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us. A lot of guys quit or had been dismissed from the line by the older Feathermen for being slack. Th e idea was that if you could cross “the burning sands” of the pledge process and become a Featherman, then you could meet any challenge that life held for you as a young Negro man, and you could succeed. Most Feathermen went on to college and became successful in professions ranging from teaching and medicine to law enforcement.
    But a lot of us pledged because the Feathermen were so damn cool. All the cute girls in camp wanted to date Feathermen. Plus the Feathermen could order the pledgees to grab their food trays, do their cabin chores, and sing off-key circus songs to make their girlfriends laugh. How cool was that?
    For me and a lot of other teenage boys, the Feather represented a path to manhood. In fact, the Order of the Feather founders created the program in 1946 as a way to challenge the gang epidemic in Harlem. Th eir alternative was simply this: you could go through a one-night gang initiation, receive your gang jacket, and go through life ducking and dodging the cops and rival gang members, or you could go through a rigorous but positive six-month initiation and proudly wear your Featherman sweater at school, church, or any place in the community. While the Feather program didn’t eradicate the gangs, a number of boys left or avoided gangs to become Feathermen.
    Two older Feathermen who lived in my neighborhood, James, nineteen, and Eric, eighteen, gave me hell while I was pledging. I had to go to their house to do their chores and pick up their food trays in the high school lunchroom. Th ey also made me run up to girls around school, then bend on one knee and recite corny sonnets. Th e girls giggled as I earnestly recited the lines the big brothers had instructed me to deliver in my best Shakespearean style, all of it romantic and silly and very, very innocent.
    When the school bus full of pledgees and Feathermen arrived in the rolling hills of Camp Minisink, things got worse. As a junior counselor I worked all day but would often be pulled from an exhausted sleep at night for push-ups and work details given by James, Eric, and other Feathermen. In a final rite-of-passage ceremony called Tap Out, we pledgees stood bare-chested around a large bonfire and received an initiation tap in the chest by Feathermen dressed in Native American and African costumes. Th e next night we received our Feather sweaters at a banquet in the camp dining hall. James and Eric were among the first two Feathermen to embrace me and welcome me into the organization.
    “You guys gave me hell,” I said, confused by the sudden warmth they showed me.
    “ Th at’s because we like you,” James replied. “If you like a dude, you always pledge him harder. Plus you made us laugh.”
    From that night on I hung out with James and Eric. When they weren’t on duty as counselors, they swapped their camp T-shirts for African dashikis and hung out in their cabin featuring Black Power posters, incense, a stereo that played Miles Davis and Malcolm X records, and a red lightbulb that gave their cabin the feel of being a black militant speakeasy in the woods.
    Because of James and Eric, I got into the fashion side of black militancy first. I grew a big Afro and dressed in bell-bottoms and dashikis. My skinny fifteen-year-old butt looked like a five-foot-eleven black Q-tip. At the end of the summer, H. Rap Brown came to speak at a youth conference at Camp Minisink. Th e younger campers had all gone home and the cabins were now filled with high school and college students who were up for the weekend attending youth leadership workshops. H. Rap Brown was the conference keynote speaker. He was often in the news as a militant leader who dismissed integration and stood for black nationalism.
    I was blown away by his whole style: the ’fro; the shades; the finger that jabbed the air like a Zulu spear when he spoke, slicing up white America. Wow, man,