Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  LUMA MADE THE team the focus of her energies in those early days in Georgia. But however fulfilling, coaching soccer couldn’t distract Luma from frequent bouts of homesickness for her friends and family. She still wasn’t speaking to her parents, who would hang up the phone on her if she ever called home, and she missed her younger sister Inam, who was now a teenager and no longer the little girl Luma remembered. Then in 2002, Luma’s grandmother Munawar, her lifeline to her family, died in Jordan.

  When Luma was grieving, her preferred therapy was to get into her daffodil yellow Volkswagen Beetle, put on some music—something fast and peppy—and simply drive. She didn’t particularly know her way around Atlanta, but the unfamiliar surroundings—the strange mixture of gleaming glass office buildings, columned houses, stucco McMansions, and long, desolate stretches of worn-out row houses—distracted her with a sense of discovery. In Atlanta, one could traverse gaping boundaries of race and class by simply crossing a street.

  On one of those trips, Luma found herself lost in what seemed to be a run-down area beyond the eastern side of the Perimeter, only a few miles east of Decatur. What she saw confused her. Amid the decrepit apartment complexes, the soulless strip malls, the gas stations, and the used-car dealerships, there were women walking the streets in chadors and hijabs and others in colorful African robes and headdresses. Luma came upon a small grocery store with a sign indicating that it was a Middle Eastern market called Talars. She pulled into the parking lot, went in, and took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the old familiar smells of cardamom, turmeric, and cumin. Luma could hardly believe it. She stocked up on groceries—pita bread, hummus, and halloumi, a salty sheep and goat’s milk cheese that was one of Luma’s favorites—then went home to make herself a meal like her grandmother might’ve made.

  Luma became a regular customer at Talars, and each time she visited she again confronted the strange sight of African and Middle Eastern dress on the streets. She had discovered Clarkston the way most Atlantans did—by accident—and like most of the people who drove through Clarkston, Luma was too preoccupied with her own worries to give much thought to the unusual tableau around her.

  LUMA ALSO HAD to make a living, and waiting tables wasn’t bringing in the sort of income she needed to survive in Atlanta. Neither did it suit her nature. Luma was better at giving instructions than taking them. She looked into the possibility of opening a franchise of an ice cream parlor chain, and when that didn’t pan out, decided to start her own business, a café that sold ice cream and sandwiches, a place where people could spend the day and relax without being hassled. She found an available storefront in downtown Decatur midway between her apartment and the YMCA, and cobbled together a group of investors from the friends and contacts she’d made around Atlanta, including some of the parents of her players at the Y. In 2003 Luma opened her own café—Ashton’s, named after a friend’s dog—in an out-of-the-way building in Decatur alongside the still busy Atlanta-to-Athens railroad line.

  Running Ashton’s was tough. Luma found herself putting in sixteenhour days, preparing food early in the morning and cleaning up late after the close. It was lonely work, but Luma had taken on the challenge of succeeding, for herself and for her investors. She still wasn’t speaking with her parents in Jordan, and her desire to prove her independence to her family back home drove her to work even harder. But the plan wasn’t working out. Ashton’s was too far off the beaten path in Decatur to lure in enough customers to make money, and Luma found herself working longer and longer hours to keep the place afloat. She was still coaching her girls’ team in the evenings, and she was exhausted.

  One afternoon Luma decided to drive to Talars to pick up some of her favorite foods from back home. Distracted by her anxiety over losses at Ashton’s, she inadvertently drove past the store, and had to make a U-turn in the parking lot of a dreary old apartment complex called the Lakes. While turning around, she came across a group of boys playing soccer on the asphalt. From behind her windshield she could see the boys playing the game with the sweaty mixture of passion, joy, and camaraderie she recognized from the games played in the empty lot on the other side of the fence from her grandmother’s house in Amman. But unlike in Amman, the boys playing in Clarkston seemed to come from a confusion of backgrounds—they were white, black, and brown. Luma parked her car and watched.

