Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  Every now and then, the dust coughed up a figure: a heavyset Iraqi man whose gray dishdasha dragged on the ground, a Sudanese man with a henna-dyed beard who walked laps on the track counterclockwise, a wooden staff in hand, and neighborhood kids who wandered freely through the scrimmage as though the field were any other right-of-way. The area behind Indian Creek Elementary was one of only a few open spaces in Clarkston accessible to the public, and in the afternoon, it seemed to attract nearly everyone in town who dared to venture out into the leaden heat. The field was the crossroads of the entire refugee community.

  LUMA SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the edge of the playing surface, her eyes calm and appraising beneath the bill of her baseball cap. There were obvious attempts to gain her favor, but Luma wasn’t easily impressed. When one young man took the ball the length of the field, dancing and dribbling through a succession of defenders before tapping in a shot, he looked toward Luma for acknowledgment of his prowess.

  “Do you know how to pass?” she called out.

  As the boys played, Luma glanced every now and then toward a footpath that led through a stand of pines to the apartment complexes where a star player from the previous season lived: Christian Jackson, the Liberian striker who had lost his siblings in that apartment fire in Clarkston the previous spring. Christian, the young man who scored five goals in the first Fugees game I’d seen, still had not shown up.

  “Where’s Christian?” one of the boys asked.

  “He’s at home on the couch, watching TV,” said another. “He said he’d come when he felt like it.”

  It was distressing news. Maybe it was the rumored hair rule, or perhaps after all he’d been through Christian simply preferred staying at home on the sofa. Whatever the reason, Luma wasn’t going to beg him to turn out. Luma felt she could teach kids a lot about soccer, but she couldn’t teach them to want it.

  The evening sun dipped behind the pines to the west of the field, casting a slanting yellow light into the clouds of chalk that hung in the air. A group of adults were playing a casual game now at the south end of the field, and refugee children, out for some playtime with their parents, dangled from the bars of the nearby jungle gym. A young Somali girl and her brother, a toddler, wandered onto the field and through the scrimmage. This was their field too. The boys played around the kids and paid them little mind. They were focused on the game, lost in it, even.

  Luma watched from the sideline in silence. This was the sight that had drawn her to start the Fugees in the first place, two years back, on a lark and with little appreciation for what she was getting herself into: a group of refugee boys who had survived the unimaginable, strangers now in an unfamiliar land, playing the game with passion, focus, and grace that seemed, for a brief moment anyway, to nullify the effects of whatever misfortune they had experienced in the past. In such quiet moments, Luma would sense the responsibility she had taken on and find herself wondering, Can I really get these kids to win? Given what they’d already been through, the challenges they faced in creating new lives in America, the social turmoil in Clarkston, and the attitudes of many locals toward these newcomers, there was another question that for now was perhaps best left unconsidered: Would they at least get a fair shot?

  LUMA BLEW HER whistle and summoned the boys in. Sweating, panting, and covered in dust, they formed a circle around her at midfield.

  “Prince,” she said, addressing the Liberian veteran with a head of braids. “If your hair is not cut by the first day of practice, you’re off the team.”

  The boys glanced at Prince, but no one said a word.

  Practices would take place twice a week and would last three hours, Luma said. The first half of practice time would be for homework and tutoring. Luma had arranged volunteers for that. Tutoring was mandatory. The second half would be for soccer—and running, lots of running.

  “If you miss a practice, you miss the next game,” she told the boys. “If you miss two games, you’re off the team.”

  “I have eleven spots,” she added. “I’m not looking for a superstar. I’m looking for players who are willing to learn.”

  The final roster for the Fugees would be posted on the bulletin board of the Clarkston Public Library by ten a.m. on Friday, she told the boys—no reason to call before then.

  “If you don’t follow the rules, you’re off the team,” she said. “There are plenty of kids who want to play. If you do follow the rules, you’re going to have a lot of fun.”

  Luma held up a stack of paper and passed a sheet to each player—contracts she expected her players to sign.

  “If you can’t live with this,” she said, “I don’t want you on this team.”

