He had hated Muslims. Now he would host one.
A tale of outreach, transformation in rural Georgia
LAFAYETTE, Ga. — Chris Buckley walks out to his porch, where the doormat once greeted customers at a Subway, and looks up and down the empty street.
“I admit it, I’m nervous,” he says, lighting a cigarette with heavily tattooed hands.
His densely colored arms are a paisley record of his many hates. KKK symbols dot his left knuckles, another is below his navel; an antigovernment militia tag covers his neck. Most prominent is the big word in Arabic emblazoned on the back of his forearm: “Infidel.”
“I wanted them to know I was the one the imam warned them about,” he says, looking down at the mark he himself tattooed on his skin during a hot, angry week in Helmand province. It was one of three deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, during which the former Army sergeant fired thousands of live rounds at an enemy he learned to despise.
But months of halting transformation have led to this moment and the arrival of an unlikely guest.
Leaving the door open, he paces back into the apartment, one of three carved out of a single-family home, where his two kids sleep on a mattress in the only bedroom. Buckley and his wife, Melissa, sleep in the living room, next to the bathroom that has no door and a kitchen with only a dorm fridge. When Buckley is off probation for drug possession in February they hope to move to a better place.
Melissa is more concerned about his reaction than the visitor he’s waiting for. The last time he got close to a Muslim, he shoved the man into a rack of potato chips in his own gas station.
She had spent years with that version of her husband, the onetime imperial nighthawk of the Georgia White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who despised “towel heads” and believed terrorists were pouring into the country disguised as refugees.
She was still getting to know this version, the one who had invited one of those refugees to their home.
“What if it’s like the gas station all over again?” she asks.
“He’s here,” Buckley calls as a black Mercedes sedan pulls under the pine trees.
Out steps a tall man with stylish glasses and glossy black hair. Like Buckley, he’s 34. He has a nice car now that he is a doctor in Atlanta, two hours south, but he grew up in Kurdish refugee camps and apartments as bleak as the one he’s about to enter in this small town in the North Georgia hills. It’s the reason he’s here, to see what a Kurd might have in common with an ex-Klansman.
“Are you ready for your blind date?” asks Heval Mohamed Kelli, his hand out, the faded shades of Syria faint in his accent.
A few days before Kelli’s
visit, the Buckleys were on the couch that doubles as their bed watching a home movie of sorts. It was a 2015 documentary on the Klan streaming on Netflix.
In it, Buckley stands in a black hooded robe, red Klan cross on his chest, white rope around his waist. Next to him, 4-year-old Chris Jr. — C.J., the same boy now running in and out of the living room with a gray puppy at his heels — was standing in a matching pre-K version of the robe.
Buckley throws a Sieg Heil salute.
“White Power!” shouts the father.
“White power!” repeats the son, his little arm extended to the sky.
Buckley learned hate, and violence, during a tumultuous childhood in Cleveland. His father would return from days-long benders and routinely whip Buckley for any misdeeds he might have committed in his absence. Feminism was stupid, homosexuality was wrong, and whites only dated whites.
Buckley joined the Army when he was a high school junior.
“Every paper target I ever shot was a Muslim,” Buckley said. “Every bit of bayonet training or hand-to-hand combat, it was other soldiers dressed up like Muslims.”
The hatred outlasted the uniform. Buckley left the Army after 13 years following a Humvee accident that left him with a broken back and an addiction to painkillers. When the doctors eventually cut him off, he started buying on the street. Soon came cocaine, mushrooms and “the love of my life,” meth. He was eventually using two grams a day and spending hundreds a week on his habit.
“He wasn’t the man I married,” Melissa says.
He would leave for the store and call from jail. The family bounced between Kentucky, Ohio and Georgia, places where conservative outrage was building over same-sex marriage, Black Lives Matter and refugees “pouring into the country.”
“You start noticing all these tensions,” Buckley says, “and you feel like you have to pick a side.”
In the spring of 2015, he picked one. He came home one day to find his sister-inlaw’s black pot dealer sitting on his couch. He kicked the man out, declared his home a white sanctuary, and started Googling “protecting the white race.”
It took him minutes to find the Klan.
Melissa began to see Klan life as a threat to her children. Her slur-spouting son was due to start school soon. Something had to change. It was her turn to Google.
“How do I get my husband out of a hate group?” she typed. The result: Arno Michaelis.
A recovered Nazi skinhead-turned-Buddhist, Michaelis has built a national reputation as a “warrior for peace.” His most recent book, “The Gift of Our Wounds,” was written with the son of a Sikh man killed by a white supremacist in Wisconsin. He runs an informal underground railroad for racists who want out.
“Melissa was done with the Klan and worried about Chris’s safety,” Michaelis recalls in an interview. “I told her I thought we could help.”
“We” was a planned A&E reality television series about rescuing Klan members. Though the show never aired, Michaelis was involved at the time, and Melissa agreed to participate. The producers contacted Buckley separately, asking if he wanted to appear in a documentary about the Klan.
