It was a common complaint among the newly arrived mothers in Clarkston. While their parents were at work—usually isolated, cleaning rooms in a hotel or working amid the din of a chicken processing plant—the kids were at school, vacuuming up the rules of the new culture, and sometimes deploying their new knowledge as leverage against their parents, with only a child’s understanding of the potential consequences. This was particularly true of non-English-speaking families, in which the kids—whose English was almost invariably better—became the family interface with the English-speaking world, particularly with authority figures like police and teachers. But even in an English-speaking family like the Ziaty family, there could be an inversion of authority when it came to dealing with the world outside the family’s apartment. Beatrice often felt she was at a disadvantage when dealing with Mandela in particular. And so when he stayed out late or acted up, Beatrice called Luma for help.
“When I have problems with the children I will call her,” Beatrice said. “I say, ‘Please come to my aid. Mandela—he’s going out too much, Luma.’ And she says, ‘I will.’ So right now, she’s really a sister to me now. Because she take care of the children more than myself.”
WHEN MANDELA ACTED out at practice, Luma appealed to Beatrice as well. The two women—a soccer coach from Jordan, a widow from Liberia—found themselves teaming up to try to keep Mandela out of trouble.
“Luma comes sometimes and says, ‘I didn’t like Mandela’s way,’” Beatrice said. “Then I will apologize to her, and I will set Mandela down to make him to understand the life we passed through.”
The life we passed through. Mandela, Jeremiah, and Darlington heard that phrase all the time, especially when their mother was angry. Unable to discipline them the way she liked, Beatrice would instead sit them in a chair and tell them once again the story of the life they’d passed through. They knew it well by now, and exactly how she would tell it.
“We went from Monrovia, got to Ivory Coast, then stay in Ivory Coast for five years,” Beatrice would preach to them. “You forgot. As for me, I didn’t forgot.
“While you’re sitting, you forgot all the bad things we passed through—you and myself!” she would say. “I think you forgot. But I not forgot. You forgot that we could go in the bush to look for food—you forgot. But I not forgot.”
“Our country’s here,” Darlington, the oldest, would sometimes protest.
But Beatrice would go on: she’d remind them of the mud hut she’d built for them in the refugee camp, and how she used to break a single nutritional biscuit handed out by aid workers into four pieces, so they could all eat. She would remind them of what she had to go through to get asylum in the United States—the countless interviews with UN officials and their attempts to ferret out lies and exaggerations by asking her the same questions over and over again, sometimes months apart—and of all the worry she had that some small mistake, some forgetful error, would doom them to that refugee camp for years more. In Atlanta, she’d been working ten-hour days as a maid at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel all the way across town—one hour by bus, each way—cleaning sixteen rooms a shift. All for her family.
“You forgot,” she told her boys. “But I not forgot.”
Beatrice would go on until she got the acknowledgment her upbringing demanded: she wanted her boys to be quiet, to bow their heads and lower their eyes. That was all. Just a simple gesture, an act of submission that acknowledged her authority and the sacrifices she’d made.
“When you make a face like this”—Beatrice scrunched her brow, narrowed her eyes, and puckered her lips. “It means disrespect.
“When you bend your head down,” she said, “you’re thinking. You’re remembering.”
Beatrice wanted her boys to remember. Remembering meant respect for all she’d done, and respect, she hoped, would keep her boys out of trouble. That was her hope. But Beatrice was never sure the message was getting through.
“Sometimes they listen,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t.”
Chapter Twelve
Meltdown
With no lines or goals, the field at Indian Creek Elementary wasn’t suitable for league games. So through the YMCA, Luma arranged for the Fugees to host their home matches at Ebster Field, a perfectly maintained grass pitch in Decatur, a fifteen-minute drive from Clarkston toward downtown Atlanta. Luma secured the use of a YMCA bus to shuttle her players back and forth between Decatur and Clarkston, and gave them instructions to meet at the Clarkston Public Library at one p.m., an hour before game time. Anyone who was late, she told them, would be left behind.
The Under 15s’ first regular-season game was on September 10 against the Gwinnett Phoenix, a club team from Lilburn, Georgia. Lilburn was only ten miles from Clarkston, but in many respects it was a world away. Lilburn was the very model of the modern Atlanta suburb: a mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class enclave that had sprung up around the old town center of a long-defunct railroad stop. With its open spaces and relative affluence, it was also soccer country. The Gwinnett Soccer Association was founded in 2000, and was home to girls’ and boys’ teams of all ages that together had won more than a dozen state championships as well as a 2001 national championship in girls’ soccer.
Soccer games were social events for the families of Phoenix players. An entourage of parents, siblings, and friends accompanied the team to Decatur and set up camp on a near sideline with folding chairs, blankets, coolers, and picnic lunches, as their boys warmed up with a complement of shiny new soccer balls. The Fugees sideline, as usual, was empty. The Fugees, it was safe to assume, wouldn’t enjoy much in the way of a home-field advantage.
