whispered.
“Yeah, thanks for that, Sam.” I rubbed my now swollen neck.
I scanned Samantha from head to toe. My heart sank as I saw a dark bruise on her cheekbone and the many tiny cuts on her arms from where she had fallen on the glass. I felt so sick from the headache, I could not think clearly. I kept blinking my eyes, trying to clear my head—this was not the time to have a foggy brain, I told myself. But my thoughts didn’t help, and with every step the pain got worse.
“All right, sit down,” Brian ordered as we walked through the door.
Mamma was standing there, arms crossed again, with a frown on her face. I looked her directly in the eyes, and she looked back at me for a moment, and then looked away, her frown getting deeper, if that were possible.
“All right,” Brian said again. “I knew this day was coming, so I have been writing to the Bishop. A few weeks ago, he sent me the address of one of their Amish communities in Minnesota, which is closer to us than Pennsylvania would be. He knows the bishop there and the community would be willing to take you girls in so you can join the church. They are in desperate need of new bloodlines, so you would be an asset to them,” Brian stated as if we were livestock.
Samantha and I looked at each other in shock. This was the first we had heard of this. Mamma snorted in contempt and Brian stared at us as if we were bad little girls whom he was shipping off to boarding school.
The news was amazing to us; we could not believe we were actually going to get out of this horrible place. Even more shocking was the fact that Brian was thinking of letting us go. I often wondered why Brian agreed to give us, their two slaves, to the Amish community.
The only explanation I could come up with at that time was that they were really afraid that I would make good on my promise to turn them in to the police. In the Amish community, we would be trapped and would not be able to bring any harm to Mamma and Brian. The Amish did not usually allow their people to contact the police.
I would later learn that Brian and Mamma expected Samantha and me to fail at joining the Amish. They expected us to fail and to realize we could not survive without them.
A few days later, it was decided that Brian would drive us to the Amish community. The plan Brian had made with the Bishop was that Brian would bring Samantha and me to their church service once every two months. Then in September, I would move to the community. Samantha would follow a few months later. I was nervous about leaving Samantha on the mountain without me at first, but Samantha scolded me, saying, “If we don’t go along with the plan, we are not going to get out of here alive, ever.”
“All right,” I finally agreed. “But if you don’t show up when you are supposed to, rest assured this time I will go to the police and report them.”
Samantha agreed to this idea, and I believe Mamma and Brian were already thinking I might do such a thing; at least I hoped so.
When we first approached the Amish community after a long drive, I heard the clip-clop of a horse pulling a buggy. As we approached it from behind, Samantha grabbed my hand.
“That’s going to be us; can you believe it, Misty?” she whispered ecstatically.
I smiled at her, wondering if she had ever been this happy.
As we pulled in, Samantha and I brought our coverings forward so hardly a hair was showing. We straightened the new, dark blue dresses and black aprons that I had made for the occasion.
I opened the truck door so Samantha and I could hop out. We stood frozen for a second. A man with a long brown and gray beard wearing a large black hat waved us inside.
“Come in, come in. You must be Brian,” he said with a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent.
“Yes, and you must be the Bishop,” Brian replied, pulling his hat down further as if to appear more Amish.
“Oh, no…” The man shook his head and smiled. “I am Uriah Hostetler, the minister, but we thought it best if you came here since our family has daughters close to the age of your daughters. The Bishop is a younger man and only has small children, so we thought you would all be more comfortable staying here for the night.”
I thought he seemed like a nice person as he guided us into the main area of the large farm house. I looked around and smiled. This house had centuries of tradition screaming from every beam. There were light blue walls and plain, dark blue curtains at the windows. In front of one of the windows was a large quilting frame, and not far from the quilting frame were two treadle sewing machines with small, unfinished clothes hanging from them.
As we stood in the middle of the room, the man yelled, “Alma, children, come here!”
Out of the kitchen and through the side door tumbled twelve children, ranging from nineteen to one-and-a-half years old. Samantha and I were in shock as they stood there looking at us. The mother seemed to be a kind lady with gray hair popping out from under her stiff white Kapp.
“Nice to meet you! Nice to meet you!” she said in the same heavy accent as her husband.
Samantha and I just stood there. We had been exposed to so few social interactions, we did not know what to do or say.
“Okay,” the mother turned to two of her teenage daughters, “Matty and Laura, you can help the girls take their things upstairs and then come back down to help with dinner. Uriah, you can take Brian to finish choring, Ja?” She turned back to her husband.
As Brian and the Hostetler menfolk went out choring, Samantha and I followed Matty and Laura upstairs, where there seemed to be an ocean of bedrooms.
“Hey, they are really nice, huh?” Samantha whispered in my ear.
I nodded, pleasantly surprised by the family’s welcoming manner.
Matty, who was nineteen, stopped at one of the doors. “This is my room. You will be sleeping with me,” she said pointing at me.
I smiled. They seemed a little awkward too, which was a relief.
“Matty and Edward are the only ones who have their own rooms,” Laura said, walking down the hall. “I share this room with Eliza, and Samantha can sleep with us in here.”
I smiled at Laura, who was intently studying my face whenever she thought I was not looking at her.
“Oh yes,” seventeen-year-old Laura continued, “you will be wearing some of our extra clothes to church so you blend in and look more like us.” She looked at our dresses and aprons.
I had noticed that, although to any outsider we would all look Amish, our clothes were very different. Among the Amish, there are many subgroups, and among the subgroups are even more subgroups, all with their own strictly enforced dress codes. Here, the girls’ clothes were much neater than ours, I thought, and instead of zippers, the girls over eleven years old wore straight pins all the way from their high collars to the apron belts at the waist. They did not have black aprons, either, but matching aprons.
I was very excited to wear clothes just like theirs, to finally belong to something.
“Let’s see,” Matty said, pulling me from my thoughts. She looked us over, trying to determine what family member’s clothes would fit us best. Cocking her head sideways, she looked at
