Somali Bantu slated for resettlement in the United States, it was clear, would need a great deal of help. They would need to learn English and how to fill out job applications, and they would have to acclimate themselves to the mores and expectations of the American workplace. They would have to accomplish their assimilation while somehow coping with the psychological aftermath of extreme trauma. Many Somali Bantu women had been raped, and not a few of the refugees had seen family members and fellow villagers slaughtered before their eyes. One Somali Bantu I met told me with good humor about his initial puzzlement over window blinds. Having never seen them in his time living in a windowless dwelling in Somalia or his makeshift shelter at a Kenyan refugee camp, he had no idea how they worked or what they did.
FEW IN CLARKSTON knew anything about the history of Somali Bantu when they learned through media reports that another wave of refugees was coming to their town. But some, like Karen Feltz, the anthropologist councilwoman, began to do some research. What she found alarmed her. She understood that the Bantu would need a great deal of help, but she was unclear about who exactly was going to provide it. The resettlement agencies were underfunded and overwhelmed as it was. Feltz wondered if the agencies were even aware of the magnitude of the challenge that awaited them. She began to ask questions. Feltz wanted first to know where exactly in Clarkston the agencies planned to house the newly arrived Bantu refugees. The agencies said they planned to scatter the Bantu around the various apartment complexes in town, wherever they could find vacancies. The Bantu, Feltz learned, would be living in the same complexes as many of the ethnic groups that historically had persecuted them.
When Feltz heard this, she said, she “had a fit.”
“These people are afraid of the police to begin with,” Feltz said. “If something happened, they would never come forward and say anything. Who are they going to tell? They think everybody’s out to get them. The people they’re living with—who raped their women, stole their children, and murdered their men? Do you think they’re going to say anything? These people would be living lives of terror!”
To Feltz and many others in Clarkston, the housing plan encapsulated everything that was wrong with the way refugee resettlement was being handled in their town. The federal government didn’t provide the agencies with enough money to do the job required of them, and the agencies—in addition to lacking a basic understanding of the plights of the people they were resettling—weren’t willing to admit that they were too overwhelmed to do the job. So the refugees kept coming.
Ultimately, Feltz believed, two groups of people would pay the price for this collective failure: the refugees themselves, and the residents of Clarkston, a small town with few resources and no expertise in handling the cultural assimilation of a group of traumatized and impoverished East African farmers into the American South.
Anger over the Bantu resettlement plan prompted Mayor Swaney to act. He reached out to the heads of the agencies to see if they might be willing to answer questions from locals at a town hall meeting. The provost of Georgia Perimeter College, a community college just outside the city limits of Clarkston, agreed to provide an auditorium and to act as a moderator. And representatives from the agencies, sensing a rare opportunity to speak directly to the locals, agreed to make themselves available as well. The day before the meeting, Mayor Swaney struck a hopeful tone in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Maybe we can find a way for everybody to work together, live together, and play together,” he said.
ON THE EVENING of March 31, 2003, about a hundred and twenty Clarkston residents filed into an auditorium at Georgia Perimeter College and began to fill out index cards with questions. Agency representatives and immigration experts took their seats behind a table on stage. The provost stood to begin the question-and-answer session. He looked down at the index cards submitted from the audience. The first question was “What can we do to keep refugees from coming to Clarkston?”
The tone of the meeting scarcely improved. Residents finally gave voice to years of frustration over the resettlement process. The agency officials, taken aback by the show of hostility, became defensive. When one resident asked why the town had not been consulted in advance about the relocation of the Somali Bantu, an aid agency representative calmly reminded the crowd that this was America and the law didn’t require people to ask City Hall for permission before they rented an apartment. In truth, the agencies might have been even harsher had they not had the politics of the moment in mind. Most strongly felt that without resettlement, Clarkston would’ve been much worse off. The agencies bargained with the landlords of those big apartment complexes, demanding that they clean up and maintain their buildings and that they cut refugee families slack on deposits and first month’s rent in exchange for a steady flow of new tenants. There were already gangs, addicts, and a rougher element living in those apartments when the agencies began sending refugees to the landlords; without the refugees and the upkeep on which the agencies insisted, most in the resettlement community felt, Clarkston might have deteriorated into a slum.
Eventually, the patience of the resettlement officials and refugee advocates at the meeting wore down. Some refugee advocates in the crowd began to attack the residents as callous, and even as racist.
“Aren’t you happy you saved a life?” one refugee supporter growled at Rita Thomas, a longtime resident and civic booster of Clarkston who had spoken out against the resettlement process.
“I certainly am,” Thomas snapped. “But I would have liked for it to have been my choice.”
At the end of the evening, most in attendance felt that rather than soothing the hostility over resettlement, the meeting had congealed it. Jasmine Majid, a Georgia state official who coordinated refugee resettlement and who had been on the stage, told an Atlanta newspaper afterward that some of the questions asked at the forum “reflect a very sad and negative aspect of Clarkston.”
Locals left the meeting just as discouraged.
“It was terrible,” Karen Feltz said. “We were really trying to sort things out, and make things better. But it didn’t turn out that way.”
Luma Mufleh knew nothing of Clarkston or the refugees there when she moved to the nearby town of Decatur, only a few miles west of Clarkston down Ponce de Leon Avenue. Decatur was coming into its own as a liberal enclave in mostly conservative Atlanta. There was a groovy café, the Java Monkey, a bar specializing in European beer called the Brick Store Pub, and an old-school bohemian music venue called Eddie’s Attic. Luma found a job waiting tables. She made a few friends and, as if by reflex, began looking around for opportunities to coach football. As it happened, the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, just down the road from the old courthouse and the home of one of the oldest youth football programs in the state, was looking for a coach for their fourteen-and-under girls’ team. Luma applied and got the job.
Luma coached the only way she knew how—by following the example set for her by Coach Brown. She was more demanding than any of the girls or their parents expected—she made her players run for thirty-five minutes and do sets of sit-ups, push-ups, and leg lifts before each practice. And she refused to coddle them. Luma explained to her girls that they would be responsible for their actions and for meeting their obligations to the team. Players who couldn’t make practice were expected to call Luma themselves; there would be no passing off the excuse-making to Mom or Dad. Likewise, if a player had problems with the way Luma ran the team—complaints about playing time, favoritism, or the like—she would be expected to raise those concerns directly with the coach.
Luma’s approach did not sit well with all of her players’ parents. Some were mystified as to why their daughters had to run themselves to exhaustion, while others couldn’t understand why Luma punished the girls—with extra laps or time on the bench—when their parents dropped them off late for practice.
Luma’s rule-making wasn’t entirely about establishing