Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

It was beyond me to weigh such matters, when my doorstep harbored snakes that could knock a child dead by spitting in her eyes.

But Nathan wouldn’t hear my worries. For him, our life was as simple as paying in cash and sticking the receipt in your breast pocket: we had the Lord’s protection, he said, because we came to Africa in His service.Yet we sang in church “Tata Nzolo”! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandary. I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house.You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment. Under that uncertain roof, where was the place for my girls? No wonder they hardly seemed to love me half the time-I couldn’t step in front of my husband to shelter them from his scorching light. They were expected to look straight at him and go blind.

Nathan, meanwhile, wrapped himself up in the salvation of Kilanga. Nathan as a boy played football on his high school team in Killdeer, Mississippi, with great success evidently, and expected his winning season to continue ever after. He could not abide losing or backing down. I think he was well inclined toward stubbornness, and contemptuous of failure, long before his conscription into the war and the strange circumstances that discharged him from it. After that, hounded by what happened in a Philippine jungle and the ghosts of a thousand men who didn’t escape it, his steadfast disdain for cowardice turned to obsession. It’s hard to imagine a mortal man more unwilling to change his course than Nathan Price. He couldn’t begin to comprehend, now, how far off the track he was with his baptismal fixation. The village chief, Tata Ndu, was loudly warning people away from the church on the grounds that Nathan wanted to feed their children to the crocodiles. Even Nathan might have recognized this was a circumstance that called for reconciliation.

But reconciliation with Tata Ndu was a mighty cross to bear. When he granted us an audience, he sat in a chair in his front yard looking away from us. He adjusted his tall hat made of sisal fibers. He took off and examined his large black glasses frames (which bore no lenses), and made every other effort at scholarly disinterest, while Nathan talked. He flicked at flies with the official staff of his office-some sort of stiffened animal tail that ends in a silky white tassel. During the second interview, Nathan even retracted baptism as a specific program, and suggested we might organize some kind of sprinkling.

We eventually received a formal reply, via the elder Ndu son, stating that sprinkling was all very well but the previous Brother Fowles had disturbed the chief with peculiar ideas about having only one wife at a time. Imagine, Tata Ndu said, a shamefaced chief who could only afford one single wife! The chief expected us to disavow any such absurdities before he could endorse our church.

My steadfast husband tore his hair in private. Without the chief’s blessing he could have no congregation. Nathan burned. There is no other way to say it. Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all, he declared to the sky, squinting up at God and demanding justice. I held him in my arms at night and saw parts of his soul turn to ash. Then I saw him reborn, with a stone in place of his heart. Nathan would accept no more compromises. God was testing him like Job, he declared, and the point of that particular parable was that Job had done no wrong to begin with. Nathan felt it had been a mistake to bend his will, in any way, to Africa. To reshape his garden into mounds; to submit to Tata Ndu on the subject of river baptism; to listen at all to Tata Ndu or even the rantings of Mama Tataba. It had all been a test of Nathan’s strength, and God was displeased with the outcome. He would not fail again.

He noticed the children less and less. He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded. Their individual laughter he couldn’t recognize, nor their anguish. He never saw how Adah chose her own exile; how Rachel was dying for the normal life of slumber parties and record albums she was missing. And poor Leah. Leah followed him like an underpaid waitress hoping for the tip. It broke my heart. I sent her away from him on every pretense I knew. It did no good.

While my husband’s intentions crystallized as rock salt, and while I preoccupied myself with private survival, the Congo breathed behind the curtain of forest, preparing to roll over us like a river. My soul was gathered with sinners and bloody men, and all I was thinking of was how to get MamaTataba to come back, or what we should have brought from Georgia. I was blinded from the constant looking back: Lot’s wife. I only ever saw the gathering clouds.

me

Things We Learned

KlLANGA

JUNE 30, 1960

Leah Price

IN THE BEGINNING we were just about in the same boat as Adam and Eve. We had to learn the names of everything. Nkoko, mongo, zulu- river, mountain, sky-everything must be called out from the void by the word we use to claim it. All God’s creatures have names, whether they slither across our path or show up for sale at our front stoop: bushbuck, mongoose, tarantula, cobra, the red-and-black monkey called ngonndo, geckos scurrying up the walls. Nile perch and nkyende and electric eel dragged from the river. Akala, nkento, a-ana: man, woman, and child. And everything that grows: frangipani, jacaranda, mangwansi beans, sugarcane, breadfruit, bird of paradise. Nguba is peanut (close to what we called them at home, goober peas!); malala are the oranges with blood-red juice; mankondo are bananas. Nanasi is a pineapple, and nanasi mputu means “poor man’s pineapple”: a papaya. All these things grow wild! Our very own backyard resembles the Garden of Eden. I copy down each new word in my school notebook and vow to remember it always, when I am a grown-up American lady with a backyard garden of my own. I shall tell all the world the lessons I learned in Africa.

“We’ve learned from the books left behind by Brother Fowles, field guides to the mammals and birds and the Lepidoptera, which are the butterflies. And we’ve learned from anyone (mostly children) who will talk to us and point at the same time. We’ve even had a surprise or two from our own mother, who grew up way deeper in Dixie than we did. As the buds on the trees turn to flowers, she raises her black eyebrows in surprise above her wide blue eyes and declares: hougainvillea, hibiscus, why, tree of heaven! Who would have thought Mother knew her trees? And the fruits-mango, guava, avocado-these we had barely glimpsed before, in the big Kroger store in Atlanta, yet now the trees reach right down and deliver such exotic prizes straight into our hands! That’s one more thing to remember -when I’m grown, to tell about the Congo: how the mango fruits hung -way down on long, long stems like extension cords. I believe God felt sorry for the Africans after putting the coconut so far out of reach, and aimed to make the mango easier to get a hand on.

I look hard at everything, and blink, as if my two eyes were a Brownie camera taking photographs to carry back. At the people, too, who have names to be learned. Gradually we’ve begun to call out to our neighbors. Closest by is poor lame Mama Mwanza, who scurries down the road on her hands. And Mama Nguza, who walks with her head held strangely high on account of the giant goiter nestled like a goose egg under her chin.Tata Boanda, the old fisherman, goes out in his boat every morning in the brightest red pair of trousers you ever saw in your life. People wear the same thing day in and day out, and that’s how we recognize them, by and large. (Mother says if they really wanted to put one over on us, they’d all swap outfits for a day.) On cool mornings Tata Boanda also wears a light green sweater with a white border on the placket-he’s quite a sight, with his muscular chest as manly as all get-out framed by the V-neck of a ladies’-wear sweater! But if you think about it, how would he or anyone here ever know it’s a lady’s sweater? How do I even know? Because of the styling, though it’s nothing you could plainly describe. So is it even a lady’s sweater, here in the Congo? I wonder.