  Hands—white, brown, yellow, black—reached for the paper. As the boys read, their eyes widened.

  I will have good behavior on and off the field.

  I will not smoke.

  I will not do drugs.

  I will not drink alcohol.

  I will not get anyone pregnant.

  I will not use bad language.

  My hair will be shorter than Coach’s.

  I will be on time.

  I will listen to Coach.

  I will try hard.

  I will ask for help.

  I want to be part of the Fugees!

  Chapter Eleven

  Figure It Out so You Can Fix It

  “Why you have to cut your hair?” Mandela Ziaty asked. “You play with your feet—the hair doesn’t touch the ball.”

  “Who are you representing?” Kanue Biah said.

  “I represent myself.”

  “No,” said Kanue. “You represent your coach and your team.”

  Luma’s hair rule had set off a debate between the veteran players on the Under 15 team. Prince had refused to cut his hair and wouldn’t be joining the team. With Christian already out—he never turned up at tryouts—and the missing players from the previous season who’d moved away from Clarkston, the Under 15 team was suddenly very short on talent. The absence of Prince and Christian in particular upset Mandela and Fornatee Tarpeh. Neither Mandela nor Fornatee had long hair. Mandela’s mother, Beatrice, wouldn’t allow him to grow his hair long; that wasn’t acceptable for young men in Africa, and she didn’t care what the American boys did. And Fornatee kept his hair cut so close to his scalp that he nearly looked bald. But the boys had counted on playing soccer with their friends and fellow Liberians, and now that Prince and Christian weren’t around, they blamed Luma and her rule that hair must be “shorter than Coach’s.”

  Luma’s hair was short—a couple of inches, maybe, trimmed above the ears and high on her neck—a length that didn’t leave the Fugees much wiggle room to fashion their own personal hairstyles. But she had her reasons for the rule. The Fugees had come in for abuse from some of their opponents outside Atlanta—in the suburbs and in the country—for their accents and names; she didn’t want to encourage hostility with hairstyles like the cornrows and braids that were worn by gang members in Clarkston and in the rougher sections of Atlanta. The issue of hairstyles was also important to Luma’s relations with perhaps her most important constituency: the mothers of her players. Many, like Beatrice Ziaty, associated braids with black Americans—whom many African refugees further associated with Clarkston’s street gangs, in the all-too-common habit of some new arrivals in America of adopting the worst of America’s racial assumptions. In any event, these mothers would be far less likely to entrust their sons to Luma if they thought the boys would be in dangerous company. Respectable African men, Beatrice believed, wore their hair short and neatly trimmed.

  There was a final reason Luma resolved to hold firm on the hair rule. The previous season, she had become so enamored of Prince’s talent on the field that she allowed him to get away with skirting the team rules. He would leave tutoring early or skip it altogether, acts that undermined Luma’s authority before the rest of the team. Players soon started to challenge her and to follow Prince’s lead. Luma counted the episode as a hard
lesson, and vowed not to let any player, no matter how talented, get away with flouting team rules.

  “They idolized him and I idolized him,” Luma said of Prince. “But it created a dynamic where he wasn’t accountable, and I made excuses for him.”

  Luma didn’t explain her rationale. She expected her players to figure it out for themselves. But Fornatee didn’t see the point. All he knew was that the hair rule was putting him in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between his coach and his friends.

  Fornatee had been in the United States for seven years, longer than most of his teammates, and was perhaps the most assimilated member of the team. Few refugee kids in Clarkston knew anything about American football, but Fornatee had been around long enough to develop a strong allegiance to the Atlanta Falcons, the local NFL team. He’d even considered playing football for his high school this fall instead of rejoining the Fugees, but he’d re-upped for soccer in part to play with Prince and in part because he knew he needed the Fugees, perhaps now more than ever.

