The Enslaved Woman They Called Lola

Eudocia Tomas Pulido’s 2011 obituary in the Seattle Times is now a curious artifact of the cruelest irony. Six years before Alex Tizon wrote about Pulido in The Atlantic as “a slave in my family’s household,” he urged the Times, where he had previously worked, to write a tribute to her life. The task fell to Susan Kelleher, who based the obituary on Tizon’s recollection and saw in his account “remarkable aspects to her life that I thought would be worth sharing.” That account, which painted Pulido as a free woman, was of course a lie. But the foundation of the most beautiful of lies is often the ugliest of truths.

“A devotion so rare that even those closest to her still struggle to comprehend it” is how Tizon described the woman he called “Lola” in that obituary. that even in revealing the depths of his lie, Tizon was still grappling to understand it.