The Poisonwood Bible

How can I explain that my two unmatched halves used to add up to more than one whole? In Congo I was one-half benduka the crooked walker, and one-half benduka, the sleek bird that dipped in and out of the banks with a crazy ungrace that took your breath. We both had our good points. Here there is no good name for my gift, so it died without a proper ceremony. I am now the good Dr. Price, seeing straight. Conceding to be in my right mind.

  And how can I invent my version of the story, without my crooked vision? How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets. Mother keeps wanting to wash herself clean, but she clings to her clay and her dust. Mother is still ruthless. She claims I am her youngest now but she still is clutching her baby. She will put down that burden, I believe, on the day she hears forgiveness from Ruth May herself. ?':?"?'. ??.-.'i .?;.' .:;;?. ;- -.'V.?? ;.. ' ?:?:?'?.? ;.:.i'*:,.. .?';;'?

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  As soon as I came back, I drove down to see her.We sat together on her bony couch -with my photographs of Africa, picking through and laying them out, making a tidepool of shiny color among the seashells on her coffee table.

  "Lean's thin," I reported, "but she still walks too fast."

  "How is Rachel holding up?"

  That is a good question. "In spite of remarkable intervening circumstances," I said, "if Rachel ever gets back to Bethlehem for a high school reunion she will win the prize for 'Changed the Least.'"

  Mother handled the photos with mostly casual interest, except for the ones that showed my sisters. Over these she paused, for an extremely long time, as if she were listening to small, silent confessions.

  Finally I made mine. I told her he had died. She was strangely uncurious about the details, but I gave her most of them anyway.

  She sat looking puzzled. "I have some pansies I need to set out," she said then, and let the screen door bang as she walked out to the back porch. I followed, and found her in her old straw gardening hat, a trowel already in one hand and the flat of pansies balanced in the other. She ducked under the tangled honeysuckle toward the garden path, using her trowel like a machete to hack through some overgrown vines that crowded her jungly little porch. We marched purposefully down her little path to the lettuce bed by the gate, where she knelt in the leaf mold and began punching holes in the ground. I squatted nearby, watching. Her hat had a wide straw brim and a crown completely blown out, as if whatever was in her head had exploded many times.

  "Leah says he would have wanted to go that way," I said. "A blaze of glory." :: - .'....?-.-,,.

  "I don't give a damn what he would have wanted."

  "Oh," I said. The damp ground soaked the knees of her jeans in large dark patches that spread like bloodstains as she worked.

  "Are you sorry he's dead?"

  "Adah, what can it possibly mean to me now?" ;.,,.'' ',,;:';

  Then what are you sorry about?

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  She lifted seedlings out of the flat, untangling their nets of tender white roots. Her bare hands worked them into the ground, prodding and gentling, as if putting to bed an endless supply of small children. She wiped the tears off both sides of her face with the back of her left hand, leaving dark lines of soil along her cheekbones. To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths. I am a mother.You aren't, he wasn't.

  "Do you want to forget?"

  She paused her work, resting her trowel on her knee, and looked at me. "Are we allowed to remember?"

  "Who's to say we can't?" .

  "Not one woman in Bethlehem ever asked me how Ruth May died. Did you know that?"

  "I guess."

  "And all those people I worked with in Atlanta, on civil rights and African relief. We never once spoke of my having a crazy evangelist husband still in the Congo somewhere. People knew. But it was embarrassing to them. I guess they thought it was some awful reflection on me."

  "The sins of the father," I said.

  "The sins of the father are not discussed. That's how it is." She returned to her business of stabbing the earth.

  I know she is right. Even the Congo has tried to slip out of her old flesh, to pretend it isn't scarred. Congo was a woman in shadows, dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is a tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder. All the old injuries have been renamed: Kinshasa, Kisangani.There was never a King Leopold, no brash Stanley, bury them, forget.You have nothing to lose but your chains.

  But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

  "I'll discuss it," I said. "I despised him. He was a despicable man."

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  "Well, Adah.You could always call a spade a spade."

