A little knowledge can be dangerous, and the knowledge we gained that day was certainly hazardous to Michael’s hopes for Rundown success. We had Michael caught in a rundown early in our next game, when Huey’s throw bounced off my glove and rolled to my grandparents’ fence. I retrieved the ball and threw it to Huey, but Michael had arrived at second base well ahead of the throw. Mike stood on the base and waited. He must have been surprised that Huey did not try to drag him off, and then downright stunned that I did not start yelling, “time out.” And as the seconds passed, his bewilderment must have yielded to a sense of triumph, as he stood there on second base, and turned to revel in his victory over his former oppressors. And all of that must have merely compounded his sense of frustration, when Huey slapped him in the chest with his glove, and said, matter-of-factly, “You’re out; you turned the wrong way.”
Mike, relentlessly gullible, buried his head in his hands. “Good try, Mike,” we said, probably less to console him than to maintain his interest in the game. But it was hardly necessary: we could not have deterred Mike if we had tried. With grim determination, Mike dug in for another try.
But, of course, there was no hope. All day long, try as he might, he simply could not avoid turning the wrong way. To his left, to his right, clockwise, or counterclockwise, every way was the wrong way. First base or second base, off the base or on it, he was “out.” And what stands out most about that day is how Huey and I ended up laughing about it, soon hysterically, and then so hard that we could barely sputter out what had become Mike’s motto. Eventually we didn’t even need to say it, we just started laughing and walking toward Mike with the ball, except for the times that we were laughing too hard to walk, and had to crawl. And Mike was laughing so hard that he ended up on the ground with us, and I thought that it was just because Huey and I were laughing so hard, but now I realize that he always knew exactly what we were up to, and that the joke all along wasn’t really on him, or even on Huey and me: it was really our joke—it belonged to all three of us.
For a brief while, Huey and I tried our rules outside my grandparents’ backyard. We played baseball one day with a bunch of other kids, and Huey was playing first base and I was at second, and a kid on the opposing team got a hit, and I, with uncharacteristic bravado, yelled that the kid turned the wrong way. Huey marched up to the kid and tagged him and said, “you’re out,” and eventually all the kids on our team caught on, and they started yelling, “that’s right,” and “he’s out,” and “he turned the wrong way.” And the kid complained a little, but it hardly mattered: he was out—he had turned the wrong way.
We kept this up for about a week. Once a game, no matter which way some kid would turn, Huey or I would yell that the kid turned the wrong way, and Huey would tag the kid out. The kid would look puzzled, and somebody on our team would say something about how you have to know the rules, and the kid’s teammates would shrug like “hey, what can we do,” and sometimes they’d even get mad at the kid for not knowing which way to turn. Then one day I yelled that a kid had turned the wrong way, and Huey went up to tag him, and the kid yelled back, “I only took one step, you idiot!” He was very sure of himself, and he was also very big, and Huey and I both knew, without needing to consult on the matter, that the kid was safe, and that we had a new rule. We decided instead to drop the old one: “you turned the wrong way” was fun with Michael, but it was just a hassle outside my grandparents’ backyard.
When I was eleven my mom remarried and we moved away, and I pretty much lost touch with Huey and Mike and the whole gang of kids in my grandparents’ neighborhood. I didn’t get to spend summers with my grandparents anymore, and Huey made other friends, and I really got to see him only at Christmas. For a few years I still got him Christmas presents, like some baseball cards or comic books, but then he seemed too old for those, and I didn’t know what to get him, and then I didn’t go see him at all.
It was 1976, and I was a sophomore in college in North Carolina, when my grandparents called me with the news about Huey. He had become the first kid in his family to go to college, and he was nearing the end of his freshman year at the University of Delaware. He was on his way to Florida for his spring break, and he and his friend stopped for gas in North Carolina. They filled the tank and looked for somebody to give their money to, but as the witnesses later explained, there appeared to be no one there. So Huey and his friend got tired of looking and waiting, and they got back in their car, and drove away. At that moment the gas station owner showed up, and he had a rifle, and he shot my friend Huey in the head. Huey died. He was eighteen years old.
The gas station owner was at first not charged, but the attorney general of Delaware intervened, and the man eventually pled guilty to manslaughter and served a year or so in prison, and was reportedly much aggrieved even at that. He was, after all, merely defending what was rightfully his.
Huey and I had played a lot of games when we were kids, and we made up a lot of rules. Some of them were good, and some of them were bad, and, looking back, some of them could have been both, depending on how you used them. But there is in my mind nothing doubtful or contingent or equivocal about this: it’s a bad rule—a terrible, vicious, hateful rule—that says it’s basically okay to shoot a kid who doesn’t pay for a tank of gas. And I cannot help thinking when I remember Huey that somebody, somehow, has us playing a really stupid game, and that somewhere along the line, we—all of us—turned the wrong way.
I didn’t go to Huey’s funeral, but my grandparents did, and they said it was a pretty rough thing, especially for Huey’s mom. But probably nobody took it harder than Michael. Mike was always kind of shy, but after Huey’s death, he seemed to close off completely from the rest of the world. It wasn’t until his mom died, some twenty years later, that Mike really went outside again. He was thirty-four when he got a job and learned how to drive. It was my grandfather who taught him.
The Original Construction
The United States celebrated the bicentennial of its Constitution in 1987, but the celebrations were momentarily interrupted by a dissenting opinion. It was Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall who sounded a more critical note: the Constitution—as originally constructed in 1787—was not, he said, necessarily worth celebrating. Justice Marshall objected to the “complacent belief” that the founding fathers presented us with a finished product two centuries ago, a completed text with a meaning permanently fixed. For Marshall, the Constitution was and remained a living document; it had to be, because the initial effort was so fundamentally flawed:
Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional governments, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, that we hold as fundamental today.
What Marshall saw in the Constitution of 1787 was principally contradiction: a text that purports to represent the voice of “We the people,” that asserts at the outset a dedication to justice and to liberty, and that is designed to be the governing charter of a nation premised on the self-evident truths of human equality and inalienable rights, in fact excluded from its protections all but a privileged few, and acquiesced in the complete subordination—through chattel slavery—of a substantial part of its citizenry. As Marshall explained, “Moral principles against slavery, for those who had them, were compromised, with no explanation of the conflicting principles for which the American Revolutionary War had ostensibly been fought.”1
Marshall’s statements evoked the predictable howls of protest: his comments were unpatriotic, unseemly, and ill-tempered. But what Marshall’s critics did not say, and what they could not say, was that he was wrong.
The Constitution was written by some very smart people; on this score, Marshall and his critics would agree. But Marshall was revealing an additional, less