I save Playbills, those little magazines you get when attending the theater.  At the performance’s conclusion, if I can’t find mine, I feel a bit unsettled and try to find a discarded one. When I get home, I stack the Playbills on a shelf of the table next to my morning reading chair. They amass there for what I consider a season—from September until the following summer. Then I move them to a bookcase in my office where I place them on top of last season’s accumulation. Why I do this I do not know. I certainly don’t catalog them. When I move them, I may glance at them, but I seldom look at them after that. I just have them.

I get the Playbills, obviously, because I go to plays, and part of the reason I go to plays is because of Professor Alan Downer. I took his course in modern drama in college. We saw a few classic movies—I seem to remember M and Treasure of the Sierra Madre–but mostly we read plays. I found almost every one of them interesting, and I still remember many of them. On the other hand, I don’t remember any specific lecture by Downer. They must have been informative, however, for I feel as though I have a solid grasp of the development of modern drama, and that had to come from the Professor.

While I enjoyed reading dozens of plays in college, I had seen very few–a couple of high school and college productions and only one or two professional companies. I had not yet learned the real power of the stage.

Soon after I came to New York that changed. I was lucky enough to attend Peter Brook’s now legendary Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I learned that night that a script can be read, but that a play must be seen. This was not Shakespeare of the printed word, but the creation of a magical world on the stage. It drew me into that world. It was more immediate than any movie could ever be. It required live actors, a stage, and an audience. I learned that evening that the theater could present an experience that could not be had elsewhere.

When I now experience the powerful moment that only the theater can give, I think of Brook’s Dream, but I also I often think of Elmer Rice, little known today but a prolific playwright from the last century. I was introduced to Rice in Downer’s course where I read The Adding Machine. I have never seen it, even though it is occasionally still mounted, but the play stuck with me. Decades after college, I learned that Rice was a graduate of the law school that employed me, and I then read some of Rice’s writings on the theater. I was gratified to find that he stressed what Brook’s Dream had revealed to me–a play is meant to be seen, not just read. He said, “To read in a stage direction such indications of mood as ‘savagely’ or ‘tearfully’ is surely not the same as to sit tensely in one’s seat while a player strides the boards in simulated rage, or to be moved to tears oneself by the apparent distress of a beautiful actress.” And he gave some examples.

Elmer Rice explained the effect watching Act II, Scene II from Macbeth had on him.  The title character has killed Duncan, but he has not implicated the grooms as planned. Lady Macbeth scornfully leaves to do the unfinished deed. The stage directions say, “Knocking within.” That direction is repeated over the next few lines. Lady Macbeth returns, and she, too, is now covered in blood. Rice continues: “It is dramatic enough in the reading, but the full effect can be understood only when one sits in the theatre watching those two desperate figures in the cold predawn light, he already overcome with guilt and remorse, she hysterically intent upon the consummation of the crime. Then comes the knocking upon the locked gate of the castle; the inchoate fears of Macbeth and the cold disdain of his wife are punctuated by the repeated pounding. Who is there? Will the guilt be discovered? The words convey all that, of course, but they are immeasurably enhanced by the visible and audible situation. No one who has merely read the play can be aware of the intensity of this celebrated scene when it is enacted.”

(Concluded on May 11.)

“Brooke Russell Astor was not in fact the last Mrs. Astor.” Frances Kiernan, The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” George Orwell, 1984.

“The summer after I graduated from high school I discovered that art wasn’t merely a way to fill a blank wall.” Dianne L. Durante, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide.

“The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin.” Dai Sijie, Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress.

“After a late dinner in their Manhattan hideaway on a star-kissed night in the autumn of 1928, Mayor James J. Walker and his showgirl mistress, Betty Compton, motored to Westchester in his chauffeured, silver-trimmed Duesenberg to hear Vincent Lopez’s orchestra play dance tunes at Joe Pani’s Woodmansten Inn.” Herbert Mitgang, Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age.

“The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins.” Edward P. Jones, The Known World.

