Summary Of The Water Is Wide By Pat Conroy

In the late 1960's, segregation had just been outlawed in the United States after a strenuous, nearly 15 year long civil rights movement. Still, despite this great achievement, racism and white supremacy still existed in the South. These tensions are seen throughout Pat Conroy's memoir The Water is Wide, in which he shares his experience as a teacher on the extremely isolated Yamacraw Island. Here, a majority of his preteen students were severely undereducated African Americans, many of whom didn't even know the alphabet. Its Pat's writing that offers a glimpse into lives his students, their year of learning, and also the hardships they faced against their racist school system.

The Water is Wide was both set and written in the late 1960's, when the pivotal African-American Civil Rights Movement was nearing its end. However, blacks were still met with discrimination in the southern U.S., as demonstrated in the book. When Pat first goes to teach on Yamacraw he meets

Piedmont during the writing of this book due to their personal experiences. Throughout the The Water is Wide, superintendent Dr. Piedmont is displayed as a racist who fires Pat for trying too hard to education these isolated black kids. Pat implies that Dr. Piedmont at least has some picture of how undereducated the student at Yamacraw are, when in reality,he could have truly had no idea. With this in mind, all those trips that Pat thought necessary for the kids due to their lack of contact off the island, Dr. Piedmont really saw as an unfair privilege because none of the kids on the mainland got such long distance field trips. Also, if this was the case, then Dr. Piedmont would've thought that those kids were decently educated and that Pat's unconventional teaching methods were just him not taking his job seriously, which is grounds for him to fired. But, it is because of the bad history between Pat and Dr. Piedmont that he's displayed as the bad