Throughout the book, soccer fields come to represent the Clarkston community’s lack of support for the Fugees, and the refugee population as a whole. When Luma begins the Fugees program, the YMCA sponsors their use of the field at the Clarkston Community Center. But when relations between the YMCA and the Community Center deteriorate, they are forced to move to a field behind Indian Creek Elementary School. This field is covered in gravel and broken glass, and anyone can walk through games. Luma is infuriated by this treatment, because she knows that the Fugees are being discriminated against because their parents are not wealthy. Affluent parents would never allow their children to play on a field, but the Fugees’ parents have neither the time nor resources to protest the decision.
Later, Luma is approved by the City Council to use a field at Armistead Park on a trial basis. But at the end of the book, Mayor Swaney authorizes a letter saying that they no longer have use of the field and will have to find another to practice on—a decision that he does not have the authority to make alone. Thus, the Fugees’ continual struggle to find a practice field is emblematic of their larger struggle to find their place in America—even though they have been able to immigrate, they are rarely welcomed or fully supported.
Fields Quotes in Outcasts United
In fact, things with the Fugees were more fragile than I could have realized that day. The team had no home field. The players’ private lives were an intense daily struggle to stay afloat. They and their families had fled violence and chaos and found themselves in a place with a completely different set of values and customs.
In 2001, Lee Swaney—a longtime city council member who called himself a champion of “old Clarkston,” that is, Clarkston before the refugees—ran for mayor.
Luma also felt that if a soccer team of well-to-do sub urban kids was assigned to play on a field of sand and broken glass, their parents would call the team’s sponsors or the league—someone—to protest. The parents of the Fugees’ players were seen as powerless, she believed, so no one thought much about making the team play on such a bad field.
Swaney’s proposal changed the energy in the room. The council’s questions became gentler. They talked among themselves and agreed that six months sounded like a reasonable amount of time for a trial period.
There was a motion, and a second.
The motion passed unanimously. Luma nodded in thanks and stifled a smile. The Fugees, for now at least, had a home.
Pull back farther, and you got a sense of where Clarkston sat in America—tucked in a green corner of the country beneath the gray ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Pull back again, and the blue oceans came into view, then other continents and countries—Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq—all looking deceptively calm. Pull back farther still and the curved horizons of the planet revealed themselves—a beautiful ball of green, white, blue, slate, and brown. Someday, somewhere down there, the Fugees would find a home.
Fields Symbol Timeline in Outcasts United
