“We should chase after them,” Hamdu Muganga whispered eventually to his teammates as they peered at the grazing animals.
“Nah, Hamdu,” deadpanned a lanky Sudanese midfielder named Kuur. “We’re not in Africa anymore.”
EVEN AS THE boys were getting used to the idea that this was their team’s new home, there were reminders that the Fugees were not entirely welcome. The Under 13s’ first practice at Milam Park had just begun when an elderly man appeared at the top of the hill overlooking the field. He was short and thick, with a shuffle for a walk, and though it was nearly nightfall, he looked as though he had just gotten out of bed. The man shouted something, but his voice was raspy, weak, and unintelligible to the boys on the field below. The Fugees kept practicing. The man called out again, angrier now. The boys grew quiet. In the lull, he called out a third time.
“Y’all got a permit?” he shouted.
Luma motioned to her players to keep practicing.
“Without a permit they can’t do it,” the man called out again.
I introduced myself. The old man declined to give his name but said he owned six acres alongside the park and had lived in Clarkston for thirty-seven years. He knew the mayor well, he said, and shared Swaney’s near obsessive concern for the turf in Milam Park. He was particularly galled by one resident who showed up in the evenings to walk his dogs in the park, under cover of darkness.
“He knows he isn’t supposed to do it,” the man grumbled. “Comes at night.”
I mentioned that the soccer team on the field had been granted permission to play there by the city council. The man seemed surprised by the news.
“For how long?” he asked.
Six months, I told him.
He thought on the news for a moment.
“They have to get a permit,” he grumbled.
An awkward silence followed. I tried to make small talk by suggesting that in his years in Clarkston, the man had probably seen a great deal of change.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We have more break-ins than we did. Lot of people walking the streets late at night. A lot different.”
In the old days, he said, people played baseball at Armistead Field. There was a rusted-out old scoreboard still standing from that time, along with a couple of twisted and misshapen old chain-link backstops. People used to come out to watch.
“They used to have a stand right here,” he said, gesturing to the grassy hillside below, which now looked eerily empty, like the slopes around the ruin of some ancient stadium. The man turned his gaze to the field and took in the sight of the Fugees in midscrimmage, shouting at one another in a confusion of accents. The man shook his head, whether in disbelief or disapproval it was hard to know.
“That was a long time ago,” he said.
FULL CIRCLE
Chapter Twenty-two
Who Are the Kings?
The Fugees all had their own soccer idols: David Beckham, Ro-naldo, Ronaldinho, and the Ivorian Didier Drogba, the stars they wanted to emulate on the field. Qendrim Bushi’s soccer idol was none other than his grandfather, once a famous goalkeeper at the highest level of play in Kosovo, and later, a well-known referee and the author of a definitive Albanian-language soccer rule book. The Bushi family kept a tattered copy of the rule book in their apartment just outside of Clarkston, one of a few things they had managed to bring with them to the United States, and one of Qendrim’s most prized possessions.
“He was very famous in my country,” Qendrim explained as he thumbed through the book one afternoon. “He used to be one of the best goalkeepers in Kosovo, and everybody wanted to be like him.”
Qendrim—everyone on the Fugees called him “KWIN-drum” but his family pronounced it “CHIN-drim”—was a tiny but talented midfielder for the Under 13 Fugees. He had crisp features, a slight overbite, and narrow eyes that often seemed lit with some impish knowledge, as if Qendrim alone were in on some long-running and yet-to-be-revealed joke that the rest of the world would come to appreciate later on. He had pencil-like legs that packed surprising power, and he was a student of the game, which his father also played. He studied his grandfather’s rule book and talked strategy with his dad. Soccer was in Qendrim’s blood.
The Bushi family came from Kacanik, an ethnically Albanian town of twenty-eight thousand in the mountains of southern Kosovo, not far from the border with Macedonia. Qendrim’s father, Xhalal—pronounced Ja-LAL—owned two small grocery stores there with his brother and father, one of which was located in the lower floor of the Bushis’ home. Together the stores provided the family with a comfortable life in Kacanik, until ethnic violence tore their homeland apart.
Kacanik was one of many towns in southern Kosovo that became battlegrounds in the 1990s in the struggle between the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army of Slobodan Milosević, which was trying to assert Serbian control over the mostly Albanian-inhabited region, and the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnically Albanian militia that was fighting for independence against Milosević’s iron rule. Civilians in Kacanik were victimized by both sides in the conflict. KLA soldiers had put sometimes violent pressure on fellow Albanians in Kacanik to flee the town for refugee camps in Macedonia, with the aim of provoking sympathy from the international community and—they hoped—a military response.
