Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  Lee Swaney took it all in. Her appeal put him in a tough spot. He’d catch hell from the old Clarkston residents, especially those who lived around Milam Park, if he gave a group of refugees free run of the place. Milam Park, surrounded by the neat houses of old Clarkston, was one of the few defining landmarks of the town, and seeing its pristine fields overrun with soccer players would be an alarming sign for some in town. At the same time, the mayor hadn’t enjoyed the fallout from his treatment of the Lost Boys Soccer Team, and he had no appetite for another round of negative publicity in the newspapers. So Swaney did what any conflict-averse public official would do when faced with two unpleasant options: he passed the buck.

  Swaney told Luma that he couldn’t unilaterally allow her to use the empty field, but that she was free to make her case to the Clarkston City Council. Swaney seemed unaware of the contradiction in his position: the mayor who had earlier claimed an outright authority to ban soccer in Milam Park now disclaimed the authority to allow it. And yet, there was opening. The Clarkston City Council met on the first Tuesday of each month. As it happened, the October meeting was just five days away. Luma planned to attend and make her case. But while there was pressure on Luma to be persuasive, the more significant voice on the matter belonged to Swaney himself. The soccer field issue had been his pet cause, for all it said about Clarkston’s identity. The city council would likely go along with whatever he recommended. On the first Tuesday of October, Swaney would have a fresh chance to let his constituents know what sort of town Clarkston was becoming.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Go Fugees!

  On the morning of the Under 15s’ first game back after their suspension, Luma woke up in her small two-bedroom apartment in Decatur, hurried down a short hallway to the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, and threw up.

  Luma had never become sick before a game until now. Her nerves were frayed, her stomach roiling with stress. She was terrified that her hastily assembled team stood a good chance of getting humiliated by their opponents. Luma understood she was dealing with a group of boys with fragile egos and with little self-esteem to spare. Kanue, Natnael, and Mandela, especially, had put their hopes and energy into this new version of their team, and against her better judgment, Luma felt she was enabling their blind optimism by keeping the season alive. She feared she was setting them up for failure, and Luma didn’t know what she would say or do to comfort them if they got blown out. She looked outside; the skies were clear. There would be no postponement due to weather. The game didn’t begin until five-thirty p.m., so Luma had all day to worry. A half hour before game time, she got sick again.

  The game was set for Ebster Field in Decatur, on a late-September Saturday. A cooling northerly breeze rolled over the foothills east of Atlanta, displacing the wet, stagnant air of summer. It was perfect soccer weather. The white YMCA bus arrived on time, and to Luma’s relief, a full roster of players disembarked and jogged onto the field.

  The Fugees ran laps around the perimeter to warm up, Kanue in the lead. He led his teammates through a stretching routine, and then had them take the pitch to practice penalty shots. The competition was the AFC Lightning from Fayetteville, Georgia, a mostly white middle-class suburb south of Atlanta. The Lightning came from a well-established soccer program with a history of sending teams to both state and national championships. The players on this particular Lightning team were big, and looked on average a good two years older than the Fugees. Their coach barked commands in a booming voice that rang off the brick buildings of the housing projects across the street. The Lightning wore red and gold, and traveled with a modest entourage of parents, friends, and siblings, who had made the fifty-minute trip to Decatur and who had set up camp on the sideline across from their bench. The Fugees had exactly three fans, a couple who volunteered occasionally to help Luma with tutoring and transportation, and a young Liberian named Tito who had been recruited late by a Liberian player named Osman and who hoped someday to make the team.

  Luma called her players in. She gave no hint of the anxiety that had had her retching earlier in the day, and her pregame instructions were spare: no cussing, and no tackling from behind. She didn’t want any players getting carded or losing their cool. The Fugees nodded in acknowledgment.

  “Are you ready?” she asked them.

  “Yes” came the reply.

  Luma extended her arm and her players formed a circle around her and stacked their hands on hers. She counted to three and the boys responded with a chant of “Go Fugees!”

