How Slavery Really Ended in America

By ADAM GOODHEART NY TIMES

On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel. Fort Monroe, Va., a fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a military post since the time of the first Jamestown settlers. This spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia Colony.

Two and half centuries later, in the first spring of the Civil War, Fort Monroe was a lonely Union redoubt in the heart of newly Confederate territory. Its defenders stood on constant guard. Frigates and armed steamers crowded the nearby waters known as Hampton Roads, one of the world’s great natural harbors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its stone parapets. Yet history would come to Fort Monroe not amid the thunder of guns and the clash of fleets, but stealthily, under cover of darkness, in a stolen boat.

Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend were field hands who — like hundreds of other local slaves — had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

 

After a week or so of this, they learned some deeply unsettling news. Their master, a rebel colonel named Charles Mallory, was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build fortifications in North Carolina. That was when the three slaves decided to leave the Confederacy and try their luck, just across the water, with the Union.

 

It cannot have been an easy decision for the men. What kind of treatment would they meet with at the fort? If the federal officers sent them back, would they be punished as runaways — perhaps even as traitors? But they took their chances. Rowing toward the wharf that night in May, they hailed a guard and were admitted to the fort.

The next morning they were summoned to see the commanding general. The fugitives could not have taken this as an encouraging sign. Having lived their whole lives near the fort, they probably knew many of its peacetime officers by sight, but the man who awaited them behind a cluttered desk was someone whose face they had never seen. Worse still, as far as faces went, his was not — to put it mildly — a pleasant one. It was the face of a man whom many people, in the years ahead, would call a brute, a beast, a cold-blooded murderer. It was a face that could easily make you believe such things: a low, balding forehead, slack jowls and a tight, mean little mouth beneath a drooping mustache. It would have seemed a face of almost animal-like stupidity had it not been for the eyes. These glittered shrewdly, almost hidden amid crinkled folds of flesh. One of them had an odd sideways cast, as if its owner were always considering something else besides the thing in front of him. These were the eyes that now surveyed Baker, Mallory and Townsend.

The general began asking them questions: Who was their master? Was he a rebel or a Union man? Were they field hands or house servants? Did they have families? Why had they run away? Could they tell him anything about the Confederate fortifications they had been working on? Their response to this last question — that the battery was still far from completion — seemed to please him. At last he dismissed the three brusquely, offering no indication of their fate.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler arrived at the fort only a day ahead of the fugitive slaves, greeted at the esplanade by a 13-gun salute. That morning, Butler sat down to compose an important initial report. When an adjutant interrupted to inform him of the fugitives, Butler set down his pen. The War Department could wait. The three ragged black men waiting outside were a more pressing matter.

Butler was no abolitionist, but the three slaves presented a problem. True, the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it. Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy. President Abraham Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” the president said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Yet to Fort Monroe’s new commander, the fugitives who turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case. The enemy had been deploying them to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort — and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a sound beating. They had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. And Virginia, as of 12 or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, having just ratified the secession ordinance passed a month before. Butler had not invited the fugitives in or engineered their escape, but here they were, literally at his doorstep: a conundrum with political and military implications, at the very least. He could not have known — not yet — that his response that day might change the course of the national drama that was then just beginning. Yet it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that an unanticipated bureaucratic dilemma would force the hand of history.

Despite his rank, General Butler had been a professional soldier barely four weeks. In private life, back in Massachusetts, he was a lawyer, and a very successful one — although he grew up poor, the swamp Yankee son of a widow who kept a boardinghouse in Lowell, the textile-mill town. Unable to attract clients through social connections or charm, he became an expert quibbler: a man who knew every loose thread in the great tangled skein of common law and who could unravel an opponent’s entire case with the gentlest of tugs. By his early 40s, he had also built a successful career as a state legislator and harbored larger political ambitions.

A fellow officer once called Butler “less like a major general than like a politician who is coaxing for votes.” Race-baiting was red meat to many of his working-class constituents in Lowell, and he had always been glad to toss morsels in their direction. But after barely 24 hours at Fort Monroe, the new commander had already sized up his new constituency. The garrison was made up predominantly of eager volunteers from New England, many with antislavery sympathies. How was Butler to win the confidence — or even obedience — of such men if his first act as their commander was to send three poor blacks back into bondage?

Butler’s features may have been brutish and his manners coarse, but inwardly, he nursed the outsize vanity of certain physically ugly men — vanity often manifest in a craving for approval and adulation. He also possessed a sympathetic, even occasionally sentimental, heart.

Still . . . sentiment was a fine thing; so was the admiration of one’s subordinates. Ultimately, though, his duty was to his commander in chief. With a few strokes of his pen, Lincoln had made Butler a major general; the president could just as easily unmake him, sending him back to Lowell in disgrace — and with another stroke, for that matter, send the blacks back to their master as slaves.

Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fort Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.

Waiting before the front gate was a man on horseback: Maj. John Baytop Cary of the 115th. With his silver gray whiskers and haughtily tilted chin, he appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.

Butler, also on horseback, went out to meet him. The men rode, side by side, off federal property and into rebel Virginia. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.

Cary got down to business. “I am informed,” he said, “that three Negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those Negroes?”

“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.

“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”

Even the dour Butler must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever answer.

“I mean to take Virginia at her word,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.”

“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

Ever the diligent litigator, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize any enemy property that was being used for hostile purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, were helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then — if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. Legally speaking, he had as much justification to confiscate Baker, Mallory and Townsend as to intercept a shipment of muskets or swords.

Cary, frustrated, rode back to the Confederate lines. Butler, for his part, returned to Fort Monroe feeling rather pleased with himself. Still, he knew that vanquishing the rebel officer was only a minor victory, and perhaps a momentary one if his superiors in Washington frowned on what he had done.

The following day, a Saturday, Butler picked up his pen and resumed his twice-interrupted dispatch to Washington. Certain questions had arisen, he began, “of very considerable importance both in a military and political aspect, and which I beg leave to herewith submit.”

