The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (7 page)

Looking back, I can see how strange I must have seemed to a town like Beaufort, a white Southern boy who was a pain-in-the-ass liberal who believed in every part of the civil rights movement, welcomed the stirrings of feminism, and protested against the Vietnam War. My own zeitgeist had ambushed me in the streets, and the sixties changed everything about how I thought. Because I was raised on Hollywood movies, it wasn’t difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys when the fire hoses were turned on black people in Alabama who were singing songs about freedom. A different kind of white Southerner was forming all over the South, but we were young and our own voices had not been heard yet and would not be fully voiced until the elections of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Though I wanted to be part of this momentous change, I arrived a bit late to the dance.

My firing became a small news item across the state. When Joe Cummings of
Newsweek
came to file a story about the incident, it became a syndicated item in papers across the nation. Hollywood began calling, and Beau Bridges, the actor, came and spent the night at our house and fed my new daughter, Melissa, her two-o’clock bottle. A telegram to the selective service bureau in Washington slowed my induction until an inspection could be done by the South Carolina selective services director. Neighbors began writing letters to the draft board protesting that Barbara Conroy had already lost one husband to Vietnam and now was in danger of losing a second. Our house was in an uproar from morning until night, filled with friends who came up
to help in whatever way they could—the scene was hip, inspirational, argumentative, and fast-talking, the nearest thing to the sixties revolution that ever happened to the white folks of Beaufort.

Then I lost the trial to get my job back, and the sixties were over for me. My first book,
The Boo
, was published the same week of the trial, and my mother planned an elegant party for me at her house on the Point. As my teaching life began to fade into the distance, the secret life of writing began to assert itself once more in my aggrieved psyche. I had begun to write about my year on the island and how that year had transformed me by demonstrating the shameful atrocities committed against black children in the South. “Separate but equal” is the most contemptible line ever spoken by a Southern tongue, and it was spoken a million times by a million liars all over the Southern states. With my time on Daufuskie, I thought I’d discovered some lost island made backward because of its isolation from the mainland. By accident, I’d discovered America, and the great tragedy would soon be clear to all, that America turned its hateful eye on the poor kids in the country—from sea to shining sea. I wrote
The Water Is Wide
in a white-hot fever, letting my rage pour out in burning funnels of lava. I wrote both day and night as I tried to re-create a magical year where I steered my boat, happy as a river otter, through weeds and rivers and vast miles of emerald marsh as I taught eighteen kids eager to learn about the world I set before them. Now my task was to tell the world about those kids, and I kept filling up page after page with words.

But I was a young man with no idea what being young meant. When I began to write
The Water Is Wide
, I was twenty-five years old and could not yet write about all the things I felt in my heart. I found my own voice elusive, and I harbored the melancholy dread of the amateur writer that every word I put down on paper was worthless and of no interest to anyone else. Still, I persisted, and the manuscript began to grow, and the yellow legal pages began to pile up on my desk. Somewhere in the middle of the passage, I realized that I had a story to tell, and one that had never been written by a white boy in my part of the world. Though I’m sure they were terrified doing so, Barbara and my mother were like lionesses protecting me from intrusions from the outside world.

In January, the selective service in Columbia requested my presence for a meeting at state headquarters. A friend named Zach Sklar prepared me for the meeting with exquisite care. I had met Zach because he had been one of the “California boys” who had spent a semester on Daufuskie for the sociology program. His father was a novelist and playwright; his mother had danced with Martha Graham’s troupe in New York, and years later Zach would receive an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay for
JFK
. A low-key intellectual, Zach possessed one of the sharpest political minds I’ve ever encountered as he prepared me for what could be a life-changing ordeal.

In my mind I’d gone over every possible scenario imaginable as I thought of the possibility of my getting drafted into the army. I thought about going to Canada, but that was the coward’s way out to me and not the way I was raised. Another option: A Marine sergeant whose family was rumored to have Mafia connections claimed that his cousin owned a judge in New Orleans. The sergeant told me to go to his hometown and refuse induction there while wearing nothing but a bra and women’s panties, and the judge would take my case from there. I also thought about signing up for Officer Candidate School, or fulfilling my natural destiny by going to Quantico and joining the Marine Corps. I thought of everything but could decide on nothing.

