A Reason to Believe Read Online Free Page A

footings. Each had six or seven sets of bunks and a small common bathroom with walls so thin, there were no secrets. In the early days, the new kids were more modest and tried to urinate silently, along the inside of the bowl, to be less obvious. Most of us had never even undressed in front of someone outside our families. The woods were spooky and exceptionally dark at night. The swimming test was a particular source of anxiety for the black campers; for many of us, contact with the water consisted of splashing in the public wading pool or running through an open fire hydrant.
    We prayed all the time: grace before meals and a blessing afterward; chapel after breakfast and before dinner. Sunday was a hallelujah marathon. We sang hymns around the campfire at night and at bedtime before lights out. Even our arts and crafts projects had Christian themes. The black kids prayed especially hard before the swimming test.
    To this day, it amazes me that the organizers were able to blend two often volatile ingredients—race and religion—and make it work. They succeeded by making it less about issues and dogma and more about people. By the end of the two weeks, no one wanted to leave. We sang camp songs and hymns together on the ride back to Chicago and cried when we had to say good-bye at the bus stop, the parents looking on with amazement. Rhonda and I had also found an experience in common all our own. By the following summer, we couldn’t wait to go back.
    I was most appreciative of the woman who preparedour fine meals. She was from Maywood, Illinois, the first African American I ever met who owned a home in a suburb. She had two daughters at the camp, one of whom became a great friend of Rhonda’s, and over the years, we visited them often in their tidy community. In her ease with whites and blacks alike, her educated diction, and her confident bearing, she seemed to confirm what my grandparents had been trying to envision for us all along: A secure middle class was within our reach.
    My grandparents and my mother were physically close but emotionally distant. They always had my best interests at heart, but their affections were circumscribed and conditional, preoccupied as they were by their own struggles and demons. What I craved most, consistent love and encouragement, I got from teachers.
    The Mary Church Terrell School was on State Street, part of the Robert Taylor Homes complex just a block behind my grandparents’ apartment. I started first grade in 1962 and attended straight through the sixth grade. All my teachers were self-confident professionals, and they embodied a very different vision. What they had—college diplomas, steady jobs, well-built homes, stable families—was what I too hoped to have someday. They spoke proper English and wore clothes that fit. And they looked like me.
    I was attentive and eager, diligently completing whatlittle homework I was given. School came easily to me, and I developed a reputation as a good student. Rhonda, a year ahead of me, came to resent that teachers started asking if she were my sister. It was supposed to be the other way around.
    In the early grades, I would hug my teachers hello and good-bye. I sought their attention unabashedly and usually got it, though it wasn’t always positive. In the third grade, I was well ahead of my classmates, and the teacher, Mrs. Threet, gave me special library privileges. I could skip certain classroom lessons and read or do homework in the library. I once came back to class in the middle of a lesson with a picture book on horses. Another student indiscreetly started asking me questions about it while Mrs. Threet was speaking.
    “Excuse me, Mr. Patrick,” she said. “I think it’s time for you to settle down.”
    I told her I hadn’t said a word.
    “Well,” she said to the class, “it seems that Mr. Patrick is getting a little too big for his britches.”
    I was devastated, though I did learn how exposed you are by privilege. (I