Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  Play they did. Young men who had seemed exhausted to the point of collapse after drills found miraculous reserves of energy once the game was on, and suddenly were capable of sprinting up and down the field without pause. Taciturn and withdrawn boys who hadn’t so much as grunted for the first two-thirds of practice now shouted insistently for the ball. The commotion had a way of drawing in the rest of the neighborhood. Young children on the jungle gym climbed higher on the bars to get a better view. Their parents and some of the older Clarkston refugees who’d come out for their evening exercise turned toward the field as well, or sat down on the cross ties parallel to the track to watch.

  AS LUMA WORKED to size up her players and to identify the best talent for particular positions, the boys too were subtly trying to size up their coach, to get a sense of her boundaries and what they could get away with at practice. Luma expected her players to work hard and take practice seriously, and above all to obey her during practice. A player shouldn’t have to speak perfect English to understand that goofing off in practice wasn’t allowed, and if there was any doubt about that, Luma’s sharp intonation conveyed disapproval across any language barrier. When she sensed she was being tested, she responded swiftly—sending kids home or ordering them to run extra laps at the first sign of disobedience or lack of focus, with a fierceness and absoluteness that sometimes made it difficult not to feel sympathy for the boys as they ran headlong into the futility of trying to skirt Luma’s iron rule.

  One afternoon as the Under 13 Fugees were running, Luma heard the boys cackling and shouting. A boy named Hussein, a small and perpetually bemused Meskhetian Turk with big eyes set wide apart near his temples, was skipping and thrashing his arms comically to the amusement of his teammates.

  “Hussein!” Luma barked. “Stop that—now!”

  Hussein, though, spoke only a few words of English, and it was unclear whether or not he understood Coach’s order. Luma turned her attention for a moment to the Under 17s, who were writing in their journals at the edge of the field. She heard a few muted laughs and turned back around to see Hussein still skipping and flapping his arms.

  “Hussein!” Luma called again, raising her arm in the air and pointing in the direction of the apartment complexes north of the field. “Go home!”

  Hussein came to a halt, and his expression knotted into one of confusion as the other players ran past him, suddenly quiet. He dropped his head, then looked up, with pleading puppy-dog eyes.

  “Go home!” Luma said, gesturing again with her arm for emphasis.

  Hussein grimaced and slouched over in defeat. However poor his English, he understood what his coach was saying. When he lifted his chin finally, Hussein looked like he might cry.

  “Go home,” Luma said again, her voice softening only slightly. Hussein turned, lowered his head again, and began to traipse sullenly toward the footpath that led to his apartment complex, just out of shouting distance from the field.

  LUMA SEEMED TO have the auditory acumen of a rabbit, and the capability of hearing foul language, even spoken sotto voce, from a field’s length away. Kids who cursed usually were sent running after a warning that if they cursed again, they’d be off the team—a threat Luma had made good on in the past. Sometimes her ability to sense insubordination seemed almost supernatural.

  Luma was watching the Under 17s scrimmage at one early practice, when the Under 13s emerged from the school building after tutoring to run their laps. The younger boys noticed Luma’s absorption with the scrimmage and sought to take advantage. They ran vigorously for the 270 degrees of each lap that took place in Luma’s field of vision. But once they passed into the blind space behind her lines of sight, the boys stopped running and began to walk. Just before they reappeared on the other side of her field of view they started running again. Luma was completely absorbed in the scrimmage. She never turned her head to catch the boys walking, to their extraordinary satisfaction.

  Soon Luma blew her whistle and dismissed the Under 17s from practice. Normally at this point she summoned the younger players in from their laps and started them on their drills. This time, though, she crossed her arms and wandered aimlessly around the field, looking at weeds, picking up rocks, kicking the sand—killing time. The younger team kept running: twenty-five minutes, thirty minutes, thirty-five … and so on. Eventually, the boys began to look at her with plaintive expressions: they were confused, in pain. Luma remained impassive, and they kept running … and running.

  “Coach—what we did wrong?” Bienvenue finally yelled out from across the field as he held his cramping midsection.

