Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  “Enough for five hundred ice creams.”

  “If you pay five hundred ice creams you can come out of jail?” he asked.

  Luma started to explain how the process of bail worked, but then she caught herself, finally grasping the boy’s confusion. The Balegamires’ father was still locked up in Makala, the notorious central prison in Kinshasa. The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo had issued no word on when—or if—he would be released.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Halloween

  On October 27, less than a week after Luma’s arrest on the way to Athens, Reuters, the BBC, and The New York Times each published short notices about a prison riot in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Details of the incident were murky, but taken together, the dispatches sketched a scene of violence and bloodshed. A riot had occurred at the ominously named Penitentiary and Re-education Center in Kinshasa—the prison once known as Makala. The government reported that five inmates had been killed and that fourteen had escaped. The dead and the escaped, the government said, had been involved in the assassination of the former president Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a meaningless detail, perhaps, since the government of Joseph Kabila, Laurent’s son who now ran the country, applied this charge to many of its political opponents.

  To most of the world, perhaps, a minor prison riot in Congo—five dead, fourteen escaped—was a mundane event, especially against the backdrop of the five-million-plus lives lost in the country’s most recent civil war. But just outside of Clarkston, at the apartment of Paula Balegamire—the mother of the Under 13 Fugees’ midfielder Grace and the young boy who had puzzled over Luma’s explanation of bail—news of a riot at Makala was cause for extraordinary worry. Joseph Balegamire, Paula’s husband and the father of her children, was an inmate there. If the riot had involved the so-called Kabila assassins, as the Congolese government claimed, it had likely occurred in Pavilion One, the wing of Makala where political prisoners, Joseph Balegamire included, were held. News coverage of the event was spare: Kabila’s security forces had detained two journalists who had shown up at the prison after locals reported hearing gunfire within. Paula called friends but could gather no additional information on her husband. So for now, she waited, hoping for a phone call to tell her of Joseph’s fate—whether he was still an inmate, among the dead, or if, God willing, he had escaped.

  HALLOWEEN WAS NOT exactly a big holiday in Clarkston, Georgia. Many of the refugees had never heard of it, or if they had, they were certainly not in the habit of knocking on strangers’ doors in the apartment complexes around town. But after the arrest in Athens and the news at the Balegamires’, Luma decided that the Fugees needed a break and an introduction to America’s most sugar-saturated holiday. Trick-or-treating safely meant leaving Clarkston, where gunfire around the apartment complexes on Halloween was common, so Luma arranged to use the YMCA’s bus for the evening and called the parents of the Under 13 players to let them know that their sons would be home a bit later than usual. She stopped by a local CVS and bought costumes—a set of matching Ninja outfits that were more or less black plastic sheets with hoods. She held a casual practice in which she scrimmaged and laughed with the kids, and then afterward surprised them all with the news that they were going trick-or-treating.

  The neighborhood Luma had in mind for the outing was not one any of the Fugees had seen before. It was an affluent subdivision near Decatur with a series of cul-de-sacs and rolling narrow lanes that closed to traffic on Halloween each year to become a trick-or-treater’s paradise. Nearly every house participated, and residents went all out: the adults wore costumes themselves and decorated their homes with elaborate spooky displays—witches and spiderwebs, ghosts and skeletons with flashing red lights for eyes, and dungeon soundtracks blaring from upstairs windows. Behind each door there were staggering supplies of candy: giant boxes of Mars Bars, Hershey’s Kisses, Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Jolly Ranchers, and huge, squirming nests of Gummi Worms. It was enough sugar to support the practice of every dentist in east Atlanta.

  As they bounced in the bus toward Decatur, Luma passed out the costumes, and the boys began to disappear beneath their black plastic sheets. The exception was Mafoday. On top of his Ninja robe, which stretched at the seams on his round frame, he wore a large pink feather boa and a rubber Elvis mask, odds and ends from the costume bin at the local pharmacy. It was easily the most outlandishly absurd getup anyone in Decatur would encounter this evening.