  “I stayed there for over an hour,” she recalled. “They were barefoot but they were having such a good time.”

  The sight of boys of so many ethnicities in one place began to open Luma’s eyes to what was happening in Clarkston, just down the road from her own home. She asked friends about Clarkston, including a woman she’d met in Decatur who worked with refugees at one of the resettlement agencies. Luma began to learn the particulars of the difficulties refugees faced upon arriving in the United States. At the time, thousands of refugees had already been resettled in and around Clarkston, and more were coming every month.

  “I’d never questioned why they had a Middle Eastern grocery store in Clarkston,” she said. “I knew there were refugees, but I had no clue about the numbers.”

  On another trip to the grocery store in Clarkston, Luma pulled into the same parking lot. A game was under way. Luma reached into the backseat and retrieved a soccer ball, then got out of her car, approached the boys, and asked if she could join in. The boys were wary. She was a stranger—a grown-up and a woman to boot. There were all manner of crazies in the apartment complexes in Clarkston—maybe she was one of those. But Luma also had a new ball, and the one the boys were playing with was scuffed and ragged. They reluctantly allowed her to join in. Once the game started, the boys saw that Luma could play. She set them up with quick passes and broke up attacks on her team’s goal. Soon, Luma was running herself sweaty, pleasantly lost in a game with strangers. It was a rare moment of connection in a world that for Luma still seemed impenetrable and socially separate.

  “It reminded me what I missed about my community at home,” she said. “And at the time I felt like such an outsider.”

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks and months, Luma continued to stop in at the Lakes on her trips to Talars. She was getting to know the boys, learning bits about their pasts and their families’ struggles. Some had just arrived and spoke little English. Her Arabic and functional French helped her communicate with kids from the Middle East and Sudan, as well as the Congo and Burundi. They began to open up, gradually, about their lives. Luma learned that the boys lived in all kinds of improvised family arrangements, often not with parents but with uncles, aunts, and cousins. In snatches of conversation she got a glimpse of the boys’ isolation from the new world around them and their desire to connect. The loneliness that resulted from being uprooted was something that Luma intuitively understood. Luma also learned that pickup soccer on the town’s parking lots was the only kind of soccer the refugee kids could afford; even the modest fees required to play soccer at the local public schools were prohibitively high for most of the boys’ families.

  Luma couldn’t help but notice how much more passionate these boys were for the game compared to the girls she coached at the YMCA. They played whenever they could, as opposed to when they had to, and they didn’t need the trappings of a soccer complex or the structure of a formal practice to get inspired. Luma decided that the kids really needed a free soccer program of their own. She didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to start or run such a program. She certainly couldn’t fund it, and with a restaurant to run and a team of her own to coach, she hardly had time to spare. But the more she played soccer in the parking lots around Clarkston and the more she learned about the kids there, the more she felt a nagging urge to engage, and to do something.

  Eventually, Luma floated the idea of starting a small, low-key soccer program for the refugees to the mother of one of her players, who was on the board at the YMCA. To her surprise, the Y offered to commit enough money to rent the field at the community center in Clarkston and to buy equipment. Luma figured
she could devote a few hours a week to a soccer program and still keep Ashton’s running. She decided to give it a try. With the help of some friends, Luma crafted a flyer announcing soccer tryouts at the Clarkston Community Center, in English, Vietnamese, Arabic, and French. She made copies and on a warm early summer day drove around Clarkston in her Volkswagen and posted the flyers in the apartment complexes. She wasn’t sure that anyone would show up.

  Chapter Five

  The Fugees Are Born

  Perhaps no one in Clarkston was as excited to hear about the prospect of a free soccer program as eight-year-old Jeremiah Ziaty. Jeremiah loved soccer. Since arriving in the United States with his mother, Beatrice, and older brothers, Mandela and Darlington, Jeremiah had been cooped up in his family’s Clarkston apartment on strict orders from his mother. She was protective to begin with, but after she was mugged on her very first commute home from her job at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Beatrice had taken a hard line. She wanted the boys inside when they got home from school. When Jeremiah asked his mother if he could try out for the new soccer team in town, she was unyielding.

