Address
Clarkston, DeKalb County, Georgia 30021 centred on West Indian Creek Drive and Church Street, seven miles east of downtown Atlanta.
Timezone
America/New_York — USA East (EST/EDT)
Find Your Footing
Clarkston moves on foot in a way that few American small cities do, and that fact alone tells you something about who lives here and how they relate to public space. The main street and its surrounding blocks are most alive in the late morning and late afternoon the hours that bracket school runs, work shifts, and the rhythms of small business. The weekends carry a different density: worship, markets, the extended social time of communities that have rebuilt their social infrastructure from the ground up and use it deliberately.
Notice the grocery stores there are several, each serving a partially distinct clientele, and each one is a more accurate map of the community than any official document. Notice the churches and mosques, their proximity to each other, and the fact that this proximity appears to be managed through mutual indifference rather than conflict a form of coexistence that is neither celebrated nor tested, simply practised. Notice the languages in use in public space, and resist the impulse to catalogue them. Listen instead for the moments when two languages meet in a single transaction and both parties adjust without ceremony. That adjustment is the texture of Clarkston.
About
Seven miles east of Atlanta, the city stops being Atlanta. The highway gives way to surface streets, the glass towers recede in the rear-view mirror, and Clarkston arrives without announcement a modest grid of apartment complexes and small businesses and a main street that does not call attention to itself. You could drive through it in four minutes and register nothing unusual. Many people do.
What Clarkston holds is not visible from a moving car. It is audible, if you stop. It is present in the signage above the shops in Amharic, in Somali, in French, in Arabic, in English as a third or fourth language. It is in the specific geometry of a Friday afternoon when the mosque empties and the Ethiopian grocery is at its fullest and a group of teenagers speaking a Congolese dialect are sitting outside a convenience store that also sells injera and phone cards to Kigali. It is in the smell of a car park on a warm Georgia evening when four different cuisines are being carried home from four different shops within a hundred metres of each other.
Clarkston is frequently described in terms of what happened to it as a place that received, that absorbed, that processed. That framing belongs to another kind of writing. What this piece is concerned with is what Clarkston has become: a place where the African continent, in something close to its full diversity, has taken up residence in approximately one square mile of DeKalb County and proceeded to live not symbolically, not as a policy outcome, but as neighbours, as business owners, as school parents, as elders, as children who have known no other home.
This is not a small thing. It is, in its quiet and entirely untheatrical way, extraordinary.