The Poisonwood Bible

by Barbara Kingsolver

Plans were laid for us by friends, including some men from Kilanga I'd never dreamed would take such chances for Anatole. Tata Boanda, for one. Bright red trousers and all, he arrived late one night on foot, toting a suitcase on his head. He had money for us that he claimed was owed to my father, though this is doubtful. The suitcase was ours. In it were a dress and a coloring notebook of Ruth May's, pieces of our hope chests, my bow and arrows. Someone in Kilanga saved these precious things for us. I suppose it's also possible the women who went through our house didn't want these

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  items, though the bow at least would have been valuable. A third possibility, then: dismayed by the failure of our Jesus to protect us, they opted to steer clear.

  The news of Father wasn't good. He was living alone. I hadn't thought of this�who would cook for him? I'd never envisioned Father without women's keeping. Now he was reported to be bearded, wild-haired, and struggling badly with malnutrition and parasites. Our house had burned, with the blame going either to Mother's spirit or the mischief of village children, though Tata Boanda allowed it was probably Father trying to toast meat over a kerosene flame. Father ran off to a hut in the woods he was calling the New Church of Eternal Life, Jesus Is Bangala. As promising as that sounds, he wasn't getting a lot of takers. People were waiting to see how well Jesus protected Tata Price, now that he had to get by the same as everyone without outside help from the airplane or even women. So far, Father seemed to be reaping no special advantages. Additionally, his church was too close to the cemetery.

  Tata Boanda told me with sincere kindness that Ruth May was mourned in Kilanga.Tata Ndu threatened to exile Tata Kuvudundu for planting the snake in our chicken house, which he -was known to have done, since Nelson pointed out the footprints to many witnesses. Kilanga had fallen on trouble of every kind. The pro-Lumumbists among Anatole's schoolboys were having armed skirmishes with what was left of the National Army, now Mobutu's army, farther south along the river. We were warned that travel anywhere would be difficult.

  It was harder than that. Even though the rain had stopped, we could barely walk as far as the Kwenge. From there we planned to travel by ferry all the way to Stanleyville, where Lumumba still has enormous popular support. There was work to be done, and Anatole felt we could be safe there. The money Tata Boanda brought us was our salvation. It was a small amount, but in hard Belgian francs. Congolese currency had become useless overnight. With a million pink Congolese bills we couldn't have bought our way onto the ferry. THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 418

  EXODUS 419

  PP

  1�1

  Everything was like that: the ground shifted while we slept, and we woke up each day to terrible new surprises. In Stanleyville we quickly saw I was a liability, even more than in Bulungu. People were outraged by the sight of white skin, for reasons I had the sense to understand. They'd lost their hero to a bargain between the foreigners and Mobutu. Anatole wrapped me up in wax-print pagnes, hoping to disguise me as a Congolese matron while trying to keep me from staggering dazed in front of automobiles. I nearly swooned in the mill and flow of Stanleyville�people, cars, animals in the street, the austere gaze of windows in the tall concrete buildings. I hadn't stepped out of the jungle since my trip with Father to Leopoldville, a year ago or a hundred, I couldn't say.

  Anatole lost no time arranging to get us out of the city. In the back of a friend's truck, covered with manioc leaves, we left Stanleyville late at night and crossed over into the Central African Republic near Bangassou. I was delivered to this mission deep in the jungle, where, amidst the careful neutrality of the sisters, a rumpled novice named Soeur Liselin might pass a few months unnoticed. Without asking a single question, the Mother Superior invited Anatole and me to spend our last night together in my little blank room. My gratitude for her kindness has carried me a long way on a difficult road.

  Therese leans close and looks up at me, her eyebrows tilting like the accents above her name. "Liselin, of what do you accuse yourself? Has he touched you everywhere?"'; :

  We expected to be parted for no more than six or eight weeks, while Anatole worked with the Lumumbists to reassemble their fallen leader's plan for peace and prosperity. We were that naive. Anatole was detained by Mobutu's police before he even made it back to Stanleyville. My beloved was interrogated to the tune of a broken rib, taken to Leopoldville, and imprisoned in the rat-infested courtyard of what was once a luxurious embassy. Our extended separation has so far improved my devotion to Anatole, my French grammar, and my ability to live with uncertainty. Finally, I've confided to Therese, I understand the subjunctive tense.

