The Poisonwood Bible

by Barbara Kingsolver

I might be envious of Adah now, with no attachments to tear her heart out. She doesn't need children climbing up her legs or a husband kissing her forehead. Without all that, she's safe. And Rachel, with the emotional complexities of a salt shaker. Now there's a life. Sometimes I remember our hope chests and want to laugh, for how prophetic they were. Rachel fiercely putting in overtime, foreshadowing a marital track record distinguished for quantity if not quality. Ruth May exempt for all time. My own tablecloth, undertaken reluctantly but in the long run drawing out my most dedicated efforts. And Adah, crocheting black borders on napkins and tossing them to the wind.

  But we've all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

  "Be kind to yourself," he says softly in my ear, and I ask him, How is that possible? I rock back and forth on my chair like a baby, craving so many impossible things: justice, forgiveness, redemption. I crave to stop bearing all the wounds of this place on my own narrow body. But I also want to be a person who stays, who goes on feeling anguish where anguish is due. I want to belong somewhere, damn it. To scrub the hundred years' war off this white skin till there's nothing left and I can walk out among my neighbors wearing raw sinew and bone, like they do.

  Most of all, my white skin craves to be touched and held by the one man on earth I know has forgiven me for it.-. � :

  Rachel Price

  THE EQUATORIAL 1984

  THIS WAS THE FIRST and the absolute last time I am going to participate within a reunion of my sisters. I've just returned from a rendezvous with Leah and Adah that was simply a sensational failure. Leah was the brainchild of the whole trip. She said the last month of waiting for her husband to get out of prison was going to kill her if she didn't get out of there and do something. The last time he was getting let out, I guess they ended up making him stay another year at the last minute, which would be a disappointment, I'm sure. But really, if you commit a crime you have to pay the piper, what did she expect? Personally, I've had a few husbands that maybe weren't the top of the line, but a criminal, I just can't see. Well, each to his own, like they say. She's extra lonely now since her two older boys are trying out school in Atlanta so they won't get arrested, too, and the younger one is also staying there with Mother for the summer so Leah could be free to mastermind this trip. Which, to tell you the truth, she mostly just arranged for the sole purpose of getting a Land Rover from America to Kinshasa, where she and Anatole have the crackpot scheme of setting up a farm commune in the southern part and then going over to the Angola side as soon as it's safe, which from what I hear is going to be no time this century. Besides, Angola is an extremely Communistic

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  nation if you ask me. But does Mother care about this? Her own daughter planning to move to a communistic nation where the roads are practically made of wall-to-wall land mines? Why no! She and her friends raised the money and bought a good Land Rover with a rebuilt engine in Atlanta. Which, by the way, Mother's group has never raised one red cent for me, to help put in upstairs plumbing at the Equatorial, for example. But who's complaining?

  I only went because a friend of mine had recently died of his long illness and I was feeling at loose odds and ends. Geoffrey definitely was talking marriage, before he got so ill. He was just the nicest gentleman and very well to do. Geoffrey ran a touristic safari business in Kenya, which was how we met, in a very romantic way. But he caught something very bad over there in Nairobi, plus he �was not all that young. Still, it shouldn't have happened to a better man. Not to mention me turning forty last year, which was no picnic, but people always guess me not a day over thirty so who's counting? Anyway I figured Leah and I could tell each other our troubles, since misery loves company, even though she has a husband that is still alive at least, which is more than I can say.

  The game plan was for Adah to ride over on the boat to Spain with the Land Rover, and drive to West Africa. Adah driving, I just couldn't picture. I still kept picturing her all crippled up, even though Mother had written me that no, Adah has truly had a miracle recovery. So we were all to meet up there in Senegal and travel around for a few weeks seeing the sights. Then Adah would fly home, and Leah and I would drive as far as Brazzaville together for safety's sake, although if you ask me two women traveling alone are twice as much trouble as one. Especially my sister and me! We ended up not speaking through the whole entirety of Cameroon and most of Gabon. Anatole, fresh out of the hoosegow, met us in Brazzaville and they drove straight back home to Kinshasa. Boy, did she throw her arms around him at the ferry station, kissing right out in front of everybody, for a lot longer than you'd care to think. Then off they went holding hands like a pair of teenagers, yakety-yak, talking to each other in something Congolese.They did it expressly

  �."� ,EXODUS 477

  to exclude me from the conversation, I think. Which is not easy for someone who speaks three languages, as I do.

