Ode to Black Lola | Dear Lola, to me you are the embodiment of strength

Dear Lola,

I am writing this ode to you because after all these years, sex workers are still looked at crookedly. They are anonymous and women outside the profession look down on them.

Is it even possible, a letter to a sex worker who died years ago? Is it socially, politically responsible? I think it is necessary. I think it's important that you also stand here among striking women.

As Black Lola, you were a well-known sex worker in World War II and beyond. Not just one. You were a landmark on the Amsterdam Red Light District. Men came to you from far and wide. You couldn't read or write but had a nose for business. Men gave you a lot of money and men also took it from you. You were really too trusting.

I think the strength of your heart of gold sustained and destroyed you. You were the extreme of two poles. You were North and South. You were black in a white world. Woman in a man's world. Rich and poor. You were smart and stupid or rather gullible, naive. The latter perhaps rare in your profession.

Born on 20 July 1909 as Nicolina Sant in Paramaribo, Suriname you were brought up as an orphan in the Saron home. When you were 10 years old, you were taken to the Netherlands by a white couple to work as a maid. I can't imagine how frightened you must have been. On the boat to a cold country with strange white people. In the 1930s, it was a status symbol on the Amsterdam canals to have a black maid. They let you sleep in the coal shed until you became too voluptuous and were thrown out on the street with only the clothes on your body. 

During the period when you were surviving on the streets, you reinvented yourself a la singer Madonna years later. You emerged as an exotic apparition supposedly born as an indigenous Aracai princess. A fictional tribe from Cuba. You should have received an Oscar for your act and the stories you told your clients. You started pecking away at Stoofstraat number 9 in Amsterdam. It was storming. A black woman under the red lights. You were a fairground attraction that was visited a lot when it was dark at night. Nobody wanted to be seen going inside your place. But inside they went, in large numbers.

Then war broke out.

Now there are many stories from that time about the red light district. Your neighbourhood. In 1948, Major Bosshardt started working in the neighbourhood. People wrote about that and even Princess Beatrix visited her. I like to think they saw you too and maybe even talked to you. Say honestly, with your expensive clothes, your fur coats and your fancy jewellery, you couldn't really be missed.

Major Bosshardt is considered a heroine. With good reason. But you were also a heroine. You were a strong woman who couldn't necessarily move mountains or kick in a door. Your strength lay in subtle qualities that enabled you to overcome obstacles and endure setbacks. You gave the food stamps you received to poverty-stricken Surinamese women who had children with white men who had come to the Netherlands before the war. They and their children were vilified and therefore could not find work.

‘Street bricks they had to eat otherwise,’ you said.

You had money and your door was open to everyone. If you needed help, you went to Lola. One didn't even have to ask. During the war years you thrived and during the Hunger Winter you tirelessly fed people and children. It is fair to say that many would not have survived the war without you.

Unfortunately because of your profession, you were vilified, bullied by young and old, looked at with disdain by strangers and people wanted nothing to do with you if they could not eat from you. You were taken advantage of to such an extent that you spent your last years in poverty.

Dear Lola, to me you are the epitome of strength. It is important to remember that strength is not always visible. Sometimes the strongest women are those who silently fight their own battles. Like you, Black Lola.

With love,
Nathalie Emanuels