lost mythology
of youth, felt something stir, thought …
about the wet witch

In the article, The Wizard of Oz at 80: how the world fell under its dark spell by Luiza Sauma from back on June 17, 2019, movie maker Joel Coen is quoted as saying, “Every movie ever made is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz.”

Ms. Sauma quotes Salman Rushdie describing the movie, “as his “very first literary influence.”

Ms. Sauma writes, “In all of western cinema, is there a more recognisable image than Dorothy in her blue gingham dress, arm in arm with the Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man, skipping down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, so that the Wizard can fulfil their dreams? It’s somehow cheering that this chaotic, surreal musical about a teenage girl, her dog and her three weird friends running away from a witch, searching for a wizard, and trying to become their best selves is so influential.” 

I have long enjoyed thinking about this article since I first quoted from it back when it came out in 2019.

Everyone has seen the Wizard of Oz.

And, as Ms. Sauma writes, “This is the key to its influence: the fact that everyone watches it in childhood. It seeps into your unconscious and stays there.”

I had to wonder.

Was it true?

In all of western cinema, is there a more recognisable image than Dorothy?

Has everyone has seen the Wizard of Oz?

I happened to be in a Pat Conroy cycle.

Pat Conroy, the author of the Low Country.

His books (and movies of his books) include The Great Santini and Prince of Tides.

And the book about his year teaching on Dafuskie Island, about 5 miles from where I am sitting.

That book, The Water is Wide, written in the early 70’s, about how, instead of joining the Peace Corps, Conroy takes a job teaching in a two room school house where he would have the 4th through 8th graders.

These kids were Gullah kids.

Born and raised on a barrier island with little contact to the rest of the world.

Conroy writes of his first day:

At the end of the day I had compiled an impressive ledger of achievement.

Seven of my students could not recite the alphabet.

Three children could not spell their names.

Eighteen children thought Savannah, Georgia, was the largest city in the world.

Savannah was the only city any of the kids could name.

Eighteen children had never seen a hill—eighteen children had never heard the words integration and segregation.

Four children could not add two plus two.

Eighteen children did not know we were fighting a war in Southeast Asia.

Of course, eighteen children never had heard of Asia.

One child was positive that John Kennedy was the first President of the United States.

Seventeen children agreed with that child.

Eighteen children concurred with the pre-Copernican Theory that the earth was the center of the universe.

Two children did not know how old they were.

Five children did not know their birth dates.

Four children could not count to ten.

The four oldest thought the Civil War was fought between the Germans and the Japs.

Do you get they picture here?

The year was 1973 but it might have been 1773.

Conroy digs in a makes the effort to expose his class to the rest of the world and encourages discussion on topics on levels that would bring in his students.

One day had a discussion, by chance after watching an old movie of the TV Show You Are There with Walter Cronkite (Conroy had discovered a movie projector in a store room and took all the movies he could get from the County School System) about The Salem Witch Trials and that led to questions and statements from the students on witches.

From here, I will let Pat Conroy tell the story.

Big C screwed his face up into his question-mark look. “It true if you throw water on a witch, she disappear?”

Suddenly every eye in the room was riveted on me. Only the pigs grunting and rooting on the schoolyard disturbed the silence created by this single question. And there was something about the question itself, something ancient and primordial, something that disturbed the hidden and oft lost mythology of my own youth; I felt something stir as I thought about the wet witch, and knew that a feeling in my subconscious was rising like an air bubble to the surface. Then I had it.

“Big C, you’ve seen the Wizard of Oz.”

Eighteen voices shouted hosannas to the trembling faker of Oz. Cindy Lou broke off into an impromptu rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Others pretended they were cowardly lions. Richard stood up and walked like a scarecrow suspended from his stake. Each member of the class had memorized the movie classic, had watched it religiously each time it appeared on television and had added personal interpretations to the bizarre forces rampant in the spirit-haunted land over the rainbow. And if the Yamacraw children knew about Oz, then I was convinced a hell of a lot of other children in America knew about it, too. My jeremiads against television since my first days on the island had continued undiminished, fed with the plentiful food of my students’ ignorance about people, events, and the world. Now, in a single moment, I had to retract my sweeping indictment of TV: it had not failed completely, only partially. Every child in the room knew the legend of Oz by heart, the importance of the yellow-brick road, the incarnate evil of the wicked Witch of the West, and the ultimate hypocrisy of the great wizard himself. Oz, it seemed, had entered into the consciousness of American children, and not just a selected few, but almost every child in every situation. I considered Yamacraw a touchstone: if the Yamacraw children knew about it, then the chances were excellent that the vast majority of American children had been reached. The Wizard of Oz, through the medium of television, had become part of American mythology as important and relevant to the children of America as the Homeric legends were to the children of Athens.