But before this missive reached its destination, matters would become even more complicated. On Sunday morning, eight more fugitives turned up at Union lines outside the fort. On Monday, there were 47 — and not just young men now, but women, old people, entire families. There was a mother with a 3-month-old infant in her arms. There was an aged slave who had been born in the year of America’s independence.

By Wednesday, a Massachusetts soldier would write home: “Slaves are brought in here hourly.”

“What’s to Be Done With the Blacks?” asked a headline in The Chicago Tribune. That was the question now facing the Lincoln administration. Within days after the three fugitive slaves crossed the river, their exploits — and their fate — were being discussed throughout the nation. At first the newspapers played it more or less as a comic sketch in a minstrel show: a Yankee shyster outwits a drawling Southern aristocrat. But Lincoln saw things in a more serious light. The president realized he might now be forced to make a signal verdict about matters he previously tried to avoid: slavery, race and emancipation.

Lincoln and his cabinet gathered to address Butler’s decision — and ended up punting. While reminding Butler that “the business you are sent upon . . . is war, not emancipation,” they left the general to decide what to do with fugitive slaves — including whether or not to continue declaring them contraband of war. Unfortunately, no detailed account of the deliberations survives. But a letter from one cabinet secretary, Montgomery Blair, suggests they were driven by a motive as common in Washington then as it is now: “a desire to escape responsibility for acting at all at this time.” By that point, the administration had already received a second dispatch from Butler, describing the influx of women and children. With this in mind, Blair — a member of a slaveholding Maryland family — suggested one pragmatic “modification” to Butler’s policy. “You can . . . take your pick of the lot and let the rest go so as not to be required to feed unproductive laborers or indeed any that you do not require,” he urged. As to the slaves’ eventual fate, Blair wrote, of course no one was suggesting that they be set free. Perhaps at the end of the war, those who belonged to men convicted of treason could be legally confiscated and sent off to Haiti or Central America. (The New York Herald, meanwhile, proposed that the federal government should wait until the war ended and sell all the slaves back to their owners, at half-price, to finance its cost.)

Yet Butler realized what Blair did not: events were unfolding far too quickly for any of that. Despite the counsels from Washington, Butler was not turning away “unproductive” fugitives. He replied: “If I take the able-bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother, must I not take the child?” By early June, some 500 fugitives were within the Union lines at Fort Monroe.

“Stampede Among the Negroes in Virginia,” proclaimed Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with a double-page spread of dramatic woodcuts showing black men, women and children crossing a creek under a full moon, then being welcomed heartily into the fort by General Butler himself (or rather, by the artist’s trimmer, handsomer version of him). One correspondent estimated that “this species of property under Gen. Butler’s protection [is] worth $500,000, at a fair average of $1,000 apiece in the Southern human flesh market.”

Journalists throughout the Union quipped relentlessly about the “shipments of contraband goods” or, in the words of The Times, “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight” — until, within a week or two after Butler’s initial decision, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly composed bit of slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity.

Were these blacks people or property? Free or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable — for answering them would have raised a host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook by letting the escapees be all those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: “Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment today.”

As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision, too: William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery — and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had acknowledged no meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with dark skin. Eventually, even black leaders adopted it.

Back at Monroe — dubbed “the freedom fort” — fugitives continued arriving daily. Each morning, dozens lined up to pitch in with manual labor. Soon they seemed almost like members of the garrison. A Times correspondent wrote: “Their shovels and their other implements of labor, they handle and carry as soldiers do their guns. . . . I have no doubt they would make fair or even excellent soldiers.” Moreover, as the garrison’s medical chief remarked, “they are the pleasantest faces to be seen at the post.”

Many of the Union soldiers had never really spoken with a black person before; the Vermont farmboys had perhaps never even seen one before leaving home. Now they were conversing with actual men and women who had been (and perhaps still were) slaves: people who had previously figured only as a political abstraction. Some fugitives shared horrific accounts; one man described “bucking,” a practice in which a slave, before being beaten, had his wrists and ankles tied and slipped over a wooden stake. Almost all spoke of loved ones sold away; the most chilling thing was that they said it matter-of-factly, as if their wives or children had simply died.

Perhaps most surprising of all — for Northerners accustomed to Southern tales of contentedly dependent slaves — was this, in the words of one soldier: “There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free. . . . Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling.”

General Butler grew ever more adamant in the defense of “his” contrabands, to a degree that must have shocked his old associates. By July, he began pressing the Lincoln administration to admit that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were — in a legal sense — no longer things but people: “Have they not by their master’s acts, and the state of war, assumed the condition, which we hold to be the normal one, of those made in God’s image? . . . I confess that my own mind is compelled by this reasoning to look upon them as men and women.”

It would take another 14 months — and tens of thousands more Union casualties — before the Lincoln administration was ready to endorse such a view.

“Shall we now end the war and not eradicate the cause?” the general wrote to a friend in August. “Will not God demand this of us now [that] he has taken away all excuse for not pursuing the right?” (During the rest of the war, Butler’s support for black civil rights — and harsh treatment of rebel sympathizers — made him hated throughout most of the South, where he won the nickname Beast Butler.)

More and more people had begun to share Butler’s conviction that the fugitives at Monroe stood in the vanguard of a larger revolution. “I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day,” a Northern visitor to the fort wrote. “Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were . . . spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic.”

Earthshaking events are sometimes set in motion by small decisions. Perhaps the most famous example was when Rosa Parks boarded a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. More recently, a Tunisian fruit vendor’s refusal to pay a bribe set off a revolution that continues to sweep across the Arab world. But in some ways, the moment most like the flight of fugitive slaves to Fort Monroe came two decades ago, when a minor East German bureaucratic foul-up loosed a tide of liberation across half of Europe. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, a tumultuous throng of people pressed against the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, in response to an erroneous announcement that the ban on travel to the West would be lifted immediately. The captain in charge of the befuddled East German border guards dialed and redialed headquarters to find some higher-up who could give him definitive orders. None could. He put the phone down and stood still for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps he came to his own decision,” Michael Meyer of Newsweek would write. “Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’ . . . ‘Alles auf!’ he ordered. ‘Open ’em up,’ and the gates swung wide.”

