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Authors: Pat Conroy
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about me,” I explained.
“These are some of the most moving letters I’ve ever received. They’re remarkable. One is by a Marine wounded at Okinawa who says he is a member of the John Birch Society. Why would he write a letter on your behalf?”
“That’s Dr. Charles Aimar. He’s always loved me. He doesn’t want to, but he just can’t help it.”
Then the colonel opened a drawer and placed a book from it on his desk. It was a copy of my first book,
The Boo
, which had been self-published a month earlier. I had never seen a loose copy of this book floating around anywhere. I was speechless as I stared at a photograph of the Boo’s head on the jacket of my book.
“My son bought it for my Christmas present. We both loved it,” he said.
“My God, what if you’d hated it?”
“Mr. Conroy, you got railroaded. I’m ashamed of the conduct of the Beaufort draft board—but here is one thing I promise: You’ll never hear from us again. You walk out of here a free man.”
“Sir, can I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Can I kiss you?”
“No, I wouldn’t like that,” he answered.
“Then that’s the only reason I won’t do it,” I said.
In jubilation, I drove back to Beaufort, taking all the back roads out of Orangeburg. The meeting had held much terror and uncertainty for me and my family, but I was struck by the wonder of it all. I had met a colonel in the last moment of my overmilitarized life that I would have followed toward any machine-gun nest in the world or fought with in any war. This colonel, whose name I never knew, permitted me a last glimpse of a kind of soldier I always fell in love with—dutiful, fair, and just—and issued me my walking papers. He returned me to the middle of my own life.
In the winter of 1971, three of the children I had taught on Daufuskie had moved in with Barbara and me in our spacious home. Margarite Washington, Jackie Robinson, and Alvin Smith lived with my family in the very year of my firing from Daufuskie. All of them were sweethearts and a pleasure to be around, and they provided fresheyewitness accounts of my time on the island. I learned that it was after the trip to Beaufort for Halloween that their parents started to trust me, and that my over-the-top performance as Scrooge in the Christmas play convinced the mothers of the island that I should quit teaching and go act in a soap opera. But the clincher was the school trip to Washington over the Easter break. The whole island got to send their children off to an enchanted place where presidents lived, and the islanders understood that I was trying to bring the world to the island or take their children out to discover that world for themselves.
“What did you like best about Washington, Margarite?” I asked her afterward.
“The bed that our hostess Judy Hanst let me sleep in,” she said. “God, that was nice.”
“What about you, Jackie?”
“The Smithsonian,” he said. “You scared us to death with that big elephant in that big hall. You told us that elephant was alive. That he was just resting and was going to stomp us all.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” I said.
“It sounds just like you,” Margarite said. “It is you.”
I wrote
The Water Is Wide
that winter. The chapters came fast and I tried to control the immense anger and hurt I felt inside me. But the words began to speak out for me, and I recognized my own voice and realized I was discovering the voice I would be using for the next fifty years. I trained it to be a strong voice, a resilient and bold one—yet I longed for suppleness, for clarity, for laughter and beauty. I trained myself to be unafraid of critics, and I’ve held them in high contempt since my earliest days as a writer because their work seems pinched and sullen and paramecium-souled. Yes, it was that fruitful winter that I made the decision to never write a critical dismissal of the works of another brother or sister writer, and I’ve lived
“These are some of the most moving letters I’ve ever received. They’re remarkable. One is by a Marine wounded at Okinawa who says he is a member of the John Birch Society. Why would he write a letter on your behalf?”
“That’s Dr. Charles Aimar. He’s always loved me. He doesn’t want to, but he just can’t help it.”
Then the colonel opened a drawer and placed a book from it on his desk. It was a copy of my first book,
The Boo
, which had been self-published a month earlier. I had never seen a loose copy of this book floating around anywhere. I was speechless as I stared at a photograph of the Boo’s head on the jacket of my book.
“My son bought it for my Christmas present. We both loved it,” he said.
“My God, what if you’d hated it?”
“Mr. Conroy, you got railroaded. I’m ashamed of the conduct of the Beaufort draft board—but here is one thing I promise: You’ll never hear from us again. You walk out of here a free man.”
“Sir, can I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Can I kiss you?”
“No, I wouldn’t like that,” he answered.
“Then that’s the only reason I won’t do it,” I said.
In jubilation, I drove back to Beaufort, taking all the back roads out of Orangeburg. The meeting had held much terror and uncertainty for me and my family, but I was struck by the wonder of it all. I had met a colonel in the last moment of my overmilitarized life that I would have followed toward any machine-gun nest in the world or fought with in any war. This colonel, whose name I never knew, permitted me a last glimpse of a kind of soldier I always fell in love with—dutiful, fair, and just—and issued me my walking papers. He returned me to the middle of my own life.
In the winter of 1971, three of the children I had taught on Daufuskie had moved in with Barbara and me in our spacious home. Margarite Washington, Jackie Robinson, and Alvin Smith lived with my family in the very year of my firing from Daufuskie. All of them were sweethearts and a pleasure to be around, and they provided fresheyewitness accounts of my time on the island. I learned that it was after the trip to Beaufort for Halloween that their parents started to trust me, and that my over-the-top performance as Scrooge in the Christmas play convinced the mothers of the island that I should quit teaching and go act in a soap opera. But the clincher was the school trip to Washington over the Easter break. The whole island got to send their children off to an enchanted place where presidents lived, and the islanders understood that I was trying to bring the world to the island or take their children out to discover that world for themselves.
“What did you like best about Washington, Margarite?” I asked her afterward.
“The bed that our hostess Judy Hanst let me sleep in,” she said. “God, that was nice.”
“What about you, Jackie?”
“The Smithsonian,” he said. “You scared us to death with that big elephant in that big hall. You told us that elephant was alive. That he was just resting and was going to stomp us all.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” I said.
“It sounds just like you,” Margarite said. “It is you.”
I wrote
The Water Is Wide
that winter. The chapters came fast and I tried to control the immense anger and hurt I felt inside me. But the words began to speak out for me, and I recognized my own voice and realized I was discovering the voice I would be using for the next fifty years. I trained it to be a strong voice, a resilient and bold one—yet I longed for suppleness, for clarity, for laughter and beauty. I trained myself to be unafraid of critics, and I’ve held them in high contempt since my earliest days as a writer because their work seems pinched and sullen and paramecium-souled. Yes, it was that fruitful winter that I made the decision to never write a critical dismissal of the works of another brother or sister writer, and I’ve lived
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