Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  As the boys connected with Luma, another complicated dynamic began to take shape: they began to compete for her approval. It was perhaps true that any group of ten- to fifteen-year-old boys would jockey for the approval of an authority figure. But for the boys on the Fugees—newly arrived refugees trying to find comfort and security in a strange, often threatening environment—the craving for Luma’s blessing was especially powerful. She was in many ways a surrogate parent, and like insecure siblings, the boys were on the lookout for any signs that others were favored. When Luma spoke casually in Arabic to an Iraqi or Sudanese player, other boys who didn’t understand would feel left out and wounded. So Luma tried to make sure she didn’t inadvertently speak Arabic, even when it was easier, and she disciplined herself not to play favorites. For her teams to work, Luma realized, everyone would have to feel they were treated fairly.

  An early rivalry between two star players proved particularly instructive for Luma. Two of the most talented players on the oldest Fugees team—Jeremiah Ziaty’s older brother Darlington and an Iraqi Kurd named Peshawa Hamad—spent months squabbling with each other, making cutting remarks about each other’s religion and ethnicity as they battled for Luma’s approval.

  “They were both incredibly athletic and incredibly talented,” Luma said. “And they couldn’t figure out which one I liked more. Darlington didn’t like that Peshawa and I spoke the same language. Peshawa didn’t like that I was close with Darlington’s family. He would make comments about Darlington being dark skinned. And they were both very selfish on the field.”

  As the team’s biggest personalities, Peshawa and Darlington influenced other players, who felt pressured to take sides. So Luma set out to get the boys to work together. When she took groups of players out to movies, she made them sit next to each other. When she was invited to Darlington Ziaty’s home for dinner, she brought Peshawa along. When Peshawa addressed her in Arabic, she responded in English. And in addition to subtle gestures, she laid down the law.

  “She said we’re all foreigners, and this is a team where everybody unites,” recalled Yousph Woldeyesus, an Ethiopian player. “And she told them she was going to kick them off the team if they didn’t.”

  The next season, Darlington and Peshawa became a dynamic scoring combination, and their team went undefeated.

  BUT AS QUICKLY as the Fugees improved and came together, the teams could all fall apart from one season to the next. Players moved away and newcomers arrived, forcing Luma to start all over again with the lessons in team unity and organized soccer basics. Even from game to game, Luma had to work hard to keep her kids focused on what they had and not on the disparities with the competition in gear, uniforms, and support. The Fugees’ outfits were often ragged compared to the shiny, new uniforms the competition wore. For a time they wore jerseys Luma had made out of T-shirts she bought in bulk at a local discount store. The Fugees’ numbers had been written on the shirts in water-soluble ink, so as the game progressed, the numbers ran into blurry clouds on their sweat-soaked backs. The Fugees often played in mismatched socks, and they didn’t have any of the fancy accessories—the matching, logoed equipment bags, which some teams had embroidered with players’ names and numbers. And their sideline was always empty.

  Luma noticed also that the Fugees seemed to provoke stronger reactions from the competition than had the girls’ team she’d coached at the YMCA. It was as if they were some sort of Rorschach test for the people they encountered on the field. Sometimes the reactions were generous. After one game, Luma thought she was being chased by a parent from a rival team. When the man caught up with her, he said he and the other parents on his team had heard about the Fugees and wanted to know how they could help. They donated soccer balls and cleats.

  But as often, the Fugees seemed to provoke hostility. Opponents sometimes mocked the Fugees’ accents during play, or else asked the players why they had a “girl,” as they always seemed to put it, for a coach. The father of the goalie of one of the Fugees’ competitors filed a complaint with the league, accusing one of the younger members of the Fugees of threatening to slash his throat during a game, a charge the player vehemently denied. During a heated game outside Atlanta, players and even some parents directed a vulgar racial epithet at Fugees players from the sideline. Some of the trash talk was perhaps the sort that happens everywhere during the heat and frustration of competition. But much of the negativity directed at the Fugees also seemed born of resentment, from parents who had spent a small fortune on gear, soccer clinics, and team fees only to see their sons trounced by a haphazardly equipped group of kids with foreign accents. And occasionally, even the referees seemed to be piling on. They would grow frustrated at having to pronounce the names on the Fugees roster during the pregame roster check. Once, two line judges were reprimanded by a head referee for snickering when the name of a player named Mohammed Mohammed was called. Another time, a referee implied that Luma had been cheating on her team’s age requirements when he saw that so many of the Fugees shared a birthday on January first. He was unaware that immigration officials often assign New Year’s Day as a birthday for refugees whose parents don’t know their children’s actual dates of birth. Luma was doubly offended by what the allegation said about her intelligence.