The Iron Curtain did not unravel at that moment, but that night the possibility of cautious, incremental change ceased to exist, if it had ever really existed at all. The wall fell because of those thousands of pressing bodies, and because of that border guard’s shrug.

In the very first months of the Civil War — after Baker, Mallory and Townsend breached their own wall, and Butler shrugged — slavery’s iron curtain began falling all across the South. Lincoln’s secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay, in their biography of the president, would say of the three slaves’ escape, “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”

Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fort Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in Northern Virginia, on the Mississippi, in Florida. It is unclear how many of these escapees knew of Butler’s decision, but probably quite a few did. Edward Pierce, a Union soldier who worked closely with the contrabands, marveled at “the mysterious spiritual telegraph which runs through the slave population,” though he most likely exaggerated just a bit when he continued, “Proclaim an edict of emancipation in the hearing of a single slave on the Potomac, and in a few days it will be known by his brethren on the gulf.”

In August, Lincoln’s War Department tried to bring some clarity to the chaos by asking Union commanders to collect detailed information on each fugitive: not just name and physical description but “the name and the character, as loyal or disloyal, of the master” — since whether the master supported the Union or the Confederacy was, of course, essential to determining whether the particular man or woman counted as legitimate contraband. Such a system would let the federal government assure slaveholders that their “rights” were protected, and possibly return the slaves to their proper owners once the rebel states had rejoined the Union.

But how were officers supposed to tell whether a master they had never laid eyes on was loyal or disloyal — even assuming that the slave was telling the truth in identifying him? Besides, didn’t the military have more pressing business at the moment, like fighting the war? The new contraband doctrine was utterly unenforceable almost from the moment it was devised, but it became hugely influential precisely because it was so unenforceable: it did not open the floodgates in theory, but it did so in practice.

And it did so with very little political risk to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, preposterous as the contraband doctrine was as a piece of law, it was also — albeit inadvertently — a masterstroke of politics; indeed, it satisfied nearly every potential theoretical and political objection while being completely unworkable in the long run. “There is often great virtue in such technical phrases in shaping public opinion,” Pierce observed. “The venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily, prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen but has no objection to their being declared contrabands.”

The system was eminently practical in other terms. Regiments needed labor: extra hands to cook meals, wash clothes and dig latrines. When black men and women were willing to do these things, whites were happy not to ask inconvenient questions — not the first or the last time that the allure of cheap labor would trump political principles in America.

Blacks were contributing to the Union cause in larger ways. Not just at Fort Monroe but also throughout the South they provided Northerners with valuable intelligence and expert guidance. When Lincoln’s master spy, Allan Pinkerton, traveled undercover through the Confederacy, he wrote, “My best source of information was the colored men. . . . I mingled freely with them, and found them ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” They were often the only friends the Yankees encountered as they groped their way anxiously through hostile territory.

Just as influential was what did not happen: the terrible moment — long feared among whites — when slaves would rise up and slaughter their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of slaves did not want vengeance: they simply wanted to be free and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war. Millions of white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free. This awareness in itself was a revolution.

Most important, though, was the revolution in the minds of the slaves themselves. Within little more than a year, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fort Monroe became a river of tens — probably even hundreds — of thousands. They “flocked in vast numbers — an army in themselves — to the camps of the Yankees,” a Union chaplain wrote. “The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”

When Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862, he framed it in Butleresque terms, not as a humanitarian gesture but as a stratagem of war.On the September day of Lincoln’s edict, a Union colonel ran into William Seward, the president’s canny secretary of state, on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”

This article is adapted from “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” by Adam Goodheart (agoodheart2@washcoll.edu), published by Knopf this month. Mr. Goodheart is the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening,” from which his article in this issue is adapted. He is director of Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and contributes frequently to The Times’s online Civil War series, “Disunion.” Editor: Sheila Glaser (s.glaser-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

Police Say Woman Picked Many Pockets in Chinatown

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR NY TIMES A 67-year-old woman from Florida, the authorities say, found an unusual way to experience the town on her frequent trips to Manhattan: strolling through Chinatown, picking the pockets of unsuspecting pedestrians. The woman, Ha Vasko, a retired restaurateur, is accused of a string of thefts that date from June 5, 2010, when she was arrested and charged with stealing $500 from a woman’s bag at the corner of Canal and Mulberry Streets. That arrest, the authorities said, led to a cycle in which Ms. Vasko would return to New York for court dates in Lower Manhattan and then head to Chinatown to lift cash and wallets. Prosecutors said in court on Tuesday that Ms. Vasko, who was born in Vietnam, told the police that she did not like Chinese people. By the time of her last arrest on March 21, Ms. Vasko, who was living in Melbourne, Fla., had been charged with three felonies and two misdemeanors, including “jostling,” which is legal jargon for trying to pick someone’s pocket or handbag. Prosecutors said all her victims were Chinatown residents. “This defendant is a calculating thief who robbed her unsuspecting victims of not only credit cards and cash, but also their sense of security in their neighborhood,” Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said in a statement. He said his office’s Crime Strategies Unit identified Ms. Vasko as a “persistent offender,” and therefore “treated this case as a priority.” A lawyer for Ms. Vasko, Richard Wojszwilo, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Tuesday night. According to prosecutors, after her initial arrest, Ms. Vasko was charged with grand larceny. Then, on a return trip to New York for a court date in December, they said, Ms. Vasko walked to Chinatown and plucked $50 from a woman’s purse at the Bowery and Grand Street, before moving on to Hester Street, where she lifted a wallet containing eight credit cards. A police officer spotted Ms. Vasko and arrested her, at which point she tried to bribe the officer with cash, prosecutors said. According to the authorities, Ms. Vasko struck at least two times after that. In January, she was arrested and charged with jostling three women on East Broadway and trying to dip into their handbags. Then in March, she was arrested at the corner of Forsyth and Division Streets after prosecutors said she reached into the purses or pockets of at least four people and stole $350 from them. Ms. Vasko was ultimately charged with bribery, jostling, and numerous counts of grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property.

