A Man from Another Land: How Finding My Roots Changed My Life by Isaiah Washington Read Free Book Online

and the room seemed different, as if every single person in the audience
     was looking not at me but right through me. I felt confused and desperately wanted to run off the stage and hide. I couldn’t
     breathe. I tried to swallow, but nothing happened. Something was stuck in my throat.
    My eyes began to water and I could see that John sensedsomething was wrong. I wasn’t supposed to actually cry at that moment, but my eyes were tearing up. He forged on as did I.
     All I could do was hold my breath to keep from gagging and choking onstage. There was no way that I was going to go down in
     this theater’s history as the guy who embarrassed the hell out of Kunta Kinte (the central character John played in Alex Haley’s
Roots
). To this day, I don’t know how I managed to contain myself for the rest of act one of the play. When the lights finally
     went down, after what seemed like an eternity, I could hear the applause rise up as I ran off stage straight into the restroom.
    As I was gasping and grabbing at my throat, someone gave me a glass of water. Another applied the Heimlich maneuver. Nothing
     worked. At this point, I could barely speak and panic was setting in. Some people watched on with shock on their faces, looking
     powerless as to what to do. Others smirked, acting as if they thought I was overreacting.
    Luckily for me, John had a back problem and needed an elaborate machine that looked like a huge stretcher with ankle straps
     and hooks on the bottom of it. The stretcher was attached to a huge metal stand that allowed one to be strapped on and then
     literally flipped upside down. Apparently this contraption helped him stretch out his spine and back muscles.
    The next thing I knew, John had strapped me to this thing and turned me upside down and then upright again with such force
     that I blacked out. The centrifugal force alone should have made that loathsome peanut shell fly up and out of my throat immediately.
     But nope, I was still choking.
    A quiet hysteria filled the very same air that I needed to breathe. I could hear the weighted and growing concern in John’s
     voice, “Someone needs to make an announcement, because we need to get this boy to the hospital.”
    “What? I hate hospitals!” I remember thinking, “Oh hell no, people die in hospitals!”
    It was either my sheer will, or perhaps my fear of hospitals, that had me demanding, through my own version of sign language,
     to go back onstage and finish the play. I began to flail my arms all about trying to signal to them to let me up. Everyone
     backstage paused for a moment and then sprang into action. The show must go on! And that is exactly what we did.
    The same calmness I felt as a child, plowing my way through the woods into unknown territory, washed over me. The last half
     of the show was probably the most focused and best stage performance of my career. I left my body—it was no longer responding
     to me as I wished. I called on my ancestors to get me through, to show me the way out of this. I wasn’t ready to die. I prayed
     for assurance of more time on the earth to fulfill my purpose, and to become an influential artist. And they answered.
    The final curtain came down and the executive director of the theater demanded that I see a doctor immediately. I was driven
     to the emergency room and X-rays confirmed that I had a sliver of peanut shell embedded in my esophagus. The doctor removed
     it, but the trauma of the choking had left me with a small laceration and a loose piece of skin that felt like a feather tickling
     the inside my throat whenever I spoke or swallowed. It bothered me for weeks.
    I was put on twenty-four-hour watch. The theater arranged for the wardrobe mistress, Melissa Toth, to monitor me. She took
     very good care of me that evening. As we were talking she said, “You should become a writer.”
    I had heard that before. I asked, “Why do you think that? I’m an actor not a writer.”
    She smiled. “No. You