It was the spring of third grade; our class was taking an overnight trip to a camp called Nature’s Classroom, where we would spend three days learning about teamwork, ecology, and history in a remote corner of upstate New York. I had been sick about it since the moment I found out, two months before, and brought the permission slip home to my parents secretly hoping they would hand it back to me and say, No way! No daughter of ours is going to the woods for three days! FORGET ABOUT IT.
I didn’t have friends. Whether this was by choice or not was a question I seemed unable to answer, for myself or for my parents, who were obviously concerned. I was anxious simply leaving my family for the day and made a collect call to my mother every lunch period, my stomach tightening when I couldn’t reach her. The best news I ever could have received would have been that my parents had decided to homeschool me, to remove all pretense of socialization and just let me spend my days with them in their studios, where I belonged.
Really, I’d hated school since the day I got there. My father often repeats the story of my initial reaction to kindergarten: I came home from the first day and plopped down at my pint-sized desk.
“So, how’d it go?” my father asked.
“It was fun,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ll go back.”
He gently explained that wasn’t an option, that school is to children as work is to grown-ups: it’s what you do. And so I would have to go every day, rain or shine, with only occasional exceptions for illness, until I turned eighteen. “Then,” he said, “you can decide what to do next.” That was thirteen years away. I couldn’t imagine thirteen more minutes of this, much less thirteen years.
But there I was, having made it to third grade, headed upstate in a fifteen-passenger van while Amanda Dilauro showed me a sheaf of pictures of her cat Shadow. The first thing I did when we reached our bunk was drop my backpack on the vinyl mattress and vomit.
Over the next few days, we were led from activity to activity. We played tambourines, weighed our leftovers before adding them to the compost pile, pretended eggs were our precious babies and carried them around our necks in padded cups dangling from twine. And then, on the final day, it was time for the faux Underground Railroad.
This is the part that no one believes.
“No adult would ever do that,” they say. “You can’t be remembering that right.”
I am, in fact, remembering it perfectly. The counselors “shackled” us together with jump ropes so we were “like slave families” and then released us into the woods. We were given a map with a route to “freedom” in “the North,” which must have been only three or four hundred feet but felt like much more. Then a counselor on horseback followed ten minutes later, acting as a bounty hunter. Hearing hooves, I crouched behind a rock with Jason Baujelais and Sari Brooker, begging them to be quiet so we weren’t caught and “whipped.” I was too young, self-involved, and dissociated to wonder what kind of impact this had on my black classmates. All I knew was that I was miserable. We heard the sound of hooves growing closer and Max Kitnick’s light asthma wheezes from behind an oak tree. “Shut up,” Jason hissed, and I knew we were cooked. When the counselor appeared, Sari started to cry.
Back at base camp, the counselor who became a bounty hunter became a counselor again and explained how many Americans traveled the Underground Railroad and how many didn’t survive it. As he spoke, he pulled out a cardboard timeline of the Civil War, and all I could think was: This is stupid. This is so so stupid.
What were we going to learn from being lashed together with our classmates and chased by a pony? Would we suddenly empathize, be able to fully imagine the experience of the American slave?
A month after Nature’s Classroom, my slave brother Jason Baujelais was suspended for casual use of the N-word. The exercise was a failure.
Fifth grade was when you made the switch to middle school, and with it came new privileges: elective classes and pizza Fridays and free periods in the library. My fourth-grade classroom was across the hall from fifth-grade history, and sometimes that teacher, Nathan, left his door open so we could hear him explaining Mesopotamia to a group of laughing eleven-year-olds. I’d seen Nathan around. He was the definition of gangly. His hair was thinning, and he cut the sartorial figure of Bob Saget, but he was youthful in the way he bounded around the classroom, using silly voices like Dana Carvey’s, my favorite, and holding contests to see who could say “like” the least. The fifth-graders all said he was the best.