My Family Had a Slave
Lola was 18 when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift. We brought her to the US. For 56 years, she toiled in our home
The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. I packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel to a rural village and hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.
Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 1.5 metres, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the US, we brought her with us. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and I. My parents never paid her and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been.
To our American neighbours, we were model immigrants. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades. We never talked about Lola. Our secret went to the core of who we were and, at least for us kids, who we wanted to be.
Af ter my mother died in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a small town north of Seattle. I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs – the American dream. And then I had a slave.
A Dark Tradition
At baggage claim in Manila, I unzipped my suitcase to make sure Lola’s ashes were still there. Outside, I inhaled the familiar smell: a thick blend of exhaust and waste, of ocean and sweet fruit and sweat.
Early the next morning I found a driver, an affable middle-aged man who went by the nickname ‘Doods’, and we hit the road in his truck.
We were headed to the place where Lola’s story began, up north in Tarlac province. Rice country. The home of a cigar-chomping army lieutenant named Tomas Asuncion, my grandfather. The family stories paint Lieutenant Tom as a formidable man who had lots of land but little money and kept mistresses in separate houses on his property. His wife died giving birth to their only child, my mother. She was raised by a series of utusans, or ‘people who take commands’.
Slavery has a long history on the islands. Before the Spanish came, islanders enslaved other islanders, usual ly war capt ives, criminals or debtors. Some chose to
enter servitude in exchange for food, shelter and protection.
When the Spanish arrived, in the 1500s, they enslaved islanders and later brought African and Indian slaves. The Spanish Crown eventually began phasing out slavery, but traditions persisted, even after the US took control of the islands in 1898. Today even the poor can have utusans or katulongs (‘helpers’) or kasambahays (‘domestics’), as long as there are people even poorer. The pool is deep.
In the spring of 1943, with the islands under Japanese occupation, Lieutenant Tom brought home a girl from a village down the road. She was a cousin from a marginal side of the family, rice farmers. Tom approached her with an offer: she could have food and shelter if she would commit to taking care of his daughter, who had just turned 12.
Lola agreed, not grasping that the deal was for life.
“She is my gift to you,” Lieutenant Tom told my mother.
“I don’t want her,” my mother said, knowing she had no choice.
Lieutenant Tom went off to fight the Japanese, leaving Mum behind with Lola in the provinces. Lola fed, groomed and dressed my mother. At night, when Lola’s other tasks were done – feeding the dogs, sweeping the floors, folding the laundry – she sat at the edge of my mother’s bed and fanned her to sleep.
One day Lieutenant Tom caught my mother in a lie – something to do with a boy she wasn’t supposed to talk to. Tom, furious, ordered her to “stand at the table”. In a quivering voice, Mum told her father that Lola would take her punishment. Without a word Lola walked to the dining table and held on to the edge. Tom raised the belt and delivered 12 lashes, punctuating each one with a word. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. Lola made no sound. My mother, in recounting this story late in her life, delighted in the outrageousness of it, her tone seeming to say, Can you believe I did that? When I recounted Mum’s version to Lola, she looked at me with sadness and said simply, “Yes. It was like that.”
In 1950, Mum married my father and moved to Mani la, bringing Lola along. Lieutenant Tom had long been haunted by demons, and in 1951 he silenced them with a .32 calibre slug to his temple. Mum had his temperament – moody, imperial, secretly fragile – and she took his lessons to heart, among them the proper way to be a provincial matrona: you must keep those beneath you in their place, for their own good and the good of the household. They will love you for helping them be what God intended.
My brother Arthur was born in 1951. I came next, followed by three more siblings. While Lola looked after us, my parents went to school and earned degrees. Then Dad was offered a job in Foreign Affairs as a commercial analyst. The salary would be meagre, but the position was in the United States – a place he and Mum had grown up dreaming of, where everything they hoped for could come true.
Dad was allowed to bring his family and one domestic. My mother informed Lola, and to her great irritation, Lola didn’t immediately acquiesce. Years later Lola told me she was terrified. “It was too far,” she said. “Maybe your Mum and Dad won’t let me go home.”
In the end what convinced Lola was my father’s promise that things would be different in the US. He told her that as soon as he and Mum got on their feet, they’d give her an allowance. Lola could send money to her relations in the village. Her parents lived in a hut with a dirt floor. Lola could build them a concrete house.
