It was the 1890s, and a series of underground tunnels and cellars existed beneath Gold Rush-era Seattle, a result of the city’s relentless leveling of hills. In these hidden places were women, often addicted to morphine, often selling their bodies to support their habit. They lived under the city’s wharves as well, in conditions described as “damp and moldy and dark.” They lived in abandoned buildings and deserted outhouses on the city’s muddy outskirts, only creeping out in the middle of the night to find money or their drug of choice.
For many such women, the day they met Emma Ray was the day their life changed. A small African-American woman, born a slave in Missouri, Emma walked unafraid in the meanest streets of Seattle because she believed that she was a child of God, and that her work was divine. As a local leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, her purpose, as she saw it, was to minister to the “lost people” of Seattle – alcoholics, prostitutes, addicts, and more. She went into the brothels, slums, prisons, and saloons, as well as places few entered. She even invited large numbers of destitute women, men, and children into her home, that they might get on their feet.
Emma Ray’s autobiography, “Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed”, was published in 1926, and is a remarkable source for Seattle history at the turn of the 20th century, from 1895 to 1920. Emma and her husband Lloyd Ray experienced Seattle during the Gold Rush, World War I, and Prohibition. They offer a very different perspective on that distant time.
And in her stories and her treatment of Seattle’s poor, Emma’s life is a reminder that homelessness is not new; addiction is not new; and the importance of simple human kindness never fades.
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Emma was born in Missouri 1859, and met her husband Lloyd – also born a slave – when she was 22 years of age. Lloyd had a very light complexion; the census takers over the decades sometimes considered him Mexican or white. Lloyd learned the trade of masonry, and Emma wrote, “We were very happy for a short time. Later, my husband began to drink… I found he had become a drunkard.”