The NATO bombing, which was ordered by President Bill Clinton and which would eventually prompt the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo, began on March 24, 1999. To avenge the military intervention, Milosević’s army unleashed a wave of destruction and brutality on some sixty towns and cities in Kosovo. Kacanik’s time came three days after the bombing began, on March 27, when Milosević’s forces ransacked the town’s commercial district, stealing food and valuables from residents and cleaning off the shelves of grocery stores, including those owned by the Bushis. The Serbian army holed up in Kacanik, but two weeks later, on April 9, a swarm of KLA militiamen attacked the Serbian soldiers there. The battle, which took place largely on Kacanik’s main street, left some seventeen dead. The next day, Serbian reinforcements came to take revenge for the attack. As they approached, many Kacanik residents fled along a canyon path that ran along a stream.
Eyewitnesses said that Serbian police drove an armored vehicle equipped with a twin-barreled antiaircraft cannon through town, shooting all the way. Sharpshooters fired on those fleeing through the canyon. There were bodies everywhere. The summer after the fighting ended, NATO troops discovered a mass grave containing the remains of ninety-three people just outside of Kacanik. Some were KLA soldiers, but most were town residents, identified from scraps of clothing they’d been wearing the day they were gunned down.
XHALAL BUSHI HAD managed to get his wife and children to Macedonia before the fighting, but he and his brother had gone back to Kacanik to look after their homes and stores. Their presence had little effect; their stores and homes were completely destroyed by the Serbian army.
“My house is burned,” Xhalal said, sitting on a sofa in his apartment outside Clarkston. “They put some bomb in it and destroyed everything.” He flung his hands in the air: “Boom!” he said.
Xhalal and his brother fled Kacanik on foot and trekked for two days over mountains toward Macedonia. They drank water from streams as they walked, and went without food, until they were apprehended by Macedonian soldiers, who placed them in a refugee camp. Xhalal was reunited with Qendrim, his wife, and his daughter, and together they lived in the camp for three months, awaiting placement by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Bushis were grateful when they learned they had been granted asylum by the United States, but the news was bittersweet. Xhalal’s extended family was broken up, sent to a variety of Western countries that had offered to accept refugees from Kosovo. His relatives from Kacanik are now scattered from Norway to England and to Australia, a world away, quite literally, from both Kacanik and his new home outside Atlanta.
Xhalal was given a $2,275 loan for his family’s one-way plane tickets to America. He spoke n
o English, and knew nothing at all about Atlanta when he arrived. The family’s resettlement was handled by the resettlement agency World Relief, which helped Xhalal get a job at the Decatur-DeKalb farmers’ market, stocking shelves and hauling groceries. Xhalal eventually got a job working for a company that made industrial conveyor belts. After a lifetime living above his store in a small Balkan village, Xhalal said the strangest thing about America was the idea of getting in a car and driving long distances for work. But he adjusted, using public transportation and getting rides from friends. The food took some getting used to as well.
“I never eat Chinese food before in my country—never know Chinese people,” Xhalal said. “Now, I like it. I like Mexican food a lot. You know Mexican buffet?” His eyes lit up at the thought.
The biggest change for Xhalal from life under Milosević was a happy one: no checkpoints, no one stopping him to ask his intentions or to interrogate him for no reason. He was so used to living that way that he found his sudden liberty unsettling.
“When I live over there, for example, when it was Milosević in power, it was very very dangerous,” he said. “If you go somewhere, for example, if you stay longer, and you come in the dark in the evening, they stop you—too many checkpoints.
“It was very different when I come here,” Xhalal said. “You can go where you want. You can do what you want. You can open business—nobody can stop you. If you want to go somewhere—nobody can stop you. I was in a different city, different people—everybody go to the store and nobody check. Nobody watch what you’re doing.”
Qendrim was not quite six years old when his family arrived in Georgia. Now twelve and a half, he still remembered his first day of school, at McClendon Elementary. He knew no English, and none of the other kids.
“I was scared,” Qendrim said. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go.”
Qendrim’s first friends were other Albanian and Bosnian Muslim kids he met in his apartment complex. As he learned English, he made friends at school. Xhalal took his son to the kids’ soccer program at the Clarkston Community Center, where Qendrim eventually met Luma and joined her refugee soccer team. The Fugees had since become the center of Qendrim’s social life. He had grown particularly close with Eldin, the Bosnian goalie, who also happened to live in his same apartment complex. Qendrim and Eldin had their own morning ritual. On weekdays, their parents left their respective apartments not long after dawn for their long commutes to work. Qendrim would get dressed and walk down the driveway of the complex to Eldin’s, where they would play video games or watch ESPN with no adults around, until it was time to go outside and wait for the school bus. They were best friends. Qendrim had become close with his other teammates as well: Grace, the midfielder from the Congo, who lived up the street; with Josiah and Jeremiah, the Liberians; with Bienvenue, the Burundian; Shahir, who was from Afghanistan; Robin and Idwar Dikori, the Sudanese brothers. Having friends from all over the world seemed perfectly normal to Qendrim; it was all he had known since arriving in the United States. Qendrim was smaller than most of his teammates, but he had their respect; when he called out directions during games, the others listened. Qendrim had come to feel the other players were more than just teammates.
“It’s like they’re all from my own country,” he said. “They’re my brothers.”
