Slave Next Door (35 page)

slaves can be rescued. This is not wishful thinking; it happens with

enough frequency to account for about one-third of all slaves rescued

in the last few years. The concerned citizens involved in these rescues

are often called Good Samaritans, and the only thing that differentiates

them from you and me is that they’ve recognized that someone needs

help and have taken action.

What makes a Good Samaritan? At the most basic level, it’s open-

ness to the possibility that something isn’t quite right. A teenager solic-

iting on a street corner or in a bar should raise a question in our minds.

A domestic servant sitting on a doorstep, or overseeing kids clearly

not her own, might simply be a housekeeper or a nanny at her job. Or

there could be something in her manner—an overriding sadness or sul-

lenness, a deliberate avoidance of contact with others, a habit of

always looking down—that indicates a deeper problem. Establishing

contact can be a difficult step, especially if you are unfamiliar with a

trafficking situation.

One Man’s Tradition, Another’s Slavery

In some instances, little action is required—an encouraging word, a sug-

gested direction. Elaine Fletcher (not her real name) lived in an affluent

town in Massachusetts, long before the passage of the Trafficking

Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000, when very few people were

aware of slavery in today’s America. She’d had an upper-middle-class

New England childhood and had attended a prestigious college. When

Elaine was in her late twenties, she became friendly with an attractive,

well-off Indian couple in their thirties. The husband was somehow con-

nected to royalty, and his wife was a child of privilege. At the time Elaine

knew this couple, they had a young “houseboy” to perform every task

they required—from answering the door to cleaning the large, rambling

house, maintaining the grounds, and cooking their meals. In fact, after

Elaine became friendly with the young man, they exchanged recipes.

“He taught me to cook tandoori chicken and palak paneer, in exchange

for my pasta primavera recipe.” Although the couple had no children,

the wife’s entire family, including several siblings, lived in the house.

Observed Elaine, “He worked his tail off.”

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Elaine thinks the “boy” was in his early twenties, but “he was slight,

bony—he had the look of a much older man.” It became clear that the

couple had “acquired” their servant while living in India. At one point,

Elaine and a few friends asked the couple where the young man slept.

“On a mat, on the kitchen floor,” was the reply. The guests were

shocked, and the husband’s explanation was “Oh, but back in India,

he’d be living on the street!” “They saw themselves,” says Elaine, “as his

saviors.” She is fairly certain that he received no pay for his work—

“and if he did, it surely wasn’t much”—and that he was expected to do

everything he was told, without talking back. He was illiterate, and

when the wife sent him to the supermarket he would match the shapes

of the letters on her shopping list with the labels of the items on the

shelf. He was also without papers; the couple had taken his documents

shortly after he entered the United States.

According to Elaine, the husband—who was well educated, “very

cultured, and somewhat passive”—had little to do with the servant, so

long as he did what was expected of him. The wife, on the other hand,

strenuously controlled all aspects of the young man’s life. At one point,

she decided it was time he married, so she arranged for friends back in

India to send one of their servants to Massachusetts as a wife for her

“boy.” The couple themselves had an arranged marriage, and an unsuc-

cessful one, as it turned out. The wife was especially unhappy and

would take her anger out on her servant. She was, in Elaine’s words,

“nasty, a dragon woman,” whose goal was not the happiness or fulfill-

ment of her servant but rather the total control over a fellow being and

the acquisition of a free pair of hands in the house.

When the female servant arrived from India and was wed to the

young man, the mistress cleared a small space in the basement for the

couple to live. What she didn’t anticipate, and what infuriated her,

was that the newlyweds actually fell in love. As Elaine describes it,

“She was absolutely miserable over their happiness,” so much so that

when the young wife got pregnant, the mistress told them the baby

had to be aborted.

The young couple was devastated. But it points up the psychological

state of slaves that it never occurred to them to question or to protest

this brutal command. As Elaine observed, “She had so much power over

them. . . . I don’t know what she was capable of. She’s a bad, bad

woman.”

One evening, while attending a dinner at the house, Elaine saw the

change that had taken place in the young man. Questioning him, she

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learned of the mistress’s plans and of the young couple’s misery. She

arranged to meet with him secretly, and over the course of a long and

stressful conversation she convinced him to take his wife and flee. Says

Elaine, “Nothing they would encounter in the outside world could have

been as horrible as what was happening to them in that house.”

With some financial help from Elaine and her friends, the young man

and his pregnant wife ran away to New York City, where, despite his

lack of documents, he found a job in a food market. At this time, there

were practically no organizations devoted to liberating and helping vic-

tims of slavery, and there is little likelihood the young man would have

known where to look even if there had been. On finding that they had

escaped, Elaine recalls, the mistress “went into a rage. She ranted and

raved, and if she’d known where they’d gone, she would have pursued

them.” Elaine never let the woman know the brief, crucial role she’d

played in providing the spark for this couple to find their freedom. “I

still like to picture him,” she says, “running a little restaurant or food

market; he was so good with food.”4

Out of Africa, into Colleyville

Sometimes Good Samaritans aren’t even directly involved in rescuing

victims of slavery but work to ensure that the liberated victim stays free

and receives the love and guidance he or she so desperately needs. In

chapter 5, you read about Given Kachepa, the remarkable young man

who emerged from enslavement in a boys’ choir to become a successful

college student and a respected antitrafficking advocate and speaker.

