A good fight.

• Author: Jordan, June
• Position: Civil rights activist fights breast cancer - Column

I was nine years old at Robin Hood Camp for Girls. Two and a half hours north of Brooklyn, by bus, and mountains and woods and lakes suddenly came together as a real-world situation for me.

I was short for my age, and very young.

It never seemed odd to me that our camp boasted the name of a rather notorious male hero.

I never wondered about the absolute difference between my regular concrete street life in Bedford Stuyvesant and the idyllic circumstance of our summertime cabins and dirt trails and huge, hearty, community meals on the outside deck of the rec hall.

I don't remember puzzling over my experience of seasonal integration, which meant that ten months of the year I lived and played in an entirely black universe, and then for eight weeks I became a member of a minority of three or four black girls in a white vacationland of seventy-five to eighty other kids coming from neighborhoods and schools quite different from my own.

I was nine years old and free! I was far away from home, and I was hellbent on having a great time. We played softball and we learned archery and we went on wilderness hikes, overnight, and we burned our tongues on hot chocolate in tin cups and we rode horses, English saddle, and we swam and we made things for our parents in arts & crafts.

I was nine years old and some of the counselors gave me The Razor's Edge and Tender Is the Night to read after lights out and some of them tried to take away what they called "that filthy rabbit's foot" that my best friend, Jodi, gave me to wear for good luck.

And we sat around campfires and sang under the stars. But best of all, we played softball and I supposed that when I grew up I'd probably become a professional shortstop for some terrific softball team, and then, maybe, after lights out, I'd write my own Tender Is the Night, or Time Must Have a Stop, or Magic Mountain.

Those were my plans. But, in fact, the most exciting thing that happened was that Jodi and I became Blood Brothers. Of course, it never occurred to us that maybe we should become Blood Sisters: We were thinking of David and Jonathan when we each cut the inside of our wrists with a penknife and mingled blood to seal our pact of eternal friendship. Not satisfied with that, we formed an elite club, The Dare Devils, and we hammered overlapping capital D's into our silver bracelets that we now could hardly wait to finish in arts & crafts where, formerly, we laconically wove lanyards or beaded belts or painted...