  “Certainly I say, Jeremiah,” Beatrice told him, “you won’t play soccer every day.”

  But soccer was one of the few things that could tempt Jeremiah into defying his mother.

  TRYOUTS WERE TO be held on the field of the Clarkston Community Center, a dilapidated brick and cream-colored clapboard building on Indian Creek Drive that had once served as the old Clarkston High School before being abandoned by the county in 1982. The building and property were refurbished in 1994, complete with a spiffy playing field in the back, by a group of Clarkston boosters who wanted a community center for the town. At the time, the center was run by an energetic African American named Chris Holliday, who early on found that though the community center was governed by a board of trustees made up mostly of longtime Clarkston residents, it was the refugee community that seemed to embrace the center with special zeal. Cooped up in small apartments around town, they were desperate for any place to go, eager to meet neighbors—or even better, real American locals—and they signed up for English and computer classes in large numbers. As Holliday was running these programs inside the community center building, the field out back was going largely unused. When it came to figuring out what sort of activities should take place on the field, Holliday said, the refugees were nearly unanimous.

  “Overwhelmingly,” he said, “the refugee community kept saying ‘We need soccer.’”

  When the community center offered a soccer program for young kids, Holliday said, there was no question about which group—Americans or refugees—was more intent on playing.

  “Refugee parents ran to get their kids enrolled,” he said, laughing at the memory. “I mean, we had moms signing people up.”

  Along the way, though, some longtime residents on the board of the community center began to question Holliday’s focus on programs for refugees. Like so much in Clarkston, the community center was becoming a chit in the battle over the town’s identity. Art Hansen, a professor of migration studies at nearby Clark Atlanta University and a volunteer on the community center board in those days, said that he and other advocates for the refugees had begun to think of the community center as a kind of “refugee town hall.” But at a dedication ceremony for the soccer field out back, Hansen said, he learned that not everyone in Clarkston felt the same way. When Hansen mentioned his delight at seeing a group of refugee children take the field to play soccer, he was rebuked by a couple of Clarkston residents who served on the center’s board and the city council.

  “They very clearly said they didn’t like all these newcomers here,” Hansen recalled. “There was this clear other sentiment saying, ‘This is the old Clarkston High School. This is a Clarkston building. This belongs to the old Clarkston—the real Clarkston. Not these newcomers.’”

  Emanuel Ransom, the black Pennsylvanian who had moved to Clarkston in the 1960s, had worked hard to turn the old Clarkston High School into a community center and served on its board. He felt strongly that the newcomers didn’t do their part to chip in to keep the center running, and resented that the place he’d worked hard to create was becoming so closely identified with refugees.

  “I’ve never been a refugee,” Ransom explained to me over a coffee at the local Waffle House one morning, in a version of a complaint I would hear many times in Clarkston. “But I know when I was in a foreign country, I almost had to learn their culture to survive, to eat. I didn’t have to become a citizen or anything—speak the language fluently—but I had to do things to get by. And I wasn’t asking for anything. Anything I wanted, I had to learn it or earn it.”

  With the refugees at the community center, Ransom said, “Nobody wants to help—it’s just give me, give me, give me.”

  But there was one reason that even the most xenophobic community center supporters grudgingly accepted the idea of a refugee soccer program on the new field out back: it was great PR to the world outside of Clarkston. The community center depended largely on foundation grants for funds, and grant applications featuring support of refugee programs had proven successful in securing donations for the center’s budget. The fact that Luma’s program was funded by the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, which paid the community center for use of its field, didn’t prevent the community center from billing itself as a home to a refugee soccer program, even if many of the center’s board members would have preferred the facility to focus on programs for what Emanuel Ransom called “real Americans.”

