Читать книгу Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town - Warren John St. - Страница 9

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 time, but the addition of the apartment complexes had another effect, creating in a sense two Clarkstons. Older Clarkston residents lived on one side of town in roughly 450 old houses, simple gabled structures with front porches and small front yards. Working-class newcomers lived in the apartment complexes. They were separate worlds—economically, socially, and otherwise—but since they were packed together on about one square mile, there wasn’t much space between them.

In the 1980s whites began to leave the apartments in Clarkston. The migration paralleled the white flight from other old residential neighborhoods close to downtown Atlanta. Crime was rising, and newer suburbs farther from town were roomier and more ethnically homogenous. Middle-class whites in Clarkston, flush from Atlanta’s economic boom following the opening of the airport, could afford to move. Vacancies rose and rents fell. Crime surged. Landlords filled the apartment complexes through government housing programs, which brought in African American tenants, and simultaneously cut back on upkeep, allowing the complexes to fall into disrepair. Pretty soon, Clarkston, or at least the part of Clarkston consisting of apartment complexes, found itself caught in a familiar cycle of urban decay.

In the late 1980s, another group of outsiders took note of Clarkston: the nonprofit agencies that resettle the tens of thousands of refugees accepted into the United States each year. The agencies—which include the International Rescue Committee, the organization founded in 1933 by Albert Einstein to help bring Jewish refugees from Europe to the United States, as well as World Relief, Lutheran Family Services, and others—are contracted by the government to help refugee families settle in to their new lives. They help find the families schools, jobs, and access to social services. But first they have to find a place for them to live.

From the perspective of the resettlement agencies, Clarkston, Georgia, was a textbook example of a community ripe for refugee resettlement. It was not quite thirteen miles from downtown Atlanta, a city with a growing economy and a bottomless need for low-skilled workers to labor in construction, at distribution centers and packaging plants, and in the city’s hotels and restaurants. Atlanta had public transportation in the form of bus and rail, which made getting to those jobs relatively easy even for those too poor to own cars, and Clarkston had its own rail stop—at the end of the line. With all those decaying apartment complexes in town, Clarkston had a surplus of cheap housing. And though the town was cut through by two busy thoroughfares, Ponce de Leon Avenue and Indian Creek Drive, as well as a set of active railroad tracks, it had enough navigable sidewalks to qualify as pedestrian-friendly—important for a large group of people who couldn’t afford automobiles. The apartment complexes were within walking distance of the main shopping center, which was now drooping and tired, with a porn shop across the parking lot from a day-care center, but its proximity to the complexes meant that residents could get their food without hitching a ride or taking a train or bus.

The first refugees arrived in Clarkston in the late 1980s and early 1990s from Southeast Asia—mostly Vietnamese and Cambodians fleeing Communist governments. Their resettlement went smoothly, and none of the older residents in town raised any objection, if they even noticed these newcomers. After all, the apartments were still a world away from the houses across town. So the agencies, encouraged by the success of that early round of resettlement, brought in other refugees—survivors of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and oppressed minorities from the former Soviet Union. World Relief and the International Rescue Committee opened offices in Clarkston to better serve the newcomers, and resettled still more refugees—now from war-ravaged African countries including Liberia, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Between 1996 and 2001, more than nineteen thousand refugees were resettled in Georgia, and many of those ended up in or around Clarkston. The 2000 census revealed that fully one-third of Clarkston’s population was foreign-born, though almost everyone suspected the number was higher because census estimates did not account for large numbers of refugees and immigrants living together in Clarkston’s apartments. In a relatively short amount of time, Clarkston had completely changed.

NEARLY ALL OF Clarkston’s longtime residents had a story about the moment they noticed this change. For Emanuel Ransom, an African American who had moved to Clarkston from Pennsylvania in the 1960s and who served on the city council, it was when he picked up on a sudden spike in the amount of garbage the town was producing each year. When he investigated, he found that the singles and nuclear families that had inhabited the town’s apartment complexes were being displaced by families of refugees living eight or ten to an apartment—and producing a proportionate amount of garbage, which the town had to haul away.

“The city didn’t realize that we were being inundated with people coming in, because it was a gradual thing,” Ransom said. “Nobody understood.”

For Karen Feltz, a chain-smoking anthropologist and city council member, it was when she noticed a Liberian woman in her neighborhood walking up and down the street with a jug on her head, cursing at the devil. After seeing the woman talking to herself on several occasions, Feltz began to fear she might be suffering a psychiatric breakdown. She approached the woman’s husband, a minister, who shrugged off her concerns.

“He said, ‘She can talk to the devil if she wants to,’” Feltz recalled, with a laugh. “I thought, Oh my God—I’m living in the twilight zone!”

To many Clarkston residents, it felt as if their town had transformed overnight.

“You wake up one morning,” said Rita Thomas, a longtime home-owner in Clarkston, “and there it is.”

