August 1968

I am sitting in a storefront Mennonite church on Seventh Avenue in central Harlem, playing Blockhead with six-year-old Charles. The red, blue and yellow wooden blocks feel misshapen in my hand, as I clumsily try to balance a flat rectangle on the round side of a cylinder. I carefully remove my hand and slowly the whole construction slides into a heap of rubble.

Charles laughs delightedly. Then he looks over at Bebop, my teenaged co-worker, who is fumbling with his shirt pocket. Charles' eyes widen, and he says in a stage whisper, "Ooh, Bebop got reefers!" Bebop gives him a disgusted look, and motions vigorously for him to shut up. Miss Lucy, the day camp director, is in the kitchen at the back of the church, and we don't want her to notice.

Bebop, Michael and I have spent our lunch hour smoking pot around the corner at Michael's mother's apartment on 147th Street. We are counselors at the Seventh Avenue Mennonite summer day camp; I'm here for the summer, a precocious sixteen year old freshman at the Mennonite college in Goshen, Indiana, in New York for an urban sociology seminar which requires a stint of volunteer work in the "inner city".

Michael and Bebop have taken me under their wing, informing me that if I stick with them I'm gonna be so cool I'll be wearing alligator shoes. Since they've discovered my predilection for smoking marijuana, we spend a lot of time smoking together -- in the park, in Michael's family's apartment when his mother's not home, even on the stoop in front of the church after dark, when the kids are hanging on the street, listening to the radio:

"I'm a girl watcher
I'm a girl watcher
Watching girls go by
My, my, my"

Miss Lucy was formerly a teacher at the Wiltwyck School for Boys, one of whose most distinguished alumni was Claude Brown, and she has loaned me her autographed copy of Manchild in the Promised Land to help me learn about Harlem. I've paged through it, but even though I am a voracious reader I'm having trouble getting through the required readings for my seminar -- Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot and The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills. Not to mention Alan Watts' Beyond Theology, which I've just discovered and am reading for my spiritual edification. There is so much to explore and experience in this pulsating city that it's getting harder and harder to find time for reading.

It is July of 1968 and I'm spending the summer living with a Mennonite minister and his wife and three-year-old daughter on the seventh floor of Esplanade Gardens on 146th St. , just down the street from the church. Richard, or Dickie, as his parishioners call him, and Ethel make an odd couple, he with his luxuriant Afro and she in a white lace prayer covering. Apart from me and Larry Miller, my roommate, Ethel is the only white person in the building. Ethel is from a conservative rural Mennonite church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her brother was one of the founders of this little mission church in Harlem, started in 1950 when the country Mennonites were beginnning to have a "burden for the city. "

Harlem is still recovering from the riots of the spring which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. , and when I walk down Seventh Avenue I can still smell the smoke and ashes as I pass a burned out storefront. When I come home from a day at work there are flecks of ashes on the sleeves of my light blue shirt, although Dickie tells me that's just plain old New York pollution, not fallout from the riots.

contined at August 1968

1968-69