Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  Taking care of Alyah in the evenings fell mostly to Alex, the quiet defender for the Under 15 Fugees, who assumed his new responsibility as Mister Mom without complaint. He would hurry home after soccer practice in time for Generose to leave for work. In the early evening, he fed Alyah, warming milk in the microwave and then stirring in powdered baby food to form a gooey white pabulum, which he would then spoon patiently into her mouth as he held her on his lap. When Alyah was fed, Alex would then turn his efforts to making dinner for his brothers—sometimes warming food Generose had made during the day, sometimes making hot dogs or some other simple fare himself, while Bien and Ive watched television or did their homework. After dinner, Alex cleaned the kitchen as well, scrubbing the pans and wiping down the counters and stove top with the same graying cotton rag. He didn’t seem to view all the work as a burden in the least, but there was no doubt it was affecting Alex in one important way. He was handling the babysitting, cooking, and cleaning in the time he had previously devoted to doing homework. Of the three brothers, he was the farthest behind with his English and reading.

  Alyah was a beautiful child with long, thin fingers, perfectly formed little lips, and for an infant, an improbably serene demeanor. She rarely cried. She could sit for an hour or more in her walker, gazing calmly at her brothers or at guests with her giant brown eyes without so much as a peep. Alyah seemed to understand that she was loved and safe. After all, she had a team taking care of her. Alyah spent much of the day sleeping in a kanga on her mother’s back, as Generose made dinner in the kitchen in the afternoons. There she would be rocked into deep slumber from the motion of Generose’s stirring a thick clump of foofoo, the starchy paste of pulverized and boiled cassava root, which had to be stretched and stirred and fought with, like taffy. In the evenings, when the boys came home, they would pick up Alyah and carry her around like a rag doll, eventually plopping her into a crease in the sofa cushions, where she would sit quietly, curiously, it seemed, for hours, at least until she got bored and squirmed her way off the edge. The typical American parent, used to coddling infants as though they were made of glass, might have been unnerved by the freedom Alyah was granted to wiggle about, and the rough-and-tumble way her brothers toted her back and forth as they did chores. But Alyah herself seemed content to bop along for the ride, and if she was accidentally dropped onto the carpet, say, by seven-year-old Ive, she was less likely to cry than to look up at him with a quiet but firm expression of disapproval: another little sister in the world convinced her big brother was a klutz.

  Each evening, the phone in the apartment would warble at around nine o’clock. It was Generose, calling by cell phone from the chicken plant to make sure everything was all right. In truth, there was little she could do if she found out things weren’t. She was an hour away, and relied on a carpool for transportation. If something went wrong, her sons would have to take the initiative to call for help. The boys would put their mother on speakerphone and share a chaotic group conversation before saying good night.

  ONE EVENING AFTER practice, Alex came home weary, and set about making dinner. He put some hot dogs in a pan for himself and his brothers and placed it on an orange-hot coil on the electric stove. Then he got to work on Alyah’s dinner. He washed a plastic container in the sink, poured in a dollop of milk, and placed the container in the microwave. Alyah was hungry now, and as she sat in her walker in the next room, she had a rare meltdown, crying out for food. Bien was on the sofa doing his homework, while Ive was lost in an episode of The Simpsons. Alyah’s cry rose to a marrow-curdling shriek as Alex waited impatiently for the microwave to beep. He stirred in the powdered formula and tested the steaming mixture with his finger. It was too hot. He stirred some more and blew into the container to cool the food. The hot dogs were sizzling in the skillet. Alex then hurried into the living room to Alyah, who was still crying. Bien had put down his book and was now bouncing his little sister on his knee, but she was in no mood to play. Alex took over. He perched Alyah on his knee and leaned her back into the crook where his arm met his body, and began to feed her, blowing on each spoonful of pabulum until it was cool. Alyah was ravenous and happy. She ate sloppily, with food pouring from her mouth. With the small spoon, Alex patiently scraped the dripping food from Alyah’s chin and the corners of her lips. Alyah’s eyes lit up with each slurp of her dinner.