  "Do you know when I hated him the most? When he used to make fun of my books. My writing and reading. And when he hit any of us. You especially. I imagined getting the kerosene and burning him up in his bed. I only didn't because you were in it too."

  She looked up at me from under her hat brim. Her eyes were a wide, hard, granite blue.

  "It's true," I said. I pictured it clearly. I could smell the cold kerosene and feel it soaking the sheets. I still can.

  Then why didn't you? Both of us together.You might as well have.

  Because then you would be free too. And I didn't want that. I wanted you to remember what he did to us.

  Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

  Leak Price Ngemba

  KIMVULA DISTRICT, ZAIRE 1986

  IHAVE FOUR SONS, all named for men we lost to war: Pascal, Patrice, Martin-Lothaire, and Nataniel.

  'Taniel is our miracle. He was born last year, a month early, after his long, bumpy upside-down ride in the Land Rover that moved our family from Kinshasa to the farm in Kimvula District. We were still ten kilometers from the village when my chronic backache spread to a deep, rock-hard contraction across my lower belly, and I understood with horror that I was in labor. I got out and walked very slowly behind the truck, to subdue my panic. Anatole must have been worried sick by my bizarre conduct, but it's no use arguing with a woman in labor, so he got out and walked with me while the boys bickered over who would drive the truck. I can vaguely recall its twin red taillights ahead of us on the dark jungle road, bumping along tediously, and the false starts of an afternoon thundershower. After a while, without saying anything, I went to the side of the road and lay down on a pile of damp leaves between the tall, buttressed roots of a kapok tree. Anatole knelt next to my head and stroked my hair.

  "You should get up. It's dark and damp here, and our clever sons have gone off and left us."

  I raised my head and looked for the truck, which was indeed

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  gone. There was something I needed to explain to Anatole, but I couldn't be bothered with it at the peak of a contraction. Straight overhead was the tree, with its circle of limbs radiating out from the great, pale trunk. I counted my way around that circle of branches like numbers on the face of a clock, slowly, one deep breath for each number. Seventeen. A very long minute, maybe an hour. The contraction subsided.

  "Anatole," I said. "I mean to have this baby right here and now." "Oh, Beene.You have never had any patience at all." The boys drove on for some time before stopping and backing up, by the grace of God and Martin-Lothaire. He'd lost the argument about driving and was pouting out the back window when it dawned on him to shout for his brother to stop: "Wait, wait, Mama must be having the b
aby!"

  Anatole threw things around madly in the truck before finding an elephant-grass mat and some shirts (at least we had with us everything we owned, and it was clean). He made me sit up so he could tuck these things under me. I don't remember it. I only remember my thighs tensing and my pelvis arching forward with that sudden thunderous urge that is so much more powerful than any other human craving?the need to push. I heard a roar, which I suppose was me, and then Nataniel was here with us, bloodying a clean white shirt of Anatole's and an old, soft pagne printed with yellow birds.

  Anatole did a laughing, backward-hopping dance of congratulation. It wasn't yet quite a year since his release from Camp Hardy, and he was sympathetic to his son's eager escape from solitary confinement. But the baby was weak. Anatole immediately settled down to driving us anxiously through the dark while I curled around our suckling boy in the backseat, alarmed to see he wasn't even that?he couldn't nurse. By the time we arrived in Kimvula he felt feverish. From there he wasted very quickly to a lethargic little bundle of skin-covered bones and a gaunt, skin-covered skull. He didn't even cry. The next many days and nights ran together for me because I was terrified to put him down at all, or even to fall

  asleep holding him, for fear he'd slip away. Anatole and I took turns rocking his limp little body, talking to him, trying to coax him into the world of the living. Martin insisted on taking his turn, too, rocking and whispering boy secrets into the little printed blanket. But Nataniel was hard to convince. Twice he stopped breathing altogether. Anatole blew into his mouth and massaged his chest until he gasped faintly and came back.

  After a week he began to eat, and now seems to have no regrets about his decision to stay with us. But during that terrible first week of his life I was racked with the miseries of a weak, sore body and a lost soul. I could recollect having promised some God or other, more than once, that if I could only have Anatole back I would never ask for another thing on this earth. Now here I was, banging on heaven's door again. A desolate banging, from a girl who could count the years since she felt any real presence on the other side of that door.