TITAS WUS HERE!

Chris Wright Boston Globe

Cast your mind back to the history books you read in school, the ones that covered classical Greece and Rome, and you’ll probably find yourself thinking about people like Pliny and Plato, Seneca and Socrates, men who seemed to spend the bulk of their days orchestrating epic battles and formulating complicated theories about shadows in caves. It seems less likely that you’ll recall the anonymous Athenian who, some 1,500 years ago, snuck out in the middle of the night to inform the world that a certain Sydromachos had a backside “as big as a cistern.” Likewise, the fact that someone named Titas was “a lewd fellow” will almost certainly have passed you by. As for the pictures in the clomping textbooks of old, these would have consisted of grainy busts and urns, not boomerang-shaped penises or disembodied testicles. But times have changed, and there they are, on page 94 of “Ancient Graffiti in Context”: the free-floating genitalia of Hymettos, carved into the rocks there by someone with time on his hands and a loose grasp of human anatomy.

You at the back there: Quiet.

The essay accompanying these images does not invite prurient interest. These carvings, we learn, have a great deal to tell us about “social connectivity” and “cultic resonances” in the ancient world. The new book in which they appear contains 10 densely argued essays in all, covering everything from sports-related goading in Aphrodisias to shout-outs among friends in Pompeii. As for what people were etching and daubing back then, a good deal of it cannot be reprinted in a family newspaper.

The first thing we learn is this: People in the ancient world were very, very sweary. So maybe Winston Churchill had it wrong. Perhaps history isn’t written by the victors; maybe it is written by the vandals.

Claire Taylor and Jennifer Baird, coeditors of “Ancient Graffiti in Context,” would be irritated by that last remark. Phallic imagery on a public wall in the ancient world was not intended to cause shock and dismay, says Taylor, who teaches Greek history at Trinity College Dublin. Instead, these images were intended to express religious devotion and community. “Context,” she says, “is everything.”

Taylor and Baird don’t quite fit with what we know about classical scholars. They occupy the sharp end of a small but enthusiastic group of academics who argue that the “Great Men” approach to history has left a gaping hole in our understanding of the ancient world. The stuff that ordinary people scratched on their city walls, the argument goes, can be far more illuminating than yet another account of the Battle of Corbione.

According to Baird, an archaeology lecturer at the University of London, the idea for publishing a collection of research on ancient graffiti came up during a conversation in a pub. “We had problems with how graffiti was being treated (or not) by archaeologists and historians,” she says. “It’s not just idle scratches, but something that gives real insights into people’s lives.” This is not to say that graffiti has been entirely overlooked by conventional scholars. Historians have noted and cataloged it, and occasionally used it to look into things like literacy rates and class divisions, but that’s about all.

The fact that graffiti is being treated as a serious, stand-alone body of evidence represents something new, something that goes even further than the folk history that has pervaded certain corners of academia in recent years. We’ve had Outsider Art — now we have Outsider Research. At first glance, anyway, what we see when we look at the clutter of graffiti in Pompeii and Athens doesn’t seem particularly enlightening. There are plenty of puns and insults and expressions of romantic yearning, but very little in the way of depth. As the first-century essayist Plutarch put it: “There is nothing useful or pleasant” about graffiti, “just that X ‘remembers’ Y ‘for good,’ or that someone is ‘the best of friends,’ or much similar nonsense.” If Plutarch sounds a bit grouchy here, he had good reason.

Cities in the Greco-Roman world were absolutely rife with graffiti. No subject was too large or too small for these people to share their thoughts about it in a public space — from imprecations to the gods to notations on the price of cheese. You found graffiti in temples and garrisons, living rooms and latrines. Everyone was at it. This fact represents a central problem facing scholars interested in exploring this subject.

As one of the essayists in Taylor and Baird’s textbook points out, nobody can really decide which set of marks is historically interesting and which is simply an eyesore. The only possible consensus seems to be that the older the graffiti, the more interesting it becomes. An inscription about the sexual preference of Aithonides, citizen of Attica, might be worthy of study; a felt-tip scrawl concerning Steve of San Francisco probably isn’t. But the graffiti scholars soldier on. The anti-Aithonides slur, we learn, is part of a cluster of similar inscriptions, which, taken as a whole, shed light on male rivalry and machismo in the ancient world. “Their authors wanted to humiliate and insult their opponents,” writes Angelos Chaniotis, a classics researcher at All Souls College, Oxford. “We are not dealing with sexuality, but with competition and power, with notions of superiority and domination.” And we are dealing with these things, importantly, in the most mass-market manner available at the time.

These were very much “public performances.” Vulgar chest-thumping played a big role in a lot of ancient graffiti, but there are plenty of gentler examples to be found. “Therefore, make me die, you who force me to live without you,” some tortured soul wrote on the wall of the Basilica in Pompeii. “The reward for the good surely will not be to be put to the rack.” In a house in Roman Campania, children scrawled images of wobbly boats and five-legged birds, which are very cute. Academics aren’t generally interested in cute, however, and the Campania etchings are clinically picked apart to explore everything from the degree to which they reflect modern theories on development psychology (“children draw what they know rather than what they see”) to what they can tell us about the movements of kids in a typical Roman household. “The graffiti are archaeological evidence of children’s presence and activities and are, therefore, worth detailed and separate exploration,” writes Katherine Huntley, a PhD student at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at Leicester University.