  Earlier in the summer, Fornatee’s father had been in the backseat of a car driven by a friend when they were rear-ended by an out-of-control truck. He was critically injured, suffering broken ribs and severe internal hemorrhaging. Fornatee’s father had been in the hospital for a month and was still weeks away from being sent home when tryouts came around. He faced a long recovery. Without his income, the family’s situation in Clarkston had become dire. Fornatee’s mother, he said, was in Africa. He had an aunt in Clarkston and an older brother who worked at the Atlanta airport. They were scraping by, but Fornatee wasn’t sure how long they could make it without his father’s income.

  “I’m scared,” he said. “My daddy can’t work. I’m wondering where we gonna get the rent. They gonna put us out ’cause we can’t pay the rent?”

  Though he didn’t like to admit it to his friends, Fornatee had come to trust and depend on Luma for support. She was one of few adults in Clarkston he trusted, a conclusion he’d come to after a simple gesture she’d made one day after practice. Fornatee had injured his hand when he fell during a scrimmage. When Fornatee hurt himself, he was used to just dealing with the pain and letting whatever hurt heal itself naturally. But after practice, Luma told him to get in her Beetle and drove him to a nearby CVS pharmacy for first-aid supplies, an act of concern Fornatee had never forgotten.

  “That’s why I want to be on the team,” he said, referring to the trip to CVS. “She’s more than a coach to me—she cares about you like she’s your parent.”

  But Fornatee also felt loyalty to his fellow Liberians, Prince and Mandela, among others. It was a connection, he said, that was more powerful than the one he felt to his Fugees teammates from other countries, a reminder that the gelling of the Fugees into a unit was by no means a foregone conclusion, particularly for the Under 15 team. At times their differing backgrounds all but vanished in the shadow of things that bound them together as a team. But the possibility of fracturing into cliques based on country or tribe or language was always there.

  “We’re international and all that,” Fornatee said of the Fugees. “But you hang out with people who speak your language and who come from your country. When we leave the field, I’m not going to call those other kids. They don’t have my number, and I don’t have theirs. That’s just the way it is.”

  Prince was one of Fornatee’s best friends. Both young men played offense. They’d planned to set each other up for goals and help each other on the field. And together they’d lobbied other Liberian friends to come out for the team, only to have them bail out when they realized they’d have to get their hair cut. Fornatee wanted Prince and Coach to work things out. But he knew Prince wasn’t going to cut his hair. It was up to Coach, he thought, to give in.

  “I guarantee you,” he said, “if Coach said, ‘Don’t cut your hair,’ all those guys—Prince, everybody—they would come back.”

  THE FUGEES’ PRESEASON practices took place amid miserable conditions. It was late August. The Georgia sun was blast-furnace hot, and still high enough in the sky in the late afternoon that its rays were unimpeded by the tree line. And the dust was everywhere. The players inhaled clots of it as they played. It ground into their hair and eyes, and settled into their clothes, giving sweat-soaked T-shirts the feel of wet, sandy beach towels. Mixed with sweat, the dust formed an abrasive paste that collected in the clammy spaces between the feet and the simulated leather of the boys’ cleats, gnawing blisters into their ankles. On the black skin of the African players, the dust turned to a gray sort of mud when soaked with rivulets of sweat, so that when the players wandered quietly to the sideline to take a sip of water, it looked like the shift change at a limestone quarry. And yet no one mentioned this quiet scourge—not Luma and not her players. It was as if all had made an unconscious pact to defy the shortcomings of their new home field by simply refusing to acknowledge them. Some problems weren’t so easily ignored. There was broken glass and trash on the field that posed a hazard to players; Luma had her teams walk the field, scouring for such debris. And it was impossible to tune out the presence of the rougher element that hung around the field. At one early practice, a young man with a beer and a joint in his hand approached Luma as she coached on the sideline. She asked him to leave, but the young man refused, and in fact was joined by two friends, who hovered menacingly alongside the field. Luma took out her cell phone and dialed the police, but a squad car didn’t show up for nearly half an hour, by which time the men had left.

  “The Y isn’t going to do anything about a new field until one of us gets shot,” Luma said to Tracy, the team manager, afterward, half-kidding.