  LUMA HAD LITTLE appreciation for the degree to which the community center—the home of her new soccer program—had become embroiled in the battle over Clarkston’s identity when she pulled her Volkswagen Beetle into the center’s parking lot on a sunny June afternoon in 2004, before her team’s first tryouts. She was uncertain too about what kind of response her flyers would generate among the boys in the complexes around Clarkston. They were naturally wary. A church in town offered a free youth basketball program that doubled as a Christian outreach operation, a fact that offended Muslim families who had dropped in unawares. Luma didn’t know what to expect.

  But on the other side of town, Jeremiah Ziaty left no doubt about his enthusiasm for the new team. His mother was still at work when he set out from the family’s apartment, a small backpack on his shoulder, ready to play.

  When Jeremiah arrived, he joined twenty-two other boys on the small field out back of the community center. On the sideline, he unzipped his backpack carefully, as though it contained a fragile and precious artifact, which in a way it did: a single black oversized sneaker. Jeremiah took off his flip-flops and slipped the shoe on his right foot, leaving his left foot bare, and took the field.

  Before tryouts began, a sense of puzzlement seemed to settle on the boys: Where, they wondered, was the coach? Luma was right in front of them, but a woman soccer coach was a strange sight to young Africans, and especially to the young Muslim boys from Afghanistan and Iraq. During a shooting drill at an early practice, Luma was instructing the boys on how to strike the ball with the tops of their feet when she overheard a lanky Sudanese boy talking to the others.

  “She’s a girl,” he said. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Luma ordered him to stand in goal. She took off her shoes as the boy waited beneath the crossbar, rocking back and forth and growing more anxious by the moment. She asked for a ball, which she placed on the grass. Then, barefoot, as the team looked on, she blasted a shot directly at the boy, who dove out of the way as the ball rocketed into the net.

  Luma turned toward her team.

  “Anybody else?” she asked.

  ON THAT FIRST day of tryouts, Jeremiah, in particular, played with all of the joyful abandon you might expect of an eight-year-old who had been stuck inside for months in a dark two-bedroom apartment. Soon the other boys had given him a nickname—One Shoe—which Jeremiah didn’t seem to mind in the least. At the end of the practice, he took his shoe off
, carefully wiped it down, and placed it in his backpack before slipping on his flip-flops and starting the two-mile walk back home.

  “See you later, Coach,” he said to Luma as he left the field.

  “See you later, One Shoe,” she said.

  WHEN BEATRICE ZIATY found out her son was sneaking off to play soccer with strangers after school, all hell broke loose.

  “You’re too small,” Beatrice scolded him. “Don’t go out of the house!”

  Jeremiah started to cry. And he cried. He begged his mother to let him play, but Beatrice held her ground. She wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her son. And she certainly wasn’t going to be defied—after all she’d done to get the family here. Inside, though, Beatrice was torn. She knew an eight-year-old boy needed to run, to get outside. She knew it wasn’t fair to keep him confined to a small apartment all the time.

  “You say you have a coach,” she finally said to Jeremiah. “Why you can’t bring the coach to me to see?”

  “Momma,” he said, “I will bring her.”

  The conversation took place outside, in front of the Ziatys’ apartment. Luma came in her Beetle and parked out front. Beatrice walked outside with Jeremiah and explained her concerns to Coach Luma: She wanted to know that her son would be safe and with an adult. She wanted to know how to get in touch with Luma if something went wrong. And she wanted to make sure that Jeremiah wasn’t walking alone through Clarkston.

  “She did the bulk of the talking,” Luma recalled. “She said that Jeremiah was her baby and she wanted to know where he was going.”

  Luma promised to pick Jeremiah up before practice and to drop him off afterward. He wouldn’t have to walk alone. She gave Beatrice her cell number and promised to be reachable.