Alive And Kicking

Another night, at the end of her first year as Fugees coach, the last boy in her car was Jeremiah from Liberia. She was going away, she'd told the boys that day, to visit friends in Massachusetts, just for four days. But life had taught Jeremiah otherwise. Rebels had charged into his home during Liberia's civil war, when he was a toddler. The soldiers believed that his father, who held a modest job in the government's payroll office, had access to big money. When they discovered that he had none, they slaughtered him in the living room.

Jeremiah's eyes filled with tears just before he got out of Luma's car. "What's going to happen to the Fugees Family?" asked the nine-year-old boy.

"What do you mean?" asked Luma.

"You're leaving and never coming back, and we won't have soccer anymore."

"But I'll be back in a few days."

"But what if something happens ... and you don't come back?"

Luma thought fast. "You know I never leave anywhere without my watch. Why don't you keep it for me until I come back?"

The boy stared at it after she left, realizing that it wasn't digital and he didn't know how to read it. Yes! How could she get angry at him if he called her each day she was away with a perfectly good question. "Coach!" he yelped each time she answered. "What time is it now?"

One night two years ago—two years after Luma had founded the Fugees—she got a call from a friend. "Turn on the news," she was told. She did, just in time to see an apartment complex where three of her players lived going up in flames. She raced there, jumped out of her car and blew past the police barricade, crying, "My kids are in there!"

She arrived to see firemen pulling out the dead bodies of the two younger sisters and brother of Christian, the fastest kid she'd ever seen, as six other Fugees watched in horror. Christian's mother, who had fled Liberia with her children, was sobbing, and a neighbor woman was screaming at 14-year-old Christian, demanding to know why he hadn't run back in and saved his siblings. Christian fled into the night, and Luma followed, driving up and down the streets of Clarkston in search of him.