Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town - Warren John St.

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THE NEXT few weeks and months, Luma continued to stop in at the Lakes on her trips to Talars. She was getting to know the boys, learning bits about their pasts and their families’ struggles. Some had just arrived and spoke little English. Her Arabic and functional French helped her communicate with kids from the Middle East and Sudan, as well as the Congo and Burundi. They began to open up, gradually, about their lives. Luma learned that the boys lived in all kinds of improvised family arrangements, often not with parents but with uncles, aunts, and cousins. In snatches of conversation she got a glimpse of the boys’ isolation from the new world around them and their desire to connect. The loneliness that resulted from being uprooted was something that Luma intuitively understood. Luma also learned that kick-arounds on the town’s parking lots were the only kind of football the refugee kids could afford; even the modest fees required to play football at the local public schools were prohibitively high for most of the boys’ families.

      Luma couldn’t help but notice how much more passionate these boys were for the game compared to the girls she coached at the YMCA. They played whenever they could, as opposed to when they had to, and they didn’t need the trappings of a football complex or the structure of a formal practice to get inspired. Luma decided that the kids really needed a free football program of their own. She didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to start or run such a program. She certainly couldn’t fund it, and with a restaurant to run and a team of her own to coach, she hardly had time to spare. But the more she played football in the parking lots around Clarkston and the more she learned about the kids there, the more she felt a nagging urge to engage, and to do something.

      Eventually, Luma floated the idea of starting a small, low-key football program for the refugees to the mother of one of her players, who was on the board at the YMCA. To her surprise, the Y offered to commit enough money to rent the field at the community center in Clarkston and to buy equipment. Luma figured she could devote a few hours a week to a football program and still keep Ashton’s running. She decided to give it a try. With the help of some friends, Luma crafted a flyer announcing football trials at the Clarkston Community Center, in English, Vietnamese, Arabic, and French. She made copies and on a warm early summer day drove around Clarkston in her Volkswagen and posted the flyers in the apartment complexes. She wasn’t sure that anyone would show up.

       Chapter Five The Fugees Are Born

      Perhaps no one in Clarkston was as excited to hear about the prospect of a free football program as eight-year-old Jeremiah Ziaty. Jeremiah loved football. Since arriving in the United States with his mother, Beatrice, and older brothers, Mandela and Darlington, Jeremiah had been cooped up in his family’s Clarkston apartment on strict orders from his mother. She was protective to begin with, but after she was mugged on her very first commute home from her job at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Beatrice had taken a hard line. She wanted the boys inside when they got home from school. When Jeremiah asked his mother if he could try out for the new football team in town, she was unyielding.

      “Certainly I say, Jeremiah,” Beatrice told him, “you won’t play football every day.”

      But football was one of the few things that could tempt Jeremiah into defying his mother.

      TRIALS WERE TO be held on the field of the Clarkston Community Center, a dilapidated brick and cream-colored clapboard building on Indian Creek Drive that had once served as the old Clarkston High School before being abandoned by the county in 1982. The building and property were refurbished in 1994, complete with a spiffy playing field in the back, by a group of Clarkston boosters who wanted a community center for the town. At the time, the center was run by an energetic African American named Chris Holliday, who early on found that though the community center was governed by a board of trustees made up mostly of longtime Clarkston residents, it was the refugee community that seemed to embrace the center with special zeal. Cooped up in small apartments around town, they were desperate for any place to go, eager to meet neighbors—or even better, real American locals—and they signed up for English and computer classes in large numbers. As Holliday was running these programs inside the community center building, the field out back was going largely unused. When it came to figuring out what sort of activities should take place on the field, Holliday said, the refugees were nearly unanimous.

      “Overwhelmingly,” he said, “the refugee community kept saying ‘We need football.’”

      When the community center offered a football program for young kids, Holliday said, there was no question about which group—Americans or refugees—was more intent on playing.

      “Refugee parents ran to get their kids enrolled,” he said, laughing at the memory. “I mean, we had moms signing people up.”

      Along the way, though, some longtime residents on the board of the community center began to question Holliday’s focus on programs for refugees. Like so much in Clarkston, the community center was becoming a chit in the battle over the town’s identity. Art Hansen, a professor of migration studies at nearby Clark Atlanta University and a volunteer on the community center board in those days, said that he and other advocates for the refugees had begun to think of the community center as a kind of “refugee town hall.” But at a dedication ceremony for the football pitch out back, Hansen said, he learned that not everyone in Clarkston felt the same way. When Hansen mentioned his delight at seeing a group of refugee children take the field to play football, he was rebuked by a couple of Clarkston residents who served on the center’s board and the city council.

      “They very clearly said they didn’t like all these newcomers here,” Hansen recalled. “There was this clear other sentiment saying, ‘This is the old Clarkston High School. This is a Clarkston building. This belongs to the old Clarkston—the real Clarkston. Not these newcomers.’”

      Emanuel Ransom, the black Pennsylvanian who had moved to Clarkston in the 1960s, had worked hard to turn the old Clarkston High School into a community center and served on its board. He felt strongly that the newcomers didn’t do their part to chip in to keep the center running, and resented that the place he’d worked hard to create was becoming so closely identified with refugees.

      “I’ve never been a refugee,” Ransom explained to me over a coffee at the local Waffle House one morning, in a version of a complaint I would hear many times in Clarkston. “But I know when I was in a foreign country, I almost had to learn their culture to survive, to eat. I didn’t have to become a citizen or anything—speak the language fluently—but I had to do things to get by. And I wasn’t asking for anything. Anything I wanted, I had to learn it or earn it.”

      With the refugees at the community center, Ransom said, “Nobody wants to help—it’s just give me, give me, give me.”

      But there was one reason that even the most xenophobic community center supporters grudgingly accepted the idea of a refugee football program on the new field out back: it was great PR to the world outside of Clarkston. The community center depended largely on foundation grants for funds, and grant applications featuring support of refugee programs had proven successful in securing donations for the center’s budget. The fact that Luma’s program was funded by the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, which paid the community center for use of its field, didn’t prevent the community center from billing itself as a home to a refugee football program, even if many of the center’s board members would have preferred the facility to focus on programs for what Emanuel Ransom called “real Americans.”

      LUMA HAD LITTLE appreciation for the degree to which the community center—the home of her new football program—had become embroiled in the battle over Clarkston’s identity when she pulled her Volkswagen Beetle into the center’s parking lot on a sunny June afternoon in 2004, before her team’s first trials. She was uncertain too about what kind of response her flyers would generate among the boys in the complexes around Clarkston. They were naturally wary. A church in town offered a free youth basketball program that doubled as a Christian outreach operation, a fact that offended Muslim families who had dropped in unawares. Luma didn’t know what to expect.

      But on the other side

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