“On October 15, 1948, three weeks before election day and in the midst of the political fight of his life, President Harry S. Truman spent the evening attending a Masonic lodge meeting in Beech Grove, Indiana.” Mark A. Tabbert, American Freemasons: Three Centuries of Building Communities.

“About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.” Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.

“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of all feasts.” James Beard, Beard on Bread.

We were not the first couple to adopt an Asian child, but when she entered our lives, Korean adoptees were not as common as they would be later. Now not just the spouse with her short leg and brace, but the daughter could bring stares and comments when she was with two white adults. (Apart from us she is, of course, less noticeable if she is in a community that has more than a sprinkling of Asians, but sometimes that is not the case. The daughter and I recently took a trip to Peru along with fifteen white people in addition to me. The daughter stood out whether or not she was with me.)

When the daughter was still a toddler, the spouse one day took her to a neighborhood park. A girl, maybe six years old, looked at the daughter and then up at the spouse and then back at the daughter and then at the spouse again. After this had gone on for a while, the girl approached the spouse and stood there for a moment. Finally, she asked, “Is that your baby?” The spouse replied, “Yes.” “Funny,” the girl felt compelled to say, “she sorta came out Chinese.”

I was in Venice on a water bus with the daughter when she was three. A man kept staring at us. He started talking to me in broken English. I gathered he was asking whether the daughter was mine. I replied, “Yes,” but he was not satisfied. He kept jabbering, and since my Italian consists of a few words that might appear on a menu, I did not understand him. Finally, somehow I grasped that he was asking if she truly was my daughter, why was she Asian? I told him that she was born in Korea, and my wife and I had adopted her. His loud and insistent replies indicated that he did not understand. How come she was Asian? I tried to find a simpler way to convey this in English, but he just kept getting louder. He was making me, and others on the boat, feel uncomfortable. Finally, I said, “Wife. Chinese.” He said the Italian equivalent of “Ah” and walked away.

Teaching moments in this family were sometimes different from those in other families. On one occasion—the daughter was five—she and the spouse went to a fast-food outlet. When they had their food and taken their seats, the daughter quietly noted, “Mom, they’re staring at us again.” “Get used to it, Sweetie,” she replied. “It’s always going to happen.”

I am part of a conspicuous couple and conspicuous family, but I do not feel the center of the attention. I am the barely noticed person with The Woman with the Brace or the unremarkable white man with The Asian Female. Perhaps only one time did I feel personally conspicuous because of the family.

The daughter was kindergarten age, and we were in New Hampshire for a week in a rented cottage. I took the daughter to a toy store in the nearby village. The spouse for part of the week was at a scientific conference, and she was not with us. It was a weekday, and I was the only man in the store. A toy vacuum cleaner was a demo, and the daughter starting “vacuuming” the carpeted stairs that went from one level of the store to the next. She went on and on trying to clean each step. I felt that the mothers were all looking at me out of their peripheral vision not because I was a white man with an Asian daughter. Instead, I was convinced they were looking at me and thinking, “Oh, he is one of those men who have traditional notions for girls. Next he is going to tie a little apron on her and bring her to the toy stove.” And I wanted to say, “I would never give her a vacuum cleaner. She has trucks and Legos and I play ball with her all the time.” (The daughter is now an adult, but she still likes to vacuum. Maybe I should have bought that toy for her.)

On this same trip, I decided that as long as we were going to be in a New England village we should experience as much small-town life as possible. I had us do things like go to a church dinner at some ungodly hour like 5 PM (the food was not good; I did not buy this church’s cookbook) and to a chicken barbecue in the town park (the food was quite good, but there was no cookbook). We had gone to both the grocery stores and the specialty food shops and, of course, to the gas station as well as a trip to the hardware store. Towards the end of the week, we were back in the park for a band concert. I stayed with our picnic packings while the spouse and the daughter went closer to the bandstand. A seemingly nice man came up to me and said, “I have seen you around town, and I want to say, ‘God bless you for all that you have done.’ ”  I must have looked dumbfounded. He then indicated that he meant that I must be a wonderful man for marrying a cripple and adopting an Asian.  All I could do was smile politely and say, “Thank you.” But as he walked away, I thought how little he understood. I had not adopted out of a sense of charity, and I had merely married the woman I loved. I was not somehow apart from those two, however, conspicuous they might be to others. The three of us were simply family no matter how others might stare or wonder.

