Micheline Slattery quietly slipped out of the chilly, rainy late-October afternoon and into an even colder kitchen. The petite 18-year-old had been a little late returning home from school, but when her adult cousin again started yelling at her, pulling and twisting her ears, 13 years of incessant beatings, endless housework and nights spent on dirty floors finally came to a head.
Grabbing the large woman’s neck, the teenager mustered the strength to push her against the kitchen wall. “This is it. I’m leaving,” she recalls screaming that day in 1994 to the woman who had purchased her for $2,500, trafficked her from Haiti to Connecticut and enslaved her in her home for four years. Grabbing a set of her thrift store clothes and a pair of shoes, Slattery bolted outside into an unfamiliar freedom, one she hadn’t known since she was 5 years old. She didn’t know where to go or what to do, but the decision was finally hers.
Swinging her large Louis Vuitton handbag, the vivacious 29-year-old Slattery turns heads as she walks into the store to pick out a new cell phone. Except for the scar on her left cheek – an ever-present reminder of the butcher knife that sliced into her – she looks like everyone else. Looking at her chocolate-brown skin, shiny jet hair and almond eyes, no one would guess that this nurse from Framingham used to be enslaved, first in Haiti and then the United States.
She didn’t get to this point easily. It has taken her years of jobs at fast-food restaurants, college, counseling and three suicide attempts for Slattery to free herself from bondage, not just physically, but emotionally.
“I used to think that I was bad, that this was the life that God chose for me,” Slattery says.
Until less than two years ago, when she started receiving counseling, she blocked out her experiences, not telling friends or even boyfriends of the cruelty she endured. Her attitude toward herself and life has come full-circle, a feat she attributes greatly to her education and faith in God.
“She [her counselor] helped me realize that I am the victim,” Slattery says. “Now I know that I am not an ugly duckling, that I am beautiful inside and out.”
Slattery’s experiences are certainly not unique. Between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States every year, according to the State Department. And each year an additional 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international boarders.
“Her story is pretty much the story of millions of people around the world,” said Liora Kasten, program director of the American Anti-Slavery Group. “It’s pretty common that people will enslave a child. Some people will think they are almost doing the child a service.”
FROM RICHES TO RAGS
Five-year-old Micheline didn’t have a care in the world. In the Haitian town of Jacmel she lived in a large, servant-filled home with three older siblings, her mother and father, who had recently been elected as prominent government official. Micheline remembers she had a large bedroom that overlooked the vast expanse of the family’s riches: fields of rice, beans and coffee and herds of cattle.
Her comfort came to an abrupt end when first her father and then her mother was assassinated by, the family believes, an opposing political group. Her aunt and uncle moved into the home, quickly selling off the older siblings as workers, but keeping the small girl because she would not fetch much income.
“They took over everything, even my bedroom,” Slattery recalls. “All I had was one sheet and I had to sleep on the floor.”
She was put to work right away, waking up every morning at 5 a.m. to walk five miles each way to get water for the house’s 13 inhabitants and pack of animals, feeding the livestock and washing the floors on her hands and knees.
“I was never done with my chores – it was a huge house,” she says. “I used to get such whippings.”
She remembers the pain vividly. One day when the 7-year-old didn’t finish her work, her aunt decided to be especially vicious. She was forced to kneel on salt-covered metal cheese graters while holding up a sizeable rock in each of her small hands. As the bloody, seemingly unbearable stinging pain shot through her skinny legs she braced herself for the whipping that was to follow.
Eventually she moved to the city with another relative who wanted a little servant; things were easier because she only had to clean-up after one person, but the physical and emotional abuse got worse.
The obstinate scar on her left cheek – visible even after three surgeries – was wrought by this cousin. The woman cut her with a butcher knife after learning that Slattery told a neighbor the relative had thrown her down the stairs after she rejected the woman’s demand for sexual favors.
One day when she was 14, Slattery, who was living with another relative at the time, was told she was going to America to be reunited with her brothers and sisters. She was given a fake name – Judette Pierre – and was heavily schooled in the art of lying to immigration officials. Holding a gun to her head, her relative told Slattery that if she didn’t do exactly as instructed when she stepped off the plane in America, she’d be dead.
Of course, she was not reunited with her family, but was trafficked to Connecticut to work for the relative who had bought her for $2,500.
“When I got there, I was crying,” she recalls. “She said, ‘if you don’t shut up I’ll slap you so hard you’ll end up back in Haiti.'”
Four years later, after she ran away from that house, Slattery was able to finish school while working at a fast-food restaurant and rented a studio apartment from a kind woman who only charged her $80 a week. Although she was 18 at the time, Slattery says her emotional growth had been stunted, causing her to act like a 12-year-old.
“After I ran away, the first thing I ever bought was a doll, because I never had a doll,” she says. “That’s why now I collect dolls. People don’t understand why.”
Slattery was eventually reunited with her brother Eli, who she lived with for awhile while studying to become a nurse. Her two brothers and sister had eventually also been trafficked to America.
She has only just begun sharing her troubled past with others, but telling the story is far from easy.
“Whenever I start talking about this, I get a pain in my spine,” she says, clutching the small of her back. “It’s not something I will ever feel free and comfortable talking about, but I do it because I think it will make a difference.”
Kasten, program director of the American Anti-Slavery Group, says public awareness is key to curbing human trafficking. The problem is improving in some sense, she says, because the world has become more aware. On Dec. 3, the United States joined 95 other nations when it signed on to the United Nation’s Palermo Protocol, which seeks to prevent trafficking and protect its victims.
Several states have passed legislation to study and help curb trafficking. A bill proposed by State Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford) is in the works in Massachusetts. If it passes, the state will develop a commission to study human trafficking in the Commonwealth and impose stricter penalties on convicted traffickers.
“Things have gotten better [since Slattery was trafficked], not numbers wise, but they’re beginning to create tools to deal with the problem,” Kasten says.
Most people, according to Kasten, do not know the extent that slavery exists in America today. It is, in fact, the world’s third largest international crime.
“It’s very hard for them to speak out about it because there’s this sense of shame and fear inherent in slavery,” she says.
The Tables Have Turned
About a year and a half ago, Slattery received a call from the daughter of the cousin who had enslaved her in Connecticut. She says she agreed to talk to the woman because she “wasn’t bad to her – but wasn’t good.”
The distant relative had heard Slattery made a nice life for herself and shared the family’s unfortunate news: They were now living in the projects – they had made all their money through a trafficking circle that was shut down – and only had enough money to bury their mother, who had just died, in the cheapest coffin they could find. Her mother had always wanted a mausoleum, but they were $5,000 short, so she asked Slattery for the cash.
Slattery agreed to give them the money and headed to Connecticut for the funeral. Things had certainly changed.
“When I went for the wake everyone was looking at me like I was this star on the red carpet,” Slattery recalls. “Everybody was paying attention to me. That was priceless. Every time they looked at me, I knew they bit their fingers. There was only one chair in the house and they would wipe the seat with their fingers before I sat in it.”
Slattery says she is finally at peace with the past. Somehow, in the years since she fled, she has been graced with a remarkable ability to forgive.
She has not only forgiven, but now believes there was a ultimate purpose for her enslavement.
“There are tons of people who were dying in Haiti every day, who have nothing to eat,” Slattery says. “It brought me here and now I have a good life. So I believe it was for a reason.”
She says if she were able to speak with her dead cousin today, she would not hold ill will toward her.
“I would tell her I forgive her,” Slattery says. “I would forgive her because she didn’t know any better. I don’t think she has the capacity to love.”
She has scorched her demons with love.
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