The Poisonwood Bible Read online

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  Egypt. Listen, what else can a girl do but try. Stay here? When everybody else gets to go home and do the bunny hop and drink Cokes? It is a sheer tapestry of justice.

  Father returned from Stanleyville with his hair just about standing on end, he was so full of the daily news. They had their election, I guess, and the winner is a man named Patrice, if you can believe. Patrice Lumumba. Father said Lumumba's party won thirty-five of a hundredy-some-odd seats in the new parliament, mainly because of his natural animal magnetism. And also the large population of his hometown. It sounded kind of like student-council elections at Bethlehem High, where whoever has the biggest click of friends, they win. Not that a minister's daughter would ever have a chance, jeez-oh-man. No matter how much you flirt or carry on like a cool cat and roll up your skirt waistband on the bus, they still just think you're L�7. A square, in other words. Try to get a boyfriend under those conditions: believe you me, your chances are dull and void.

  So Mr. Patrice will be the Prime Minister of the Congo now and it won't be the Belgian Congo anymore, it will be the Republic of Congo. And do you think anybody in this hip town we live in is actually going to notice? Oh, sure. They'11 all have to go out and get their drivers' licenses changed. In the year two million that is, when they build a road to here and somebody gets a car.

  Mother said, "Now is he the one they're saying is a Communist?" Father said, "Not so's you'd notice."That is the one and only Mississippi expression he has ever picked up from Mother. We'11 ask her something like "Did you iron my linen dress like I asked you to?" And she'll say, "Not so's you'd notice." Back home she could be a smart aleck sometimes, and how. When Father wasn't around, that is. Father said he heard soon-to-be Prime Minister Lumumba talk on a radio in a barbershop in Stanleyville about neutral foreign policy and African Unity and all that jazz. He says now Patrice Lumumba and the other elected Congolese are trading chickens and eggs to set up a government that everybody in the parliament will go along with. But the problem is all of them still like their own tribes and their own chiefs the best. I can just picture the par-

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  liament room: a hundredy-some-odd Tata Ndus in pointy hats and no-glass glasses all flicking flies away with animal-tail magic wands in the sweltering heat, pretending to ignore each other. It will probably take them one hundred years just to decide which person gets to sit where. It's enough already. All I want is to go home, and start scrubbing the deep-seated impurities of the Congo out of my skin.

  Ruth May

  MAMA NEEDS her some Quick Energy.After Father went away with Leah on the plane, she went and got in her bed and won't get up.

  It wasn't the Mr. Axelroot plane. He goes and comes whenever he feels like it. This was another airplane just as little but yellow this time. The driver had on a white shirt and Vitalis in his hair that you could smell. He smelled clean. He had Experimint gum and gave me a piece. He was a white man that talked French. Sometimes some of them do and I don't know why. We all put on our shoes and went down to see the airplane land. I have to wear -white baby shoes even though I'm not a baby. When I am grown my mother will still have my shoes. She aims to turn them into brown shiny metal and keep them on the table in Georgia with my baby picture. She did it for all the others, even Adah and her one foot's no count; it curls up and makes the shoe wear out funny. Even that bad sideways-worn-out shoe Mama made into metal and saved, so she'll save mine.

  Mama said the airplane was a special chart plane the Under-downs sent for us to get all our stuff that needed getting and fly on out of here. But Father wouldn't allow. Only he and Leah got on, and didn't take anything because they are coming back. Rachel sassed him straight to his face, and tried to climb right into the airplane with her things! He flung her back. She threw her stuff on the ground and said fine, then, she was going to go drown herself in the river, but we knew she wouldn't. Rachel wouldn't want to get that dirty.

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  Adah wasn't there either; she stayed home. Just me and Mama stood on the field to watch the plane fly away. But Mama -wouldn't even jump up and wave bye. She just stood with her face getting smaller and smaller, and when you couldn't see the airplane anymore she went in the house and lay down on her bed. It was morning, not night. Not even nap time.

  I told Rachel and Adah we needed some yUp for Mama. Rachel does the radio advertisements from back home and that is one: "Bushed? Beat? Need ionizing? yUp is the greatest discovery yet for getting new energy quick. In two to six minutes you'll feel like

  a new you."

  But all day went by and it got dark and Mama still doesn't feel like a new Mama. Rachel won't talk to me about getting yUp. She's sitting out on the porch looking at the hole in the sky where the airplane went away. And Adah doesn't talk anyway, because of how she is. Nelson got us our dinner, but he is sneaking around the house like somebody got in a fight and he's staying out of it. So it's real quiet. I tried to play but I didn't feel like it. I went in and picked up Mama's hand and it fell back down. Then I just crawled in the bed with her, and now that makes two of us that don't feel like getting up ever again.

  Leak

  MY FATHER AND I have patched things up. He allowed me to accompany him to Leopoldville, where we got to see history in the making. We watched the Independence ceremonies from a giant rusty barge tied to the bank of the Congo River that was loaded with so many pushing, squirming people Mrs. Underdown said we'd probably all go down like the Titanic. It was such an important event King Baudouin of Belgium, himself, was going to be there. It was childish, I know, but I got very excited when she told me that. I suppose I was picturing someone in a crown and an ermine-trimmed scarlet robe, like Old King Cole. But the white men sitting up on the stage were all dressed alike, in white uniforms with belts, swords, shoulder fringe, and white flat-topped military hats. Not a single crown to be seen. As they waited their turn to speak, dark sweat stains blossomed under the arms of their uniforms. And when it was all over I couldn't even tell you which one had been the King.

