Read The Water Is Wide for Free Online

said we couldn’t pray on Yamacraw, but I feel if the Lord ain’t on our side, then who is. If the Lord ain’t with us, then who’s gonna be for us. If the Lord decides to forget us, then there ain’t much use in livin’. Don’t you agree, Mr. Patroy?”
    Mr. Patroy nodded his head in solemn agreement.
    We said the Lord’s Prayer, vilified the Soo-preme Court once more, then broke up the meeting.
    After the room had cleared of the underclasses, I put Plan Number 1 into immediate effect. I asked the kids to write a paper briefly describing themselves, telling me everything about themselves that they felt was important, what they liked about themselves and what they didn’t like. This seemed like a fairly reasonable request to me but most of the kids stared at me as if I had ordered them to translate hieroglyphs from a pyramid wall. I repeated the instructions and insisted that they make some attempt to follow them. So they began.
    As I walked around my new fiefdom, the kids earnestly applying themselves to the task at hand, I had my first moment of panic. Some of them could barely write. Half of them were incapable of expressing even the simplest thought on paper. Three quarters of them could barely spell even the most elementary words. Three of them could not write their names. Sweet little Jesus, I thought, as I weaved between the desks, these kids don’t know crap. Most of them hid their papers as I came by, ashamed for me to see they had written nothing. By not being able to tell me anything about themselves, they were telling me everything.
    Next I read them a story, a very simple story, I thought, about a judge and a U.S. marshal in the Wild West. The story contained a murder, a treacherous friend, and a happy ending. I asked the eighth graders and the other kids who appeared the least bit literate to retell the story in their own words on paper. Frank, the eighth grader and the boy Mrs. Brown had introduced as the intellectual torch of the Yamacraw School, wrote the following: “Jim was a ranch. Jim had horse thef. Mike father was short in his back, Mike said Jim had shile his father.” A sixth grader wrote, “There was a cowboy name Jim and Mike had a ranch when Mike father got shoot in his barn. Mike did not no ho shoot him fadher one he fond out h.” This was Cindy Lou, who proudly produced this composition after fifteen minutes of laborious effort.
    Oh, I thought, we have no accomplished essayists in the class, so let us continue into other fields of endeavor. Perhaps some latent Demosthenes was sitting before me awaiting the coming of some twentieth-century Macedonia. I asked each child to tell me about his summer, what he did, what he enjoyed the most, or what he disliked about it. Since there was an obvious dearth of volunteers, I called on a diminutive boy named Saul, a seventh grader who looked no older than six.
    â€œTell me about the summer, Saul, me hearty lad,” I said, desperately trying to inject some life in the deadpan atmosphere of the room.
    Saul arose with paramount dignity, tugged on his belt, and spoke with a musical prepubic voice. “I slop de hog. I feed de cow. I feed two dog. I go to Savannah on the boat.”
    The next orator arose and said, “I slop de hog. I feed de cow. I feed three dog. I feed two cat. I go to Savannah in the boat.”
    The next brilliant innovator arose and said, quite surprisingly, “I feed the hog. I feed the cow. I feed the horse. I feed seven dogs. I go to Savannah in the boat.”
    Every other child in the class stood up and without a trace of expression or self-consciousness repeated Saul’s original speech verbatim. A boy named Prophet gave the only variation of the theme when he confided to the class with a grin that “1 help poppa fick the poppa hog.” The class roared.
    After this failure to learn something about each of my new students, I pulled an old trick of the