  One night as I sat on the floor rocking, sleepless, deranged by exhaustion, cradling this innocent wreck of a baby, I just started to talk out loud. I talked to the fire: "Fire, fire, fire, please keep him warm, eat all the wood you need and I'll get more but just don't go out, keep this little body I already love so much from going cold!" I spoke in English, fairly certain I'd gone mad entirely. I spoke to the moon outside and the trees, to the sleeping bodies of Anatole and Patrice and Martin, and finally to the kettle of boiled, sterile water and tiny dropper I was using to keep the baby from dehydrating. Suddenly I had a fully formed memory of my mother kneeling and talking?praying, I believe?to a bottle of antibiotics when Ruth May was so sick. I could actually hear Mother's breath and her words. I could picture her face very clearly, and feel her arms around me. Mother and I prayed together to whatever it is that we have. This was enough.

  If God is someone who thinks of me at all, he must think of me as a mother. Scraping fiercely for food and shelter, mad entirely for love, by definition. My boys all cry,"Sala mbote!" as they run out the door, away from my shelter and advice but never escaping my love.

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  Pascal has gone farthest?for two years he's been in Luanda, where he studies petroleum engineering and, I sincerely believe, chases girls. He reminds me so much of his namesake, my old friend, with similar wide-set eyes and the same cheerful question breaking like a fresh egg upon every new day: "Beta nki tutasala? What are we doing?"

  Patrice is just the opposite: studious, sober, and an exact physical copy of his father. He wants to study government and be a Minister of Justice in a very different Africa from this one. I go weak in the knees with dread and admiration, watching him sharpen his hopes. But it's Martin-Lothaire who's turning out to be the darkest of my sons, in complexion and temperament. At twelve, he broods, and writes poetry in a journal like his father's hero Agostinho Neto. He reminds me of his Aunt Adah.

  Here in Kimvula District we're working with farmers on a soybean project, trying to establish a cooperative?a tiny outpost of reasonable sustenance in the beEy of Mobutu s beast. It's futile, probably. If the government catches wind of any success here, the Minister of Agriculture will rob us out of existence. So we quietly plant our hopes out here in the jungle, just a few kilometers from the Angolan border, at the end of an awful road where Mobutu's spies won't often risk their fancy cars.

  We count our small successes from day to day. Anatole has reorganized the secondary school, which had been in pure collapse for ten years?hardly a young adult in Kimvula village can read. I'm busy with my ravenous Taniel, who nurses night and day, riding in his sling on one side or the other so he won't have to pause while I boil his diapers. Patrice and Martin have been commandeered by their father to teach French and mathematics respectively, even though this puts Martin in charge of children older than himself. Myself, I'm just happy to be living among fruit trees and cooking with wood again. I don't mind the satisfying exhaustions of carrying wood and water. It's the other exhaustion I hate, the endless news of Mobutu's excesses and the costs of long-term deprivation. People here are instinctively more fearful and less generous than

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  they were twenty years ago in Kilanga. Neighbor women do still come calling to offer little gifts, a hand of bananas or an orange for the baby to suck on and make us laugh at his puckery face. But their eyes narrow as they look around the room. Never having known a white person before, they assume I must know Mobutu and all important Americans personally. In spite of my protests, I think they worry I'll report to someone that they had an orange to spare. There's nothing like living as a refugee in one's own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist. Zaireans are tired to death, you can see it anywhere you look.

  Our house here is mud and thatch, plenty large, with two rooms and a kitchen shed. A happier place, for sure, than the tin-and-cement box that packaged us up with all our griefs in Kinshasa. There, the cranky indoor plumbing constantly grunlbled at us like God to Noah, threatening the deluge, and Anatole swore if he lived through ten thousand mornings in Kinshasa he would never get used to defecating in the center of his home. Honestly, a latrine does seem like a return to civilization.