Clusters of chatty graffiti in Pompeii, meanwhile, are said to provide clues about how adults forged and maintained social relationships — and, more pertinently, how eager the citizens of Pompeii were to present their friendly banter in a public setting. These people, as one scholar argues, were effectively tweeting each other. There is something deeply fulfilling about being able to draw parallels between the mundane and the exotic — be it faraway places or the distant past — and the study of ancient graffiti provides plenty of opportunities for that. The sexual boasting, the political griping — if it weren’t for the cryptic-sounding names and the strange syntax, you could be reading this stuff on the benches of the Harvard Square T. And then there’s this, more than 2,000 years old, etched into a wall in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: “Rufus est.” This is Rufus.

Susan Farrell, who oversees the website www.graffiti.org, says that the underlying motive for all graffiti writers is “the urge to make a permanent mark during an ephemeral life.” This fact is as true of the wall-scratcher Rufus as it is of the kids in Sao Paulo who climb railroad bridges to spray paint their elaborate tags. “I think of it as the need for meaningfulness,” says Farrell, “which I believe is a basic human urge.”

One of the chapters in “Ancient Graffiti in Context” explores the rock faces at El Kanais, a remote outpost in the Egyptian desert, which are cluttered with names and dates left by generations of travelers who simply wanted to state that they were there: “Demetrios wrote this” and “Zenon came up here too.” Some of the more intrepid graffitists had clambered up onto ridges high above the desert floor — just like those crazy kids on the bridges of Sao Paulo. A few weeks ago, Theodora Richards — daughter of Rolling Stoner Keith — was arrested for defacing a nunnery with a red paint pen. Her message to the world: “T [HEART] A.” Centuries earlier, a citizen of Aphrodisias etched a similar sentiment on the column of a portico there: “I love Epikrates.” Such inscriptions, as one essayist puts it, reveal that these ancient cities, so far removed from the world we live in now, “were inhabited by people, who lived and loved, quarreled, hated.” Not so very different, after all, from you and me.

Baird insists that we should be careful about using graffiti to draw parallels between the ancient world and our own. “It is incredibly tempting to do this,” she says. “And while there’s certainly something universal in the need to make one’s mark on the world, it’s important we recognize the ways in which things are different.” Context is everything. Maybe so, but the more I learn about graffiti in the ancient world, the more I am reminded of a line, crudely spray-painted onto a wall not far from my house: “You are not alone.” Chris Wright is a writer living in Spain.

A Clock Moves in Grand Central, and Memories Stir
By JAMES BARRON NY TIMES
James Barron/The New York Times The old clock in its new space at Grand Central Terminal.
It was never the famous “meet-me-under-the-clock” clock at the old Biltmore Hotel. Nor is it the gilded four-faced centerpiece in the concourse of Grand Central Terminal. It was just a plain workaday clock that spent most of its life in a lower-profile nook at Grand Central answering one of two questions: Can I make the train, for people sprinting to catch one, or how late was it, for people sprinting off a train that had finally arrived.

Now it has a new home. It has been moved downstairs, to the dining concourse on the lower level. It is on the ceiling near the gates to Tracks 108 and 109.

Metro-North Railroad officials hope more people will see it there. Its old home was on the upper level, inside the gate at Track 19 — “above the block,” in railroad lingo. The block is where the tracks end.

Metro-North is sprucing up the area inside the gates on the upper level, with new terrazzo floors and energy-efficient lighting, said Marjorie Anders, a Metro-North spokeswoman. It was the new lighting that drove out the clock: The new fixtures blocked the clock’s round face.

The clock, in a square oak case, is a relic from the pre-digital days when Grand Central rolled out a red carpet — literally — for the 20th Century Limited. The clock’s face carries a name that railroaders remember, that of the Self Winding Clock Company of New York.

Once there were more than 50,000 Self Winding clocks across the country, all maintained by Western Union, according to Nancy Dyer, the librarian and archivist of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors.

“The time was picked up from the Naval Observatory in Washington and transmitted by Western Union to Self Winding clocks, which were in the train stations everywhere,” she said. “This was part of the standardizing of time before time zones and all that. Every railroad operated on their own time — if you were riding on the B&O, the lines ran on Baltimore time. if you were riding on the Pennsy” — the nickname for the Pennsylvania Railroad — “it was the time in Philadelphia. On the Central” — as the New York Central was often called — “it was the time in New York City.”

“It was important that everything was coordinated,” she said, “because if you had a single track, the trains could run into each other.”

Self Winding was the brainchild of two Brooklynites, Charles Pratt, the tycoon who founded Pratt Institute, and Henry Chester Pond, who already held a patent for an “electro-mechanical clock” when they started the company. Self Winding was looking to cash in on the railroad boom, not by laying tracks or engines, but by marketing the most precious commodity of all: time, or at least timepieces — big ones. In the 1880s they set up a factory on Willoughby Street that hummed and clattered till the late 1950s, when the company moved to Lower Manhattan. It went out of business several years later.

In Self Winding’s heyday, its clocks kept time on New York skyscrapers and inside the United States Capitol. It also made Grand Central’s four-faced clock. And — though Metro-North no longer knows exactly when — it delivered the one that has been moved to the dining concourse.

“That clock was too big and too beautiful to put it in a museum,” Ms. Anders said. “And it still works fine.”

Conservative Pie; Republicans Introduce Legislation Redefining Pi as Exactly 3
IAN Squires Huffington Post
Congresswoman Martha Roby (R-Ala.) is sponsoring HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, declaring the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3. The bill comes in response to data and rankings from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, rating the United States' 15 year-olds 25th in the world in mathematics.

OECD is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011, and the Paris-based NGO released its international educational rankings, placing the US in a three-way tie for math, equaling Portugal and Ireland, just beneath No. 24 Luxembourg.

"That long-held empirical value of pi, I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better," said Roby, the 34-year old legislator representing Alabama's second congressional district, ushered into office in the historic 2010 Republican mid-term bonanza.

Pi has long been defined as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius, a mathematical constant represented by the Greek letter "π," with a value of approximately 3.14159. HR 205 does not change the root definition, per se. The bill simply, and legally, declares pi to be exactly 3.

