Free The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son by Pat Conroy

parents. Ricky Pollitzer and Larry Rowland sat in the wheelhouse of their shrimp boat. They had let me work as a striker on this same shrimping boat when I’d lost my job teaching. A crowd had gathered on the public dock to meet us. The men were piling shovelfuls of blue crab and boiled shrimp onto newspaper covering weathered picnic tables. There was a lot of hugging and kissing and laughter as we all ate lunch—there is nothing that tastes better than fresh crab and shrimp just taken from a salt creek that morning.
    After lunch, I started to open the boxes of books and give them out to the children and other islanders. The day was both emotionally exhausting and bittersweet for me. There were times I could barely speak as I said good-bye to my kids. When the shrimp boat pulled away from the dock and the people of Daufuskie waved farewell, I teared up and thought I was saying good-bye to something of infinite value, to a job that had meant something to me, to kids I’d fallen in love with, and to a youth and a bright take on life that was darkening fast behind me. As I waved to my kids for the last time, I felt great loss, but also an immense joy. Those children on the dock had managed to place their story in front of the whole world. Their photographs had appeared inthe pages of
Life
magazine, and a script was being written in Hollywood as the shrimp boat entered the waters that would take it past Hilton Head and into Port Royal Sound. Although Daufuskie had let me know everything I needed to know about myself and the man I was planning on becoming, I never stepped foot on Daufuskie Island again.
    There are three more stories I want to tell about my time on the island, and three only.
    Sallie Anne Robinson, who is shown on the jacket cover of
The Water Is Wide
, was a sixth-grader when I taught her. She was a bright and pretty young girl who has turned into a beautiful, articulate woman who writes cookbooks for a living. I wrote an introduction for her first cookbook,
Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way
, and I was proud as a Carolina gamecock when it came out. One of the greatest moments of my life was when Sallie and I signed her cookbook together at the Bay Street Trading Co. in Beaufort, where I’d signed every book I’d written since 1970.
    In 2010, Sallie sent me an e-mail after a trip she took to Washington, D.C. She told me she had never been back there since I had taken her and her classmates over the Easter break in 1970. She remembered my excitement in taking the Daufuskie children to the Smithsonian, and she recalled my showing the kids the Hope Diamond and the dinosaur skeletons. Then she stunned me with the news that she had just come back from signing her cookbook after a speech she delivered at the Smithsonian Institution. As I read her joyous message, I closed my eyes and let myself be enkindled by the miraculousness of Sallie Anne’s written words. She added that everyone had loved her and that the crowd had been huge at the signing. I was sixty-five years old when I learned that Sallie Anne Robinson had a book signing at the Smithsonian Institution. It was a very good day in my life.
    Several months later, I was sitting in the May River Grill in Bluffton when a feisty, combative man approached my table. I rose to introduce myself to him. He had the terrific Southern name of Cloide Branning and told me his wife wanted to give me a copy of her new cookbook,
Shrimp, Collards & Grits
.
    “It has my name written all over it, Cloide,” I said. His table came over to my table, and his wife, Pat, signed one of her books for me—abeautifully bound and boxed book that would look handsome in any kitchen. Their pretty young daughter had begun her teaching career on Hilton Head and had just finished reading
The Water Is Wide
. I told the young teacher that I was twenty-five years old when I started writing that book and had reached the age when I did not listen to anything a twenty-five-year-old, snot-nosed