  Luma looked at her watch. Forty minutes of running.

  “It took them this long to figure it out,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  Luma blew her whistle and called in the 13s. From now on, she told them, they would no longer run laps around the track, out of view. Instead they would run back and forth at one end of the field, in her direct line of sight, so she could keep an eye on them. The boys looked at each other with a mixture of guilt and anger, as if searching for the one among them who had suggested trying to pull one over on their coach in the first place. It hadn’t been such a bright idea after all.

  Later I asked Luma how she’d known the boys were walking when she couldn’t actually see them. She scrunched her brow in thought for a moment, in the way of someone who is asked to explain an act that had been performed instinctively. Luma said she knew from experience how long it should take for the boys to reappear in her field of vision on one side after disappearing behind her on the other—if they were running. They didn’t reappear when they were supposed to, she explained, so she knew they were walking. I asked her then why she hadn’t called the boys on their infraction the moment she noticed it. Luma said she wanted to know if the boys would police themselves, to see what sort of team she was dealing with. Now she knew, and both she and her team would live with the consequences.

  “They need to figure it out so they can fix it,” she said.

  If Luma’s way of teaching these lessons to her players seemed harsh, she made no apologies.

  “These kids face so many hardships,” she said. “Some of them are taking care of their siblings. They don’t have the mom driving them in the SUV. So I’m not going to baby them, because they’re never going to get babied. They need to grow up.”

  THE UNDER 15S were also testing Luma in their own way. Even though he was no longer on the team because of his refusal to cut his braids, Prince hadn’t gone away exactly. He had made a habit of stopping by practice and watching from a distance, his braids stylishly intact. He snickered as the Fugees groaned and sweated their way through laps and exercises as Luma barked instructions. He showed up one day with a group of friends—guys and girls—who laughed and cut up in view of the practice field before wandering off to hang out as they pleased. Prince’s conspicuous displays of personal liberty during the Fugees’ practice were a challenge to Fornatee and Mandela: Were they going to cave to the coach or hang out with their friends?

  The challenge seemed to unnerve them both. Fornatee and Mandela began showing up late, talking back to Luma, grumbling and sulking through drills—small gestures of protest to register their unhappiness at having to play without their best friends. During one practice, Mandela simply wandered off and joined in a pickup soccer game at the far end of the field. Fornatee invited some girls he liked to come watch him at practice; when Luma saw him chatting with them, she sent him home.

  “My daddy don’t care if I talk to girls,” Fornatee said. “So why does she care?”

  Collectively, Fornatee and Mandela threatened to undermine Luma’s authority over the Under 15 Fugees, an ominous sign heading into the team’s season opener, just a week away. Luma had to decide on a course of action. Her first instinct was to blame her circumstances. The old field at the community center was fenced off and private. A kid like Prince who was intent on disrupting practice wouldn’t even have been allowed on the propert
y. But while practicing in the open field behind the public elementary school there was little beyond bluffing that she could do to run Prince off. She also felt a pang of … if not sympathy, then perhaps tolerance toward Prince. He was showing up as a way of acting out himself, she suspected, because on some level he did want to be on the Fugees, or at least to play soccer with his friends. There was a simple way he could accomplish that, and it involved nothing more complicated than a pair of scissors. On that, Luma wouldn’t budge.

  AS LIBERIANS, PRINCE, Fornatee, Mandela, Christian Jackson, and the others shared not just a connection but special challenges as well. Within the resettlement community in Clarkston, there were commonly held generalizations about the various groups of refugees who had come to town: Vietnamese were hardworking and valued jobs over education. The Lost Boys wanted to go to college before pursuing jobs. Afghans were tough and resilient; Somalis were quiet, proud, and uninterested in assimilation. The stereotypes almost always accentuated the positive. But with Liberians it was different. They were “a challenge,” or “troubled,” caseworkers would say. Fourteen years of civil war in Liberia—wars marked by unspeakable violence and cruelty—had taken their toll. Children who had grown up in that environment had little or no access to formal education, except for brief bits they might have received in refugee camps. Their social skills, such as they were, had developed in a crucible of fear and stress. Many young men had grown up fatherless because the war claimed so many men of fighting age. And many boys had been drawn into the fighting themselves, usually by compulsion. Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president, after all, was arrested and charged with war crimes in part because of his wanton use of child soldiers in waging the bloody conflict that led him to power.

