“There was one month in one summer what I felt me any good at all, there was a girl. You remember the camps up the road. All them Jewish people from down in the city would come up here for the summer? Most was up in the Catskills. A couple was here. The nicer ones was in the Catskills, the poorer families come to this ridge. The cult called them the ‘Jew camps,’ and told us all to stay away. One day, I’d run off from my mother’s house and the church and the beatin’s, and I was hopin’ to run away for good. I was walkin’ up by them summer camps and I come across a girl. She was the prettiest girl I ever saw. We was kids, twelve or thirteen, I guess. She had red hair, kind of red-brown. I said to her I never seen a Jew girl with red hair and she got sad. We sat on a big, flat rock by a little dribble of a stream runnin’ down the hill. It had them ferns growin’ out by the little puddle of water the stream made and it smelled like moss. She smelled sweeter than the moss or the ferns. We sat there on the rock, and we talked, and she said her grandma wasn’t no Jewish at all and she was seen as a kind of outcast, and I said I was too. We sat on that rock the entire afternoon and we talked about bein’ outcasts, and I told her about the church basement and the beatin’s and the ass fucking sons a bitches in that place and we got to be real good friends. James, we even snuck off into the woods a few times, if you know what I’m sayin’.
“That was the best summer of my life. Then one day we was supposed to meet on our rock, and she wasn’t there. The next week she was, and I could tell she’d been told not to see me no more and we both sat there and cried. Her daddy, some big shot in the camp, heard she’d been talkin’ to me, and I guess they wasn’t even supposed to touch us that wasn’t Jews, so fuckin’ was some big crime. I never told nobody about her, not even you, and you was my best friend. I told her I was goin’ to go and torch the whole camp, but she asked me to not do it and she said she loved me, and she got up from our flat rock and walked away. Bein’ with that girl was the best time of my life. The other time my life was ruined and wrecked by somebody’s religion.
—- Mose Tester, The Berry Pickers
