On the recent trip to James Madison’s Montpelier, I examined its exhibits about the “three-fifths clause.” Often today we tend to see that provision in the Constitution as saying that slaves were only three-fifths of a person, but that was not the constitutional point. The clause, which is in Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, states, “Representatives [for the House of Representatives] and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Free blacks were thus counted the same as whites, as were indentured servants. The number of slaves, although that term was carefully avoided, were multiplied by 60% and added to the free population for the apportionment of Representatives.

Southerners at the Constitutional Convention were not stating that slaves were only three-fifths of a person. For apportionment of the House of Representatives, they wanted slaves to be counted as whites. It would have meant greater representation for the South. Northerners, not surprisingly, resisted their being counted at all. The result was the famous three-fifths compromise. Thus, southern states had a greater number of Representatives than would have been the case if slaves had not been counted at all, but less than would have been the case if slaves had been fully counted. (Slavery existed in the northern states at that time, but the number of slaves in the North was minuscule compared to the South.)

Of course, it seems outrageous today that states could have more power in the national government because they had large numbers of slaves, people without legal rights who, of course, could not vote, but we should remember that the country was not a democratic one. In most, if not all states, a man could vote only if he held a certain amount of property, and this comprised only a fraction of white males, even though all were fully counted in the apportionment. And, of course, women could not vote, even though fully counted. And throughout our history even until today, children and non-citizens, who cannot vote, are counted for apportioning the House. Representatives have always represented more people than just those who can legally vote.

The three-fifths clause in the Constitution not only meant that large slave states would have greater power in the House than other states, it also assured that the presidency would be largely controlled by Virginia at the beginning of the Union. As we have been reminded at least twice in the last two decades, the President is not elected by the people but by electors. The Constitution provides, “Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” Southern states not only had more Representatives because of the three-fifths clause, they also had more electors.

This effect of the three-fifths compromise had important consequences. For example, Jefferson beat John Adams for the presidency in 1800 and won 73 electors while Adams won 65. However, if slaves had not been considered in apportioning Representatives, the Montpelier exhibit showed that Adams would have had a majority in the electoral college. With the three-fifths clause, it is not surprising that four out of our first five presidents called Virginia home.

As I pondered this information, I wondered how our country would have been different without the constitutional compromise. I also wondered if Jefferson ever thanked God or Providence or the stars for the institution of slavery not just because of the privileged life that institution afforded him but also for his Presidency.

(To be continued at random times.)

The spouse and I recently took a trip to Charlottesville, Virginia, and visited the presidential homes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Jefferson’s Monticello and Monroe’s Highland Plantation (now called Ash Lawn—Highland) are a few miles apart in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Madison’s Montpelier is a forty-five minute drive away. Six weeks earlier we had gone to George Washington’s Mount Vernon. We were struck by many things including the fact that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all owned hundreds of slaves.

We noted also that the guides at each of the homes referred to slaves as “enslaved people.” The informational placards at all the homes also refrained from using the word “slaves.”

I asked a guide at Montpelier about this. She replied that we should be seeing those in bondage as individuals with multi-dimensional lives. They should not be defined solely by their status as slaves. Thus, “enslaved people” is the preferred term. I understood that, but while better capturing the humanity of those in slavery, it also, at least to me, undercuts the force of slavery as an institution.

“Enslaved people” sounds too much like “indentured servitude,” a temporary and often voluntary condition. Yes, we should see the enslaved people as part of the humanity of which we are all part, but we should also recognize that the white slave society existed because it saw the slaves as less than fully human. You can say and even believe that “All men are created equal,” but you can own others only if you believe that those others are not fully human. We should see those in bondage as human, but realize that many who founded our country could not recognize the complete humanity in them. And perhaps then we might reflect on how many today do not see others who have different skin colors or eyes through the lens of “All men are equated equal.”