  “Liberians have been through a conflict for almost thirty years,” said the Reverend William B. G. K. Harris, a Liberian-born pastor at the International Christian Ministries, a mostly Liberian congregation just south of Atlanta. “So you’re talking about a group of people who were born into a war-torn nation. All they have seen or known is instability, war, crime. And some of them were fools for carrying guns. They saw lots of different things happening to themselves and to their families. So some of them never even stay in school for a year. And nonetheless, even with minimal education, they come over here, and they are an age where they should be either finishing high school or almost finishing high school. So they come with no social skills or education or background to help them move on. So those are the challenges—coupled with the normal thing of just being an immigrant.”

  What put Liberian refugees in Clarkston at special risk had to do with not just Liberia’s troubles but America’s as well. More perhaps than any other refugee group in Clarkston, Liberian boys and young men were susceptible to the lure of the American gangs that flourished in the public schools and in the parking lots of the apartment complexes around town. For a young man who had grown up in Liberia during the war, the leap to the world of American gangs was not a particularly big one. Most Liberians speak English, so they had no trouble communicating with indigenous gang members in Clarkston. The subset of hip-hop culture that glorified gangs and violence was as popular in the streets of Monrovia as it was in Atlanta. And for young, fatherless men, some of whom had been co-opted into violence themselves as child soldiers, or who certainly had brothers or friends who had fought, a gang—with its promise of power and authority amid economic and social dissolution—must’ve seemed an intensely familiar analog to the bands of fighters who roamed Liberia during the war. Because Liberians were so familiar with American culture, they were also keenly aware of the degree to which, as immigrants and refugees, they were outside it. A gang offered a chance to bridge that divide, a way to become, as it were, American.

  For Liberian parents in America, the prevalence of gangs in Clarkston—and their potential allure to young Liberian men—created a bitter paradox. After succeeding at getting their children out of the war in Liberia, they were now charged with saving them from another low-grade but still deadly conflict on the streets of the United States, their “safe haven.” And if they ever forgot about the dangers that lurked outside their doors in Clarkston, the periodic sound of gunfire cutting through the night and echoing off the walls of their apartment complexes would remind them. Beatrice Ziaty had heard the sound of gunshots puncturing the nighttime quiet around her apartment complex and was frightened by it. The sound was an echo from a haunting past. And as then, she worried about her boys. Jeremiah did what she said—he stayed inside when he wasn’t with Coach Luma. Darlington, the oldest, could fend for himself, and spent most of his time watching TV in the apartment. But Beatrice worried most about Mandela. There was no telling what kind of trouble a fifteen-year-old could get into in Clarkston.

  MANDELA ZIATY DIDN’T like thinking of himself as a refugee. Refugees, to his mind, weren’t American. They were poor. It was true that there had been times when Mandela’s mother, Beatrice, was too broke even to buy food for her three sons. Mandela didn’t want people to know about that, not his friends especially. Like a lot of fifteen-year-olds, he worried about what people thought of him. On school days, Mandela wore what American kids wore—long T-shirts that hung halfway to his knees, blue jeans so big and baggy that they slid off his hip bones, and clunky high-tops that he left untied so the laces trailed behind him. But when someone pulled out a camera at home, Mandela would go to his closet and pull out his church clothes—his clean white dress shirt with the crisp collar, his smooth black pleated slacks, and his shiny black shoes. He didn’t want to look like a poor person. You never knew who might see a photograph.

  Mandela didn’t ask for help, and if he ever felt sorry for himself, he didn’t let on. Instead, he got mad. When Mandela got mad, he got quiet, the kind of leaden, ear-splitting quiet that made people ill at ease.

