This is the time of years when many parents and children start thinking about the possibility of summer camp.  I remember my overnight summer camp experience, a Quaker camp that watered and fed the seeds of peace already planted in me. My father’s camp experience gave him his own social and political awareness.

 In 1936 I went to camp for the first time. Dad was a religious politician. He was a Methodist in Eluthera. When he got to Harlem he saw the Baptists had all the power. He became a Baptist. Understand, his mode of being a Baptist was to send my mother to church. And he sends us (children) to church. Dad very seldom went to church. When he got older, when he got closer to death he began to wonder about this stuff and he went to church more often.

There was a camp. Camp Minisink. But it was run by the Methodists.  Dad went up there and made them old Methodist motions and the next thing I know I was at camp. The camp was two, two and one, that is two weeks, two weeks, and one.  They decided to send me the first two weeks then if I liked it they would let me do the next two weeks and then if I really liked it they would pay for last week.

I was in camp two days and I came down with chicken pox.  They were supposed to send me home.  The camp made the decision, we had 36 people, campers, and then another ten staff. The guy who was the doc took pity on me. I had to stay in bed in this little dispensary. Nice little room, I could see the lake. So I stayed there almost two weeks. But I loved it (camp after getting well) So my parents said okay five weeks

Was that when you really fell in love with nature?

Yes. Not just nature, Black Nationalism in a funny kind of a way. You had this real struggle, remember were talking 30s, so you’re talking about people who don’t really want to be political, don’t agitate the white man and so forth and so on and there was still a lot of North/South commerce and every (black) mother out there who had a son born and raised in the North wouldn’t even send their son south of Brooklyn. (laughter)  It was just alla that. So you didn’t get the kind of talk that you get now, over the last twenty, thirty years.

from The Algonquin Legends of Nw ENgland 1884

(At camp) there was an old man Mr. Parker.  Mr. Parker just talked, to hell with everybody. But they did most of it using an American Indian kind of theme. So we had an American Indian construct with an African context. Of course Native people have some of the same things. So we had to go through twenty rituals at a time and you’d be naked and they’d march you off into the woods and we had to make a camp, make a bed and then find a way back. And we all did. Of course they picked guides, but the ones they picked, they knew they could do it really.

But that’s a nice coming of age.

 Oh yeah we went through those rituals. It was alright with me. I loved camp. We hiked. We went a few places.  I learned partly to cook there.  Remember that place I had in Sonoma where I had to cook with a wood stove. I went ahead cooking on that stove and then I was like Damn Reggie what are you doing and it got to me I had helped the cook out at camp for four or five years.

But I don’t understand how that brought you closer to Black Nationalism.

 Because of the stories they told. They told all kinds of stories about warriors fighting for freedom and always being in a minority position but always having the strength. They were of course all God-fearing but it was the first time I actually heard the thing that you were supposed to be responsible to something bigger than yourself. Not just your religion. You had to be responsible to God. But this was your people.

They did plenty of poetry. As I look back and we keep talking about this stuff. We played the dozens of course. A bunch of poems we had memorized. The Signifying Monkey in particular. Everybody knew it.

So they used poetry and storytelling and folk tales as a way to forward progressive political notions without being overt. These are underlying human principles of freedom, struggle, independence, and strength, whatever.

 Yeah. Old Parker would have these old scary ass stories an Adobo warrior would save us from the ghost, who was the forces of evil.

Now Minisink was just black people from Harlem. But I have to say in terms of my memories now, most of the social formations to which I belonged until I started doing my thing, like I sang in a glee club at the Y(MCA) were primarily folks who were of West Indian extraction, mixed islands. Harlem was one of the big destinations of Bahamians.  St. Albans (Queens) was where we (West Indians) broke in first and they were just about 1000% Jamaican.  But the little islands went all over. Somebody was short folks would say, “Oh he must be from St. Kitts.”  And the Jamaicans would say, ”You Bahamians you all Floridians. What do you mean Bahamians?”

Note: While looking for some images to attach to this story I found a Camp Minisink site for families that attended the camp in their youth.  They still seemed to be all African-American and some were talking about a fifty year reunion. Camp Minisink really must have been a special place.