Sooner or later she always ran out of commercials, though, like a toy winding down. Then all would go quiet and we'd return cheerlessly to our books. Our reading material was random and inappropriate, delivered to us in unlabeled cardboard boxes from Leopoldville. We suspected Mr. Axelroot of having better boxes that he took to luckier children elsewhere. Back in Bethlehem, we ourselves had organized book drives for the underprivileged, and now I pitied those children who got slogged with our dusty second-rate novels and outmoded home-carpentry manuals, and were expected to be grateful about it. When we get back home, I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them.
From the same nursery-school lot that brought the Bobbsey Twins I chose a Nancy Drew, out of pure boredom, feeling guilty .., and outraged to be reduced to that circumstance, as a young woman who menstruates and reads at the college level. Though I must confess, some of the Nancy Drews held my attention. One of them had a strange, secret-basement plot that led me astray, while I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, into long fantasies that felt sinful. I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil's workshop. I did have thoughts of the Devil at these times. I imagined Nancy descending a long iron staircase into the netherworld, and a man who waited for her at the bottom. Sometimes he was just a shadowy faceless
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man in a hat. Sometimes he had a gap-toothed smile and an elegant, scarred face. Other times he was that red Devil who lurks on the Underwood ham cans, self-satisfied and corrupt in his bow tie, mustache, and arrow-point tail. The first time I dreamed this scenario I can't really say whether I was still awake or had fallen into a feverish, colorful sleep. All I know is that suddenly I snapped out of it, surrounded by the sharp odor of my own sweat, and felt prickled and exquisitely wide awake below the waist. I knew this feeling was very wrong. Even so, I had more such dreams?and sometimes, I'm sure, I was still half awake when they began.
After a few weeks my fevers became more pronounced, and my mother realized that because I am large and active for my age she'd been underestimating my dosage of quinine. Those feelings below my waist, it turns out, were a side effect of malaria.
For Christmas Mother gave us all needlework things.We'd known not to expect much, and lest we forget, Father's Christmas-morning sermon was all about having grace in your heart, which displaces the lust for material things. But still. For a Christmas tree we had a palm frond stuck in a bucket of rocks. As we gathered around it and waited our turn to open our meager, constructive gifts, I stared at that pitiful frond decorated with white frangipani angels going brown around the edges, and decided the ?whole thing would have been better off ignored. Even when you've recently turned fifteen without a birthday cake, it's hard to be that mature about Christmas.
Mother announced that now we girls could use our idle time to build up our hope chests. I'd heard of this kind of thing before, without giving it a second thought. I'd seen those Mark Eden advertisements in the backs of comic books, which promised things embarrasing to look at, and so I assumed that building a hope chest was a question of exercising the muscles of the chest,1 to get busts. But no, that wasn't it at all. Mother meant the other kind of chest, like a steamer trunk, in which a girl was supposed to put everything she hoped she'd get to use one day after she got married. This was
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her rationale for all the embroidery floss, pinking shears, and so on that we toted (secretly or otherwise) across the Atlantic.
Now we were supposed to get enthusiastic about long-range marriage plans, while lying here in bed watching our shoes mildew. Rachel and Adah were assigned any number of hope-chest projects to work on, but the domestic arena was never rny long suit, so I was to focus on a single, big project: a cross-stitch tablecloth. It's nothing but a thousand tiny x's to be made up in different colors of thread. The tablecloth has the pattern stamped straight on the linen in washable ink, like a paint-by-numbers picture. A monkey could do it, if he got bored enough. Certainly no talent is required for cross-stitch. The hopeful part, I guess, is that after you're done with it all, you'll find someone who'd want to marry you.