Luma drove to Ebster Field in her yellow Volkswagen, the backseat full of soccer balls, shin guards, and cleats, which she planned to hand out to her players who couldn’t afford their own soccer shoes. The visitors faced equipment challenges of a different kind. Before warm-ups, a young man from the Phoenix stepped on the pitch and rubbed his hand across the turf, testing its depth and thickness.
“I think I should change my spikes,” he said to his dad, who was standing nearby.
“You better pick the right ones,” the dad replied. “I paid three hundred dollars for those shoes.”
LUMA EXPECTED THE YMCA bus to show up at Ebster Field by 1:15. At 1:30 p.m., though, the bus was still nowhere in sight. Luma looked at her watch and shook her head in frustration. The Phoenix took the field and began warming up. Luma took out her cell phone and called the bus’s driver to see what was going on. Some of the players hadn’t shown up, he reported. He’d waited as long as he could and was now on his way, but without the full roster.
A few minutes later, the bus hurtled into sight and then stopped abruptly alongside the field. The Under 15s began to disembark. When the bus had emptied, Luma did a head count. Only nine Under 15 Fugees had shown up, two short of a full roster.
Mandela Ziaty had made the bus. He sat on the bleachers, counting heads as he tied the laces of his cleats. Disgusted, he shook his head. Mandela had hoped that Fornatee and the others had simply hitched their own rides to the game. It was only now settling in that they simply hadn’t shown up. Mandela was angry. Playing nine against eleven was not the way to win soccer games. Not only that—it was close to 95 degrees and stultifyingly humid. With no substitutes, each member of the Fugees would have to play the whole game in the heat without a break. The Under 15 Fugees stood not just to lose, but to lose in particularly exhausting fashion.
Mandela sat next to me on the bleachers and asked to borrow my cell phone. I obliged, and he began frantically calling his absent teammates to see where they were. He reached Fornatee at his apartment; Fornatee had missed the bus and was now stretched out on the sofa, watching television. Mandela asked me if I had a car. My bright midsize rental car was parked in view. He wanted to know if I would drive him to pick up Fornatee and two other members of his team. If we left immediately, he thought we could make it back by game time.
I hesit
ated, weighing the need for journalistic detachment against the desperation on Mandela’s face. I also worried what Luma would think—if my helping Mandela round up his teammates might in her eyes look as though I was enabling their truancy. Tracy, the Fugees’ team manager, was nearby. I asked her advice; she said she thought it would be all right. Mandela and I jogged to the car and were off.
At 1:55 p.m., we pulled back alongside the field, with three additions to the Fugees roster, including Fornatee, in the backseat. The boys sprinted onto the field to join warm-ups, which were already in progress. Luma, though, wasn’t with her players. Instead, she was standing in a corner of the field, far removed from the action and offering no instructions to the team.
“Coach,” shouted Kanue Biah, the Liberian veteran, “why you not talking to us?”
“Because there’s nothing to say,” Luma replied. She turned her back on her players, walked to a set of bleachers in the shade at the far end of the field, and sat down.
Only Kanue seemed to fully understand that something serious was going on. He was a veteran member of the Fugees and was devoted to the team. Kanue was always on time, and more than any other player had bought into Luma’s system. He decided to take charge. He told his teammates to hurry up, to get on the field and start jogging.
A moment later, the referee summoned the players to the midfield stripe to go over their player cards. He called their names haltingly. One by one, the boys stepped forward and acknowledged their names, correcting the referee on his pronunciation. The teams took their positions on the field, the Fugees in dark blue shorts and light blue jerseys with orange trim, the Phoenix in white jerseys and white shorts. The referee blew the whistle, and the game was under way. Luma was still sitting far from the field in the shade, arms crossed, silent.
Minutes into the game, the Fugees were called for a foul in the box, setting up a penalty shot for the Phoenix. The Fugees’ goalie dove left; the ball went right. The parents on the Phoenix sideline jumped to their feet and cheered. Before they’d even had enough time to get comfortable in their folding chairs, the Phoenix led 1–0.
The Fugees responded by playing more desperately, and aggressively. They were called for one offsides penalty, then another, and yet another. Fornatee shouted at the referee in protest and in the process drew a yellow card, to cheers from the Phoenix sideline. A moment later, the Phoenix scored again: 2–0.
Mandela was angry now, and determined to get a shot on goal with or without help from his teammates. He took the ball on a pass from Fornatee and dashed up the middle of the field, fighting his way through the Phoenix defense and shielding the ball with his large frame. He dribbled to his right across the top of the box and blasted a shot high and to the right—score: 2–1. The Phoenix responded minutes later, on a crisp cross to an unmarked forward right in front of the goal. It was now 3–1, and the Phoenix had the momentum. But just before the half, Fornatee got free up the middle. He had an unusual way of controlling the ball; he put his back toward his defender and then moved his way down the field by gently rolling his foot over the top of the ball. It was almost like a center in basketball, dribbling his way toward the basket just before taking a turnaround jumper. Fornatee made his move, quickly tapping the ball into an open space to his right: he had a wide-open shot. Inexplicably, he hesitated—for a bit of showy footwork, a juke to the left, a feint back to the right. It was just enough of a pause to let the Phoenix goalie move out to cut off the angle.
