Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

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

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 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.”

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!