  Luma handed out simple plastic shopping bags for the candy they would collect. It was the first Halloween for most of the Fugees, and they seemed unsure of what they were supposed to do, so Luma gave them instructions: ring doorbells, say “Trick or treat?,” take a few pieces of candy, and say “Thank you.”

  The Fugees were conspicuous as they disembarked. They were the only trick-or-treaters to arrive in the neighborhood by bus, and they were among the only children in the neighborhood who weren’t white. But the boys were too taken with the scene before them to note the attention they drew to themselves. One by one they stepped off the bus and gazed at the shimmering suburban wonderland around them. It looked nothing like Clarkston. The houses were in the colonial style, with red brick facades, black clapboard shutters. Gleaming sconces and pendant lights over the front doors were ablaze. Children in elaborate costumes roamed the streets by the hundreds, while parents socialized in packs in the front yards. The cool evening air was filled with playful screams and laughter, punctuated by the occasional cries of toddlers too young to fully appreciate the good nature of the holiday beneath its spooky facade. There were no police to be seen, and no menacing older boys standing around scouting for trouble. There was a strange sense of ease and safety, reinforced by Luma, who told the boys that she and Tracy would stay behind to watch the bus. They were free to roam as they pleased. Halloween, to the Fugees, seemed almost too good to be true.

  The boys resolved to give trick-or-treating a try. Grace, Josiah, and Bien led the way to the first house, up a lighted walkway and a flight of brick steps. With trepidation, Josiah rang the doorbell. A moment later, the door opened.

  “My word!” a woman said, startled by the sight before her: a pack of small, dark-skinned faces and white eyes peering out from behind black plastic sheeting. The boys were scared silent by the reaction. Finally someone up front mustered the magical phrase: “Trick or treat!”

  The woman recovered from the unexpected sight before her and extended a box full of candy through the doorway. One by one the Fugees dipped their hands in to retrieve their bounty. The boys were judicious, taking just one or two pieces and depositing them in the small plastic grocery sacks they carried with them. One by one they said thank you and moved aside for their teammates. The last in line was Mafoday, in his boa and Elvis mask, who waited patiently for his turn. When the other boys finally moved out of the way, he could scarcely believe his eyes: an entire box of candy for the taking. He plunged his two hands deep into the pile of shiny wrappers and shoveled out a good pound of loot into his bag.

  “Young man!” said the woman.

  “Thank you!” Mafoday said, flashing his giant klieg light smile. He ran after his friends, his pink feather boa streaming behind him in the breeze.

  Familiar now with the magical transaction of trick-or-treating, the boys went through the neighborhood methodically, venturing deep into cul-de-sacs and up shadowed sidewalks to houses that many other kids avoided. If there was candy to be had, the Fugees were going to find it. The boys stuck together, and for the most part kept to themselves. Their only real interaction with American kids involved, perhaps not surprisingly, soccer and came about as a result of a misunderstanding. A group of American girls of fourteen or fifteen had dressed up as much younger girls—with pigtails and teddy bears, wearing pajamas and kiddie clothes. One was wearing a soccer uniform, shirt neatly tucked in, socks pulled up to her knees, in the fashion of a peewee soccer player who had been fastidiously
dressed by her mother. Grace Balegamire didn’t understand that the get-up was a costume and assumed instead that the girl had come straight from practice, as the Fugees had.

  “What position do you play?” he asked her earnestly when they passed each other on the street.

  “What position do you think I play?” the girl said sassily, in character.

  “You look like you play defense.”

  “Defense?” the girl said, now sounding every bit her age. “I think he just insulted me!”

  With that, both the Fugees and the girls laughed, though no one seemed quite sure why, and went their separate ways.

