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. The woman who was the head of the household guaranteed to my grandfather that she would clothe, feed, provide shelter, as well as provide the necessary tools to put my mother through school.

At that time and many, many years later, in order for children to go to school, you had to be rich. School was not public, nor was it free. You had to pay to go to school. You had to show up with the proper uniform, supplies and books, or you would be punished.

My mother’s parents saw this as an opportunity for my mother to get out of their impoverished home and have a better life. This family would be able to give her a greater expectation in life.

They were disillusioned.

From that point on for the next eight years, my mother was a slave. She, like many other children in Southeast Asia, was sold into slavery by her own parents. This was the beginning of her nightmare.

1959-1967

My mother was lucky by many standards. She was there to be the housekeeper and cook for the family. She could have had it much worse, because there are numerous children that have been sold into the sex slave trade. Yet, she still had her own nightmares to contend with.

The matriarch of the house was an evil woman. She told half lies to my grandfather. She sent my mother to school, but only paid for my mother to wear a partial uniform, with no school supplies or books. Each day my mother showed up to school unprepared and was beaten before the entire class.

Some of the children felt bad for her, because each day she had to endure the ridicule of being beaten before her peers. My mother was a good artist, so the girls in class asked her to draw pictures for them. She became a master of drawing paper dolls and clothes. In exchange for her drawings, they would pay her with a pencil or a sheet of paper.

She did not have time to play after school, because she had chores to do back at the house. She would run home and prepare dinner. If dinner wasn’t ready when the lady of the house came home, my mother would have to suffer her wrath. One day, when the woman came home and found dinner was not ready on the table, she went into the kitchen to find out why her dinner wasn’t ready.

She found my mother sitting next to a pot of boiling rice, stirring it. She demanded to know why dinner wasn’t ready. My mother did not answer her. She did not tell her that the teacher had made her stay after school as punishment for not showing up to school with a proper uniform. She did not want to disrespect her master and tell her it was her responsibility to properly clothe her.

My mother’s silence angered her. She then grabbed the pot of boiling rice and dumped it over my mother’s head and then hit her with the pot. She dropped the pot and said, “That will teach you a lesson to have dinner ready when I come home.” My mother was nine years old.

Years later when she had her first menstrual cycle, she did not know what to do. She had come home and discovered the blood on her underwear. Ashamed, she tried to wash the blood out of her underwear before the woman came home.

Unfortunately, the matriarch came home early that day. She walked around the house looking for my mother. She found that the dinner was cooking, but my mother was nowhere to be seen. She found her downstairs washing clothes. She walked up and demanded to know what she was doing. She looked down to see the cotton white panties and blood in the basin. Then she saw the blood on the underwear.

A smile stretched across her face. She bent down and picked up the wet, blood stained panties and smeared it in my mother’s face, forcing her to the floor. When she was done, she walked away laughing.

These two moments were two of the most traumatic events that occurred while my mother lived in that woman’s household. There was something every single day: the nasty demeaning words, the sabotage of her work so that would give rise to beat her, throwing dishes at her because something was not right…the list goes on and on.

There were people at the school who saw the bruises and marks on my mother, but they could not do anything to help. There was a teacher and a couple of students who decided to help her escape. She was sixteen years old when she ran away from that treacherous household and never looked back.

LIFE AFTER SLAVERY

My mother was 22 when she met my father in Bangkok. They married two weeks later. It wasn’t a matter of love at first. My father had his reasons for marrying my mother. My mother had her reasons, as well. Her main reason was because she refused to let her future children be subjected to the same life that she had. She wanted her children to have a greater expectation in life. The United States was the place where dreams came true. She knew that in America, her children could never become slaves.

I was eighteen years old when my mother told me this story. Weeping, she said to me, “It is my dream that someday you will write my story.” Over the years, I learned more about my mother’s history and embraced the Thai side of my heritage. When I was growing up, I believe she was too ashamed of where she came from to tell me about what it means to be Thai. I am a full-blooded American. I can’t even really call myself Asian-American because I grew up knowing so little about my Thai heritage. She wouldn’t even teach me the language or the Thai recipes until after that day she told me that story. She pushed being an American onto me all throughout my youth. It was only when I became an adult that she felt I was old enough to know about her past. I also think she needed all those years to come to terms with what happened to her.

Over time, I realized that my mother instilled all her hopes and dreams into me. She wanted me to have that life she was never given. I also came to understand that all throughout my life, she had made me into a fighter and protector of those who are less fortunate.

I don't hate my grandparents for selling my mother into slavery. They had to do what they had to do in order for the rest of our family to eat. I don't hate Thai people either because they enslaved my mother, who is also Thai. Hate defeats the purpose of what needs to be done to ensure that it doesn't happen to other children. You live; you learn; you seek change.

This will not be the last time I will ever write about my mother’s story. I plan on writing about her full story (in a fictional background) in the years to come. In the meantime, I have to do what it takes to try and end slavery in the world. It takes one step at a time.

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This is part one in a series of articles about slavery for Orato.com by Michelle Kenneth. Read part two here [1]