Personally I can't see it as likely. In the first place I am flat-chested, just plain too skinny. When Adah and I got moved up two grades, it just made things that much worse. We were preacher's daughters to begin with, and now we were really onions in the petunia patch, amongst all those ninth-grade girls with flirty eyes and foundation makeup and bosoms poking out the fronts of their mohair sweater sets. No boy ever looked at me except for homework help. And to tell the truth, I can't say that I care. Kissing looks like too much of somebody else's dental hygiene if you ask me. If you want to see stars?which is what Rachel claims it's all about?then why not just go climb up a tree in the dark? When I try to picture the future, I can't see myself as anything but a missionary or a teacher or a farmer, telling others how the Lord helps those that help themselves. Some kind of a life of piety, at any rate (which should guarantee that Adah's nowhere within a hundred miles); and I should like to spend as much time as I can outdoors, exulting in God's creation, and wear pants if at all possible.
I do sometimes picture myself with children, for why else am I keeping my notebook, with all the lessons of my childhood in Africa? Yet you can't say boo to your own children without a husband first. It does seem a dreadful obstacle.
My father says a girl who fails to marry is veering from God's plan?that's what he's got against college for Adah and me, besides 150
the wasted expense?and I'm sure what he says is true. But without college, how vill I learn anything of any account to teach others? And -what red-blooded American boy will look twice at a Geography whiz with scabs on her knees, when he could have a Sweater Girl? I suppose I'll just have to wait and see. God must know his arithmetic. He'd plan it out well enough to plunk down a husband for every wife that He aims for to have one. If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's His business.
Rachel, on the other hand, has never had any doubts in this department. Once she got over the initial shock of no new record album by the Platters, no mohair twin set, nor any place to wear or dance to either one, she was thrilled by the notion of a hope chest, or pretended to be. Why, she'd throw herself belly down on her bed with her knees cocked and feet sticking up and her busy hands five inches in front of her eyes, plowing through her hope-chest projects in earnest. She seemed to think she needed to have it all finished up in the next week or so. Oh, she monogrammed guest towels and crocheted collars for her trousseau and I don't know what all. It was the only time she ever stopped rolling her eyes and flicking her hair, to settle down to a piece of honest work.
Adah and I dragged our sewing projects out to the porch so we could still keep an eye out for interesting goings-on in the world. Something had come between Adah and me for the worse, since the day she was supposed to have been followed by that lion, which the vhole village was still talking about. They loved to point Adah out when they saw us, pantomiming a lion's roar, which didn't help us to put the affair behind us. But on the bright side, the event provided a great boost for Father's church. People seem to think that if Jesus could stop a lion from gobbling up a poor lame girl, he must be staying awake pretty good for the Christians?ha! Just when everybody was thinking their regular African gods were aggravated with us and fixing to teach us a lesson. The way they see it, it was kind of a wrestling match between the gods, -with Jesus and Adah coming out on top. Father of course says this is superstitious and oversimplifying matters. But as luck would have it, he'd preached
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the parable of Daniel and the lions' den just a few days before, so naturally now they are knocking each other over to get to church on Sunday. And Adah is the cause. Father is pleased as punch with Adah, I don't care what he says?he put his arm around her shoulder in public! Which is not entirely fair.
But we still had to go on being each other's main company. Chained to th
e porch by Mothers instructions, like grumpy twin bears in captivity, we enviously watched Nelson as he went about his business, free to go back and forth to the village and contract the kakakaka any time he had a mind to. As he walked away we could see his round pink scar spying back at us through the trees like a small, laughing eye. We also watched Methuselah, who after four months of liberation still hung around our house mumbling. It was very strange to hear the voices of our own family members coming from the tree branches, as if we'd been transformed into flying spirits of a type preoccupied with peanuts, bananas, and common phrases of greeting. Sometimes at night he'd startle us, when we forgot he spent his lonely nights in the latrine. Believe me, it gives you a queer feeling to sit down in the dark to pee and hear a voice right behind you declare, "Sister, God is great!" But we felt sorry for him and took to leaving him pieces of fruit in there. We were careful to keep the latrine door shut and latched at night, so no mongoose or civet cat would find its way in and polish him off.
