Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  “A lot of these big guys—grown people—grown men, I call it, wearing cleats and all this stuff—they really work on a field,” Swaney said. “So we don’t have a place for ’em.”

  The mayor seemed to be changing his argument on the fly. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a soccer field in Clarkston, exactly—it was that there was no soccer field for grown men. So what about youth soccer? I asked.

  The mayor seemed momentarily caught out, but he quickly changed tack once again. There was a narrow set of circumstances, he told me, under which he would allow soccer at Armistead Field in Milam Park. If the players were twelve years old or younger, and if they were supervised by an adult who had undergone extensive background checks conducted by the city, the mayor said, he would allow them to use one half of the multiuse field at Milam Park.

  I was beginning to understand what Nathaniel Nyok must have felt when he met with Swaney months before. The mayor’s rules were constantly shifting. First, there were no soccer fields—period—in Clarkston. When that argument collapsed, the problem became soccer played by “big guys, grown people, grown men,” as the mayor had put it. By big guys, we now learned, the mayor meant anyone over the age of twelve. Finally, even if a group of twelve-and-under kids showed up with an adult who had passed some undefined series of background checks, they would be able to use only half of Armistead Field. The other half, the mayor said, had to be reserved for Little League baseball. At the same time, the mayor admitted there was no Little League baseball team in Clarkston, and hadn’t been for at least three years.

  It was of course highly unlikely that anyone would meet the mayor’s freshly conceived criteria. His rules were not published anywhere; they existed only in his head, where they could be altered later if necessary. And anyway, there were no twelve-and-under youth soccer teams in Clarkston, as the mayor surely knew. Luma’s youngest team consisted of boys thirteen and under, a year too old to play soccer in Mayor Swaney’s park.

  As frustrating as it was to listen to the mayor’s excuse-making, I actually found myself developing a degree of sympathy for Swaney as he fumbled through his rationalizations. He was sixty-eight years old, and had spent much of his life in a community to which he could no longer fully relate or even recognize. As an old-guard mayor, he had the impossible task of trying to maintain the status quo in a town that was changing radically all around him. He was sure to fail at that task—Clarkston was changing more every day, as new refugee families arrived—and he was equally sure to disappoint his constituents, who had counted on him to succeed in preserving their town’s identity. The sheer clumsiness of his arguments for keeping soccer off the town fields hinted at a kind of desperation. It was also clear from Swaney’s defensiveness that he didn’t relish his reputation as the mayor who banned soccer. Swaney, like most politicians, yearned to be liked. The issue, I sensed, was eating at him.

  And yet the mayor seemed almost unaware of the contradictions he’d articulated. He seemed to feel that he had succeeded in explaining the soccer field issue with perfect clarity, and evinced no hostility toward me for my bothersome questions. He even suggested we meet sometime for lunch. I accepted the invitation and asked Swaney where he liked to eat in town. With all the ethnic restaurants, he said, he was down to just one spot where he could get the traditional American fare he liked: a hole in the wall across the railroad tracks called City Burger.

  “Whatever they fix, it’s good,” the mayor said as I stood to leave. “It’s cooked right then—for you.”

  The exchange gave me some insight into the confusion and isolation Lee Swaney must have felt toward the town he’d lived in for twenty or so years and that he now governed. It turned out that City Burger, the best American restaurant in town, was now owned by an Iraqi.

  ON THE FIRST Tuesday night in October, Luma went to City Hall to make her case for the Fugees’ use of the field in the town park. She had a lot riding on the council’s decision. The fields at Clarkston High School and at nearby Georgia Perimeter College were booked for the fall. The Clarkston Community Center was no longer an option given the rift between the center and the YMCA, and the field behind Indian Creek was too dangerous given Tito’s shooting, Luma believed. She refused to put her players at risk. Her best bet if the council turned her down was to find a parking lot someplace where the boys could play, or else to cancel practices altogether.

