THE WATER IS WIDE by Pat Conroy

Finished We 7/19/23

This is a memoir that was written as a novel. In 1969 the author, Pat Conroy went to work at an all black school on an island off the coast of South Carolina. 

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"The Water Is Wide is a 1972 memoir by Pat Conroy and is based on his work as a teacher on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, which is called Yamacraw Island in the book. The book sometimes is identified as nonfiction and other times identified as a novel.

Yamacraw is a poor island lacking bridges and having little infrastructure. The book details Conroy's efforts to communicate with the islanders, who are nearly all directly descended from slaves and who have had little contact with the mainland or its people. He struggles to find ways to reach his students, ages 10 to 13, some of whom are illiterate or innumerate, and all of whom know little of the world beyond Yamacraw. Conroy (called Conrack by most of the students) does battle with the principal Mrs. Brown over his unconventional teaching methods and with the administrators of the school district, whom he accuses of ignoring the problems at the Yamacraw school."

I really liked the book and it provided a look at various shades and varieties of Racism in the Deep South near the end of Desegregation. Sometimes blacks believed in the separation of the races because, "If The Man is happy then things will go well and if he isn't, then things could go very bad".

There was an organization in the book that aided municipalities in the implementation of of desegregation. The group would get both sides together to find the most efficient way to ease the pain of desegregation and attempt to end Jim Crow policies. I had never heard of this and I wonder if such outreach programs actually existed.