Summary
Written in verse and narrated in the first person by the novel’s protagonist, Will Holloman, Long Way Down opens with Will saying that he is telling a true story. He hasn’t told it before because “don’t nobody believe nothing these days.”
His brother Shawn was shot and killed two days earlier. He says you never want to see a family member’s blood on the outside of their body. He likens his sadness to a stranger pulling a tooth against his will, adding that the worst part is how you can’t help your tongue slipping into the space where the tooth used to be.
Will goes back to two days earlier. He and his friend Tony are outside talking about whether they will get taller now that they are fifteen. Shawn grew maybe a foot and a half and gave Will his old clothes. At the sound of shots, everyone runs and ducks as they’ve been trained to. They wait with their lips to the ground, praying not to get hit, and then lift their heads to count the bodies. This time there is only one: Shawn.
Whenever someone is killed, moms, girlfriends, or daughters scream. Shawn’s girlfriend Leticia shrieks as though her voice will clot the blood. Will’s and Shawn’s mother moans and hangs over Shawn’s body. Then come sirens, and cops flashing lights in people’s faces, asking if anyone saw anything. Everyone claims not to have seen anything, because people don’t speak when someone gets killed.
Will clenches his teeth and looks at his dead brother, lying like an old stained couch. The shooters didn’t even steal his gold chain. The blood looks like chocolate syrup in the street light. After the yellow police tape goes up, Will returns to the eighth floor and locks himself in the room he shared with Shawn. He listens to his mother crying. He wants to cry himself but can’t because, “Crying is against The Rules.”
Will lays out The Rules: no crying, no snitching, and get revenge against anyone who has killed someone you love. He says The Rules weren’t “meant to be broken. They were meant for the broken to follow.”
In the room shared with Shawn, the only thing ever out of place on Shawn’s side of the room has been a dresser drawer sticking out because it is forced in at an angle. It is stuck this way to keep Will and their mother out and Shawn’s gun in. Will gets up and pulls the drawer open, holding the cold steel of the gun. It is a tool for rule three.
Will comments that Carlson Riggs is known for being as loud as police sirens but as soft as his first name. He is short, and a trash talker. Riggs and Shawn were friends once, but he shot Shawn. Will believes this because Riggs moved to the part of the neighborhood where the Dark Suns gang has territory. Riggs wanted to join the block boys who wait for anyone to cross the line into their territory. That line is nine blocks from Will’s building, in the same neighborhood as the corner store that sells the special eczema soap Shawn went to buy the night he was killed.
Will says he used to watch cop shows with his mother and could always pinpoint the killer before the police. Will says he has never held a gun. It is heavier than expected, like a newborn. But he knows “the cry would be much much much much louder.”
Analysis
The opening pages of Long Way Down depict Will Holloman’s reaction to his brother Shawn’s murder and introduce the major themes of grief, masculinity, gun violence, and revenge. The short chapters also boldly establish the novel’s experimental form. Rather than writing the book in prose—the ordinary non-metrical language of most novels—Jason Reynolds expresses the story in verse. The result is that Will’s narration is broken into lines and stanzas more often seen in poetry. By writing in verse, Reynolds gives himself greater freedom to vary the rhythm and emphasis of Will’s words while simultaneously using the appearance of the text itself as a tool of expression.
The opening pages also immerse the reader in Will’s unique voice. While many readers might associate poeticism with formal or archaic literary language, Long Way Down sees Reynolds unite poetry with the colloquial voice of a fifteen-year-old. A phrase like “don’t nobody believe nothing these days” stands as an example of the author’s intentional use of ungrammatical English to showcase who Will is through his voice.
But although Will speaks casually, the conflict in which he is embroiled is as serious as that of any Shakespearean tragedy. Early in the text, Will reveals that his older brother was killed in a public shooting. It happens close enough to Will that he gets up after the shots end to see Shawn’s body in a pool of blood on the ground.
Despite his sorrow, Will conveys a nonchalant, masculine toughness as he explains the murder by speaking of it as one of the many shootings he has witnessed. Although he is only fifteen, Will has a more developed understanding of gun homicides than the police who arrive on the scene to question witnesses. Will notes that this must be the cop’s first shooting because he appears to believe people will tell him something useful. Will, however, understands that no one ever talks to the police after a shooting because it is against the community’s code of silence, a code likely informed by both a distrust of the police and a fear of reprisal from gangsters.
When confronting his feelings alone in his room, Will makes sure to suppress his tears. As natural as it is to cry when a loved one dies, Will knows crying is against “The Rules,” taught to him by Shawn himself. With his characteristic bravado, Will shares the short, simple rules: no crying, no snitching, get revenge. Will’s “tool” for revenge is the handgun his brother keeps in the crooked middle drawer of an otherwise orderly room. Will is eager to dispatch the unpleasant sorrow he is dealing with, so he invents a flimsy reason to channel his anger toward Carlson Riggs.