We landed in Los Angeles on May 12, 1964. I was four years old – too young to question Lola’s place in our family. But as my siblings and I grew up, we came to see the world differently.
Lola never got that allowance. She asked my parents about it when her mother fell ill with dysentery, and her family couldn’t afford the
medicine she needed. “How could you even ask?” Dad said. “You see how hard up we are. Don’t you have any shame?”
My father was transferred from the consulate general in LA to the Philippine consulate in Seattle. He was paid $5600 a year. He took a second job cleaning trailers, and a third as a debt collector. Mum got work as a medical technician. We barely saw them.
Mum would come home and upbraid Lola for not cleaning the house well enough or for forgetting to bring in the mail. “Didn’t I tell you I want the letters here when I come home?” she would say, her voice venomous. “An idiot could remember.” Sometimes my parents would team up until Lola broke down crying.
It confused me: my parents would be affectionate to us kids one moment and vile to Lola the next. I was 11 or 12 when I began to see Lola’s situation clearly. Arthur, eight years my senior, introduced the word slave into my understanding of what Lola was.
“Do you know anybody treated the way she’s treated?” he said. He summed up Lola’s reality: wasn’t paid; toiled every day; was tonguelashed for sitting too long or falling asleep too early; was struck for talking back; ate scraps and leftovers by herself in the kitchen; had no friends or hobbies outside the family.
One night when Dad found out that my sister Ling, who was then nine, had missed dinner, he barked at Lola for being lazy. “I tried to feed her,” Lola said. Her feeble defence only made him angrier, and he punched her just below the shoulder. Lola ran out of the room and I could hear her wailing, an animal cry.
“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said. My parents turned to look at me. In Mum’s eyes was a shadow of something I hadn’t seen before. Jealousy?
“Are you defending your Lola?” Dad said.
I was 13. It was my first attempt to stick up for the woman who spent her days watching over me. The woman who would rock me to sleep, and when I got older would dress and feed me and walk me to school in the mornings and pick me up in the afternoons. To now hear her wailing made me crazy.
Our Shameful Secret
My parents took pains to hide their treatment of Lola. When guests came over, they would either ignore her or, if questioned, lie and quickly change
IT CONFUSED ME: MY PARENTS WOULD BE AFFECTIONATE TO US KIDS ONE MOMENT AND VILE TO LOLA THE NEXT
the subject. In Seattle, we lived across the street from the Misslers, a rambunctious family of eight. “Who’s that little lady you keep in the kitchen?” Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once asked. A relative from back home, Dad said. Very shy.
Billy Missler, my best friend, didn’t buy it. He spent enough time at our house to catch glimpses of my family’s secret.
“Why is she always working?” he once asked me. “She likes to work,” I said. “Your dad and mum – why do they yell at her?” “Her hearing isn’t so good…” Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. We spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the new land. Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people we were. Whether we deserved to be accepted.
There was another reason for secrecy: Lola’s travel papers had expired in 1969. After a series of fallings-out with his superiors, Dad quit the consulate and declared his intent to stay in the US. He arranged for permanent-resident status for his family, but Lola wasn’t eligible. He was supposed to send her back.
Lola’s mother, Fermina, died in 1973; her father, Hilario, in 1979. Both times she wanted desperately to go home. Both times my parents said, “Sorry. No money, no time.” My parents also feared for themselves, they admitted to me later. If the authorities had found out about Lola, as they surely would have if she’d tried to leave, my parents could have got into trouble, possibly even been deported.
My father’s resignation started a turbulent period. Money got tighter, and my parents turned on each other. The family moved from Seattle to Honolulu back to Seattle to the Bronx and finally to Umatilla, Oregon, population 750. Mum often worked 24-hour shifts, first as a medical intern and then as a resident. Dad would disappear for days, working odd jobs but also (we’d later learn) womanising.
For days Lola would be the only adult in the house. We brought friends home, and she’d listen to us talk about school and girls and boys and whatever else was on our minds.
When I was 15, Dad left the family for good. Mum wouldn’t become a fully qualified doctor for another year, and her specialty – internal medicine – wasn’t especially lucrative. Dad didn’t pay child support, so money was always a struggle.
