The white-frame house where Clifford Triplett lives sits on the outskirts of this dusty Delta town, down a country road with stray cotton clumped along its edges like small drifts of snow.
Out front, there is a porch swing and a pair of plastic pink flamingos. In the back, three puppies frolic in the mud next to pens that house a half-dozen chickens, three turkeys and a hog named Rebecca, who will be a family pet until January, when she moves to the freezer.
Inside, there is a grandfather who plays catch and an older brother who helps with homework. And there is a grandmother who, every night, gives Clifford a shot to help his starvation-stunted body grow and rubs his skin with cocoa butter, hoping to heal with her hands the scars that once criss-crossed his body from head to toe.
Most of the marks have faded by now, but you can still see evidence of the cigarettes burned into his scalp and a single dark line, the legacy of a particularly brutal whipping, that runs down the middle of his back.
He weighs 50 pounds, which is skinny for a 9-year-old but not for one who, at age 5, weighed just 18 pounds, the average size of a 12-month-old. His size-8 pants are belted at the waist to keep them up, but he’s growing fast enough that his grandmother has already let out the hems, even though she bought them in September.
As for the other scars and hunger pangs, the ones no one can see, those, too, are being mended by the soothing touch of love and time and patience.
This Thanksgiving, four years to the day after he was brought to a Chicago hospital starved and beaten to the brink of death–a story that drew national attention and renewed scrutiny of the state’s child-welfare system–Clifford Triplett will celebrate his first holiday with a family that is truly his.
Last month, he was formally adopted by his paternal grandparents, Rebecca and Willie Triplett, who both grew up in Humphreys County and returned to its cotton fields and catfish farms from Chicago’s South Side seven years ago, seeking a simpler and safer way of life.
Rebecca, 51, is a trimmer at a local catfish processing plant. Willie, 50, works for the owner of the 2,000-acre farm surrounding the two-bedroom house where they live rent-free.
In March 1996, Clifford joined them and his 11-year-old brother, also named Willie, following a protracted, sometimes bitter struggle among the various agencies and people entrusted with his future.
His grandmother keeps the adoption papers in a manila folder, which, like the other mementos hung on the walls and stacked on the shelves of this modest home, trace Clifford’s long and troubled journey into the family’s arms.
She has saved newspaper accounts of the suffering he endured at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend, both of whom went to prison, although his mother has since been released on parole.
On the living room wall hangs the certificate from the group home where he stayed while people debated who should care for him. Tucked into the dresser mirror of the room he shares with his brother is a program from the Shiloh Deovelente Church, where both boys sing in the children’s choir.
On a desk is their computer, a gift from their uncle Clifford, who lives next door and works for the school district. He helps them use it when he watches them in the afternoons. In the back room, a stand displays Clifford’s prized possession: the trophy from his Little League team.
On a balmy afternoon the Friday before Thanksgiving, Clifford tossed a baseball behind the house with his brother and his grandfather, whom he calls “Pops.” The hog, which the boys named after their grandmother to tease her, grunted for attention. Butch, Lady and Duke, the three dogs, tumbled at their feet.
Clifford threw hard and fast, and when the ball skittered out of his brother’s hands and into the field, a grin came to his narrow, normally serious face.
“Pops,” he crowed, “I’m going to be a pitcher.”
Hardly anyone thought Clifford Triplett would ever play baseball.
When his mother, Aretha McKinney, brought him to St. Bernard Hospital on Thanksgiving in 1993, he was so severely dehydrated and malnourished that he was fading in and out of consciousness. He would have died within a day.
St. Bernard transferred Clifford to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, which has a pediatric intensive-care unit. The remains of the staff’s potluck dinner were still out when he arrived.
The irony of this child being starved on the holiday of plenty escaped no one. “It was a case you would expect to see from some war-torn country, not from somewhere on the CTA line,” said Dr. Christopher Clardy.
Starvation wasn’t the only cruelty inflicted upon Clifford. Whip marks, burns and bruises covered most of his 35 1/2-inch body. There was an imprint of a belt buckle on his back and rope burns on his wrists. He had a healed rib fracture and two missing teeth.
But it wasn’t until he began to get better that the extent of his ordeal became apparent.
An angry public learned that investigators with the Department of Children and Family Services had visited his family’s apartment at 6161 S. Michigan Ave. twice that year to check reports of abuse and allowed Clifford to remain there despite evidence he was being hurt.
Clifford lived with his mother and her boyfriend, an ex-convict named Eddie Lee Robinson, in a first-floor apartment. Two more of McKinney’s children lived with them or with other family members who occupied apartments upstairs. Willie, who had spent most of his childhood with his grandparents in Mississippi, also stayed with his mother for about four months that year.
