. Those children on the dock had managed to place their story in front of the whole world. Their photographs had appeared in
the pages of
Life
magazine, and a script was being written in Hollywood as the shrimp boat entered the waters that would take it past Hilton Head and into Port Royal Sound. Although Daufuskie had let me know everything I needed to know about myself and the man I was planning on becoming, I never stepped foot on Daufuskie Island again.

There are three more stories I want to tell about my time on the island, and three only.

Sallie Anne Robinson, who is shown on the jacket cover of
The Water Is Wide
, was a sixth-grader when I taught her. She was a bright and pretty young girl who has turned into a beautiful, articulate woman who writes cookbooks for a living. I wrote an introduction for her first cookbook,
Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way
, and I was proud as a Carolina gamecock when it came out. One of the greatest moments of my life was when Sallie and I signed her cookbook together at the Bay Street Trading Co. in Beaufort, where I’d signed every book I’d written since 1970.

In 2010, Sallie sent me an e-mail after a trip she took to Washington, D.C. She told me she had never been back there since I had taken her and her classmates over the Easter break in 1970. She remembered my excitement in taking the Daufuskie children to the Smithsonian, and she recalled my showing the kids the Hope Diamond and the dinosaur skeletons. Then she stunned me with the news that she had just come back from signing her cookbook after a speech she delivered at the Smithsonian Institution. As I read her joyous message, I closed my eyes and let myself be enkindled by the miraculousness of Sallie Anne’s written words. She added that everyone had loved her and that the crowd had been huge at the signing. I was sixty-five years old when I learned that Sallie Anne Robinson had a book signing at the Smithsonian Institution. It was a very good day in my life.

Several months later, I was sitting in the May River Grill in Bluffton when a feisty, combative man approached my table. I rose to introduce myself to him. He had the terrific Southern name of Cloide Branning and told me his wife wanted to give me a copy of her new cookbook,
Shrimp, Collards & Grits
.

“It has my name written all over it, Cloide,” I said. His table came over to my table, and his wife, Pat, signed one of her books for me—a
beautifully bound and boxed book that would look handsome in any kitchen. Their pretty young daughter had begun her teaching career on Hilton Head and had just finished reading
The Water Is Wide
. I told the young teacher that I was twenty-five years old when I started writing that book and had reached the age when I did not listen to anything a twenty-five-year-old, snot-nosed kid had to say.

“You had a lot to say and you said it well,” she replied.

“Thank you so much,” I said.

“I played golf once a week with Walter Trammell,” Cloide said, with mischief in his eyes.

“I hear my superintendent was a very good golfer,” I said.

“He used to beat me every time we played,” he said. “Then you came along.”

“I don’t understand what I had to do with his golf game,” I said, puzzled.

“Well, you ruined his whole life. That’s just for starters. When your book and movie came out, he became one of the most hated men in America. The same school board that fired you fired him a couple years later—what you did to him haunted him to his death.”

“I used to have nightmares about Walter Trammell,” I said.

Cloide said, “You whipped his ass, and Trammell knew it and so did the whole town.”

“Good. I couldn’t be happier. But his golf game?”

“Every time we went out to a golf course, he would get ready to tee off on the first hole,” Cloide explained. “Walter would begin his backswing, and I’d say, ‘Pat Conroy,’ and his arms would palsy up and begin shaking—they would actually spasm when I said your name. It ruined his golf game.”

And finally. A month later, I attended a black-tie affair when Penn Center announced that I was one of the two inductees into the 1862 Circle, a prestigious fellowship that usually goes to one of the pillars of the black community around Beaufort. The circle is named in honor of the dedicated band of Quaker teachers who left their homes in Philadelphia to teach slaves freed from local plantations. The Beaufort slaves were the first freedmen in the former Confederate state, and the Penn School became the center of the Geechee-Gullah culture in the low
country. Penn Center was begun in 1862 in what was known as the Port Royal Experiment.

Sallie Anne Robinson surprised me by showing up to introduce me, and she gave a moving and elegant talk about our time on Daufuskie when I was a young man and Sallie Anne was a child. I had been her teacher forty-one years ago and I still could remember how she combed her hair and what clothes she’d wear to class.

It was a night of deep reconciliation for me, because when I was fired from Daufuskie, I expected Penn Center would throw their support to me. After all, I had practically spent my high school years going to seminars and workshops over there. At Penn Center, I’d met Martin Luther King Jr. and the entire leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In addition, I had taught the first Afro American history course at the former all-white Beaufort High School.

Though Penn Center did not inform me of their decision, I walked into the Hampton courtroom that day in December of 1970 and my knees nearly gave way beneath me when I saw the board of Penn Center sitting on the side of the board of education and Walt Trammell. When I saw black friends of mine sitting beside white administrators who would tell the court under oath that I was a worthless teacher, a liar and a cheat, a book thief, and a clear danger to children. No one from Penn Center would look, speak to, or acknowledge me. Julia Johnson, the black woman who taught in the next room to me, whom I pulled off two of my kids when I found her beating them with a leather strap, was sitting next to the head of Penn Center, and they were in the middle of an animated talk. Someone had sabotaged the boat that was bringing a group of islanders as my witnesses. I didn’t have a single witness from the island.

