Free The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy

and listen for that bloodsucker death,” I yelled again.
    â€œYeah, I hear ’im,” Mary said.
    â€œMe, too,” a couple of the others agreed.
    Finally, everyone was hearing old death rapping at the door. Once we labeled death and identified him for all time, I switched to the Triumphal March from Aida. Rhapsodically explaining the glorious entry into Rome, swelling with pride over the victories in the Egypt-Ethiopian campaigns, I described Verdi’s panoramic vision of the coming home from the wars. I impressed no one with the performance and discovered to my unconcealed chagrin that I had played the Emperor Waltz instead.
    â€œWe want to hear Bay Cloven.”
    â€œShut up. You will listen to Verdi.”
    â€œWe want death,” Fred said.
    â€œThen death you get.” Bay Cloven was definitely the top tune of the day. When I played Brahms’s Lullaby, I whisked Sam out of his seat, cuddled him like an infant, and rocked him asleep. He reacted brilliantly, as only a natural performer could, throwing his head back in a ludicrous imitation of sleep, his mouth open, his eyes closed.
    The class also reacted well to “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov.
    â€œYou hear them bees?” I asked.
    â€œJust like a honey tree,” Frank answered.
    â€œAny honey trees on Yamacraw?”
    â€œYeah, they honey trees. Honey bees too.”
    â€œBee sting,” Prophet added.
    â€œBee sting bad,” someone else said.
    â€œWho wrote this song?”
    â€œRinkey horsecup,” Jimmie Sue said authoritatively.
    â€œGang, we are going to learn all the songs on this record,” I said. “And I just thought of a good reason for doing it. Because you are going to look like geniuses when you know these songs. People are going to come to this island to revel in stupidity and poverty. I am going to switch on the record player and you are going to look at these people and exclaim with British accents, ‘Pahdon me, suh. Are you perchance familiar with Rimsky-Korsakov?’ We can knock their behinds off. Now, an important question: do you guys and gals think you can learn these songs and who wrote them? You already know three of them. You know Beethoven’s Fifth, ’The Flight of the Bumblebee’ by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Brahms’s Lullaby. You learned three of them without even trying. Can you learn a whole mess of them?”
    â€œYeah,” everyone shouted.
    â€œI believe you.”
    So we did it. That night I chose twenty of the most impressive titles written by the most impressive composers. For the next two months a portion of each day was set aside for the consumption, memorization, and enjoyment of this top twenty. On a weekend I purchased a huge poster of Beethoven, and hung his shaggy-maned visage on the bulletin board. It tickled me to think of Big B’s reaction to his celebration on an island as remote as Yamacraw. In a short time he became “Bay-Toven the Fifth” and no matter how earnestly I tried to explain that the fifth was not an addendum to his name, so it remained. It gave an incredible feeling to put the needle down, to hear Tchaikovsky swell into the room, then watch the hands shoot up, or to hear voices excitedly identify the piece without bothering with the raised-hand crap.
    Soon we derived a game out of it. I would skip all over the record, trying to fool them into guessing wrong. When it was apparent that most of them had developed an almost infallible expertise in the big twenty, I told them that they were the most advanced scholars in classical music functioning in the elementary schools of Beaufort County. Bay Cloven would be proud, I told them, and so would James Brown. I then told them that they had to look upon themselves in a different light, that they had to be convinced of their basic worth, and that they could learn just as fast as anybody else. If they didn’t believe it, they could get the