Before I left Beaufort, I received a Citadel haircut from Harvey’s Barber Shop on Bay Street. I spit-shined my inspection shoes from The Citadel and dressed in the blue suit I wore to my wedding. Out of nervousness, I spun my Citadel ring, which was always on my right hand. Barbara was so upset that day, I don’t even remember telling her good-bye. My mother hugged me at the back door and said, “You were raised to do your duty to your country, Pat. Never forget that.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. “I just don’t know what form that duty is going to take.”

In Columbia, I entered the office of a colonel who had taken temporary command of the selective services after his retirement from the armed services. He was a fine-looking, muscular man in impeccable shape, and gentlemanly to his core. I liked him the moment I saw him, and he flashed me a friendly smile as we sat down. I had spent a lifetime in the brotherhood of colonels.

His first move startled me. He was staring at a thick file of articles and letters when he looked up at me, tapped his ring on the table twice, and said, “The Citadel”; then he cited the year of his graduation.

Thinking that this could be very good news—or possibly catastrophic—overwhelmed me, but I recovered enough to tap my own ring on his desk and I said, “Citadel, 1967.”

“So, you’re the young man who’s been causing all the fuss,” he said as he waded through newspaper clippings.

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid I am.”

“Are you a conscientious objector, Mr. Conroy?”

“I most certainly am not,” I said.

“If this country was attacked by an enemy nation, what would you do?”

“Throw me a rifle, sir.”

“If I draft you today, what will you do?”

“Be a good soldier, sir.”

“When did you decide that?”

“On the trip up here,” I said.

He took out a piece of paper and studied it with great interest. He read the page again slowly; then he said to me, “The superintendent who fired you? He thinks he may have had a drink or two. He called a member of the draft board, who also admits that he too may have had a drink or two. The superintendent said he had just fired you, and a letter drafting you was sent out the next day. It’s the worst case of collusion I’ve ever encountered. Son, these people not only wanted to fire you, they wanted to kill you. It’s disgraceful.”

“I irritate people, Colonel,” I said. “I get it from my father.”

“Your father’s in Vietnam. Your wife’s first husband died in Vietnam. How did he die?” the colonel asked.

“He was flying close air support for troops on the ground when he was shot down,” I said.

“You adopted the two children he left behind?”

“Yes, sir. Jessica and Melissa.”

“I’ve received over fifty letters from your neighbors protesting the fact that you received a draft summons.”

“They worry about Barbara, not 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 fresh
eyewitness 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 up to that promise to myself. No writer has suffered over morning coffee because of the savagery of my review of his or her latest book, and no one ever will.

It was the same winter I drove to Columbia twice a week to a poetry workshop taught by James Dickey. Though his poetry has had an electrifying effect on my writing, it helped me more as a human being to take his measure as a man. I found it dangerous for a poet’s soul to
be surrounded by achingly beautiful coeds who were openly flirtatious with the poet and enamored of his work. I never wanted a column of grad students trailing behind me like a line of newly hatched goslings as I made my way from class to class.

Also, Mr. Dickey alerted me to the dangers of the company of other writers. Although I admired his body of work extravagantly, I never entertained the thought of becoming his friend. He was competitive, hostile, and carnivorous in his relationships with other writers when he was with them on the speaking circuit. When writers gathered, I felt as though I’d been thrown into a tank of moray eels. From the beginning, I distrusted the breed and made a vow to avoid them for the rest of my life. Though I’ve made some great friends among writers, I’ve stayed away from most of them and it’s made for a better and more productive life. I would’ve loved being able to write like Jim Dickey, but didn’t want to be anything like him as a man. His life was a force field of chaos—just like mine would turn out to be.

But my luck had changed and my future had brightened. I was writing well and starting to average a chapter a week as I recounted that year when I was a teacher who learned far more than he taught to the children of a cutoff Gullah nation. Eventually, I failed my kids completely because I ran my mouth and got myself fired by throwing myself into the fray of Southern racial politics. Southern politics was a fanged and poisonous thing that always ate its young. But the island had changed me, and I would never go back to being that young man who arrived on Daufuskie the previous September. I had to go to a small sea island to learn the lessons of a great, bright, and sometimes ruthless world.

In that cold season, the elegant literary agent Julian Bach wrote me a life-changing letter when he agreed to represent
The Water Is Wide
for publication. Then Houghton Mifflin quickly bought it, and later,
Life
magazine would publish an excerpt of it, and 20th Century Fox bought the movie rights. Even though I had brought my family to the point of financial ruin, I could finally breathe again. Barbara lost that look of mourning and fear she had carried with her since the night I was fired. News of the book began to spread through Beaufort, unsettling the town, disturbing the dreams of school board members.