52 pages • 1 hour read
Sooley
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Part 1, Chapters 1-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Summary
Samuel Sooleymon is a 17-year-old boy from the remote South Sudanese village of Lotta. Samuel’s mother, Beatrice, is a homemaker with no formal education who cares for his three siblings (brothers Chol and James and sister Angelina), while his father, Ayak, teaches at a two-room, open-air school. Life in the village is relatively stable, even though a brutal civil war has entered its second year in the country. Growing up in “the bush” means Samuel’s life has consisted of tending to the family garden and playing basketball on the village’s dirt court. When he is invited to try out for an under-18 basketball team that will travel to America for a showcase tournament, the entire village celebrates.
The tryouts are held in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, and Samuel takes the long bus trip by himself. The bus is crowded and hot, and the ride is bumpy on the unpaved roads. As they approach Juba through “miles of shantytowns, then blocks of sturdier homes” (17), Samuel is awestruck by how vibrant, modern, and busy the city is. He vows to attend university and pursue a career in the city if his basketball career doesn’t take off.
Coach Ecko Lam, a 40-year-old man who fled the South Sudanese civil war as a child and grew up in America, runs the basketball tryout. He discovered basketball in America and played on the varsity team at Kent State. After graduating, Ecko aspired to become a Division 1 head coach. However, while he bounced between assistant coaching jobs, a nonprofit organization offered him the opportunity to coach an all-star team in South Sudan, so now he spends his time scouting for talent and trying to help them find places to play in America.
Ecko opens the tryouts by talking about the civil war and emphasizing the importance of unity. He warns them that ethnic rivalries will get them cut from the team. Samuel is a six-foot-two point guard, with raw athleticism but poor ball-handling and shooting. He is the smallest player at the tryouts and has not played against real competition because his village is so small. As Ecko watches him shoot, he notes how poor his form is but marvels at his vertical leap. He gives Samuel some pointers on how to improve, and Samuel immediately focuses on them. During their downtime, the boys go to a shopping mall and are awestruck by all the expensive things they cannot afford. They also watch a Will Smith action movie and “believed in [their] soul[s]” (31) that they can make it to the NBA and have that lavish lifestyle.
The second morning in Juba, Samuel wakes up early to explore the university campus and finds his way into the gym. When Ecko arrives, he realizes that Samuel has already been practicing there for an hour. His jump shot is still poor, but his form has improved slightly, and Ecko can sense Samuel’s determination.
Samuel performs poorly at the tryouts, and the other coaches want to cut him. In the end, Ecko elects to keep Samuel, and he is the last player selected for the team.
Part 1, Chapters 5-10 Summary
Before all the boys are sent home, Ecko gives each a new sports bag containing a new basketball, practice gear, and other gifts. Samuel takes the bus home, but three government soldiers board it just outside of Juba. They carry Kalashnikov rifles, and they are on high alert. Later, the bus is ambushed by a gang of raiders. The gang leader is a grown man, but the rest are boys around Samuel’s age or younger “dressed in their best imitation of real soldiers, a hodgepodge of leather ammo belts and guns on both hips, along with their rifles. One wore a white cowboy hat. One had on basketball shoes” (37). They do not anticipate the government soldiers and are swiftly taken down. Once the shooting has stopped, one boy from the gang of raiders drops his gun and pleads for his life. The soldiers kick him in the face and shoot him at point-blank range. They clear the road and loot the bodies for any valuables. Once the bus is moving again, the soldiers call Samuel to the front of the bus, interrogate him about his new bag, and take some of its contents. However, after a discussion about basketball, they return his things, and he sits back down.
Once he arrives home, the village celebrates his success in making the team well into the night. Samuel has trouble sleeping as his mind jumps between excitement over his future and the horrible scene he witnessed on the bus.
Two months later, when it is time for him to leave for America, the village pitches in to give Samuel some spending money for his trip.
By the time Samuel arrives back in Juba, he has grown a couple inches. The team receives new shoes from Reebok, one of the tournament’s sponsors. When they practice, “everyone would wear the same shorts, socks, and shirts. Nothing else. No bandanas, no sweat bands, nothing to draw attention to the individual” (53). Ecko also gets them perfectly matching gray uniforms to highlight that everyone on the team is equal.
