by Gina Perry
‘— five dollars to Mr Ness.’
‘Did you see after he gave it to us he walked away real quick?’ I imagine this might have been Harold, who paid such close attention to the men.
‘He didn’t say grace today. He always says grace.’
‘He’s mad at us?’
‘He split us up, didn’t he?’ a boy said impatiently.
‘But what did we do?’
There was a short silence.
‘We did something,’ another boy said glumly.
Their conversation was cut short by the clanging of the dinner bell.
While Carper’s group had come to no decision, Jack White’s group had decided after some discussion to buy something that could stay on at the camp after they’d gone. They opted for two flags — an American flag and a camp flag with an emblem on it. But what emblem? An eagle? A wolf? Under the sway of the ghost stories they’d been telling the night before, one boy suggested a picture of a wolf eating a gallbladder, but the others dismissed the idea. Perhaps under the influence of their jungle comic books, they finally decided that the second flag should decorated with the image of a black panther.
Once the table had been cleared, Carper announced that the caretaker was compiling a list of supplies for his morning trip into town: what did they want him to buy with their prize money? The boys exchanged glances and then John piped up that they’d decided on a Coleman lamp. Were they sure? Carper asked, glancing from boy to boy around the table, remembering the arguing that had gone on just an hour before. Was it a unanimous decision, Carper wanted to know. John turned to the rest of the group and asked for a show of hands. Sherif, hiding in the kitchen, would likely have watched impatiently, irritated by Carper’s questions. It was enough that the boys had fallen in with John’s suggestion. It showed a hierarchy had developed, with John as a leader whose plans the others followed. Still, Carper looked doubtfully at the group of boys, worrying that the quieter ones had been railroaded. Sherif hurried into the mess hall, in my imagination pulling out a small notebook and the stub of a pencil from his pocket, like an actor hurrying onto a stage. He licked the stub and flipped the notebook open, and in his heavy accent announced theatrically, ‘One Coleman lamp, coming up.’
Sunday morning was overcast, the air thick and muggy. The boys in Jack White’s group had rushed to the mess hall at breakfast time, expecting to see the others. But when they got there, the cook was wiping the second table with a wet rag and it was clear the other group had been and gone. The room would have felt empty and quiet with just the twelve of them there. It was beginning to dawn on these boys, like Doug and Peter and Irving, that they were not just in separate tents but were being kept apart. Peter, who had relished the archery games with his friend Laurence, was feeling resentful, and he called out sarcastically to the cook in the kitchen, ‘Hey Sandy, why don’t we eat together? Not allowed to see our friends, eh?’ But Sandy just shook his head at the boys, saying nothing.
After breakfast, while the others returned to their tent, Peter, Irving, and a boy called Nathan ran quickly in the other direction, towards their friends’ tent, hiding behind bushes and trees, keeping out of sight of the camp counsellors. But Jack White spotted them as they burst from some bushes and ran low across the stream, and he ran after them. In the last 100 yards, they called to their friends, ‘Laurence! Eric! Hey!’ The tent flap burst open and a group of boys spilled out, whooping hellos, but Jack White had caught up to the three runaways, blocking their path and saying that Mr Ness had insisted they return to the mess hall. He herded the reluctant boys away. For Irving, it had been a daring prank, and he was excited and cheered by the adventure. But Peter walked sullenly ahead of Jack White, saying nothing, while Nathan kicked at the dirt, raising dust.
Sunday church services, along with early morning reveille, were part of summer-camp tradition. But a visiting minister might ask questions or cause problems, so Sussman volunteered to fulfil these duties, eager to take a more active role in the study rather than being caught up in the daily chores of arranging food, supplies, and maintenance. He’d volunteered his services for this experiment because he felt under-appreciated at Union College, where at his first faculty meeting after his appointment as assistant professor in 1951, he was puzzled when the president introduced him not by his new job title but as coming from a long line of watchmakers with skills in restoration and repair. To his dismay, he discovered that five of the faculty — including the dean — were avid collectors of antique clocks. He spent most nights working late at his workbench, making repairs and trying to ignore his growing humiliation and the conviction that it was these vocational skills rather than his academic qualifications that had gotten him the job. Now here he was in a similar situation. Instead of being treated as an equal in the research project, he was stuck doing the menial work.
