My Family's Slave

Lola was 18 when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift. We brought her to America. For 56 years, she toiled in our home.

- Alex Tizon

THE ASHES FILLED A BLACK PLASTIC BOX ABOUT the size of a toaster. I packed it in my suitcase this past July [2016] for the trans-Pacific 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 4 foot 11, 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 United States, 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 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.

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.

After 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.