The Poisonwood Bible

"Well! Is that the kind of leniency you show your boys on their math and French in school? They must never learn anything!"

  "Oh, no, miss! I crack their naughty heads with a stick and send them home in disgrace."We both laughed. I knew better.

  "Please come for dinner tonight, Anatole. With this rabbit we'll have too much to eat." In fact this lonely rabbit would make a small stew and we would still be hungry while we washed the dishes afterward?a feeling we were trying to get used to. But that was how people said thank you in Kilanga. I'd learned a few manners at least.

  "Perhaps I will," he said.

  "We'll make a stew," I promised.

  "Mangwansi beans are high in the marche," he pointed out. "Because of the drought. All the gardens are drying up."

  "I happen to know who has some: Mama Nguza. She makes her kids haul water up from the creek to pour on her garden. Haven't you seen it? It's sensational."

  "No, I have not seen this sensation. I will have to make better friends with Tata Nguza."

  "I don't know about him. He sure doesn't talk to me. Nobody talks to me, Anatole."

  "PoorBeene."

  228

  THE JUDGES 229

  "It's true! I don't have a single solitary friend here but Nelson and Pascal, two little boys! And you. All the girls my age have their own babies and are too busy. And the men act like I'm a snake fixing to bite them."

  He shook his head, laughing.

  "They do so, Anatole.Yesterday I was sitting in the weeds watching Tata Mwanza make fish traps, and when I stood up and asked him to show me how, he ran away and jumped in the water! I swear it!"

  "Beene, you were naughty. Tata Mwanza could not be seen talking to a young woman, you know that. It would be a scandal."

  "Hmmph," I said. Why was it scandalous for me to converse with any man in Kilanga old enough to have a whole seat in his pants, except for Anatole? But I didn't ask. I didn't "want to jinx our friendship. "What I do happen to know," I said, being maybe a tiny bit coy, "is that a civet cat got all of the Nguzas' hens last Sunday. So Mama Nguza will be in a mood to trade mangwansi beans for eggs, don't you think?"

  Anatole smiled enormously. "Clever girl."

  I smiled, too, but didn't know what else to say after that. I felt embarrassed and returned to combing out Ruth May's hair. "She appears to be a very glum little girl today," Anatole said. "She's been sick in bed for weeks. Mother has too. Didn't you notice when you came by the other day how she was standing out on the porch just staring into space? Father says they'll both be all right, but..." I shrugged. "It wouldn't be the sleeping sickness, do

  you think?"

  "I think no. Now is not the season for tsetse flies. There is hardly any sleeping sickness at all in Kilanga right now."

  "Well, that's good, because what I've heard about sleeping sickness is you die of it," I said, still combing, feeling like someone who's been hypnotized into that one single motion. Sleeping in her braids for sweaty days and nights on end had creased Ruth May's dark blond hair into shining waves like water. Anatole stared at it as I combed it down her back. His smile got lost somewhere in that quiet minute. . , ,..., ..........

  "There is news, Beene, since you asked for it. I'm afraid it is not very good. I came to talk to your father."

  "He's not here. I can tell him whatever it is, though."

  I wondered if Anatole would consider me a sufficient messenger. I'd noticed Congolese men didn't treat even their own wives and daughters as if they were very sensible or important. Though as far as I could see the wives and daughters did just about all the work.

  But Anatole apparently felt I could be spoken to. "Do you know where Katanga Province is?"

  "In the south," I said. "Where all the diamond mines are." I'd overheard talk of it when Mr. Axelroot flew Father and me back from Leopoldville. Evidently Mr. Axelroot went there often. So I was guessing, but I guessed with my father's trademark confidence.

  "Diamonds, yes," Anatole said. "Also cobalt and copper and zinc. Everything my country has that your country wants."

  This made me feel edgy. "Did we do something bad?"

  "Not you, Beene."

  Not me, not me! My heart rejoiced at that, though I couldn't say why.

  "But, yes, there is a bad business going on," he said. "Do you know the name Moise Tshombe?"