My Beaufort High English teacher, Gene Norris, rushed to my side.

“Why would Penn Center do this to me, Gene?” I asked. “They practically raised me.”

“I’ve told you that race is one of the most dangerous subjects in the world,” Gene said. “The board of Penn Center decided it was more important to back up a black teacher than to defend a white one. It’s despicable, Pat, but sometimes it’s the way the world works.”

I’ve never written about this betrayal before and would not write about it now if the past had not risen up, snake-headed and mean-spirited, to remind me of those wretched times. On the night of the Penn Center induction all those years later, one of those old board members hunted me out to say, “I remember you from those Daufuskie days, Pat. I never saw such a hothead in my life.”

I let it go because I had to stand up and make my thank-you speech before the crowd, but words can sometimes sink down and catch in my throat, making it hard to swallow. I got up to do my speech, which was a happy one as I went over my life in Beaufort and my life at Penn Center.

“When I first drove into this town,” I said, “black people were not allowed to enter and buy a meal in any restaurant in town or rent a room in a single hotel. There were separate water fountains in the Greyhound bus station, and separate bathrooms, and it was against the law for a white kid to go to the same school as a black kid. Look at us on this magical night, five hundred black people in their tuxedos and gowns, one hundred and fifty white people dressed in their Sunday finest! We’re gathered in a hotel where any of us could pay good money to spend the night. Tell me the South hasn’t changed, and changed for the better. I had a former board member of Penn say tonight that he had never seen such a hothead as I was. It startled me to hear a young Southern white boy being called a ‘hothead’ by a civil rights leader. But I thought about it and have considered it deeply. I’ve come to the conclusion that I was not a hothead. Penn Center, I’ve come to the conclusion that I was right. I thought I was right then and I think it even more today. And, Penn Center, you who honor me tonight, please tell me something—those mean-ass white folks who fired me—tell me I didn’t get those sorry sons of bitches back!”

I sat down to a standing ovation. I looked at the award I was given on May 7, 2011, welcoming me to the fellowship of the 1862 Circle. It said I was being honored for being an author, a Gullah culture advocate. Finally, it said, “Educator.” I swear it did. It said, “Educator.”

At long last, that circle closed.

After the publication of
The Water Is Wide
, I began work on what would become my first novel.
The Water Is Wide
had enjoyed more success than I’d dreamed of having my entire lifetime, yet that success filled me with far more dread than confidence. Since I was a little kid, I’ve always been comfortable with disaster and catastrophe and wary of triumph of any kind. Bad news is a comfort zone for me, the fields of brawling where I’m most at home.

I was setting forth into dangerous waters, and no one knew it better than I did. But I also thought I was getting ready to write the book I was born to write. Because I had studied the biography of Thomas Wolfe with such meticulous attention, I thought I knew all the pitfalls and fly traps into which I could fall by writing on such an incendiary subject as my own family. When I began to write the book, I had never heard the phrase “dysfunctional family.” Since the book came out, that phrase has traveled with me as though a wood tick has attached itself to my armpit forever.

The shadow looming over this book was the figure of my Thor-like father. As I began to write, my rage at Dad was a disfiguring thing even to me. My portrait of my father was so venomous and unforgiving that I had to pull back from that outraged narrative voice and eventually decide to put the book into third person. But even then, the words flowed like molten steel instead of language.

When I sent three or four chapters off to my beloved editor, Anne Barrett, she wrote back a very kind note. The essence of her letter explained that my descriptions of Col. Bull Meecham troubled her profoundly. No reader could expect to believe that such an unsavory man could exist without a single virtue to recommend him. To make him credible, I had to include scenes that displayed a softer and kinder man.

So I took my walking orders from Anne Barrett, and had Bull Meecham give his son a flight jacket for his eighteenth birthday and take him out to the officers’ club for his first drink. On the night of his prom, Bull sent his daughter a dozen red roses. Both scenes were fictional and would never have occurred in my father’s house. To make my father human, I had to lie. Because Anne did not believe his violence against his wife and family, I softened up my hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners father.

One day, I was sitting around with my brothers and sisters and I asked them, “Did Dad ever do anything nice for us when we were kids—ever?”

They thought about it for a while, and then Mike said, “Nope. Not a single time.”

But I persisted. “Did he take us out to get us a hot dog or a root beer?”

“Are you nuts?” Jim said.

“Never happened,” Tim said. “Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Now, I’ve never had an insight into Dad’s behavior in my life, but I finally had one. Question: When was the only time you knew for certain that Dad was going to hit you?”

“When he was drunk,” Jim said.

“No,” Tim said. “Sometimes he passed out.”

“After he hit Mom,” Mike offered.

“No,” Kathy said. “Sometimes he’d just hit her.”