  “I mean, come on,” she said. “If I’m going to cheat I’m going to come up with something better than that.”

  THE HOSTILITY THE Fugees encountered, the deficiencies in their gear, their lack of support on the sidelines, seemed only to solidify the bonds among this otherwise disparate group of boys. They sensed they were underdogs and connected with each other over the prospect of evening the score once the whistle blew.

  Luma grew closer with her players’ families too. She identified with them. She too had left the familiarity of home for a new and sometimes alienating place. She understood what it was like to feel like an outsider, and she’d come especially to value friendships in this new place. Families in extreme poverty would ply Luma with dinners of rice, mantu, and freshly baked Afghan bread, leafy African stews, and foofoo, the doughy, elastic porridge made from ground cassava root. And over time they learned her preferences. Beatrice Ziaty, for example, liked to make especially fiery stews, but she cut back on the peppers whenever Luma was coming over because she knew the coach couldn’t handle the hot food. And Luma’s proclivities wore off on her impressionable young players as well, in sometimes unexpected ways. Once, she had taken Jeremiah to the grocery store when she agreed to babysit him for a night for Beatrice. In the supermarket, Jeremiah asked his coach to buy bacon, one of his favorite foods, so they could have it for breakfast. Luma explained that as a Muslim, even a secular one, she didn’t eat pork, and suggested they pick turkey bacon instead.

  A few weeks later, Beatrice herself was at the store, Jeremiah in tow, when she reached for a package of bacon at the meat counter.

  “You can’t eat that,” Jeremiah told his mother. “Coach says it’s not good.”

  Beatrice told her son that she liked pork—it was one of her favorite foods—and that as a Christian she was free to eat it as she pleased, which she intended to do. But Jeremiah wouldn’t budge: he told his mother he wouldn’t be getting near the stuff. Coach said it was no good. When I met the Ziatys, they had not had pork in their apartment in more than a year.

  “Since Coach can’t eat it, he will not eat it,” Beatrice explained with a shrug.

  So what do you do? I asked.

  “I don’t buy it!” Beatrice said.

  But even as the Fugees congealed into a family, the world around them was still roiling.

  Chapter Eight

  “They’re in America Now—

  Not Africa”

  In January 2006, a Clarkston resident and Nigerian immigrant named Chike Chime was driving to a local pharmacy to buy some prescription eyedrops when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw a Clarkston police cruiser with its lights flashing. Chime (who pronounces his name CHEE-kay CHEE-may) pu
zzled over what he might have done wrong. He wasn’t speeding—that he was sure of. He had just pulled out of the driveway of his apartment complex and hardly had a chance to accelerate when the cruiser’s lights began to flash. Chime also wondered why he had been singled out. His vehicle had been hemmed in by a slow-moving car in front and another car behind; all three vehicles were moving along the narrow space on Montreal Road at a crawl. As he pulled his 2005 Honda Accord onto the shoulder and waited for the officer to approach, Chime held out hope that it had all been a misunderstanding and that he’d soon be on his way.

  The officer behind the wheel of the cruiser was Timothy Jordan, a Clarkston police officer hired by Chief Charlie—Chollie—Nelson and who had a troubled past. Jordan had been fired from another police force in the area for excessive use of force, and was found “unfit” to serve as a police officer in a psychological review, in part, the therapist wrote, because of his volatile temper. Jordan said he informed Chief Nelson about his past but was hired anyway. Another officer was assigned to work with Jordan for a time, to monitor his behavior. But by the time he pulled over Chike Chime in January 2006, Jordan was working the beat alone. Even so, there would be a witness to his interaction with Chime, in the form of a video camera mounted on the dashboard of his Clarkston Police Department cruiser.