  The Fugees began the game tentatively. They turned the ball over early on clumsy passes, and then let the Lightning sneak past for a pair of early shots that went wide. Luma subbed her players frequently, to keep them rested and to see which lineups were more effective. Not ten minutes into the game, a Lightning player settled a pass on the wing and sprinted down the line past Kanue and into open space. From twenty yards out, he pivoted and quickly took the shot, catching the Fugees’ goalie flat-footed. The ball sailed beneath the crossbar and into the net. The Fugees were down 1–0.

  Kanue urged his teammates to keep their spirits up. While most of the newcomers lacked the confidence to call out instructions to each other, Kanue calmly encouraged his defenders to move up the field, his midfielders to spread out, his forwards to attack. Soon, the Fugees made a run down the right side, but Muamer, the mustachioed Bosnian forward, drew the linesman’s flag for offsides. The Fugees made another go; Muamer was called offsides again, to groans from his teammates. Kanue didn’t snap at Muamer; he simply gestured reassuringly with his hand to encourage his new teammate to stay on sides, to be patient. The Fugees seemed to gain confidence from the assaults. Soon they made another run; this time Mandela took off down the right line. He powered through the Lightning defenders and worked the ball back toward the middle of the field before blasting a shot that hit the right post and ricocheted in: 1–1.

  As the half wore on, the Fugees charged once, twice, and then a third time, at one point racing down the field unimpeded and at a full sprint, like kids chasing an ice cream truck. Finally, they were getting somewhere. Kanue floated a pass downfield to Mandela, who traded passes with Hamdu as they attacked the Lightning defense. When the defense converged, Mandela flicked the ball to Sebajden, a wiry but tenacious Kosovar midfielder, who volleyed the shot: goal. At the half, the Fugees led 2–1.

  At halftime, Luma tried not to let her relief show. Her mind was brimming over with adjustments she felt her team needed to make to win. She gathered her players in a corner of the field and quickly ran through her observations.

  “Listen up,” she told them. “You’re playing well, but it’s getting sloppy. What they do is they get the ball and they either cross it or switch the field and they overlap. They do the same thing over and over and over again. Don’t let them do it. Don’t let them do it.”

  Her players nodded. They understood.

  “The midfielders need to get in there and squeeze them out before they can cross it in. Okay? Don’t give them any crosses, because they could finish them off.

  “Next thing: Mandela—they’re going to mark you this half,” she said. The strategy now, she told him, was to head in to the box, draw the defenders, and kick the ball out wide to the open player. After doing that a couple of times and conditioning their defenders, she told him, he should take the shot himself. But not until then.

  “A good soccer player is not going to let them know what he’s going to do every time,” she said.

  Mandela nodded. Kanue tapped him gently on the back, a quiet gesture of assurance. They could win this.

  “You guys have been doing great,” Luma told her players. “When you guys have been going in for the attack, there’s like eight of you charging through. They’re not going to be able to defend eight of you going through. Okay? You need to keep it up at that level. All right? It’s two to one. We need two more. It’s your first game. You need to set the tone for the season today.”


  THE FUGEES TOOK the field in the second half with a renewed sense of energy and confidence—self-assuredness that grew as the second half bore out each of Luma’s halftime observations to eerie perfection. The Lightning marked Mandela, as she had predicted. In frustration, Mandela pushed off, drawing a yellow card. Kanue patted the air with his palms, gesturing to Mandela to calm down. Mandela nodded, seeming to remember what Coach had said. On the next trip down the field, Mandela powered through the hulking Lightning midfielders and dribbled toward the box. The defense collapsed around him, just as his coach had told him they would. Mandela jabbed a pass out on the wing to Muamer, who was open. He tapped the ball, altering its angle and freezing the goalie. The ball rolled clear, and into the net: 3–1 Fugees.

