A Slave’s Story
Solo carefully writes a note for me to deliver to his parents in Ghana. The weight of each letter leaves marks on the blank pages beneath.
“This is my house,” Solo says, handing me my notebook back.
The single room isn’t even worthy of the term “apartment” let alone house. And it’s not really his, as he owns nothing himself.
It’s his “master’s” room. He eats his “master’s” food once a day. And each time Solo says “master,” a shiver shoots down my spine.
Solo is possessed—not by ghosts or demons, but by something just as scary: another human being. He is owned. He is property. He says that the donkeys on the farm are treated better than he is. “At least when they don’t work, they still get fed.”
Solo’s comments echo John Steinbeck’s in Starvation Under the Orange Trees: “If you buy a farm horse and only feed him when you work him, the horse will die. No one complains of the necessity of feeding the horse when he is not working. But we complain about feeding the men and women who work our lands.”
Solo and I are continuing our discussion from the cocoa fields where Solo taught me how to harvest the cocoa pods, split them, and store them on the ground to ferment. When the details of his life started to come out, I asked if there was somewhere else we could talk, somewhere more private than a cocoa field in which 50 villagers had gathered to watch the whitest dude they’ve ever seen—me—hack away at the yellow pods with a machete.
Before entering his home, I slipped off my shoes, stained with the mud and dirt from a half-dozen Ivorian cocoa farms. None of them prepared me for this. Nothing could. Solo insisted that I leave my shoes on, but I refused. They sit next to his rubber boots. The only light enters the concrete box of a room through the open door and shines on the only decoration—a faded poster of an English soccer team.
Solo, who is only 20, has worked at this farm for four months. He came here from another cocoa farm in Ivory Coast. He was lured to that farm after a woman arrived in his village in Ghana and promised him an opportunity to make $300 for a year’s worth of work.
“I left there because they didn’t have respect for workers.” Solo says, talking about the first farm. “They didn’t give food—” A goat bleats and passes by the door. “They forced us to work.”
“Did they hit you?” I ask.
He shakes his head “No.” I ask him if he’s treated better here.
“Here it is the same. They don’t beat, but what they do is more than beating,” Solo pauses and then repeats himself, as if the weight of the words now verbalized, echo in his head. “What they do here is more than beating. The small man I’ve shown to you . . . he becomes mad. He talks bad, he . . . I can’t even talk about it.”
Solo, sitting on the thin mattress of his wooden bed, silently stares at my socks. Out of politeness I lower my gaze to his bare feet and think.
More than beating? You’re forced to work, fed once per day, and they do something to you worse than beating?! What could that something be?
“Does he touch you?” I ask. “Like . . . sexually?”
“Oui,” Solo answers in French, a language he didn’t speak a year ago.
“He sexually molests you?”
He drops his gaze even more.
“I regret coming here. If I would have known, I would have stayed in Ghana.”
Solo’s master doesn’t live on the farm. The “small man” Solo referred to is the master’s brother.
“The first time my master came here, I told him everything plain. I did not hide anything.”
Solo told him that he wanted to be paid for the time he had worked and be able to leave. But neither of those things happened; he wasn’t paid or permitted to leave. The farm is a three-hour drive down a dirt road through the jungle past two military checkpoints. The farm is a prison without walls or guards but isolated and inescapable all the same.
“Do you think they’ll pay you at the end of your time?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Are there many workers here like you from other places who can’t go home?”
“No. Only me.”
Solo is alone.
“Solo!” A man appears in the doorway. It’s the second time he has interrupted us. The first was to tell Solo to move his container of palm wine; he said that it was too near the door and people were stealing it. The visit seemed contrived; I knew he was there to check on us. Now he was uneasy and demanded that I join the festivities. The man wasn’t leaving without me.
I follow him toward the thumping music, a rhythmic soundtrack out of sync with my spinning thoughts. I read Solo’s note to his parents as we walk.
The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 20.9 million slaves in the world, two-thirds of whom work in construction and agriculture. I knew that slavery still existed. But to see it face-to-face—to meet Solo, see the hopelessness and the pain in his face, and to read the note he had written to his family—made it real.
