Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee

Author:Andrea Lee [Lee, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83027-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Days of the

Thunderbirds

When the Thunderbirds arrived at Camp Grayfeather, Ellen, Chen-cheu, and I were waiting for them, lounging on the splintery steps of the recreation hall. Behind us a big fly with a weary August note to its buzz banged against the screen door. In front of us, under a level evening sun, the straw-colored Delaware countryside—pointedly referred to as “Wyeth Territory” in the camp catalogue—rolled off from our own wooded hillside toward the bluish haze that was Maryland. It was a Tuesday and just after dinner, the tranquil period in a camp day when the woods are filled with the soft clanging of bells announcing evening activities and the air still holds a whiff of tuna casserole. After dinner was supposed to be journal-writing time for the three dozen or so fourteen-year-olds who made up the rank and file at Grayfeather, but Chen-cheu, Ellen, and I had slipped out of our tent in order to witness the coming of the Thunderbirds. It was an event we were awaiting with the same kind of horrified delight as that with which biblical adolescents—as deep in glandular boredom as we ourselves were—must have greeted a plague of serpents. The Thunderbirds were a black teenage gang, one of many that battled in the close brick streets of Wilmington, and through some obscure adult arrangement they were coming to spend a week with us at camp.

“Do you think they’ll have knives, Sarah?” Chen-cheu asked me, rubbing an array of chigger bites on her ankle.

Chen-cheu was the camp beauty, a Chinese-American girl from Oberlin, Ohio, whose solid-cheeked, suntanned face had an almost frightening exotic loveliness above her muscular swimmer’s shoulders. She had, however, a calm, practical personality that belied her thrilling looks, and she talked with a flat midwestern accent, as if she’d been brought up in a soddy.

“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

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