Outcasts United
(April 23, 7 p.m.) Warren St. John and Fugees coach Luma Mufleh will speak about Outcasts United. Proceeds benefit the Fugee Family Foundation. Alys Stephens Center. $35, includes signed first edition; $20 students. 975-2787. alysstephens.org
By Carla Jean Whitley
It’s easy to make a splash in Alabama with a book about joining the RV circuit as they follow Alabama football, and that’s just what Warren St. John did with the 2004 publication of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer. The book went beneath the surface of fan-dom, though, as St. John attempted to uncover the reasons why fans (including the Birmingham born and bred author himself) so ardently follow their teams. He again peels back the layers in Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town, which will be published on April 21. The city of Clarkston, Ga., has become one of the most diverse in the nation as refugees from war-torn countries are relocated to the city, just outside of Atlanta. An abundance of rental housing and mass transit connecting the city to Atlanta made it a fit for refugee resettlement programs. Outcasts United depicts a changing town through the lens of the Fugees, a soccer program comprised of refugee children.
St. John will be in Birmingham on April 23, speaking with Fugees coach Luma Mufleh at the Alys Stephens Center. We spoke to him about the process of reporting on this complex topic. This is an extended version of the interview printed in our April 2009 issue.
Q: How were you first introduced to this story? I know you also wrote about it for the New York Times.
A: Actually that’s a misperception I need to make clear. … I had gone to Atlanta to talk for Random House about Rammer Jammer. One of the people who reached out to me when I was down there was a fan of Rammer Jammer who happened to work in a refugee settlement in Atlanta, a Florida Gators fan. A really nice guy, he asked me if I would have a hamburger with him and his wife after my talk. I was just really interested in what he did so I started asking him about what he did, as reporters do. … A light bulb went off in his head, and he said, you should check out this soccer program in Clarkston if you’re interested in all this.
As a Southerner who was raised in Birmingham … I tried to imagine what that would look like, how that would look, what the locals would think about a wave of people from every corner of the globe. What would be the challenges there? What would be the opportunities?
I was down South on another assignment. Over the next week or so I was able to go to a couple games. I wrote about the first game in [Outcasts United] and when I saw what I saw, I thought, “Wow, this is what I’m going to be writing about next.” [My editor and I] had always talked about what I was going to do next, so I called him up and told him, “I found out what I’m going to do.”
I was working on a book six months before I published the article in the Times. They asked me along the way what I was working on and they said, that’s really interesting. Would you be interested in writing some pieces along the course of your research?
I went back and forth … but I knew there would be great value first of all in having the institutional support of the New York Times behind my reporting. I learn from writing. The writing process, for me, is where I come up with the bulk of my ideas. It’s not sitting and staring at a wall, it’s in the writing. I knew there would be great value in writing about some of these subjects in a slightly more circumscribed process than a book manuscript. The articles came out of the book, not the other way around.
… Fortunately I was able to be there on the ground for so much of what you read. I was just there and I was taking notes and talking into my tape recorder. I think the book has an immediacy because of that that I never could have obtained by going back and trying to reconstitute things.
WEB ONLY Q: How long did you spend reporting? Writing?
A: It’s hard for me to answer that question because I don’t think I ever stop reporting until an editor tells me, “You have to get that to me.” Even then I’m still making phone calls and checking on things, and even my editor would tell you I’m sending emails late at night saying, let’s check on this.
[I spent] August to December 2006 down in Clarkston more or less full time. I was there a great deal and I would dash back to New York now and again. Even in the next year, I went down and did two more front page pieces for the Times while I was still reporting.
… I was taking notes and journal entries all along, some of which kind of became part of the manuscript. I have a very sort of chaotic writing process where I try a lot of things out and there’s a great deal that’s left on the cutting room floor, as it were. Again, it’s so hard for me to say well it took me this long to write it because I felt like I was writing from the moment I began reporting … It’s not, I report from A to B and write from time point C to D. It’s a big jumble of multi-tasking.
Q: Were you already well-versed in the game of soccer, or did that require additional research?
A: I played soccer badly in high school and I have followed European soccer, I’d say, with probably more zeal than I follow the NBA or even Major League Baseball. I’m fortunate to have a sister who lives in London and her husband’s English, so when I visit them I frequently go to Arsenal and Chelsea matches. That said, my interest in soccer as far as time or emotionally, I wouldn’t compare it to Alabama football.