  AT FIRST GLANCE, Chike Chime appeared a typical, newly arrived Clarkston refugee. He had a dark complexion and spoke with a pronounced African accent. In fact, Chime had been in the United States for nearly fifteen years. He had come voluntarily as an immigrant, not as a refugee, for the same reason so many immigrants come to the United States—to make a better life for himself, to take advantage of economic opportunity not available to him in his home country of Nigeria. Chime lived for six years in Queens, New York, before moving to Atlanta, which he found more open and more accepting of a Nigerian immigrant than New York had been.

  “It was more multiculturally advanced than New York,” Chime said. “All races seem to be doing very well here. Discrimination wasn’t as bad. I was impressed because you can get a job, you can live in a decent house, and you can start a small-scale business with not much money.”

  Chime was determined to do just that. He had sold insurance in New York and thought he could make a business of it in Atlanta, where the steady flow of immigrants and refugees provided a market for reliable, low-cost insurance policies for their cars and homes. For start-up capital, Chime pawned his car for $1,500, then hung a shingle in a modest strip mall just outside of Clarkston.

  In the intervening eight years, Chime’s business had grown steadily. His company was grossing some $120,000 a year, $50,000 of which Chime counted as profit. He had employees and had become well known in the community, where he supplemented his income by helping newcomers with their tax returns. He thought of himself as a walking embodiment of the American dream, and in fact, in Clarkston, Chime stood out for his success. He dressed well and every few years leased a new car. But his newly leased cars seemed to attract scrutiny and even hostility from local police officers who were used to seeing refugees riding around in beat-up vehicles with dented bump-ers and sagging suspensions.

  “I have a dark-skinned pigment and I lease new cars,” Chime said. “You can’t have dark skin and a new car in Clarkston without harassment.”

  It was after nine o’clock and dark when Jordan approached Chime’s vehicle on the shoulder of Montreal Road. Jordan carried a large flashlight, not a standard-issue model, but a heavy light with a long metal casing like a baton. He had bought it himself. Jordan approached the car with his flashlight on and shone it in Chime’s eyes. His tone was friendly; Jordan asked Chime how he was doing, and Chime, still in his car, asked the officer what he had done wrong. If Jordan assumed Chime was a recently arrived refugee, this inquiry might have startled him. Most refugees in Clarkston were terrified of police officers. Chime, though, had been in the United States long enough to know his rights and to understand the requirement of probable cause for traffic stops.

  Officer Jordan seemed not to appreciate Chime’s question. He ordered Chime to get out of the car and to produce his driver’s license.

  “I stopped you for speeding,” Jordan said, his voice sharpening.

  “I wasn’t speeding. I just—” Chime responded.

  Jordan snapped. He lashed out with his fists, grabbing Chime by his lapels and slamming him back against the car. Jordan then spun Chime around. Now Chime had his hands up and was leaning over the trunk, with Jordan, who on the video appears a full foot smaller than Chime, on his back. Chime protested that he was trying to get his driver’s license from his wallet, as Jordan had ordered. But Jordan was now in full-on confrontation mode. He grabbed Chime around the head, which he pushed toward the ground, and twisted Chime’s arms behind his back. Chime was now pleading for mercy, but with his arms behind his back and Jordan shoving his head down, Chime began to lose his balance, and to tip over toward his right. At this moment, Jordan, holding Chime’s arms behind his back with one hand, took his metal flashlight and with a roundhouse motion bashed Chime on the back of the head.

  Chime wasn’t sure what had hit him. He was stunned, and fell toward the pavement with Jordan on top of him, pressing his face into the asphalt. Jordan reached in his belt and pulled out a small can of pepper spray, or actually, cayenne oil, a more powerful form of pepper spray that often causes severe swelling in the eyes and faces of those unlucky enough to get a dose. Clarkston Police Department regulations required officers to carry two bottles of water in their squad cars in order to rinse the substance from the faces of any suspects on which they’d had to discharge the chemical. Jordan placed the nozzle against Chime’s face and eyes and pressed the button. Chime cried out, and was silent—he fainted, he believes. The video camera captured Jordan’s next words to a now flaccid Chime.

  “It’s you—it’s Africans,” Jordan said. “I have nothing but problems from you guys. Always love to argue. That’s why there’s so much crap going on around here—because you guys don’t understand I’ve got a job to do.”

