Daufuskie Island

Hilton Head - Daufuskie Island Ferry
One of many gorgeous live oaks on Daufuskie Island

First Union African Baptist Church - 1882

Mary Fields Elementary School (1930) , where Pat Conroy taught

I've spent the past three days in and around Hilton Head. The occasion was the annual meeting of representatives from the 11 universities in the Peach Belt Athletic Conference. It took place at the Crowne Plaza Resort. I was one of four reps from my fine institution. I had little expertise to bring to the discussions of athletic scheduling, conference expansion, annual budget, and so on. But I found the deliberations interesting and early next week will pass my notes along to our president (whom I was sitting in for). Plus, the food and accomodations weren't bad.

Because the fun didn't really commence until the Wednesday evening reception and dinner, I decided to leave home early that day and make time for an afternoon excursion to Daufuskie Island, just across Calibogue Sound from Hilton Head's Harbor Town. I've been interested in the island and its history since reading Pat Conroy's first book, The Water is Wide, shortly after it came out in 1972. It tells the story of the year he spent as a teacher in the two-room schoolhouse on the island (which for some reason he calls "Yamacraw"). It's a fine book that yielded a mediocre movie, Conrack, starring Jon Voight. For years it was nearly impossible to get to Daufuskie without a private boat. (There's no bridge to the island.) But now there's a regular boat service for $23 round trip aboard the Captain Eulice. It takes an hour, and the ride over and back alone is worth the fare.

Upon arrival at the marina, most visitors rent gas-powered golf carts to motor around to the 13 points of interest shown on the laminated map available at the general store. I chose to rent a thick-tired bicycle, which provided me with a superb three-hour workout as I pedaled over the partly paved, partly dirt (or sand) roads winding around the island. The dimensions are about 5 miles by two miles, although parts of the island are private and off-limits. Of greatest interest to me was the old schoolhouse where Conroy taught at about the same time I was teaching in even more primitive conditions as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. Also worth the pedaling were the various cemeteries, the beautiful old Baptist Church, the pristine, almost-empty beach, the miniscule Silver Dew Winery, and a massive eagle's nest (with no eagles in sight).

The island has far fewer year-round inhabitants than back in the 19th century when slaves worked the plantations to produce fine quality Sea Island Cotton. After the boll weevil did in the cotton, and indigo and lumber were no longer big crops, the population dwindled even more. Now, there are only a few hundred residents, some of them Gullah descendants of slaves. But upscale resorts, condominiums, and houses are now encroaching on the now-undeveloped expanses of palmetto/live oak/pine woodlands and the attractive island beaches. No doubt, it's just a matter of time before Daufuskie, like Hilton Head itself, will become essentially a densely populated gated community where only the well-heeled are welcome. It would be a shame and a disgrace to lose the wild acreage and the reminders of the rich history (sometimes violent and often oppressive) that give the island its character.

The James Dickey Conference

James Dickey's son Christopher, author of With the Contras and Summer of Deliverance, now Newsweek Paris Bureau Chief

Pat Conroy

I attended most sessions of The James Dickey Conference at the University of South Carolina last Friday and Saturday. Oddly, the venue was the 8th floor of the Business School. The panels featured scholarly papers on Dickey's work as well as personal reminiscences. Attendance was respectable but not quite as heavy as I expected. A number of the presenters, such as Lorrie Goldensohn from Vassar College and Edward Larrissy from the University of Leeds in the UK (both on my Saturday afternoon panel) had their expenses paid. I expected to see far more students, especially grad students, in attendance. Perhaps the conference fee was a deterrent, but you'd think the English Department would wave costs for students. The only undergrad I saw there was my friend Akane, who showed up particularly for my session, which pleased me.

I particularly liked the session featuring writers John Lane, James Applewhite, and Ron Rash, as well as the fascinating panel discussion by Dickey's sons Chris and Kevin, his daughter Bronwen (now in grad school at Columbia University), and his second wife Deborah. They acknowledged his drinking and carousing but all praised his parenting, agreeing that despite his work, he never turned them away. He could be stern but never violent. He often devised inventive, unorthodox games and elaborate fantasies with them. He taught them all to shoot a bow and arrow. Chris and Kevin, who were growing up just as Dickey's star was rising and he was traveling extensively, commented on the poet's contacts with celebrities, such as the time Robert Redford came to visit their Lake Katherine home to discuss movie projects--or the time Bob Dylan called in the middle of the night to discuss creativity.

Pat Conroy, who actually attended some of the other sessions, delivered a funny and poignant closing talk to a packed auditorium. He gave a hilarious account of his own trip down the Chattooga River with a friend, emulating the guys in Deliverance. He spoke for a good 40 minutes from a text hand-penned on yellow legal sheets. He recalled his fascination with Dickey's work when he was in his early twenties, working on the book that would become The Water is Wide. He eventually commuted two days a week to USC to audit a poetry course with Dickey. Conroy admits to being a lousy poet but claims to have learned much from the man he reveres as his best teacher. As much as he admired Dickey, he said, "I got to see James Dickey fall in love with being James Dickey. This taught me something. He was heading straight for 'sock-em dog' [an infamous stretch of rapids on the Chattooga, which had done in Conroy on his outing]." Conroy went on, "It was deleterious to have moon-eyed groupies such as me follow him like turtles around campus."

Conroy, in a characteristic bit of hyperbole, claimed that Poems: 1957-1967 is "the best book of poetry published by an American." Dickey "strung language up to his bow and aimed it at the carotid artery of poetry itself."

About his first book, The Boo, Conroy said that the Citadel officer who was the book's title character was (unlike his father) "a hard man who was also a soft man." And "Dickey was that way too."

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Joe Queenan writing about astonishing books