“They didn’t tell me the point was to get me out,” Buckley says.
In the summer of 2016, he was tossing a baseball with C.J. — and high on meth — when Melissa, Michaelis and a cameraman walked into the yard. It didn’t go well. Michaelis said he was there to help. Buckley promptly told them to get off his property.
But after four months, with Melissa threatening to leave with the kids, Buckley agreed to give Michaelis his Klan patch. He wanted out.
Buckley talks now of the hate draining away. Hoping to fill the vacuum with empathy, Michaelis took Buckley on a compassion tour of homeless shelters and gang rehab centers in Los Angeles. At one, Buckley began a conversation with an African-American woman that ended with him sobbing in her arms, apologizing for all the pain he had inflicted.
“That’s when I knew Chris wouldn’t be going back to the Klan,” Michaelis says.
But there still were the drugs.
It was only after being arrested again last summer for felony possession that he got a serious start on sobriety. He detoxed during his four-month sentence and then opted for an intensive probationary rehab program. One week turned into a month, a month into 177 days and counting.
He has become a model participant, his thick workbook filled with completed essays and check marks for each sober day.
“Sometimes he and C.J. will be right there on the rug doing their homework together,” Melissa says.
“I take a lot of pride in it,” Buckley says.
Michaelis did too. Early in 2018, he thought Buckley was ready for the last lesson.
“Chris, I want you to meet my guy Heval.”
They’ve been talking for
almost four months — exchanging messages and phone calls — when Heval Mohamed Kelli steps onto the porch. Buckley holds out his hand, but the shake instantly gives way to a hug. Not a bro hug, but a full chest-to-chest embrace, Kelli’s Ray-Bans against Buckley’s yin-yang earlobe plugs.
Kelli then embraces Melissa. C.J. and Miera, 3, run in and stare.
“I brought something, I hope you’re not offended,” Kelli says, stepping out and pulling two large Ross bags from his trunk. Among the loot, a remote control car and a Play-Doh Fun Factory.
“It’s a Kurdish custom to bring gifts,” he explains.
There is no tour. Kelli can see the entire apartment from just inside the door. It is similar to the place his family lived in for their first 12 years in United States.
He was 12 when his family fled Syria after his father, an Aleppo lawyer, got crosswise with a regime that persecuted the Kurdish minority. After six years in Germany, they were granted asylum in the United States in 2001. They landed in Clarkston, an Atlanta suburb that is home to one the country’s biggest refugee communities.
“I came 10 days after 9/11,” he tells Buckley.
“I had just finished basic training,” Buckley responds.
Kelli was 18 and didn’t speak English. But he drilled himself in vocabulary as he washed dishes at a Mediterranean restaurant. He soon graduated from Clarkston High School and then from Georgia State University. When Kelli finished up at the Morehouse School of Medicine, he bought his family a new house on a pond.
Now Kelli is finishing a cardiology fellowship at Emory University and planning a career split between medicine and giving back to all the communities he credits with propelling him from poverty to prestige.
He has started a mentorship program at Georgia State to help other refugee kids navigate college. He works monthly at the shortstaffed Atlanta VA hospital, saying he’s humbled to serve those who served his adopted country, and volunteers at numerous clinics providing free care to the underserved. And he spends part of every day in Clarkston visiting refugee families and acting as their liaison to the American culture he has mastered and loves.
After the 2016 election, Kelli adopted a new mission: meeting as many Donald Trump supporters as he could and offering himself as an ambassador for Islam, for refugees, for Syrians, Kurds, the brown, the poor, all the hated “others” who helped fuel the president’s rise. With a ready smile and open ears, he found success. Before going to lunch at
the Dari Dip, where Melissa has just gotten a job as a server, they take Kelli across the street to show him the Haven.
Started as an informal church next to an insurance agency, the five-room former office has become a busy day shelter for Walker County’s neediest and poorest.
“You got what you need, bro?” Buckley says to an African-American man.
Tanya Nave, one of the Haven founders, tells Kelli how Buckley became a Haven mainstay after first refusing their help several months earlier. The family had been living at a dive motel where volunteers handed out sandwiches. Buckley always refused, sometimes rudely.
He changed. He learned to accept help and then to give it.
“Now I feel like this place is my purpose,” Buckley says.
On many issues, Buckley remains the firebrand reposter of conservative memes on Facebook. His first phone talk with Kelli was a 45-minute defense of gun rights. He complains that he must rely on a translation app to communicate with his Latino colleagues.
But while he wants those workers to learn English, he doesn’t hate them as he once did. He calls Martin Luther King Jr. a hero. He befriends those he once despised.
“What do you want to do (next) Chris?” Kelli asks as they leave the Haven.
They talk about making speeches together, about Michaelis’s work extricating Klan members. It all seems possible, and thrilling.
“I don’t know what I want to do,” Buckley says. “I just want to do good to make up for all the bad.”