  The smoke came first as a faraway scent, and then as a quick moving thundercloud rolling from the kitchen into the living room: the hot dogs. Alex put the food down and propped Alyah against the arm of the sofa and ran into the kitchen. The hot dogs had melted into a black goo in the skillet, which was now billowing a foul-smelling smoke. Alex grabbed the wet rag he used to clean the kitchen, took the scalding skillet by the handle, and hurried to the sliding door at the back of the kitchen. He dropped the pan on the small concrete apron that constituted the back porch, overlooking the noisy interstate below. He closed the door to keep the smoke out. By now Bien and Ive had appeared at the kitchen door. Alyah was crying in the other room.

  The three boys stood quietly and watched the skillet smoke through the glass.

  “What was that?” Ive asked finally.

  “Dinner,” Bien said.

  WHEN MANDELA ZIATY walked into his apartment after getting kicked off the Fugees, he walked past his mother, Beatrice, without saying a word, and went upstairs to his room. Beatrice asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t answer. He just brooded. It took another few days for Beatrice to learn what happened, which came when Mandela announced he wouldn’t be going to practice.

  “Why you can’t go to practice?” Beatrice asked him.

  “Mandela quit from the team,” Jeremiah told her.

  “Jeremiah, shut up your mouth,” Mandela said.

  BEATRICE WAS WORRIED for Mandela. Without soccer, he would be free in the afternoons and evenings to roam around Clarkston, to get into trouble. She’d been mugged herself there. Tito had been shot right in front of their apartment complex. Like Generose, Beatrice now worked a night shift, folding cardboard at a packaging factory that made boxes for takeout pizza chains. While she was at work, Mandela, now untethered from the Fugees, would be free to do as he pleased. What was Mandela going to do with himself to avoid this kind of trouble?

  “He ain’t got nothing to do,” Beatrice said.

  IN CLARKSTON, BEATRICE had met a Liberian man named David Faryen, a political scientist in their old country, who had come to the United States a decade or so before. They came from rival tribes, he Gio, she Krahn, but they liked each other and had started dating. Their relationship was sometimes contentious. They argued, sometimes about money, sometimes about the boys. Faryen had been in the United States longer than Beatrice, and thought he understood certain things better. He wasn’t exactly a father figure to the boys—Beatrice was too strong a presence and felt too possessive of her boys to cede authority over them—but he helped the boys when he could, and he didn’t hesitate to express his opinions, especially about the other Liberian kids Mandela hung out with when he wasn’t playing soccer. Faryen distrusted them. He thought Liberians who came to America succumbed to bad influences and did bad things, especially to one another. Faryen frequently brought up what had happened to the Jackson family after the apartment fire that had killed four of their children. A local Liberian had volunteered to collect donations for the family, who was also Liberian. The community responded by donating thousands of dollars, but the man promptly disappeared with the funds. That’s what we’re up against, Faryen would tell the boys.

  Faryen’s reflexive distrust of others was perhaps excusable, given his personal history. Despite his Gio heritage, he had found a job as a public servant in the mostly Krahn government, a position that made him the target of distrust among other Gios. On a Saturday night in January 1990, a group of rebels showed up at his house with guns. They spoke a dialect he didn’t recognize, and said they had orders to take him away. Faryen stalled. He pointed out that he was in his shor
ts, and that he hadn’t showered. The rebels told him he didn’t need to shower. There was a discussion among the strangers that he couldn’t understand, and then, to his surprise, one of the armed men told him to go inside and to put some clothes on for their journey. It was a journey Faryen had no intention of taking.

  “I know that if I get in the car,” Faryen said, “I’d be dead.”

  Faryen went into his house and fled out the back door—running for all he was worth to the bush. When the rebels eventually left the house after discovering their prey’s escape, Faryen’s neighbors assumed they’d taken him with them. Word of his supposed disappearance spread, and Faryen’s abduction and presumed execution was eventually reported by the BBC as an example of the harassment of government officials by rebels. In truth, Faryen spent two nights in the bush. He made his way to Guinea by foot, where he spent three months before going to live in Abidjan in Ivory Coast, for six years. He applied to the UNHCR for resettlement, and eventually was accepted into the United States. He moved to Staten Island—a resettlement location for Liberian refugees—and later, to Atlanta.