  With twelve minutes to go, the Lightning drew within a goal, on a penalty kick. Time was winding down, and the Fugees were getting tired. Kanue encouraged them to keep fighting; Coach had told them to get two more—they had one to go. Moments later, Mandela broke free again up the middle of the field. This time he charged the box, and when the defenders marked their men on the wings, he followed his coach’s advice again and took the shot himself: goal. Tito, the Liberian recruit, and the two volunteers shouted in celebration. It was 4–2, Fugees.

  The final minutes of the game were desperate and dangerous. Kanue caught a finger to the eye and crumpled to the ground, only to rise up moments later in anger. Luma shouted to him to keep himself under control; he took a deep breath and walked away from a confrontation and possible card. The Fugees were exhausted. The Lightning made a run, took a shot, and appeared to score, but the linesman raised his flag to signify offsides—a ruling that provoked jeers from the Lightning and their parents on the sidelines. Angry now, they made another run, and set up the overlap and cross on the right side—the very sequence Luma had warned her players to shut down. Kanue called out to his teammates to cover the overlap, but it was too late. The Lightning forward was in the open; he leaned into his shot and blasted the ball into the upper-right corner of the net. It was 4–3. The Lightning had seized the momentum. Their parents and coach were urging them on. There was a sense that the Fugees had run out of energy.

  “No, guys!” Tito called from the sideline. “Don’t let it happen!”

  The Lightning would have their chance to tie in the final moments, when Hamdu Muganga, now on defense for the Fugees, was called for a foul at the top of the penalty box. The Lightning were awarded a free kick from fifteen yards out. A lean, blond-haired striker set up to take the kick. His teammates lined up on the left and right of the goal. He gave the signal, and his teammates charged just as he connected with all his might. The ball sailed on a head-high line drive toward a mass of bodies in front of the goal. Unable to see the ball, the Fugees’ goalie was frozen. From the midst of the scrum, a light blue jersey leaped into the air; it was Kanue. He cocked his neck and thrust his head into the speeding ball. There was a violent thud, and the ball ricocheted back toward the lanky striker who had kicked it, sailing over his head and bouncing into the empty space at midfield. The ball was still rolling when the referee blew his whistle—once, twice, and again—to signal the end of the game. The Fugees had won.

  Luma dropped her head in relief. Her players, some of them still strangers to each other, were high-fiving and shouting joyfully at the sky as they ran toward her on the bench. They seemed as surprised as she did. Luma raised her head, pulled her shoulders back, and smiled for the first time in two weeks.

  “You guys floored me,” she told her players when they had settled down enough to hear her speak. The Fugees broke into applause, for each other and for their coach.

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think you guys were going to come through today,” Luma said finally. “But you played a beautiful game.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gunshots

  The gunshots sounded at first like small firecrackers rather than anything dangerous or deadly. They came in quick succession: one, then another, and another, and possibly a fourth—witnesses would disagree—echoing between the buildings of the apartment complexes behind Indian Creek Elementary at about ten-forty Sunday morning. When the shooting was finished, Tito, the Liberian whom Osman had recruited to the Under 15s and who had cheered the Fugees on to victory the day before, was covered in blood, shot in the face.

  The exact circumstances of the shooting were murky, lost in the fog of competing rumors around the complexes. A few details were corroborated to police by witnesses. Tito and some fellow Liberians were walking up the street when they encountered an African American teenager they knew, walking with his mother and her boyfriend. An argument ensued. The kids on the team heard that the argument had to do with territory and gangs. The shooter was in a gang of American kids; Tito and his fellow Liberians, who identified themselves as members of a gang called the Africans, were walking on the wrong turf. The argument had been brief, cut short by the appearance of the small-caliber pistol the American teenager whipped out and began shooting. Everyone ran, including the shooter, who dashed back to his apartment.