My mum kept herself together enough to work, but at night she’d crumble in self-pity and despair. Her main source of comfort during this time: Lola. I’d find the two of them late at night in the kitchen, telling stories about Dad, sometimes laughing wickedly, other times working themselves into a fury over his transgressions.
MY DRIVER DOODS WAS humming. I’d dozed for what felt like a minute and awoke to his happy melody. “Two hours more,” he said.
His not knowing anything about the purpose of my journey was a relief. I had enough interior dialogue going on. I was no better than my parents. I could have done more to free Lola. Why didn’t I? I could have turned in my parents, I suppose. It would have blown up my family. Instead, my siblings and I kept everything to ourselves.
Doods and I passed through beautiful country. Mountains ran parallel to the highway on each side, the Zambales Mountains to the west, the Sierra Madre Range to the east. From ridge to ridge, west to east, I could see every shade of green.
Doods pointed to a shadowy outline of Mount Pinatubo. I’d come here in 1991 to report on the aftermath of its eruption, the second-largest of the 20th century. Volcanic mudflows reached deep into the foothills of Tarlac province, where Lola’s parents had spent their entire lives, and where she and my mother had once lived together. So much of our family record had been lost in wars and f loods, and now parts were buried under six metres of mud.
Standing Up for Lola
A couple of years after my parents split, my mother married a Croatian immigrant named Ivan, whom she had met through a friend.
Ivan had been married four times and was an inveterate gambler who
The author (second from the left) with his parents, siblings, and Lola, in the US
enjoyed being supported by my mother and attended to by Lola.
The marriage was volatile from the start, and money – especially his use of my mother’s money – was the main issue. Once, during an argument in which Mum was crying and Ivan was yelling, Lola stood between them and firmly said his name. He looked at Lola, blinked, and sat down.
Ivan was about 113 kilograms, and Lola put him in his place with a single word. I saw this happen a few other times, but for the most part Lola served Ivan unquestioningly. I had a hard time watching Lola vassalise herself to someone like Ivan. But what set the stage for my blow-up with Mum was something more mundane.
In the late 1970s, Lola’s teeth started falling out. She’d been saying for months that her mouth hurt.
“That’s what happens when you don’t brush properly,” Mum told her.
I said that Lola needed to see a dentist. She was in her 50s and had never been to one. I was attending college an hour away, and I brought it up on my frequent trips home. A year went by, then two. Lola’s teeth looked like a crumbling Stonehenge. One night, I lost it.
Mum and I argued into the night. She said she was tired of working her fingers to the bone supporting everybody, and sick of her children always taking Lola’s side, and she wished to God she hadn’t given birth to an arrogant, sanctimonious phony like me.
I came back at her, saying if she stopped feeling sorry for herself for one minute she’d see that Lola could barely eat because her teeth were rotting out of her head. Couldn’t she think of her as a real person instead of a slave?
“A slave,” Mum said, weighing the word. “A slave?”
The night ended when she declared that I would never understand her relationship with Lola. It’s a terrible thing to hate your own mother, and that night I did. The look in her eyes made clear that she felt the same way about me.
Mum drove Lola harder, saying, “I hope you’re happy now that your kids hate me.” When we helped Lola with housework, Mum would fume. “You’d better go to sleep now, Lola,” she’d say sarcastically. “You’ve been working too hard.”
Lola finally begged us to stop trying to help her. Why do you stay? we asked. “Who will cook?” she said, which
“WHY DO YOU STAY?” WE ASKED LOLA. “WHO WILL COOK?” SHE SAID, WHICH I TOOK TO MEAN, WHO WOULD DO EVERYTHING?
I took to mean, Who would do everything? Another time she said, “Where will I go?” This struck me as closer to a real answer. She had no contacts in the US, and no facility for getting around. Phones puzzled her. Fast-talking people left her speechless, and her own broken English did the same to them. She couldn’t make an appointment, arrange a trip, fill out a form, or order a meal without help.
I got Lola an ATM card linked to my bank account and taught her how to use it. She succeeded once, but the second time she got flustered, and she never tried again.
I TOOK OUT A MAP and traced the route to the village of Mayantoc, our destination. Not many of Lola’s people were left. Only one sibling remained in the area, Gregoria, 98 years old, and I was told her memory was failing.