INDEED, WHILE THE Under 15s were struggling to keep their team together, Qendrim and the Under 13s were beginning to gel. They had started the season with a tie and a loss but had since won their last two, putting them in a position to actually win their division. Their play was improving, they were communicating better and with more confidence, and above all, they were having fun.
During practice, the usual custom was for the players to strike out on their laps at their own pace; Qendrim, Josiah, Jeremiah, Bien, and the Dikoris would take off, while Eldin, Mafoday, and Santino—the recently arrived Sudanese refugee—would follow, each at his own slower pace. On Wednesday, though, as Luma was watching her Under 17 team scrimmage, she looked over to see the 13s running together in a kind of chorus line: the faster players had slowed down for the slower players, who in turn had sped up so as not to hold their teammates back. They ran like this quietly for fifteen minutes or so, at which point the boys began to clap in rhythm with their strides. Eventually the boys initiated a call-and-response chant.
“Who are the kings?” someone would shout to the group, in time.
“The Fugees!” the team would answer.
Luma remained focused on the older boys’ scrimmage, but the 13s wouldn’t be ignored. They chanted louder with each pass until Luma finally turned around to see what the fuss was all about. When the 13s saw they had their coach’s attention, someone else called out: “Who is the queen?”
“Luma!” the boys shouted.
When Luma shook her head to convey her befuddlement, the boys tumbled to the ground in laughter. It was a small, ridiculous moment, but also a sign of more significant developments. Boys from thirteen different countries and a wide array of ethnicities, religions, and languages were creating their own inside jokes. Even Mohammed Mohammed, the Iraqi Kurd whose family had arrived in the United States only a few months before the season and who spoke almost no English at all, was chanting at the top of his lungs and laughing as if someone had just told him the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
AS THE BOYS became more comfortable with each other, Luma was making progress on the sideline as well. She was getting a better feel for her roster and for the ways she could move players around for different effects. She had learned, for example, that Bienvenue was a kind of secret weapon. She would keep him hidden on defense for the first half or so of a game, then switch him to offense as the other team tired, a move akin to holding back a racehorse and then letting him go on the final stretch. By the time the competition realized the threat—usually when Bien fired a perfect cross or else let loose with a perfectly executed bicycle kick—it was often too late to make adjustments. Jeremiah could play both offense and defense equally well, just as he could kick the ball equally well with his left and right feet, making him a threat on corner kicks from either side. Mohammed Mohammed was proving a relentless and tough defender despite his pint size. Luma still had to direct him mostly in Arabic, but it was no coincidence that his limited but rapidly expanding English vocabulary consisted largely of soccer terminology. On offense, the Fugees’ strength was at left forward in Josiah, a fast and agile ball handler, whose streaking forays down the sideline had resulted in a half dozen goals so far. Qendrim was an able midfielder, capable of directing his teammates and setting up his talented front line, while Shahir, a quiet and unassuming left midfielder, was getting more confident and reliable with each practice.
There was still a glaring weakness on the Under 13s, though, in goal: Eldin and Mafoday, the heavyset young man from Gambia with the blinding smile. A good goalie was quick, determined, and not a little menacing. Ideally, attacking players would fear a keeper’s aggressiveness, especially when they took the ball in to the goalie box. Eldin and Mafoday inspired no such fear. They didn’t go to the ball so much as wander to it, and standing in goal with their innocent, slightly goofy smiles, they gave the impression that they were less likely to take out an attacking forward than to hug him and invite him over to play. But Eldin and Mafoday had been with the team since the beginning. They were on time. They did their homework. The boys set a stellar example, so Luma had resolved to coach around their weaknesses in goal.
Such a strategy suited Luma well. As rigid as she could seem about team rules and the like, she favored a flexible, unregimented approach to the game itself. In the spectrum of international soccer styles, Luma favored the Latin American, and particularly Brazilian, style over the more regimented and methodical styles of European soccer. In drills and in games, she assigned her players a particular task but left it up to the players themselves to find their own personal ways of achieving that goal. Where some soccer coaches mi
ght have emphasized, say, striking the ball on a particular part of the foot to achieve a specific effect, Luma instead focused on the end result, and graded her players on their ability to find their own personal ways of achieving the end. Creativity was essential in overcoming weaknesses in soccer, and beyond. Before one early game, Luma had mentioned idly that her strength was coaching offense, since she’d never actually played defense herself. So what was her defensive strategy for the game? I asked.
“Score a lot,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-three
Showdown at Blue Springs
“Coach,” Mafoday said in a whisper. “It’s all white people.”
The Under 13s were walking onto the home field of the Blue Springs Liberty Fire in Loganville, Georgia, an old southern town still beyond the grasp of Atlanta’s creeping tendrils, and down the road from other old southern towns with names such as Split Silk and Between. Luma looked around. It was true. Loganville was more than 90 percent white, and there wasn’t so much as a suntan on the faces of the Liberty Fire or their parents, assembled on the sideline with an array of lawn furniture, coolers, and picnic blankets. Luma reminded Mafoday that the Fugees rarely faced teams with black players.
Outcasts United Page 22