So Big C’s question was the catalyst for a great and memorable afternoon, one of those rare moments generated by chance, planned by no one, spontaneous and joyful, transcending the need for a teacher or a classroom, and making me once more think of education as something alive and helpful, instead of as a withered dream in need of formaldehyde. Oz took over the rest of the day. For a couple of minutes it was utter pandemonium. Fred introduced a moving argument in incomprehensible Fredese in favor of the proposition that water could evaporate witches. Prophet thought this was crap. He told Fred so. Fred told Prophet he would kick his butt if he continued to think it was crap. Mary mumbled something into her left hand about fire being better than water. Saul said that there ain’t no sure way to kill a witch.

Cindy Lou’s voice finally broke through the general upheaval of noise and offered to recite her King James Version of the story.

“O.K.,” said I.

“There was this little girl who got blown away in a rainstorm,” she started.

“That ain’t the way it was,” said Jimmy Sue.

“How was it then, you old ugly self?” Cindy Lou shot back.

“Ain’t no rainstorm, sister.”

“Damn right it was a rainstorm.”

“No, girl, it was a tor-nay-do.”

“Yeah,” the class agreed, “it was a tornado.”

“Same thing,” claimed Cindy Lou.

“No, girl. Tor-nay-do take your head clean off,” offered Mary.

“You tellin’ the story, girl?” Cindy inquired menacingly of Jimmy Sue.

“No.”

“Then you keep your mout’ out of it.”

“This girl got blown away by a wind and the house she was in hit a bad witch on the head and kill her dead. Then the girl and her little dog go marchin’ down this yellow-brick road ’til they meet this chicken lion who try to act tough.”

“No,” a chorus of voices shouted.

“No, what?” Cindy Lou asked.

“That girl don’t meet no lion,” said Samuel, in one of his first vocal contributions of the year.

“Sure she meets a lion.”

“No, girl, first she sees the scarecrow. Ain’t got no brains.”

“Yeah, scarecrow first,” the class agreed, acting out the chorus in this impromptu drama.

“You tell the story, cockeye.”

“Call me cockeye and I bust your head,” Samuel shouts, clenching his fists.

“Don’t call Samuel cockeye, Cindy Lou.”

“He is cockeye.”

“Yeah, he cockeye,” the chorus agrees.

“No,” I say.

“I bust your head,” Samuel warns the whole class.

“You cockeye,” the class chants.

“The scarecrow first,” says Richard. “Let me tell the story.”

“Oh boy, Richard, give it to us.”

So Richard rendered his version of Oz. Then Oscar, then Frank, then Mary, then Sidney, each adding their own peculiar interpretations, each emphasizing a different part of the story, and each feeling perfectly free to combine incidents from the Wizard of Oz with incidents that occurred in other television programs. Sidney got Oz confused with an episode from “Bonanza.” Hoss Cartwright battling the witches of the Purple Sage. According to Oscar, Oz and Disneyland were somehow related. Richard somehow got Captain Kangaroo confused with the wizard, and Mr. Greenjeans confused with the scarecrow.

Ethel, a purist in the group, strutted to the microphone and began a long, precise, but monotonous epic, which was technically unflawed and accurate except that everyone in the class believed she was making the stuff up. In the middle of her story, Top Cat got up and started singing a new song just released by swing-man James Brown. He hopped and swayed what he called a “new jive” while the kids clapped their hands and tapped their feet until the great head of Mrs. Brown appeared in the window, flashing a look the Romans must have worn on their faces when turning thumbs down on some prostrate Christian. But even though the kids quit responding and reverted back to their classical pose of scholars erect in their desks and lusting for knowledge, Top Cat gyrated on, a grin like a jack-o’-lantern carved on his face and eyes raised in adoration of some muse deep within him.

When Top Cat finally subsided and sank back into his desk, Prophet of the unknown tongue continued the interrupted marathon of Oz, an untranslatable potpourri of grunts and monosyllables, punctuated only by Prophet’s beautifully effusive smiles.

When the afternoon was over and the bus ambled into the schoolyard, and the kids had filed out of the room, I had on tape the story of Oz as it had never been told before—a new Oz, a land that Judy Garland had never entered, but one especially created on a December afternoon by children of an island ruled by a river, and possibly another wizard, with perhaps a greater claim to credibility.*

Ms. Sauma writes, “Everyone has their own Oz.”

You know what?

I think that’s true.

Ms. Sauma closes her 2019 article writing, “The Wizard of Oz doesn’t sugar-coat the truth: there are monsters out there, and the only things that matter are fellowship and home, wherever you find them – a message as relevant now as it was in 1939.”

I agree.

Got to end this now as it has gone on long enough and I want to check under the bed for flying monkeys.

*The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972).