Read The Water Is Wide for Free Online Page B

In fact, I was told that you were the principal.”
    â€œOh no, Mr. Patroy. You are the principal. Of course you’re the principal.” A month and a half later Dr. Piedmont sent word over to the island that Mrs. Brown was indeed the principal.
    She laid the papers on my desk, then went back to her room. It suddenly struck me that she took it for granted I was principal simply because I was white.
    Just as the first day of school was spent getting to know the individual children in the class, the second day was spent in an honest effort to find out what they knew. No one on the mainland could tell me exactly what problems I would encounter. Everyone seemed to agree it was bad, yet no one knew what diagnostic techniques to recommend. Several administrators intimated that whatever I taught the Yamacraw children, it would be infinitely superior to what they had learned before, regardless of what methods I employed. Yamacraw was an enigma to the minions who gathered under Piedmont’s protective wing. Bennington knew more than anyone, but his major preoccupation was to erase his own trail of incompetence and his contribution toward actually shoving the true portrait of the Yamacraw School before my eyes was negligible. After the second day of school, however, Bennington, Piedmont, and all the other king’s horses could come to me for information about the quality and condition of education on the island. It stunk.
    It is important to realize that I had never taught in an elementary school, that my experience had only been with high school students. I had not the vaguest notion what body of knowledge a sixth or seventh grader possessed. Nor did I really know what I was expected to teach them. So the night after the first day of school, I prepared a list of questions, questions that seemed to be the most basic units of information I could devise. I also pulled eighteen books out of the two bookshelves that passed for the library. These books ranged from the simplest I could find to one with a relatively complex vocabulary.
    In the morning the yellow school bus came into the yard at promptly eight o’clock. The kids filed in, each one of them giving me an obsequious good-morning as he passed through the front door. I swatted each one of the boys on the shoulder as he entered, called him “chicken,” and dared any of them to summon up the courage to fight back. Big C crept up behind me and booted me in the rump. The class squealed and laughed approvingly. I chased Big C into a corner and commenced to wrestle him to the schoolroom floor. By this time the noise level had risen to an insect pitch. I was about to put Big C into a full Nelson, when a funereal silence descended on the room; I saw Mama Brown’s huge head staring disapprovingly into the window. She beckoned me to the door with her finger. Her finger was the size of a small blackjack. I went.
    â€œMr. Patroy,” she said, “you have already lost the respect of these children. You have lowered yourself in their eyes. They need discipline, not fun time. This school isn’t any fun time, you know.”
    â€œYes, ma’am,” I mumbled, embarrassed as hell.
    â€œRemember what I told you about colored children. They need the whip. They understand the whip. O.K. Do you understand me?”
    â€œYes, ma’am.”
    â€œO.K., that’s good. Now, this is the day we hand out books. In exactly one hour, I want you to send a child you trust to my room. The state requires us to hand out these textbooks as soon as possible.”
    â€œCan the kids read these books?” I asked.
    â€œThey are supposed to read them. The state department requires them to read them.”
    â€œWhat if they can’t?”
    â€œThen we must make them read them. Of course, some of them are retarded and can’t read anything. You got to remember that we are overseas, Mr. Patroy, and things are tough overseas.”
    â€œI’ll