THE CHANGE IN Clarkston was an accelerated version of demographic changes taking place all across America because of immigration and refugee resettlement. But in at least one way it was unique. While some towns such as Lewiston, Maine, and Merced, California, have attracted large numbers of a single ethnic group or nationality—in Lewiston’s case, Somalis, in Merced’s case, Hmong, and in countless cities in the Southwest and West, Latinos—Clarkston was seeing new residents who were from everywhere. If a group of people had come to the United States legally in the last fifteen years, chances are they were represented in Clarkston in perfect proportion to the numbers in which they were accepted into the country at large. The town became a microcosm of the world itself, or at least of the parts plagued with society-shattering violence. And in the process, in less than a decade, little Clarkston, Georgia, became one of the most diverse communities in the country.

INDEED, WHILE THE freight trains continued to rumble through town a dozen times a day, little in Clarkston looked familiar to the people who’d spent their lives there. Women walked down the street in hijabs and even in full burkas, or jalabib. The shopping center transformed: while Thriftown, the grocery store, remained, restaurants such as Hungry Harry’s pizza joint were replaced by Vietnamese and Eritrean restaurants, a Halal butcher, and a “global pharmacy” that catered to the refugee community by selling, among other things, international phone cards. A mosque opened up on Indian Creek Drive, just across the street from the elementary and high schools, and began to draw hundreds. (Longtime Clarkston residents now know to avoid Indian Creek Drive on Friday afternoons because of the traffic jam caused by Friday prayers.) As newcomers arrived, many older white residents simply left, and the demographic change was reflected in nearly all of Clarkston’s institutions. Clarkston High School became home to students from more than fifty countries. Fully a third of the local elementary school skips lunch during Ramadan. Attendance at the old Clarkston Baptist Church dwindled from around seven hundred to fewer than a hundred as many white residents left town.

While many of the changes in Clarkston were incremental and hard to notice at first, other events occurred that called attention to the changes and caused the locals to wonder what exactly was happening to their town. A group of Bosnian refugees who had come from the town of Bosanski Samac came face-to-face in Clarkston with a Serbian soldier named Nikola Vukovic, who they said had tortured them during the war, beating them bloody in the town police station for days. (They eventually sued Vukovic, who was living just outside of Clarkston in the town of Stone Mountain and laboring at a compressor factory for eight dollars an hour, and won a $140 million judgment, but not before Vukovic fled the United States.)

A mentally disturbed Sudanese man who was left at home with his five-year-old nephew went into a rage for reasons unknown and beheaded the boy with a butcher knife. He was found by a policeman walking by the railroad tracks in a daze, his clothing drenched in blood. “I’ve done something real bad,” he told police, before leading them back to the apartment. Family members blamed the act on the post-traumatic stress the young man suffered after being tortured in a refugee camp, an explanation that hardly soothed the anxieties of older Clarkston residents, given the number of people in their town from just such camps.

A young member of the Lost Boys of Sudan, the 3,800 refugees who resettled in the United States after a twelve-year flight through the desert and scrub of war-ravaged Sudan, died after getting bludgeoned by another Sudanese refugee in a fight over ten dollars. An Ethiopian man was arrested and later convicted for conducting the brutal practice of female circumcision on his young daughter. And so on. Each of these events fed the perception that the refugees were bringing violent pasts with them to Clarkston, and caused even empathetic locals to worry for their own safety.

THE CITIZENS OF many communities might have organized, or protested, or somehow pushed back, but Clarkston wasn’t a protesting kind of place. The old town’s quiet, conservative southern character didn’t go in for rallies and bullhorns. And the troubles of the 1980s had destabilized the community and imbued longtime residents with a sense of futility when it came to resisting change. Rather than making noise, during the first decade of resettlement the older residents of Clarkston simply retreated into their homes.

Karen Feltz remembers that when she moved to Clarkston from the nearby Atlanta neighborhood of Five Points—a community with a vibrant nightlife and where neighbors say hello and look after one another—she was struck by the strange wariness of her neighbors. Few people talked. A sense of community was missing. It took a while, but Feltz said she came to realize that the sudden changes brought on by resettlement had simply made people afraid.

“You’re talking about one-point-one square miles of encapsulated southern ideologies,” Feltz said of her town. “People living their safe quiet lives in their white-bread houses, and all of a sudden every other person on the street is black, or Asian, or something they don’t even recognize, and ‘Oh my God, let’s just shut down and stay in our houses!’”

For all the unique circumstances of Clarkston’s transformation, there was something altogether normal about the townsfolk’s withdrawal from the public sphere. In 2007, a group of researchers led by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published a study detailing the results of surveys they had done with some thirty thousand residents of forty-one ethnically diverse communities in the United States. Their findings underscored the cost of diversity: when people have little in common, they tend to avoid each other and to keep to themselves.

“Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life,” the authors wrote, “to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

In Clarkston, the withdrawal from collective life was matched by growing resentment at the forces and people that had caused the town to change in the first place: the resettlement agencies and the refugees. For a surprisingly long time—the better part of a decade—townsfolk kept their anger to themselves. But as resentment built, it would begin to find its expression.

“Nobody knew what to do about it, so they just sort of ignored it,” Karen Feltz said of the influx of refugees. “And that’s how we got in trouble.”

THE FIRST SIGNS of trouble surfaced in interactions between the refugees and the Clarkston Police Department in the late 1990s. The police chief at the time was a man named Charlie—or Chollie, to people in Clarkston—Nelson, an old-school presence whose office wall was adorned with a poster of Barney Fife, the goofball deputy on The Andy Griffith Show, captioned with the phrase, “Hell no, this ain’t Mayberry.”

The refugees were a constant problem, in Nelson’s eyes. They didn’t understand English. Many were poor drivers. Some, when pulled over, gesticulated and cried out, and even reached out to touch his officers—a sign of disrespect if not outright aggression to most American police officers. Nelson looked askance at diversity training and opposed offering any “special treatment” for refugees, particularly in the arena of traffic violations. Writing traffic tickets to refugees became one of Clarkston’s more reliable sources of revenue. A study by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that the average Georgia town of Clarkston’s size raised about 9 percent of its budget from traffic tickets. In Clarkston, by contrast, the number was 30 percent. Nelson argued that he was simply enforcing the law. It wasn’t his fault, he said, if some refugees hadn’t learned the rules of the road in the United States. But the refugees felt singled out.

“A lot of our community members felt harassed, discriminated against,” said Salahadin Wazir, the imam of the Clarkston mosque, whose congregation was often ticketed for parking improperly around the mosque at Friday prayers. “They were all just pulled over for anything.”

Eventually, some members of the refugee community became so fed up with what they saw as harassment from Nelson’s force that they decided to act. For many, doing so meant making a leap of faith. Most had come from war-ravaged regions where the police and other authority figures were not only untrustworthy but frequently active agents of oppression. To stand up to the police in America was to take the nation’s promise of justice for all at face value. In one incident, a Somali cabdriver, after getting pulled over by a Clarkston police officer for reasons he thought bogus, summoned other cabbies from the Somali community on his CB radio. His colleagues quickly drove to the site of the police stop. The officer feared a riot might occur and let the driver off with a warning.

In 2001, Lee Swaney—a longtime city council member and a self-described champion of “old Clarkston,” that is, Clarkston before the refugees—ran for mayor. As an advocate of life as it was in a simple southern town, Swaney fit the part. The owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, he had a big walrus-y mustache and sleepy eyes that made him look older than his sixty-eight years. He drove a big white pickup truck of the sort you might expect to see on a ranch, wore cowboy boots and an American flag lapel pin, and spoke with a thick, low-country accent that betrayed his South Carolina upbringing. Swaney’s platform reflected his old-school values: he promised the citizens of Clarkston that if elected, he’d work hard to lure a good old-fashioned American hamburger joint to open up within the city limits.

A year and a half after Swaney took office, something happened that pushed the tensions in Clarkston over the edge: refugee agency officials announced that they planned to relocate some seven hundred Somali Bantu to Georgia, many of them to Clarkston.

The Somali Bantu presented an extraordinary challenge for resettlement officials. An assemblage of agricultural tribes from the area of East Africa now comprising Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique, the Somali Bantu had undergone more than three hundred years of almost uninterrupted persecution. They were kidnapped and sold into slavery with impunity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Arab slave traders. Later, under the sultanate of Zanzibar and subsequent rule by the Italian colonial government, the Somali Bantu were enslaved to work on plantations, a condition that persisted until as recently as the 1930s. When the British granted Somalia its independence in 1960, the Bantu were hounded, abused, and brutalized by ethnic Somalis. When the Somali civil war began in 1991, the persecution accelerated dramatically as warring factions forced the Somali Bantu off their land in the fertile Juba River valley. Amid the lawlessness and the systematic campaigns of rape, torture, and killing, the Somali Bantu fled en masse with other persecuted Somalis to the empty and dangerous open spaces of northeast Kenya and into four main refugee camps established there by the United Nations. By the late 1990s, the population of those camps exceeded 150,000.

This history of persecution and wandering had torn at the social fabric of the Somali Bantu and left them, on the whole, poor, deeply traumatized, and far removed from the trappings of the modern world. They had little in the way of education. Many lived their lives in primitive conditions, with no running water or electricity. Their cultural isolation was acute as well. The Somali Bantu were sometimes referred to by Somalis as the “ooji”—from the Italian word oggi, meaning “today”—for their perceived inability to think beyond the moment, a misunderstanding rooted in the different way the agrarian Somali Bantu conceived of time.

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.”