Wayetu turns five in Caldwell while Gus and friends discuss the approaching civil war and Mam remains away in New York.

The Moores' Chinese neighbors, the Chen family, pack up and leave Caldwell out of fear of the advancing rebels.

A friend of Mam's arrives at the Moore home and warns Gus that rebels have reached Caldwell Bridge.

Gus leads his daughters and Ol' Ma out through the back door and into the forest as gunfire erupts nearby.

The Moore family arrives at ETMI, a refugee camp where thousands of Liberians have gathered for shelter.

A mother at ETMI wakes to find her daughter kidnapped, and Ol' Ma insists the family leave the camp at once.

Gus tells Wayetu that the bodies lying in dark red puddles along the road are merely sleeping.

Gus throws a wad of money at a young armed rebel to free a hostage named Amos from the roadside.

At the final checkpoint before Junde, soldiers pull Gus into a line of detained men with their hands behind their backs.

After the checkpoint ordeal, the Moore family crosses into Junde and waits for a canoe to take them to Lai.

The Moore family arrives in the hidden village of Lai and finds that Ol' Pa has already taken refuge there.

Ol' Pa takes a canoe to the nearby town of Burma to gather supplies and is intercepted and killed by rebels.

A young female rebel arrives in Lai and announces she has come to collect Augustus Moore and his daughters on behalf of Mam.

Satta produces a photograph of Gus's newborn son Augustus Jr., convincing Gus that Mam has truly sent for his family.

The Moore family opens a door in Bo Waterside to find Mam waiting inside, and the family is finally reunited.

The memoir opens on Wayetu Moore's fifth birthday in Caldwell, Liberia, where her father Gus and his friends discuss the approaching civil war while Mam is away studying in New York. When rebels advance on their neighborhood, the family flees into the forest and takes shelter at an overcrowded refugee camp called ETMI, which they soon abandon after a child is kidnapped. The family treks through the war-torn countryside, passing bodies on the road and surviving dangerous rebel checkpoints, before crossing into the border town of Junde. From Junde they reach the hidden village of Lai, where they shelter until a young rebel soldier named Satta arrives carrying proof that Mam has sent for them. Satta escorts Gus and his daughters through rebel territory and across the border into Sierra Leone, where the Moore family is at last reunited with Mam in Bo Waterside.

The Moore family's civil war escape and reunion with Mam.

Wayetu asks her teacher about the disappearance of her school friends and is told only that they have gone to America.

Mam sends a package of VCR movies from New York, including The Sound of Music, which the family watches together.

While fleeing through the forest, Wayetu imagines monsters in the dark branches and screams, believing she sees Bendu Sudan and the Monkey Men.

The fleeing family takes shelter at the Pastor's house, where dozens of panicked Liberians have crowded onto sofas and rugs.

The family learns from a fellow refugee hiding in an abandoned house that the Sierra Leone border is closed to men.

A mother hiding with her family reveals that her teenage son joined the rebels to stop them from raping her.

Amos, grateful for his rescue by Gus, travels with the family toward Junde before tearfully parting ways to head for Ghana.

Young K falls dangerously ill with malaria in Lai and villagers treat her with a steaming bath of jollobo leaves.

Worried about K's worsening malaria, Gus travels alone by canoe to Junde to find medicine, overriding Ol' Ma's warnings of danger.

Adult Wayetu, recovering from a two-year relationship ending in Brooklyn, begins dreaming repeatedly of Satta carrying a jug of palm oil.

On Halloween night in Stratford, Connecticut, Wayetu experiences her first nightmare about the war in Liberia.

A cashier chases Wayetu and her friends out of a corner store in Spring, Texas, hurling racist slurs at them.

Adult Wayetu returns to Monrovia after years away and is met at Robertsfield Airport by both of her parents.

Wayetu visits the former Moore family home in Caldwell to find it occupied by squatters and Mam's garden destroyed.

Wayetu and Mam spend a full day waiting at a café for former rebel contact Agnes to appear, but she never arrives.

Before the war disrupts everything, small details of ordinary Liberian life foreshadow the danger ahead — missing classmates, packages from New York, and the family's first glimpse of a world beyond Liberia through the movies Mam sends them. During the flight from Caldwell, Wayetu screams in the forest at imagined horrors, and the family encounters other refugees whose stories reveal the full human cost of the war. In the village of Lai, young K battles malaria and Gus risks his life to find medicine, capturing the daily dangers of their fragile refuge. Years later in Brooklyn, adult Wayetu processes a breakup through dreams of Satta and therapy, while childhood memories resurface — from her first nightmare in Connecticut to a violent racial attack in a Texas corner store. When Wayetu returns to Monrovia and searches for Satta through former rebel contacts, she visits her childhood home and waits in vain at a café for a meeting that never happens.

Supporting scenes from the escape, childhood in America, and the search for Satta.

Despite Mr. Chen's personal warning about the war, Gus decides to stay in Liberia and wait for a peaceful resolution.

The Moore family huddles on the floor as rebels near their home, and Ol' Ma covers the girls with her head tie.

At the back of the house during the family's flight, Moneysweet shakes Gus's hand and runs alone toward the highway.

A bullet strikes a tree trunk where Wi had been standing just moments before, revealing rebels are shooting into the forest.

Ol' Ma overrules other escape options and declares that the family must head to Lai, her ancestral Vai village hidden in the forest.

To avoid suspicion at rebel checkpoints, Gus presents his university ID and tells soldiers he is a teacher, not a government worker.

The three Moore sisters pound on a booth window with such force that Gus is finally released from the soldiers' detention.

A search party returns to the village of Lai and announces that Ol' Pa has been found dead, and Ol' Ma faints on the porch.

Wayetu asks her mother the long-unspoken question of why Mam left her daughters in Liberia to study in New York.

Mam attends a missionary's demeaning slideshow presentation about Liberia at a Manhattan church, confronts him, then rushes out and vomits.

Mam receives a phone call from Amos in Ghana confirming that Gus is alive in Lai but that Ol' Pa is dead.

Mam visits her longtime friend Roy at Columbia University and lays out her plan to cross into Liberia and rescue her family.

On a bus bound for the Liberian border, Mam meets a trader named Jallah who tells her about a rebel named Satta.

Mam meets Satta in Bo Waterside, pays her six hundred dollars, and hands her a photo of the baby to show Gus.

At the final border checkpoint, Satta vouches for Gus and his daughters and the family crosses safely into Sierra Leone.

The civil war's escalation is shaped by a series of pivotal choices — Gus's fateful decision to stay in Liberia despite warnings, the family's terrifying flight under gunfire, and Ol' Ma's crucial declaration that they must seek refuge in her ancestral village of Lai. The checkpoint sequence brings the family to the edge of catastrophe before the Moore daughters' defiance frees their father, and the discovery of Ol' Pa's death signals the end of their fragile sense of safety. Back in New York, the narrative shifts to Mam's hidden story: her pregnancy discovered alone in a clinic, news of Ol' Pa's death delivered by a phone call from Amos, and the bold decision to return to West Africa she forms with her friend Roy. A chance meeting with a trader named Jallah on a bus to the Liberian border leads Mam to Satta, the rebel whose courage and cunning make the family's rescue possible.