Unlikely Camper

The summer after my mother died, I was sent to a camp I could hardly have imagined.

By Charles Lattimore Howard

After my mother passed away when I was little, my older sister, Ami, 12 years my senior, took me in. She, along with my other siblings, Chucky and Trinah, and my cousin Joe, are in many ways the heroes of my childhood. There was never a day that I didn’t know that I was loved. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t difficult days—in fact, most of the days were difficult—but love finds a way.

My sister was 23 years old when she became my guardian. She was working and taking classes, so there were many nights that I would come home to an empty apartment. After figuring out something for dinner, I would either meet up with friends or find a basketball hoop to pass the time and get my mind off of things. Hours can go by when a kid is just getting up shots, playing against imaginary opponents, pretending to be dribbling down the court with just 10 seconds on the clock and then taking the final shot . . . “for the win!”

Basketball helped keep me sane. It was a friend during lonely evenings. I had not at that point played organized basketball or had any formal coaching, but I still dreamed of one day either playing for John Thompson at Georgetown or Mike Krzyzewski at Duke.

At the beginning of that first summer after Mom had died, with the hope of keeping her little brother out of trouble during the months when I would not have school to keep me occupied, my sister found an overnight sports camp for me to attend.

When she first told me, I was intrigued. An all-boys camp where we play sports all day? And at each meal they serve kid food like chicken nuggets, pizza, or hamburgers? This sounded amazing. She then told me that the camp wasn’t in Baltimore where we lived, or even another city in Maryland. The camp was in Maine.

Leaving my sister felt like another loss to me, and this grief followed me to the camp, which was by far the farthest away from home I had ever been, and I arrived with tears in my eyes. It was not an easy start for a new kid who wanted to seem cool to his bunkmates. And yet it wasn’t just my crying that made me stand out on that first day. I quickly realized that I was the only person in the camp who was Black, including campers, counselors, cooks, and groundskeepers. My sister somehow forgot to mention the racial demographics of the camp. But that’s not all she forgot.

The first Friday evening rolled around, and we made our way to the rec hall, which was a multipurpose building that served as a cafeteria, theater, and auditorium for gatherings. When I walked in, several guys put on their heads what I described in a letter to my sister as “little caps.” They then began to sing songs in a different language, and it finally dawned on me that this wasn’t just a predominantly white camp. It was in fact a Jewish camp.

I was shocked, to say the least. My only previous exposure to the Jewish community had been mediated through my father. My father was a good man. A strong, groundbreaking African American attorney who was a great dad to me and my siblings. I don’t remember a lot of our conversations as it has now been many years since he passed away, but I do remember him from time to time talking about “those Jews.” He spoke with derision and with what I’d now call antisemitism.

He was responding to the discrimination and hate that he and others in the Black community felt from their Jewish neighbors, a sad, paralyzing circle of distrust that dissolved what was at times an important alliance in Baltimore and in American history.

I couldn’t help but hear his loud baritone echo from the past as I sat surrounded by my Jewish bunkmates. Would they discriminate against me too? I wondered. Would I dislike and hate them?

One afternoon during that first week, I was at the basketball court during a free play period finding solace in an activity and space that was familiar. Alone and holding back tears, I was putting up a lot of shots, but found that I was missing most of them. I was big and fast, which usually brought me success in sports, but my shooting form was off, and I had never received the guidance that proper coaching can bring. So, I stood alone on that blacktop court feeling bad about my inability to play ball well and feeling awkward about my inability to fit in.

The director of the camp was a man named Lee Horowitz. A tall, kind man who had coached basketball and lacrosse most of his life, he approached me, in the gracious grandfatherly way that he was known for, and asked if he could give me a “few tips” about how to shoot the ball.

Sometimes small adjustments can completely change the trajectory of the shots we take and the trajectory of our entire lives.

It wasn’t lost on me that Lee was not working with the standout players who had started a pickup game at another basket or doing whatever it was that camp directors did all day. Instead, he was with me, a homesick Christian Black kid with bad shooting form. A homesick Christian Black kid who ended up going back to that camp, summer after summer, for 10 years, eventually becoming the head basketball counselor.

Every Friday of those 10 years I would participate in the Friday night services, often helping to lead the congregation in singing the Shema and picking up just enough Hebrew to pass a language requirement years later in seminary.

My bunkmates and many others at that camp became family to me and we shared each other’s journeys. They shared with me what it was like to be one of a very few Jewish students in a school with friends trying to convert you, the difficulty of being in Christian-normative communities and enduring ongoing questions and jokes about what you can’t eat, and the sting of antisemitism. I provided them with a window into what it was like to be one of a very few Black kids in a school with people thinking you are less intelligent, are going to steal something, or only got in because of sports or affirmative action. We played ball together, got in trouble together, went to bar mitzvahs and birthday parties with one another. I even officiated the weddings of some of those guys. They were and remain family to me.

Those guys welcomed and loved “the foreigner living among them,” as Torah commands. They were brothers and allies across racial and religious differences and continue to be so amid time and distance. So much happened during the 10 minutes or so that Lee Horowitz spent with me on the court that night. He really did improve my shot. He also began the healing of a generational interracial/interfaith distrust that I had inherited. He also planted a seed that would grow into a lifelong love of mentoring and coaching basketball.

Charles (Chaz) Howard C’00 is the University Chaplain and Vice President for Social Equity & Community at Penn. Excerpt from Uncovering Your Path: Spiritual Reflections for Finding Your Purpose by Charles Lattimore Howard (Morehouse Publishing).