I sat with my back against the slimy, wet, green stone wall and watched the other prisoners talk in quiet tones. A few people slept here and there but it was hard to get comfortable with 24 beings in a tiny over-grown prison cell. It was cold; I rubbed my arms to circulate blood. A table sat in the middle of the cell and a few men were gathered around it, deep in serious conversation. I stood, stretched my sore legs, and tried to remove some of the mud off my worn cargo pants. Just days earlier they had been brand new from Target, but now, a few hundred miles of muddy roads later, they looked about as old and worn as a pair of pants could look. I moved toward the group of men.
“There’s the women and children to think about though! We can’t just leave them.” “We could come back for them.” “And risk them being beaten alive or worse?”
They noticed me and their conversation halted abruptly. “Alexandra.” One of them nodded at me. I nodded back and stepped confidently over.
“I can get you a cell phone.” I had been waiting for this opportunity to arise. Nobody had yet talked about escape, and here was my chance to help. They looked incredulously at me.
“How do we know you can do it?” “Yeah, you might get us killed.”
I looked at them with a serious face. “Trust me. I want to get out of here as much as the next person, and without a cell phone, you won’t get anywhere.”
There was a moment of silence and hesitation on their part, and finally one of the men stuck out his hand with a resolute face. “Name’s Mike. I heard Ben call you Alexandra?”
I nodded. Mike was tall and looked like a giant next to Ben. Somehow I knew Ben from somewhere, at some point we’d met earlier in life. We knew each other, in any case, and that left one other man unknown to me. He stepped forward, his longish blonde hair swaying. He nodded curtly and held out his hand. I shook it. “Collin.”
And so, it began. Collin, Mike, Ben and I stood in a group, discussing the Second Great Escape from persecuting, back-stabbing Marine soldiers.
I remember feeling very fulfilled, like my life was helping. Like the pieces that had so long been floating about my life were finally falling into place.
A large hole was dug, in between warnings of “They’re coming, sit on the hole” or “Here comes lunch, quick; hide it.” Eventually, throughout a stretch of about 4 days, the hole grew big enough for the largest of our company to squeeze through. It curved up and around, leading out of the stale prison cell air into the overgrown prison camp. We didn’t know why we’d been forced to travel from Texas all the way to California by foot. We didn’t know why we were forced to lay low in an unused prison camp for a few weeks. We didn’t know why Marines were taking hundreds of people captive and forcing manual labor. But we did know we wanted out. We wanted to warn others; to bust this operation.
I was the first one out. It was dark outside, and I had to overcome my fear of pitch black nights to crawl out of that hole. I flattened myself against the wall immediately and stood perfectly still for over five minutes. It was raining, to make things worse, and when I finally moved, my legs were covered in mud spattered up from the ground. I leaned over and remembered lessons on clearing a space from behind something. There was not much activity at all. I took note of one guard standing off by himself in a dark corner, and then something else caught my eye. Resting on a stretcher in the rain, clothed in red blankets, was an elderly African American woman, her eyes closed in sleep and her hands gripping something. I could not tell what it was. A man stood leaning against a tree a few feet away, whip in hand, his head nodding to his chest in exhaustion. My mouth dropped open.
So this was Mable.
This was the abused Mable, the Mable who received lashes from a whip every time someone did something wrong. The Mable who never cried out, who never remained ever close to her God. The Mable everyone loved and trusted.
I knew we couldn’t leave her. But I didn’t know how we would rescue her; I just knew she wouldn’t survive much longer if left here to bleed, sleeping in cold rain and eating broth once a day.
I signaled through the tiny cell window that it was clear if they were careful. One, two, and then three women came out, then a man. I pointed toward a path I’d already scoped out and ran down mentally. I nodded, smiled encouragingly at the women, and they flew down it like ghosts. They were completely silent. As they reached the broken down, mossy fence line, they disappeared through a man-sized hole. I looked up at the black sky and thanked God.
