Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  It was impossible to visit Generose’s family without having a large meal cooked in one’s honor: rice or foofoo heaped with cassava leaves the consistency of creamed spinach, potatoes soaked in tomato broth, beans, greens stewed with sardines, and often fried whole fish or beef in a sauce of onions, tomatoes, and garlic—though the family would have rarely had whole fish or beef on their own. Fresh meat was simply too expensive for any but special occasions.

  Like many refugee parents I met in Clarkston, Generose was eager to meet an actual American. Meeting Americans was a rare occurrence for newcomers. Refugees and locals went through their days in full view of each other—a stream of thousands of Atlantans passed by on the interstate each day on the other side of Generose’s glass sliding door—but the two groups rarely interacted. Instead, they lived along the borders of two inaccessible but transparent worlds, separated by some invisible border, like birds from fish.

  The first time I visited Bien and Alex at home, things got off to a rocky start. I introduced myself to Generose by saying that I worked for a newspaper in New York and had come to Atlanta to write about the Fugees. Bien translated into Swahili and listened to his mother’s response.

  “My mamma say she don’t like newspapers,” he said.

  I asked why, expecting to hear a version of the seemingly universal distrust of journalists, but instead Generose quickly stood and disappeared into another room. A moment later, she emerged with an envelope, which she handed to me: it was a $136 bill for daily delivery of The New York Times—my employer. I was puzzled; it didn’t make sense to me that a Burundian refugee who spoke no English should have a subscription to the Times. Generose was equally confused.

  “Why they bring newspaper every day and ask for the money?” Bien said, translating for her. “We don’t want. It’s too much.”

  Generose had never ordered daily delivery of the Times—aside from the language issue, the cost was well beyond her means—and yet the paper had been piling up at her front door for weeks. I said I would take the bill and call the company myself to sort things out. When I called the Times’ subscription department and explained the situation, the company dropped the charges and a supervisor chalked the situation up to a misunderstanding on the part of one of the telemarketing companies the Times used to sell subscriptions.

  It was an insight that helped explain a recurring problem I heard about from refugees in Clarkston over the next weeks and months: they were constantly getting calls from telemarketing companies offering free subscriptions, vacations, legal help with immigration issues, and the like. Telemarketers, resettlement officials surmised, had figured out that dialing numbers located in the Clarkston zip code produced an excellent chance of reaching someone who spoke little or no English. With a few inducements that broke through the language barrier—repeating the word “free,” for example—and by playing on the hopes of the newcomers, marketers could get them to sign up for just about anything. Signing up a new customer required only a simple yes, a word most refugees knew and often used as a substitute for “what” or “pardon.” It was a regular task of aid agency caseworkers and volunteers to extract refugees from agreements and arrangements they’d inadvertently signed up for, and there was no way of knowing how many refugees simply paid the bills out of fear. The transactions came with an additional cost to the sense of security and optimism refugees felt toward their new home, as I was reminded a few months later when I received a call from Bienvenue’s older brother, Alex. The family had received a letter in the mail offering them a free car, he said. He wanted my help in claiming it. I called the number on the circular to confirm what I knew—that it was a scam. I called Alex back with the news, which he relayed to Generose while I was still on the phone. The long silence that ensued left no mistake about her disappointment.

  Despite my affiliation with the company that kept sending newspapers—and bills—to Generose’s apartment, I was invited to sit down on a tattered sofa in the living room. I dropped my weight on the sofa, but instead of landing on a soft cushion, I collided with a piece of wood framing that hid beneath the fabric. When the boys saw me wince, they laughed hysterically. The coccyx-busting sofa frame had become a family joke, and had claimed another victim.

  Generose covered the coffee table with a piece of beige fabric and brought out a stack of small plates and a fistful of forks from the kitchen. The boys followed with the food: a large plastic bowl full of steaming rice and smaller ceramic bowls containing warm helpings of cassava, beans, potatoes, and stewed greens. Generose pressed Play on the VCR beneath the TV, and the screen came to life with the blurry images of a Catholic choir from Congo, singing hymns outdoors against changing backdrops of mountains and green forests.

  In at least one respect, Generose and her boys perfectly fit the profile of the typical refugee family in Clarkston. Their English skills were in inverse proportion to their ages. Generose, who spoke Swahili, some French, and Kirundi—the language of Bujumbura and western Burundi—knew only a few words of English. Alex, fifteen and the oldest, understood English, but spoke haltingly and with a thick Burundian accent that, combined with his deepening and sometimes cracking adolescent voice, made him sometimes difficult to understand. Sensing this, perhaps, Alex was shy and quiet and spoke mainly in Swahili to his family. Bienvenue—Bien or Bienve to his family—was two years younger, a difference in age that had helped him pick up a new language more quickly than Alex. Luma had managed to get Bienvenue accepted into a nearby charter school with a curriculum designed for immigrants and refugees, extra help that had improved Bien’s English quickly. He spoke with a less pronounced accent than Alex, and though he struggled with writing and reading, his natural desire to make jokes and to engage powered him through spoken English. When he occasionally got hung up searching for an elusive word or phrase, Bien would lower his chin, place his open palm on the crown of his head, and rotate it in small quick circles, the same motion, I learned later, that Generose had used to soothe him when he cried as a child.

