Sixteen

The triple-digit temperatures we endured last week reminded me of the time, long ago, when I spent a summer in the Deep South, where the thermometer that year often climbed over 100 and once reached 117. I was sixteen, a participant in an American Friends' Service Committee summer work camp for young people.

The ten of us, all teenagers, were assigned to work in an historically black college in Georgia. We lived in a dormitory there, our job to repair and paint those college rooms that were most in need of attention. In deference to the southern mores of the day, all of us were white, and the AFSC had taken pains to clear our project with local officials well in advance.

A few days after we arrived, an annual summer fair came to the campus. If I had possessed the sense of a mayfly, I would have kept away from it, for it was intended only for Negroes, as they were then called. But the fair's enormous Ferris wheel exerted an almost hypnotic attraction for me. Wouldn't it be fun to ride on it! I persuaded the prettiest girl in our group to go with me, and we patiently stood in line to buy tickets. We entered a gondola and soon ascended high above the campus, the only white faces in a sea of black.

That night the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the college lawn. We never knew for sure what spooked the KKK - whether it was the sight of a white girl on a Ferris wheel patronized by blacks or the fact that white people were living in a black dormitory or both - but it was clear we could not remain in the college much longer. One of the many thoughtless things for which my parents forgave me over the years was the telegram I sent them the next day: "stay close to phone."

We spent the rest of the summer at an orphanage in South Carolina, where we worked at various agricultural tasks, none of which I remember. I ate okra and grits for the first time, discovered that frozen, peeled peaches are delicious, and began to smoke. I was introduced to segregation, which I casually accepted as simply the way things were, like the wisteria-framed porches and the accents of the locals.

Today I blush when I recall my behavior that summer. But youth is almost a synonym for foolishness, ignorance, and inexperience. With luck, these conditions lessen with age, along with emotional turmoil, confusion, and acne, and we become, if not wise, at least wiser. Alas, in the words of the proverb. we become too soon old and too late smart.