5/12/2023 0 Comments The river is wide pat conroyConroy is greeted at the island schoolhouse by Mrs. Today, Daufuskie Island is a luxury resort area with swimming pools, condos and championship golf courses a rustic recreational annex to Hilton Head.Ĭrossing the river to Yamacraw by fishing boat, Mr. It is the real estate market that has changed: until the mid-1970's, only 100 or so people, descendants of slaves, lived on Daufuskie Island in a community as untouched and backward as the Appalachia that Walker Evans and James Agee documented during the Depression. It's not getting better fast: the No Child Left Behind improvements that President Bush campaigned on in 2000 were mostly left behind in the wake of Sept. Programs like Teach for America attest to the economic and social disparities that still plague communities all over the country. Not that the American public school system has improved so much in the last four decades. It is a disgrace softened by the romance of rarity. They are raised in cultural isolation and subsistence living that is now mostly found in the third world and a few New Age cults in California. Island children are blank-slate innocents, so thirsty for attention and learning that they listen, awestruck, to a recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. On Yamacraw, the fictional name of Daufuskie Island, there are no television sets, boomboxes or video games filling the educational void.
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