  As Beatrice’s companion, he spent no small amount of energy worrying about the boys. He liked Luma and what she had done for them. When Faryen had suggested that the older boys get a job at McDonald’s, Jeremiah said that his soccer coach said that if you got an education, you wouldn’t have to work at McDonald’s. Faryen appreciated that. He marveled too that a soccer coach could get through to the boys better than he could.

  “They have never had this much freedom,” he said of the kids. “They kind of overgrow their parents, and they don’t know how to deal with that. The way they dress, the way they carry themselves, the kind of hairstyles, the kind of pants—baggy, baggy—and gradually they go off bounds. The parents are not able to control them.

  “We, as Africans, have a way of dealing and bringing up our children,” he continued. “And when they get used to that, living in America, you got to be strong, you see, and keep on telling them, ‘You are here, but you are not from here. You got a culture, and you need to respect it.’”

  Faryen believed that the problems of many Liberian boys in the neighborhood could be traced back to their parents. The strategy for keeping kids out of trouble, he believed, was simple.

  “You need to make sure you perform, and put bread on the table,” he said. “Because once they have enough to eat, and they go out there, there will be something else hopefully positive, not negative. If they are hungry, they will follow some bad friends and do what they’re not supposed to do. So we encourage them to go to school, to take their academics seriously, and to also have food available in the house that they’ll be able to eat.”

  As Faryen was speaking, Mandela came home from school. His mood was gloomy, and he offered only a nod of the chin as a greeting to his mother, Faryen, and myself. I asked Mandela about the Fugees, but he said simply that he wanted to play basketball now, and walked into the kitchen to get a snack. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  Once he was out of earshot, though, Beatrice said she had picked up on some subtle signs that Mandela was more conflicted about his dismissal from the team than he was willing to let on. A few days before, she had overheard him talking to his younger brother.

  “Jeremiah, I want to talk to Coach,” Mandela had said.

  “Why you want to talk to Coach?” Jeremiah asked him.

  “Why you want to talk to her?” Beatrice asked her son.

  “I just want to talk to her,” Mandela said. He didn’t appreciate all the questioning, Beatrice could tell, so she let up. But in Mandela’s room, there was a sign that perhaps he missed the Fugees more than he was saying. His bed was a mattress on the floor. The walls were bare but for one item. On the wall over his pillow, Mandela had carefully hung a light blue pair of shorts and a jersey of the same color: his old Fugees uniform.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The Dikoris

  After her fallout with Mandela, Luma tried to regroup. Between running her cleaning business, coaching, and helping the families of players and employees, she had had little time for rest or for dealing with the quotidian tasks of her own life. Phone calls and e-mails were going unanswered. A brake light had burned out on her Volkswagen, and Luma had been too busy to replace it. And every time it seemed as though Luma might get a break, another crisis would bubble up. This week, a Somali woman who worked at Luma’s cleaning company had become all but incapacitated from back pain. Luma and Tracy, the team manager, scrambled to find a doctor who would see the woman and rearranged their schedules to drive her to the appointment, where she was diagnosed with a severe joint infection in her spine. The doctor surmised that the woman had developed the infection long before her arrival in America. Unsure of how to navigate the health care system or how she would pay for treatment if she managed to figure out how to obtain it, the woman had simply suffered through the pain.

  ON THE SOCCER field, though, things were looking up. The move to Milam Park had invigorated the Fugees, and having a proper field allowed Luma to work on her teams’ weaknesses. Throw-ins, especially, had been a problem. There were no throw-ins in the informal games kids played in the parking lots around Clarkston, because there was no real out-of-bounds; when the ball drifted away, someone just chased it down and kicked it back into play. But in formal games, the player throwing the ball back onto the pitch had to keep both feet on the ground at all times, to use two hands during the throw, and to launch the ball from behind and over his head. In their previous games, the Fugees, and especially the Under 13s, had managed practically every illegal variation of throw-in form imaginable: picking up a foot, throwing the ball from the side of their head, and even casually heaving it into play with the motion approximating a chest pass in basketball. The result had been a steady flow of pointless turnovers and no small amount of laughter from rival players and parents who couldn’t fathom how kids playing organized soccer could be so ignorant of such basic rules.