At first I wanted Methuselah to come back and live in his cage, until Father explained to me that this whole arrangement was wrong. We let Methuselah go because his captivity was an embarrassment to us. It made the parrot into a less noble creature than God intended. So I had to root for Methuselah to learn to be free. I don't know what Adah rooted for as we lay out there -with our needlework, watching him waddle up and down the branches. I have to say she probably didn't care one way or the other, really, and was just fascinated to see what would happen next. Adah is that way. She feels no obligation to have good thoughts on behalf of her mortal soul in the hereafter, or even the here and now. She can simply watch life, without caring.
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Certainly she wasn't putting in any effort on behalf of her future womanhood. Adah did weird, morbid things for her hope chest, black borders on cloth napkins and the like, which exhausted our mother. And Ruth May was exempt from hope chest, but was allowed to lie in a hammock with us and make cat's cradles out of yarn if she promised not to run off and break something.
I lolled on my back and worked on my tablecloth listlessly, to preserve my mother's fantasy that I'd be getting married one day, and after a while it began to draw me in. The cross-stitch itself was tedious, but the prospects were beautiful; Mother had the foresight to give me a botanical motif, knowing how I love green and growing things. Bunches of pansies and roses were meant to bloom in the four corners, all connected by a border of twining green vines. And in the very same way the Spirit long ago became manifest in the Body of Christ, the first cabbage rose began to materialize on my tablecloth. From there, I could envision the whole garden.
Still, the project seemed impossibly large. Rachel polished off a complete set of dinner napkins in the time it took me to fill in one pink rose. The humidity was so thick it dripped off our eyelashes, and in this damp atmosphere the first bouquet took so long that my metal embroidery hoops rusted in place.
The hope-chest program didn't last long as our main preoccupation. Rachel hoped too much and ran out of material, while the rest of us hoped too little and ran out of steam. Once in a great while I still do pull out my tablecloth and try to get reinspired. I've even prayed for God to make me more fit to be a wife. But the rusted embroidery hoops left an unsightly orange ring on the linen that may have damaged my prospects for good.
Ruth May
TRIED TO SEE NELSON NAKED. I don't know why I wanted to. When he gets up in the morning first he washes his face out of a dingered-up bowl in the chicken house and puts on his pants and his shirt. He washes the back of his neck with the pink hole in it till his skin shines and water runs all down.Then he looks at his clothes real hard and says a hex before he puts them on. Brown pants, red T-shirt.That's all the clothes he has. Everybody here has just one clothes. My friends are the one with the blue pajama shirt, the one with the checkered pants with the legs rolled up, the one with shorts with big white pockets hanging out the bottom, and the one with the pinkish shirt down to his knees and no pants.The girls don't ever, ever wear pants. And the little babies don't wear a speck of clothes so they can just squat down and pee-pee ever-when they take a mind to.
The chicken house is made out of sticks. The wall has square little holes and I just wanted to see Nelson. I was bad. Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me be good, but Baby Jesus didn't.
The chickens were setting on eggs. Good little mamas, we said, making us some more chickens. Their house was nothing but a shack. They tried to hide their nests in the bushes but Nelson and I found them. He said they were bad hens trying to steal their babies from us. I tried to scold them, but he said chickens don't understand English. He showed me how to sing to them: Kuyiba diaki, kuyiba diaki, mbote vel Mbote ve! Then we took back all those eggs. I got to help Nelson in the morning when Rachel and them had school, if I promised Mama I wouldn't go near any other children.They are ah1
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sick. They have to go to the bathroom number two in the bushes and we might catch it.
We took the eggs in to Mama and she floated them in a bucket. Some sank on the bottom, and some floated on top like when you bob for apples.The sinkers are okay to eat and the floaters are the rotten ones. When you say, Last one in is a rotten egg! I reckon that means you're going to float. Nelson wanted those and Mama worried he'd get sick if he ate them but she said, "Oh, go ahead," and so he took them. But he didn't eat them. He hid them in a place. He said the witch doctor Tata Kuvudundu wanted those eggs for the dead people that needed to lie down. Nganga means witch doctor. Tata Kuvudundu is one because he has six toes on one of his feet. Nelson said Nganga Kuvudundu could make live people dead, and dead people come back alive. Nelson thinks Tata Kuvudundu is probably so important he could run the army, but he's too old. Maybe one of his sons instead. Nelson knows who Patrice Lumumba is, too, like me. He says some of them are saying to bury rocks in your garden right now, and after the white people are all dead, dig them up and those rocks will be turned into gold. Nelson said he didn't believe that. Nobody really believes it, he said, except the people that want to. I said, Why will all the white people be dead? Nelson didn't know.