  Good-bye and none too soon, is what I say. Leah was like a house on fire for the last hundred miles of the trip. She'd made a longdistance call from Libreville to make sure he was getting let out the next day for sure, and boy, did she make a beeline after that. She couldn't even bother herself to come up and see the Equatorial� even though we were only half a day's drive away! And me a bereaved widow, practically. I can't forgive that in my own sister. She said she would only go if we went on down to Brazzaville first, and then brought Anatole with us. Well, I just couldn't say yes or no to that right away, I had to think. It's simply a far more delicate matter than she understands. We have a strict policy about who is allowed upstairs, and if you change it for one person then where does it end? I might have made an exception. But when I told her I had to think about it, Leah right away said, "Oh, no, don't bother. You have your standards of white supremacy to uphold, don't you?" and then climbed up on her high horse and stepped on the gas. So we just stopped talking, period. Believe me, we had a very long time to listen to the four-wheel-drive transmission and every bump in the road for the full length of two entire countries.

  When it was finally over I was so happy to get back to my own home-sweet-home I had a double vodka tonic, kicked off my shoes, turned up the tape player and danced the Pony right in the middle of the restaurant. We had a whole group of cotton buyers from Paris, if I remember correctly. I declared to my guests: "Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!"Then I kissed them all on their bald heads and gave them a round on the house.

  The trouble with my family is that since we hardly ever see each other, we have plenty of time to forget how much personality conflict we all have when it comes right down to it. Leah and Adah and I started bickering practically the minute we met up in Senegal. We could never even agree on where to go or stay or what to eat. Whenever we found any place that was just the teeniest step above

  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 478

  horrid, Leah felt it was too expensive. She and Anatole evidently have chosen to live like paupers. And Adah, helpful as always, would chime in with the list of what disease organisms were likely to be present. We argued about positively everything: even communism! Which you would think there was nothing to argue about. I merely gave Leah the very sensible advice that she should think twice about going to Angola because the Marxists are taking it over.

  "The Mbundu and the Kongo tribes have a long-standing civil war there, Rachel. Agostinho Neto led the Mbundu to victory, because he had the most popular support."

  "Well, for your information, Dr. Henry Kissinger himself says that Neto and them are followers of Karl Marx, and the other ones are pro-United States."

  "Imagine that," Leah said. "The Mbundu and Kongo people
have been at war with each other for the last six hundred years, and Dr. Henry Kissinger has at long last discovered the cause: the Kongo are pro-United States, and the Mbundu are followers of Karl Marx."

  "Hah!" Adah said. Her first actual unrehearsed syllable of the day. She talks now, but she still doesn't exactly throw words away.

  Adah was in the back, and Leah and me up front. I was doing most of the driving, since I'm used to it. I had to slow way down for a stop sign because the drivers in "West Africa were turning out to be as bad as the ones in Brazzaville. It was very hard to concentrate while my sisters were giving me a pop quiz on world democracy.

  "You two can just go ahead and laugh," I said. "But I read the papers. Ronald Reagan is keeping us safe from the socialistic dictators, and you should be grateful for it."

  "Socialistic dictators such as?"

  "I don't know. Karl Marx! Isn't he still in charge of Russia?"

  Adah was laughing so hard in the backseat I thought she was going to pee on herself.

  "Oh, Rachel, Rachel," Leah said. "Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with �who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who

  EXODUS 479

  owns the wealth of your nation, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?"

