Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  IN THE SPRING of 2006, about the time Luma learned the Fugees had been booted from the community center field, a twenty-six-year-old Sudanese refugee named Nathaniel Nyok decided to organize a soccer team in Clarkston. Nyok, who lived in Clarkston, was one of the Lost Boys, a group of young men from southern Sudan who had been separated from their families during a civil war between the Muslim and Arab north and the Christian and African south. The boys had endured unimaginable misery in a years-long hegira through the Sudanese wilderness—crossing rivers full of crocodiles and scrubland roamed by ravenous lions—before making it to a series of refugee camps across the border in Kenya and Ethiopia. Nyok had been separated from his family during fighting when he was eight years old. With other orphans, he had made it to Kakuma, a sprawling, water-starved refugee camp of more than seventy thousand in an arid corner of northwestern Kenya, where he lived for ten years before he was accepted for resettlement, along with thousands of other Lost Boys, in the United States. One hundred and fifty of the Lost Boys had been resettled in and around Atlanta, and many of them, like Nathaniel Nyok, ended up in the apartments of Clarkston. Resettlement had been hard on the Lost Boys, but they endured the difficulty by relying on one another. Their main escape was soccer, and so Nathaniel Nyok had no problem recruiting players for a club team he started and called simply the Lost Boys Soccer Team.

  “We grew up playing soccer,” Nyok said. “We are still young and so we just want to play and keep our game alive. Some of us still have this trauma of not having our family, our parents. So we just want to have a little fun.”

  Nyok and his team needed a place to practice and noticed that the field in Milam Park, which was owned and maintained by the City of Clarkston, was hardly ever used. Armistead Field, as it was called, was the town’s general-purpose field. A large rectangle with a blanket of rich Bermuda grass, Armistead was surrounded by thick stands of pine trees and sat at the foot of a hillside that offered perfect, bleacher-like viewing. At opposite ends of the field, there were rusty chain-link backstops, the vestiges of a long-defunct Little League baseball program. Lately, there was almost no activity on the field at all. It was just a giant virginal pitch of green that to Nyok seemed almost to plead for soccer. There was one hitch: a small sign affixed to the chain-link fence around the field warned that no one was to use the field without permission from City Hall.

  Nathaniel Nyok had been in the area long enough to know that Clarkston was a town of rules. Cops doled out traffic tickets to drivers for violations that seemed impossibly arcane to many newcomers. One local refugee restaurant owner who had undertaken a small remodeling project in his restaurant without the proper permit had been handcuffed and carted away to jail. Signs in Milam Park notified would-be picnickers that they needed to obtain permission from City Hall before so much as eating a sandwich in the shade of the large wooden pavilions there, and as a result, the pavilions remained mostly empty on even the balmiest summer Saturdays. There was even a sign in Milam Park notifying visitors that simply walking a dog on the park grounds, even leashed, would bring a fine of no less than five hundred dollars. Clarkston, it was clear, was a town that liked things just so.

  Nyok didn’t want any trouble for himself or for his team. Despite the urge to hop the fence and start playing soccer immediately on Armistead Field, he did as the sign there demanded: he called City Hall to ask for permission. Nyok was referred by a clerk at City Hall to a man known to most in town simply as Coach Cooper, a onetime Little League coach who, Nyok was told, oversaw scheduling of the fields in Milam Park. Nathaniel called Cooper, who was pleasant and happy to schedule the Lost Boys for use of Armistead Field. So late one afternoon, Nyok and his friends went to the park to scrimmage. It wasn’t long before the first squad car showed up from the Clarkston Police Department.

  “They claimed it was neighbors who called and told on us,” Nyok said. “We said, ‘We don’t drink, we don’t make noise, we don’t cause any problems—why can’t we play?’ They said, ‘We can’t tell you, but you have to leave the field.’”

  Nyok and his teammates left the field, certain there had been some kind of misunderstanding. Nyok called Coach Cooper, who confirmed that the Lost Boys had permission to play. Again they took the field to practice, and again the police came. When Nyok asked for an explanation, he said, the police refused to respond.

  “The police were rude,” he recalled. “They would intimidate us every time they came.”

  Nyok was now annoyed and determined to get some answers. He went to City Hall and asked to speak with Mayor Swaney. Swaney denied any knowledge of the situation and told Nyok to take it up with the police chief. The chief too claimed ignorance and told Nyok that Coach Cooper handled the schedule for Armistead Field. Nyok called Cooper. Cooper gave the Lost Boys permission. The Lost Boys showed up to practice. The Clarkston Police arrived and told them to leave.

  This absurd process went on over the course of several weeks, until the Lost Boys Soccer Team had been ordered off the field at least eight times. The last time, Nyok said, both he and the police were fed up. When the police arrived, he asked them why they were interfering with his right to assembly as guaranteed by the United States Constitution. The police were in no mood for a lesson on constitutional law from a Sudanese refugee.

  “They gave us a warning that myself and some of my assistants would be arrested,” Nyok said. “I wanted to talk to them but they’d tell me, ‘Keep quiet or you will go to jail.’ I was quite upset. I decided I don’t want to get in trouble for soccer.”

