Slave Next Door (3 page)

lation of unemployed former slaves. Planters instituted a system that

was as close to the old slavery as possible, but with some new wrinkles.

With the blessing of President Andrew Johnson, each southern state

Bales_Ch01 2/23/09 10:53 AM Page 9

T H E O L D S L AV E R Y A N D T H E N E W / 9

passed what were referred to as Black Codes. These laws were nothing

more than legalized racial repression, dictating every aspect of the lives

of the former slaves. The laws of each state varied, but in general, segre-

gation was made mandatory, and African Americans were forbidden to

vote, sit on juries, carry weapons in public, testify against whites, or hold

certain jobs. Violations were punishable by fines and imprisonment.

This time, instead of the old-fashioned antebellum slavery, the rule

was “peonage,” a simple form of debt bondage slavery that took two

forms. In the most blatant form of peonage slavery, local authorities

were allowed to “bind out” to local farmers any violators convicted of

a crime, often a misdemeanor, and unable to pay their fines. With the

law on the side of the white farmers, court-imposed fixed terms of labor

became the norm. The number of “violations” increased dramatically

as the work called for it. At harvest time, sheriff’s deputies were sent

into African American neighborhoods and drinking spots to arrest a

fixed number of the strongest men. Charged with being “drunk and dis-

orderly,” they would be ordered to “work off” a large fine for several

months with local white farmers. Cotton production consumed a large

part of the people enslaved through peonage, but local governments

also worked this scam to serve other interests. This type of forced labor

was used to build railroads, roads, and bridges, to clear forests, and to

manufacture turpentine. It wasn’t the long-term ownership of the ante-

bellum South, but these slaves weren’t expensive, and it still meant com-

plete and violent control, no pay, and economic exploitation, the

defining hallmarks of slavery. From the 1870s, white-controlled local

governments all across the Deep South were essentially slave brokers,

enslaving and then selling the labor of African Americans.

In the second form of peonage, African Americans were duped or

coerced into signing contracts as field workers or sharecroppers. Farm

owners would hold their pay, and the sharecroppers were obligated to

make all their purchases from the “company store,” using tickets or

orders rather than money. When their annual contracts expired, they

found that the crops they raised never paid the debts they owed.

Although it was often apparent that these “debts” were fraudulent or

impossibly inflated, the penalty for nonpayment was jail. The only alter-

native was to stay on the land and try to work off the debt, which never

seemed to lessen or disappear. Worse, the debt passed from parent to

child, binding families to the land with no hope of advancement or escape.

Each year became a frustrating, spirit-crushing effort to break even.

Historian Jacqueline Jones has said that “perhaps as many as one-third of

Bales_Ch01 2/23/09 10:53 AM Page 10

1 0 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E

all sharecropping farmers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia were

being held against their will in 1900.”6 Peonage was practiced across

the South and upheld for decades by local and federal government. A

full federal ban on peonage-based slavery was not passed until 1948,

and it persisted across much of the South well into the 1960s.

T H E M O R E T H I N G S C H A N G E ,

T H E M O R E T H E Y S TAY T H E S A M E

While both the federal government and the American people generally

ignored peonage, another form of slavery was very much on the minds

of Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century. Large num-

bers of foreign-born women immigrants were being exploited in many

areas of the workforce, and some of them were being forced into pros-

titution. On the West Coast, young, Asian, immigrant females (some

younger than the age of ten) were smuggled into the United States,

thereby circumventing immigration laws that excluded them. Asian

women were bought and sold as property in a system that became

known as the “yellow slave trade.” Bogus “contracts” were created to

enforce this system of slavery in which Asian women became domestics

or prostitutes. The contracts offered these women a chance to work to

buy their freedom, but in ways that were impossible to achieve. In San

Francisco alone the number of Asian immigrant women who died in

enslaved conditions was in the thousands.

At this same time prostitution was rapidly expanding along with the

cities and was controlled by the same criminal gangs who often ran cor-

rupt local governments. Operating from the premise that white women—

both immigrant and native born—were being either lured or abducted,

sold, and forced into prostitution, reformers and religious groups

mounted a nationwide campaign. Using the term
white slavery
to

describe the systematic sexual coercion of unwilling young women, reli-

gious leaders and journalists waged war against pimps and procurers.

The campaign captured the imagination of middle-class white America.

The first attacks and exposés were highly anti-Semitic, portraying Russian

Jews as the gravest offenders. The Jews, claimed the authors, were selling

their own sisters and daughters to educate and advance their sons. The

charges were preposterous and vicious, and they set an anti-immigrant

tone that permeated the movement for years. But the biggest target of the

reformers was the “urban machine,” for it was in the cities that the evils

of rape, seduction, and forced prostitution were most rampant.

Bales_Ch01 2/23/09 10:53 AM Page 11

T H E O L D S L AV E R Y A N D T H E N E W / 1 1

Within a short time, the white slavery issue became a plank in

Progressive election platforms, and candidates trumpeted their concern

for the innocent young victims of the “vice combines.” The whole ques-

tion of “white slavery,” however, became entangled (as it has today) with

questions of race, ethnicity, and immigration. Inevitably, legislation for

the safeguarding of endangered womanhood was introduced. The first of

two laws, the 1907 Immigration Act, allowed the government to deport

any immigrant engaging in any form of prostitution within three years

of his or her admission to the country (thus deporting the victims of

“white slavery”). The second law was the brainchild of Chicago con-

gressman James R. Mann. In 1910, he introduced the White Slave Traffic

Act, more commonly known as the Mann Act. Its provisions were

simple: the federal government could prosecute anyone who transported

young women and forced them into prostitution (or “any other immoral

purpose”). The bill was signed into law with little resistance.

