The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy Read Free Book Online Page B

one.”
    â€œFive,” he whispered again. By this time his eyes were begging me to cease the interrogation. His classmates laughed at him each time he gave a wrong answer. I had humiliated him and his eyes carried the message.
    â€œDon’t worry about it, Prophet, we are going to bust the hell out of those old numbers before this is over. O.K.?” He nodded.
    Prophet gave the general appearance that a thought never entered his head, that his brain had never suffered from the painful malady of an idea. Samuel and Sidney, the twins, by their appearance alone made Prophet look like a candidate for the “College Bowl.” They were pitifully skinny, unanimated, dull-eyed, and seemingly retarded. Whenever I got the other children laughing by performing some insane act or saying some outrageous thing, Sam and Sidney would laugh several seconds after the other kids, as if they depended on the reaction of their peers for the proper responses. The twins seemed hopeless. Prophet smiled often enough, with his bell-ringer grin, to give me some faith that he was not completely oblivious to the world about him.
    This second day proved a hypothesis formulated quickly and haphazardly on the first day. A huge, almost unbridgeable communication gap existed in the room. When the kids were conversing normally, there was not a tinker’s chance in hell that I could understand them. The island blacks of South Carolina are famous among linguists for their Gullah dialect. Experts have studied this patois for years and they have written several books on the subject. It is a combination of an African dialect and English; some even claim that remnants of Elizabethan English survive among the Gullah people. Whatever the origin of the speech, I could not decipher the ordinary conversation of any of the children in the class. They spoke like machine guns, rapidly or in short, explosive spurts. Whenever I would stand off and listen to a group of them conversing, it became impossible for me to follow what they said. I could not grasp the syntax, nor could I follow any logical sentence pattern, nor could I participate in their discussions by piecing together words I did catch accidentally when one of them was sprinting through his version of a story.
    To make matters even more serious, none of them could understand me. Among the peoples of the world I am not universally admired for the bell-like clarity of my diction. Words slide out of my mouth like fat fish. Having lived my life in various parts of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas and having been sired by a gruff-talking Marine from Chicago and a grits-and-gravy honey from Rome, Georgia, what has remained is an indefinable nonspeech, flavored subtly with a nonaccent, and decipherable to no one, black or white, on the American continent. I am embarrassed to talk on telephones for the simple reason that operators cannot understand me. So the situation in the classroom was desperate in more ways than one. I knew the kids didn’t know very much and I knew that I could teach them a hell of a lot, but I could not understand a word they were saying, nor could they understand a word I was saying. With the help of Mary a compromise was reached. Mary seemed to understand almost everything I said, and on occasion I could understand some of what she said. I designated her as grand interpreter with illimitable powers of life and death over all. When Prophet said something known only to God, Mary would tell me what he said. Sometimes the whole class would help Mary out, and seventeen voices would rise slowly in an unintelligible gibberish, grow louder as each voice tried to be heard, and finally reach a deafening crescendo a la Babel.
    â€œEnough of this,” I’d yell. Then Mary would proudly explain to me that Prophet wanted to take a piss.
    That night I fired off a rather angry, self-righteous letter to Dr. Piedmont telling him that his cute little schoolhouse on Yamacraw was