“Nah,” I said. “Gangs use guns these days.”
In fact my only knowledge of the habits of gangs came from seeing the movie West Side Story, but like the other black kids at Grayfeather, most of us the overprotected or horribly spoiled products of comfortable suburban childhoods, I had been affecting an intimate knowledge of street life ever since I’d heard about the Thunderbirds.
“Maybe we’ll end up massacred,” said Ellen in a hopeful voice, unwrapping a stick of gum.
Ellen was always chewing gum, though it was against camp rules; she had come to Grayfeather with about a thousand packages of Wrigley’s hidden in her trunk, and even, to the derision of her bunkmates, made little chains of the wrappers. She chewed so much that her father, a Reform rabbi in Baltimore, once made her walk around a shopping mall with a wad of gum stuck to her forehead. She and Chen-cheu and I had been close friends all summer, a brisk female triumvirate who liked to think of ourselves as Maid Marians, both lawless and seductive. (In reality it was only Chen-cheu who provided the physical charms, since Ellen and I were both peaky, bookwormish types.) The three of us made a point of being on the spot whenever anything interesting or scandalous happened at the camp, and the arrival of the Thunderbirds was certainly the most riveting event of the summer.
They were not the first visitors we’d had at Grayfeather: already we’d played host to a morose quartet of Peruvian flute players and a troop of impossibly pink-cheeked Icelandic scouts. The Thunderbirds represented, however, the most ambitious attempt to incarnate the camp motto, which was “Adventures in Understanding.” As Ellen once remarked, instead of being a tennis camp or a weight-loss camp, Grayfeather was an integration camp. The campers, most of whose fathers were professors, like Chen-cheu’s, or clergymen, like mine, had been carefully selected to form a motley collection of colors and religions, so that our massed assemblies at meals, chapel, and campfires looked like illustrations for UNICEF posters.
It was at chapel the previous Sunday that Ned Woolworth, the camp director, had announced the coming of the Thunderbirds.
“During the next week you’ll be more than just kids relating to kids,” he said, strolling up and down between the rows of split-log benches, scanning our dubious fourteen-year-old faces with his benign, abstracted gaze, his big gnarled knees (his nickname was Monster Legs) working below his khaki shorts. Woolworth was tall and looked like Teddy Roosevelt, and had an amazing talent for not knowing things. He ignored the generally unenthusiastic silence as his campers coldly pondered the ramifications of doubling up in tents with their comrades-to-be, and passed over the muttered lamentations of the camp misfit, a Nigerian diplomat’s son named Femi. He read us a few lines from The Prophet and then told us we would be like ambassadors, bridging a gap that society had created. It appeared that the staff had already written and gotten permission from all of our parents.
The arrival of the Thunderbirds at Grayfeather was signaled by a grinding of gears and a confused yelling from far down the dirt road that led through six miles of woods to the camp. As Ellen, Chen-cheu, and I poked one another in excitement, a battered yellow school bus covered with a tangle of long-stemmed graffiti rattled into the clearing and swerved into the dusty parking lot beside the rec hall. The bus ground its gears once more, shuddered, and seemed to expire. The doors flew open, and the Thunderbirds poured down the steps into the evening sunlight.
“They’re so small!” Ellen whispered to me.
There were ten boys and seven girls—the girls forming, as we later found out, a sort of auxiliary unit to the Thunderbirds—brown-skinned teenagers with mature faces and bodies and stunted, childish legs that gave the boys, with their muscular shoulders and short thighs, the look of bantam cocks.
One of the boys came up to Chen-cheu, Ellen, and me and stood rocking on his heels. “Hello, ladies,” he said. “My name is Marvin Jones.” He wore tight black pants and a green t-shirt that was printed with the words KING FUNK, and he had an astonishing Afro pompadour that bobbed like a cresting wave over his mobile trickster’s face. Above his left eye he had dyed a platinum streak in his hair, and down one brown cheek ran a deep scar.
Looking at him, I had the feeling that something unbelievable was happening in front of me. “Hello,” said Chen-cheu, Ellen, and I in a faint chorus.
In a minute Ned Woolworth and the rest of the staff were there organizing things. The sleepy little camp clearing with its square of sun-bleached turf and its cluster of low green-painted buildings seemed suddenly frantic and overcrowded. Radios weren’t allowed at Grayfeather, but one of the Thunderbirds had brought a big portable receiver that filled the air with a Motown beat. Martha and the Vandellas were singing, their shrill, sweet voices crackling with static, and the Thunderbirds were bouncing to the beat while they eyed the camp, shoved one another, picked up their abbreviated luggage, and shouted back and forth. Meanwhile, the rest of the Grayfeather campers had slipped unobtrusively, even furtively, out of the woods, like an indigenous tribe showing itself to explorers; they settled on the steps and porches of the rec hall to swing their feet and observe. Little Nick Silver, a math whiz from Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania, who at a precocious twelve years old was the youngest kid at camp, sat down next to me. “You have got to be joking,” he whispered. “They’ll eat us for breakfast!”
With the Thunderbirds had come a counselor from the social agency that had sponsored their visit: a tall, sallow white man with thinning curly hair and a weary, skeptical way of regarding the woods,