Being conspicuous and part of a conspicuous family, however, must have affected the three of us—our images of ourselves, each other, and a world that often distinctively reacts to us as individuals and as a family. The daughter has written, amusingly and touchingly, about her identity. Perhaps someday I will get her to post about that.

I consider myself rather ordinary looking, neither good looking nor its opposite. (I wait in vain for friends and acquaintances to protest my self-description as too modest.) I just sort of blend into the woodwork, at least when I am alone. But even so, I am part of a highly visible family.

The spouse, on the other hand, has always been conspicuous.  She was born with her right leg significantly shorter than the left, and she has always worn a brace on that leg. The brace has taken various forms, but since I have known her, two pieces of metal on the side of the leg extend above and below her shoe. The shoe sits on a metal plate and is attached to the plate by a T-bolt. A crosspiece is at the bottom of the brace covered in tire rubber, and this is the “sole” she walks on. A leather cuff is at the top of the brace, and this wraps around her leg and fastens with Velcro. Of course, this makes her noticeable, and that does have a benefit. People do not have to meet her three or four times, as they do me, to remember her, and acquaintances from decades ago instantly recognize her.

On the other hand, strangers regularly stare at her.  Sometimes we have joked about it. In my small northern hometown, we stood outside a downtown department store. Some curious Wisconsinites stopped about ten feet away and stood and gaped. She looked uncomfortable, and I said, “They have never seen anyone from Florida before.” She laughed.

Little kids do not always stand ten feet away to stare. Many come right up to her with eyes locked on the brace. Some ask about it. The wife has a patter for these situations—“I was born that way; were you born with a short leg?”–but it gets wearisome. And often the parents are embarrassed or get angry at their child for their apparent rudeness, and this only makes things worse.

In my initial years with her, I learned to accept what she had long before accepted—not to be surprised by the stares and comments, but that never meant that the looks and words were welcomed. These experiences, however, did make me reflect on some of my own childhood behavior.

My hometown, like many small places in the Upper Midwest, was all white. Six miles north of us, however, was a small Army base. (I don’t know what the point to the base was, but we could hear gunnery practice on occasion. We would see over Lake Michigan small pilotless planes—drones–towing targets. We assumed that when the planes got to the base, shells were fired at the targets. If invaders flew at fifty miles per hour like these planes, I knew we would be safe.) Some of the soldiers were black, and on a few occasions these soldiers would come to our downtown. They stood out, perhaps even more than the spouse. I know that once at the very corner outside that very same department store where she was stared at, when I was ten or twelve, I stood motionless across the street and stared and stared at a black soldier. Because of the wife, only decades later did I get an inkling of what that man might have been feeling.

The spouse was conspicuous and when I was with her, we formed a conspicuous couple. And then along came the daughter.

(Concluded on May 4.)

I learned yet again that, even if it is run at its slowest speed, it is a mistake to leave the top off the blender.

Chalked on a sidewalk sign in Times Square: “Special. 2 drinks for the price of 2 drinks.”

When I want to feel special, I tell myself that I am one of the few people who knows that Tarzan lived in Wisconsin.

“There is nothing that makes a man grow beyond his own stature than a woman telling him she loves him.” Jo Nesbø, The Headhunters.

The news article said that three men who had just been convicted of various crimes “could face up to life imprisonment.” Isn’t this redundant? If life is the maximum possible punishment, then the judge “could” give them a life sentence, but before they are sentenced, they “face” life imprisonment.

I have heard often of the “undeserving poor,” but never of the “undeserving rich,” even though there are many in that latter category.

At a meet-and-greet, the candidate said what I have heard from many others: “We can do whatever we set our minds to.” Each time I hear this cliché, I think: Poppycock.

