Chapter Ten- The Water is Wide

“Always we turned outward to where they would drift when they left Yamacraw, to the world of lights and easy people, to the dark cities that would devour their innocence and harden their dreams.”  I chose this sentence because the children would ask Conroy what New York was like. These children would fantasize and live through his stories. The children would think it was this great place but, in reality, this place would take them for granted and let them down.

At the beginning of chapter ten, Conroy was getting frustrated with the children and the pace of their learning. In my opinion, Conroy had never had a class on this level and he did not realize the time that it would take. He wanted so much for these children, but they were too far gone for them to be where Conroy wanted them to be.

On in the chapter, Conroy makes an announcement to the class that they would be going to Washington D.C. However, we all knew how Mrs. Brown would react. Of course she said this trip was unnecessary and that the children should be spending their time doing “reading’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic. Conroy continued to explain that flying the children was out of the question because they would be too scared to fly. Busing seemed to be the next best thing, but it ended up being too expensive. The route that they ended up taking was by automobile.

The class left on the first Monday in May. When they arrived in Washington D.C., the children really enjoyed the statue of Lincoln. This is because he “freed the colored folk and did the Mancey Pation Decoration.” This sentence made me laugh and broke my heart all in the same one because it showed how illiterate these children were, but they respected the people who helped them.