  Nathaniel Nyok and his friends were worn down, and thought they finally understood the reason behind the treatment they were receiving from Clarkston town officials.

  “It came into our mind that it’s because we are not from this country,” he said.

  Nyok and his friends were disappointed not to have a place to play soccer. But they were more upset about what the whole strange episode seemed to tell them about their status in their new home. They didn’t feel welcome, Nyok said. They felt like outsiders.

  “When I came to America I heard it was the land of opportunity, and indeed it was,” said Nyok. “But on that particular day, I was disappointed. It was too bad for me and my team. We live in Clarkston. If we can’t play in our city, where can we play?”

  IN JULY, A little more than a month before tryouts for the Fugees’ fall season, a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution named Mary Lou Pickel caught wind of the dispute between Mayor Swaney and the Lost Boys over use of the field in Milam Park. Pickel interviewed the mayor and Nathaniel Nyok and published news of the dispute in a succinct 633-word article. “The Lost Boys of Sudan want to practice soccer in their new hometown of Clarkston,” Pickel wrote. “But when the refugees play it usually ends with the police telling them to, well, get lost.”

  “There will be nothing but baseball down there as long as I am mayor,” Mayor Swaney said in the story. “I don’t have no beef with nobody. But I do have a problem with these big guys playing soccer because those fields weren’t made for soccer.”

  The mayor’s comments puzzled Nathaniel Nyok. In his conversations with the mayor over use of the field, he said, the mayor had never mentioned any prohibition on “big guys” playing there—or any ban on soccer at all. He’d simply referred them to Coach Cooper. Something didn’t quite make sense to Nyok. Why would the mayor send him on a wild goose chase involving the police chief, Coach Cooper, and numerous Clarkston police officers if the issue were simply that there was a rule against adults playing soccer in the park? Something else didn’t follow. Whatever a large green rectangle of grass has been made for, Nyok felt, it could probably sustain plenty of other activities—football, soccer, ultimate Frisbee, lawn bowling, doing cartwheels, sunbathing—without upsetting the cosmic order. But even so, there was a more explicit problem with the mayor’s argument that, as he’d put it, “those fields weren’t made for soccer.” In the corner of the parking lot above the disputed patch of gras
s in Milam Park, there was a cracked and aged sign that in faded lettering proclaimed the name of this public space to any who might pass by—ARMISTEAD FIELD. Beneath those words, three simple, hand-painted illustrations, sun-bleached but still decipherable, declared exactly what sorts of games the park’s founders intended Clarkston’s residents to play on the field. There was a drawing of a baseball, a football, and, just as prominently, a patchwork orb of geometric shapes clearly recognizable as a soccer ball.

  IN FACT, MAYOR Swaney was not alone among politicians around the country in his consternation over the “soccer problem.” Controversies over the use of public park space for soccer have long been part of the game’s history in the United States. But in recent years, disputes over soccer in public parks were occurring more frequently around fast-growing cities like Atlanta, due largely to the influx of immigrants—particularly Latinos—from soccer-playing cultures around the world. Unable to get field time on park space set aside for more traditional American sports like baseball and football, soccer enthusiasts around Atlanta were moving their games to whatever open spaces they could find. In Doraville, a suburb north of Atlanta, a group of Latino immigrants had provoked a public outcry by playing soccer in a town cemetery.

  A group of local white kids tossing a Frisbee in a cemetery would probably not make the newspapers. But soccer seemed to be different, and indeed the Doraville cemetery incident—and the town mayor’s angry reaction—received coverage in the local press. Soccer, perhaps more than ever, had become a conspicuous symbol of cultural change. The sight of a large group of Latino men taking over a public space as if it were their own—to play a foreign-seeming game, no less—seemed to gall those Americans who were growing fed up with immigration, legal or otherwise.

  In justifying his soccer ban in Clarkston, Mayor Swaney had cited an argument public officials commonly deployed against the sport: the grass defense. It was a firmly held belief among soccer’s detractors that the game was harder on turf than other sports. There was something to the charge. Americans typically played soccer in highly structured settings; kids joined teams, which were part of leagues, which scheduled games well in advance. Parents showed up a half hour before game time, bivouacked with folding chairs, blankets, and a picnic lunch, then, after the game, broke camp and headed home, after which the field—usually at a large, well-maintained soccerplex—had time to recover. Immigrants tended to play soccer more the way American youths play basketball in public parks—in spontaneous pickup games that went on all day. It was also true that many soccer-playing immigrants to America came from poor nations where the game was less likely to be played on grassy fields than on rectangles of bare earth on which grass could never take root for the constant use. Poor immigrants and refugees from war-torn regions, it’s probably fair to say, do not share Americans’ collective obsession with lawn care.

