Servitude

(Picture: Claudia's first communion--with her brother Peter, some friends, and Dionisia. Lima, Peru, 1969.)

In our learning about America, we have now reached the mid-1800s. From the emotional workout that were the Indian Wars, we've marched straight into the searing whip-lash of slavery. No happy slaves singing contentedly on the grand plantation—the textbook we use did not include such a story. Instead, this week we read about Henry Brown, a slave whose wife and children had been sold and taken away from him. In 1849, bereft and hopeless, he mailed himself to freedom in a box. Tightly confined in a large package, he went from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, to an address manned by the Anti-Slavery Society.

There are many details to this story: what kind of box was used; how Henry survived inside the box; the length of the trip; the mismanagement of the postal service which ignored signs on the box that read: “Handle With Care. This Side Up.” Henry Brown wasn't “handled” with anything that resembled “care,” but he did make it.

The happy ending is irrelevant to Simon. He cannot be bamboozled by an upbeat twist in the plot. He doesn't care about Henry Brown, the grown-up, celebrating his freedom in Philadelphia.

“What about his children? How many did Henry Brown have? What were their names? How old were they? Who purchased them? Who took care of them? Did the kids miss their mother and father? They must have been so sad. What about the mom? Her heart was broken. Why don't they tell us how many children Henry Brown had? Just saying he had “children” is not fair. How many? Two? Eight? The author is not so smart. We need to know. Who bought the kids? What happened to them?”

In case I didn't hear him in his first barrage of questions, Simon asks again: “Mom, what happened to the kids?”

“Sweetie, I don't know. Let's hope their new owners were kind to them. Let's hope they got food and shelter. Let's hope they did not have to work too hard.”

“Yeah,” says Simon.

We lie there, on the day-bed, for a few minutes completely silent. I wrap my arm around him.

Although he's eleven, Simon has recently taken to bringing a stuffed rabbit to the day-bed, especially to our readings in American history. The word regression has crossed my mind.

Simon lifts the rabbit to my neck and makes kissing sounds. “Do you like my rabbit?” he asks.

“He's a very cute rabbit,” I say.

“You wouldn't really cook him with mustard--would you? Or give him away?”

I have been threatening to cook the pesky bunny rabbit aux moutarde and serve him up for dinner, or give him to my younger sister's small children.

“Of course not.” I say, “We'll take good care of him.”

* * *

After his schooling in America, my father moved back to Germany. Unable to get an immigration visa to America, my parents, who'd met while working in Cologne, decided to emigrate to Lima, Peru. In the early fifties, jobs and housing were still scarce in Germany; if you were lucky enough to have a job, the pay was very low. At twenty-two, Father landed a job working for a tin baron operating out of Peru and Bolivia; father was supposed to oversee the tin ore shipments going out of the port of Callao. In time, my father became a metal trader in Peru, and later in Canada and Brazil, working for an American company.

In Peru, I grew up with maids. The houses and apartments came with at least one maid's room, or a little beehive of tiny rooms the size of closets, sometimes with no windows, only ventilation slits going out to a hallway. The maid's bathroom was often the size of a small shower stall. To shower, you had to sit or kneel on the toilet. There was a drain at the bottom of the bathroom floor. My parents, unused to colonial ways, would give a maid two of the tiny rooms, or later, when they were flush, move walls to make the maid's room livable.

Various women worked for us over the years in South America. Usually just one at a time. They were a constant of my childhood, always in the background. They cleaned, served, cooked, washed, ironed. They tended to my brother Peter and me, and later my little sister Andrea, when my parents went out, or when they traveled abroad.

However, with the exception of one, I cannot remember the names, or the faces, of any of the women who worked for us in Lima. I know Dionisia's name (in the picture above) because she's the only one that appears in the dozens and dozens of annotated photo-albums my father made of our years in Peru.

But there was one maid I think of often. She worked for us in the early seventies, in the years before we left Peru. In 1968 there had been a nationalist revolution. I was eight. After that, foreigners were no longer welcome. It took my parents until 1974 to give up and leave Peru, a country they'd come to call home.

What I remember about this one maid is that her room smelled of starched and ironed laundry, and hair that had not been washed in a few days; she listened to soap-operas on the radio while she ironed; she would knit herself a sweater and then, after a few weeks or months, unravel it onto an empty toilet paper roll, to then begin a new and different sweater; she made great fried egg sandwiches—two pieces of white toast, one egg fried in oil with salt and pepper.

I began going to her room because of my assignments for my home-economics class—ten centimeters worth of knitting. Could she help me? If she could knit for me, I would iron. So I ironed items I couldn't mess up, like underpants, while she did my knitting.

She didn't say much. Neither did I. I never asked her about herself. We never looked at one another. She ironed or knitted. The radio played soap-operas. When I wasn't ironing, I sat cross-legged on her bed. She made me take off my shoes.

And then I started coming to her room all the time, to do my homework, to read, just to hang out. And she let me in every time. Her room was bare. A calendar, I think, hung on the wall. My parents were stressed, fighting. You couldn't buy chicken, or gas, certain days of the week. There were tanks in the streets. Father had a job offer in Teheran; then he had one in Manila. Who wanted to go there? The maid's room was far away from all of that.

I don't know if we got her address when we left for Canada. Maybe. I never wrote. We didn't take a picture of her. I don't remember her name, and her face is a blur.

She was kind to me. I missed her and her room when we first arrived in Montreal.

Decades later, I found myself at a Buddhist retreat in Elmhust, New York, trying to learn how to meditate. I wasn't any good at it. I couldn't count to three without a tsunami of worries rushing in.

When I met with the abbot, an old bony Taiwanese man, he said: “Think of smell, smell that help you settle your very silly worry mind.”

In that cold room—it was a snowy January-- I remembered the maid's room: clean starched laundry and unwashed hair. And how the sunlight hit her bare walls. And the low whisper of the radio.

I've thought of her often since. I know life can't have been good to her. I know that. I do. She was in my life—and then she was not. She was an Indian who had come down from the hills for a life of servitude in the city. My family hired her to do the work we did not want to do. And then we left for a new life in Canada, where we hired an imperious, fat woman called Madame Genarde to clean our house once a week. For a half-day's work, we paid Madame Genarde, whose name I do remember, as much as we paid in a month to our maids in Peru.