Slave Next Door by Bales Kevin & Soodalter Ron

Slave Next Door by Bales Kevin & Soodalter Ron

Author:Bales, Kevin & Soodalter, Ron. [Bales, Kevin & Soodalter, Ron.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: University of California Press
ISBN: 9780520255159
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


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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1 6 8 / T H E F I N A L E M A N C I PAT I O N

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



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