  A SHORT WHILE later, the Fugees headed back to the bus. Their plastic grocery sacks were bursting at the seams, leaving a trail of foil wrappers that reflected the light from the houses like gemstones. A quiet fell over the boys. They were weary now from all the walking, and crashing from their sugar highs. When they reached the bus, the boys sat down together on a prickly slope of wheat-colored zoysia. They picked through their stashes of candy and one by one paused to look up and take in the scene before them: the glimmering, gabled homes, the throngs of kids laughing and running freely around a neighborhood, the incredible costumes they’d clearly spent hours perfecting. A comfortable American can afford to take a jaundiced view of suburban life. But this tableau was what many of the refugees who arrived here had imagined—and hoped—America might be like: a land of plenty, where each family had a home and a car, where parents could let their kids play in the streets without worrying about their safety. And the basic transaction of trick-or-treating—knocking on a stranger’s door and getting a sweet reward—was thrillingly unfamiliar. Grace was asked what he thought of his first Halloween and if it compared to anything he’d experienced before arriving here.

  “Well,” he said after careful consideration, “when you knock on somebody’s door in Africa—they don’t give you candy.”

  “Yep,” Bien concurred, a bit wearily. “You’d be lucky if you got an egg.”

  LATER THAT EVENING, after the bus had dropped the boys off at their apartments around Clarkston, Grace Balegamire lay in bed, sleeping off the day’s excitement, when he was startled awake: gunshots—fired just below the second-story window of his bedroom. Grace knew better than to look outside, and instead stayed low in his bedroom. He was afraid. A little while later, the police arrived. The sharp sound of their radios echoed in the parking lot and in the darkened stairwells of the apartment complex, and the blue lights atop the police cruisers flashed menacingly through the windows of the Balegamires’ home. A little while later, the cops pulled away. They’d made no arrests. Quiet returned. Grace closed his eyes and tried once again to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The Fifteens’ Final Game

  “How come you never told me your father was dead?” Natnael asked Joseph.

  The two boys were friends—Natnael, the leader of the Under 15s, and Joseph, a veteran of the Under 17 Fugees—and were riding together in the backseat of a car on the way to the 15s’ final game of the season. Joseph was coming along to give the younger team support. Kids on other teams rode to games alone with their parents. The Fugees rode together on the bus or, when the bus was full, in the cars of volunteers, and the trips were a kind of sacred time for talk about life outside of soccer. “We don’t talk about the game for very long on the bus,” Joseph explained once. “We talk about some crazy stuff.”

  “I don’t really tell anybody,” Joseph said, answering Natnael’s question about his father. “Because I don’t want them asking all sorts of questions about it.”

  Natnael’s curiosity was piqued now. He seemed startled that he didn’t know such an important detail of his friend’s life.

  “Did you cry?” he asked Joseph.

  “No,” Joseph said. “I didn’t cry.”

  Natnael considered the response.

  “How can you not cry?” he asked finally.

  “Well, if you don’t know somebody—” Joseph cut himself off, and tried to think of an example.

  “You got an uncle, right, in your old country?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Joseph thought for another moment. He wanted to explain.

  “Well, you got your mom, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Natnael.

  “Well, if your mom died, you’d cry, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if you never knew your mom, then you wouldn’t cry,” Joseph said.

  Natnael nodded. That was why his friend didn’t cry at his father’s death. He understood now.

  A FEW MINUTES later Natnael and the Under 15 Fugees took the field to warm up for their final game of the year. Joseph sat on the bench to cheer them on. It hadn’t been the season Luma or the boys on the 15s had hoped. Their goal at the beginning of the fall had been to make the State Cup—a tournament for the area’s best teams. Instead, they were fighting for their pride and against the threat of getting demoted to a lower division for next season. Despite all the off-the-field trouble, they had had their moments: the big win after their hiatus, and a 1–1 tie against the best team in their division. Luma had made sure not to point out that team’s ranking to her players before the game, because she hadn’t wanted them to get intimidated. The ploy had worked. When the Under 15s found out that they had nearly beaten the number one team in their division—they’d held a 1–0 lead until the final moments—they’d seemed stunned.