  The white men mostly spoke of the glorious days of the previous king of Belgium, King Leopold, who first made the Congo into what it is today. Mrs. Underdown reported this to me, in quick little bursts of translation while she squeezed my hand tightly, since it was mostly all in French. I didn't care for her holding my hand; I am as tall as she is and a good sight less of a scaredy-cat. But we could have gotten lost from one another in all those people, too. And Father wouldn't have held my hand for the world�he isn't like that. Mrs. Underdown called me a poor lost lamb. She couldn't believe it when Father and I showed up without the rest of them.

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  Her jaw dropped to her bosom. Later, when we were alone, she told me it was her opinion that Father was not in his right mind and should think of his poor children. I told her my father would know what was best in the sight of the Lord, and that we were privileged to serve. Why, that just flabbergasted her. She is a meek woman and I can't say that I respect her. They are leaving tomorrow to go to Belgium, and we're going back to Kilanga to hold the fort until another family can come. That is Father's plan. Reverend Under-down is pretending not to be mad at us.

  After the King and the other white men spoke, they inaugurated Patrice Lumumba as the new Prime Minister. I could tell exactly which one he was. He was a thin, distinguished man who wore real eyeglasses and a small, pointed beard. When he stood up to speak, everyone's mouth shut. In the sudden quiet we could hear the great Congo River lapping up its banks. Even the birds seemed taken aback. Patrice Lumumba raised his left hand up and seemed to grow ten feet tall, right there and then. His eyes shone bright white with dark centers. His smile was a triangle, upcurved on the sides and reaching a point below, like his beard. I could see his face very clearly, even though we were far away.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the Congo," he said, "who have fought for the independence won today, I salute you!"

  The quiet crowd broke open with cheers and cheers. "Je vous salue! Je vous salu
e encore!",

  Patrice Lumumba asked us to keep this day, June 30,1960, in our hearts forever and tell our children of its meaning. Everyone on the raft and the crowded banks would do what he said, I knew. Even me, if I ever get to have any children. Whenever he paused to take a breath, the people screamed and waved their arms.

  First he talked about our equal partner, Belgium. Then he said other things that made Mrs. Underdown nervous. "Our lot was eighty years of colonial rule," she translated, and then she stopped. She let go my hand, wiped it on her slacks, and grabbed me again.

  "What all's he saying?" I asked her. I didn't want to miss word one of Patrice Lumumba. As he spoke his eyes seemed to be on fire.

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  I have seen preachers at revival meetings speak like that, with voices rising in such a way that heaven and anger get mingled together. The people cheered more and more.

  "He's saying we despoiled their land and used the Negroes for slaves, just as long as we could get away with it," she said.

  "We did that?"

  "Well. The Belgians in general. He's very mad about all the nice things they said earlier about King Leopold. Who was a bad egg, I'll admit that."

  "Oh," I said. I narrowed my eyes to a hard focus on Patrice Lumumba and tried to understand his words. I was jealous of Adah, who picked up languages easier than she could tie her own shoes. I wished I'd studied harder.

  "We have known les maisons magnifiques for the whites in the cities, and the falling-down houses for the Negroes." Oh, I understood that all right. He was right, I'd seen it myself when we went to the Underdowns'. Leopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make their homes out of sticks or tin or anything in the world they can find. Father said that is the Belgians' doing and Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment. He says after Independence the Americans will send foreign aid to help them make better houses. The Underdowns' house has soft red Persian rugs, chairs with matching ottomans, even a radio. She had a real china tea set on the dark wooden sideboard. Last night I watched her pack up all the fragile cups, moaning about what she'd have to leave and who'd get it. For dinner the houseboy brought us one thing after another until I thought I'd burst: real meat, orange cheeses wrapped in red wax, canned yellow asparagus. After a hundred white meals offufu, bread, Potato Buds and Carnation milk, it was too much taste and color for me. I chewed and swallowed slowly, feeling sick. After dinner, why, chocolate cookies from France! The Underdowns' two sons, big crew-cut boys shifting around in grown men's bodies, grabbed

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  handfuls of cookies with their big hands and bolted from the table. I took only one and couldn't get my mouth to eat it, though I wanted to badly. The Underdowns' skinny houseboy sweated in his ironed white apron while he hurried to bring us more things. I thought about the kilo of sugar he'd tried to stash under his shirt. With so much else around, "why wouldn't Mrs. Underdown just go ahead and give it to him? Was she actually going to take all her sugar back to Belgium?

  Tomorrow she'll be gone, and I'll still be here, I thought to myself as we stood on our barge fastened to the bank of the Congo, watching history. A rat ran under the bare feet of some people standing near us, but no one paid any attention. They just cheered. Patrice Lumumba had stopped speaking for a moment to take off his glasses and mop his forehead with a -white handkerchief. He wasn't sweating in his dark suit the way the white men had stained their white uniforms, but his face gleamed.