Sadly, these laws were also used as an excuse for racist oppression

and the wholesale deportation of recent immigrants. Police systemati-

cally searched ghettos and other ethnic neighborhoods and raided

brothels in several major cities across the United States, arresting recent

immigrant clients and prostitutes for “moral turpitude” and deporting

them. At the same time, many male immigrants were being caught up in

forced labor in agriculture, mining, and construction, and American-

born and immigrant women were still being enslaved in prostitution,

but their existence or fate was rarely noted.

To this day, the debate continues as to how much “white slavery”

actually existed. At the time, most Americans believed it was rampant,

but there was no effective way to count victims. Ironically, the very situ-

ation that sparked fear and action one hundred years ago may have

become a reality today. Thousands of foreign and native-born women

and children are being enslaved in the United States by foreign and

native-born human traffickers. Forced prostitution is, according to the

federal government, the largest market for slave labor in America. This

time there is no moral panic; most Americans are simply clueless.

Slavery in America probably hit its lowest ebb in the 1940s and

1950s. True, some states were still enslaving African Americans through

trumped-up legal charges, and in remote areas Mexican and Chinese

workers were locked away, abused and unpaid. Still, by the sixties, espe-

cially with the civil rights movement and farm mechanization under-

mining Southern sharecropping systems, slavery seemed all but dead.

But beginning in the 1980s, and then exploding in the 1990s, slavery

Bales_Ch01 2/23/09 10:53 AM Page 12

1 2 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E

came back with a vengeance. With the end of the Cold War and the

tripling of the global population, borders collapsed around the world

and the traffic in people expanded exponentially. America, once again,

became a prime destination for slave traders.

S L AV E RY C O M E S I N M A N Y G U I S E S

The government, when it addresses the subject of human trafficking at

all, focuses primarily on the area of forced prostitution, possibly

because it makes the biggest splash. More visible than most other forms

of slavery, it is thought to account for about half the trafficking victims

in the country. These women and children are subjected to serial rape,

physical injury, psychological damage, and constant exposure to sexu-

ally transmitted diseases, including HIV.

But what about all the other forms of slavery thriving right under our

noses? If you don’t see them, you’re in good company; neither do many

of our public officials. The plight of enslaved domestics, such as Maria,

accounts for about one-fourth of all slaves in America. Agriculture is

another major area of human trafficking. An unknown number of vic-

tims of forced labor are tending and picking our fruit and vegetables.

They come here looking for a decent wage. Instead, they are enslaved by

crime syndicates and families—and sometimes through our govern-

ment’s own unwieldy “guest worker” program—in such states as

Florida, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.

What happened to seventeen-year-old Alejandro, an orphaned street

kid from Guatemala, is typical. A trafficker, in the guise of a sympa-

thetic neighbor, “loaned” Alejandro the money to come to America,

promising good pay and the chance to get an education. When he

arrived in the Southwest, he was immediately thrown into a barracks

with twenty other trafficked workers, kept under guard by thugs with

automatic weapons. Here he was told he had to work to pay off his

“debt,” which had suddenly doubled, with an interest rate of 75 per-

cent. Of course the debt was never meant to be paid off; the money he

earned went straight to his traffickers. Beaten, bound, and blindfolded,

trucked from field to field, and threatened with torture and death should

he run away, the disoriented and desperate boy finally managed to elude

his keepers and found his way to a homeless shelter. Here the scars on

his body were noticed, and he told his story. A “Good Samaritan” con-

tacted a local refugee resettlement agency, and various nongovernmen-

tal organizations (NGOs) became involved. Finally, Alejandro was

Bales_Ch01 2/23/09 10:53 AM Page 13

T H E O L D S L AV E R Y A N D T H E N E W / 1 3

placed in a licensed foster home and worked with the Department of

Justice to prosecute his traffickers. As with Maria, his story is unusual

only in that he escaped his slavery; most do not.7

It turns out that slaves are all around us, hidden in plain sight—the

dishwasher in the kitchen of the restaurant where you and your family

dined last night; the kids on the corner of Forty-first Street, selling cheap

trinkets for a dollar; the man in gray overalls, sweeping the floor of the

big-name department store where you buy your Christmas presents.

What they share in common is that their lives are not their own, and

they deserve better. But without our help, their world will change only

by getting worse.

Almost impossible to detect, slavery exists in our fields, in our towns,

and, sometimes, in the house next door. And even if we did suspect a

person of being a slaveholder, many of us would say it is none of our

business. Be honest, nobody’s listening; if you suspected that
your
next-

door neighbor, your golfing buddy, or one of the women in your book

club seemed to be keeping a “domestic” against her will, what, if any-

thing, would you do? It’s a tough question, not least because most

Americans are not even sure what defines a slave.

B E C O M I N G S L AV E S

Slavery has been defined in various ways, but there are three essential

criteria for knowing if someone is a slave. The first is the complete con-

trol of one person by another, through the use of violence—both physi-