Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

This is off the subject but do you know who I always really felt for? Those soldier boys that went back to the States after Vietnam. I read about that. Everybody was crying, “Peace, brother! “And here they’d been in the jungle watching fungus eat up the dead bodies. I know just how they felt.

Personally, I didn’t need that. I’m the type of person where you just never look back. And I have become a success in my own right. I’ve had opportunities as a woman of the world. An ambassador’s wife-imagine that! Those girls back in Bethlehem must be getting old and gray, still loading their Maytags and running after their kids or even grandkids by now and still -wishing they were Brigitte Bardot, whereas I have actually been in the Foreign Service.

I never was able to have children. That is one thing I do regret. I have had very bad female problems on account of an infection I contracted from Eeben Axelroot. Like I said, I paid my price with him.

There is never a dull moment here at the Equatorial, though. Who needs children when you have monkeys rushing into the dining room to steal the very food off your guests’ plates! This has happened on more than one occasion. Among the variety of animals I keep in cages in the garden I have four monkeys and a bat-eared fox that will escape on the slightest pretense from the boy who cleans out the cages. Into the restaurant they’ll run screaming, the poor fox running for his life but the monkeys all too easily diverted by the sight of some fresh fruit. They’ll even pause to grab a bottle of beer and drink it down! One time I returned from a trip to the market to find my two vervet monkeys, Princess Grace and General Mills, teetering drunk on a table while a group of German coffee-plantation owners sang “Roll Out the Barrel!” Well, I’ll tell you. I tolerate just about any kind of good times my guests wish to have, since that’s how we keep our heads above the water in this business. But I made those German gentlemen pay for the damage.

Every so often a group of fellows will stop by in the afternoon on a sightseeing tour, and receive a mistaken impression of my establishment. This only happens with newcomers who are unfamiliar with the Equatorial. They take one look at me stretched out by the pool with all the keys on a chain around my neck, and one look at my pretty young cooks and chambermaids on their afternoon break, lounging against the patio wall between tie geraniums. And guess what: they’ll take me for the madam of a whorehouse! Believe you me, I give them a piece of my mind. If tliis looks like a house of prostitution to you, I tell them, that just shows the quality of your own moral fiber.

I have to admit, though, it’s funny in a certain way. I am no longer as young as I might have been, but if I do say so, I have never let myself go. I guess I should be flattered if some fellow peeks around the garden wall and thinks he spies Jezebel. Oh, if Father could see me now, wouldn’t he give me The Verse!

I’m afraid all those childhood lessons in holiness slid off me like hot butter off the griddle. I sometimes wonder if dear old Dad is turning in his grave (or whatever he’s in). I’m sure he expected me to grow up as a nice church lady with cute little hits, organizing good deeds. But sometimes life doesn’t give you all that many chances at being good. Not here, anyway. Even Father learned that one the hard way. He came on strong, thinking he’d save the children, and what does he do but lose his own? That’s the lesson, right there. If you take a bunch of practically grown, red-blooded daughters to Africa, don’t you think at least some of them are going to marry or what have you, and end up staying? You can’t just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back. Oh, I see it time and again with the gentlemen who come through here on business. Some fellow thinks he’s going to be the master of Africa and winds up with his nice European-tailored suit rumpled in a corner and his wits half cracked from the filaires itching under his skin. If it was as easy as they thought it was going to IF, why, they’d be done by now, and Africa would look just like America with more palm trees. Instead, most of it still looks exactly how it did a zillion years ago. Whereas, if you think about it, the Africans are running all over America right now, having riots for their civil rights and predominating the sports and popular-music industries.

From the very first moment I set foot in the Congo, I could see we were not in charge. We got swept up with those people that took us to the church for all their half-naked dancing and goat meat with the hair still on, and I said to myself: this little trip is going to be the ruin of the Price family as we know it. And, boy, was it ever. Father’s mistake, see, was to try to convert the whole entire shebang over into just his exact way of thinking. He always said, “Girls, you choose your path and stick to it and suffer your consequences!” Well. If he’s finally dead now and laid to rest in some African voodoo cemetery, or worse yet eaten up by the wild animals, well, amen. I guess that is about as consequential as it gets.

The way I see Africa, you don’t have to like it but you sure have to admit it’s out there. You have your way of thinking and it has its, and never the train ye shall meet! You just don’t let it influence your mind. If there’s ugly things going on out there, well, you put a good stout lock on your door and check it twice before you go to sleep. You focus on getting your own one little place set up perfect, as I have done, and you’ll see. Other people’s worries do not necessarily have to drag you down.

I amaze myself sometimes at what I have personally been through and still remain in one piece. Sometimes I really do think I owe the secret of my success to that little book I read long ago called How to Survive 101 Calamities. Simple remedies for dire situations, that’s the lesson. In a falling elevator, try to climb up on the person nearby so their body will cushion your landing. Or in a crowded theater when everybody’s hightailing it for the fire exit, stick your elbows hard into the ribs of your neighbors to wedge yourself in, then pick up your feet so you won’t get trampled. That is how people frequently lose their lives in a riot: somebody steps on your heel, then walks right up till you’re flat and they’re standing on you. That’s what you get for trying to stand on your own two feet-you end up getting crushed!

So that’s my advice. Let others do the pushing and shoving, and you just ride along. In the end, the neck you save will be your own. Perhaps I sound un-Christian, but let’s face it, when I step outside

my own little world at night and listen to the sounds out there in the dark, what I feel down in my bones is that this is not a Christian kind of place. This is darkest Africa, where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up.

If you ask me, that’s how it is and ever shall be. You stick out your elbows, and hold yourself up.

Leah Price

SANZA POMBO, ANGOLA

ONCE UPON A TIME,” Anatole says in the dark, and I close my eyes and fly away on his stories. It’s almost a shock to be alone together in our bed, practically elderly, after almost thirty years of little elbows and heels and hungry mouths. When Taniel turned ten he abandoned us for a cot of his own, full of rocks that fall out of his pockets. Most boys his age still sleep on the pile of their families, but Taniel was adamant: “My brothers have beds to themselves!” (He doesn’t realize they’ve moved on from solitude-even Martin now at college has a girlfriend.) With his curly head cocked forward bent on keeping up and trying to eat the world in one bite, he takes my breath away. He’s so much like Ruth May.