Wide Water

            In one of his first attempts at non-fiction, novelist Pat Conroy detailed his year teaching school on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina. Conroy, a graduate of the Citadel during the turbulent late 1960’s, chose a different path from most of his classmates. They chose military service and Vietnam, he became a teacher.

            “The Water is Wide” details Conroy’s year teaching poor, black students, descendants of the “Gullahs” who lived on all of South Carolina’s barrier islands. Daufuskie today is a retreat for the wealthy and privileged elite with multi-million dollar homes accessible only by ferry. You stand on the beach at Daufuskie and see Hilton Head Island to the Northeast; to the South lies Tybee Island and Savannah. These islands reek of money and success and whiteness; it is a far cry from Conroy’s time there.

            Conroy was changed by his year on Daufuskie. He didn’t survive the school year. The all-white school board located on the mainland, wanted nothing to do with Conroy’s ideas of exposing the island children to the world beyond their shores. And that, Conroy realized, was a problem. All these beautiful black children knew was life on Daufuskie. To the school board, that was fine. “The Water is Wide” is a metaphor for the figurative miles that separated theses children from a better life; it was also a metaphor for the distance that racism had created in the hearts of the all-white school board to the plight of the children of Daufuskie.

            I found myself thinking of Conroy’s story the other night as I watched Cubby get hauled out of the building and taken to “the hole.” He’ll be in there ten, maybe fifteen days and then they’ll ship him to a higher level – “3” or “4” – to finish his last nine months. Cubby – a cherub-faced twenty-two year old white kid – is a heroin addict. He’s “dirty;” at least once a week he spends $50 on a chapstick capful of heroin that he snorts and smokes. The heroin leaves him nearly incoherent and red-faced. He scratches and jerks and then finds himself violently vomiting for hours.

            “The Water is Wide,” so very wide. I know why Cubby uses. And, I know he’ll continue to use until he dies from an overdose. There isn’t anything DOC is doing about it. Yeah, they see him high; they piss test him; they throw him in solitary; and he gets out and finds the drugs – or the drugs find him – and he uses. He could die in here; heroin is a killer. No one will accept blame; no one – it seems is responsible; not DOC, not his mom. And all Cubby knows is the heroin helps him sleep.

            Last semester, the students were given a writing assignment. “Describing a life-defining moment.” And, in my job as TA, I read and reread the fifteen or so papers and offered style and grammar changes. I came to Cubby’s paper and felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

            He described how as an eleven year-old middle class boy, his life was turned upside down when his father – “his hero” – was arrested. He wrote, “I walked my dog at night around the neighborhood and wondered why my dad did it. Why did I have to lose my dad? What did I do to deserve this?” I read it and froze. See, my younger son was also eleven when I was arrested. And all the guilt I carry from letting him down overwhelmed me.

            So, I talked to Cubby, trying to understand his feelings over his dad’s arrest. But he looked at me and said, “Larry, you took money. You were, you are a good guy who screwed up. My dad was molesting my sister...” and he trailed off and I did the only thing I seem to think can work when these young men bare their souls to me. I hugged him like I used to hug my own sons.

            The water is wide, so very wide and swift. Cubby’s story described the first time he used heroin – at fifteen – and his father’s release from prison (after less than 30 months) and his inability to confront or hate his dad. I read and I hoped that his story would provide a catharsis and he would be healed and his pain would subside. But, he is too far from the shore and the water is wide.

            Cubby is one of dozens, maybe hundreds of addicts, I’ve met on this island. And all they know is the addiction. Cubby’s mother brings him pills when she visits she “knows” her son is suffering so she sneaks in pain pills every Sunday to “help him” relax. He gulps them down and fades … fades back into oblivion. And she’s killing him – or at least helping to – one handful of pills at a time. I wonder if she’ll feel responsible when her son overdoses, when he’s just another dead addict on the medical examiner’s slab?

            “He needs to just quit.” “He’s nothing but a junkie.” I hear it all the time here on my island. Hell, I thought it all the time when I lived “out there,” on the “mainland,” when the water was wide enough to keep me from such people, such things …

            We have a new college instructor, biology teacher, a sweet woman. She saw Cubby nodding off in class. She had to let him know the investigator needed to speak with him. Class ended and she approached me. “Will he be alright? I could tell he was in a bad way.” Her worry, her care and concern were obvious and so alien to life at this place. I assured her it wasn’t his first go-round with drugs and the investigators. And I told her he’d be all right – even while I don’t believe it.

            They’ll send him to a higher level and he’ll be preyed upon by some ruthless sociopathic inmate for whom a young man is nothing but fresh meat. And the demons that torment Cubby will grow and he’ll find more drugs and the gulf between the world “out there” and the pain in his soul lengthens because the water is wide, too wide for our humanity which seems in such short supply, to overcome.

            I had a GED student, TMac. He never amounted to anything in class. Forty-something and just obnoxious and ignorant. He would come in and out of school and no matter how hard I worked, how much effort I put forth, he just didn’t care about getting his high school education. So, I start working full time for the college program and I start teaching computer classes and I leave the adult basic ed students to other aides.

            TMac approached me the other day. He needed help filling out papers for a Richmond City program to get him drug treatment and counseling. And I was curt and short-tempered with him. “Why do you want my help now?” I said. He looked down and quietly said, “I’m an addict. I been here inside seven times. I can’t go back out and use again.” You ever feel like dirt on a shoe? Where had my humanity gone? The water, the wide gulf between this island and compassion, had – I feared – washed over me.

            “Am I my brother’s keeper?” DOC will tell you in here the answer is no. Cubby is just a junkie. And junkies rise … and fall on their own weakness. The water, the wide water, tells you that. I lay in my bunk the other night and prayed about Cubby and this seemingly impassable waterway. The separation on this island and these men – like Cubby – who only know what they feel. And what they feel is pain and shame and failure. That water is so wide and prison makes it worse. But there can be a bridge, a way across. Cubby has to swim, one stroke at a time; swim to shore and peace and self-awareness. I have to believe he can make it. I have to believe we all can.