That afternoon, Sunday 26 July, each group cleared a separate space in the woods and fashioned an altar. Sussman took charge of the proceedings, and held two different services, complete with hymns and a homily on the importance of ‘clean minds’. The choice of topic was no coincidence. Both White and Carper had reported uncharacteristic swearing and dirty talk in both their groups. If Sussman preached against cursing and the boys continued to do it, it would demonstrate the strength and power of their ‘emerging group norms’.
Sussman’s sermon clearly touched a nerve because after the service someone from White’s group, Brian Kendall, a tall boy whose smile revealed a large gap between his two front teeth, came to see Jack White, looking troubled. Biting his lip, he confided to Jack that the night before, some of the boys had formed a swearing club, with an initiation ceremony. He told Jack that he didn’t believe in swearing and he didn’t like it, clearly expecting Jack White to intervene and put a stop to it.
‘That would have been me all right,’ Brian laughed on the phone. ‘I remember that in our group there were a few boys who just kept pushing the boundaries. Kids will do that,’ he said.
Brian’s conversation was peppered with these easy, authoritative statements about children. He had spent his working life as a junior-high teacher. When I spoke to him, he was retired. At the time of his conversation with Jack White, he didn’t yet know the camp was an experiment. But White’s response should have tipped him off. ‘He didn’t react the way you’d expect,’ Brian said. ‘You’ve got to remember even “damn” and “shit” were shocking words back then, and we never, ever used the f-word. This kind of language really was taboo. It wasn’t just vulgar — we were taught it was sinful.’
Brian’s memories of the camp were sketchy. He remembered little about the other boys, but he did remember feeling guilty about telling Jack White about the swearing club. But if he was worried about getting others into trouble, he needn’t have been. White had no intention of putting a stop to it. He was more interested in finding out from Brian exactly what was involved in the initiation ceremony — ‘saying a sentence of 6 words, of which 5 were profane’ — so he could describe this exciting development, proof that the group was developing its own rules, to Sherif.
But given how taboo Brian said swearing was, I was curious about just how it had started. How did it happen that boys who had refused to sing the word ‘hell’ on the first night of the camp because it was curse word had ended up just a few days later forming a swearing club? Perhaps Brian was right, that some boys were seeing how far the men would allow them to go. And they read the lack of censure as a form of approval.
Yet there’s a clue in the notes that the some of the men were actively encouraging it. OJ Harvey seemed to have a fluid role in the camp — disguised as assistant camp manager, he had free rein to drop in on either group on any number of pretexts, from asking what items boys wanted in stock in the camp store to collecting their mail. Harvey had been ‘initiated’ into the swearing club, earning membership by demonstrating his skill with foul language. No wonder Brian was bothere
d and approached Jack White after the Sunday service. But White’s response didn’t make him feel any better. ‘I was left with a kind of dirty feeling,’ Brian said on the phone. ‘Looking back, I guess I thought I was doing the right thing, but it didn’t feel like it. I probably sensed then that we couldn’t rely on those guys.’
In the background, classical musical swelled from a radio. There was a long pause.
Brian cleared his throat. ‘You know, I’m a volunteer at a community garden. A lot of city people, you know, don’t know much about gardening, and that’s part of what I do, I show them how. When I was growing up, my mother raised chickens and grew vegetables, but she could never get me interested, you know. I always had my head in a book. But I remember when I got home from that camp, the first thing I wanted to do was go out with my mother and feed the chickens and look for eggs.’ Brian laughed suddenly, like a trumpet blast. ‘I wonder what my mother made of that!’
