The Human-Trafficking Victim Next Door

Initially, when Djena got to the States, she was tasked with taking care of Denise and Mohamed’s youngest child, Timou, who was not yet two years old. Djena bottle-fed him and kept him entertained. She also helped in the kitchen, cleaning up after Denise had finished making dinner. Over the years, her duties expanded. She would wake up at 6:30 A.M., make the other children’s beds and tidy up their rooms, and then spend the rest of the day doing housework. Denise would send her to the grocery store, and Djena, who couldn’t read, learned to shop by the look of things—the symbol on a label, the color of a package. Years later, a neighbor would recall being surprised by what seemed like an incongruous sight in an affluent suburban neighborhood like Southlake: a little girl dressed in a head scarf and faded, ill-fitting clothes, trudging down the street carrying multiple bags of groceries, her eyes cast downward.

Denise and Mohamed told friends that Djena was their niece—rescued, they said, from poverty in Guinea—and they were gentle with her in front of visitors. In private, they were cruel. Once, Denise took Djena into the back yard and hosed her down with cold water, as one might a dog, saying that she smelled bad. There were subtler humiliations, too. When Djena first got her period, Denise scolded her for using a sanitary pad that she’d found in the house without first asking permission.

In a family where hugs and other displays of physical affection were common, Djena was hardly ever touched, unless she was being disciplined. The kids would tell her that she wasn’t pretty and that she would never find a boyfriend. The only warmth she received came from Rema, the youngest Toure daughter—born after Djena arrived—who once gave her a birthday card. The Toures’ eldest daughter, Saran, who was a few years younger than Djena, was generally hostile. For a while, Djena kept a bin with her clothes in Saran’s closet, until Saran threw it into the hallway, angry at Djena for forgetting to close her bedroom door. Djena moved the bin to the garage.

Sometimes Denise would punish Djena by banishing her from the house, and Djena would seek refuge at a local park, where there was a covered bench that she could sleep on if needed. In November, 2011, after Denise got upset that Djena wasn’t doing enough to help the kids get ready for school, Djena slept in the park for a week. The nights grew so chilly that Djena would go to a public rest room and use a hand dryer to warm herself. When the Toures found her—Timou went on a run and spotted Djena at the park—she was reluctant to return. “I told them I wasn’t going back,” Djena later recalled, though, ultimately, she relented. It was too cold to continue sleeping outside, and there was nowhere else for her to go.

Although Djena wasn’t literally trapped in the Toures’ home, she was trapped by her circumstances. Djena came to the U.S. knowing no English; she had grown up speaking Malinke and French. Over time, she learned to speak English by listening—to the Toures, who switched between French and English at home, and to the television, which she watched after finishing her housework. She taught herself to read using a copy of “Hooked on Phonics” that Denise had been using with the younger children, and which Djena kept hidden under Rema’s bed. At one point, Denise found the book and forced Djena to return it, but Djena got hold of it again, and used it to make flash cards. She taught herself to ride a bike, too, even though she didn’t have one. At night, after taking out the trash, she would grab one of the Toure kids’ bikes and take it for a quick ride.

For years, Djena had almost no contact with anyone outside the Toure household. That changed in the mid- to late two-thousands, when she began walking Timou and Rema to school and encountering other children and their parents. While accompanying the Toure kids to a local track-and-field program, she met Anthony Meehan, one of Saran’s classmates. Meehan, a gay Black fourteen-year-old, was accustomed to isolation; from Djena’s bearing, he sensed something similar in her experience. “Anyone who’s by themselves, I like to talk to them, because I was bullied in high school,” he explained later. He saw Djena standing alone and introduced himself. She was guarded at first, but, as the program went on, they eventually became friends.