The boys’ father, Willie Triplett Jr., wasn’t really part of their lives. Like their mother, family members say, he had a drug problem.
In April, a DCFS investigator found that Willie had been beaten, noticed Clifford had scars and recommended family counseling. Instead, McKinney called the Tripletts and told them to come get Willie.
They asked for Clifford, too, but she refused, they said.
Three months later, another DCFS investigator documented that Clifford slept on a cold porch, isolated from the rest of the family and next to a pile of dirty clothes. She noted that he had scars and scratches and looked like he was 2 years old. His mother claimed he was a dwarf and mentally retarded.
The investigator left him there.
In Belzoni, Rebecca and Willie Triplett learned what happened to Clifford when they saw it on the WGN-TV news after they finished Thanksgiving dinner.
As soon as Rebecca could get leave from her job, the couple drove up to Chicago to see him. They were there within the first week, but Clifford had already been swept into the web of the child welfare system. His mother would be paroled before he was released.
McKinney was convicted of cruelty to a child and served less than 3 years of a 7-year sentence. Robinson, whose criminal record included rape and burglary, pleaded guilty to abusing Clifford and was sentenced to 9 years in prison. The two DCFS investigators were fired.
Medically, Clifford was ready to be discharged from the hospital within a week or two, but he stayed at Rush for more than six months while everyone tried to find the perfect home for him–and disagreed about whose home it should be.
Then, after a stint at Hephzibah Children’s Association, a private child welfare agency in Oak Park, he moved in with a foster family who wanted to adopt him.
But the adoption fell through, and Clifford moved to another foster home.
All the while, the Tripletts wanted to take Clifford home with them, but a series of misunderstandings and missteps complicated their efforts. The scrutiny surrounding the case made everyone that much more cautious.
Robert Harris, the Cook County public guardian’s office courtroom supervisor who represented Clifford, questioned whether the boy and his grandmother connected emotionally. Others were outraged after a television reporter talked Triplett into borrowing a video camera and shooting footage of Clifford riding a tricycle in the hospital.
While he waited, Clifford continued to make progress. In March 1995, Harris went to his kindergarten to check on him and was amazed to see him use a pair of scissors.
He still keeps the cut-out leprechaun in Clifford’s bulging case file.
With the backing of the inspector general’s office, the Tripletts eventually won custody of Clifford and the confidence of his workers.
There were more serious issues too. Clifford lacked what the Tripletts gently refer to as manners. He had none of Willie’s ” Yes, sirs” and “No, ma’ams.” They worried at first that he wasn’t eating enough or saying much.
“We told him that this was his home, and that he ain’t got to worry about what happened any more,” Rebecca Triplett said. “From then on, he was like a bird.”
Now, he can make his way through a heaping dinner plate of barbecued chicken, butter beans, cabbage greens, candied yams and cornbread–and remember to say grace first.
He attends Ida Greene Elementary School, where he is in the 3rd grade and doing well. He has a little trouble with reading but excels at math, according to his teacher, Claudia Stewart.
Clifford is the smallest child in his class of 25, though not remarkably so. He has plenty of friends but gets teased occasionally about his size. Willie, the protective older brother, advises him to ignore it.
The two boys are inseparable. “Willie,” said Rebecca Triplett, “is Clifford’s backbone.”
Neither of them talks much about what happened, but they have not forgotten. Willie will say only that he “remembers a lot of things.” Clifford remembers being abused and he remembers being hungry.
“It hurt,” he said.
Since Clifford’s mother was released on parole a year ago, she has not called or tried to contact Clifford, according to the Tripletts. Her other children, including a son she had while awaiting trial, are in foster care. The family does not hear much from Clifford’s father, either. He never visited Clifford in the hospital or came to any of his court hearings.
Every night, Clifford gets a shot of protropin, a growth hormone, and is so used to the procedure that he doesn’t even flinch. There is still some question about whether Clifford has an organic condition that will affect his growth, and although he did so well in counseling that he no longer sees a psychiatrist, Rebecca Triplett knows that the questions and anger may resurface some day.
Everyone in the small, white-frame house is just thinking about each day as it comes. For Thanksgiving Day, because Rebecca only has one day off work, they will go to Shoney’s, though she plans to cook up one of her famous feasts–with menus that Clifford and Willie print out on their computer–for Christmas.
This Friday before Thanksgiving, Willie Triplett took his grandsons into town, as he does most Fridays, to pick up some groceries and buy the boys a treat.
They rattled off down the country road in a white pickup truck. The town water tower, which is painted with a heart, stood in the distance.
The image signifies Belzoni’s place in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, but there’s no reason it can’t have other meanings, too.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Find background on this story plus more photos of Clifford at chicago.tribune.com/go/clifford
