From this month's Atlantic magazine, "My Family's Slave"

[SticksnStones]

Written by the late Alex Tizon...

A story that just emptied my heart...gut wrenching...but had to be told. May Lola be remembered always ~

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/

Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

[Blue_Tires]

1. I'm physically ill after reading that...

Yes there's a noble attempt by the author to make amends, but nothing can ever properly answer for everything Lola went through for a lifetime...

[airmid]

2. I read this earlier. It will stay with me for awhile I think...

[SticksnStones]

3. I had that same reaction...

But brought it here because of these words in the editors note on the piece. (The author died in March, before learning his piece was to be the cover story for Atlantic's June issue...)

His interest in the lives of people situated far outside the mainstream was abiding and deep. When he came to us with the enthralling, vexing story of his immigrant family and its terrible secret, we recognized that this was the sort of journalism The Atlantic has practiced since its inception. The magazine was founded in 1857 by a group of New England abolitionists eager to advance the cause of universal freedom.

When I first read a draft of Alex’s piece, I imagined that the founders—people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—would not have believed that 154 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, humans would still be enslaving other humans, in America and across the planet. The eradication of all forms of slavery remains an unfinished goal of civilization, and of this magazine, and stories like Alex’s help us understand slavery’s awful persistence.

[GeoWilliam750]

4. Message deleted by DU the Administrators

[Lee-Lee]

5. This really, really hits home for me

Because but for luck and fortune this could have been the story of my father.

He was orphaned during the Japanese occupation when my grandfather was taken off to a Japanese prison/slave labor camp never to return and my grandmother died from complications shortly after his birth since the Japanese had seized all hospitals and were only allowing Japanese and select others access.

He survived the US invasion too young to remember much and spent his young years shuffled from family member to family member and started working as a house boy for US troops in the barracks at 8 years old and as a teen worked for a Navy Chaplin and his family in their home. They adopted him as their own , taught him to read and pulled strings to allow him to not only enlist in the US Navy but enlist as a Machinists Mate in a time when Philippine citizens were normally only allowed to enlist as cooks.

He spent 26 years in the US Navy between the active and Reserve time, became a US Citizen, met my mom and got a good job using what he learned in the textile machinery repair field and then turned that into a business where he bought and sold machines and parts.

And all it would have taken is one wrong person along his path in his childhood for his story to look totally different and more like Lola's.

[SticksnStones]

6. Thank you for sharing part of your family's story

lucky, indeed for your family.

Lola's story...I didn't really have a sense that something like that could go on in this country that far into the 20th century. Eye opening, gut wrenching...

[Lee-Lee]

7. It's common in many places

Take some time to look at how the "domestic help" in Saudi Arabia is treated. They bring in workers from Africa and the pacific into a system of virtual slavery. No protectiosn, the legal immigration status is tied to employment so the "employer" can threaten to fire them and have them arrested for being in the county illegally. Rape and physical abuse are systemic. A worker reporting they haven't been paid for years is more likely to be arrested for some immigration violation if the "employer" says they are fired than have their complaint investigated. Routinely work permits are "sold" transferring the employee without their consent just like slaves were sold here.

[Blue_Tires]

8. The response:

https://mic.com/articles/177407/the-case-for-reparations-to-the-family-of-eudocia-tomas-pulido-who-died-a-slave-called-lola#.KpOz7Xmdt

[SticksnStones]

9. I completely agree with the response.

Thanks for bringing it into this thread. Of course, pulido's family should see the money this story earned the late author's family. Of course.

And yes, just because he was a Pulitzer Prize winning now deceased author, of course he was just as complicit as an adult who knew what was going on and chose to let her status as the family slave continue.