Great Escape
Walking on Water, and Other Ways Black People Escape Life on Land
A surfer challenges modern American narratives about black bodies, water, and freedom
The cold of the Pacific Ocean hits you like a drug high. It’s a painful, pleasant shock to the system. The water bites, but doesn’t break the skin. Instead, it penetrates.
As you walk into the water, the purple light of dawn against your back and a surfboard under your arm, you equally welcome and recoil from the predictable sting. The first wave swallows and submerges you. When you resurface, the cold runs down from the crown of your head; it streaks past your eyebrows and rushes down your face in tiny rivers of frigid liquid. The sea water exhilarates and restores you in ways nothing else could. You think about how walking on water forever changes how you walk on land. For the better.
Water is my everything. Always has been. Out there, bobbing in cold oceanic currents on my surfboard, feeling the grey morning swells rumble and roll beneath me as I wait for my wave. Drifting free on the skin of the sea. Waiting to walk on water. Alone in my oceanic escape. Yet when I tell people I’m a surfer, they often have the same puzzled look.