  Ive, who was seven, spoke English fluently and with no accent. His favorite TV show was The Simpsons, and not by coincidence, he spoke in a slightly high-pitched intonation and sometimes with a surprisingly knowing tone that sounded a lot like Bart Simpson himself. It often fell to Ive, as the best English speaker in the family, to answer the phone and to have conversations with Americans—the landlord, billing agents from the phone and power companies—who were decades older than he was.

  Having to rely on her seven-year-old son as her interface with the outside world had its frustrations for Generose. But the more pressing impact of her inability to speak English was in the job market, where it limited her options significantly. She had managed a part-time job as a stocker at a local drugstore for a while, but since giving birth to Alyah six months before, she had been unemployed. She had no money, she said. Alyah’s father, in Canada now and without immigration papers to get into the United States, helped out as much as he could by sending money, and a well-to-do Atlanta woman who volunteered to help refugee families through the International Rescue Committee donated groceries and helped Generose make ends meet while she looked for a job. But working presented its own economic challenge. Having a job would require Generose to find day care for Alyah. To come out ahead after childcare costs, Generose figured she would have to find work that paid thirteen or fourteen dollars an hour. If such work existed in Atlanta for unskilled applicants who spoke no English, Generose had yet to find it.

  Rent for the family’s two-bedroom apartment was $650. Power and phone bills amounted to nearly $200 a month. Food was a relatively cheap but not inconsequential expense; Generose bought her rice in bulk, in large, fifty-pound plastic sacks from the DeKalb County farmers’ market, just down the road. She was open to a job at night, she said; that way the boys could babysit Alyah when they returned from school while she worked, and she could sleep and stay with the baby during the day.

  It was a measure of Generose’s des
peration that she was willing to leave her six-month-old daughter in the care of her three sons, ages seven, thirteen, and fifteen. While in a refugee camp in Mozambique, Generose had lost a daughter not to war or famine, but to a domestic accident. The girl had accidentally knocked over a pot of boiling potatoes that was propped over a fire on an arrangement of rocks. The girl was badly scalded, and Generose, too poor to afford transportation out of the camp to a hospital, was left to tend her daughter’s burns with wraps of leaves. For a time it seemed the girl might be fine, but eventually she succumbed to her wounds and probable infection, and died at just nine years old. Generose was constantly shooing her younger children out of the kitchen, and allowed only Alex, the eldest, to cook on the stove. She feared the idea of leaving her children alone at all. But she had to find a way to provide for them.

  Generose hadn’t anticipated that life in the United States would require her to decide between work and watching after her children. Like many refugees in Clarkston, she had put so much of her energy and hope into getting out of a refugee camp that she hadn’t thought much about what life might be like after she arrived in a new country.

  “I thought America would be paradise,” Generose said, through Bien.

  “We thought America would be like this,” Alex said, pantomiming a magician with a wand and flicking it at the table to conjure something out of the ether.

  “Soda!” he said, then, flicking the wand again: “Food!”

  Bienvenue, Generose, and Ive guffawed along with Alex. In just over a year in the United States, they had come to see their blind faith in America’s bounty as naive to the point of comedy. Disappointment on this count was common among the refugees in Clarkston and drove home the reality that however much the United States’ reputation had suffered around the world in recent years, most refugees arrived here with the image of America as a land of plenty. Over time, a more complicated reality set in.

  “No worry, no worry,” Generose said in her sparing English, and raising her hands to stifle the pessimistic conversation about money. “God very, very good.”

  Generose turned her attention to the hymns still playing on the television, closed her eyes, and rocked her head back and forth gently, singing along in a hushed falsetto.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Trying Again

  When Luma called the team’s sponsors at the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA to let them know she had folded the Under 15s, administrators there were incensed. They called her in for a meeting, which took place around a table in a small upstairs conference room. As long as the YMCA was sponsoring the Fugees, Luma was told, only YMCA officials had the authority to cancel the team’s season. In particular, administrators at the YMCA were concerned about how folding a team after a season had begun would affect the Y’s reputation within the Georgia Youth Soccer Association, the large and sometimes political overseer of some seventy-five thousand youth soccer players in the state. The administrators argued that Luma should simply kick the troublemakers off the team and continue with the core of committed players.

  Luma’s counterargument was simple. She was not going to waste her time coaching kids who wouldn’t show up on time for practice or games. It was true that there were some committed players on the Under 15 Fugees, but if she kicked off the troublemakers she would be left with just eight or nine players, short of the full complement of eleven. She would have no substitutes, so each player would have to play entire games in the Georgia heat with no breaks. It wasn’t safe, she argued. And if a kid got tired and frustrated and started fouling, Luma would have no one to put in his place until he cooled off. It wasn’t fair to the players who would remain, she said.

