The Water Is Wide Read Online Free PDF Page A

spoke of the other teacher. She was his personal discovery. He had championed her arrival on the island. Mrs. Brown appeared at the door of the schoolhouse and welcomed us to Yamacraw Elementary School. A large woman, she had great pendulous bosoms and huge sinewy arms and a handsome, expressive face. She was light-skinned and laughed a great deal. Everything about her seemed exaggerated and blown out of proportion. She treated Mr. Bennington like a nun would treat a visiting bishop. Mrs. Brown greeted me cordially and welcomed me “overseas.” She told me, “Things are tough overseas, Mr. Conroy. I’m a missionary over here helping these poor people. Only Jesus and I know how much they need help …” She spoke without a dialect and obviously was not from the island. When I asked her about this, she confided that she was from Georgia but was educated in a very fine private school where the cruder forms of black dialects were frowned upon by the Presbyterian educators who presided over the school. She was not from the island, she assured me. She had come to the island at the insistence of Mr. Bennington.
    â€œMr. Bennington is the only one who understands the problems of Yamacraw Island. He knows what’s wrong,” she said, “and he knows what to do about them.” She spoke in rhythms. Her speech was exaggerated, going up and down like a piano scale. It almost scanned conversations in iambic pentameter; the words rolled off her tongue in poems.
    I tried to talk to some of the children, but they simply gazed at me with shy amusement, then buried their faces in their hands. The children were subdued, passive, and exceedingly polite. They had risen in unison when we walked into the room. They chanted “good morning” on cue from Mrs. Brown. They folded their hands and sat up straight at their desks. In an effort to achieve the common touch, Bennington walked among the children and cracked a few jokes. They looked at Mrs. Brown, saw that she was laughing, then laughed like hell themselves. Bennington then put his hand on one small boy’s head and whispered something in his ear. The boy smiled. Bennington was a fish in water.
    It was a yes-sir, no-sir world I had entered. Math and spelling papers hung from the bulletin boards. Everything was Mickey-Mouse neat and virgin clean in the classroom. A map of the world, contributed by a Savannah bank, hung on one wall. Near it was a poster which read: EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS . A picture of a large key drove the point home. On Mrs. Brown’s desk was an item that caught and held my eye. It was a leather strap, smooth and very thick. It lay beneath a reading book.
    The relationship between Brown and Bennington intrigued me. Bennington represented a dying part of the South: the venerable, hoary-maned administrator who tended his district with the same care and paternalism the master once rendered to his plantation. As I watched him perform his classroom routine, I also observed Mrs. Brown’s reaction, a black teacher who nodded her head in agreement every time he opened his mouth to utter some memorable profundity. I could not tell if this was a role she was playing or if she actually believed that Bennington was the word made flesh. Anyway, they went well together. Both of them hated Miss Glover. For some undisclosed reason, Miss Glover was not at school on that day. Bennington and Brown cornered me and proceeded to blame the educational inadequacies of the children on Miss Glover.
    â€œShe had been here forty years and the children didn’t even know how to use a fork,” said Mrs. Brown.
    â€œWell, Ruth,” Bennington intoned slowly, “that’s why I sent you out here. I knew you could lift these people up.”
    â€œI try, Mr. Bennington. You know I try. But these people don’t want to better themselves. Why, Mr. Conroy,” she said, turning to me, “the parents stay likkered up down there