  Luma opted for a simple fix to the problem. She had the Fugees practice throwing the ball flat-footed and from a stop, rather than the more customary method of running to gain momentum and dragging the toes of one’s back foot. She figured that throwing from a standstill offered fewer opportunities for a mistake. The Fugees lined up and practiced the maneuver over and over again; anyone who made an error was ordered to run a lap. With this incentive, the boys quickly caught on, and by the end of a single afternoon practice, the problem was solved.

  Luma would have liked to practice corner kicks, penalty kicks, and free kicks, specific situations in which the Fugees needed improvement badly, but she was hamstrung by the failure of the YMCA to come through with those soccer goals. She had managed to scrounge up a couple of small folding practice goals more suited for a kiddie team than her own players—they were perhaps four feet across and three feet high—and while better than nothing, the setup deprived the Fugees of the opportunity to develop a critical aspect of the game: its third dimension, the space between the ground and the crossbar of the goal. Scoring, particularly long shots and penalty and corner kicks, required a natural sense of that space—a feel for the angles to the top corners of the net, beyond the goalie’s reach. With nothing to shoot at but the empty space between clumps of T-shirts placed on the ground since the beginning of the season, the Fugees hadn’t had the chance to practice in 3D, and their shooting record showed it. While Josiah, Jeremiah, Qendrim, and Bien were dangerous when charging downfield one on one, the Fugees were missing long shots and crosses badly, and their conversion rate on corner kicks was poor as well.

  This coming weekend, the Under 13s would be put to the test. On Saturday, October 21, they were set to face their toughest competition of the season—the Athens United Gold Valiants, a team that had not lost a game and that had put some teams away by scores that nearly invoked the league’s mercy rule. The game was in Athens, a good hour and a half from Clarkston. Despite their weakness in goal and their shooting prob
lems, Luma felt the 13s had a chance. They were communicating better with one another. Luma herself had a better feel for the roster and how to rotate players through positions to create opportunities. And the team had discovered a secret weapon of sorts: the Dikori brothers.

  IDWAR AND ROBIN Dikori were playing their first season with the Fugees and were among the team’s youngest players. Idwar was twelve, Robin just nine. Robin was small, with tiny cat feet and spaghetti-thin legs that seemed to extend to his armpits. Idwar was taller, with a frame that had filled out only slightly more than his little brother’s. With their wiry builds, the boys hardly presented the image of athletic prowess. They were also quiet, shy, and, seemingly, unassertive. But on several occasions over the previous few games, the Dikoris had each displayed eye-popping speed that seemed to make the rest of the players on the field look as though they were running in slow motion. Luma knew they were quick, but her eyes were opened to the boys’ potential at that moment in the Blue Springs game when Robin appeared out of nowhere to clear the ball. If she found a way to utilize the boys’ quickness against Athens, Luma felt the Fugees had a chance to knock off the best team in the league.

  THE DIKORIS WERE from the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan, an area the size of South Carolina, with more than a million inhabitants. The land is divided between bare, bouldered mountain slopes and fertile, rain-fed bottomlands that supported both grazing and abundant agricultural production. The Nuba region traversed a fault line between African and Arab culture, prompting Yusif Kuwa, the late rebel leader of the Nuba, to declare his people “prisoners of geography.” In the Nuba region, some fifty different ethnic groups, including Christians, Muslims, and practitioners of traditional African religions, lived in relative peace. Unlike many in the better-known—to outsiders—regions of southern Sudan and Darfur, the collection of ethnic groups of the Nuba region put a premium on being left alone over political independence from Sudan’s central government. They were content to be Sudanese.