Читать книгу Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade - Various - Страница 24

"I want you to know everything I have witnessed in my three years of slavery. I was first sold in Custom House Place, by a young man working for Mr. ——, traveling the city and little towns, or wherever he could find girls.

"Here we were, always from fifteen to eighteen girls, most of us very young. The man who bought me made us work like real slaves and then never gave us our money even if it was shamefully earned. His place was always full of so-called detectives, and if some one came to claim some one of us, quick she was slipped to some other town.

"Pictures of foreign girls would arrive by mail, and if one was pretty enough they would wire to Paris and say, 'Send parcel at once.' They arrive by different ports—New York, Boston, Quebec, San Francisco—and those poor unfortunates are all claimed by some one pretending to be an aunt, or father, or husband.

"Letters are received by the resort keepers from all the states, and I believe from all the prisons of the world. If any one could read all of those men's mail, I think one would learn horrible things.

"Also we never can receive our mail direct, for the keeper opens the letters, and if they are indifferent they are closed and given to us, but if they are any way wrong in his eyes we never see them.

"If we escape and insist on not returning, they will send some one after us to propose that we leave for Denver, San Francisco, China or Panama. Most of those men who make their living off those girls are old thieves and gamblers, and most of them have served terms in prison. There are very few girls who would tell, for those bad men surely would kill them if they found out who gave them away.

"If one girl is a good money-maker, they make her take one of those men to support. They say if she does not do this, she is not respected by their class of people. They take all those poor girls' money every night, and they send them back to work the next day penniless. If they should not make enough for them they are beaten, and sometimes killed.

"When those runners bring us to those houses, they keep us sometimes weeks to teach us what to say in case the police or some one would try to rescue us, and with the threat to kill us if ever we would tell.

"Some one ought to do his duty and make war on those horrid men. They simply take girls for their slaves in all the country. For even if we are weak, some one with courage ought to help us not to be persuaded by those men.

"I am certainly glad that all the men are not bad, that some one takes our part. You can be sure that most of the girls are happy that some one came to make us strong.

"Have courage! God is with you, and many of the slaves."

It is well known that some of these brutal traffickers were legally hanged in California for murdering the women on whose earnings they were living.

E.A.B.