Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  To support the two of them, and to have money left over to send back home, Barlea shouldered an almost inhuman work schedule. He took two jobs in back-to-back night shifts at the Atlanta airport, an hour’s commute by rail. He left the apartment each evening at seven p.m. and worked a shift cooking burgers at a fast food restaurant at the airport. When that shift was over, Barlea then worked a second shift at the airport in the morning, as a porter. He returned home each day around three p.m. and collapsed into bed for a few hours of sleep before waking up for another double shift. He was perpetually exhausted and bleary, and a little cranky, particularly when dinner wasn’t ready.

  Kanue’s role was to cook and keep the apartment. After classes each day at a public school called Avondale Middle, he went home and got to work making African food from recipes he’d learned from Grandma: beans and spicy stews of spinach and cassava leaves, which he poured over rice, and his favorite, peanut butter soup. He stored the meals in the refrigerator so they were ready for Barlea when he came in the door from his long night and morning of work. Barlea would heat the meals in a microwave and quickly eat—often too tired to exchange more than a few words with Kanue—before dashing off for his few hours of sleep. Kanue had kept up this routine from the age of thirteen. He was not allowed to play soccer, do homework, or leave the house until the cooking was done. So the food was always there. Kanue never complained. In fact, his duties at home had imbued him with a sense of responsibility and self-reliance that belied his age and set him apart from his peers.

  These qualities came in handy in the halls and classrooms of Avondale High School, a rough and failing public school where American kids could be cruel to new arrivals, particularly refugees. Kanue was fortunate that as a Liberian he was fluent in English. But his thick accent set him apart from American students, who frequently teased him. Once, while reciting his lines in a school play, Kanue was mocked by an American student because of his accent. He lashed out. There was a tussle, and Kanue was briefly suspended. But it wasn’t in Kanue’s nature to seethe or hold grudges. Instead, he tried a different tack, engaging kids who made fun of him so that he could learn from his mispronunciations and grammatical mistakes.

  “They say, ‘You don’t know how to speak English,’” Kanue said. “So I always say, ‘When I speak wrong English, don’t laugh at me—just correct me.’”

  Not long after Kanue arrived in the United States, he was playing soccer in the parking lot of Southern Pines when one of the other kids told him he should come to practice with the Fugees. It was summer, and tryouts were two months away, but the coach, Kanue learned, would let kids join summer practice so long as they understood that they weren’t guaranteed a spot on the roster. They’d still have to prove themselves at tryouts. Kanue was determined to make the team. He crafted his own conditioning program, running to and from practice each day, to get in better shape. At practice, Luma would ride her bicycle around the track for half an hour, setting the pace for her players, who ran behind her. In his mind, Kanue imagined himself overtaking her, and he tried his best each day to catch up with Luma. His endurance improved by the week.

  The Fugees offered a welcome opportunity to get out of the apartment. Kanue made friends. He honed his cooking routine to free up time for soccer practice. And he was determined to stick around, even if a slot didn’t open up on the roster.

  “I said to Coach, ‘If I don’t make the team can I just practice with you?’” he recalled.

  An opening did arise, eventually, at goalkeeper. It wasn’t the most desired position for someone as physically fit and eager to participate in the game as Kanue was, but he happily accepted. He gave the position his all and quickly developed a reputation among his teammates for toughness bordering on recklessness in his efforts to keep the ball out of the net. In his entire first season as keeper, Kanue gave up only three goals.

  Once, the Fugees showed up to a game three players short of a full roster. Luma could have forfeited, but instead she decided to make adjustments and play eight against eleven. Thinking that she needed her best athletes up front if she hoped to stay in the game, Luma moved Kanue from keeper to striker. Kanue knew it was his chance. As a keeper, he had watched and learned the tricks and moves of successful offensive players, and had noted how the best had worked to keep a goalie off-balance. He was determined to put that experience to work. In that first game as striker, Kanue managed to score his first goal. He was so elated that his celebratory dance drew a yellow card. The Fugees went on to win that game 4–2, despite playing down three players. In the process Luma had discovered a new offensive weapon.