Roby, raised in Montgomery, Ala., is on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.

"It's no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi," Roby said. "I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier."

Democrats first responded to the measure with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.

"Really?" asked George Miller (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the Education and Labor Committee. "Isn't that an awful lot like assuming only even numbers can be negative? You can't legislate math; that's like making it illegal to rain on the Fourth of July," the San Francisco Bay area representative chuckled.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) ridiculed objections from the left as further examples of classic elitist liberalism.

"Democrats don't want our children to succeed, they would actually feel better if France one day bests our kids on that test," Boehner said, unaware that, by tying Slovakia for 16th, France already does outrank the US in math. "Time after time, Democrats refuse to acknowledge American exceptionalism, and they're doing it again by trying to deny our children another tool for success."

Rep. Roby took a slightly more pragmatic stance.

"For decades, we've all been learning that pi is this crazy 'irrational' number. And any number with no end is, not, well, it makes it really hard," Roby said. "We talked about making pi 3-and-a-third, but that wouldn't really help, because you're still then stuck with endless threes."

HR 205 is expected to pass the House of Representatives but even if it also passes in the Senate -- unlikely with Democrats maintaining a slim majority -- President Obama has pledged to veto.

"I badly want to refuse to dignify HR 205 with acknowledgment, but... my Republican friends are serious," Obama said. "And I don't care how strongly Geometric Simplification has been polling, I just can't be responsible for that." The president added, "Unless there's something on the table. Barack Obama does love a good compromise. Maybe if Republicans will agree to let Planned Parenthood perform AIDS testing. Or just convince the Tea Party Caucus to at least publicly agree it is the Earth that revolves around the sun, and not the other way around."

New York City Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) responded to Roby's legislation with a massive brain aneurysm. Democrats are hopeful to retain his New York City seat in an April special election.

Triangle Fire: Liberating Clothing Made in Confinement
By RUTH LA FERLA NY TIMES
Remembering the fire that killed 146 workers at a garment factory in Manhattan and its lasting impact.
The American shirtwaist was a trend that, quite literally, had legs. This brash but sensible pairing of tailored shirt and skirt offered a glimpse of the ankles, which was as rare in its day as it was freeing.

Designed for utility, the style was embraced at the turn of the 20th century by legions of young women who preferred its hiked hemline and unfettered curves to the confining, street-sweeping dresses that had hobbled their mothers and aunts.

Few looks have been as versatile — or as egalitarian — adapting through the decades to all sorts of shifting conditions and sociopolitical landscapes.

And few have so nimbly walked the line between function and frivolity.


By 1911 the Triangle factory, a half-block east of Washington Square Park, was the largest maker of waists in New York City. Pressed elbow to elbow at the factory, in Greenwich Village, hundreds of women, working 12 to 16 hours six days a week, earned $5 a week or less to help dress Americans in the white, gauzy blouses — also called shirtwaists — that when worn with a skirt completed the look.

In the last minutes of the work week, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a match or a cigarette tossed into a waste basket ignited a fire that fed on the scraps of cloth and paper patterns hanging overhead. The blaze swept through the factory — the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the 10-story building — within a half-hour, leaving 146 dead, all but 23 of them young women. About 50 jumped to their deaths to escape the relentless flames.

As hundreds of events this week mark the 100th anniversary of the fire on Friday, the shirtwaist style has proved its remarkable staying power.

Democratic from its inception, the shirtwaist was “one of America’s first truly class-shattering fashions,” wrote David Von Drehle, who briefly outlined its history in “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

The practical uniform of factory hands, clerks, shopkeepers and librarians, it “both symbolized and enabled a wave of women’s liberation,” Mr. Von Drehle argued, the “perfect repudiation of corsets and bustles and hoops — all the ludicrous contraptions that literally imprisoned women in their own clothes.”

The earliest shirtwaists — originally shirts and separate skirts — were engineered for mobility, their popularity coinciding with a huge urbanization that saw women rushing about the streets, demanding the vote and, ultimately, flooding the workforce.

By 1910, when the entire American population was only 90 million, more than 5 million women held jobs outside the home. At that time, as Mr. Von Drehle noted, nearly a third of all factory workers in New York State were women, the majority dressed in a shirtwaist and skirt.

Shirtwaists flourished in the early 1900s as a badge of confidence and athletic femininity, the sporty attire of the Gibson Girl. They attained a touch of worldliness in the late 1940s when Christian Dior introduced a version, propped up by petticoats, as an essential component of his fabled New Look.

By midcentury, calf-length interpretations of the Dior shirtwaist represented domesticity to a generation of homemakers taking their style cues from Donna Reed. More recently, this sturdy fashion archetype was resurrected on “Mad Men,” the popular television series set in the 1950s and ’60s, inspiring a wave of nostalgic revivals on American fashion runways.

The look traveled well, as popular on the playing field as it was in more formal settings. As the fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank observed in “New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style” (Abrams, 1989), the dress “was suitable for working women and college students, for street wear and lunching in a restaurant, and also for golf, tennis, boating and other summer sports.”

In the early 1900s, “waists,” as these comfort-driven shirts were known, were turned out by the thousands in steamy tenement rooms and factories like that of the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village. In later versions combining top and skirt, they thrived as the practical uniform of women working on assembly lines, as bookkeepers and clerks, as seamstresses and even as factory foremen.

Buttoned-up as it was, the shirtwaist could flirt. There is nothing more coquettish in the summer than “a crisp-looking shirtwaist of taffeta,” proclaimed The Chicago Daily Tribune in 1903. Society scribes liked its standardized look. “If a man can wear the same general-type shirt all day why can’t a woman do the same?” Amos Parrish pointedly inquired in The Schenectady Gazette in the spring of 1934.

By the 1950s, the trend had extended its reach to every level of the marketplace, from Saks Fifth Avenue to Sears.