  I shudder to think what Father would say to me here, skulking among a tribe of papist females. I pass the days as productively as I can: trying to stay clean, sharpen my aim, and keep my lip buttoned from Vespers till breakfast. Trying to learn the trick of what passes for patience. Every few weeks I get a letter from Leopoldville, which holds me on track. My heart races when I see the long blue envelope in a sister's hand, delivered to me under her sleeve as if a man himself were inside. And, oh, he is! Still sweet and bitter and wise and, best of all, still alive. I squeal, I can't help it, and run outside to the courtyard to taste him in private like a cat with a stolen pullet. I lean rny face against the cool wall and kiss its old stones in praise of captivity, because it's only my being here and his being in prison that saves us both for another chance at each other. I know he despises being useless, sitting still while war overtakes us. But if Anatole were free to do as he pleased right now, I know he'd be killed in the process. If captivity is damaging his spirit, I just hope for an intact body and will do what I can for the rest, later on.

  The nuns spied me out there and told me I'm going to wear away their foundation. They are used to gunfire and leprosy but not true love.

  Clearly I'm here to stay awhile, so Mother Marie-Pierre has put me to work in the clinic. If I can't quite get the hang of poverty-chastity-and-obedience, I can learn instead about vermifuges, breech deliveries, arrow wounds, gangrene, and elephantiasis. Nearly all the patients are younger than me. Preventatives for old age are rampant here. Our supplies come from the French Catholic Relief, and sometimes just thin air. Once a messenger on a bicycle came teetering up the jungle path bringing us twelve vials of antivenin, individually wrapped in tissue inside a woman's jewelry box�an astounding treasure whose history we couldn't guess. The boy said it came from a doctor in Stanleyville who was being evacuated. I thought of the Belgian doctor who'd set Ruth May's arm, and I decided to believe Ruth May herself was somehow involved in this gift. The sisters merely praised the Lord and proceeded to save a dozen people from snakebite; more than we've lost.

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  From talking with the patients I've gotten passably fluent in Lin-gala, which is spoken throughout northern Congo, in Leopoldville, and along most of the navigable rivers. If Anatole ever comes back for me, I'll be ready to go most anywhere. But then a month will pass with no letter and I'm sure he's slipped into death or recovered his clear ideals and the sense to steer clear of a badly misplaced white girl, he's gone forever. As lost to me as my sister, oh, sweet Jesus, Ruth May. And Adah, Rachel, Mother, and Father, all gone as well. What's the meaning of my still being here without name or passport, parroting "how-do-you-do" in Lingala? I am trying to get some kind of explanation from God, but none is forthcoming. At nights in the refectory we sit with our hands in our laps and stare at the radio, our small, harsh master. We hear one awful piece of news after another, with no power to act. The free Congo that so nearly came to pass is now going down. What can I do but throw my rosary against the wall of my cell and swear violence? The nuns are so patient. They've spent decades here prolonging the brief lives of the undernourished, accustomed completely to the tragedy playing out around us. But their unblinking eyes framed by their white starched wimples make me want to scream, "This is not God's will be done!" How could anyone, even a God distracted by many other concerns, allow thi
s to happen?

  "Ce n'est pas a nous," says Therese, not ours to question. As convincing as Methuselah shouting, Sister God is great! Shut the door!

  "I've heard that before," I tell her. "I'm sure the Congolese heard it every day for a hundred years while they had to forbear the Belgians. Now they finally get a fighting chance, and we're sitting here watching it get born dead. Like that baby born blue out of that woman with tetanus this morning."

  "That is an awful comparison." ,;;V

  "But it's true!"

  She sighs and repeats what she's told me already. The sisters take no position in war, but must try to hold charity in their hearts even for the enemy...�'�. : � ,�''' � �.' ,r �: .�� .���:� ' , ;

  "But who is the enemy? Just tell me that much, Therese. Which side are you trying not to hate, white men or Africa?"

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  She snaps a sheet open wide in her hands and takes the center with her teeth to fold it in half. Also, I think, to stop up her mouth.

