Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  In one way, at least, Luma’s harsh reaction to Mandela had precedent. It was how she had often dealt with violations of the sense of control and order she worked diligently to create around herself. When that control was violated—or perceived to have been violated—Luma’s reflex, it seemed, was to banish the violator. At various times in the last year, she had dismissed Christian Jackson, Prince, Fornatee, the entire Under 15 team, and even a young boy on the Under 13s for skipping during practice when he should have been running. But those close to Luma said the episodes had less to do with punishment than with Luma’s need to conceal her vulnerability from others, especially the boys who depended on her. “When her boys are in trouble, she tries to be tough and wants to be the tough figure in their lives,” said her sister Inam. “She has these emotions, but she doesn’t want people to see them.”

  The episode with Mandela left Luma exhausted and heartbroken. She spent the evening and most of the next day at home in her apartment. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She didn’t want to be around the kids for fear that she might say something she might later regret. So she kept to herself.

  “It’s like a kid you were hoping … and a family you’re really close to,” she said, trying to explain before interrupting herself.

  “You don’t want to give up,” she said.

  SUCH MOMENTS OF despair and deep frustration were common among those who worked in refugee resettlement in Clarkston. The work had a Sisyphean quality. Individual refugee families often needed more help than an individual could give, and because new families kept arriving, the need was constantly multiplying. Resources for providing help were limited—there were never enough English classes or decent jobs. Sometimes refugees themselves were distrusting and rejected help. And adding to the frustration was a sense that the world beyond Clarkston seemed not to know or particularly to care about the struggles taking place there. For many who worked in resettlement, the steady accrual of disappointment eventually led to burnout.

  Those who stuck out the frustration and remained committed tended not to strike a balance between their private lives and the lives of the refugees so much as to give in to the idea that Clarkston and the refugees were a large part of their lives. They tended also to be searchers who were capable of reframing the terms of transaction between themselves and newcomers in a way that emphasized the benefits of getting involved.

  “You have to remember that you’re being given a lot more than you’re giving,” said Jeremy Cole, a youth services coordinator at Refugee Family Services, an aid agency just across the Clarkston town line in Stone Mountain. “Because the refugees give you something in return—an understanding of international cultures, of generosity.”

  Cole was emblematic of a small but passionate group of volunteers and social workers in Clarkston who powered through the daily frustrations and who as a result had found their lives transformed in surprising ways. Soft-spoken and contemplative, Cole had lived a comfortable life before coming to Clarkston. He now spent much of his day going from one crisis to another—working with families from dozens of countries, including the Ziatys, and educating local police departments about the refugees in their jurisdictions. Persevering through daily disappointments was his stock in trade, because the families who came to Refugee Family Services were frequently among the neediest in Clarkston. They came Cole’s way after their three months of assistance from the resettlement agencies had expired, often broke, often depressed or dealing with post-traumatic stress. When I sat down with him for the first time at his cubicle at Refugee Family Services, Cole was working on the case of a troubled thirteen-year-old Sudanese boy whose father had killed himself three months before.

  “He has a lot of problems—discipline problems—which of course were made much worse with the suicide,” Cole said. The boy had been arrested for carrying a gun at a local mall, he said, and suspended from school for unrelated disciplinary reasons. “So I’m dealing with trying to get him back into school,” he said. “And working with his teachers to figure out what’s going on while also referring him to a new mental health program here.”

  As someone who dealt frequently with refugee boys and teenagers like Mandela, Cole understood the difficulties they faced. They were caught between worlds, first as teenagers moving from childhood to adulthood, but also as resettled refugees, transitioning from one culture to another. Social scientists refer to the state of being between worlds as liminality, which the anthropologist Victor Turner described as the state in which a person “becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state.” The process is hard enough on the average teenager, but compounded for refugees and immigrants, who social scientists say possess “double liminal status.” A teenager who’d left Liberia at the age of seven or eight for America—and who now spoke English fluently, had friends from around the world, and had been educated in American culture—was not Liberian exactly, or American. In fact, the hardest moments for kids on the Fugees came when they were expected to be entirely one or the other: when their parents pressured them to dress and speak the way children did in the old country, or when the American kids at school mocked them for their accents, strange mannerisms, and unfamiliarity with American customs.

  “We hear a lot of stories about parents with kids, because our kids are the ones who are getting in trouble,” Cole said. “The parents see this and know the kids are on the wrong track, and they go into this long story about ‘what I went through to get here—I walked carrying you on my back, barefoot, for a hundred miles in the desert, just so we could survive, eating roots and anything I could, and you’re acting like this?’ It’s sort of a guilt trip—it is a guilt trip—and it’s a hard thing for the kids to deal with.”

  Understanding this dynamic in abstract terms was useful, but it didn’t necessarily help Cole get through to young men or their parents, because of the profound distrust many refugees had built up through the process that led to their flight in the first place.

  “They’ve been betrayed by their country, their government, their soldiers, the police, the refugee camps probably,” he said. “How can you trust easily having gone through those circumstances?”