Style setters lent it an unassailable chic. Grace Kelly wore a version in beige silk — subsequently christened the “To Catch a Prince” — when she and Prince Rainier of Monaco announced their engagement a few months before their marriage in 1956.

The following year the shirtwaist became, without willing it, an emblem of stoic resistance. “Of all the images of the civil rights movement, one of the most chilling is a photo of a black teenager in a shirtwaist dress and sunglasses,” Andrea Stone wrote in a 2007 USA Today article commemorating the desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School.

In the early 1970s, the shirtwaist was given a shot in the arm by Halston, whose streamlined, one-style-suits-all adaptation was issued in machine-washable Ultrasuede.
The bread and butter of his line, it achieved best-seller status, engendering a raft of knockoffs for the better part of the decade and continuing even now to inspire designers who have tweaked it for a modern eye.

The fashion equivalent of comfort food, recent incarnations derive their appeal from an economic climate that favors reliable standards over the showy and the new.

Yet designers have played fast and loose with a formula built on cinched waists, roomy skirts and mannishly tailored placket fronts. In their spring shows, some riffed on the shirtwaist, offering versions in leather. Others toyed with skewed waistlines and fluttery kimono sleeves, placing their own quirky stamp on this trusted American classic.

Bus Crash in the Bronx Ends a Man’s Fight for His Family

By KIRK SEMPLE and JEFFREY E. SINGER
The authorities were at Wang Jianhua’s door in Fujian Province, China, intent on taking his wife away. Her crime: She already had a child and she was pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy.

As Mr. Wang would later recount to his friends, he stepped between the officials and his wife. A scuffle ensued, Mr. Wang’s wife escaped, and the officials hauled Mr. Wang, the son of poor rice farmers, to a jail where he was held for several days and severely beaten, his friends said.

The confrontation was apparently a turning point in Mr. Wang’s life, which had already been marked by poverty and hardship. Within months, his wife still pregnant, he would set off alone for the United States with the aid of smugglers, taking a chance that a better life awaited him — and eventually his family.

But on March 12, three years after his arrival in New York City, his aspirations were dashed in a sudden crash of steel and asphalt on Interstate 95 in the Bronx. Mr. Wang, who had been working as a restaurant deliveryman, was one of the 15 passengers who died when their bus overturned and was sliced open by a sign post as they were returning to New York’s Chinatown from a casino in Connecticut.

There were a few threads that tied these victims together. Many were first-generation, working-class immigrants, many were Chinese, and many were seeking some kind of solace and hope, however illusory, in the parallel universe of the Mohegan Sun casino. This is a portrait of one of those victims.

From interviews with Mr. Wang’s friends, relatives and co-workers, both in the city and in China, a profile emerged of a man who was guided by a deep devotion to his family and who lived a life of continual struggle, embodying many of the hallmarks of the immigrant experience among the latest Chinese newcomers to New York.

Mr. Wang grew up in Gui’an, a rural village in a mountainous region of Fujian Province; he dropped out of school when he was about 13 to join his relatives in the rice paddies.

“He told jokes, even on the hardest days,” his older sister, Wang Wenzhen, recalled in a telephone interview from the family’s home in Gui’an. “But he was also an introverted, reserved person; didn’t share his true feelings.”

As a young man, Mr. Wang never talked about career plans, his sister said. “We are in a very backward village,” she explained. “All they can think about is making more money. What else can we dare to wish for?”

She added: “I am sure he had his own dream, but he never talked about it. He knew that’s impossible.”

His father died of a stomach ailment when Mr. Wang was 19, tipping the family deeper into poverty. Mr. Wang left home in search of better work to help support the family and, through his 20s and 30s, chased opportunities for work in Fujian Province, mostly manual labor. For several years he drove a taxi, often taking the night shift so he could help with household chores during the day and take his mother, who was chronically ill, to the hospital, Ms. Wang said.

He was a perfectionist. “Whatever he did,” Ms. Wang said, “he wanted to make sure every detail was fine.”

Work and Love Struggles

During those years, he saw many friends and neighbors leave for the United States, often with the help of smugglers. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of young people from villages in Fujian have made the trip; many headed for New York City. But according to Ms. Wang and several of his friends, Mr. Wang never talked about taking the journey himself.

Mr. Wang struggled not only with work but also with love. As his friends successfully found mates, married and started families, Mr. Wang, a thin man with close-set eyes and a crop of thick black hair, met failure. His sister blamed the family’s economic straits.

“Nobody wanted to pick him,” she said. “Which girl would want to marry into poverty?”

When he was about 30 — old to be a bachelor by the standards of his village — he married Lin Yaofang and they had a baby, a girl. When Ms. Lin became pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy, the authorities made her get an abortion, relatives and friends said.

When word of her third pregnancy reached the government, he later told friends, officials went to their house to take Ms. Lin away, leading to Mr. Wang’s detention and beating. The account could not be verified with the Chinese authorities.

His decision to try his luck in New York came quietly and suddenly. He did not share his deliberations with many relatives or friends. Only when he had made up his mind did he turn to the rest of the family: he needed their help raising $75,000 to pay smugglers for his passage.

The task was a group undertaking, with all his closest relatives appealing for loans from everyone they knew. Ms. Wang said she herself raised more than half the amount he needed. It took her more than a month. “You borrow $1,500 from one person, another $3,000 from another person,” she said. “One by one.”

Until the mid-1990s, many Chinese were smuggled into the United States in large ships, hundreds at a time. But in the face of crackdowns, smugglers began developing other methods and routes, and in recent years, officials say, most Chinese have been smuggled into the country in small groups or individually, often by way of Latin America or the Caribbean, many across the Mexican border.

Mr. Wang set off in late January 2008, leaving behind his daughter and pregnant wife. There was no going-away party, no ceremony, his sister said. He just said goodbye and was gone. His friends and family said they did not know what route he took — he had never told them, and they had never asked.