  "I'd fight alongside the Simbas if they'd let me," I confessed to her once.

  Therese has a way of looking at me sideways, and I wonder if she wasn't too hasty in taking her vows. She's attracted to mine sweeping. "You have a good aim and good nerves," she allowed behind the sheet she was folding. "Go join them."

  "You think I'm joking."

  She stopped to look at me seriously. "Non, ce n'est pas me blague. But it's not your place to fight with the Simbas, even if you were a man. You're white. This is their war and whatever happens will happen."

  "It's no more their war than it is God's will be done. It's the doing of the damned Belgians and Americans."

  "The Reverend Mother would wash your mouth with disinfectant."

  "The Reverend Mother has more pressing needs for her disinfectant." And nowhere near enough, either, I thought. In the privacy of my little room I've damned many men to hell, President Eisen-hower, King Leopold, and my own father included. I damn them for throwing me into a war in which white skin comes down on the wrong side, pure and simple.

  "If God is really taking a hand in things"! informed Therese, "he is bitterly mocking the hope of brotherly love. He is making sure that color will matter forever." With no more to say between a devout farm girl and a mine sweeper, we folded our sheets and our different-colored habits.

  The Simbas would shoot me on sight, it's true. They're an army of pure desperation and hate. Young Stanleyville boys and old village men, anyone who can find a gun or a machete, all banded together. They tie nkisis of leaves around their wrists and declare themselves impermeable to bullets, immune to death. And so they are, Anatole says, "For how can you kill what is already dead?" We've heard how they sharpened their teeth and stormed the invaders in northeastern Congo, feeding on nothing but rage.

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  Thirty whites killed in Stanley, two Americans among them�we heard that over the shortwave radio and knew what it meant. By nightfall the United Nations would launch their answer, an air and land attack. The Combined Forces, they're calling this invading army: the U.S.,Belgium, and hired soldiers left over from the Bay of Pigs. Over the next weeks we heard a hundred more times about the whites killed by Simbas in Stanleyville. In three languages: Radio France, the BBC, and Mobutu's Lingala newscasts from Leopoldville, the news was all one. Those thirty white people, rest their souls, have purchased an all-out invasion against the pro-Independents. How many Congolese were killed by the Belgians and labor and starvation, by the special police, and now by the UN soldiers, we will never know. They'll go uncounted. Or count for nothing, if that is possible.

  The night the helicopters came in, the vibrations pummeled us out of our beds. I thought the old stone convent was falling down. We ran outside with the wind from the blades tearing down on us from just above the trees, whipping our plain white nightgowns into a froth. The sisters registered their dismay, crossed themselves, and hurried back to bed. I couldn't. I sat on the ground, hugging my knees, and started to cry, for the first time since time began, it seems. Crying with my mouth open, howling for Ruth May and the useless waste of our mistakes and all that's going to happen now, everyone already dead and not yet dead, known or unknown to me, every Congolese child with no hope. I felt myself falling apart� that by morning I might be just bones melting into the moldy soil of the sisters' vegetable garden. A pile of eggless, unmothering bones, nothing more: the future I once foretold.

  To hold myself together I tried to cry for something more manageable. I settled on Anatole. Kneeling before our little statue of the Virgin with an eroded face I endeavored to pray for my future husband. For a chance. For happiness and love and, if you can't pray for sex outright, the possibility of children. I found I could hardly remember Anatole s face, and couldn't picture God at all. He just ended up looking like my father. I tried to imagine Jesus, then, in

  EXODUS 423

  the body of Brother Fowles.Tata Bidibidi, with his kind, pretty wife and their precarious boat dispensing milk powder and quinine and love to children along the river. Attend to Creation, was his advice. Well, the palm trees in our courtyard were ripped and flattened from the wind of the helicopters, and looked far too defeated by war to accept my prayers. So I focused on the sturdy walls of the compound and prayed straight to the black stones. I implored them, "Please let there be sturdy walls like these around Anatole. Please let them hold up a roof that will keep this awful sky from falling on him." I prayed to old black African stones unearthed from the old dark ground that has been here all along. One solid thing to believe in.