At the time I was thrown by this seemingly abrupt change of subject. But later it occurred to me that Brian was connecting his interest in self-sufficiency to something that happened on the camp. Perhaps White’s failure to intervene and put a stop to the swearing had taught Brian a powerful lesson: don’t turn to others to look after you; you have to learn to do it yourself.
By Monday morning, the effort of keeping the two groups apart was proving too difficult to sustain. Sherif decided that getting more physical distance between the groups was a priority. He scheduled a three-night camping trip for each group, starting on different days and travelling in opposite directions.
The first group to leave was Carper’s, on Tuesday morning, and from his description of the boys it’s clear they were relieved to be getting away. They hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that Harry Ness was punishing them by keeping them from their friends. Ness was staying behind at the camp, so this trip meant they could forget about him for a while. They packed their new Coleman lamp carefully, then hoisted rucksacks and tents into the back of the truck and pulled over the tarpaulin, chattering excitedly as the truck bumped away from camp in the direction of Lake George. By the time they arrived, their worries about Ness and sense of guilt and unease from the night before seemed to have dissipated. They tumbled out of the truck and walked the last two miles to a campsite on a long finger of land that jutted out into the lake. In contrast to the deep green Camp Talualac, enclosed by woods, here their campsite overlooked the vista of the blue lake dotted with islands. The breeze off the lake was warm, but still a change from the muggy closeness of the camp in the woods.
After lunch, the boys took the small track down to the end of the point and round to a sandy bay, where they played in the water and John showed the others how to build a dam to trap fish, then supervised its construction. Mickey threw himself into the task, and even Harold, who had a habit of wandering off on his own, joined in, collecting rocks and building an elaborate wall to stop the rushing water and make a pond. Laurence seemed to have cheered up and taught the others to make farting noises with their wet armpits. I pictured Carper sitting on the beach, leaning casually back on his elbows, chewing a blade of grass, as if enjoying the view of the thickly wooded mountains rising on the other side of the lake. Through half-closed eyes, he watched the activities of different boys, and memorised snippets of conversation, as well as committing to memory who was giving instructions and who was carrying them out. Carper’s notes described not a single group of children but pairs, trios, and loners. Even so, they seemed to be content. I suspect that Jim Carper was feeling more relaxed too, free of the scrutiny of the intense and uptight duo of Sussman and Sherif. Reading Carper’s notes from this trip, it was the first time I began to wonder how the mood of the men may have affected the children and whether the push–pull of the men’s emotions could be mirrored in the boys’ interactions with one another.
While Carper watched the boys, I imagine he had time to think about the distance between the rules they’d agreed to and the reality. Sherif was eager for him to speed things up a bit, feeling that unanimous group votes on activities was slowing things down. But Carper’s notes hint he was uncomfortable with the idea. It was true that the research predicted a hierarchy would develop, but the idea that one or two boys be allowed to hold all the power and wield it over the rest didn’t sit right with Carper, and he stuck with his practice of encouraging group decisions. That night in his notes, he demonstrated his resolve to stick as scrupulously as he could to Kelman’s instructions. He described how neither he nor Rupe, the junior counsellor, took a leadership role or made an attempt to influence the boys that day. They didn’t help the boys in preparing and cooking their food or in pitching their tent, even though the boys were tired from the afternoon of swimming and struggled to put up the large canvas tent on their own. Harold yelled at Carper, ‘We need somebody’s advice.’ Carper wrote, ‘This was directed to the counsellors, who said not a word.’ But the impracticality of non-intervention was obvious to him too. He confessed in his notes that he had to ‘goad’ the boys into getting supper ready and set rules about when they went swimming.
