At the encouragement of the IRC, Beatrice Ziaty began her job search almost immediately. Like all refugees accepted into the United States for resettlement, she would have only three months of government assistance to help her get on her feet, to say nothing of the debt she owed on her plane tickets. With the IRC’s help, she landed a job as a maid at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the Buckhead section of Atlanta—one of the most exquisite hotels in the South, and in Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhood. It was an hour’s commute by bus from Clarkston.
Beatrice wasn’t worried about the work. She was sturdy and self-sufficient—that’s how she’d gotten to Atlanta, after all—but she didn’t like the idea of leaving her boys behind. They were going to school during the day, but she wouldn’t get home from work until well after dark. She encouraged them to stay inside until she returned in the evening. Beatrice didn’t know how to use the bus system in Atlanta, but a fellow Liberian offered to show her the way from Wyncrest to the bus stop on her first day of work. At five-thirty a.m. she set out for the Ritz.
The work there was hard. Maids were expected to clean fifteen to sixteen rooms a day by themselves, and though the shifts were technically eight hours long, in reality it took much longer to clean so many rooms, extra work that occurred, Beatrice said, off the clock. Beatrice’s back ached when she made it back to the bus stop at around ten o’clock. Without her friend to guide her this time, she was on her own. As she rode the bus back through the strange glimmering landscape of Atlanta, she tried to put the fear of the last few years out of her mind. She allowed herself the uncharacteristically optimistic thought that maybe she and her family were finally safe.
The bus heaved to a stop in Clarkston. Beatrice got off, hopeful she had chosen the right stop. She looked around and tried to recall the way back to her apartment. It was easy to get turned around in Clarkston—there were no tall buildings to help her orient herself—and it would take Beatrice the better part of a month to feel confident about the way back to Wyncrest. She set out haltingly along the sidewalk. It was a cool October night filled with the sounds of chirping crickets and the intermittent whoosh of passing cars. Beatrice heard a noise and looked over her shoulder. A man was following her. She sped up and clutched her bag. It contained her new driver’s license, social security card, work permit, and all the cash she possessed. She felt the man’s hand on her arm.
“Halt,” he said. “Give me the purse.”
Beatrice let go of the bag and braced for a blow that never came. The man ran, and she took off running herself in the opposite direction. Eventually she stopped, out of breath, and began to sob between gasps for air. She didn’t know where she was, or how to call the police. She was tired, and tired of running. A stranger, another man, found her and asked what had happened. He was friendly, and called the police. The officers took Beatrice home and offered to help find the mugger. But she didn’t get a good look at him. She only knew his accent was African.
The incident robbed Beatrice of the hope that her new home would provide her and her family with a sense of security. She became obsessed with her boys’ safety. In Liberia, a neighbor would always look after her kids if she needed to leave them to run an errand or to visit a friend. But Beatrice didn’t know anyone in Clarkston. Many of her new neighbors didn’t speak English, and some of the ones who did frightened her. There was plenty of gang activity in and around Wyncrest. Gunshots frequently pierced the quiet at night. For all Beatrice knew, the man who mugged her lived in the next building over. She didn’t particularly trust the police either. She’d been told by Liberians she’d met that the police would take your children away if you left them alone. So she told the boys and told them again: When you come home from school, go into the apartment, lock the door, and stay inside.
ONE EVENING NOT long after the mugging, Jeremiah disobeyed Beatrice. He was playing outside alone at dusk when a policeman on patrol stopped and asked him where his parents were. He had to think fast.
“She’s inside sleeping,” he told the cop.
“Well, then go inside,” the officer said.
Later that evening, Jeremiah told his mother what had happened. She went into a rage, fueled by the anxiety that had been building up for months.
“When you come home from school, go inside and you lock yourself in the house,” Beatrice shouted at him. “When you come from school you will lock yourself up!”
Chapter Three “Small Town … Big Heart”
Before refugees like Beatrice Ziaty started arriving, Mayor Swaney liked to say, Clarkston, Georgia, was “just a sleepy little town by the railroad tracks.”
Those tracks suture a grassy rise that bisects Clarkston and still carry a dozen or so freight trains a day, which rattle windows and stop traffic. Few, though, in Clarkston complain about the trains with much conviction. Amid the strip malls, office complexes, fast food joints, and sprawling parking lots of modern-day Atlanta, the sight of lumbering freight cars contributes to a comforting sense that Clarkston has not been entirely swallowed by the creeping sameness of urban sprawl. Indeed, while many small towns around Atlanta have been absorbed into the city or big county governments, Clarkston has retained its independence. Clarkston residents elect their own mayor and city council and have their own police department. A pastoral island of around 7,200 amid an exurb of some five million people, Clarkston is still, improbably enough, a town.
Clarkston was settled originally by yeoman farmers and railroad men in the years after the Civil War. They built the town’s first Baptist church on land near a creek that was a popular site for baptisms, ground the church still occupies. Back then, Clarkston was sometimes called Goatsville, perhaps because goats were used to keep grass low by the tracks, perhaps as a pejorative by city folks—no one seems quite sure. But the name lives on, by allusion at least, in the mascot of Clarkston High School: the Angoras.
For the better part of the next hundred years, little of consequence happened in Clarkston. It was a typical small southern town, conservative and white, and not too far removed in temperament from the next town over, Stone Mountain, a longtime headquarters of sorts for the Ku Klux Klan and the site of cross burnings as recently as the late 1980s. Folks in Clarkston sent their kids to Clarkston High School, went to services at one of the churches on Church Street, and bought their groceries at a local independent grocery store called Thriftown, which was located in the town shopping center, across the tracks from the churches and City Hall. Life in Clarkston was simple, and few from the outside world paid the town much note, which suited the residents of Clarkston just fine.
That began to change in the 1970s, when the Atlanta airport expanded to become the Southeast’s first international hub and, eventually, one of the world’s busiest airports. The airport brought jobs, and the people working those new jobs needed places to live. A few enterprising developers bought up tracts of cheap land in Clarkston because of the town’s location, just outside the Atlanta Perimeter—a beltway that encircles the city and offers easy access to the airport and downtown. They built a series of apartment complexes—mostly two-story affairs with multiple buildings arranged around big, commuter-friendly parking lots. Developers got a boost when MARTA, the Atlanta public transit system, built its easternmost rail station outside Clarkston. More complexes went up, with idyllic-sounding names only real estate developers could concoct: Kristopher Woods, Brannon Hill, Willow Branch, and Olde Plantation.
Middle-class whites moved in, and over time the population of Clarkston more than doubled. No one paid much attention at the