“Shoot it!” his teammates yelled.
Fornatee took the shot, but it was blocked. The whistle blew twice, signaling the half.
THE FUGEES GATHERED near midfield and as a group looked toward Luma, awaiting her halftime instructions. But Luma stayed where she was, head down, in the shade, refusing even to make eye contact with her players.
“You see our coach right there?” Fornatee fumed to his teammates. “She’s got a job to do. I can’t be the coach. You look at her—she’s sitting right there!”
“Play on,” Kanue said. “You’ve got to play on. You’ve got to come together.”
“When you get the ball, kick it!” someone snapped at Fornatee.
“Coach has never did this to us,” Fornatee said. “She’s got a job. That’s why she’s a coach. This is her job!”
He paused and took a breath. The other Fugees stood in silence. “We’re not going to worry about that,” Fornatee said, collecting himself. “We’re just going to play. Three to one isn’t that much. I’m sorry, I had a shot. That won’t happen again. If I’m open like that, I’m going to score, I promise y’all.”
At once, everyone started shouting.
“One at a time!” Fornatee said, before taking the floor again himself.
“Let me tell you something: Coach is just a coach. She cannot show us how to play soccer. Is she playing? No—we are. The skills we got, we don’t need her. She’s just going to talk. She cannot come on the field and play for us. We gotta play for ourselves. It don’t make no difference if she’s sitting down because she’s not playing for us! Don’t no coach play. They coach, but they don’t come in the game and play. We gotta do that for ourselves.
“She’s trying to make us think that we can’t play without her,” he continued. “She’s trying to test us, man. She’s trying to make us realize that we need to win this.
“When the second half comes—we start scoring,” Fornatee said. “We can win this, man. There’s gotta be a reason why she’s not coaching now. But it don’t matter, man. We gotta win this game, man. We gotta win this game.”
“Get your hands in here,” Kanue yelled. The young men formed a circle and stacked their hands one on top of the other.
“One, two, three,” they chanted. “Go Fugees!”
MINUTES INTO THE second half, the Phoenix forwards methodically and almost casually picked their way through the Fugees’ defense and tapped the ball into the left side of the net for an almost embarrassingly anticlimactic goal. It was now 4–1. The Fugees were yelling at each other now, their halftime enthusiasm instantly drained. After another offsides call, Fornatee cursed at the referee, drawing his second yellow card and an ejection. The Phoenix parents and friends were quiet now; there was no need to pile on. The Fugees were exhausted, and without their coach, they were lost. The Phoenix scored again, and kept scoring. When the referee blew his whistle three times to signal the end of the game, the score was 7–2, Phoenix.
After the game, the Fugees gathered on their bench in silence, guzzling water from plastic cups until Luma called to them from across the field to get on the bus. As the players filed off the field, I asked her what was going on.
“They show up to tutoring late,” she said. “They’re disrespectful. They show up to practice not dressed to play, their pants hanging down. I tell them practice is at five-thirty, they show up at six-thirty. I tell them, ‘You have to be at the field at one o’clock for a two-o’clock game,’ and they’re coming, what, like ten minutes before the game?
“It’s not going to work,” she said. “So I was like, ‘You know, the way they’re behaving is the way I’m going to behave. They’re being irresponsible, and I’m not going to be accountable for them.’” She told me that she’d thought about going to get a hamburger, but the referee told her before the game that if she left the field her team would have to forfeit. So she decided to sit and watch what she knew would be a meltdown, especially on the part of Fornatee.
“He can’t handle it when I get mad at him,” she said. “They don’t have the discipline to hack it. They don’t show up to practices. They don’t show up to the game. You can’t compete like this.”
With that, Luma walked away, trailing behind her players as they walked toward the bus. She waited for them to board and to take their seats. A moment later, she climbed onto the bus to address her players and to give them the news. Luma had decided to cancel the Under 15s’ season. They would forfeit the rest of their games. There would be no more practice or
tutoring sessions. The Under 15 Fugees were finished.
Chapter Thirteen
“How Am I Going to Start All Over?”
Luma’s decision to cancel the Under 15s’ season was hard on many of the team’s players, but it was especially wrenching for fifteen-year-old Kanue Biah.
Kanue was from Nimba County, in eastern Liberia, though his family fled the war there when he was just two years old, for refugee camps first in Ivory Coast and eventually Guinea. Kanue kept the circumstances of his upbringing to himself; for reasons he rarely revealed, he was separated at some point from his parents and taken in by his uncle, a stern and demanding man named Barlea, and a great-aunt, whom he called simply Grandma. In 2004, Barlea was accepted for resettlement in the United States and placed in Clarkston. The plan was that he would eventually bring as many members of his extended family as possible into the United States. A year later, Kanue was accepted for resettlement as well, and joined Barlea in a two-bedroom apartment in Clarkston, a dreary place with bare walls, tattered old carpeting, and in the kitchen, warped particleboard cabinets and uneven linoleum floors. Asylum for those family members left behind did not come easily, or at all. Months passed, and none were granted entry into the States. So Barlea and Kanue, uncle and nephew, did the best they could on their own.
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