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

way the world works.”
    I’ve never written about this betrayal before and would not write about it now if the past had not risen up, snake-headed and mean-spirited, to remind me of those wretched times. On the night of the Penn Center induction all those years later, one of those old board members hunted me out to say, “I remember you from those Daufuskie days, Pat. I never saw such a hothead in my life.”
    I let it go because I had to stand up and make my thank-you speech before the crowd, but words can sometimes sink down and catch in my throat, making it hard to swallow. I got up to do my speech, which was a happy one as I went over my life in Beaufort and my life at Penn Center.
    “When I first drove into this town,” I said, “black people were not allowed to enter and buy a meal in any restaurant in town or rent a room in a single hotel. There were separate water fountains in the Greyhound bus station, and separate bathrooms, and it was against the law for a white kid to go to the same school as a black kid. Look at us on this magical night, five hundred black people in their tuxedos and gowns, one hundred and fifty white people dressed in their Sunday finest! We’re gathered in a hotel where any of us could pay good money to spend the night. Tell me the South hasn’t changed, and changed for the better. I had a former board member of Penn say tonight that he had never seen such a hothead as I was. It startled me to hear a young Southern white boy being called a ‘hothead’ by a civil rights leader. But I thought about it and have considered it deeply. I’ve come to the conclusion that I was not a hothead. Penn Center, I’ve come to the conclusion that I was right. I thought I was right then and I think it even more today. And, Penn Center, you who honor me tonight, please tell me something—those mean-ass white folks who fired me—tell me I didn’t get those sorry sons of bitches back!”
    I sat down to a standing ovation. I looked at the award I was given on May 7, 2011, welcoming me to the fellowship of the 1862 Circle. It said I was being honored for being an author, a Gullah culture advocate. Finally, it said, “Educator.” I swear it did. It said, “Educator.”
    At long last, that circle closed.

CHAPTER 4 •
The Writing of
The Great Santini
    After the publication of
The Water Is Wide
, I began work on what would become my first novel.
The Water Is Wide
had enjoyed more success than I’d dreamed of having my entire lifetime, yet that success filled me with far more dread than confidence. Since I was a little kid, I’ve always been comfortable with disaster and catastrophe and wary of triumph of any kind. Bad news is a comfort zone for me, the fields of brawling where I’m most at home.
    I was setting forth into dangerous waters, and no one knew it better than I did. But I also thought I was getting ready to write the book I was born to write. Because I had studied the biography of Thomas Wolfe with such meticulous attention, I thought I knew all the pitfalls and fly traps into which I could fall by writing on such an incendiary subject as my own family. When I began to write the book, I had never heard the phrase “dysfunctional family.” Since the book came out, that phrase has traveled with me as though a wood tick has attached itself to my armpit forever.
    The shadow looming over this book was the figure of my Thor-like father. As I began to write, my rage at Dad was a disfiguring thing even to me. My portrait of my father was so venomous and unforgiving that I had to pull back from that outraged narrative voice and eventually decide to put the book into third person. But even then, the words flowed like molten steel instead of language.
    When I sent three or four chapters off to my beloved editor, Anne Barrett, she wrote back a very kind note. The essence of her letter explained that my descriptions of Col. Bull Meecham troubled her profoundly. No reader could expect to believe that