Language matters. Instead of talking about eliminating regulations, we could be talking about eliminating protections.

“Her older sister used to say that men hated pity; rather, they wanted sympathy and admiration—not an easy combination.” Min Jin Lee, Pachinko.

It was the night before the twenty-fifth reunion. A group had assembled at a bar that was a hangout in the years after the high school graduation. Marty went up to the bar. Marty had been a middling student. Marty had been a middling athlete. But Marty had moved high up the executive chain in a local corporation and was a semi-bigwig in the small community. Marty ordered a beer. The bartender turned to get the ordered bottle. Marty put $10 down. But then after the briefest of moments, as the bartender turned to uncap the bottle, Marty looked around to see if anyone was watching but did not see me. He put his hand over the bill, palmed it, and put it in his pocket. Then somewhat conspicuously he went to his wallet and laid down a $100 bill on the middle of the bar.

A caption to a picture in a Hilton Head Coastal Discovery Museum publication states, “From the 1920s until the 1970s, several island families operated oyster factories. In the Hudson factory, over 250 gallons of oysters were shucked each day by the women working there. Workers were paid with Hudson money, which could only be used at the Hudson store.” I was struck by the fact that they were paid in scrip redeemable only at the company store.

Company stores, often associated with logging or mining operations, have served useful purposes. When workers are lodged in a remote place cut off from transportation that allows reasonable access to other commerce, a store provided by the company may be a necessity.

Payment in scrip redeemable at the company store can also make sense. Cash will not be easily flowing in and out of that remote logging camp, and the cash flow of the logging company might be restricted for long periods if logs are only sold at protracted intervals. Under such circumstances, regular payment in scrip might be fairer to the workers than irregular cash wages.

Company stores, while having a purpose, however, have mostly lived in infamy. First, they had high prices. Part of the reason for that came naturally from their remote locations. The transportation costs for the goods had to be higher than for goods in more normally-trafficked places. But prices were also high because company stores had a monopoly. Competition did not moderate what the company stores charged, and many company stores took advantage of their monopolies to gouge the workers

Company stores were also quick to extend credit. This might seem to be a good thing, but the companies did not do this out of a charitable impulse. Workers often found themselves in debt to the company store and that bound them to the job they were in until they could pay off the debt. The store often served the company’s purpose of helping to insure the availability of a generally low-wage workforce. People my age remember Sixteen Tons sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford, a song about a coal miner. (You can check it out, I am sure, on YouTube.) The way I remember the lyrics: “You load sixteen tons and whadaya get/another day older and deeper in debt/St. Peter doncha call me cuz I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.”

The company store for the Hilton Head oyster factories may have made sense before the bridge to the mainland was built. The payment in scrip, however, seems more problematical. While it may not have been easy to regularly move goods onto the island before the bridge, ferries regularly went to Savannah and other mainland points. Cash could have easily come and gone from the island, and while logs may have only been moved once a year for sale, canned oysters were no doubt regularly move off the island and sold. The companies surely had regular infusions of cash.

Wages paid in scrip redeemable at the company store also served to bind  the worker to the company. Imagine a worker in the Hilton Head oyster factory who gets a letter from a cousin in Philadelphia encouraging her to move north for a good job. But how is she to pay for a trip north? Even if she scrimps and saves, she does not get paid with almighty dollars that can pay the bus fare north. No, that scrip-paid worker is bound to her job. Her work only allows her to buy things at the company store, not elsewhere. And if workers through scrip pay and company-store debt are bound to the job, the employer does not have to compete through wages for workers. Pay will be low.

