Date: 23 May 2021
Location: Essie
Fourteen Bookers plus a couple of spouses convened on Essie’s new patio to discuss Pat Conroy’s, The Water is Wide.
It was another beautiful Sunday afternoon and the second time the Bookers could meet in person following the pandemic year.
Again, it was so delightful to get together and enjoy one another’s company after such a long period of isolation.
I think this was Conroy’s second book–following his self-published, The Boo, named for Col Courvoisie at The Citadel.
The Water is Wide is the story of Conroy’s experiences teaching on South Carolina’s coastal Yamacraw Island.
His young black students could barely speak English, were nearly illiterate and almost totally unaware of the world beyond their isolated island.
The book describes Conroy’s efforts to teach the children about geography, history and music and to expose them to the real world off their small island.
Of course, Conroy had little patience with the school administrators supposedly responsible for ensuring that these children received an education — and the results were predictable.
Conroy was fired after his first year. He protested to the school board and for a while supported a school boycot by the children.
When it became clear that his protests were futile, he accepted his termination and decided to write a book about his experiences. So take that, administrators!
Almost all of us read and enjoyed the book. Naturally, we were pulling for Conroy in his efforts to help his students, and we were dismayed at the lack of support offered by the school administrators. But, in one sense, we actually owe those administrators a big debt. If Conroy had not been fired, his literary life may have been completely different and we may have been deprived of many of his wonderful books.
One issue that came up was whether it was ‘proper’ for a memoir to use fictionalized names and places. The actual island where Conroy taught is Daufuskie Island, and we wondered if he used the true names of the students and administrators.
A little Googling seemed to indicate that a standard memoir should indeed use true names and locations, but as explained here:
“If the names or places of a memoir are changed to protect those involved, then this would be classified as a fictionalized memoir.” So I guess we can let Conroy say it is a memoir.
Following our discussion, we once again had a very fine dinner thanks to Essie and the rest of the Bookers.
— Bob