Clyde Bresee was just five years old in 1921 when his family moved from a tiny Pennsylvania farm to the Lawton Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. While his father labored for the next decade to revitalize the sprawling sea island plantation's dairy operation, Clyde reveled in a world utterly foreign from the community of his birth; he encountered a society of mannered gentility, a climate in which winter passed in a twinkling of an eye, a place of wandering tidal streams and vast expanses of salt marshes, and a people - African-American people - he had never met. In Sea Island...