  The chamber at City Hall where the Clarkston City Council held its monthly meetings had the feel of a small country church at a weeknight service. Half-full rows of wooden benches, arranged like pews, faced a raised dais, where the mayor and six council members sat framed by flags. The town attorney and a clerk sat at desks off to the council’s side. A low ceiling gave the room an air of intimacy verging on the claustrophobic. There was a microphone and a lectern in the gallery, but it was hardly necessary. A conversational voice would suffice in so small a space, and if not, one could always yell, as happened more than occasionally at city council meetings in Clarkston.

  On this Tuesday evening, as on most, the meeting had drawn a small group with city business to transact and a larger group of the usual cranks and conspiracy theorists who had come to complain about slights from neighbors, disrespected property lines, and in one case, the threat that electronic voting machines posed to the institution of democracy worldwide. Chief Scipio was in attendance; Mayor Swaney wanted to commemorate the end of the chief’s first year on the job with a plaque he’d had made for just the purpose. Luma sat quietly in the back.

  The meeting was called to order and began with a heartfelt recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Various committee reports were asked for and delivered. Chief Scipio received his plaque, to applause. The council then moved on to the people’s business. The first to address the council was an Ethiopian woman who owned a restaurant across the tracks from City Hall. She had come to petition for the right to sell beer on Sundays. Council members grilled her with a series of pointed questions focusing on the restaurant’s proximity to the Clarkston International Bible Church, and seemed on the verge of rejecting the request when a lawyer in the gallery—a local citizen with no particular authority—pointed out laconically that the council had no authority to rule on the matter one way or the other, as liquor licenses were issued by the state. A council member asked the Ethiopian woman sharply if she had such a license, and when the woman said yes, council members looked at each other in a dumbfounded way and fell silent until someone suggested they move on to other business.

  Soon, another conundrum presented itself. A man rose and pointed out that there was that sign in Milam Park threatening a fine of five hundred dollars to anyone who should walk a dog on park property, leashed or not. Had the city council ever actually passed a law, the man wanted to know, establishing a fine for walking a dog in Milam Park? There was another round of mumbling and puzzled expressions among the mayor and council members before the town attorney spoke up to declare that there was no such law on the books. Mayor Swaney, who’d apparently ordered the sign put up, turned red in the face around his white mustache and sheepishly agreed to take the sign down. A theme was emerging in the matters the people were bringing before the council: those who governed Clarkston had a tendency to overreach their authority, at least until called to account by the citizens.

  Against this backdrop, Luma rose and approached the lectern. She spoke in a soft, uncharacteristically meek voice, taking care not to offend, and introduced herself as the head of a soccer program for Clarkston’s youth.

  “We’d like to request the use of Armistead Park as our field to practice on, Monday through Thursday from five till sunset,” she said.

  “Why?” a councilwoman asked.

  “Indian Creek Elementary is all gravel,” said Luma. “It’s also not controlled. Anyone can go on there and play, so unsupervised kids are out there playing. Unsupervised adults are out there playing. And it’s not a healthy environment for kids.”

  A barrage of questions follow
ed: What would it cost the town? How old were the boys? Were they local? Would they be supervised? What kind of equipment would they be using? What about insurance?

  Luma parried the challenges and maintained a supplicant monotone that would’ve amused the boys on the Fugees, who knew what she sounded like when she wanted to make a point. But this was a different audience. These weren’t kids, and they held all the cards. Luma said she would always supervise; the team would supply its own equipment; the program would be insured; the players were all local.

  “Are these mixed teams for both boys and girls?” another councilwoman asked.

  “No, it’s just boys right now,” Luma said.

  “Just boys,” the woman said, repeating the phrase for emphasis, like a trial lawyer who had just scored a point with a hostile witness.

  An awkward silence followed, broken eventually by Mayor Swaney.

  “This lady came and talked to me about using the lower end of Armistead Field—using the end for soccer,” he said. “She knows that you don’t play soccer on a baseball field. And we got the lower end of this field that we do not use and have not used. And the only time it was used was when grown people—grown soccer people—come in there with cleats and everything else, and was tearing the field up.”

