The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (34 page)

Shortly after Kula arrived she said she and CeCe were told to sew traditional African dresses: matching tops, long skirts, and head wraps in the style of West African formalwear, something that felt like a costume to the girls after growing up in shorts and T-shirts at the orphanage. They would
wear the outfits in public. At Colin Campbell’s church they sang while the congregation passed the collection basket, soliciting donations “for African children.” An
Above Rubies
photographer took pictures of the boys racing go-karts and the girls experimenting in the kitchen. CeCe sometimes traveled with Nancy Campbell to sing at Above Rubies retreats around the country.

Off-camera the children helped work on the new cabin on the Primm Springs compound. As in Liberia, which still hasn’t restored a reliable power grid, the new house had only a generator, no air conditioning in the hot summer, and only a smoking woodstove in winter. The lack of running water meant showers were infrequent and toilets were flushed with a bucket of water. The children said they were hungry so often that a few times CeCe killed and dressed geese or turkeys they caught on the land. “We went from Africa to Africa,” she said.

During this time Serene had become pregnant again. Instead of going to school, Isaiah and Alfred helped Sam in his house-painting business or worked in Campbell’s immense vegetable garden. Meanwhile CeCe, Kula, and Cherish were put to work cleaning, cooking, and tending a growing number of young children. The “African children,” as they referred to themselves, got up at six, as Sam prepared for work and Serene slept in with her younger kids. Both boys and girls carried five-gallon buckets of water up a hill from a creek behind the house or, in drought, on a long trek through the wooded property to the homes of Nancy Campbell or Sam’s mother, also living nearby, to fill a reservoir tank on their roof.

Homeschooling for the Allisons consisted mostly of Serene reading to the younger children and an occasional worksheet. In Liberia schooling was not free, and the children wanted to learn. They watched a school bus drive the country road that borders the Campbells’ property and asked why they couldn’t go too. Alfred was told that school wasn’t good for him, Isaiah that he would find it too hard, CeCe that they would be made fun of, and Kula that “black people don’t go to school in America.”

“Most days,” said Isaiah, now a compact, muscley sixteen-year old, “I’d go to work with Sam, painting, going on roofs. He told me, ‘If anyone asks you, tell them we’re doing homeschooling.’”

CeCe hadn’t yet learned to read when Serene gave her a book on midwifery in order to learn how to deliver the Allisons’ future babies. Cherish, who was the same age as one of the Allisons’ biological daughters, was charged with changing baby diapers and carrying the baby up and down the stairs. When CeCe asked why only Cherish had to work, she
claims Serene told her, “‘I heard that you guys work hard in Africa so you’re strong.’”

“They treated us pretty much like slaves,” CeCe said. It’s a particularly provocative accusation coming from Liberian children, but it is one that Kula and Isaiah—as well as two neighbors and a children’s welfare worker—all repeated.

There were clues in the magazine about the life the children were living: mentions of the boys working with Sam painting houses and the girls tending house while Serene went into early labor. The Campbells’ four adoptees came in spring 2007, teenagers they renamed Sapphire, Mercy, Psalmody, and John. John was pictured in one editor’s note, shovel in hand, watching Colin Campbell dig a precise hole in the garden.

Rachel Johnston, a twenty-eight-year old from Louisiana, also came to Primm Springs in March 2007 as an
Above Rubies
volunteer intern, one of many “Rubies girls” who came to help after graduating from homeschool. Her mother was an avid
Above Rubies
reader, but when Rachel arrived she was distressed at the dissonance between the image of large-family living presented in the magazine and the reality in Primm Springs. “I had only been there about a day when I realized that things weren’t really right,” Johnston said. Walking through the woods on the property, she came across a naked toddler, one of dozens of children living on the property, wandering on his own. Shocked, she picked him up and brought him to Nancy, who didn’t understand why Rachel was upset.

In the middle of Rachel’s internship Colin Campbell brought home three of the four adoptees. “They were so full of hope and excited to be starting a new chapter in their lives,” Johnston recalls. The next morning at dawn Rachel found Nancy teaching them how to make bread—apparently to be their job from then on—and Nancy gushing “about the big garden she would have that year because all her new children would work in it.”