  Rachel Axelroot

  JOHANNESBURG 1964

  JF I'D KNOWN WHAT MARRIAGE was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

  It isn't living here in South Africa that I mind. It hardly even seems like a foreign country here. You can get absolutely anything you need in the stores: Breck Special Formulated Shampoo, Phillips' milk of magnesia, Campbell's tomato soup, honestly you name it! And the scenery is beautiful, especially taking the train down to the beach. My girlfriends and I love to pack up a picnic basket with champagne and Tobler biscuits (which actually are cookies, not biscuits�imagine my surprise when I bought some aiming to serve them with gravy!), and then -we just head out to the countryside for a view of the green rolling hills. Of course you have to look the other way when the train goes by the townships, because those people don't have any perspective of what good scenery is, that's for sure. They will make their houses out of a piece of rusted tin or the side of a crate�and leave the writing part on the outside for all to see! But you just have to try and understand, they don't have the same ethics as us.That is one part of living here. Being understanding of the differences.

  Otherwise this country is much like you'd find anywhere. Even

  EXODUS 425

  the weather is very typical. I have always felt that people in other countries just don't have any idea that Africa could be this normal. The only bad thing is that with the equator being above us the change of seasons conies backwards, which does take some getting used to. But do I complain? Heck, no, I just slap up our Christmas tree in the middle of summer and sing "Deck the Halls" and have a martini on the patio and don't give it another thought anymore. I am a very adaptable kind of person. I don't even mind speaking Afrikaans to the maid, which is practically the same thing as English once you get the hang of it. As long as you're just giving orders, anyway, which are more or less about the same in any language. And if you hear the word "Nuus" on the radio, for example, why, any fool can figure out that means "News." So you just get up and switch over to the English station!

  I have a good life, as far as the overall surroundings. I have put the past behind me and don't even think about it. Do I have a family? I sometimes have to stop and ask myself. Do I have a mother, father, and sisters? Did I even come from anywhere? Because it doesn't seem like it. It seems like I'm just
right here and always was. I have a little tiny picture of my sisters and me cut out in a heart shape, which I happened to be wearing in a gold locket when I left our unfortunate circumstances in the Congo. Sometimes I get it out and stare at those teeny little sad white faces, trying to make out where I am in that picture. That's the only time I ever think about Ruth May being dead. Which I've said was all because of Leah, but really, mainly, it's probably Father's fault because the rest of us just had to go along with whatever he said. If it was up to me, I would never have stepped foot in that snake-infected place. I would have sat home and let other people go be missionaries if they wanted to, bully for them! But the picture is so small I have to hold it practically at the end of my nose to make out who is who. It hurts my eyes to focus on it, so mostly it stays in the drawer.

  Like I said, I am content with my present circumstances for the most part. My misery comes from a different concern: my marriage. There is just no word bad enough for Eeben Axelroot. Who has still

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  not made an honest woman out of me, I might add! He just treats me like his slave-girlfriend-housemaid, having a roll in the hay when he feels like it and then running off doing God knows what for months at a time, leaving me alone in my prime of life. But if I threaten to leave him, he calls me the poor little rich girl (which, if we actually were rich, would be a whole different story) and says I can't leave him because no man we know around here could afford the upkeep! That is completely unfair. Everyone we know has a nicer house than us. He received a large sum for his service in the Congo, a decent nest egg you might say, but have I seen it? No, sir, and believe you me I looked under the mattress, because that is the kind of person he is. Actually, there's a gun under there. He says he invested the money. He claims he's gotten back involved with the diamond business in the Congo and has many foreign partners, but you still have to remind him to take a bath on any given day. So if he has foreign partners, I don't think they are of a very high class. I told him so, too. Well, he raised up his head from his beer bottle just long enough to have a good laugh at my expense. He said, "Baby, your intellectual capacity is out of this world!" Meaning the vacuum of outer space, ha, ha. His favorite joke. He said my brain was such a blank slate he could tell me every state secret he knows and then march me straight down to the Damnistry International and not have a thing to worry about. He said the government should hire me to work for the other side. This is not lovey-dovey quarreling, mind you. He says these things and laughs in my face! Oh, I have cried till I threatened to ruin my own complexion, let me tell you.