  "Tell me what he's saying," I pleaded with Mrs. Underdown. "I've only gone as far as the past perfect tense in my French book." Mrs. Underdown relented after a while and told me certain sentences. Much of the rest of it began to come to me in bursts of understanding, as if Patrice Lumumba were speaking in tongues and my ears had been blessed by the same stroke of grace. "My brothers," he sa.id,"Mesfreres, we have suffered the colonial oppression in body and heart, and we say to you, all of that is finished. Together we are going to make a place for justice and peace, prosperity and grandeur. We are going to show the world what the homme noir can do when he works for freedom. We are going to make the Congo, for all of Africa, the heart of light."

  I thought I would go deaf from the roaring. ..: , M

  Adah

  Y ~ MULP DER ENO. So much depends on the single red feather I L.�. saw when I stepped out of the latrine.

  It is early morning now, rooster-pink sky smoky air morning. Long shadows scissoring the road from here to anywhere. Independence Day. June thirtieth.

  Does anyone here know about the new freedom? These women squatting, knees wide apart in their long wrapped skirts, throwing handfuls of peppers and small potatoes into hissing pans over cook-fires? These children defecating earnestly or -weakly, according to their destiny, in the bushes? One red feather for celebration. No one yet has seen it but me.

  When Miss Dickinson says, "Hope is the thing with feathers," I always think of something round�a ball from one of the games I -will never play�stuck all around like a clove-orange sachet with red feathers. I have pictured it many times�Hope!�wondering how I would catch such a thing one-handed, if it did come floating down to me from the sky. Now I find it has fallen already, and a piece of it is here beside our latrine, one red plume. In celebration I stooped down to pick it up.

  Down in the damp grass I saw the red shaft of another one, and I reached for it. Following the trail I found first the red and then the gray: clusters of long wing feathers still attached to gristle and skin, splayed like fingers. Downy pale breast feathers in tufted mounds. Methuselah.

  At last it is Independence Day, for Methuselah and the Congo. O

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  Lord of the feathers, deliver me this day. After a lifetime caged away from flight and truth, comes freedom. After long seasons of slow preparation for an innocent death, the world is theirs at last. From the carnivores that would tear me, breast from wishbone.

  Set upon by the civet cat, the spy, the eye, the hunger of a superior need, Methuselah is free of his captivity at last. This is what he leaves to the world: gray and scarlet feathers strewn over the damp grass. Only this and nothing more, the tell-tale heart, tale of the carnivore. None of what he was taught in the house of the master. Only feathers, "without the ball of Hope inside. Feathers at last at last and no words at all.

  Book Three

  THE JUDGES

  And ye shall make no league with the

  inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars . . .

  They shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.

  JUDGES 2:2-3

  Orleanna Price SANDERLING ISLAND, GEORGIA

  LISTEN, LITTLE BEAST. Judge me as you will, hut first listen. I am your mother. What happened to us could have happened anywhere, to any mother. I'm not the first woman on earth to have seen her daughters possessed. For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease, they'll bend to his light.

  Oh, a wife may revile such a man with every silent curse she knows. But she can't throw stones. A stone would fly straight through him and strike the child made in his image, clipping out an eye or a tongue or an outstretched hand. It's no use. There are no weapons for this fight. There are countless laws of man and of nature, and none of these is on your side. Your arms go weak in their sockets, your heart comes up empty. You understand that the thing you love more than this world grew from a devil's seed. It was you who let him plant it.

  The day does come, final
ly, when a daughter can walk away from a man such as that�if she's lucky. His own ferocity turns over inside her and she turns away hard, never to speak to him again. Instead she'll begin talking to you, her mother, demanding with a world of indignation: How could you let him? Why?

  There are so many answers. All of them are faultless, and none good enough.

  What did I have? No money, that's for sure. No influence, no

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  friends I could call upon in that place, no way to overrule the powers that governed our lives. This is not a new story: I was an inferior force. There was another thing too, awful to admit. I'd come to believe that God was on his side. Does this make me seem lunatic? But I did believe it; I must have. I feared him more than it's possible to fear a mere man. Feared Him, loved Him, served Him, clamped my hands over my ears to stop His words that rang in my head even when He was far away, or sleeping. In the depths of my sleepless nights I would turn to the Bible for comfort, only to find myself regaled yet again. Unto the woman God said: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shall bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

  Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

  My downfall was not predicted. I didn't grow up looking for ravishment or rescue, either one. My childhood was a happy one in its own bedraggled way. My mother died when I was quite young, and certainly a motherless girl will come up wanting in some respects, but in my opinion she has a freedom unknown to other daughters. For every womanly fact of life she doesn't get told, a star of possibility still winks for her on the horizon.

  Jackson, Mississippi, in the Great Depression wasn't so different from the Congo thirty years later, except that in Jackson we knew of some that had plenty and I guess that did make us restless from time to time. In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had�a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves. Except when children died�then they wept and howled. Anyone can recognize the raging injustice there. But otherwise I believe they were satisfied