I’d been in touch with one of Lola’s nieces. She had the day planned: a low-key memorial, then a prayer, followed by the lowering of the ashes into a plot at the Mayantoc Eternal Bliss Memorial Park. It had been five years since Lola died, but I hadn’t yet said my final goodbye. All day I had been feeling the terrible heaviness of losing her, as if she had died only the day before.
Doods veered north-west, then took a sharp left at Camiling, the town Mum and Lieutenant Tom came from. Two lanes became one, then gravel turned to dirt. The path ran along the Camiling River, clusters of bamboo houses off to the side, green hills ahead. The home stretch.
AFTER THE BIG FIGHT, I mostly avoided going home, and at age 23 I moved to Seattle. When I did visit I saw a change. Mum got Lola a fine set of dentures. She cooperated when my siblings and I set out to change Lola’s immigration status. It was a long process, but Lola became a citizen in October 1998, four months after my mother was diagnosed with leukaemia. Mum lived another year.
Before she died, she gave me her journals. Leafing through them as she slept a few feet away, I glimpsed slices of her life that I’d refused to see for years. She’d gone to medical school when not many women did. She’d worked for two decades at a state institution for the developmentally disabled in Oregon. Female colleagues became close friends. She had a life and an identity apart from the family and Lola.
Mum wrote in great detail about each of her kids, and how she felt about us on a given day – proud or loving or resentful. And she devoted volumes to her husbands, trying to grasp them as complex characters. When Lola was mentioned, she was a bit character in someone else’s story. “Lola walked my beloved Alex to his new school this morning. I hope he makes friends quickly so he doesn’t feel so sad about moving again…”
The day before Mum died, a Catholic priest came to the house to perform last rites. Lola sat next to my mother’s bed, holding a cup with a straw, poised to raise it to Mum’s mouth.
The priest asked Mum whether there was anything she wanted to forgive or be forgiven for. She scanned the room with heavy-lidded eyes. Then she reached over and placed an open hand on Lola’s head. She didn’t say a word.
A New Life
Lola was 75 when she came to stay with me. I was married with two young daughters, living in a cosy house on a wooded lot. We gave Lola licence to do whatever she wanted: sleep in, watch soaps, relax. I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.
I’d forgotten about all the things Lola did that drove me a little crazy. She was always telling me to put on a sweater so I wouldn’t catch a cold (I was in my 40s). She groused incessantly about Dad and Ivan. I learned to tune her out. Harder to ignore was her fanatical thriftiness. She threw nothing out. She washed and reused paper towels again and again until they disintegrated in her hands. The kitchen became glutted with grocery bags, yoghurt containers and pickle jars.
She cooked breakfast. She made our beds and did our laundry. She cleaned the house. I found myself saying to her, “Lola, you don’t have to do that.” OK, she’d say, but keep right on doing it.
It irritated me to catch her eating meals standing in the kitchen, or see her tense up and start cleaning when I walked into the room. One day, after several months, I sat her down.
“I’m not Dad. You’re not a slave here,” I said. When I realised she was startled, I took a deep breath and kissed her forehead.
“This is your house now,” I said. “You’re not here to serve us. You can relax, OK?”
“OK,” she said. And went back to cleaning.
She didn’t know any other way to be. I realised I had to take my own advice and relax. If she wanted to make dinner, let her. Thank her and do the dishes.
One night I came home to find her sitting on the couch doing a word puzzle, her feet up, the TV on. Progress, I thought.
She planted a garden in the backyard – roses and tulips and every
“THIS IS YOUR HOUSE,” I SAID. “YOU’RE NOT TO SERVE US. RELAX.” SHE SAID “OK” AND WENT BACK TO CLEANING
kind of orchid – and spent whole afternoons tending it. She took walks around the neighbourhood. At about 80, her arthritis got bad and she began walking with a cane. She cooked only when the spirit moved her. She made lavish meals and grinned with pleasure as we devoured them.