  Over the course of his two years with the team, Kanue’s devotion to the Fugees and to Luma had become complete. He showed up early for practices and was always on time to the bus for games. He rode his bike from his apartment complex near Clarkston to Decatur to watch the younger Fugees team play, and to help Coach carry gear. If the Fugees held a team car wash to raise money, Kanue washed more cars—and more thoroughly—than any of the others. In games, he would frequently chase the ball from one end of the field to the other, switching from defense to midfield to offense and back, of his own accord, running himself to exhaustion. Luma’s biggest challenge with Kanue was preventing him from doing too much. She learned that his teammates would sometimes slack off, knowing that Kanue would step in to make up for their lack of effort. She had even benched Kanue midgame simply so that her other players didn’t become too reliant on him. And she helped him too with Barlea. Once when Barlea told Kanue he couldn’t play soccer because he hadn’t yet made dinner, Luma stopped by with a roasted chicken for Barlea so Kanue could leave the apartment.

  With no siblings in the United States, and a guardian who was hardly ever home, Kanue began to view the team as his family.

  “The Fugees—it’s really important to me,” he said. “When I play on that team, I’m with my brothers.”

  Luma’s decision to cancel his team’s season hit Kanue hard. She offered to let him join the Under 17 Fugees, but for Kanue it wasn’t the same. Those boys were older and bigger than he was, and anyway, he wanted to play with the boys he’d become close to over the previous two years.

  “I was feeling really bad,” Kanue said. “I was thinking, How am I going to start all over?”

  THE SUNDAY AFTER Luma canceled the 15s’ season was rainy and listless. On such days, the apartment complexes of Clarkston were especially dreary. Televisions blared and echoed menacingly in the empty hallways. The footfalls of upstairs neighbors shook the thin walls and rattled the ceiling lights. Children could be heard crying amid the clanging of pots and pans. In the parking lots, teenagers scurried between buildings, slouched, heads bowed against the rain, on the way to see friends, or else they stood under the eaves, poking their heads out to check the sky, waiting for the rain to cease. Every now and again, a crowded automobile would dart into the lot and an adult would hop out and run through the rain toward a front door—carpools of refugees on the way home from weekend shifts at local commercial bakeries, packaging or poultry processing plants. Kanue was at home by himself, bored, and upset about the demise of his team. The phone rang. It was Luma.

  Luma asked Kanue if he wanted to see a movie; she was picking up Mandela and Natnael, another team leader and a close friend of Kanue’s. Kanue said sure, and he went outside on the balcony to wait for the sight of Luma’s yellow Volkswagen.

  The ride to the theater was quiet. No one mentioned the team. The movie was Invincible, a true story about a South Philadelphia bartender who went on to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. Luma didn’t care much for American football, but she thought the boys might enjoy the plot. In truth, their minds were elsewhere. They were thinking about the Fugees.

  It wasn’t until they got back into Coach’s car after the movie that Kanue finally broached the subject. He asked Luma not to cancel the season. Luma told the three boys that she couldn’t coach a team of players who weren’t committed enough to even show
up on time for practice or games. If she cut the bad apples from the team, there wouldn’t be enough players for a full roster, she explained. And it wasn’t fair to ask the remaining players to play an entire season with a short roster and no substitutes. Without a full roster, she told them, the Fugees would probably lose every game.

  Kanue was ready with his own arguments.

  “Canceling the whole team wouldn’t be fair to us,” he said. There were good kids on the team who followed her rules, he said. They shouldn’t be punished because of the others. Kanue understood Coach’s argument about playing with a short roster, but he had a solution. He, Mandela, and Natnael could round up a new roster of players. They could knock on doors in Clarkston and find good kids—kids who would follow her rules. They could start all over again, with another day of tryouts. They would go back to the old players and tell them that if they weren’t willing to obey the rules, they shouldn’t show up. Kanue told Luma that he would read the contract to new recruits himself. If he had any doubts that they would abide by her rules, he wouldn’t let them try out. Luma presented the counterarguments: It would take the boys ten days to get players and hold tryouts, by which time they would have had to forfeit two games—their season would be shot. And even then, how would a bunch of kids who had never played together compete with teams from Atlanta’s best soccer academies—teams that had been playing together for years?