  I might have heard it, but -wasn't sure. I started to nod, but then admitted, "No." I decided right then to stop pretending I knew more than I did. I would be myself, Leah Price, eager to learn all there is to know. Watching my father, I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

  "Moise Tshombe is leader of the Lunda tribe. For all practical purpose he is leader of Katanga Province. And since a few days ago, leader of his own nation of Katanga. He declared it separate from the Republic of Congo."

  "What? Why?"

  "Now he can make his own business with the Belgians and Americans, you see. With all his minerals. Some of your countrymen have given a lot of encouragement to his decision."

  230

  "Why can't they just make their deals with Lumumba? He's the one that got elected. They ought to know that."

  "They know. But Lumumba is not eager to give away the store. His loyalty is with his countrymen. He believes in a unified Congo for the Congolese, and he knows that every Katanga diamond from the south can pay a teacher's salary in Leopoldville, or feed a village ofWarega children in the north."

  I felt both embarrassed and confused. "Why would the businessmen take Congo's diamonds away? And what are Americans doing down there anyhow? I thought the Congo belonged to Belgium. I

  mean before."

  Anatole frowned. "The Congo is the Congo's and ever has been."

  "Well, I know that. But?"

  "Open your eyes, Beene. Look at your neighbors. Did they ever belong to Belgium?" He pointed across our yard and through the trees toward Mama Mwanza's house. . '

  I'd said a stupid thing, and felt terrible. I looked, as he commanded: Mama Mwanza with her disfigured legs and her small, noble head both wrapped in bright yellow calico. In the hard-packed dirt she sat as if planted there, in front of a little fire that licked at her dented cooking can. She leaned back on her hands and raised her face to the sky, shouting her bidding, and a chorus of halfhearted answers came back from her boys inside the mud-thatch house. Near the open doorway, the two older daughters stood pounding manioc in the tall wooden mortar. As one girl raised her pounding club the other girl's went down into the narrow hole?up and down, a perfect, even rhythm like the pumping of pistons. I'd watched them time and again, attracted so to that dance of straight backs and muscled black arms. I envied these daughters, who worked together in such perfect synchrony. It's what Adah and I might have felt, if we hadn't gotten all snared in the ropes of guilt and unfair advantage. Now our whole family was at odds, it seemed: Mother against Father, Rachel against both of them, Adah against the world, Ruth May pulling helplessly at anyone who came near, and me trying my best to stay on Father's side.

  THE JUDGES 231

  We were tangled in such knots of resentment we hardly understood them.

  "Two of her children died in the epidemic," I said. "I know."

  Of course he knew. Our village was small, and Anatole knew every child by name. "It's a terrible shame," I offered, inadequately. He merely agreed, "E-e." "Children should never have to die."

  "No. But if they never did, children would not be so precious." "Anatole! Would you say that if your own children died?" "Of course not. But it is true, nevertheless. Also if everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure." "But everybody wants to live a long time. It's only fair." "Fair to want, e-e. But not fair to get. Just think how it would be if all the great-grandparents still were walking around. The village would be crowded with cross old people arguing over who has the most ungrateful sons and aching bones, and always eating up the food before the children could get
to the table."

  "It sounds like a church social back in Georgia," I said. Anatole laughed.

  Mama Mwanza shouted again and clapped her hands, bringing a reluctant son out of the house, dragging the flat, pinkish soles of his feet. Then I laughed, too, just because people young and old are more or less the same everywhere. I let myself breathe out, feeling less like one of Anatole's schoolboys taking a scolding.

  "Do you see that, Beene? That is Congo. Not minerals and glittering rocks with no hearts, these things that are traded behind our backs. The Congo is us."

  "I know." , "Who owns it, do you suppose?" i j , I did not hazard a guess.

  "I am sorry to say, those men making their agreements in Katanga just now are accustomed to getting what they want."

  I drew the edge of the comb slowly down the center of Ruth May's head, making a careful part. Father had said the slums outside

  232

  Leopoldville would be set right by American aid, after Independence. Maybe I was foolish to believe him. There were shanties just as poor in Georgia, on the edge of Atlanta, where black and white divided, and that was smack in the middle of America.

  "Can you just do that, -what they did down there? Announce your own country?" I asked.

  "Prime Minister Lumumba says no, absolutely not. He has asked the United Nations to bring an army to restore unity." "Is there going to be a war?"

