The Poisonwood Bible

ee. She's told me everything she can recall of her older sister, Anatole's mother, and like a kid I make her repeat the stories. I'm hungry for any family I can get. I'm lucky if I hear from Mother and Adah twice a year. It's not their fault. I know they've sent countless pack-
EXODUS 447
ages that are piled up somewhere in the great, crumbling postal edifice downtown. I expect the Minister of Post could build himself a second or third home out of undelivered boxes.
By some miracle, we did get a package at Easter time. The boys hooted and ran the length of our 17 Janvier lane brandishing their precious Mars bars. (Which, I heard Pascal boast to his friends, are manufactured on Mars.) I was tempted to do the same -with my own loot: five books in English! Also clothing, aspirin, antibiotics, hand lotion, thick cotton diapers, batteries for our radio, and long letters. I buried my face in the clothes for the scent of my mother, but of course they came from some American child who's no kin to us. Mother does volunteer work in African relief. We re her pet project, you could say.
In every package there's one oddball thing from Adah, a sort of secret message is how I think of it. This time it was an old Saturday Evening Post she'd found in the bottom of Mother's closet. I leafed through it, wondering, Did Adah want me to read about how Jimmy Stewart got his start, or to know that when a Philco moves in, your TV troubles move out? Then I found it, an article called "Will Africa Go Communist?"Adah retains her eagle eye for irony. It was all about how the U.S. ought to take better charge of the maverick Congo; the two photographs stopped my heart. In one, a young Joseph Mobutu looks out imploringly above a caption declaring his position in jeopardy. Next to him is a smiling, rather crafty-looking Patrice Lumumba, with a caption warning: "He may be on his way back!" The magazine is dated February 18, 1961. Lumumba was already a month dead, his body buried under a chicken coop in Shaba. And Mobutu, already well assured of his throne. I can picture the Georgia housewives shuddering at the Communist challenge, quickly turning the page on that black devil Lumumba with the pointed chin. But I was hardly my less in the dark, and I was in Bulungu, the very village where Lumumba had been captured. My sister married a man who may have assisted in his death-sentence transport to Shaba, though even Rachel will never know that for sure. We have in this story the ignorant, but no real innocents. ,-, ...