  When the police arrived a few minutes later, they found the American kid’s mother at the scene of the shooting, picking up the shells that had discharged from her son’s weapon. She claimed her son had been in their apartment all morning, asleep; but eyewitnesses to the shooting identified the sixteen-year-old as the shooter, and DeKalb County police officers handcuffed him and loaded him into the backseat of their black and gray squad car. Tito himself was lucky: the bullet had crashed into his chin and ripped through his jaw. A fraction of an inch lower, and it would have cut through his neck, spinal cord, or carotid arteries; a few inches higher, and it might have entered his brain. Tito, on this day, would survive.

  LUMA WAS SHAKEN by the news. Her immediate concern was for her other players. Rival gang members certainly knew that Tito had been practicing with the Fugees, with his close friend Osman, and everyone in Clarkston knew exactly where and when the Fugees practiced. Luma feared gang members might show up to try to take revenge for their friend who had been arrested. She canceled practices and got the word out to her players not to show up at the field at Indian Creek until further notice. She drew a hard line with Tito and Osman as well. None of the Fugees had heard of a gang called “the Africans,” and several thought that any declaration of membership in such a gang was little more than a bluff meant to frighten away the boys’ American tormentor. Luma wasn’t sure, but she was not prepared to discount the idea. And anyway, even pretending to be a part of such a group was enough for her. Tito and Osman were to have nothing to do with her soccer program ever again.

  The shooting pointed up an unpleasant reality for refugee boys around Clarkston. While they experienced hostility from older white residents in town who believed the refugees were altering Clarkston’s identity, they also faced hostility, often more acute and more violently expressed, from the poor Americans with whom they shared the same apartment complexes. Just as poor whites in the South had felt threatened by the prospect of fair competition from blacks in the years leading up to the civil rights struggle, poor blacks in Clarkston—who made up the majority of the American residents of those apartment complexes where the refugees lived—saw the newcomers as rivals. The contrived turf war that a sixteen-year-old African American used to rationalize the shooting of an African refugee was a make-believe corollary of the more realistic competition over limited resources—housing, jobs, government aid—that fueled identity-based hostility in Clarkston among adults. The shooting, after all, had taken place in front of two adults, one of whom had gone out of her way to cover up the crime.

  For Luma, the shooting had immediate implications for how she would run her soccer program. It was difficult for her to imagine ever feeling safe again on the field at Indian Creek Elementary. The field was next door to the very apartment complex where the shooter lived, which Luma now knew was also considered the sovereign territory of a street gang—a gang that now seemed to
be embroiled in conflict with some of her own (now former) players. The field at Indian Creek was a free-for-all in the afternoons; there were no fences around the property, and neighborhood teenagers were constantly popping out of the surrounding woods. It would be impossible to sort out a particular stranger who was simply taking a shortcut by walking across the field from one with bad intentions. The teenagers who hung out in the parking lot beside the field, smoking pot and drinking beer out of paper bags, suddenly seemed no longer just a nuisance but a threat. Luma had no idea who they were. She felt vulnerable and compromised. Luma promised her players’ parents that she would keep them safe; she wasn’t sure she could keep that promise at Indian Creek.

  On Tuesday night, Luma would have a chance to improve things for her team if she could convince the Clarkston City Council to let her use the city’s field in Milam Park. She would face a tough audience, but Luma resolved to give it her best shot.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Getting Over It

  While the city government of Clarkston—and Swaney in particular—struggled to deal with radical demographic change, a handful of institutions in town had stared change in the face and found ways to embrace it. Indeed, when looking for a successful model for coping with—and benefiting from—Clarkston’s diversity, one needed to look no further than the local supermarket, Thriftown.

  Thriftown was owned by a man named Bill Mehlinger, a Florida native who grew up working on a chicken farm and whose family had moved to the nearby town of Tucker, Georgia, when he was fourteen. Mehlinger’s mother was a schoolteacher and his father made a living as an egg salesman. Tucker, like Clarkston at the time, was a typically homogenous white southern town. Integration had only just begun when the Mehlingers moved to town, and the only nonwhites young Bill Mehlinger encountered were the handful of black students enrolled at Tucker High School.