That March, following a path carved by so many Chinese before him, he surfaced in New York’s Chinatown and contacted Fujianese acquaintances who were already here. He had an immediate network to plug into. Many Fujianese have settled outside the historic core of Chinatown, west of the Bowery, clustering instead around East Broadway and north of Canal Street on the Lower East Side.

Mr. Wang moved into a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side with five other men, including a friend from Fujian. They slept in bunk beds and the place was loud with the constant rumble of traffic from the nearby off-ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Mr. Wang bought a bicycle and found a job as a deliveryman at Iron Sushi, a restaurant in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. He worked six days a week, his friends said, often in 12-hour shifts. Mr. Wang quickly fell into a grueling routine, his life pared down to its simplest components: work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep.

He ate instant oatmeal for breakfast and maybe a slice of pizza for dinner. He splurged on occasion by going to McDonald’s. He made about $500 a week, and after paying basic expenses like rent, he sent home most of whatever was left to pay his creditors and support his family, which had grown by one: his wife had given birth to a son. But he also managed to set aside enough to buy an inexpensive laptop to call his family in China at low rates on Internet telephone networks by piggybacking on a neighbor’s wireless signal.

The calls were apparently the highlight of his life. He called every day, usually before he went to sleep. When his family managed to get a computer, they were able to make video calls. His mother would hold up her grandson to a webcam and Mr. Wang would light up with pride, a roommate recalled. “Say, ‘Daddy,’ ” Mr. Wang would implore his son. “Say, ‘Daddy.’ ”

In his spare time, Mr. Wang washed his clothes or lay in bed streaming films online — he preferred historic war movies, the roommate recalled. Their Saturday workday started an hour later than usual, so on Fridays, he and his roommates often played cards in their apartment — they preferred a Fujianese card game resembling poker — and drank red rice wine fermented locally by Fujianese store owners.

Riding to the Casinos

Then Mr. Wang discovered the inexpensive buses that traveled from Chinatown to the region’s casinos, and he started taking them on Friday nights.

Mr. Wang’s friends insisted that he did not wager, but sold the free food and gambling vouchers that were included with the bus ticket and pocketed his profit, usually about $30.

When asked if he had any other recreational outlets or hobbies, several of his friends laughed as if the question were preposterous. “When can we play?” said Mr. Liu, one of his roommates, who asked that his full name not be used because of his illegal immigration status. “We can work. That’s all we do.”

Mr. Wang’s friends and co-workers in New York said he was quiet and polite. When he talked, they said, his conversation never wandered far afield from the matters of work and money. It was his single-minded obsession, all in the service of his family and his debts, they said. “At night he talked about money worries,” Mr. Liu said, “but that’s what we all talk about.”

At the same time, Mr. Wang was apparently banking much of his hope on an asylum application he had filed in November 2008. Lee Ratner, an immigration lawyer who represented him, said the petition was based on “problems with the family planning policy in China,” but offered no further information, citing attorney-client privilege. The policy is commonly used as justification for asylum petitions by Chinese immigrants.

Mr. Wang told his friends that his asylum claim, which was still pending when he died, stemmed from his run-ins with the government over his wife’s pregnancies. Dennis Lau, the manager at Iron Sushi, said Mr. Wang had told him that if he was granted asylum, he would invite Mr. Lau to celebrate at a karaoke bar — “because he knew I liked karaoke.”

But another friend, Lin Feng, said that Mr. Wang’s stoical resolve had started to crack and that he had begun to express regret about emigrating from China. “The pressure was so much,” Mr. Lin said.

Late last year, Mr. Wang had a severe setback when he fell off his bicycle during a delivery and shattered his arm. The injury kept him out of work for four months, and he lived on worker’s compensation payments of about $200 a month, his friends said.

During this time, he was so broke that he started to borrow the money to send to his family and help cover his debts in China, friends said.

More Frequent Trips

Until his bicycle accident, his visits to the casino had been once a week or less, his friends said. But unable to work a conventional job, he started to ride the bus several times a week, sometimes even taking two round trips a day, selling his free vouchers to other passengers, his friends said.

But this new routine was apparently a source of embarrassment: he never mentioned the casinos to his family, his sister said, and he rarely talked about them to his roommates.

Several months ago, Mr. Wang moved into a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a dingy tenement building on Chrystie Street on the Bowery. He shared one of the rooms with three other men; his share of the rent was $200 a month. Two women rented the second room.

The apartment was cluttered, every corner stuffed with the roommates’ belongings: clothing, cooking equipment, suitcases, a spare mattress for short-term residents. Roaches climbed the walls and pigeons were roosting in a makeshift exhaust vent that snaked along the wall. The only decorative touches were colorful Chinese-language characters hanging on the front door and in the kitchen; the characters appealed for good fortune and riches.

Last week, Mr. Wang’s belongings were piled on his bunk, mostly clothes and travel bags. Sitting on a makeshift bedside table was his laptop, a bottle of Chinese herbal medicine — for a toothache, Mr. Liu said — and an old plastic takeout container in which Mr. Wang kept some of his valuables: loose change, his employee identification card from Iron Sushi and a small address book full of telephone numbers. The container also held a players’ club card from Mohegan Sun and several $1 chips from Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, items that suggested he had gambled at least a bit.

After the bus crash, Mr. Lin called Mr. Wang’s family to break the news.

“The family just collapsed overnight,” Ms. Wang said. “My head may explode at any minute.” She said her mother fainted several times a day from crying so much. The family has not yet begun to think about how they will assume the burden of Mr. Wang’s debt.

“Creditors don’t know what happened yet,” she said. “They won’t treat us nicely.”

Contacted by telephone, Ms. Lin, Mr. Wang’s widow, could barely formulate sentences amid her sobs. “What can I do?” she pleaded. “Everything is a mess. And he just died.”

A group of Mr. Wang’s friends and relatives in New York have hired a lawyer to explore litigation in the case. The lawyer said he was also trying to secure a temporary visa for Ms. Lin and her two children to travel to the United States and view Mr. Wang’s body one last time before it was buried.


Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.