A Long Way Gone: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The memoir opens with a short prologue. Ishmael Beah is in high school in New York City in 1998. When his classmates become curious about his time in Sierra Leone, he answers as curtly as possible. He doesn’t tell them anything about why he fled home except that there was a civil war. He keeps his time as a child soldier a secret.

Beah then begins his story. It is 1993, he is twelve, and is leaving his hometown, Mogbwemo, in south-east Sierra Leone, for the day. He is going with his brother Junior and friend Talloi to Mattru Jong, a town sixteen miles to the east, to dance in a talent show. His best friend Mohamed can’t make it. Figuring that they will only be gone a day, they don’t tell anyone where they are going. Although a violent, bloody revolution is being waged in Sierra Leone between the government and rebels, Beah and his village have yet to be touched by it. Their only knowledge of it comes from refugees who pass through their town. Usually the refugees decline to talk about their experience with war, but when they do, Beah thinks their tales seem exaggerated.

The boys decide to walk the sixteen miles to Mattru Jong to save the cost of travel, playing as they make the trek. After ten miles, they stop at Beah’s grandmother’s house in the village of Kabati. She wonders what the boys could possibly being doing in Mattru Jong if it doesn’t involve school. Her scolding is like that of Beah’s father, who has often wondered if the boys even understand what their favorite rappers are saying. A couple of hours later they arrive and meet their friends Gibrilla, Kaloko and Khalilou, who live in Mattru Jong.

The next day Beah, Junior and Talloi, who are staying at their friend’s, are surprised when their friends return early from school. Gibrilla, who has joined the boys in a push-up competition without giving them the news first, explains that Mogbwemo has been attacked by the rebels and that everyone has fled. They learn that Mattru Jong is next on the rebel’s list.

Beah and his friends head to the wharf, where refugees are arriving from Mogbwemo by boat, wanting to see if they can find their families or get some information about what might have happened to them. They wait anxiously for three hours, but their families do not arrive, and no one has any news of them. Beah notes how strange it was to him that that the sun could shine and the birds would sing. He cannot believe the war has reached them.

Beah then remembers with great pain the last time he saw his father. Beah was about to go to see his mother, whom Beah’s father was divorced from. Sitting on his porch, Beah was approached by his father, who was just coming home from work. His father smiled at him. Beah’s relationship with his father is rough, especially because his father has stopped paying for his schooling and has remarried. But before either of them can say anything, Beah’s stepmother comes out, and his father disappears into the house to speak with her. Beah then leaves to go see his mother, and she asks after her ex-husband, reminding Beah that he means well. Now, Beah imagines his father running home from work and his mother running to pick up his little brother during the attack.

The boys decide to head for Mogbwemo, despite the terror that is evident on the faces of the refugees and their warnings. The boys make it as far as Kabati, Beah’s grandmother’s village, which has been deserted, but what they see there makes them reconsider. A car drives into town, and out of it spills a bloodied man who had tried to escape with his family. Beah is horrified to see that the man’s entire family is dead in the car. More refugees come through town, some of them carrying their dead children to the hospital as if they were still alive. Others are unaware that they are even wounded. Beah dreams that night for the first time of the war, and in the dream he is shot.

Utterly stunned at the violence and unable to comprehend its purpose, the boys decide not to head for Mogbwemo, but instead to return to Mattru Jong. Back in Mattru Jong, the boys continue to head to the wharf for news for a week, but the stream of refugees slows to a trickle and finally stops altogether. Government troops arrive, and the boys comfort each other by agreeing that the war cannot last, spreading a rumor that the army has already gone to flush the rebels out of the mines, and listening to rap music.

To distance himself from what he has seen, Beah remembers his grandmother’s directive to “be like the moon,” as the moon always makes people happy. Beah has always followed her advice, and as a boy, spends much of his time contemplating the moon and seeing images in its surface as one does with clouds. In the present in New York City, Beah is pleased to know that something of his younger self remains, since he can still look with the same the pleasure that he once did at the moon.