All the homes now deal more forthrightly with slavery than on a visit decades ago and admit freely that those presidents could live their affluent lives only because they held others in bondage. The homes now try to provide some understanding of slave lives. Montpelier has an extensive exhibit called “The Mere Distinction of Color” that is informative, profound, provocative, and moving. Monticello and Montpelier show us the primitive cabins where the slaves lived. A sign at Jefferson’s home taught me a lot. It stated that the slaves were allotted only eight pounds of cornmeal and one pound of pork a week. (It is hardly surprising that slaves often tried to steal meat, and Jefferson’s smokehouse was carefully, if not always successfully, locked.) But I doubt that no matter what I might see or read, I can ever truly understand what it was like to be an enslaved person.

On the other hand, for a more complete understanding of slave lives in their context, I wish I had a better understanding of non-slave lives at the country’s founding. Visiting the homes, I got some understanding of the luxurious lives of the presidents, but I know little about how ordinary people of that time lived. I assume, but do not know, that many northern farmers were only eking out a living. What were their accommodations and diet? What was the life like for the majority of the whites in the south at that time?  In a number of southern states, a graphic at Montpelier revealed, blacks comprised up to 40% of the population. Since people like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe owned up to 300 slaves, the vast majority of the whites in those must not have owned slaves. What was life like in a slave society for the whites who did not own slaves? What were their attitudes towards enslaved people and slavery? How did they regard those who owned hundreds of slaves?

It was not the mission of the presidential homes to explore such questions, but the visits made me wonder about them.

(To be continued on May 16.)

Rice also gave a more prosaic example than Shakespeare of how a staged play can be more powerful than just reading. He tells of how as a youth he saw Sherlock Holmes. Professor Moriarty is about to trap Holmes in a room, when Holmes douses the light. Moriarty tells his henchmen to follow the lit cigar Holmes has been smoking. When the lights are switched back on, Holmes has escaped. He had put the cigar on the sill of one window and escaped out the other. “It may all sound rather ridiculous, but it would be impossible to exaggerate the effect it had upon the audience. Shivers and exclamations of apprehension were followed by relief that expressed itself in delighted laughter and sustained applause. I saw the play [decades ago], . . . but I shall never forget . . . the excitement of that scene.”

I, too, remember a collection of moments that can only occur in the theater. As with Rice, they have occurred in plays both sublime and the humble, and one was also in Macbeth. Patrick Stewart was starring, and even though I have read and seen the play several times, Stewart’s portrayal made me emit a stunned gasp when Macbeth first sees Banquo’s ghost. The theater had taken my breath away. (Patrick Stewart, as well as Ben Kingsley, were in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night Dream that so affected me half a lifetime ago, but I remember neither from that production.)

One memorable moment was in a play in a small theater with a small audience. I remember nothing about the play other than a few moments by an actor whose name I no longer know, but he once did the Dunkin’ Donuts ads where he was obsessed with getting up early to make fresh doughnuts. In this play he did a monolog on hammer toes that was funny and mournful and touching not only through his voice but also through his face and shoulders and belly.

I remember Scapino with Jim Dale. (Carol Channing was in the audience, and she sat, as Carol Channing ought, with wide eyes and her mouth open during the entire performance—that was at the uptown Circle in the Square Theater where audience members can see each other—with a bevy of good looking men around her.) A running gag throughout the play was that any character exiting the stage would say “Ciao!” Then everyone on stage, seriatim, would say “Ciao!” As intended, this chorus started to get laughs, even though I doubted it would have seemed funny on the printed page. The magical moment came after this was done for the dozenth time. After the litany of “Ciao”, the sweetest “Ciao” you ever heard came from the front row of the audience. It was from the sweetest-looking six-year-old, beaming boy you ever saw (this was a matinee). The cast could not help themselves; they struggled not to, but they broke up in laughter, and we in the audience broke up, too, laughing a prolonged and uproarious thank-you to the entire enterprise knowing that we had seen something unique.

There have been many more special moments since I started going to plays, and there have been many special productions. I now go to the theater a couple dozen times a year, and something important or magical or special does not always happen, but it happens often enough that I continue going. And for this I thank Alan Downer’s course and Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Without both of those experience, I might never have gone to the theater as much as I have. I would have missed much.

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.)