While Carper was trying to maintain an arm’s length, back at base camp it seemed Sherif had abandoned this idea altogether. Straying from the research team’s agreement to shadow the boys in secret, Sherif had begun working enthusiastically alongside them on a series of chores around the campsite. Instead of standing back to watch how the boys made decisions and letting the group form naturally, Sherif seemed intent on moving things along. On Monday, they had to build a latrine, erect a hut, and dig out and remove a large boulder from the hut’s floor — all of which required the combined physical strength of the whole group and sometimes the assistance of Sherif-as-caretaker and Jack White as well. But the men only pretended to help, secretly pulling instead of pushing to make the boys work together all the more, and forcing one of them to take charge and give directions. I thought of Doug, a self-confessed puny kid, lifting and hauling rocks, and Brian the homebody, who loved reading, and how this labour sounded more like something to be expected of men in military training than eleven-year-old boys.
But as far as Sherif was concerned, whether they were a collection of children or an assemblage of men didn’t matter: groups as large as ‘ethnic groups or nations’ or as small as ‘a fraternity or sorority or a well-knit club’ shared the same properties. What Sherif apparently couldn’t see, or wouldn’t acknowledge, was the particularities of this group of boys that undermined this larger narrative and limited any generalisations he might like to make. They were children in an alien environment, surrounded by adults whose behaviour puzzled and sometimes troubled them, and they were far from home.
On Tuesday morning, just before they left for their camping trip, Sherif-as-caretaker came back from town with the flags the boys had ordered. They gathered around excitedly to unpack them. First they unveiled the American flag and were overawed at its large size. Before they could undo the other parcels, Jack White told them the story that Sherif had concocted that morning. Unfortunately when Sherif got to the store, he discovered the order for a Panther flag would not be ready before the end of camp, so instead Sherif had bought a plain flag that Jack could help the boys decorate. The good news was that the store had offered them a ‘special purchase’ — for fifty cents, each boy could have a t-shirt and a matching cap. But it was an ‘all or nothing’ deal — every boy had to buy them or the deal was off. I was surprised when I read this. Presumably Sherif had dreamt up this excuse so that he could demonstrate that the boys had created their own ‘group products’, but it was direct manipulation of the situation to a level I had not encountered in the notes before this point. It made me wonder if spending the treasure-hunt money on the flags had been entirely the boys’ idea after all, or if Sherif or Sussman had played a role in planting that notion as well.
A few boys made a start on decorating the plain flag, with camp manager Mr Sussman helpfully providing a picture
of a panther’s head to use. But drawing on the fabric was difficult, so Jack White did most of the work. While the boys played a game of dodgeball, White stencilled the panther head onto the flag. Was it a spontaneous decision by the boys to have the word ‘Panthers’ stencilled on their t-shirts too? White’s notes certainly make it appear that way. Once one boy had it done, the others clamoured for the same design.
By mid-morning, when Jack White left with the boys for their camping trip to a spot near Sacandaga Reservoir, all of them, including Jack White and Ken Pirro, the junior counsellor, were wearing their uniform of Panther t-shirts and caps. They carried with them their new Panther flag. But was it deliberate or a mistake that White had left a critical detail the boys had requested — olive branches, symbolising peace — off the design? The flag flapped in the hot breeze as they hiked; the panther’s mouth snarled, its sharp black teeth silhouetted against the white background.
They might have had a group name and a flag, but at times there was little sense of camaraderie. White’s Panthers were a divided bunch. On one side were boys like Peter and Brian, and I’m guessing Doug too, who had protested about the swearing club. On the other side were boys like Nathan and Joe, who instituted ‘depantsing’, where they pulled the trousers off boys and threw them up into a tree as punishment for slowing them down or failing to do their share of chores. Jack White excitedly described this ‘corrective’ as a sign that the group was policing itself. Correctives were ‘examples of censure or punishment of boys either by other individual boys or by a whole group. Examples included being ignored, ridiculed, chided mildly, berated, physically punished.’ White, like Sherif, read the instigation of punishment as a healthy sign of the development of the group’s shared rules, ignoring the fact that some of the boys objected to it, and missing an alternative explanation — it was the behaviour of unhappy children.