When I began writing the book, I actually thought that going to the games would be the most … what’s the word? I thought it would be the least exciting part of the reporting, intellectually. Because with youth soccer you think, “What are the stakes, really, in youth soccer?” Once I began to get to know the kids and once I began to understand their personal struggles, their emotional struggles, their family struggles, it began to change the way I viewed the game.
Unlike basketball or baseball or football where, after every play, everything kind of resets to zero … soccer, there’s this flow to it. So if you want to try to understand why someone scored a goal you have to kind of work back to the first touch because everything that happened before that affects what happened after it.
If you’re watching a game [of refugee children from different countries], to understand how that happened, you understand the first touch goes way beyond the literal first touch at the beginning of the game. It goes back to the geopolitical realities that led these people to playing at that time.
… Soccer is obviously a metaphor for the change that’s come to Clarkston. … In Clarkston, soccer becomes a symbol of what’s different, how the town has changed.
Q: How did you go about developing relationships with everyone involved? There are so many people in the story, I can only imagine that was a long process.
A: First of all, you just have to spend time there. There’s no substitute for that. … It’s hard to generalize about groups, about a broad community, like the refugee community in Atlanta, especially because there are so many different people from different cultures and places. … One thing you can say about the refugee community is that it’s a wary mindset because these are people who have been let down, certainly by government, let down by authority figures. They’ve developed a keen sort of sense of danger. The default mechanism for a lot of refugees is just to stay within themselves and to protect themselves before they’re willing to be open with strangers. It takes a long time to develop trust.
Luma, for example, has been down there for so long and has been working so tirelessly with the kids and their families that they have a level of trust for her that I could never hope to acquire. But that wasn’t the goal from a reporter’s point of view. You want people to relax enough with you and understand what your mission is enough that they feel comfortable talking to you.
I think once you get past that, there is a kind of universal human urge to communicate your history and your story to others. Once you sort of break through that initial wariness, in many cases people, they wanted the outside world to know what they’d been through. They wanted people to know what their life is like now. There’s sort of competing urges: They have the urge to be private and be wary, and then the very [primitive urge to share].
Q: What about city officials?
A: At the beginning most people were very happy to talk to me. There were a couple of officials who told me they just had no interest in discussing refugees at all. There was a city council member who I approached after a city council meeting and told her what I was working on, and she literally turned her back and walked away.
I think the first message I got from a lot of the officials in Clarkston was, there’s no story here. If there’s any tension, that’s all in the past. I think that proved to be wishful thinking on their part because for example, the incident of the police brutality on the Nigerian immigrant—he wasn’t a refugee, he was an immigrant—that occurred a few months before I began reporting. The more I learned, the more I realized that wasn’t the whole story.
WEB ONLY Q: This is a complex story that goes far beyond what you see on the soccer field. How did you flesh out that information? As you wrote, what guided how much would be revealed and when? Was it difficult to incorporate that background into the narrative?
A: Well I’d just been reading, for one thing, constantly. I had some familiarity with most of the conflicts. … I had sort of a working newspaper reader’s familiarity with most of the conflicts, and some of it I just had to research. I did some of that after my initial wave of reporting, I did some of it during. And some of the refugees themselves were very eager to explain it to me, to explain their own personal view of what happened where they were so I understood. Once you dive in, you find with most of these conflicts there’s been a great deal written.
Just from a writing perspective, that’s always a challenge. How do you [incorporate history] throughout the course of your narrative without losing your reader? You have to be economical about it. The main thing is they have to feel like there’s something in it for them to keep going.
In some ways I am the first reader. I’m the first in experiencing all this. When someone says to me, let me explain to you my experience in Liberia or in Congo during this time, I’m really interested. I want to understand that better. One thing with the reaction to the first Times piece that I did was that people seem quite curious, quite willing to be engaged. It was heartening.
WEB ONLY Q: How did you balance professional distance with getting immersed in these people’s lives? That must have been difficult.
A: Definitely. You’re in this fragile environment, and there’s so much need all around you. It’s hard. Human instinct is to help people and to get involved, and while I was reporting that was … I had to hold myself back. I think that fairly soon after I got there, I realized it was going to be hard watching a soccer game and be rooting for the Fugees.
WEB ONLY Q:Are you still in contact with any of the team or parents?
A: I am, quite a few. Some kids more than others. I follow the sport online every weekend, get reports from Luma and have gone to games in the interim as well. Whenever I go through Atlanta, I go to a game.