  Cole was not necessarily the likeliest person to be advising refugees from Africa or the Middle East on how to live their lives. He came from a solidly upper-middle-class American family of Methodists in Macon, an hour and a half south of Atlanta. His mother was a federal magistrate, his father, a law professor. He attended Oberlin, and after college worked for a while at a homeless shelter in Boston before moving back down south to Atlanta. He took a job at Refugee Family Services mostly because it was available. He began working on an after-school program for refugee kids and supervised a tutoring program for adults, and in the process found his worldview unexpectedly challenged. The refugees Cole worked with came from literally dozens of different countries and ethnic groups, and yet there was something culturally similar about them in Cole’s eyes. They tended to value family above all else. Most were pious Christians or Muslims. Many were welcoming and reflexively generous in ways Cole had never experienced in America. Whatever their personal troubles, most seemed blissfully nonmaterialistic and free from the consumerist obsessions that drove the world Cole inhabited when he was not at work. And Cole was taken by something else he saw in many of the refugees he met: an improbable optimism and clearheadedness about what was important.

  “To be ripped from their home and forced to another place is enough to make you think that people would give up,” Cole said. “Not only do they keep going, but they cling to the vital aspects of their lives as closely as possible—family, friendship, love, kindness, community.”

  Cole didn’t know exactly what to call this worldview—he settled on simply “traditional,” and contrasted it with the world he was familiar with and that he saw as driven largely by ego and sel
fishness. Whatever one called this new worldview, Cole began to crave it.

  “The thing I got to thinking about,” he said, “is—what are the conditions that lead to larger portions of society being generous, humble, and selfless? While we have the conditions for economic opportunity here—and that is a blessing—do we have the conditions to learn how to self-regulate our own passions for the good of the whole?”

  At the same time Cole was contemplating these lofty questions, he began pursuing his master’s degree in religion at the University of Georgia. For his studies, and out of his own curiosity, he also wanted to learn Arabic, a language spoken or at least understood by many of the families Cole worked with from Africa and the Middle East. He mentioned his interest in Arabic to one of his clients, a well-educated Kurdish woman who had fled Iraq and persecution under the rule of Saddam Hussein and who now lived with her husband and children in Clarkston. She offered to tutor Cole in Arabic for free. He began making regular visits to the family’s apartment, where he was welcomed with tea and traditional Kurdish food. As his Arabic improved, he grew closer with the family, and received invitations to social events, including their daughter’s wedding. He began to feel as though he were part of their family.

  Cole’s time with the family also deepened his interest in Islam, the religion that he most strongly associated with the openness he felt in the refugee community. It was a view of Islam not widely held among Americans, particularly the folks in Macon, Georgia, where Cole had grown up.

  Interestingly to Cole, few of his Muslim clients showed more than a passing interest in his curiosity about their faith, a reaction at odds with the aggressive proselytizing that characterized the conservative Christians Cole knew from growing up in Georgia.

  “I expected an overwhelming response trying to convert me, calling me every day, asking me how my ‘faith decisions’ were going,” Cole said. “I never got this. I just had clients who were kind, and generous, and fair.”

  In 2003, Jeremy Cole—an otherwise typically polite, khaki-wearing southerner from Macon—converted to Islam, joining the exceedingly small subset of people who use the phrases “y’all” and “Salaam Aleichem” with equal ease. He began to pray at the Masjid al-Momineen, the multinational mosque on Indian Creek Drive in Clarkston, and cut pork from his diet—not an easy decision for a man from Macon, a place, he said, with some pretty good barbecue. Cole’s family—his parents and his wife, who was raised Catholic, reacted to his decision with confusion, surprise, and “many, many questions,” he said. But Cole’s marriage was strong, and he was on good terms with his parents. All, he said, have respected, if not entirely supported, his decision. Cole doesn’t make a point of declaring his faith to others—he dresses no differently than he did before, in the same khakis and oxford button-downs, and he hasn’t grown a beard.

  COLE’S TRANSFORMATION WAS a striking example of the cultural osmosis taking place in and around Clarkston. The refugees were assimilating, to varying degrees, into American culture, and the natives—at least those who dared to interact meaningfully with the newcomers—were changing as well. Of course, few were converting to Islam as Cole had, and in fact many of the most zealous supporters and volunteers of the resettlement community came from local churches. But his story was a reminder that those who had committed themselves to working in resettlement over the long haul and who had managed to persevere through the inevitable letdowns and frustrations often did so in part also out of a search for meaning in their own lives.

  “Working with refugees makes you think that maybe there is something we need to learn from the ‘traditional’ world,” Cole wrote in an e-mail to me one evening. “Maybe our modern, ‘civilized’ world has lost something that we need as human beings.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Hanging On at Home

  On the morning of September 6, early in the Fugees’ season, a team of federal agents descended upon the small town of Stillmore, Georgia, about three hours south of Atlanta, looking for illegal immigrants. The raid targeted Crider Inc., a local chicken processing plant that employed hundreds of Latino immigrants, some of them illegal, and the trailer parks where Crider’s workforce lived. By the end of the day, 120 people—most of them Mexican—were in custody. Hundreds more, including women and children, had fled into nearby woods, fearing arrest or deportation.

