Sold Into Slavery, Sold Into Suffering

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery in the United States and brought an end to the Civil War. For most people, we believe this is when slavery ended. Slavery did not end that year in 1865. It still exists in America behind closed doors and throughout the world.

I’ve oftentimes had to sit and listen to people talking about the wrongs committed to their ancestors, as if they are the same wrongs being committed to them in this day and age. They use slavery as a means to fuel their anger towards another race of individuals, yet these victims they talk about are people they’ve never even met and existed long before their birth. How many of them can say that their parent or grandparent was a slave? Not one of them can, because they are talking about slavery pre-1865. Yet, I can stand up and say, my mother was a slave.

The latest controversial case in New York is about slavery. A husband and wife were arrested and sentenced to time in prison after being caught for having two Indonesian slaves in their home. This case reminded me of my mother's story.

MY MOTHER, THE SLAVE

In 1959, my mother was one of nine children in a very poor family from the region of Korat, Thailand. She was eight years old that year when her parents made a difficult decision to sell one of their children to a rich family. The decision fell on my mother, one of the middle children, to go and live with the family. The money they received for my mother would be able to feed the rest of the family for a couple of months.