The Water Is Wide: Pat Conroy’s Year on Daufuskie Island

In the fall of 1969 Pat Conroy took the job at the Mary Field School, the island’s two-room school for its Black children, which their church families had built and opened in 1934. He had the older children, fifth through eighth grade. In the book some of them can’t read yet, and none of them knows much of the world beyond the island. They couldn’t quite say “Conroy”, so they called him Conrack.

He taught them his own way, and he refused to use corporal punishment. That put him at odds with the school’s administration, and at the end of the 1969-70 school year he was fired. In the book he renamed Daufuskie “Yamacraw”, and that is still the name many readers know it by; our Daufuskie Island history page covers what the island was before and after him.

The book came out in 1972 and won an award from the National Education Association. It is a teacher’s account, funny and angry by turns: the children, the island’s people, and his fight with the people who ran the schools. It came before the novels that made him famous, The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides among them.

You don’t need to know the ending before you go, and we won’t spoil it. Pat Conroy’s own site has the book’s page, with a readers’ guide and a note on where his students are today.

Conrack (1974) took its title from the children’s name for him. Martin Ritt directed it for 20th Century Fox, with Jon Voight as Conroy and Paul Winfield in the cast. It was not filmed on Daufuskie: it was shot in Georgia, mostly on St. Simons Island and in nearby Brunswick.

The book was filmed again for television in 2006 under its own title, as a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie with Jeff Hephner as Conroy and Alfre Woodard. That one was shot in Wilmington, North Carolina. So neither film shows the real island; the only way to see it is to go.

The Mary Field School is on School Road in the middle of the island, a low white building behind a rail fence. It closed as a school in 1997 and was renovated in 2009 for church functions and as a community center, so it is not a museum. A state historical marker out front names Conroy and the book. Inside, Daufuskie Blues dyes cloth with indigo, and School Grounds Coffee shares the spot, so when they are open you can step in as a customer rather than a sightseer.

First Union African Baptist Church, where the island’s children went to school before Mary Field was built, is a short ride away; both are on the Historical Foundation’s trail map. The gated communities at Haig Point and Melrose are private, but the school and the churches are on the public roads.

There is no bridge, so the trip starts with a boat: see our Daufuskie Island ferry page for the crossings, and rent a cart with our Daufuskie Island golf cart rentals list, since visitors can’t bring cars. Or let someone else do it: Outside Hilton Head’s history trip includes the boat, a cart and a guide and stops at the school, and Sallie Ann Robinson, who was in Conroy’s class, shows visitors her island herself. Our Daufuskie Island tours page compares them.

Conroy finished high school in Beaufort, up the coast from Hilton Head. The Pat Conroy Literary Center at 601 Bladen Street in Beaufort keeps exhibits on his life and work and runs programs and events for readers and writers; check its hours before you drive up. He died on March 4, 2016, and is buried on St. Helena Island, near the Penn Center.