There's all these extra people going to church now. Nelson says it's because the lion tried to eat up Adah, but Jesus turned her into a bushbuck right just at the last minute. Like in the Bible. And right when the lion's mouth bit down on the Adah that turned into a bushbuck, the real Adah disappeared from there and turned up okay on our porch.
Nelson says everybody's got their own little God here to protect them, special African ones that live in the little tiny thing they 'wear around their necks. Agree-gree is what you call it. It's like a little bottle, only made out of sticks and shells and things. Sometimes I think about all those little teeny Gods riding around on people's necks, a-hollering: Help! Let me out of here! Like the genie in the Laddin's lamp. You just rub it and say, Here, little God, you better watch out for me or you'll get eat up by the lion right along with me!
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All the little Gods are mad at Jesus right now, and they'd like to hurt one of us if they could. If Jesus doesn't look out. I told Nelson that Jesus is -way too big to ride around in a little gree-gree. He is big as a man, with long brown hair and sandals, size extra-large. Nelson says yes, everybody has figured out that He is a right good size. They've a lot of them started going to hear Father talk about Jesus and figure out what's what. But Nelson says they've got one foot in the door of the church and one foot out. If something bad happens to one of us, out they'll go.
After we found all the eggs in the bushes and took them, Baby Jesus made all the chickens be good and lay their eggs in the one big nest we made in the corner of the chicken house. Mama took a pencil and marked thirteen eggs with X.We kept those in the nest, and when the hens laid fresh ones, we took those for eating. Sometimes scrambled, sometimes hard-boiled. We don't ever eat the X-mark eggs, because they're a-going to turn into baby chickens. When they grow up they'll be our new laying hens, some of them. A
nd the other ones will grow up to be fried chicken! The not-lucky ones. They'll get their necks chopped off and jump around squirting blood, ha ha ha, poor them. The chickens better get their own little gree-grees to wear on their necks, I reckon.
Every day I looked to see if the babies hatched out, and I was the first one to find them. They all hatched out but save for one, and it got squashed. It was flat against the mud wall behind the nest like a picture hanging up. Nelson lived in there with a dead baby chicken picture on the wall. I was sorry and didn't try to look at his peewee any more after that.
If it's dark outside and you see a snake, or even if you just want to talk about one, you can't say snake.You have to say 5frm?.You say, Remember that day we saw a little black string coming home from the picnic? If it's nighttime, that's how you talk. Nelson got so mad at me for saying snake when it was dark, because he says after the sun goes down a snake can hear you calling its name and it'll come a-running. Other animals too. They can hear real good in the dark, so watch out.
Nelson got mad at Leah, too, for keeping her a owl for a pet.The owl was a baby that couldn't fly right when we found it, so Leah made it a cage and fed it bugs and some meat. Its fur is white and sticks out all over. Leah named it a word in that language they have here: Mvufu. It means owl. But Leah's friend Pascal hates it, and Nelson hates it worse. Mama Mwanza hates it when she comes over scooting on her hands to trade us oranges for eggs. And Mama Boanda does. She's the one that wears the black skirt with the great big pink star across her bottom and a hairdo that looks like stars too, sticking up ever whichaways. The one that does people's hairdos is old Mama Lo, who's only just got the two teeth, one upstairs and one down, so she chews crossways. She hates our owl the most of all, and hollered at us for having it! Because her sister just died here awhile back. Everybody that ever sees our owl just plumb hates it. Nelson said take it out of the house or he wasn't coming in and that