  "There is already a kind of war, I think. Moise Tshombe has Belgians and mercenary soldiers working for him. I don't think they will leave without a fight. And Katanga is not the only place where they are throwing stones. There is a different war in Matadi, Thysville, Boende, Leopoldville. People are very angry at the Europeans. They are even hurting women and little children." "What are they so mad at the white people for?" Anatole sighed. "Those are big cities. Where the boa and the hen curl up together, there is only trouble. People have seen too much of the Europeans and all the things they had. They imagined after Independence life would immediately become fair." "Can't they be patient?"

  "Could you be? If your belly was empty and you saw whole baskets of bread on the other side of a window, would you continue "waiting patiently, Beene? Or would you throw a rock?"

  My belly is empty, I thought of telling Anatole. "I don't know," I confessed. I thought of the Underdowns' home in Leopoldville with its Persian rugs and silver tea service and chocolate cookies, surrounded by miles of tin shanties and hunger. Perhaps there were boys stomping barefoot through that house right now, ransacking the near-empty pantry and setting fire to the curtains in a kitchen that still smelled of Mrs. Underdown's disinfectant soap. I couldn't say who was wrong or right. I did see vhat Anatole meant about the snakes and hens too close together in a place like that: you could trace the belly scales of hate, and come up howling. I glanced nervously at our own house, with no rugs or tea service, but how

  THE JUDGES 233

  much did that matter? Would Jesus protect us? When He looked in our hearts to weigh our worth, would he find love for our Congolese neighbors, or disdain?

  "Well, it's the job of the United Nations to keep the peace," I said. "When will they come?"

  "That is what everybody would like to know. If they won't come, the Prime Minister has threatened to ask Mr. Khrushchev for help."

  "Khrushchev," I said, trying to cover my shock. "The Communists would help the Congo?"

  "Oh, yes, I think they would." Anatole eyed me strangely. "Beene, do you know what a Communist is?"

  "I know they do not fear the Lord, and they think everybody should have the same ..." I found I couldn't complete my own sentence.

  "The same kind of house, more or less," Anatole finished for me. "That is about right."

  "Well, I want the United Nations to come right away, and fix it up so everything's fair, this minute!"

  Anatole laughed at me. "I think you are a very impatient girl, eager to grow up into an impatient woman." I blushed.

  "Don't worry about Mr. Khrushchev. When Lumumba says he might get help from Russia, it is, what do you call this? // trompe son monde, like the hen who puffs up her feathers like so, very big, to show the snake she is too big to eat."

  "A bluff," I said, delighted. "Lumumba's bluffing." "A bluff, exactly. I think Lumumba wants to be neutral, more than anything. More than he loves his very own life. He doesn't want to give away our wealth, but he most especially does not want your country for an enemy." "He has a hard job," I said.

  "I can think of no person in all the world right now with a harder job."

  "Mr. Axelroot doesn't think much of him," I confessed. "He says Patrice Lumumba is trouble in a borrowed suit."

  234

  Anatole leaned close to my ear. "Do you want to know a secret? I think Mr. Axelroot is trouble in his own stinking hat." Oh, I laughed to hear that.

  We stood awhile longer watching Mama Mwanza argue good-naturedly with her lazy son and take several broad swipes at him with her big cooking spoon. He jumped back, making exaggerated shouts. His sisters scolded him, too, laughing. I realized that Mama Mwanza had an extraordinarily pretty face, with wide-set eyes, a solemn mouth, and a high, rounded forehead under her kerchief. Her husband had taken no other wife, even after her terrible accident and the loss of their two youngest children. Their family had seen so much of hardship, yet it still seemed easy for them to laugh with each other. I envied them with an intensity near to love, and near to rage.

  I told Anatole: "I saw Patrice Lumumba. Did you know that? In Leopoldville my father and I got to watch him give his inaugural speech."

  "Did you?" Anatole seemed impressed. "Well, then, you can make up your own mind. What did you think of our Prime Minister?"

  It took me a moment's pause to discover what I thought. Finally I said, "I didn't understand everything. But he made me want to believe in every word. Even the ones I wasn't sure of." "You understood well enough, then."

