Nigger possessed the mystery and lure of forbidden fruit, and I overused it in the snickering clusters of white friends who helped my growing up.” My mother taught that only white trash used the more explosive, more satisfying epithet to describe black people. “Those were years when the word nigger felt good to my tongue, for my mother raised her children to say colored and to bow our heads at the spoken name of Jesus.

Conroy begins the memoir with a confession of the commonplace racial bias of his family and his childhood: Despite making good on his commitment and moving the children toward literacy, exposing them to music, art and the wider world, Conroy was eventually banned from the classroom and barred from the island.ġ. His memoir records the story of his devotion and determination to connect and teach students whose previous educational experience was uninspired, authoritarian and ineffective. Conroy was hired to teach middle school children in a ragged, understaffed, segregated school and was shocked by the 19th century conditions he encountered. Site of brutal Indian massacres and equally brutal African enslavement, teeming with animal life, and sparsely populated by black families who had lived on the island for generations, Yamacraw had intermittent electricity and was accessible only by water. Pat Conroy’s memoir, The Water is Wide, takes readers to isolated Yamacraw (Daufuskie) Island in 1969.

The water is wide book