  As the boys and Luma debated, Kanue took Luma’s cell phone and quietly began to scroll through her contacts list, writing down the phone numbers of his teammates and other kids whose names he recognized.

  Luma, uncharacteristically, was torn. Canceling the team would send a clear message about her expectations to players on all of her teams, and she was anxious about seeming to cave in. She was also worried about encouraging Kanue, Natnael, and Mandela to recruit new players, knowing that such a hastily conceived team faced the prospect of humiliation against a schedule of well-coached and well-prepared teams in their division. She feared what might happen if her players got frustrated and lashed out during play.

  On the other hand, Luma thought about the good kids, the ones who had done all she’d asked, like Kanue. She thought of Mandela, a kid on the fence for whom the Fugees were a lifeline. She shuddered to think of what kind of trouble kids like Mandela might get into without the Fugees to keep them busy.

  Luma mulled her options and decided to try to bide her time. There was a possibility that Kanue, Mandela, and Natnael might not round up enough new recruits to even force her into a decision. She told the boys that if they convinced the committed players on the team to return and rounded up new players who would follow her rules, she would be willing to hold another day of tryouts. She’d make her final decision about the team’s season based on how those tryouts went. There were no guarantees, she said.

  The boys were quiet for the rest of the ride home. Luma dropped them off one by one. When they got to Southern Pines, Kanue said goodbye, climbed out of the car, and dashed through the rain to the front door of Building D, where he lived. Barlea was at work, so Kanue had the apartment all to himself. He picked up the phone and began to work his way through the numbers he’d taken from Luma’s phone.

  “Bring all friends who want to join the team,” he told everyone he called. “We’re going to have tryouts. Coach is giving us another chance.”

  THE 15S’ SEASON was on hold, but Luma still had two other teams to coach, and on Monday afternoon she stood on the field at Indian Creek Elementary as the younger of those, the 13s, completed their running. Luma summoned them in with a blast of her whistle. The boys were joking with each other as they approached, but when they got close enough to read Luma’s expression, they sensed that her mood was gloomy, and fell quiet.

  “You’re supposed to all line up and start running nonstop for twenty-five minutes—no walking,” she said by way of a greeting. “See how many of you are here? I don’t have to take you all to the game on Saturday. I only have to take eleven. So if you decide to cuss, Jeremiah”—her bionic hearing had apparently picked up on some foul language from across the field—“you will be sent home.

  “I don’t know if you all know, but we no longer have an Under 15 team, and the reason is because of their behavior. So if you want to follow in their footsteps, go ahead—I don’t have a problem with that. But then you too will no longer have a team. If you want to come out here and have fun, then play hard. If you want to take walks around the track, then go home. You’re only practicing twice a week, so twice a week you run the whole time. No jogging. Real quick—if any of you lag you’re going to take five more laps.”

  The 13s’ first two games had not portended well for their season. They tied their first game 4–4, and then gave up a one-goal lead in their second, to lose 3–1. The team wasn’t passing well. Players weren’t holding their positions, and they weren’t talking to each other on the field. They had a long way to go. But the 13s seemed to get the message from Luma. It was time to get serious. Their Monday practice was quiet and intense. Two days later, on Wednesday, the boys showed up on time, ran hard, and were focused during their drills. The 13s seemed to determine to let their coach know they weren’t like the 15s. They were willing to do what she said, and they wanted to win.

