I woke up this morning to this article that my cousin posted on his Facebook wall and I clicked on it, riveted by the title: My Family’s Slave. And I proceeded to stay in bed until after eight so I could finish it because there was no way I was going to go on with my day not knowing how Lola’s story would end.
If you haven’t read it yet or seen it on social media making its rounds, here’s the link to the original article, as well as the audio version of the full cover story for the June issue of The Atlantic.
It’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read and one that won’t leave my thoughts for a long time. And I post it here because I don’t want to forget.
Liz Durano 
That was a story that was difficult to listen to. Slavery still exists to this day and this is an example that occurred recently. I am without words.
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It’s something we grew up in my culture and was “just the way things are” so you’re told not to question it. The caste system was so prevalent in the Philippines before the Spaniards came and it’s filtered through the centuries into something like this story. My grandmother had one like Lola and she slept in the kitchen or what we called the “dirty kitchen.” Just a narrow bed and a pillow. She helped raise my mother and aunts and my grandmother would buy her tobacco leaves from the market. I wonder now if she was paid anything else but room and board. No one knew her age and my mom’s youngest sister (who was her favorite)
took care of her till her last days. During her funeral which my aunts took care of, no one from this woman’s family or town came because she left when she was a teen-ager. If we had any ideas of inheriting that practice of owning someone, my American stepfather took care of that pronto. We had to learn to do things on our own!
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