The Escape

Chapter One

This story actually is an extended version of a slave narrative that I had to write last year for my eighth grade social studies class. I thought it turned out really well, so I decided to make it into a story with more depth. It is set during the time where there were still slaves in the southern states of America, but not in the north. If you see anything that might offend you race-wise, it's completely not intended, it's just how people felt and treated each other during that time in history. By the way, I have NEVER read Huckleberry Finn, but I heard about it and its general plot sounds sort of like mine. So if you're a major Huckleberry Finn fan, I assure you that I don't even know what it's about, I was just told to write a slave narrative in class.

“ALEX JAY!” My teacher called from the other side of the small one room school house. I glanced over from my spot at the door, willing my feet not to just bolt out. I knew what was in store for me, and I dreaded the beating I would get when I brought that note home to my dad. His face was a puke green color, the way it always was when he was mad, so it wasn’t that weird anymore. “You are on the brink of expulsion because of your endless fights and trouble-making. On top of that, you haven’t turned in three assignments and it’s only the fourth day of school!”

Ok. Now don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t the one who picks fights with those jerks, they came to me… and that’s exactly what I told my teacher, which only made his face turn an even sicker green. He spat at me, I mean LITERALLY spat at me.

“I’m 4’10”. Do you honestly expect ME to get into a battle with that giant freak?” I half yelled. I admit, I’m a little on the short side, considering I wasn’t some ten year old, but actually a seventeen year old. To make matters worse, I’m picked on by basically every male in this whole entire freakin’ town. Even being a white person, I had midnight black hair that went with my black eyes, but didn’t match my pale skin. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that they disliked me for no reason beside my different features.

To that comment, I just got a very long lecture and a dreadful letter. On my way home, I made a mental note to run as fast as I could, because running is my specialty, if I got made fun of again. We, as in me and my dad, lived in a small town right above Charleston in South Carolina. My house, or cottage, was actually outside the town near a lake. My dad ran a fishing business and I was meant to inherit it, but I was already helping out anyway.

There was a plantation right next to my cottage. I went around to the back where the chicken coops were and grinned at the tall African American slave boy clumsily tending to the chickens. There sat my best friend in the whole entire world, Jeremiah King. He’s been on this plantation with his mother ever since he was born, and even though it wasn’t allowed, I taught him everything I learned from school. His matted, cropped, black curly hair had beads of sweat dripping from them as he lifted his head to smirk at me.

Hey Alex,” he said. “You’re awfully late today. Get into another scramble?”

“It’s not my fault.” I exclaimed.

He chuckled. “It never is.” By now he had stood up to talk to me.

I leaned over the fence that reached my shoulders, getting a little ticked off that it only reached a little above Jeremiah’s waist, and looked past his big body, to see the plantation owner walking over to him. Quickly and swiftly, I hid behind a nearby tree. His owner was upset, and he was yelling at Jeremiah for no reason at all again. I looked over, just terrified by the sight that I should have been used to, seeing as I had witnessed it nearly a million times: Jeremiah getting flogged by that horrid man. I winced every time the whip came down. When it was over, his owner left without an ounce of sympathy, leaving my friend only a small handkerchief. I ran over to him and used my shirt to clean off as much of the blood as I could before he roughly shoved me away.

“You should leave.” Jeremiah said coldly.

“But—“I began, only to be cut off by him.

“GO!” He yelled. I was shocked by his harsh tone and slunk away, running as fast as I possibly could to my small home.

To my relief, my dad wasn’t there. As I was walking into the kitchen, which is really just a counter top in our two room cottage, I noticed a newspaper article on the table. It talked about how there are more and more runaway slaves and how the people of the North were actually protecting them. A small idea, that even scared me, formed in my mind. I started to remember that even though we weren’t abolitionists, we would get a lot of papers from strangers talking about something called the Underground Railroad. My dad never paid any attention to them and just stuffed them in a drawer. I, on the other hand, actually read a little into it till my dad got pissed off.

I went to the small drawer in the furthest corner of the room and took out the bundle of papers hidden inside. After about an hour of researching them, I had the perfect plan in mind. And that plan was to get Jeremiah out of that nightmare of a place. It would take a lot of planning, so I decided that I would be at the library and downtown looking into the Underground Railroad for the next couple of days. I heard my dad’s heavy footsteps coming, so I stashed the papers under my cot.

He came in, looking as though someone had just punched him and ran away: Angry. “Is there anything you would like to tell me?”

It was then that I remembered about the teachers note. I decided to play it safe. After all, he seemed already mad enough. “Um... no…”

Apparently, he didn’t like that answer. Swiftly, he kicked me square in my chest, making me fall backwards. “Really? Because I ran into your teacher at the market today. He mentioned something about a note and how you were misbehaving during class.” He got more upset by the minute, the little vein on his forehead pulsing rapidly.

“Oh… I forgot.” I stated bluntly. “Sorry.”

He didn’t take that as reasonable answer, and opted for kicking me again, this time in my head. “Well, maybe next time, you should remember more, and stop lying.”

All I could remember after that was an array of blows all over before my mind blanked and I was barely conscious.