  THE 13S’ THIRD game of the season took place on a sweltering Saturday afternoon at Ebster Field, the Fugees’ home ground in downtown Decatur. The opponent was the Triumph, a mostly white team from nearby Tucker, Georgia. Luma gave her players their positions—

  Josiah, the tall, slightly bowlegged Liberian with deceptive speed at left forward; Jeremiah Ziaty on the right. Qendrim, the small, spindlylegged Kosovar, would play center midfielder; Bienvenue, the happy-go-lucky Burundian, would direct the defense from the middle in back. The 13s had heeded the precedent set by Luma’s cancellation of the 15s’ season; a full roster had turned out for the game. So in the early going, Luma was able to substitute freely, to keep her players fresh in the heat. To his astonishment, even Santino, a quiet ten-year-old Sudanese boy who had arrived in the United States only a few weeks before the season, found his way into the rotation.

  Only minutes into the game, Jeremiah took a throw-in on the far side, near the corner. He heaved the ball to Josiah, who captured it neatly beneath his cleats and passed it back to Jeremiah, who fired a long, arcing shot that flew across the face of the goal and just inside the opposite pole: the Fugees were up 1–0. Before the half, tiny Qendrim dribbled through the defense ten yards out and tapped a slow roller past the goalie’s left foot. The Fugees were up 2–0.

  Luma, though, wasn’t satisfied.

  “We’ve got one big problem going on,” she told her team at halftime. “You guys are starting to play like them. You’re starting to kick the ball wherever it goes. You’re starting to walk around. You’re starting to get lazy.”

  It was a theme I would hear countless times during the season: when the Fugees played poorly, or slowly and without zeal, Luma would tell her players they were playing the other team’s style of soccer—playing “like them.” It was a clever bit of psychological manipulation; while ostensibly a criticism, the line contained the implication that the Fugees themselves were special. The only way they could lose, her argument suggested, was by adopting the ordinary ways of their mostly American opponents. It was as close as Luma ever came to pointing out to her players that as refugees, they had not just a connection to one another, but a special quality that set them apart.

  “Start spreading the ball, looking up, and taking more shots on goal,” she said. “You haven’t won this game, and the way you’re playing you’re not going to win it.

  “You need to go in with the game zero-zero and you need to play hard,” she continued. “You’re better than them. We all know you’re better than them. But you’re not going to be better if you start playing like them.

  “You guys ready?” Luma asked her team finally.

  “Yes!” they shouted in unison.

&n
bsp; In the second half, the Fugees put on a show. Josiah slipped around his defender on the left side, and dribbled downfield at a full gallop before taking a clean shot into the right side of the net: 3–0, Fugees. Luma moved Bien from defense up the field to offense, and he quickly executed an amazing bicycle kick over his head. The ball flew straight to the goalie, but the move was so remarkable that the parents of the Triumph players applauded in appreciation. Jeremiah scored again, and late in the second half, Bien lobbed an elegant cross across the face of the goal. Qendrim dove headfirst, arms at his sides, like a spear, and executed a perfect header, deflecting the ball and freezing the goalie—another score. When the whistle blew three times to signal the end of the game, the Under 13 Fugees had won 5–1.

  “Guys, you had a good game,” Luma told them afterward. “It wasn’t your best game, but a good game.

  “We’re going to keep working on our crosses, because we’re getting there,” she added. “Not bad. Next week will be a much better game—okay?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alex, Bien, and Ive

  The apartment where Bienvenue lived with his brothers, Alex and Ive, his infant sister, Alyah, and his mother, Generose, looked scarcely more lived-in than it did the night they arrived from Burundi, a year and a half before. The walls were still bare but for a photograph of Bienvenue that he himself had hung with tape in the living room, as well as a large abstract drawing in black crayon on a wall leading into the kitchen—a mural young Ive had started and abandoned but that had not yet been washed away. There was a TV on a stand in the corner, with rabbit-ears antennae on top and a VCR underneath, and three old sofas around the perimeter of the living room—all items that had been donated to the family by a local church. Off a small hallway to the right, there were two bedrooms—the boys shared one and Generose and Alyah slept in the other. The living room opened onto a modest kitchen with bright fluorescent lights in the ceiling and tawny linoleum tiling on the floor. A glass sliding door at the back of the kitchen remained closed most of the time; it opened onto a small concrete slab and a thinly wooded hillside that sloped down to the ever-thrumming interstate below.