The interplay between debt to the company store and payment in scrip is often characterized as a form of debt bondage or debt slavery. The worker can’t stop working for the company as long as there is the debt, and there is almost no way to pay it off. It is not really slavery, but it is not really freedom either, or that was my thought as the Hilton Head oyster factories were in my mind when I recently attended Matata and Jesse James: An American Tragedy, a play by Dan Friedman. In the drama, a slave couple had just been emancipated, and the wife asks, “Yes, but what does it mean to be free?” Her husband responds, “We can work for wages.” Later in the play when a storekeeper is reluctant to sell the black man seed, he replies that then he will go over to the next town and make the purchase. Getting paid wages, being able to choose where to shop are hallmarks of freedom, but for some on Hilton Head this freedom did not exist when affluent people were buying property and building houses. There was a divide on that island, but I am not sure that the people behind the gates were overly concerned about it. I doubt that they asked each other, “Do you have a friend who gets paid in scrip?”

These particular divided Hilton Head worlds did not overlap for long. The oyster factories closed shortly after the resort developments began. Part of the reason was overharvesting and foreign competition, but the developments themselves helped cause the demise. The marinas and the golf courses and the homes produced pollution that harmed the oyster beds, and the factories had to compete for labor with construction, resort, and retail jobs that the developments brought. Keeping workers bound to low-wage employment through scrip and a company store no longer worked.

Our country’s history has been filled with divisions. North and South. Rich and poor. Smokers and non. Churchgoers and the backsliders. And so on. There has never been just one question that would highlight all of America’s dividing lines. But if we are going to contemplate such questions, here is perhaps a meaningful one that Hilton Head history suggests, “Do you live in a gated community?”

The segregated and impoverished world outside the gates may not have been apparent to the new arrivals to Hilton Head. If they had looked, they would have seen a relatively new school building for young black students. The segregated Hilton Head Elementary School, limited to blacks, was built in 1954 as part of the South Carolina School Expansion Program that operated from 1951 to 1954. A new school building might have seemed to indicate a concern for a quality education, but improving the education of black children was not the driving force behind the effort. Indeed, many elected South Carolina officials and others of that era stated openly that they did not want a better educated populace because that might upset the low-wage labor market, and they certainly did not want a better educated black populace. Instead, money was being put into schools specifically to save a segregated system.

The brilliant legal NAACP litigation campaign led by Thurgood Marshall against segregated schools had been having success after success. The South Carolina governor and others wanted to preserve the “separate but equal” doctrine, but it took only a glance to see that black schools were seldom equal to white schools. Acting as if in panic, South Carolina started to put money into black school buildings in hopes of maintaining legal segregation. Not surprisingly, the initiative that on the surface seemed as if it were concerned with a better education, ended in the year that the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education holding that separate schools were inherently unequal. South Carolina and Beaufort County, where Hilton Head is located, fought integrated schools, and it was not until 1972, after my friend’s parents bought in Sea Pines, that the schools were integrated.

What existed outside the gates of Hilton Head resort communities when they were first developed was not just a segregated world, but also a poorly educated one. Before the new elementary school for black students was built in 1954, the kids attended one-room schools that dotted the island. It was not until that year that a black high school of any sort was available, and that was on the mainland. And since the bridge to the mainland was not yet opened, attending school on the mainland was hardly easy in 1954. Moreover, in the days of the one-room schoolhouses, the county only paid teachers to come to Hilton Head for three months each year. Perhaps by the time of Sea Pines development, children were being better educated beyond the gates than in previous generations, but all the existing adults had had almost no chance for a respectable education.

The Midwesterners, of course, had to have known of the segregated world they were moving into. Even the least socially and culturally aware people of the 1950s and 1960s had to realize a civil rights movement was underway. The migrants to Hilton Head, however, while well aware of segregation, may not have known about some of the work conditions on the island.

(Concluded on April 27.)

The bridge that opened in 1956 connecting Hilton Head to the mainland and the Sea Pines development on the island that also began in 1956 foretold the future of Hilton Head. It would be, and now is, a place filled with resort communities. The first golf course was built in 1960, and now there are many. The first Heritage Golf Classic, won by Arnold Palmer by three strokes, was played in 1960. Arnold also landed the first plane at the Hilton Head Airport, which opened in 1967. Also in 1967, Sea Pines first installed gates.

