Escape

It was the same day that they showed us part of the television miniseries Roots in the media center during 6th grade social studies. I’d never seen it. Of course, I had learned about slavery in America a few grades before, but I hadn’t seen many images of it yet, and none of them had been moving pictures. I still didn’t know a lot of bad stuff about the world and had managed to stay pretty young for my age.

I think we’re probably lucky if we can move from innocence to the adult world one stroke at a time, through that weird underwater place of adolescence, instead of too quickly. But even then you know you’re changing; you just don’t want to look closely at it or name it, just want to hold your breath and wait for it to pass like everything else so that when it does, you’ll be safely on the other side and eventually will be able to talk about “the way it used to be when you were little,” but not until you’re through it.

I’d never seen a man whipped by another man even if they were just actors on TV. I felt sick. The world was terrible. What else didn’t I know? Why were people still walking down the halls and smiling? The boys were laughing rudely and shoving to get to lunch. The girls were making plans to sit next to someone, to leave someone else out.

My middle school was made of blue-green stone. It looked like it had been carved into its existence right where it stood. A team of men chipped it out and smoothed it out and filled it with desks and lockers and hung up the pencil sharpeners. Blue-green stone paved the wide first floor halls. Blue-green stone led up the wide steps to the second floor and down past the low-ceilinged mat room for the wrestlers and past the close, hot boiler room for the janitors to the Dorito-feet-warm-cheese-hotdog smell of the cafeteria. But I’d be skipping that room on that day.

I made some excuse to my best friend, Krissy, and managed to be in the main floor girls’ bathroom just as the bell rang before the sixth grade lunch period. It was easy. And there I was. The eighth graders were all tucked into their classrooms on either side of the bathroom walls. No one was in the hall. My sixth grade classmates were all below the blue-green stone under my feet eating their lunches, but I wasn’t with them.

Already, I was feeling a little relief. But the real escape came only when I pulled out of my brown paper lunch bag Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I slid my back down the blue-green wall to the floor and was in another place. Even if just for 18 stolen minutes, I had left the world of homework, jeering boys, and changing tides of friendship. I had left the world where men claim to own other men and beat each other with whips.