That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers.
.
Either way, such debt slaves could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be “disciplined” if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to work off the debt of their parents if the parents died, became disabled, or escaped.
Emery’s husband sickened and died. There was no doctor, no medicine beyond a few expensive over-the- counter preparations and the herbs that the workers grew in their tiny gardens. Jorge Francisco Solis died in fever and pain on the earthen floor of his shack without ever seeing a doctor. Bankole said it sounded as though he died of peritonitis brought on by untreated appendicitis. Such a simple thing.
But then, there’s nothing more replaceable than unskilled labor.
Emery and her children became responsible for the Solis debt. Accepting this, Emery worked and endured until one day, without warning, her sons were taken away. They were one and two years younger than her daughter, and too young to be without both their parents. Yet they were taken.
Emery was not asked to part with them, nor was she told what would be done with them. She had terrible suspicions when she recovered from the drug she had been given to “quiet her down.” She cried and demanded the return of her sons and would not work again until her masters threatened to take her daughter as well.
She decided then to run away, to take her daughter and brave the roads with their thieves, rapists, and cannibals. They had nothing for anyone to steal, and rape wasn’t something they could escape by remaining slaves. As for the cannibals…well, perhaps they were only fantasies— lies intended to frighten slaves into accepting their lot.
“There are cannibals,” I told her as we ate that night.
“We’ve seen them. I think, though, that they’re scavengers, not killers. They take advantage of road kills, that kind of thing.”
“Scavengers kill,” Emery said. “If you get hurt or if you look sick, they come after you.”
I nodded, and she went on with her story. Late one night, she and Tori slipped out past the armed guards and electrified fences, the sound and motion detectors and the dogs. Both knew how to be quiet, how to fade from cover to cover, how to lie still for hours. Both were very fast. Slaves learned things like that— the ones who lived did. Emery and Tori must have been very lucky.
Emery had some notion of finding her sons and getting them back, but she had no idea where they had been taken. They had been driven away in a truck; she knew that much. But she didn’t know even which way the truck turned when it reached the highway. Her parents had taught her to read and write, but she had seen no writing about her sons.
She had to admit after a while that all she could do was save her daughter.
Living on wild plants and whatever they could “find”
or beg, they drifted north. That was the way Emery said it: they found things. Well, if I were in her place, I would have found a few things, too.
A gang fight drove her to us. Gangs are always a special danger in cities. If you keep to the road while you’re in individual gang territories, you might escape their attentions. We have so far. But the overgrown park land where we camped last night was, according to Emery, in dispute. Two gangs shot at each other and called insults and accusations back and forth. Now and then they stopped to shoot at passing trucks. During one of these intervals, Emery and Tori who had camped close to the roadside had slipped away.
“One group was coming closer to us,” Emery said.
“They would shoot and run. When they ran, they got closer. We had to get away. We couldn’t let them hear us or see us. We found your clearing, but we didn’t see you. You know how to hide.”
That, I suppose was a compliment. We try to disappear into the scenery when that’s possible.
Most of the time it isn’t. Tonight it isn’t. And tonight we watch two at a time.
“He doesn’t trust us. Why should he? We’ll have to watch all four of them for a while. They’re…odd.
They might be stupid enough to try to grab some of our packs and leave some night. Or it might just be a matter of little things starting to disappear. The children are more likely to get caught at it. Yet if the adults stay, it will be for the children’s sake. If we take it easy on the children and protect them, I think the adults will be loyal to us.”
“So we become the crew of a modern underground railroad,” I said. Slavery again— even worse than my father thought, or at least sooner. He thought it would take a while.
“None of this is new.” Bankole made himself comfortable against me. “In the early l990s while I was in college, I heard about cases of growers doing some of this— holding people against their wills and forcing them to work without pay. Latins in California, blacks and Latins in the south… . Now and then, someone would go to jail for it.”
“But Emery says there’s a new law— that forcing people or their children to work off debt that they can’t help running up is legal.”
“Maybe. It’s hard to know what to believe. I suppose the politicians may have passed a law that could be used to support debt slavery. But I’ve heard nothing about it. Anyone dirty enough to be a slaver is dirty enough to tell a pack of lies. You realize that that woman’s children were sold like cattle— and no doubt sold into prostitution.”
I nodded. “She knows too.”
“Yes. My God.”
“Things are breaking down more and more.” I paused. “I’ll tell you, though, if we can convince ex-slaves that they can have freedom with us, no one will fight harder to keep it. We need better guns, though. And we need to be so careful… . It keeps getting more dangerous out here. It will be especially dangerous with those little girls