  The council members leaned forward to look at the mayor to see where he was going with all this. He had been the one obsessed with policing the playing fields of Clarkston, after all.

  “So, you know,” he said finally, “I don’t see anything wrong with this lady using the lower end of Armistead Field, doing a little soccer to get our kids off the street. How does the council feel about letting this lady use the lower end of Armistead Field for a trial period, and let’s see what happens?”

  The mayor’s comments seemed to surprise the council members on either side of him at the dais. Luma stood stone-faced, trying not to reveal her own disbelief at the mayor’s expression of support. Swaney’s proposal had the effect of changing the energy in the room. The council’s questions became more agreeable. They talked among themselves and agreed that six months sounded like a reasonable amount of time for a trial period. One council member even asked if they should forgo a formal vote and simply agree in principle to approve the idea. Mayor Swaney didn’t take the bait on that one; he wanted a vote, with everyone on the record. If anything went wrong at the park—if these soccer people caused any kind of trouble—the mayor didn’t want to have to shoulder the blame himself.

  There was a motion, and a second. At that moment, the mayor’s wife, Joan, seated in the front row of the gallery facing her husband and the council members on the dais, shook her head, to indicate her opposition to the idea. Over the years, Joan Swaney, who worked at the Clarkston Community Center, had come to be identified with the older residents in town who had organized against resettlement. She was no advocate for the refugees. But looking directly at his most powerful constituency—his wife—Mayor Swaney called for all in favor.

  The motion passed unanimously. Luma nodded in thanks and stifled a smile. The Fugees, for now at least, had a home.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Playing on Grass

  “What makes people join a gang?” Luma asked the boys.

  “Race,” said one.

  “Money.”

  “Protection.”

  “To be cool.”

  “To be men.”

  “What makes a gang different from the Fugees?” Luma asked.

  “They fight.”

  “They shoot each other.”

  “Once you’re part of a gang, you can’t get away.”

  “In a gang, you have to do whatever they want. Otherwise, if you don’t do it, you get shot.”

  After Tito’s shooting and her meeting with the city council, Luma called separate meetings of the Under 13s and 15s, which she held in a classroom at Indian Creek Elementary during practice time. At Luma’s invitation, Chief Scipio met with the younger team while Luma addressed the 15s. It was quickly apparent that the Fugees knew more about gangs than Luma might have hoped.

  “How many here would know where to join a gang in their neighborhood?” she asked.

  “I would,” said one boy, without hesitation.

  Luma called Kanue to the front of the room, pulled an iPod out of her pocket, and offered to give it to him if he agreed to carry something for her. Kanue hesitated. The boys responded with nervous laughter.

  “They give you money—they say, ‘Oh, here’s five bucks, walk this across the street for me,’” Luma said. “They say, ‘I know Kanue wants an iPod.’ Or ‘Mandela wants a new pair of Air Jordans.’

  “Why do people do that? Because they’re the ones who don’t want to get caught,” Luma said. “They want you to do the dangerous work. And once you do it once, once you do it twice, you’re in their gang. You’re a part of them. And you’re not going to get out. Okay? Because they would rather kill you than have you get out and maybe tell the police.”

  Luma asked the boys what sorts of things they could say if someone offered them money or an iPod to carry something.

  “I would say, ‘Give me the iPod first,’” one kid said. The boys laughed.

  “What else could you say?” Luma asked.

  “I’m sorry, I’m going the other way.”

  “You said if you do it, like, three or four times and you’re in,” said another kid. “So Tito did it three or four times?”

  “I don’t know if Tito ran drugs,” Luma said. “I don’t know if Tito joined a gang to be cool, or for protection, or because he didn’t want to walk down the street and get jumped.”

