Ishmael Beah - A Long Way Gone

Once, Junior taught me how to skip a stone on a river. We had gone to fetch water and he told me he had learned a new magic that let him make stones walk on water. Bending his body sideways, he threw stones out, and each one walked on the water farther than the last. He told me to try, but I couldn’t do it. He promised to teach me the magic some other time. As we were walking back home with buckets of water on our heads, I slipped and fell, spilling the water. Junior gave me his bucket, took my empty one, and returned to the river. When he came home, the first thing he did was ask me if I was hurt from falling. I told him I was fine, but he examined my knees and elbows anyway, and when he was done, he tickled me. As I looked at him that evening sitting on the verandah of a house in an unknown village, I wanted him to ask me if I was fine.

Gibrilla, Talloi, Kaloko, and Khalilou were all looking at the top of the forest that engulfed the village. Gibrilla’s nose twitched as he sat with his chin on his knee. When he exhaled, his whole body moved. Talloi continuously tapped his foot on the floor, as if trying to distract himself from thinking about the present. Kaloko was restless. He couldn’t sit still and kept switching positions, and sighed each time he did so. Khalilou sat quietly. His face showed no emotion and his spirit seemed to have wandered away from his body. I wanted to know how Junior was feeling, but I couldn’t find the right moment to break into the silence of that evening. I wish I had.

The following morning, a large group of people passed through the village. Among the travelers was a woman who knew Gibrilla. She told him that his aunt was in a village about thirty miles from where we were. She gave us directions. We filled our pockets with unripe oranges that were sour and unbearable to eat but the only source of food at our disposal, and we were on our way.

Kamator was very far away from Mattru Jong, where the rebels were still in control, but the villagers were on guard and ready to move anytime. In return for food and a place to sleep, the six of us were appointed watchmen. Three miles from the village was a big hill. From the top, one could see as far as a mile down the path toward the village. It was at the top of that hill that we stood watch from early in the morning until nightfall. We did this for about a month and nothing happened. Still, we knew the rebels well enough to brace for their arrival. But we lost our vigilance to the gradual passing of time.

The season for planting was approaching. The first rain had fallen, softening the soil. Birds began building their nests in the mango trees. Dew came down every morning and left the leaves wet and soaked the soil. The odor of the soaked soil was irresistibly sharp at midday. It made me want to roll on the ground. One of my uncles used to joke that he would like to die at this time of year. The sun rose earlier than usual and was at its brightest in the blue, almost cloudless sky. The grass on the side of the path was half dry and half green. Ants could be seen on the ground carrying food into their holes. Even though we tried to convince them otherwise, the villagers grew certain the rebels weren’t coming, and so they ordered us from our scouting posts and out into the fields. It wasn’t easy.

I had always been a spectator of the art of farming and as a result never realized how difficult it was until those few months of my life, in 1993, when I had to assist in farming in the village of Kamator. The village inhabitants were all farmers, so I had no way to escape this fate.

Before the war, when I visited my grandmother during harvest season, the only thing she let me do was pour wine on the soil around the farm before harvest commenced, as part of a ceremony to thank the ancestors and the gods for providing fertile soil, healthy rice, and a successful farming year.

The first task we were given was to clear a massive plot of land the size of a football field. When we went to look at the bush that was supposed to be cut, I knew tough days lay ahead. The bush was thick and there were lots of palm trees, each surrounded by trees that had woven their branches together. It was difficult to get around them and chop them down. The ground was covered with decayed leaves that had changed the top color of the brown soil to dark. Termites could be heard rummaging under the rotten leaves. Every day we would repeatedly stoop and stand under the bushes, swinging machetes and axes at the trees and palms that had to be cut lower to the ground so that they wouldn’t grow fast again and disrupt the crop that was to be planted. Sometimes when we swung the machetes and axes, their weight would send us flying into the bushes, where we would lie for a bit and rub our aching shoulders. Gibrilla’s uncle would shake his head and say, “You lazy town boys.”

On the first morning of clearing, Gibrilla’s uncle assigned each of us a portion of the bush to be cut down. We spent three days cutting down our portions. He was done in less than three hours.

When I held the cutlass in my hand to start attacking the bush, Gibrilla’s uncle couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing before he showed me how to hold the cutlass properly. I spent restless minutes swinging the cutlass with all my might at trees that he would cut with one strike.

The first two weeks were extremely painful. I suffered from back pains and muscle aches. Worst of all, the flesh on the palms of my hands was peeled, swollen, and blistered. My hands were not used to holding a machete or an ax. After the clearing was done, the bush was left to dry. Later, when the cut bush was dried, we set fire to it and watched the thick smoke rise to the blue summer sky.

Next we had to plant cassava. To do this, we dug mini-holes in the ground using hoes. To take a break from this task, which required us to bend our upper bodies toward the ground for hours, we fetched cassava stalks, cut them into shorter pieces, and placed them in the holes. The only sounds we heard as we worked were the humming of tunes by expert farmers, the occasional flapping of a bird, the snaps of tree branches breaking in the nearby forest, and hellos from neighbors traveling the path either to their own farms or back to the village. At the end of the day, I sometimes would sit on a log at the village square and watch the younger boys play their wrestling games. One of the boys, about seven, always started a fight, and his mother would pull him away by his ear. I saw myself in him. I was a troublesome boy as well and always got into fights in school and at the river. Sometimes I stoned kids I couldn’t beat up. Since we didn’t have a mother at home, Junior and I were the misfits in our community. The separation of our parents left marks on us that were visible to the youngest child in our town. We became the evening gossip.

“Those poor boys,” some would say.

“They aren’t going to have any good complete training,” others would worriedly remark as we walked by.

I was so angry at the way they pitied us that I would sometimes kick their children’s behinds at school, especially those who gave us the look that said, My parents talk about you a lot.

We farmed for three months at Kamator and I never got used to it. The only times that I enjoyed were the afternoon breaks, when we went swimming in the river. There, I would sit on the clear sandy bottom of the river and let the current take me downstream, where I would resurface, put on my dirty clothes, and return to the farm. The sad thing about all that hard labor was that, in the end, it all went to ruin, because the rebels did eventually come and everyone ran away, leaving their farms to be covered by weeds and devoured by animals.

It was during that attack in the village of Kamator that my friends and I separated. It was the last time I saw Junior, my older brother.