Sooley

This section of the novel sees both Samuel and Beatrice lose their home and family and be thrust into completely new environments. By juxtaposing the ways they are able to manage these tragedies, Grisham continues to develop his theme of the Absurdity of Global Inequality.

Both Samuel and Beatrice form new connections to replace the support they got from their family. For Samuel, this comes through the bonds with his teammates and coaches—first the football team, and then the basketball team—and being taken in by the Walkers as a de facto son. Samuel immediately endears himself to the football team by his positive attitude and work ethic, and they throw him a surprise birthday party. Due to his grief, Samuel decided not to tell anyone about the event, but his new family steps forward to make him feel cared for. When he meets the Walkers, Ida quickly identifies Samuel as “a deeply wounded boy who needed all the love and support [the Walkers] could give” (147-48). This outpouring of support from all corners allows Samuel to manage his grief while still engaging with the pleasures of life, such as basketball and parties.

Beatrice, on the other hand, does not have the opportunity to grieve, much less enjoy small pleasures. In the wake of the camp attack, she not only must care for her own two sons but begins taking care of two women from Lotta and their children. These women form her new support system at the refugee camp, but she ultimately gives much more to them than they do her. Where Samuel is allowed space and comfort, Beatrice’s new family ends up adding as much new responsibility as it does comfort. This juxtaposition shows the sheer absurdity of the difference in their circumstances. Beatrice has to fight for tents while Samuel is handed roof after roof, and even the comfort and meaning she ekes out is meager in comparison.

A symbol that emerges to underscore this juxtaposition is food. Beatrice waits in line for small bowls of rice that barely sustain her and her children. Samuel, under the care of the Walkers, eats huge meals. In Sooley, food comes to symbolize safety and stability, both in body and in spirit. Though Beatrice struggles for the rice in these chapters, she is still safer than she was wandering through the wilderness before reaching the refugee camp. Samuel, however, has reached his high point of physical and emotional safety, and this is seen in the massive homecooked meals he eats with the Walkers. At his first Thanksgiving, he “thought they were joking about so much food for one meal” (188), showing how sharply Samuel’s circumstances have improved from Lotta. Access to food, especially through the Walkers for Samuel, becomes a barometer of how safe the character will be in the following chapters.

In the second part of the novel, Grisham also begins fleshing out his theme of America as a Land of (In)opportunity. Despite his trauma and grief, Samuel is able to throw himself into basketball. He gets into the habit of waking early and treating himself to “the solitude of a deserted, semidark gym, with 3,000 empty seats, and not another person around” (162). While this image recalls the time when he snuck into the gym to practice before tryouts for the South Sudanese team, the two experiences starkly contrast in Samuel’s level of well-being at the time: America seems worlds apart from South Sudan, and for now, Samuel is seeing nothing but the opportunity ahead of him. By the end of the novel, however, his fortunes will have turned once more, and that opportunity will gain a dimension of irony.

As Samuel adjusts to life in America, he also gets his first exposure to the Danger of Sudden Fame and Wealth. These temptations will only become stronger, and their inclusion here foreshadows Samuel’s tragic end. Significantly, Samuel not only resists the temptation of recreational drugs at his first party but is so overwhelmed by it that he leaves by himself. The text suggests this is largely due to culture shock, because “[where] he came from, kids, as well as their parents, couldn’t afford alcohol or drugs, and he had not been exposed to [them]” (192). Likewise, when Murray is in New York with the team and Robin makes sexual advances on Samuel, he ardently resists and throws her out. In both instances, Samuel displays strong moral convictions that lay a foundation for Grisham to later explore how both fame and American culture can be corruptive.

When the police stop Samuel as he walks home from the party, the scene provides a salient example of how Grisham’s attempted apoliticism can complicate a story and, depending on the interpretation, create narrative inconsistencies. The cops’ intentions are initially ambiguous, and the tension builds to a sense of genuine mortal threat. Samuel is forced to reach into his pocket for a school ID, echoing multiple real-world instances of police brutality in which Black people have been shot for simply reaching into their own pockets (a gesture that, many police assailants later claim, made it seem as though the person was reaching for a gun). Grisham lingers on that image, drawing the suspense out to maximum efficacy, only for the cops to reveal themselves as basketball fans and offer Samuel a ride home without issue. This anticlimax undercuts a scene that could have advanced Grisham’s themes about inequality and raised awareness about racially motivated police violence.

Yet there is another sense in which this plot event—precisely because the outcome is such a dramatic serendipity—ultimately magnifies the tragic elements of Samuel’s character arc. The interaction conspicuously echoes a scene earlier in the narrative, when the government soldiers in Sudan call Samuel to the front of the bus. Then, too, the suspense is high, only for the soldiers to dismiss Samuel after discussing basketball. When Samuel then has his blessedly nonviolent encounter with the police, the unlikely recurrence of such a hair-raising “near miss” conveys a sense of the protagonist’s uncanny luck. Indeed, numerous plot details converge to form an image that, in mythic narratives, would typically signify divine favor: There is the fact that Samuel is the best player in his South Sudanese village; the fact that, despite his remote rural location, his talent is discovered by those who can help him; the fact that his coach has faith in him and champions him despite his shortcomings and disadvantages; his passage from the war-torn Lotta to the secure United States; his “adoption” by the beneficent, upper-class Walkers; his meteoric rise to prestige. In the context of this preternatural pattern, Samuel’s evasion of harm from military and police figures seemingly confirms his stars’ alignment and suggests he is an unstoppable force with a lofty destiny. This makes it all the more world-shattering when, by the end of the novel, Samuel has fallen. There is also tragic irony in how his death is precipitated by the very thing that his good fortune brings him: wealth and, consequently, reckless decadence, symbolized by the recreational designer drugs that lead to his overdose. He will have escaped the external threats of poverty, civil war, and police violence only to succumb to the internal threat of his own hedonism.

Tragedies often evoke a sense of waste or wasted destiny by portraying the downfall of characters who could have achieved enduring greatness (or at least happiness) if not for their fatal flaw, or hamartia. Samuel’s character upholds this literary convention. However, to compound the tragedy, his hamartia is only human. It is almost inevitable that someone like Samuel—young, alone, desperate for security and belonging—would act as he does when presented with the same temptations. Even with Grisham’s political restraint, his narrative comments how systemic inequalities can make a person physically and psychologically vulnerable. If Samuel’s life involved less precarity, the promise of wealth and pleasure may not be quite so seductive and disorienting for him. Samuel alone is not the agent of his death.