  Grim faces fell on several of the boys. This last point was one they could relate to. Walking through the complexes around town could be treacherous, since you never knew when you might be treading on someone else’s turf. Who wouldn’t want some form of protection against such a random and unseen threat? Luma sensed the boys’ discomfort.

  “If I got beat up, I would want someone helping me out—to beat them up,” she said. The boys laughed.

  “I would,” Luma said. “But what other ways could I look at it? What other things could I do?”

  The boys called out in response: You could tell someone. You could tell the police. You could take another route.

  “Right,” Luma said finally. “And if you keep getting beat up on the same road, take a different road.”

  Luma let the message sink in for a few moments. The classroom quieted, and several of the boys lowered their gazes to the floor in a quiet signal that they understood: If you keep getting beat up on the same road, take a different road.

  Luma had an announcement that proved she planned to practice what she had been preaching. The Fugees, she said, were finished playing soccer at Indian Creek Elementary. Beginning on Tuesday, she said, practicing would take place across town at Milam Park. The field was flat, she told them, with grass and no other soccer teams. Practicing there would offer a chance to play without distractions or fears for their safety. But it came with responsibility.

  “You are the first soccer team to use that field,” she said. “So you have to set an example so other people can use that field for soccer.”

  Everyone would be expected to pick up trash in the park so no one in town blamed the Fugees for any mess. To get to the field, the boys would have to walk past houses of older Clarkston residents in the neighborhood behind the library and community center. Luma told them she’d better not hear any reports of yelling or cussing or turning over trash cans. There could be no disruptions. And no one was to go on the field until Luma was there.

  “I need you guys to be responsible and respectful,” she said.

  “I know where the field is,” one of the kids said. “But I’m not sure if I can walk there.”

  “You don’t walk, you don’t practice,” Luma said. “Nobody here is in perfect shape. You all could use the exercise.”

  “Nobody has an excuse not to get to that field,” she added. “
You don’t want to play, don’t show up. That’s the field we’re going to be playing on, okay? We’re not going to be playing on this field—ever again.”

  THE BOYS COULD hardly believe their eyes when they showed up for their first practices in Milam Park. Compared to the dust bowl at Indian Creek Elementary, Armistead Field was Eden: A thick blanket of soft green grass covered the playing surface and itched their backs when they splayed out for sit-ups and stretches. The field was surrounded on three sides by tall trees draped in a tangle of vines and kudzu, forming nature’s equivalent of an indoor arena. On the fourth side, running parallel to the field, there was a steep hill bisected by a crumbling set of concrete steps. The hill offered a stadium-like view of the field below. A decrepit chain-link fence formed an oval boundary around the circumference of the field, forcing visitors on their way to the playgrounds and picnic tables on the far side of Milam Park to take a detour around the playing area. The Fugees truly had a home field to themselves.

  The main drawback of the move, from Luma’s point of view, was having to give up the classrooms at Indian Creek Elementary, which the Fugees had used for tutoring and homework sessions before practice. There was a sheltered picnic area in Milam Park, not far from the field, with long wooden tables and benches. Luma resolved to hold tutoring sessions there for now. Later in the season, when it got too cool, or when the sun began to set earlier in the evenings, she figured she could hold practices slightly earlier and then move the teams to the Clarkston Public Library, about a half-mile away, for homework.

  The bucolic quality of the Fugees’ new home was so extraordinary that it almost seemed like a kind of elaborate joke. At an early practice, as the boys were scrimmaging, a gaggle of geese took flight from a pond on the other side of the woods. They flapped and honked noisily as they flew low over Armistead Field, startling the Under 13s, who then began laughing hysterically at the idea that they had been spooked by a flock of birds. At another practice, the Under 15s had gathered in a circle at midfield to stretch, when they heard noises in the woods—snapping twigs and the crushing of dry leaves. As the sound grew louder, the puzzled members of the 15s quieted and turned their heads in the direction of the hill alongside the field, just as a small herd of deer wandered into the clearing. The boys could hardly believe their eyes.