  But our life in this village feels provisional. We have one foot over the border into the promised land, or possibly the grave. Our plan is to pack up our truck again and drive from here to Sanza Pombo, Angola, as soon as we possibly can.There we'll keep our hands busy in a new, independent nation, whose hopes coincide with our own. We've been leaning toward Angola for ten years now?Anatole had a chance to serve in the new government there in 1975, right after the treaty that gave Neto the presidency. But Anatole wasn't yet ready to abandon the Congo. And then Neto died, too young. In 1982 another invitation came from the second President, Jose dos Santos. Anatole was prevented from accepting that post by the inconvenience of living in a two-meter-square room with a bucket of his excrement for company in theThysville penitentiary.

  I don't believe Anatole has many regrets, but he would have been proud to work with Neto or dos Santos. Thanks to those remarkable men, plus others uncounted who died on the way, Angola has vrested itself free of Portugal and still owns its diamonds and oilTHE POISONWOOD BIBLE 502

  wells. The industry of Angolans doesn't subsidize foreigners, or any castles "with moats, and their children are likely to get vaccinations and learn to read. They're still desperately poor, of course. They kept their diamonds and oil at a horrific cost. None of us predicted "what came to pass there. Least of all Neto, the young doctor-poet who just meant to spare his people from the scarring diseases of smallpox and humiliation. He went to the U.S. looking for help and was shown the door. So he came home to try to knock down Portuguese rule on his own and create a people's Angola. Then he got some attention from the Americans. For now he was a Communist devil.

/>   Ten years ago, when Anatole received that first letter stamped with the new, official seal of the Presidency of Independent Angola, it looked like dreams could come true. After six hundred years of their own strife and a few centuries of Portuguese villainy, the warring tribes of Angola had finally agreed to a peace plan. Agostinho Neto was President, in an African nation truly free of foreign rule. We so nearly packed up and went, that very day. We were desperate to move our sons to a place where they could taste hope, at least, if not food.

  But within two weeks of the peace agreement, the United States violated it. They airlifted a huge shipment of guns to an opposition leader, who vowed personally to murder Neto. On the day we heard this I sat sobbing in our kitchen, flattened with shame and rage. Patrice came and sat on the floor by my chair, patting my leg with a little boy's solemn endurance. "Mama, Mama, nepleure pas. Ce n'est pas de lafaute de Grand-mere, Mama." It didn't even occur to him to connect me with American disgrace; he thought I was angry at Mother and Adah. He looked up at me with his narrow little face and almond eyes and there was his father years and years and years ago saying, "Not you,Beene."

  But who, if not me, and for how many generations must we be forgiven by our children? Murdering Lumumba, keeping Mobutu in power, starting it all over again in Angola?these sound like plots between men but they are betrayals, by men, of children. It's thirty

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  million dollars, Anatole told me recently, that the U.S. has now spent trying to bring down Angola's sovereignty. Eveiy dollar of it had to come from some person, a man or woman. How does this happen? They think of it as commerce, I suppose. A matter of hardware, the plastic explosives and land mines one needs to do the job. Or it's a commerce of imagined dreads, the Bethlehem housewives somehow convinced that a distant, black Communist devil will cost them some quarter in their color-matched living rooms.

  But what could it possibly have mattered to them that, after the broken treaty and Neto's desperate plea for help, the Cubans were the only ones to answer it? We cheered, the boys and Anatole and our neighbors all jumping and screaming in our yard, when the radio said the planes had come into Luanda. There were teachers and nurses on board, with boxes of smallpox vaccine. We imagined them liberating Angola and marching right on up the Congo River to vaccinate us all!

  Rachel informs me I've had my brains washed by a Communist plot. She's exactly right. I've been won to the side of schoolteachers and nurses, and lost all allegiance to plastic explosives. No homeland I can claim as mine would blow up a struggling, distant country's hydroelectric dams and water pipes, inventing darkness and dysentery in the service of its ideals, and bury mines in every Angolan road that connected food with a hungry child. We've watched this war with our hearts in our throats, knowing what there is to lose. Another Congo. Another wasted chance running like poisoned water under Africa, curling our souls into fists.