  But with their early loss, the forfeits during the hiatus, the losses since, and a total of eight penalty points against the team for red cards at various points along the way, the Under 15 Fugees faced the prospect of finishing dead last in the league, unless they could manage a big win on this day. In the scheme of things, second to last isn’t much to fight for. The Fugees’ demeanor reflected the unpleasant reality of where their season had gone. They were in a lackadaisical mood, laughing and joking with each other, trying, it seemed, not to think too much about soccer. Two and a half months of stress had worn them out. Luma urged them to focus.

  “You’ve got your last game of the season today—this is it,” she told them beforehand. “The way you play today is going to tell me how you guys are going to play next year. Okay? So let’s work it.”

  The Fugees were playing the Cobb YMCA Strikers, a middle-of-the-pack team that, while ranked higher in the standings than the Fugees, didn’t enjoy a particular advantage in talent. The Fugees had managed a win earlier in the season against a team that had beaten the Strikers soundly. Today they stood a chance.

  Despite Luma’s efforts to wake them up, the Fugees played the early minutes in a daze. They were flat and easily frustrated, and aside from Kanue—playing all-out as usual—the players were walking and showing little intensity. The Strikers countered with calm, methodical passes and controlled the ball. They scored ten minutes into the half, and then again before the half, to lead 2–0. Luma was enraged: it was one thing to lose, and another thing not to try. After all that we’ve been through.

  “So, what’s wrong?” she asked her players. “Is the ref cheating?”

  “No,” the boys said.

  “Are they faster than you?”

  “No.”

  “Are they better than you?”

  “No,” the boys said.

  “So the score’s two to nothing for what reason?”

  Silence.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Luma said, her voice rising. “Because you are all a bunch of idiots. You do not know how to play soccer. You know how to play street ball. So everything that everyone has said about this team—that you don’t deserve to play, that you don’t know how to play as a team, because you don’t have the discipline or the respect to play—it’s true. Because you don’t know how to play.

  “If you want to play on the streets, let me know,” Luma said finally. “Because this is a waste of my time.”

  Luma walked away from her players and the boys sat quietly for a moment, heads bowed. They
were dejected by their play, wounded by their coach’s comments, unsure of what to do next.

  “That’s what I hate about her, man,” one player said. “When she stops coaching us, then we’re gonna lose everything.”

  “She’s supposed to be mad, man,” said Sebajden, a midfielder from Kosovo. “We’re playing like little kids.”

  “Nobody get mad,” said another boy.

  “Let’s make our coach happy, man,” Sebajden said.

  “We can do this. Come on.”

  The boys put their hands together a final time, chanted, “One, two, three—Go Fugees!,” and jogged back onto the field to try to salvage the afternoon.

  They played harder, Kanue leading the way. Natnael scored on a long free kick, a gorgeous shot that floated just beyond the goalie’s fingertips. The Fugees attacked, and chased down free balls. But again the U15s made mistakes. They turned the ball over with sloppy throw-ins, and were called for offsides seemingly every time they managed to gain some momentum. Hamdu Muganga got called for a foul in the box, and the Strikers put away the penalty shot. The Fugees began to get frustrated, and to foul. When Kanue fought his way through two defenders in the box late in the game and prepared to shoot, the referee stopped play and called Kanue for using his elbows against the Strikers’ defender. Kanue shouted in frustration. Luma quickly pulled him from the game. When the referee blew his whistle, the score was 3–1, and the Under 15s’ season was over.

  The boys walked quietly toward Luma after the game and sat down around her. Her tone had shifted. She was no longer angry, or yelling, but she was every bit as emphatic as she had been at halftime.

  “You knew better than I did, is why you lost,” Luma told the boys afterward. “It’s an embarrassment to sit on the sideline and see you do throw-ins with your feet up, and throw-ins with your feet stepping over the line. And it is an embarrassment to sit here as a coach and watch you miss open shots at goal. And it’s even more of an embarrassment to see you use your elbows and push players away and lose your cool. That is not the team I coach.