Discipline in the Allisons’ household was harsh and included being hit with rubber hosing or a sort of stick and was used to the point of drawing blood. These instruments could fall for disrespecting Serene or not wanting to eat her raw-food meals, for spilling a glass of juice or failing to fill the water reservoir. Another common punishment was being put out of the house for days at a time to sleep on the porch or in the car without blankets until the children apologized.

In the case of Engedi, the toddler, discipline came because of her attachment to CeCe, who was around the same age Engedi’s own mother had been. Engedi was adopted at nearly two years old but had been so
malnourished she looked like she was six months. “I remember holding her like she was going to break,” said Isaiah.

To make her bond with Serene, the Allisons would place the child on the floor between them and CeCe and call her to come. If she went to CeCe, CeCe, Kula and Isaiah all remember, the Allisons would spank her until she wet herself. “They would beat that little girl, and you would see bruises on her and she would pee and she wouldn’t even be able to breathe. It used to make me so sad,” said CeCe.

The Allisons broke the bond not only between Engedi and CeCe but also her other siblings as well, forbidding CeCe from braiding Cherish’s hair, as she had since they were young. “In Africa I was their everything, I was their mom and their dad. I always took care of them. . . . That was something special that she stole from me.”

In March 2007 Serene gave birth to her fifth biological child. After she returned from the hospital Serene began demanding to know whether the children had been sexually abused in Liberia. In the larger world of Liberian adoptions, this was becoming a panicked theme, as sexual activity and abuse in some of the orphanages was coming to light. She began accusing CeCe of being sexually interested in Sam and took her for a gynecologist’s exam—the only doctor’s appointment CeCe recalls having had in Primm Springs. Serene criticized CeCe’s developing body and accused her of dressing like a prostitute, and Nancy Campbell called a family friend and told her the family was worried because Sam had been seen walking with CeCe, holding her hand like a lover. In turn, Isaiah claims that Serene began to flirt with him, kissing him on the lips in a way that she didn’t kiss any of the other children, calling him sexy, and asking him to massage her. CeCe felt that life at the Allisons’ was worse than the orphanage, but she worried about Cherish and Isaiah, whom she had promised her mother to always look after.

In September 2007 Serene wrote a cryptic essay for
Above Rubies
, saying that her “mothering was challenged beyond anything I could have imagined.” She wrote vaguely about “situations that seem out of your control or even out of your children’s control” that other adoptive mothers might face.

From then on
Above Rubies
, which had begun to resemble a doting grandmother’s scrapbook, mentioned the Liberian children with decreasing regularity. But between the lines they were there, as Campbell wrote about the need for strict discipline and training of children to bring about harmony in the home. “If you have to have a little war before you have peace,” Campbell wrote, “don’t be afraid.”

When the Campbells first said they had adopted from Africa, their next-door neighbors, the Bufords, who are African American, thought it was a wonderful thing. Carolyn Buford, a sixty-four-year-old retired foster parent, saw the children on the Campbells’ property and occasionally walking or riding a bike down their long country road. One of Buford’s fellow church members told her she had stopped by the Campbells’ compound when she noticed the children’s hair wasn’t properly combed to ask the two sets of adoptive parents if she could help, but was politely turned away. Buford spoke to the children when they passed in the street, but she noticed they were often abruptly called home.

One day two of Buford’s foster sons saw Alfred and John out in the yard and asked if they could go make friends. They came back quickly and told Buford that something wasn’t right—the boys were working hard and the Campbells had told them to leave.

Buford wasn’t the only neighbor who was increasingly bothered by the goings-on at the compound. Carl Graham, a fifty-seven-year-old veteran police officer, had been Hickman County’s first black cop, working in various departments for thirty years; its first black elected official; and one of its first successful black business owners, running a heating and air conditioning repair shop. Graham lives on a property adjacent to the Campbells, and when he first saw the children they were walking down the road in traditional African dress. He didn’t see them again until Colin Campbell contacted him one scorching summer day, asking him to repair his AC. When Graham entered the Campbells’ house, he said a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl he had never seen before stood up, walked across the room, and put her arms around him.

