Chapter Excerpts

“Tomorrow is Christmas,” my mother said, casting a purple stitch. A partial mitten appeared under her knitting needles. Long cracks spidered her hands from the cold temperatures and never-ending daily household chores. Each night, she moisturized with Vaseline—a petroleum jelly— but her hands remained dry and rough. I didn’t like it when she touched my arms or washed my face. Her hands scratched my sensitive skin.

Everyone sat around the living room stove after supper. Joseph slept in a baby basket next to my mother, his pacifier hanging from a string pinned to his homemade dress. In our particular Wisconsin community, little boys wore dresses like the girls until they started walking. Al stacked a pile of wood blocks on the floor. His blond hair, cut in the shape of an upside-down soup bowl, needed an- other trim; the curls were too long and got into his eyes. Rachel pretend-fed milk to her twin faceless Amish dolls dressed in matching dark blue clothes.

“What’s Christmas?” I asked. A picture book slid off my lap and fell on the floor.

. . .

“If you forsake the Amish, God will punish you and send you to hell,” the bishop said. He stood before around eight hundred people seated in a barn. Everyone was dressed in black.

Hard wooden benches with no backs lined the width of the barn and divided it down the middle. Men and boys, their black wide-brimmed hats removed, sat on one side and women and girls, wearing white or black caps with strings knotted below their chins, sat on the other. I was in the women’s section with my mother, my sister just younger than me—six-year-old Rachel—and two-year-old baby Joseph. My father and four-year-old brother Al sat across the aisle with the rest of the men.

Earlier that week, members of the two Amish Church districts in our Wisconsin community had gotten together to prepare for the funeral. They’d moved the bales of hay into a corner and swept the floor clean. But bits of straw floated around from the breeze coming through the open barn door. When the pieces landed, the men and boys leaned down to pick them up. They chewed on the stems—and spit them out—during the long, three- hour service.

A teenage boy lay in the open casket next to the bishop. During rumspringa—a period of time from age sixteen or seventeen until marriage—he’d bought a car and, after a night of drinking and partying, ended up killed in a crash. This shook the community up.

“He was a very bad boy,” my mother had told me when we got the news of the death. She looked grim. “He disobeyed his parents and now he’s going to hell.”

. . .

Around the age of thirteen, I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and learned about the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman became my first female role model. In our 300-plus years of history, no female has held a leadership position in the Amish.

Tubman was the first strong, fierce woman I found for guidance in challenging an institution of slavery. What she did for enslaved people inspired me to believe in myself and do whatever it took to set myself free, too. Tubman helped me to see that I could take ownership of myself. I didn’t have to continue obeying abusive masters. I wasn’t someone else’s property. I told myself that if I made it after my escape, I’d help the ones left behind, like Tubman did.

. . .

It’s important to note that there are many good women and men inside the Amish Church who want things to change for the better. An adult or child shouldn’t have to give up the only world they’ve ever known just for a chance at realizing a life of their dreams. The penalty for asking questions, learning, and self-actualization shouldn’t come at the cost of shunning, excommunication, and losing access to and support from your family, community, and heritage.

I want to keep the good parts of my culture and weed out the bad parts. Children deserve safety and love and a chance to make informed decisions about their future. I, as a fifteen-year-old, shouldn’t have had to escape under cover of darkness just to claim my rights to life, liberty, and property. And I shouldn’t have had to lose everything for that chance.