  And there was another hard-to-ignore shortcoming of the Fugees’ field: there were no soccer goals. The Fugees’ sponsors at the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA had received a $9,100 grant to supply the Fugees with uniforms, equipment, and goals and had promised to have them put in place by the time the Fugees started fall practices. And yet no goals had arrived. The delay, Luma had been told, was due to concern that the neighborhood around Indian Creek was so bad that the new goals might be stolen. Luma had persuaded the elementary school’s principal to allow the new goals to be cemented in place, but the Y still hadn’t sent them. Luma registered their absence as another small sign of neglect and disrespect for her team, and one with practical implications. Soccer was a game played in three dimensions, and soccer without goals, Luma said, was “like playing basketball without a hoop.”

  After two weeks of practicing without goals, Luma got fed up. She called the YMCA and insisted that they offer some sort of temporary solution. A coordinator at the YMCA offered to loan Luma an extra set of goals the Y had in a park not too far from Clarkston, if Luma was willing to pick them up herself. So on a hot August day Luma and Tracy rented a U-Haul and drove to the park. There were three sets of goals in the park; a small set of the sort that was used for kiddie leagues, and two larger, regulation sets. The Fugees played with regulation-size goals, so Luma and Tracy got to work, disassembling a pair of the heavy metal frames into piles of individual tubes, which they loaded one by one onto the truck. They drove across town, carted the metal tubes up a hill and onto the field at Indian Creek, and put the goals back together.

  Later, a panicked administrator at the YMCA called Luma to inform her that she had taken the wrong goals from the park. Luma would have to return them. Luma refused. If the YMCA wanted their goals back, she said, they could go pick them up themselves. It was a bluff—Luma hoped the Y would put as much energy into taking goals away from Indian Creek as they had into acquiring them. But in this case, the Y showed quick resolve; by the weekend the goals were gone, with nothing left to replace them. The field was once again bare.

  THE REGIMEN FOR each of those early practices was the same. The Under 15s practiced on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the 13s and 17s on Mondays and Wednesdays. For the first half of the days on which Luma coached two teams, the Under 17s practiced first while the 13s received tutori
ng in a classroom inside Indian Creek Elementary from Tracy and whomever else she could find to volunteer to help the boys with their schoolwork. After an hour and a half, the younger boys came outside and ran their laps while the Under 17s scrimmaged in front of Luma. At the end of the scrimmage, the older players were dismissed to write in journals, an exercise they performed sitting on cross ties that surrounded a bark floor beneath the jungle gym. The Under 13s then finished their running and took the practice field for drills and instruction.

  Practice for all the teams began with twenty-five minutes of running laps on the grass just inside the asphalt track. Luma had resolved that her teams would never lose because they were out-conditioned, and she found that running was the closest thing to a foolproof therapy for boys who acted out at school or at practice. When boys misbehaved, she’d run them to exhaustion.

  The boys ran in silence, but they would jerk upright when they heard Luma call out a teammate’s name for running too slowly. When the players had completed their running, Luma ordered them to line up on the fringe of grass at the field’s edge. There she led them through sit-ups, push-ups, leg lifts, and bicycle kicks, walking up and down the line to push down the backs of players who tried to make their push-ups easier by bending up at the waist, or to stand over a player who was groaning theatrically during leg lifts, to make sure his heels never touched the ground. The spectacle drew laughter from the neighborhood kids who’d come out to play on the jungle gym alongside the track. Occasionally it seemed Luma would prolong the exercises to elicit a few more futile groans from her players for the entertainment of the younger spectators on the monkey bars.

  After exercises, she laid out a line of small orange cones in an alternating pattern and ran the players through a series of drills: quick passes, headers, and chests—nothing fancy, just the rudiments of the game. As practices progressed, Luma would add a new twist at the end of the routine—a drill in which she fed balls to shooters, who were expected to volley the ball before it touched the ground, for example, or a new passing combination. Practice ended with a straight scrimmage—the unquestioned highlight of the afternoon for the boys. Luma divided the players into teams. The boys deposited two clumps of sweaty T-shirts in the dust at either end of the field, to delineate the goals. Luma blew the whistle and let them play.