“She looked at me like, ‘you’re here.’ That look sent chills through me, and it bothers me to this day,” he told me. Graham and his partner returned to complete the job several days later, and while they were working in the Campbells’ basement, he said they heard “blood-curdling screams.” Graham stepped outside and saw Colin Campbell leading the same girl, Jennice (whom the Campbells had named Psalmody), by the arm and neck to a metal tool shed behind the house. Graham said his partner, who is not African American, told him he had no dog in this fight. The screaming lasted fifteen or twenty minutes. Before they left, Colin Campbell came in to say he hadn’t whipped the child but just isolated her to calm her down. “He said these children are programmed and taught to lie,” Graham said. “That in their native country, when they get old enough
to speak, they teach them how to deceive and lie and cheat, and that’s what we’re trying to get out of them.”

In the fall of 2009 Graham said that Colin Campbell knocked on his door on one of the first freezing mornings of the year and asked if he had seen Jennice, because she had left sometime in the night. Buford said Nancy Campbell had come to ask her the same thing. Graham said he would organize a search party and went to the Campbells’ house. There, Nancy Campbell told him she had just found Jennice (who did not answer my requests for an interview) out back. Graham went to look, and said that he found her in a crawl space below the porch, dressed in summer clothes and open shoes. “She was shivering like nothing I had ever seen and crying uncontrollably.”

Graham said Nancy Campbell told him that Jennice had been disobedient and couldn’t come in until she apologized. It was then Graham thought he understood what had really happened. “She had been out all night in the freeze. They had put her out,” he said. “If you want my opinion, they were building an alibi.” Graham told Campbell she could let the girl in the house or he would take her home with him; Campbell grudgingly let them enter. “I got her warmed up enough that she got herself composed. And I whispered in her ear, I am going to get you out of here, but I need you to apologize and just be here until I can.”

Later that day, Buford said, the girl came to her house and asked for help. Buford said she took her to an unresponsive Hickman County DCS. “They said there wasn’t any abuse going on up there.” Together with a Nashville woman, whom Buford said had taken in another of the Campbell’s adoptees after she left the household, they appealed to other local leaders, whose influence allowed them to get Jennice out of the home.

In January 2011 Buford said the Campbells’ son John, who also did not respond to interview requests, came to her as well. Buford and Graham had often seen him working long hours in the Campbells’ vegetable garden, from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon in both the cold of winter and the heat of high summer, when Graham said even Tennessee guard dogs are brought inside. When John appealed to Buford, he was already eighteen and beyond the Department of Children’s Services’ mandate. Buford, who was leaving town for her sister’s funeral, took him to the homeless mission in Nashville, but she said that John, whose only experience of life in America had been in Primm Springs, returned to the Campbells within hours. “They were going to help him, but this boy is so illiterate and frightened,” said Buford. “He’d been there pretty much all his life and kept in the dark, and now he’s afraid of everything.” Buford
later received a letter from John (who had at least basic writing skills)—in his handwriting but not using his normal vocabulary—saying it was all a mistake and the Campbells were good to him. From there he was sent to Kentucky, then returned for a period before leaving again.

Graham exhausted the possibilities of agencies he thought could help: the county sheriff, DCS, the state Department of Health, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. He never heard back from anyone—something that was not a surprise to another Tennessee children’s welfare worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, who said that Hickman County has a reputation for not wanting to rock the boat with religious conservatives in the Primm Springs area. In frustration Graham and Buford called a local news channel, but when producers showed up at the Allisons’ home, the children refused to talk. (“We didn’t know who they were,” Kula remembers.)

“Slavery is alive and well. There’s no doubt in my mind,” Graham told me in 2011. “I couldn’t get anybody to do anything for those kids. I am strictly bitter over that, and I will always remain bitter.”