  "I never said I was the expert. I just said I read the papers."

  "Okay, let's take Patrice Lumumba, for example. Former Prime Minister of the Congo, his party elected by popular vote. He was a socialist who believed in democracy. Then he was murdered, and the CIA replaced him with Mobutu, a capitalist who believes in dictatorship. In the Punch and Judy program of American history, that's a happy ending."

  "Leah, for your information I am proud to be an American."

  Adah just snorted again, but Leah smacked her forehead. "How can you possibly say that? You haven't set foot there for half your life!"

  "I have retained my citizenship. I still put up the American flag in the bar and celebrate every single Fourth of July."

  "Impressive," Adah said.

  We were driving along the main dirt road that followed the coast toward Togo. There were long stretches of beach, with palm trees waving and little naked dark children against the white sand. It was like a picture postcard. I wished we could quit talking about ridiculous things and just enjoy ourselves. I don't know why Leah has to nag and nag.

  "For your information, Leah," I informed her, just to kind of close things off, "your precious Lumumba would have taken over and been just as bad a dictator as any of them. If the CIA and them got rid of him, they did it for democracy. Everybody alive says that."

  "Everybody alive," Adah said. "What did the dead ones say?"

  "Now, look, Rachel," Leah said. "You can get this. In a democracy, Lumumba should have been allowed to live longer than two months as head of state. The Congolese people would have gotten to see how they liked him, and if not, replaced him."

  Well, I just blew up at that. "These people here can't decide anything for themselves! I swear, my kitchen help still can't remember to use the omelet pan for an omelet! For God's sakes, Leah, you should know as well as I do how they are."

  "Yes, Rachel, I believe I married one of them."

  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 480

  I kept forgetting that. "Well, shut my mouth wide open."

  "As usual," Adah said.

  For the entire trip I think the three of us were all on speaking terms for only one complete afternoon. We'd got as far as Benin without killing each other, and Adah wanted to see the famous villages on stilts. But, wouldn't you know, the road to that was washed out. Leah and I tried to explain to her how in Africa the roads are here today, gone tomorrow. You are constantly seeing signs such as, "If this sign is under water the road is impassable," and so forth. That much we could agree on.

  So we ended up going to the ancient palace at Abomey, instead, which was the only tourist attraction for hundreds of miles around. We followed our map to Abomey, and luckily the road to it was still there. We parked in the center of town, which had big jacaranda trees and was very quaint. It was a cinch to find the ancient palace because it was surrounded by huge red mud walls and had a very grand entryway. Snoozing on a bench in the entrance we found an English-speaking guide who agreed to wake up and take us through on a tour. He explained how in former centuries, before the arrival of the French, the Abomey kings had enormous palaces and very nice clothes. They recorded their history in fabulous tapestries that hung on the palace walls, and had skillful knives and swords and such, which they used to conquer the neighboring tribes and enslave them. Oh, they just killed people right and left, he claimed, and then they'd put the skulls of their favorite enemies into their household decor. It's true! We saw every one of these things�the tapestries depicting violent acts and the swords and knives and even a throne with human skulls attached to the bottoms of all four legs, plated with bronze like keepsake baby shoes!

  "Why, that's just what I need for my lobby in the Equatorial," I joked, although the idea of those things being the former actual heads of living people was a bit much for three o'clock in the afternoon.

  This was no fairy-tale kingdom, let me tell you. They forced women into slave marriage with the King for the purpose of reproducing their babies at a high rate. One King would have, oh, fifty or

  ,. EXODUS 481 �

  a hundred wives, easy. More, if he was anything special. Or so the guide told us, maybe to impress us. To celebrate their occasions, he said, they'd just haul off and kill a bunch of their slaves, grind up all the blood and bones, and mix it up with mud for making more walls for their temples! And what's worse, whenever a King died, forty of his wives would have to be killed and buried with him!

  I had to stop the guide right there and ask him, "Now, would they be his favorite wives they'd bury with him, or the meanest ones, or what?"