  And yet, sorting out fair and responsible use of playing fields in public parks was not among society’s more insurmountable problems. All around the country, in fact, progressive city and county governments were taking steps to accommodate soccer’s growing popularity, by developing scheduling systems so that fields could be shared for multiple uses, and in the case of DeKalb County, in which Clarkston was situated, converting less trafficked fields for soccer-specific use. In Clarkston, accommodating soccer would have been easier than in most places for the simple reason that there was no competition for field time in Milam Park. The Little League baseball and football teams in town had folded. No adult sports leagues had asked City Hall for use of the field. No one besides the Lost Boys soccer team, it seemed, actually wanted to play sports on Armistead Field.

  Of all the episode’s strange details, this one puzzled Nathaniel Nyok the most. In the weeks following the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, he would drive by Milam Park to have a look at the activity there, expecting to see all those baseball teams Mayor Swaney was looking out for. But Nyok saw no baseball teams or anyone else—just a beautiful green meadow, neatly mowed and seeming to cry out for someone to roll some kind of ball across it.

  “It was empty,” Nyok said, confusion still in his voice. “Indeed, there were no people on the field.”

  WHEN LUMA HEARD about Swaney’s comments in the Atlanta newspaper, her heart sank. It was midsummer. Tryouts for the Fugees’ fall season were fast approaching, and she had hoped to hold them on the very field that Swaney had declared off-limits to soccer. His statement that the park was reserved exclusively for baseball had seemed unequivocal. Luma concluded she would have to make other plans. She had just a month to find the Fugees a new home field within walking distance of the apartment complexes where her players lived. Since the Fugees had almost no budget, save the small amount the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA had put into equipment and occasional use of a small bus to get to away games, Luma wouldn’t be able to pay much, if anything, to rent a field. Her options were few.

  Administrators at the YMCA offered to help out, and after a few weeks, they called Luma to let her know they’d found a solution: a field out back of Indian Creek Elementary School, just across the Clarkston town line on one of the town’s main drags. Luma had driven past Indian Creek Elementary School countless times without ever realizing that there was a field out back. One afternoon in July, she got in her car and drove to see her team’s new home.

  When she saw the field at Indian Creek Elementary, Luma was stunned. It was a rutted, gravelly moonscape of gray Georgia chalk, with a few tufts of grass and weeds on the fringes. The field and surrounding asphalt track were covered with glass from broken bottles, and there were no soccer goals—only a couple of rusting and wrenched chain-link backstops. Despite the field’s condition, there was a crowd. Members of the Clarkston refugee community were taking their afternoon strolls around the track. Young men were playing their own pickup games of soccer on the field. There was a jungle gym alongside the track, where parents watched their toddlers tumble about. A basketball court alongside the field drew a crowd of young men who went back and forth between playing hoops and sitting in their cars, smoking blunts and sipping beer from cans in brown paper bags. As one of few open spaces in Clarkston available to the public, the field at Indian Creek Elementary was certainly well used, but it was a rotten place to run a youth soccer program.

  “There was broken glass everywhere, electrical wires hanging down,” Luma said. “And mass chaos.”

  LUMA LIKED TO run her practices in private, where her players were free of distractions. The field at the community center was in a secluded bog behind the town library, away from the social flow. The field at Indian Creek, on the other hand, was something like the refugees’ town square. The field at the community center was fenced, and Luma had no problem running off her players’ friends who stopped by after school to heckle them as they submitted to her regimen of running and calisthenics. At Indian Creek, anyone could wander onto the field, and there was little Luma could do about it.

  The field did have a few things to recommend it. For one, it was easily accessible to the apartment complexes around Clarkston, some of which were visible through the gangly stand of loblolly pine trees on the field’s northern side. The elementary school itself had classrooms, where Luma could run tutoring for her kids before practice. Perhaps best of all, the field was free. The principal of Indian Creek had given the Fugees use of the field with the understanding that she wasn’t offering much: there were no lights, no soccer goals, no bathrooms.

  Luma resolved to put the best face on the new field. There were no bathroom timeouts during soccer games, she would tell her players, for example, so there would be no bathroom breaks during practice either. But if pressed, Luma would admit the situation with the field made her angry—at Mayor Swaney, at the folks who ran the community center, and even at her sponsors at the YMCA, who, she felt, should’ve worked harder to meet the community center board’s demands, even if they were unreasonable. Another thought nagged Luma. She knew that if a soccer team of well-to-do subur
ban kids were assigned to play on a field of sand and broken glass, their parents would call the team’s sponsors, the league—or someone—in protest. The parents of the Fugees’ players were seen as powerless, she believed, and unlikely to make much noise, so no one thought much about shunting the team off to such a dire environment. Her team would be playing at a marked disadvantage.

  THE SITUATION WITH the field underscored a frustrating reality for Luma. She aspired to build the Fugees into a well-organized program that provided refugee children with the sorts of opportunities—athletic, educational, or otherwise—available to better-off American kids. But for now, the Fugees’ organization consisted of one woman running practices on a ragtag field while scrambling off the field from one crisis to the next. Luma realized she needed help, and she began to recruit from the pool of volunteers she interacted with when dealing with refugee families. The catch, of course, was that Luma couldn’t afford to actually pay a salary. She would have to find someone as passionate about the work as she was.