I become hyperaware of my whiteness. I feel light-headed, pale, powerless, and completely incapable of processing what I had just heard.
Heads bounce. Hips shake. Hundreds of young and old, mainly women and children, jump and gyrate celebrating our arrival. Tom Neuhaus sits at the head of the party in one of the guest-of-honor seats; the other, now empty, is for me. Tom visits villages like this and brings machetes, rubber boots, and other tools donated through his organization, Project Hope and Fairness, which seeks to build relationships with West African cocoa farmers to better understand their challenges and needs. Tom has been visiting the region since 2003.
Everyone cheers when they see me and I force a smile as I sit next to Tom.
“How’d it go?” He asks, his smile mirroring the smiles of everyone else within earshot of the party.
“Good,” I say, sounding not so good. “I got 10 [cocoa] pods.”
“Do you feel like you got a little experience?” Tom asks.
“Yeah, a little too much.”
“A little too much?”
Solo’s master comes over to us and asks me how it went. I tell him it was great, exactly what I was hoping for. I force a joke about not cutting off any fingers with the machete. He gives me a big grin and the local handshake that is part high-five and finger snap. He hands us each a cup of palm wine and rejoins the crowd watching the dance party.
“So…Solo is basically held against his will and sexually molested,” I tell Tom, the music so loud that a normal speaking voice is as private as a whisper.
“Really?” Tom’s smile fades.
“They are going to pay him after he works eight more months.”
“So you actually found someone who everybody talks about,” Tom says.
“Can we buy him?” I ask. I can’t believe I’m saying this. I’m honestly thinking about buying a human.
“Who owns him, though?”
I nod to Solo’s master. Tom can’t believe it. Of all the people to have a slave, it had to be him?
“Why would he invite you to talk to [Solo] if . . .?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He said he was telling the truth and he really struggled to talk about it. Why would he make this stuff up? I would just go and talk to [Solo’s master] and say, ‘Hey, here is what Solo told me; we’re taking him with us.’ But I don’t know what kind of situation that puts us in here. I don’t know; maybe [Solo] is just making it all up.”
Tom is dumbfounded. As if we didn’t stand out enough already, we are the only two at the celebration looking as if our puppies had been stolen.
“I guess we should act happy,” I say, trying not to look like I’m hatching a plan to get Solo the hell out of here. I tap my foot to the music and write in my notebook as if I’m recording the scene for posterity. I scribble four words at the bottom of Solo’s note to his parents.
“I’m open to recommendations,” I say to Tom.
“Like on what to do with the information?” Tom asks.
“Yeah. Do we just ignore the whole thing? I don’t know, maybe [Solo’s master] doesn’t know this. Maybe [Solo] is just making this shit up. But if I go forward with something, and he is lying, then he gets the shit kicked out of him.”
I slip Solo’s note to Tom.
“I’m going to go dance to avert attention.”
I stand up and join the dancers to the hoots and hollers of all. A woman takes a scarf and puts it on my shoulders. Arms are up. Sweaty heads are bouncing. People are clapping. Someone blows a whistle to the beat. I may or may not be dirty dancing with someone’s grandma.
“Woooo!” I holler and force a smile.
I’m smiling and dancing on the outside, but inside my wheels are turning. Do I try to give Solo a shot at freedom, or do I regret not doing anything for the rest of my life?
I know that there are millions of Solos. Does helping one person matter when the problem is so great?
Solo’s master records the scene with his camera as Tom reads the note.
My mother and father,
I am sorry for not tell you before leaving. I am not missing. I will be back again. You don’t worry about me. This is Solomon. I am in Cote d’Ivoire.
At the bottom of the note, my four words are scribbled in cursive: dancing, singing, little kids.
The dancing continues, but I excuse myself. Solo’s master gives me another high-five, finger-snapping handshake on my way to rejoin Tom.
I lean over to Tom and say, “I have a plan.”
This video is of Solo showing me around the cocoa field:
