On account of Independence I'd been thinking more about money than ever before in my life, aside from story problems for sixth-grade math. Fifty dollars a month in Belgian francs might not sound like much, but in Kilanga it had made us richer than anybody. Now we are to get by on zero dollars a month in Belgian francs, and it doesn't take long to figure out that story problem.
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Sure enough, within a few weeks of Father's and my empty-handed return, the women figured out we had no money, and stopped corning to our door to sell us the meat or fish their husbands had killed. It was a gradual understanding, of course. At first they were just confused by our lowered circumstances. We spelled out our position as best we could: jyata, no money! This was the truth. Every franc we'd saved up had gone to Eeben Axelroot, because Father had to bribe him flat-out to fly the two of us back from Leopoldville.Yet our neighbors in Kilanga seemed to think: Could this really be, a white person jyata? They would remain in our doorway for the longest time just staring us up and down, while their baskets of plenty loomed silently on their heads. I suppose they must have thought our wealth was infinite. Nelson explained again and again, with Rachel and Adah and me looking over his shoulder, that it was Independence now and our family didn't get paid extra for being white Christians. Well, the women made lots of sympathetic noises upon hearing that.They bounced their babies on their hips and said, A bu, well then, ayi, the Independence. But they still didn't believe it, quite. Had we looked everywhere, they wanted to know? Perhaps there is still a little money stashed under those strange, tall beds, or inside our cabinet boxes? And the little boys still attacked us like good-natured bandits whenever we went outside? cadeau, cadeaul?demanding powdered milk or a pair of pants, insisting that we still had a whole slew of these things stashed away at
home.
Mama Mwanza from next door was the only one who felt sorry for us. She made her way over on the palms of her hands to give us some oranges, Independence or not. We told her we didn't have a thing to give her back, but she just waved up at us with the heels of both her hands. A bu, no matter! Her little boys were good at finding oranges, she said, and she still had a bakala mpandi at her house?a good strong man. He was going to set his big fish traps later in the week, and if the catch was good, he would let her bring us some fish. Whenever you have plenty of something, you have to share it with the jyata, she said. (And Mama Mwanza is not even
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Christian!) Really you know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
Mother -was taking life hard. The last we knew, when Father and I took off on the plane for Leopoldville, she was still trying to rise to the occasion; but in the short time we were away she'd stopped rising and gone downhill. Now she tended to walk bewildered around the house in her nightgown, scuffed brown loafers, no socks, and an unbuttoned pink blouse, spending both nights and days only halfway dressed for either one. A lot of the time she spent curled up on the bed with Ruth May. Ruth May didn't want to eat and said she couldn't stand up right because she was sweating too much. The truth is, neither one of them was taking a healthy interest.
Nelson told me confidentially that Mother and Ruth May had kibaazu, which means that someone had put a curse on them. Furthermore he claimed he knew who it was, and that sooner or later the kibaazu would get around to all the females in our house. I thought of the chicken bones in a calabash bowl left on our doorstep by Tata Kuvudundu some weeks back, which had given me the creeps. I explained to Nelson that his voodoo was absolutely nonsense. We don't believe in an evil god that could be persuaded to put a curse on somebody.
"No?" he asked. "Your god, he didn't put a curse on Tata Chobe?" This was on a sweltering afternoon as Nelson and I chopped firewood to carry into the kitchen house. It was endless work to feed our cast-iron stove just for boiling the water, let alone cooking.
"Tata Chobe?" I was wary of this conversation but curious to know how well he'd learned the teachings of the Bible. Through the very large holes in his red T-shirt I watched the strings of muscle tense up in Nelson's back for one hard second as he raised his machete and split the deep purple heart of a small log. Nelson used his machete for everything under the sun, from splitting kindling to shaving (not that he had a real need at age thirteen) to cleaning the stove. He kept it extremely sharp and clean.
He stood to catch his breath. He laid the machete carefully on
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the ground and threw his arms in wide circles to loosen them out. "Your god put a kibdazu onTata Chobe. He gave him the pox and the itches and killed all his seven children under one roof."
"Oh,Job" I said."Why, that wasn't a curse, Nelson. God was testing his faith."
"A bu" Nelson said, meaning more or less, "Okay, fine." After he'd taken up his weapon again and split three or four more purple-heart logs he said, "Somebody is testing faith for your mother and your little sister.The next one he will be testing is the Termite."
Mvula?a pale white termite that comes out after a rain?is what people here call Rachel, because she's so pallid.Their opinion is that she gets that way from staying indoors too much and being terrified of life in general. Rachel doesn't think much of termites, needless to say, and insists that the word has some other, higher meaning. I am generally called Leba, a much nicer word that means Jig tree. At first we thought they couldn't say "Leah"but it turns out they can say it perfectly well and are being nice to avoid it, because Lea is the Kikongo word for nothing much.
I repeated to Nelson that, however he might interpret the parable of Job, our family doesn't believe in witch-doctor ngangas and evil-eye fetishes and the nkisis and gree-grees people wear around their necks, to ward off curses and the like. "I'm sorry, Nelson," I told him, "but we just don't worship those gods." To make our position perfectly clear I added, "Baka ve/i."This means, "We don't pay for that," which is how you say that you don't believe.
Nelson gently stacked wood into my outstretched arms."A bu" he said sorrowfully. I had no choice but to look closely into Nelson's sweat-glazed face as he arranged the wood in my awkward embrace?our work brought us that close together. I could see that he seemed truly sad for us. He clicked his tongue the way Mama Tataba used to, and told me, "Leba, the gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best."
Adah
WONK TON O DEW. The things we do not know, independently and in unison as a family, would fill two separate baskets, each with a large hole in the bottom.
Muntu is the Congolese word for man. Or people. But it means more than that. Here in the Congo I am pleased to announce there is no special difference between living people, dead people, children not yet born, and gods?these are all muntu. So says Nelson. All other things are kintu: animals, stones, bottles. A place or a time is hantu, and a quality of being is kuntu: beautiful, hideous, or lame, for example. All these things have in common the stem word ntu. "All that is being here, ntu," says Nelson with a shrug, as if this is not so difficult to understand. And it would be simple, except that "being here" is not the same as "existing." He explains the difference this way: the principles of ntu are asleep, until they are touched by nommo. Nommo is the force that makes things live as what they are: man or tree or animal. Nommo means word. The rabbit has the life it has?not a rat life or mongoose life?because it is named rabbit, mvundla. A child is not alive, claims Nelson, until it is named. I told him this helped explain a mystery for me. My sister and I are identical twins, so how is it that from one single seed we have two such different lives? Now I know. Because I am named Adah and she is named Leak.
Nommo, I wrote down on the notebook I had opened out for us at our big table. Nommo ommon NoMmo, I wrote, wishing to learn
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this word forward and back-ward. Theoretically I was in the process of showing Nelson, at his urging, how to write a letter (ignoring the fact he would have no way to mail it). He enjoys my silent tutelage and asks for it often. But Nelson
as a pupil is apt to turn teacher himself at the least provocation. And he seems to think his chatter improves our conversation, since I only write things on
paper.
"NOMMO MVULA IS MY SISTER RACHEL?" I queried.
He nodded.
Ruth May, then, is Nommo Bandu, and Leah is Nommo Leba. And where does Nommo come from?
He pointed to his mouth. Nommo comes from the mouth, like water vapor, he said: a song, a poem, a scream, a prayer, a name, all these are nommo. Water itself is nommo, of the most important kind, it turns out. Water is the word of the ancestors given to us or withheld, depending on how well we treat them. The word of the ancestors is pulled into trees and men, Nelson explained, and this allows them, to stand and live as muntu.
A TREE IS ALSO MUNTU? I wrote. Quickly I drew stick man and stick tree side by side, to clarify. Our conversations are often mostly pictures and gestures. "A tree is a type of person?"
"Of course," Nelson said. "Just look at them. They both have
roots and a head."
Nelson was puzzled by my failure to understand such a simple thing. :,',.:
Then he asked, "You and your sister Leba, how do you mean you came from the same seed?"
Twins, I wrote. He didn't recognize the word. I drew two identical girls side by side, which he found even more baffling, given that Leah and I?the beauty and the beast?were the twins under consideration. So then, since no one was around to watch us and Nelson seems incapable of embarrassment, I brought forth a shameless pantomime of a mother giving birth to one baby, then?oh my!? another. Twins. His eyes grew wide. "Baza!"
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I nodded, thinking he was not the first to be amazed by this news about Leah and me. But it must have been more than that, because he leaped away from me with such haste that he knocked over his chair.
"Baza!" he repeated, pointing at me. He delicately touched my forehead and recoiled, as if my skin might burn him.
I scribbled with some defensiveness: You never saw twins?
He shook his head with conviction. "Any woman who has baza should take the two babies to the forest after they are born and leave them there. She takes them fast, right away. That is very very very necessary."
Why?
"The ancestors and gods," he stammered. "All gods. What god would not be furious at a mother who kept such babies? I think the whole village would be flooded or mostly everyone would die, if a mother kept her baza"
I looked around the room, saw no immediate evidence of catastrophe, and shrugged. I turned the page on our lesson in business correspondence, and began to work on an elaborate pencil drawing of Noah's ark. After a while Nelson righted his chair and sat down approximately four feet away from me. He leaned very far over to try to peer at my picture.
THIS IS NOT ABOUT TWINS, I wrote across the top. Or who knows, maybe it is, I thought. All those paired-up bunnies and elephants.
"What happened to your village when your mother did not take you to the forest?"
I considered the year of my birth, and wrote: WE WON THE WAR. Then I proceeded to draw the outline of an exceptionally elegant giraffe. But Nelson glowered, still waiting for evidence that my birth had not brought down a plague upon my house. NO FLOODS. NO EPIDEMICS, I wrote. ALL IS WELL IN USA, WHERE MOTHERS KEEP THEIR BAZA EVERYDAY.
Nelson stared at me with such pure, annoyed skepticism I was tempted to doubt my own word. Hadn't there been, say, a rash of
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hurricanes in the months after Leah and I were born? A bad winter nationwide for the flu? Who knew. I shrugged, and drew a second giraffe with a dramatic, Z-shaped crook to its neck. The benduka
giraffe.
Nelson was not going to let me off. Clearly my twinhood was a danger to society. "Tata Jesus, what does he say?"
TOO MUCH, AS A RULE.
"What does he say to do when a woman has. . ." he hesitated over even saying the word in English.
I shrugged, but Nelson kept pushing me on this point. He would not believe that the Jesus Bible, with its absolutely prodigious abundance of words, gave no specific instructions to mothers of newborn twins. Finally I wrote: JESUS SAYS TO KEEP THEM, I
GUESS.
Nelson became agitated again. "So you see, both wives of Tata Boanda go to the Jesus Church! And the Mama Lakanga! All these women and their friends and husbands! They think they will have twins again, and Tata Jesus will not make them leave the babies in
the forest."
This was fascinating news, and I queried him on the particulars. According to Nelson's accounting, nearly half my father's congregation were relatives of dead twins. It is an interesting precept on which to found a ministry: The First Evangelical Baptist Church of the Twin-Prone. I also learned from Nelson that we are hosting seven lepers every Sunday, plus two men who have done the thing that is permanently unforgiven by local gods?that is, to have accidentally killed a clansman or child. We seem to be the Church for the Lost of Cause, which is probably not so far afield from what Jesus himself was operating in his time.
This should not have been a great surprise. Anatole had already tried to explain to us the societal function of our church, during that fateful dinner that ended in a shattered plate. But the Reverend feels he is doing such a ripping job of clarifying all fine points of the Scripture to the heathen, he cannot imagine that he is still merely serving the purpose of cleaning up the streets, as it were.
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Removing troublesome elements from the main ceremonial life of Kilanga. The Reverend failed to notice that every churchgoing family whose children were struck hard with the kakakaka quietly removed themselves back to ancestor worship, while a few of the heathen families that were hard hit quietly came and tried out Christianity. While it makes perfect sense to me, this pragmatic view of religion escapes the Reverend utterly. Each time a new convert limps through the door on a Sunday morning, he will boast over dinner that he is "really calling them home now, buddy. Finally attracting the attention of some of the local big shots."
And so he continues ministering to the lepers and outcasts. By pure mistake, his implementation is sometimes more pure than his intentions. But mostly it is the other way around. Mostly he shouts, "Praise be!" while the back of his hand knocks you flat.
How did he come to pass, this nommo Nathan Price? I do wonder. In the beginning was the word, the war, the way of all flesh. The mother, the Father, the son who was not, the daughters who were too many. The twins 'who brought down the house, indeed. In the beginning was the word the herd the blurred the turd the debts incurred the theatrical absurd. Our Father has a bone to pick with this world, and oh, he picks it like a sore. Picks it with the Word. His punishment is the Word, and his deficiencies are failures of words? as when he grows impatient with translation and strikes out precariously on his own, telling parables in his wildly half-baked Kikongo. It is a dangerous thing, I now understand, to make mistakes with nommo in the Congo. If you assign the wrong names to things, you could make a chicken speak like a man. Make a machete rise up and dance.
We his daughters and wife are not innocent either. The players in his theater. We Prices are altogether thought to be peculiarly well-intentioned, and inane. I know this. Nelson would never come out and say as much. But he has always told me, when I ask, the words we get wrong. I can gather the rest. It is a special kind of person who will draw together a congregation, stand up before them with a proud, clear voice, and say words wrong, week after week.
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Bandika, for example: to kill someone. If you spit it out too quickly, as the Reverend does, it means to pinch back a plant or deflower a virgin. What a surprise it must be to the Congolese to hear that brave David, who intended to smite the mighty Goliath, was actually jumping around pinching back plants, or worse.
Then there is batiza, Our Father's fixed passion. Batiza pronounced with the tongue curled just so means "baptism." Otherwise, it means "to terrify." Nelson spent part of a
n afternoon demonstrating to me that fine linguistic difference while we scraped chicken manure from the nest boxes. No one has yet explained it to the Reverend. He is not of a mind to receive certain news. Perhaps he should clean more chicken houses.
Ruth May
SOMETIMES YOU JUST WANT to lay on down and look at the whole world sideways. Mama and I do. It feels nice. If I put my head on her, the sideways world moves up and down. She goes: hhh-huh. hhh-huh. She's soft on her tummy and the bosoms part. When Father and Leah went away on the airplane we just needed to lay on down awhile.
Sometimes I tell her: Mommy Mommy. I just say that. Father isn't listening so I can say it. Her real name is Mother and Misrus Price but her secret name to me is Mommy Mommy. He went away on the airplane and I said, "Mama, I hope he never comes back." We cried then.
But I was sad and wanted Leah to come back because she'll pick me up and carry me piggyback sometimes, when she's not hollowing at me for being a pest. Everybody is nice sometimes and Baby Jesus says to love everybody no matter how you really do feel. Baby Jesus knows what I said about wishing Father would never come back anymore, and Father is the preacher. So God and them love him the best.
I dreamed I climbed away up to the top of the alligator pear tree and was a-looking down at all of them, the teeny little children with crooked cowboy legs and their big eyes looking up and the teeniest wrapped-up babies with little hands and faces that are just as fair till they get older and turn black, for it takes a spell I guess before God notices they are the Tribes of Ham. And the dirt-color houses all just the same as the dirt they're sitting on. Mama says not