  “When he would get mad, oh my God!” said Alex Nicishatse, Mandela’s teammate. Alex laughed nervously at the thought. “Nobody would want to talk to him—they were afraid.”

  When Mandela’s little brother, Jeremiah, began playing soccer for the Fugees, Mandela made fun of him. Soccer was whack, he said—for refugees. Jeremiah loved soccer and wanted his brother to play for the Fugees too, on the older boys’ team. Mandela laughed at the idea.

  “Mandela, from the beginning, he not wanted to play soccer,” Beatrice recalled. “When Jeremiah come home, he would start mocking Jeremiah. Mandela say, ‘As for me, I will play basketball.’”

  Basketball was the popular game at school. Mandela had the frame for it too. He was tall, quick, and built like a punching bag—the physique of the perfect power forward. But in the summer, there weren’t many options for basketball in Clarkston. Mandela was bored. Jeremiah kept at him. Beatrice had come to trust Luma, and she joined in.

  “That lady—she’s doing well,” Beatrice told Mandela. “To keep you busy all the time is good!”

  Restless, Mandela eventually gave in and joined what was now the Under 15s. He didn’t know the game particularly well, but on the field his natural ability took over. He could outrun most of the other kids. He used his big frame, his softball-size shoulders, and his chiseled biceps to ward off defenders the way a basketball player might block out for a rebound. His shot was devastating. Goalies learned to run from it. Luma had once caught a stray shot of Mandela’s on the top of her thigh. She was bruised and sore for a week.

  And yet something weighed on Mandela. He never seemed fully comfortable. It often seemed as though he wanted to be someplace else. When he was in one of his moods, he acted out in practice—talking back, showing little effort. Normally, Luma might have sent a kid like Mandela away. But she had grown close to Beatrice, and she held out hope that Mandela was going through a phase, that he would behave and do what he was told, like his little brother. Mandela was one kid Luma was convinced she could help.

  Mandela made friends on the Fugees—mostly with the other Liberian boys like Prince and Fornatee—and he made friends
at school. But they weren’t always the kind of friends Beatrice had hoped he would have. The boys hung out after practice, sometimes late into the night. Beatrice worried. She felt he was hanging out with the wrong crowd. She didn’t like the way the boys dressed—the ghetto look, with those low-hanging pants, untucked T-shirts—or their braids.

  “I say, ‘Is that a way we can dress in Africa?’ No!” she said. “It’s not a way that the men, they can dress. You can’t hang your trousers right here.” She pointed low on her hips. “We can’t do that in Africa. Men always have the low haircuts. Men can’t grow hair—it’s for ladies!”

  If she were in Africa, Beatrice said, she would’ve set Mandela straight.

  “In Africa, when you tell your kid something and he doesn’t want to listen, you will beat him—take the rod to him,” she said. “Next time when you say ‘Shhh,’ he will not do it. But here, nothing, you cannot do that.”

  America’s sensitivity to corporal punishment ran counter to nearly everything that Beatrice and many refugee mothers had learned about keeping kids in line. The new rules favored her kids, she felt, and undercut her authority. She had learned this the hard way. A few months before, Jeremiah left his new winter jacket at school. Beatrice yelled at him for being so careless with something she had worked so hard to buy. She didn’t feel he was sufficiently contrite.

  “He make me mad, so I beat him,” Beatrice said. “When he go to school, he say, ‘My ma beat me! My ma hit me right here.’ And his school have to send for me! The times I beat him, I say, ‘Next time don’t do that again,’ and he say, ‘Okay, I will not do it.’ But from now on, when they ask him at the school, he say, ‘My ma beat me!’ And they have to send for me! When I’m in Africa, they can’t do that. When your child misbehave in the school, you can go to the school and say, ‘Teacher, you can give the child twenty-five lashes—twenty-five on his butt.’ They will beat him sound. They will lay him on the bench and beat him. Fine! He won’t do that again. He respect the teacher. When teacher say ‘Shhh!’ he won’t talk. But here, nothing.”