  Poultry processing plants had become the front lines in the nation’s increasingly heated debate over immigration policy. They offered low-paying, dangerous work in revolting conditions and at an unrelenting pace, work Americans seemed less willing to do than immigrants, at least for the wages offered. Plant managers had come to value immigrant laborers. They worked hard, and fearful of getting detained or sent back to their native countries—and often separated from family in the process—they were more compliant than American workers, less likely to file workers’ compensation claims or to support union organizing drives. A significant number of those Latino workers were in the United States illegally. The federal government estimated that the total number of illegal immigrants in Georgia had doubled from 220,000 in 2000 to 470,000 in 2005. The state’s Republican governor, Sonny Perdue, had pledged a crackdown.

  The Crider raid was simply a higher-profile version of raids that had been occurring with increasing frequency at slaughterhouses and processing plants around the South. Stillmore, Georgia, Crider’s home, became a kind of ghost town after the raids, as the remaining Latinos left for home or, more likely, for jobs in other American communities. The company raised wages and conducted aggressive recruiting efforts, which included busing in workers from surrounding counties, and yet still couldn’t match its pre-raid production levels. Crider bused in workers from a homeless shelter, and even cut a deal with local corrections officials that resulted in a controversial program to compel probationers and convicted felons to work in the plant as part of their restitution for their crimes. Even after all these efforts, the plant was still three hundred workers short of its pre-raid workforce of one thousand. That’s when company officials implemented another outreach program: to lure Hmong refugees who had been resettled in Minnesota and Wisconsin to move to Stillmore.

  Refugees, if you could find them, were a good substitute for illegal workers. Most important, they were legal, having been granted asylum by the U.S. government. They were often poor and often desperate, and since many didn’t speak English, they had few options when it came to employment. Consequently, they worked for low wages and they labored hard to keep the jobs they could get. For the most part refugees, at least in their first few months or years in the United States, were every bit as fearful and compliant as illegal immigrants, if not more so. Latino immigrants to Georgia plugged into a vast and experienced network of other Latinos who had come before them and who knew the ins and outs of the American system. There were more than 600,000 Latinos in Georgia legally, in addition to the hundreds of thousands there illegally, and there were whole neighborhoods south of Atlanta where Spanish was the predominant language. By contrast, there were only a few hundred Somali Bantu refugees—or Burundians, or Meskhetian Turks, or Burmese Karen—in the Atlanta metropolitan area, and most had arrived at around the same time and were learning the ropes together. They were not likely to cause much trouble.

  Crider had to recruit Hmong from Wisconsin in part because much of the refugee workforce around Atlanta had been spoken for by chicken processors in the north of the state. Recruiters for the processors kept in touch with the job placement coordinators at the resettlement agencies, and as a result, the first full-time job for many refugees in Clarkston was cleaning and butchering just-killed chickens. Many chicken plants around Atlanta ran twenty-four hours a day, and many refugees—starting out at the bottom of the employee hierarchy—ended up taking jobs on the night shift. Managers didn’t care what language workers spoke, so long as they showed up on time. And anyway, it was too loud in a chicken plant to carry on a conversation.

  With a newborn baby gi
rl to take care of and no husband around, Generose—the mother of Alex, Bien, Ive, and six-month-old Alyah—needed income, but she couldn’t take just any job. She spoke almost no English and couldn’t afford day care for Alyah. There was one obvious option: a night shift job at a chicken processing plant.

  The plants were in a constant scramble for new workers, so Gene-rose had no problem finding a plant with an opening. She simply asked other refugees she’d gotten to know in Clarkston. They inquired with their bosses on her behalf, and within a couple of days she was piling into a friend’s car with other refugees for the hour-long commute to a local plant. Her shift ran from late afternoon to two in the morning; with the commute, she would get home just after three a.m., in time for a few hours of sleep before the boys woke up for school. Wearing a gown, hair covering, and plastic gloves, Generose joined a group of twenty or so line workers charged with butchering dead chickens into cuts. The floor was loud, the smell, acrid and nauseating. And of course, the work was relentless; during the eight-hour shift, chicken carcasses kept coming—pink piles of warm flesh coated in a white smock of skin and fat. It took Generose only a few shifts to develop a revulsion toward chicken. Now on the rare occasions when she’d eat meat, she stuck to beef and fish.

  Generose did the work without complaint. She seemed to find the exercise more confounding than anything else. The idea of leaving one’s family at home, driving an hour away to work at a factory to get paid by the hour struck Generose as a weird and inefficient quirk of American society. In Burundi, a mother worked within sight of her children. Commuting—an hour in each direction, no less—was an alien concept. Far worse than the actual work was the idea of being so far away from her children. Generose had lost a nine-year-old daughter in the camp in Mozambique in a cooking accident. Now her boys—fifteen, thirteen, and seven—were at home alone with an infant.