About 70% of the island is now located behind the gates of more than a dozen communities, often with “plantation” in their names. The developments have been eco-friendly, and beautiful trees and tasteful houses are everywhere. This was a place seeking to attract the affluent. At the beginning, these were primarily second homes. Primary homes were rare; people were not going to buy Hilton Head houses because of a nearby job. Second homes in general are for the affluent, and these spacious, well-constructed homes were not meant to attract the trailer-park crowd.

I tend to think of Hilton Head communities, at least at their inception, as having especially attracted the upper crust of small Midwest towns. My image may merely be because that described the parents of friends of mine who bought a place in Sea Pines in the 1960s. But even if that image of their hometown locations is wrong, it surely is correct that the it was the affluent who were buying into this place with large homes near the ocean. Those early development days promised a new community that offered explicitly and implicitly both a uniformity and a separation from the world. Architectural rules made sure that the color and size of houses would fall within a predictable range, and of course, the location of Hilton Head and the real estate prices held the promise that neighbors would be “much like us.” Gates made sure that “others” would not be allowed.

However, another world existed on Hilton Head when the Midwestern folk started buying land and houses behind the gates. I wonder if the new arrivals ever thought about that other Hilton Head. Behind the gates it was a de facto segregated world of the wealthy who were overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. Outside the gates was a continuation of a formally segregated, often impoverished Southern world, a world that may have been difficult for the affluent to understand. A couple of quotations come to mind.  Charles Pierre Péguy, the poet, said, “Short of genius, a rich man cannot imagine poverty.” Walter Bagehot, the journalist and essayist, said something similar: “Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”

(Continued on April 25.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)

As I thought about friends who owned pickup trucks and reflected on books about the economic and political divides in this country, I realized that I was focusing mostly on present-day America. I also knew, however, that divisions had been part of our history for a long time, and that many of us have been little concerned about them. A recent trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, had me thinking about this.

Hilton Head is a shoe-shaped, resort island twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, as the crow flies but not as the driver drives. (Query: Do crows invariably fly straight for twenty miles?) While there I heard much about the rich history of Hilton Head and the surrounding Lowcountry of which it is a part.

I already knew a little about the Lowcountry’s Gullah heritage from visits to Charleston, South Carolina, other coastal islands, from remarkable novels—Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Roots by Alex Haley, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall—and a memorable movie directed by Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, which was re-released a few years ago. All the novels and the movies utilize the striking Gullah story of Igbo (or Ibo) Landing.

I may have known a bit about the Gullahs, but I knew next to nothing about the rest of Hilton Head’s history. While there, I learned that the island in the antebellum era had about twenty plantations growing indigo and Sea Island cotton. The island, however, was an unpleasant place. Because of the prevalence of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever, the plantation owners did not live there. Slaves and overseers (the polite label, I suppose, for slave drivers) were the inhabitants.

The plantations were abandoned during the Civil War as a result of Sherman’s march to the sea, and large-scale farming operations did not return after Lee’s surrender. The few thousand inhabitants that remained on Hilton Head, almost all former slaves with little contact with the mainland, survived on subsistence farming, fishing, and oystering. Through the years, the population declined, and at the end of World War I an estimated 1,500 blacks and a few dozen whites lived on the island.

Change came to Hilton Head Island in the early twentieth century. Rich white men, largely from the north, began buying large tracts of land, which could be had at bargain prices, to be used for hunting preserves. By the 1930s two New York brothers-in-law owned 80% of the island while about 600 blacks still owned small plots on the island.

In addition, a few oyster factories were opened. Workers shucked oysters for canning. The shells were ground up for use as chicken feed and to make roads. Initially, blacks and whites, often Polish immigrants, worked side by side in the factories, but over time the workforce became largely black.

Land ownership again changed after World War II as acreage from the hunting preserves was sold to the newly-formed Hilton Head Company for logging. Hilton Head, however, remained a primitive and isolated place. Electricity first came to the island in 1950 and telephones only a few years later. Two truly transformative changes, however, came in 1956. A bridge to the mainland was opened, and Charles Fraser began developing what would be the Sea Pines community on one end of the island.

(Continued on April 23.)