  "Anatole, is Katanga close to here?" He flipped his finger against my cheek. "Don't worry, Beene. No one will be shooting at you. Go and cook your rabbit. I'll come back when I can smell umvundla stew from my desk in the school-house. Sala mbote!"

  "Wenda mbote!" I clasped my forearm and shook his hand. I called to his back as he walked away, "Thank you, Anatole." I wasn't just thanking him for the rabbit but also for telling me things. For the way he said, "Not you, Beene," and "You understood well enough."

  He turned and walked backwards for a few bouncing steps. "Don't forget to tell your father: Katanga has seceded." ;

  THE JUDGES 235

  "I won't possibly forget."

  I returned to Ruth May's braids, but was very conscious of Anatole s broad shoulders and narrow waist, the triangle of white shirt moving away from us as he walked purposefully down the dirt road back to the village. I wish the people back home reading magazine stories about dancing cannibals could see something as ordinary as Anatole s clean white shirt and kind eyes, or Mama Mwanza with her children. If the word "Congo" makes people think of that big-lipped cannibal man in the cartoon, why, they're just wrong about everything here from top to bottom. But how could you ever set them right? Since the day we arrived, Mother has nagged us to write letters home to our classmates at Bethlehem High, and not one of us has done it yet. We re still wondering, Where do you start? "This morning I got up . . ." I'd begin, but no, "This morning I pulled back the mosquito netting that's tucked in tight around our beds because mosquitoes here give you malaria, a disease that runs in your blood which nearly everyone has anyway but they don't go to the doctor for it because there are worse things like sleeping sickness or the kakakaka or that someone has put a kibaazu on them, and anyway there's really no doctor nor money to pay one, so people just hope for the good luck of getting old because then they'll be treasured, and meanwhile they go on with their business because they have children they love and songs to sing while they work, and . . ."

  And you wouldn't even get as far as breakfast
before running out of paper. You'd have to explain the words, and then the words for the words.

  Ruth May remained listless while I explored my thoughts and finished up her braids. I knew I ought to have bathed her and washed her hair before combing it out, but the idea of lugging the big tub out and heating a dozen teakettles of water so she -wouldn't get chilled?it was more than a day's work, and now I had mang-wansi beans to worry about and the skinning of a rabbit. That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this." So

  236

  no bath for Ruth May that day. I merely pushed her awhile in the swing as I'd promised, and she did kick her feet a little. Maybe it made her happy, I can't say. I hope it died. Anatole's words had pushed things around inside of me. It's true that sickness and death make children more precious. I used to threaten Ruth May's life so carelessly just to make her behave. Now I had to face the possibility that we really could lose her, and my heart felt like a soft, damaged place in my chest, like a bruise on a peach.

  She flew forward and back and I watclhed her shadow in the white dust under the swing. Each time she: reached the top of her arc beneath the sun, her shadow legs were transformed into the thin, curved legs of an antelope, "with small rounded hooves at the bottom instead of feet. I was transfixed and! horrified by the image of my sister with antelope legs. I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

  Ruth May

  ALL THOSE BLACK FACES in the black night a-looking at me. They want me to come play. But you can't say the words out loud at night. Mother May I? No you may not! Mama says no. Mama is here breathing. When we're both asleep I hear her talk and that's what she says: no no no no. But the lizards run away up the walls with the rest of her words, and I can't hear.

  Sometimes I wake up and: nobody. Outside there's sunshine so I know it's broad day, but everybody is gone and I'm sweating too much and can't talk about it. Other times it is dark, and Mama and Father are saying secrets. Mama begs Father. She says they went after the white girls up in Stanleyville. They went in their houses and took everything they wanted to, the food and the radio batteries and all. And they made the missionaries stand naked on top of the roof without any clothes on, and then they shot two of them. Everybody is talking about it and Mania heard. In Stanleyville is where the doctor put a cast on my arm. Did he have to go on the roof of the hospital without any clothes? I never can stop thinking about the doctor with no clothes on. The lizards run away up the walls and take all the words I want to say. But Father says what the Bible says: The meek shall inherit. He started to pat his hand on Mama and she pushed him away. Hearken therefore unto the supplications of thy servant, that thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day.