Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Mama says there’s another man and lady with two little girls and a baby living in our house in Bethlehem, Georgia. The man is the minister while we’re gone. I hope they know about Father’s chair

because if they sit in it, oh, boy. They’ll get it.

Adah

IT WAS NEITHER DIABOLICAL NOR DIVINE; it but shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. So feel I. Living in the Congo shakes open the prison house of my disposition and lets all the wicked hoodoo Adahs run forth.

To amuse my depraved Ada self during homework time I wrote down that quote from memory on a small triangular piece of paper and passed it to Leah, with the query: FROM WHAT BOOK OF THE BIBLE? Leah fancies herself Our Father’s star pupil in matters Biblical. Star Pupil: Lipup Rats. Miss Rat-pup read the quote, nodding solemnly, and wrote underneath, The book of Luke. I’m not sure which verse.

Hah! I can laugh very hard without even smiling on the outside.

The quote is from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I have read many times. I have a strong sympathy for Dr. Jekyll’s dark desires and for Mr. Hyde’s crooked body.

Before we fled Bethlehem’s drear libraries I had also recently read The Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost, which have weaker plot lines than Dr. Jekyll, and many other books Our Father does not know about, including the poems of Miss Emily Dickinson and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque by Edgar Allan Poe. I am fond of Mr. Poe and his telltale Raven: Erom Reven!

Mother is the one who notices, and tells naught. She started it all, reading the Psalms and various Family Classics aloud to Leah and me. Mother has a pagan’s appreciation for the Bible, being devoted to such phrases as “purge me with hyssop,” and “strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round,” and “thou hast put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness.” Likely she would run through the fields dressed in sackcloth, hunting hyssop amongst the wild bulls, if not obligated to the higher plane of Motherhood. She is especially beset by Leah’s and my status as exceptional children. When we entered the first grade, we were examined by the spinster principal of Bethlehem Elementary, Miss Leep, who announced that we were gifted: Leah, on account of her nonchalant dazzling scores on reading-comprehension tests, and myself by association, as I am presumed to have the same brain insofar as the intact parts go. This was a shock to Mother, who up to that point had offered us no education higher than the names of the wildflowers growing in the roadside ditches where we walked barefoot (when Our Father’s scorching eyes were not upon us: Sun o put o not upon us!) from the parsonage to the corner market. My earliest Mother memories lie laughing blue-eyed in the grass, child herself, rolling side to side as Rachel and Leah decorated her all over with purple-clover jewelry. Once Leah and I were gifted, though, everything changed. Mother seemed sobered by this news from our teachers, as if she had earned a special punishment from God. She became secretive and efficient. She reined in our nature walks and settled down to business with a library card.

She need not have troubled with secrecy, for all Our Father noticed. On first hearing Miss Leep’s news he merely rolled his eyes, as if two dogs in his yard had reportedly been caught whistling “Dixie.” He warned Mother not to flout God’s Will by expecting too much for us. “Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,” he still loves to say, as often as possible. “It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.”

And so I shall never have opportunity to have my leather wrecked by college, but I do owe a great debt to Miss Leep for saving me from the elementary discard heap. A principal less observant would have placed Leah in Gifted, and Adah in Special Ed with the mongoloids and all six of Bethlehem’s thumb-sucking, ear-pulling Crawley children, and there would I remain, to learn how to pull my own ear. Overjoyed, null and void, Mongoloid. I still have a fellow feeling for that almond-tasting word.

Oh, but it did unsettle the matrons of Bethlehem to see the poor thing boosted into a class ahead of their own children, there to become dazzling slick-quick at mathematics. In third grade I began to sum up our grocery bill in my head, silently write it down and hand it over, faster than Delma Royce could total it on her cash register. This became a famous event and never failed to draw a crowd. I had no idea why. I merely felt drawn in by those rattling, loose numbers needing their call to order. No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.

My hobby is to ignore the awards and excel when I choose. I can read and write French, which in Kilanga is spoken by all who ever passed through the Underdowns’ school. My sisters seem not to have slowed down long enough to learn French. Speaking, as I said-along with the rest of life’s acrobatics-can be seen in a certain light as a distraction.

When I finish reading a book from front to back, I read it back to front. It is a different book, back to front, and you can learn new things from it. It from things new learn can you and front to back book different a is it?

You can agree or not, as you like. This is another way to read it, although I am told a normal brain will not grasp it: Ti morf sgniht wen nrael nac uoy dna tnorf ot kcab koob tnereffid a si ti. The normal, I understand, can see words my way only if they are adequately poetic: Poor Dan is in a droop.

My own name, as I am accustomed to think of it, is Ecirp Nelle Hada. Sometimes I write it this way without thinking, and people turn up startled. To them I am only Adah or, to my sisters sometimes, the drear monosyllabic Ade, lemonade, Band-Aid, frayed blockade, switchblade renegade, call a spade a spade.

I prefer Ada as it goes either way, like me. I am a perfect palindrome. Damn mad! Across the cover of my notebook I have written as a warning to others:

ELAPSED OR ESTEEMED, ALL ADE MEETS ERODES PALE!

For my twin sister’s name I prefer the spelling Lee, as that makes her-from the back-court position from which I generally watch her-the slippery length of muscle that she is.

The Congo is a fine place to learn how to read the same book many times. When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.

When the rainy season fell on us in Kilanga, it fell like a plague. We were warned to expect rain in October, but at the close of July- surprising no one in Kilanga but ourselves-the serene heavens above began to dump buckets. Stekcub pmud! It rained pitchforks, as Mother says. It rained cats and dogs frogs bogs then it rained snakes and lizards. A pestilence of rain we received, the likes of which we had never seen or dreamed about in Georgia.

Under the eave of the porch our charge Methuselah screamed like a drowning man in his cage. Methuselah is an African Grey parrot with a fine scaly look to his head, a sharp skeptical eye like Miss Leep’s, and a scarlet tail. He resides in a remarkable bamboo cage as tall as Ruth May. His perch is a section of a sturdy old-fashioned yardstick, triangular in cross-section. Long ago someone broke off the inches nineteen through thirty-six and assigned these to Methuselah for the conduct of his affairs.