Now meet Sandy Shepherd, Given’s legal guardian, de facto mother, and

a true Good Samaritan.

Recall that Keith Grimes, a Baptist minister in Sherman, Texas, had

gone to Zambia and brought home a number of boys’ choirs—ostensi-

bly to earn money with which to build schools and improve the lives of

the boys’ families in their home village of Kalingalinga. (In actuality,

nearly all the money ended up in Grimes’s pocket, with practically noth-

ing finding its way back to Zambia.) In the early 1990s, after appoint-

ing himself pastor of the “Ministry of the Zambian Acapella Boys’

Choir,” Grimes converted a barn for offices, housed the boys in trailers,

and went looking for venues where they could perform. He first focused

on the churches. In 1996, he contacted the First Baptist Church of

Colleyville, a town outside Dallas. No one in the congregation was more

enthused about hosting the choir than Sandy Shepherd.

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Sandy was, and is, a devoted churchgoer. She had been deeply

involved in church activities since she was very young; in 1969, she had

helped write a ministry program called Early Christian Awareness, for

children between the ages of six months and three years. She married

IBM executive Walter Deetz Shepherd and spent several years moving

her family to various cities, both within and outside Texas. Finally, she

and Deetz moved to the affluent, predominantly white town of

Colleyville, and in 1990 they built a house and settled in with their

three daughters. Nothing in her or Deetz’s life prepared them for what

was to follow.

When the choir was booked to sing in Colleyville, Sandy took on the

task of finding “host families”—members of the congregation who

would be willing to put up the boys while they were in the area. Sandy

herself took in two of the boys only two days after her oldest daughter’s

wedding. They didn’t speak much English, and, as Sandy recalls, “They

didn’t understand the electric lights, or the bathroom fixtures. They

expected to sleep on the floor.”5

Sandy’s church hosted five concerts within a short time, and “by this

time, I was hooked. I volunteered, and made lots and lots of calls to find

them concerts and host families. I wrote a curriculum for their teacher,

since it was obvious that they were getting no education.” As it turned

out, that wasn’t all they weren’t getting.

When the boys returned later in the year, their language skills had

improved enough for them to make Sandy understand that something

was wrong. There was little or no money being sent home, no schools

were being built; and the education the boys had been promised had

simply never materialized. Further, she discovered that other host fami-

lies were writing letters to the boys and enclosing telephone calling cards

so that they could call their relatives in Zambia, or the host families

with whom they had built relationships, but that Grimes was comman-

deering the calling cards and throwing all the letters away before the

boys saw them.

Grimes hired a series of two-person teams—a voice teacher and a

choir director—to tour with the boys. The first teams were Zambian.

Initially, the teams enforced Grimes’s rules, until—one by one—they

grew disillusioned over the treatment of the boys and the hypocrisy of

Grimes’s operation and quit. To an observer, on the surface everything

looked all right; Grimes bought the boys uniforms and a school bus to

get them to their venues. And, as Sandy recalls, “to hear him speak, you

could never believe he’d do anything wrong.” But those boys who dared

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to question him were labeled troublemakers and sent home in disgrace,

and new recruits were brought over. It was a juggling act in which

Grimes let the parents—and the village community at large—know that

the returned boys had been “bad, disobedient, and disrespectful” and

that the boys selected to replace them, the “good” choirboys, should

avoid all contact with those who had been expelled. As for the parents,

“They believed the white pastor, in the white suit, on his proverbial

white horse.” Some parents were so ashamed of their sons’ “miscon-

duct” that they refused to allow their children back home. As a result,

some of the boys, whose only offense had been questioning their treat-

ment by Keith Grimes, became homeless.

As Grimes continued to rotate boys for the choir, his rules became

increasingly stringent. The boys were regularly awakened at 4:30 a.m.,

and if there was no time to eat before the bus left they went hungry.

They did all the physical work to set up for their concerts, gave their

performances, then struck the set afterwards. As Grimes made more

and more money from the choir’s performances, their treatment wors-

ened. Gifts—items such as clothing and sneakers—that had been given

or sent to the boys by their host families were confiscated. The boys

were systematically searched for “contraband.”

Sandy, thus far unaware of the extent of the maltreatment, decided

that new host families would benefit from a guidebook that detailed the

boys’ history—places they’d visited, foods they liked—so she wrote a

host booklet, which was distributed by the boys to the families in the

communities where they sang. The host families, who had been hearing

from the boys themselves about Grimes’s treatment of them, began to

annotate the booklets, passing them on to the next families with notes

about what they’d learned. When Grimes found out, he confiscated the

booklets and forbade their further distribution.

Congregations hosting the choir were becoming increasingly con-

cerned but didn’t think these were criminal offenses. After all, says

Sandy, “it was a Christian ministry!” After a while Sandy realized that

Grimes was a charlatan, and she was resolved to make things better for

the boys. Then one boy in the choir was rushed to the hospital by a

host family; he was seriously ill with tuberculosis. It became apparent

that Grimes had not tested the boys for either TB or HIV/AIDS, two ill-

nesses common to their part of Africa; he claimed to have been “too