  Chime felt his face and windpipe swelling from the cayenne oil. His head was throbbing from the flashlight strike. Jordan never offered to rinse the pepper oil from Chime’s eyes. At one point on the tape, as Chime whimpered in the backseat of the cruiser and complained about the chemical, Jordan told him, “I hope it burns your eyes out.”

  At some point, Jordan apparently got spooked by Chime’s condition. He called an ambulance. Chime remembers that it seemed to take forever to arrive. The medics rinsed Chime’s face and flushed his eyes with water, providing some relief. When Chime revived, the medics gave Jordan the all-clear to take him away. Chime was booked on a variety of charges, including speeding and resisting arrest. It was a Friday night at the DeKalb County Jail, and in the confusion of his booking, no one told Chime that he might be eligible for bail. Chime had no one at home to notice his absence; he and his wife had separated. So he sat in jail for one night, and another, and yet another, essentially lost in the system. As he waited among a population of much tougher and younger men, Chime’s greatest worry was not for his physical safety so much as for the business he’d worked twelve years to build.

  “Some of my customers thought I was dead,” Chime said. “And some of my tax customers thought I’d run away with their refund checks.”

  The incident involving Chike Chime and Officer Jordan underscored the degree to which tensions remained in Clarkston some fifteen years or more after resettlement began. While some sought to write off Jordan as simply a rogue cop with an anger-management problem, months later, in the relative calm of a lawyer’s office during a deposition related to the incident, he was able to articulate the frustration he and many others felt toward people like Chime who were changing the social landscape around Atlanta and who, in his view, weren’t doing enough to adapt to local customs.

  “They’re in America now,” Jordan said of the immigrants and refugees. “Not Africa.”
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  Chapter Nine

  Get Lost

  The Fugees themselves were not immune to the continued tensions between refugees and some locals. At about the same time as the incident between Chime and Jordan, problems began to develop between the team and its hosts at the Clarkston Community Center, where the Fugees practiced. Emanuel Ransom, a board member at the center who had long criticized the refugee community for not contributing more to the center’s upkeep, thought the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, which sponsored the Fugees, should pay more for the program’s use of the field. And after some refugee teenagers got into a fight near the field, Ransom insisted that the Y hire security guards. The Y balked. While her sponsors and hosts squabbled, Luma tried to stay focused on her players and their families. But late in the spring season of 2006, she received a call from an executive at the YMCA who told her that the relationship between the Y and the center had broken down completely. The Fugees, Luma learned, were no longer welcome to play at the center at all.

  Luma still had games to play that spring, so she scurried to find a place for her team to practice. She eventually found an unused field a few miles outside of Clarkston and managed to borrow a bus from the YMCA to shuttle her players back and forth from the apartment complexes to practice. It wasn’t a long-term solution, financially or logistically. Luma didn’t have unlimited use of a bus, and in the autumn season, a few months away, it would be dark by the time Luma could get the kids bused to a field outside of town. Luma didn’t know what she would do for a permanent fix, so she focused on the remaining games, and vowed to work on the field issue over the summer.

  AT THE END of a soccer season, Luma was usually exhausted. She liked to take a break to recover, to spend a little time visiting friends from Smith or go to the mountains of western North Carolina, where she would turn off her cell phone and lose herself in the cool air and calming perfume of the laurels and rhododendrons. In a quiet moment before leaving Clarkston to recuperate, Luma logged on to Google Earth and scanned a satellite view of the town for open spaces. From orbit, Clarkston is a jumble of rectangles around gray splotches of asphalt—all those apartment complexes—nestled alongside the white vein of I-285 and indistinct from the confusion of angular shapes and shadows that emanate from downtown Atlanta in a pattern of gradually decreasing density. Swaths of green were few and far between. There was a jade-tinted rectangle in the middle of Clarkston, however: Armistead Field in Milam Park. It was less than a half-mile from the old community center field, and easily accessible from all corners of Clarkston. Perhaps that would work. Luma would need permission from Mayor Swaney, who recently had been reelected to a second term. No telling what that would entail. But Luma resolved to take the matter up when she was rested. August, and the beginning of a new season, was still a long way off.