After nearly 36 hours of connecting flights and bus rides, the team arrives in Florida. Samuel calls home using Ecko’s cell phone and talks to his family.
The tournament games begin. There will be seven games in eight days, and Ecko plans to play all the players equally so they have a chance to show what they can do in front of the scouts. Samuel has a decent first outing against Croatia, but they end up losing the game 54-52. They win the second game against Italy, but Samuel realizes he is the weakest point guard on the team. Before the third game, they get a tour of the Orlando Magic’s arena, and the players marvel at how luxurious everything is. They also meet Niollo, a current NBA player from South Sudan whose charity work had paid for their travel to America for the tournament. Inspired by meeting their hero, the team cruises to victories over Ukraine and Brazil.
Part 1, Chapters 11-14 Summary
After the first four games, Ecko talks to the attending scouts and coaches about his players, as several of them are garnering interest from American schools. He is particularly pleased to see his old friend, Lonnie Britt. Ecko and Lonnie played against one another in college and spent years as assistant coaches for the same team. Lonnie is now head coach at North Carolina Central, a small, historically Black university in Durham. Ecko tries to convince Lonnie to sign Samuel, but Lonnie is unconvinced he will ever be good enough.
Their fifth game is against Houston Gold, who are one of the favorites to win the tournament because they are backed by a Texas businessman who “spared no expense” (83). The game is back-and-forth, but Houston Gold wins in the end because their coach is willing to make substitutions. After the game, Ecko tells his team things will change in the remaining two games because they need to win those to qualify for the national showcase. After the game, Ecko meets with Lonnie again. Lonnie has become more intrigued by Samuel after seeing the full extent of his athleticism during the last game. He also has roster spots open because two of his players were just arrested and kicked off the team.
Back in Lotta, the village is attacked by rebel soldiers during the night. All the men, including Ayak, are rounded up and ordered to go inside the church. The church is then set on fire, and Ayak is killed trying to escape. Beatrice attempts to flee with the children but is discovered by rebel soldiers. They strip Angelina of her clothes and take her away. Beatrice manages to escape into the bush with Chol and James. The next day, no one answers when Samuel tries to call home.
The Sudanese team wins its sixth game in the showcase, meaning that if they can win their final game, they will advance to the national showcase in St. Louis. However, before the final game, Ecko learns of the village attack and informs the team. Samuel wants to go home, but Ecko explains there is no home to go to.
Part 1, Chapters 15-17 Summary
Beatrice and her sons desperately search for food, water, and safety with a group of other survivors. Save for one teenage boy, they are all women and children, and they have no idea which direction to go. They find a farm, but the farmer has nothing he is willing to share. He suggests a camp farther south that has water and shelter. When they finally reach this camp, it is too overcrowded to take them in. The camp provides them with muddy water and a few raw peanuts.
The team decides to play the final scheduled game against the United Kingdom. Samuel doesn’t play, and the team is listless and clearly not focused on the game. They end up losing and are eliminated from the tournament. Ecko uses the team’s remaining money to take them to Washington DC before heading back to South Sudan. There, he meets again with Lonnie, who offers Samuel a scholarship to North Carolina Central to play on the Eagles, the men’s basketball team. Samuel is still overwhelmed and believes he should go home to find his family, but he is ultimately convinced it’s best to stay in America and look for them from there. They visit the Sudan embassy and complete the paperwork to expedite a student visa. The remainder of the team returns to Sudan, while Samuel heads to Durham to stay with Coach Lonnie until the next semester starts.
