“Not yet. I’ve been in Crip school, but at the end of this past school year, my teacher told my mother she can’t teach me anymore, so I’m out. The public schools don’t take Crips, so I’m going to a private school. An all-white private school, no less. You know, our crippled school has been integrated for years, maybe always. I figure they don’t care enough about us to bother about segregating us. Or maybe they figure we’re our very own race, like the Chosen People, except no god has ever promised us anything that I know of.

“I don’t like the idea of a Segregation Academy, and neither do my folks. But what can I do? This private school is taking me because my mother has a friend on the faculty. I guess I should be grateful. Maybe I’ll like it. I don’t know. They have serious teachers and a library and even a language lab. But Crip school is great because we’re all crippled—it’s truly bizarre—and there’s only one Republican in the class!”

My parents voted for Nixon in the last election and for Goldwater before that. But that’s none of her business.

“Maybe you can give me some lessons on how to be a Crip in Norm school. I’ll have to start figuring that out, I guess.”

“I don’t think of my-self as crip-pled. I’m like eve-ry-one else.”

“Aw, come on. You’re a Crip. Otherwise you wouldn’t be in Crip Camp. Say it loud, ‘I’m crippled and proud!’”

I can’t argue. The James Brown imitation, so unexpected, sets me off again.

I’m still choking when the counselors come back. “Oh, good, someone made your name tags,” Sue says. She picks up the knife and mutters, “Oh dear, did I leave this here?” Sara gives me a conspiratorial look. No one has to take responsibility.

Sue puts the knife back, then bends down behind me and slaps off my brakes. The other counselor, Carole, takes Sara, and side-by-side we ride past the flagpole, into the pine woods.

The camp looks like a normal camp, or what I imagine a normal camp might look like, except maybe a normal camp wouldn’t have blacktop on the narrow paths that wind through the woods. The asphalt makes the ride nice and smooth. It’s so quiet I think I can hear our axles ringing, two faint notes in odd harmony with each other and with the song of a distant bird. The bird goes quiet and stillness surrounds us. We roll forward. Our damp skin breaks through the wall of air that was undisturbed until we came.

*   *   *

Midway down, a chunk of the hill has been lopped off to make space for four cabins. We veer toward one that hangs suspended on piers over the hill’s downward slope.