I knew Lola had been sending almost all her money – my wife and I gave her $200 a week – to relatives back home. One afternoon, I found her sitting on the back deck gazing at a snapshot someone had sent of her village. “You want to go home, Lola?” “Yes,” she said. Just after her 83rd birthday, I paid her airfare to go home. I’d follow a month later to bring her back – if she wanted to return. The unspoken purpose of her trip was to see whether the place she had spent so many years longing for could still feel like home. She found her answer. “Everything was not the same,” she told me as we walked around Mayantoc. Her house was gone. Her parents and most of her siblings were gone. Childhood friends were like strangers. She’d still like to spend her last years here, but she wasn’t ready yet.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
LOLA WAS AS DEVOTED to my daughters as she’d been to my siblings and I when we were young. After school, she’d listen to their stories and make them something to eat. She couldn’t get enough of them.
It was so easy to make Lola happy. We took her on family holidays, but she was as excited to go to the farmer’s market down the hill. She became a wide-eyed kid on a field trip: “Look at those zucchinis!”
And she taught herself to read. It was remarkable. She did those puzzles where you circle words within a block of letters. Every day she watched the news and listened for words she recognised. She underlined words in the newspaper and figured out the meanings. She came to read the paper every day, front to back. I wondered what she could have been if, instead of working
the rice fields at age eight, she had learned to read and write.
During the 12 years she lived in our house, I tried to piece together her life story.
One day, I asked: “Have you ever been romantic with anyone?”
She smiled, and she told me the story of the only time she’d come close. She was about 15, and there was a handsome boy named Pedro from a nearby farm. For several months they harvested rice side by side. “I liked him,” she said. Silence. “And?” “Then he moved away,” she said. She often gave one- or two-word answers to personal questions, and teasing out even the simplest story was a game of 20 questions that could last days or weeks.
Some of what I learned: she was mad at Mum for being so cruel all those years, but she nevertheless missed her. Sometimes, when Lola was young, she’d felt so lonely that all she could do was cry. But living with Mum’s husbands made her think being alone wasn’t so bad. Maybe her life would have been bet ter if she’d stayed in Mayantoc, got married, and had a family. What came her way instead was another kind of family: Mum, my four siblings and me, and now my two daughters. The eight of us, she said, made her life worth living.
LOLA’S HEART ATTACK star ted while she was making dinner and I was running an errand. When I returned she was in the middle of it. A couple of hours later at the hospital, before I could grasp what was happening, she was gone.
She died on November 7, the same day as Mum. Twelve years apart.
Lola made it to 86. She’d had none of the self- serving ambition that drives most of us, and her willingness to give up everything for the people around her won her our love and utter loyalty.
She’s become a hallowed figure in my extended family.
Going through her boxes in the attic took me months.
I found photo albums with pictures of my mum. Awards my siblings and I had won from grade school. A stack of yellowed newspaper articles I’d written and long ago forgotten about.
She couldn’t read back then, but she’d kept them anyway.
LOLA’S WILLINGNESS TO GIVE UP EVERYTHING FOR THE PEOPLE AROUND HER WON HER OUR LOVE AND UTTER LOYALTY
Final Farewell
Doods’s truck pulled up to a small concrete house. Before I even got out, people started coming outside.
“This way,” a soft voice said, and I was led to the house. Following close behind were about 20 people, mostly old. Once we were all inside, they sat down on chairs and benches arranged along the walls. I remained standing. People glanced at me expectantly.
A middle-aged woman in a housedress sauntered in with a smile. Ebia, Lola’s niece. This was her house. She gave me a hug and said, “Where is Lola?”
I handed my tote bag to her. She sat on a wooden bench and pulled out the box. She set it on her lap and rested her forehead on top of it. Her shoulders began to heave, and then she was wailing – a deep, mournful, animal howl.
I hadn’t delivered Lola’s ashes sooner in part because I wasn’t sure anyone here cared that much about her. I hadn’t expected this kind of grief.
Before I could comfort Ebia, a woman walked in from the kitchen and wrapped her arms around her. The next thing I knew, the room erupted with sound. The old people – one of them blind, several with no teeth – were all crying. I was so fascinated that I barely noticed the tears running down my own face. The sobs died down, and then it was quiet again.
Ebia sniffled and said it was time to eat. Everybody started filing into the kitchen, puffy- eyed but suddenly lighter and ready to tell stories. I glanced at the empty tote bag on the bench, and knew it was right to bring Lola back to the place where she’d been born.