Part 1, Chapters 1-17 Analysis
The novel opens with the image of life in an idyllic village that has so far avoided the atrocities of the ongoing civil war, and this setting lays the groundwork for the novel-wide juxtaposition of South Sudan and America. For Samuel, the village not only is safe and familiar but provides support: When he practices, other children rebound and pass him the ball; when he gets the tryout invitation and eventually makes the team, the entire village celebrates; and when he leaves for America, everyone pools their meager resources to give him spending money. However, Samuel is about to graduate from his tiny secondary school, the maximal education in Lotta, and has already established himself as the best player in the village. He has reached the limits of his opportunities if he stays. This sets up the dichotomy between safety and opportunity that will plague Samuel throughout the novel. For Samuel, pursuing further opportunities means leaving the safety and support of home to venture out on his own in an unfamiliar world. This transition is symbolized by the six-hour bus ride he must take into the city, where he encounters people on the bus that he doesn’t understand because they speak a different dialect, and the familiar dirt roads gradually turn to concrete. At the tryout, Ecko immediately identifies Samuel as “obviously a kid from the country intimidated by the surroundings” (19). America is a foreign land that seems unfathomably wealthy to Samuel, lush with the opportunity he craved in Lotta. The near-magical appearance of America to Samuel begins to set up the theme of the Absurdity of Global Inequality.
However, the safety/opportunity binary is complicated on Samuel’s return trip home when the bus is attacked by a gang of raiders. Most of the gang members are children Samuel’s age or younger, and one of them is even wearing basketball shoes. While the attack happens away from the safety of Samuel’s village, the scene ultimately foreshadows that his village cannot avoid the war forever and suggests the future that awaits Samuel if he doesn’t leave. Thus, ironically, the home he leaves turns out not to be safe at all, and eventually, ceases to exist.
In addition to thematic elements, Grisham’s distinctive style takes shape in these early chapters. As in his legal thrillers, Sooley’s plot moves quickly and spares no time. Grisham also uses foreshadowing to build tension. At the end of Chapter 6, when Samuel is leaving for the showcase in America, the narrator states, “He would never see his father again” (49). The reader, fresh off the explosive violence Samuel witnessed on the bus, can assume the civil war will spill into Samuel’s peaceful village, but this anticipation goes unfulfilled until Chapter 13, six whole chapters later. In the meantime, Samuel calls home, and the village spends a rapturous evening watching one of the games on TV at their local church. This delay allows the tension to build and even have small releases, before it eventually explodes into the horrific scene that sees Ayak killed and Angelina taken. A similar technique is used on a smaller scale during the bus scene when the government soldiers—who have just mercilessly slaughtered the gang of rebels—re-enter the bus and interrogate Samuel about his new vinyl bag. In the wake of the bloodshed, readers may naturally assume the worst when soldiers begin removing things from Samuel’s bag. In the end, the soldiers are friendly toward Samuel and return his things, but only after Grisham lingers on their dubious intentions.
This swift pacing lends an urgency and immediacy to the plot events but impacts character development. The plot unfolds so quickly that many characters, Samuel included, are given relatively little room for interiority or complex development. In these first chapters, Samuel is a prototypical sports fiction protagonist: positive, relentless, and determined to improve as a player. During the tryouts, Coach Ecko criticizes his jump shot, and rather than getting upset or sulking about it, Samuel immediately expresses gratitude for the advice and gets to work fixing it, even going so far as to sneak into the gym before anyone else wakes. While this makes Samuel a conventionally palatable protagonist, fitting Grisham’s desire for entertainment value above literary merit, this style of character creation can lead to stereotyping. In basketball (as in nearly all sports), there is a racist idea that, while Black players have more raw athleticism, they are not as technically skilled or intelligent as white players. This relies on assumptions that Black people (especially Black men) are valuable only for their physical abilities and can bring nothing else to the table. In Sooley, Samuel makes the Sudanese team and the North Carolina Central team because he is quick and his vertical leap is exceptional, but his rural upbringing means his technical skills are severely lacking. Samuel eventually overcomes these deficiencies through obsessive practicing, yet the novel does not pointedly challenge the stereotype.
Samuel’s narrative is, however, crafted to emphasize his extraordinary qualities—and tragic heroes often are extraordinary, which makes their eventual undoing all the more dramatic. After all, presumably he more than anyone has come from disadvantage and hardship, and he lacks technical skill not because he lacks intelligence but because he was never given the privilege of being taught the same techniques that his teammates were taught. Moreover, despite this disadvantage, Samuel eventually teaches himself and rises above his peers. If anything, this suggests his superior aptitude for quick learning and his formidable industriousness. Even so, luck and chance will also be crucial factors in the protagonist’s ascent—as well as his downfall. Samuel’s extraordinariness extends to both extraordinary fortune and extraordinary misfortune.
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