Q: Your book tour will include an event at the Alys Stephens Center and will benefit the Fugees—is that correct?
A: That’s exactly right. That’s the goal. I think one of the things about a book coming out is you have a big, literally multinational corporation behind you, publishing you, publicizing you … My experience tells me that when people read about the story it makes people want to get involved. It’s not specifically with the Fugees, but generally, in their community. The book shows how one person can affect so many people. I think you see that over and over again with Luma, with her effort to better the lives of so many people.
The take away of the book to me is that you don’t have to take the … approach she does of making that your entire life to affect change, but you can affect change in small ways by helping one person out or one family out. I think that’s one thing in general in Atlanta, the refugees depend in large part on the church community and others to reach out and help them. Whether we’re talking about refugees or just the poor, it takes surprisingly little to positively affect another person’s life.
Q: Your books, while very different, are tied to sports. Is that intentional?
A: It’s definitely coincidence. After Rammer Jammer, I sort of swore to myself I’d never write another sports book. Not that I have anything against sports books—I love sports books. But I don’t think of myself as a sports writer. I’m sure I’m hopelessly naïve about this, but I don’t remotely think of this book as a sports book. I’m sure I’ll be corrected numerous times along the way. A sports book is primarily concerned with some element of the game. [This is] a book about human beings and about people making lives for themselves, and their efforts to find a place in the world.
One thing about the Times story is that I was able to just accidentally get some insight into who was interested in the story. I heard from so many readers. I think by a somewhat overwhelming majority, the people I heard from were women. There’s something about Luma’s story in particular that’s inspiring. She was the only woman coach I ran into on the field reporting, for over a year, only woman coach of a boys’ team.
One of the most surprising things for me, coming at this world from your typical—from the perspective of a typical American—is how much responsibility these children were willing and capable of taking on themselves. That’s one of the hallmarks of Luma’s message, she does ask a lot of her players. She gives a lot in return. But when she says you need to get to the library at 7:30 to meet the bus, she needs you to get to the library at 7:30. The logistics of how you accomplish that, that’s your responsibility as a player, whether you get an alarm clock yourself and wake yourself up and walk to the library, whether your parent works the night shift … That sort of responsibility would be impossibly beyond the grasp of many American kids. That’s not how we do things here. Our parents do a lot for us. And that’s great—parents do these things for us out of love. But what happens if you can’t depend on them to do things for you? What are you left with?
I think what Luma does, she teaches the kids how to seek responsibility for their lives. The confidence they get from that is really profound. I saw kids who were quiet, withdrawn, shy … in the course of the time I was reporting really blossom into confident leaders on the field. They did that with a great deal of help from her because she was giving them the tools they needed to get through the day on their own. Self-reliance. It’s one of the hardest things to teach people. You can call it tough love, apply whatever label you like. But what I found was that kids were so willing to meet those challenges themselves, they were capable of it, and the results were incredible.
… The other thing is, she tells you the rules. You know what you have to do. There’s not a lot of trying to guess what’s expected of you. You know and it’s very clear what’s expected, and that in and of itself is very reassuring, because kids, once they know what’s expected of them they can strategize. I think the hardest situation is when you don’t know exactly what you need to do to please authority figures around you. When the requirements are arbitrary or when they change, that’s when it becomes really hard to orient yourself. But with Luma it’s very straightforward at the beginning of the season.
The kids learn from that, and they’re coming from an environment where that’s really not how all adults handle themselves. I don’t mean to moralize, but what these kids get from it, they get a sense of cause and effect from doing the thing you say you’re going to do. They realize you gain the respect of others and self confidence. And in the case of Luma, the group gets rewarded by involvement in her program.
WEB ONLY Q: What have you been reading lately?
A: Right now I’m reading a science fiction thriller from one of my colleagues at the Times. I’ve got a big long shelf of books about African history and politics that I’ve been reading for the last year and a half, so I’m definitely enjoying giving myself something more plainly entertaining. It’s called The Silent Man, by Alex Berenson.
WEB ONLY Q: What’s up next for you?
A: I may have another book idea. I’m sort of doing all the preliminary work I have to do to see if an idea has to pan out. I’m still on book leave from the Times. My expectation is to go back to the paper. … For me, it’s basically been a two year period from beginning my reporting to doing these three lengthy pieces for the Times to writing the book.
