The Most Painful Story I Never Told

It was hard being a black kid in a black neighborhood that goes to school with white kids. Well, to be more accurate I guess I would say it was confusing. And the confusion made it hard. It didn't have to be, I suppose. But such is life.

During the school year I spent the day speaking one language that felt foreign to me and at night with my friends I did the same. If language is the first step to establishing commonality with others around you I guess I never felt at home. Thankfully I was a natural loner so when I didn't feel like I fit in I just hung by myself.

In seventh grade a kid named Ryan and I became good friends. He was sarcastic and clever with almost as much fever for Nintendo as me. We got along famously. When he suggested going off with him to Christian camp I co-signed immediately. Why not?

Camp Barakel that summer was more fun than I thought it possible to have in eight days. On arrival Ryan and me hooked up with two other guys who thought like we thought and liked what we liked. And since this was the last year before you had to go to high school camp we were the oldest kids there. We ran that camp.

Counselors loved us. All the kids adored us. Our sports teams won every award allowed. We excelled in all of our individual activities. Everywhere we went was where the party followed and I left that camp chomping at the bit for a return.

The next summer Ryan and I picked up another friend of mine, Nick, and off we went. The world, however, is cruel. And for every bit of sky-scraping happiness you must experience a soul-crushing pass through the deepest valley.

The two guys we were gonna hang with from the previous years had opted to attend different weeks. Ryan left four days in due to illness. My camp counselor was a hyper-conservative, overly solemn bag of un-fun. And I was reminded, on a daily basis, that I was different.

I don't think anyone actually meant to make me feel like I wasn't a part of things. I'm pretty sure their hearts were in the right place. But somehow I'd become the ambassador for all things black. Why do black kids talk different? Why do black kids act different? Why don't you sound like the black kids I know?

I went fishing on the second day of camp and caught an 8-inch mystery fish five minutes after dropping my line and without using any bait. Pure luck. Ryan hadn't been there, but had heard about it and asked me about it at supper that night.

"Dude! I heard you caught a fish all quick without using any bait!"
"The attendant didn't know my name. How'd you know it was me?"
"He said the black kid did it. Who else would it be?"

I also happened to be the only kid at camp that week wearing a hoodie in summertime and sunglasses 24/7. But that's not what best distinguished me in the mind of the fishing attendant. I don't think he meant anything by it, but it hurt anyway and I didn't know why.

We were to go home on Sunday morning. It was Thursday. And I felt like all eyes were on me every day. I was so up in my own head I couldn't perform well at athletics or at the individual activities so I have up on them preferring to shoot pool in the Rec Center and read in the bunkhouse when everyone else was out. I hid all this from Nick who seemed to be having a good time. I could see no point to bringing him down with my frustration and uncertainty, but it only left me feeling more alone and isolated than ever.

So I did the only thing I could think to do. I reached out to my neighborhood friends. I tried using the phone, but we had to be chaperoned by a camp counselor and were limited to five minutes a call. So I wrote to them. They would understand what I was going through. I bought a few postcards and wrote to them in the closest thing to the most familiar language I could think of. I put the addresses on 'em and dropped them in the mailbox. There was no way they'd be able to return a letter to me at camp before I left, but it didn't matter. Writing those postcards made me feel better than I had in all the days of camp so far.

The next day at lunch there was an announcement. The head counselor was a tall, goofy looking guy with dark brown hair in a pseudo bowl cut. He stood on the stage at the front and prepped his microphone. It reverbed. He giggled. Someone had attempted to mail a few postcards to Detroit without postage. I already knew. My face burned. I stopped eating. And I sat there hoping I could play cool long enough for him to finish and for me to find a way to sneak out of there.

*laughing* "The letters were sent to...'Yo, whuzzz'!"
*cafeteria laughing*
*LAUGHING* "Hey bro!!"
*CAFETERIA LAUGHING*...

I bolted. There was a third. If I could have just sat through the third and played cool I might, through some miracle, have found a way to make people think it hadn't been me. But I couldn't take it. I hated him. I hated them. I hated everyone. And I had to get out of there before I let that hate get ugly.

I sat on my bunk for forty-five minutes. There were sports tournaments and activities going on after lunch so I had time to be alone and think. I hated because I felt I was being singled out as different and mocked for it. But I didn't think anyone was trying to hurt me. And that hurt more. You can see it coming from the ones that want to harm you, but can never prepare for the ones who do it by mistake.

My counselor, thankfully, got the postcards for me. I couldn't see them the same though. What had once been the albatross of my salvation was now the instrument of my humiliation. I snatched them from him mid-sentence and began ripping them apart into the smallest portions imaginable. The trash was no good since I thought someone might see them again so I made sure that the pieces were small enough so as not to interrupt the septic system. We'd been warned never to put anything foreign into those toilets, but my counselor did nothing to stop me as I tore them up and flushed them. And flushed again. And flushed again.

I never went back to camp Barakel. They even extended me the chance to become a counselor a couple years later but I turned that down too. Nothin' personal. Just wasn't for me anymore.