  The guide said he thought probably it would have been the prettiest ones. Well, I can just imagine that! The King gets sick, all the wives would be letting their hair go and eating sweets day and night to wreck their figures.

  Even though Leah and I had been crabbing at each other all week, that afternoon in the palace at Abomey for some reason we all got quiet as dead bats. Now, I have been around: the racial rioting in South Africa, hosting embassy parties in Brazzaville, shopping in Paris and Brussels, the game animals in Kenya, I have seen it all. But that palace was something else. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. We walked through the narrow passages, admiring the artworks and shivering to see chunks of bone sticking out of the walls. Whatever we'd been fighting about seemed to fade for the moment with those dead jremains all around us. I shook from head to toe, even though the day was quite warm.

  Leah and Adah happened to be walking in front of me, probably to get away from the guide, because they like to have their own explanations for everything, and as I looked at them I was shocked to see how alike they were. They'd both bought wild-colored waxcloth shirts in the Senegal market, Adah to wear over her jeans and Leah to go with her long skirts (I personally see no need to go native, thanks very much, and will stick to my cotton knit), and Adah really doesn't limp a bit anymore, like Mother said. Plus she talks, which just goes to show you her childhood was not entirely on the up-and-up. She's exactly as tall as Leah now; too, which is simply unexplanatory. They hadn't seen each other for years, and

  THE POISONWOOD BIBLE 482

  EXODUS 483

  here they even showed up wearing the same hairstyle! Shoulder-length, pulled back, which is not even a regular fashion.

  Suddenly I realized they were talking about Father.

  "No, I'm sure it's true," Leah said. "I believe it was him. I think he really is dead."

  Well! This was news to me. I walked quickly to catch up, though I was still more or less of a third wheel. "You mean Father?" I asked. "Why didn't you say something, for heaven
's sake."

  "I guess I've been waiting for the right time, when we could talk," Leah said.

  Well, what did she think we'd been doing for the last five days but talk. "No time like the present," I said.

  She seemed to mill it over, and then stated it all as a matter of fact. "He's been up around Lusambo for the last five years, in one village and another. This past summer I ran into an agricultural agent who's been working up there, and he said he very definitely knew of Father. And that he's passed away."

  "Gosh, I didn't even know he'd moved," I said. "I figured he was still hanging around our old village all this time."

  "No, he's made his way up the Kasai River over the years, not making too many friends from what I hear. He hasn't been back to Kilanga, that much I know. We still have a lot of contact with Kilanga. Some of the people we knew are still there. An awful lot have died, too."

  "What do you mean? Who did we know?" I honestly couldn't think of a soul. We left, Axelroot left. The Underdowns went all the way back to Belgium, and they weren't even really there.

  "Why don't we talk about this later?" Leah said. "This place is already full of dead people.",. .,,.-' .�, �';,..�.

  Well, I couldn't argue with that. So we spent the rest of our paid-for tour in silence, walking through the ancient crumbling halls, trying not to look at the hunks of cream-colored bones in the walls.

  "Those are pearls that were his eyes," Adah said at one point, which is just the kind of thing she would say.i , "Full fathom five thy father lies," Leah said back to her. ^t; �

  What the heck that was about I just had to wonder. I sure didn't see any pearls. Those two were always connected in their own weird, special way. Even when they can't stand each other, they still always know what the other one's talking about when nobody else does. But I didn't let it bother me. I am certainly old enough to hold up my head and have my own personal adventures in life. I dreamed I toured the Ancient Palace of Abomey in my Maiden-form Bra!

  Maybe once upon a time I was a little jealous of Leah and Adah, being twins. But no matter how much they might get to looking and sounding alike, as grown-ups, I could see they were still as different on the inside as night and day. And I am different too, not night or day either one but something else altogether, like the Fourth of July. So there we were: night, day, and the Fourth of July, and just for a moment there was a peace treaty.