  To join league play, the Fugees needed affiliation with an established organization, and the Y had stepped in. The Y provided use of the bus to get the Fugees home after practice and to away games, and helped with scheduling and logistics. But resentments had built up on Luma’s part. There were still no goals on the field at Indian Creek Elementary School. Luma had spent hours looking for quality leather soccer shoes that were affordable under the team’s paltry budget, so that her players didn’t have to play in the cheap, uncomfortable plastic shoes she knew the YMCA would likely purchase for them if given no guidance. She passed the information on the affordable leather shoes to the youth sports coordinator at the YMCA, but the coordinator had gone ahead and bought the cheap plastic shoes anyway. Luma’s players were now paying the price with their blistered feet. On successive nights the previous week, the YMCA bus had failed to show up after practice, leaving Luma to ferry two teams’ worth of players home four at a time in her Volkswagen. It was Luma’s firmly held belief that the YMCA would never simply forget to send a bus to take home the well-to-do American kids in its other athletic programs. And no one from the Y ever came out to games or practices or showed any particular involvement or support.

  Luma had started the Fugees on her own, and had committed herself to the program. She worked as a volunteer; she received no salary from the YMCA and had no official position there. If Luma decided not to coach the 15s, the team would simply cease to exist. There was no other coach in the wings to take over her position if she simply decided not to show up at practices or games, and no committee of team moms to fill the breach. The Y was essentially telling Luma that she was compelled to volunteer—“like they own me,” she fumed.

  “They tell me, ‘You don’t have the authority to make those decisions,’” she said after the meeting. “They don’t have the authority to make me show up!”

  Administrators at the YMCA were beginning to believe that Luma was simply too difficult and demanding to work with. They read her relentless advocacy for her players as haughtiness, and a lack of appreciation for what the YMCA had provided the Fugees: use of its bus, as well as financial and logistical support.

  For Luma, the dispute was in part about issues of authority and control. She felt strongly that if she was going to run a soccer program, she had to do it on her terms. If she thought it was both unfair and unsafe to field a depleted team, she did not expect to be questioned by people who worked behind desks and who had rarely, if ever, seen her teams play. The Y’s incompetence with the bus, the shoes, and the goals, she figured, all but disqualified them as advisers on how to run her soccer program. Luma also feared that if she gave in and went back on her decision to end the season, players on her other teams might try to see what they could get away with. She could lose control of the whole program.

  But more infuriating to Luma than simple matters of control or authority was her belief that the YMCA had simply failed repeatedly to follow through on its word. In her worldview, there was no greater flaw.

  “She still has this high expectation that people will do the right thing, coupled with a very strong sense of right and wrong,” Tracy said. “She won’t work with someone that she thinks lacks integrity or the proper motivation to do what’s right.”

  Aside from the battles of will with the Y and with her players, there was a much more practical concern that Luma had taken into account in deciding to fold the team, one that went more or less unspoken: she was exhausted. She was coaching three teams—the Under 13, the Under 15, and the Under 17 Fugees—in addition to running her cleaning company, which employed refugee mothers. She had forty-eight players in all, and she spent her evenings and weekends driving around Clarkston visiting and helping their families—shuttling them to doctors’ appointments, making sense of their phone and power bills, explaining the meaning of the countless forms that arrived from school and from various government agencies. Even for someone of her commitment and zeal, it was depleting work. Luma rarely had any time for herself. She might occasionally make time for a weekly night of trivia at a local pizza parlor with friends, but for the most part her social life consisted of short two- or three-line e-mails to friends and a slew of unreturned phone calls. By jettisoning the Under 15 team, Luma still wouldn’t have time for herself exactly, but she could focus her energies on
the kids who were reciprocating her commitment to the Fugees. She had agreed to hold new tryouts for the Under 15s if Kanue, Mandela, and Natnael managed to round up enough new players, but her mind was more or less made up.

  TRYOUTS FOR THE possible revival of the Under 15s were set for Monday afternoon on the sandy field behind Indian Creek Elementary, as chance would have it, during a reprieve from the late-summer heat. Luma had agreed to attend if Kanue, Mandela, and Natnael did the recruiting and organizing. They had come through—new faces were arriving from the footpaths through the surrounding woods—although there had been some confusion about the starting time. The boys had told their teammates and potential players to show up at five-thirty p.m. and absentmindedly told their coach to show up at six p.m., an instruction the boys later forgot. So for half an hour the boys stretched, jogged, and passed a ball around, all the while glancing anxiously at the parking lot for sight of Luma’s yellow Beetle. Perhaps, someone wondered aloud, she had changed her mind.

  As the boys waited, members of the other two Fugees teams began to show up as well, to see what sort of talent Kanue, Mandela, and Natnael had unearthed from the apartment complexes around town. Word that something was up with the Fugees seemed to have seeped out to the other kids in the neighborhood, even those who didn’t play soccer; boys and girls who normally would have unhesitatingly run across the field in the middle of practice gathered quietly beside the running track and climbed atop the big orange and blue jungle gym to watch.