Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Anatole wrote in his note that here was his best student and we would soon see why. We did. The day Nelson came to us he only spoke, “How are you, thank you please,” for English, but after a few weeks he could say about anything that mattered, without turning it all on its head the way Mama Tataba used to. I would say Nelson is gifted. But I’ll tell you what, gifted doesn’t count for a hill of beans in the Congo, where even somebody as smart as Nelson isn’t allowed to go to college, any more than us Price girls are. According to the Underdowns, the Belgians are bent on protecting against independent thought on native ground.

If that is so, I wonder about Anatole-how the Underdowns got away with putting him in as a schoolteacher, for instance. I have scenes in my mind sometimes where I ask him. When my sisters and I are lying down after lunch and my mind is idle, I think of these scenes. Anatole and I are walking on the path toward the river. There is some good reason we’re doing this, either he’s going to help me carry something home or maybe he invited me to discuss some point of the Scripture he’s not totally clear on. And so there we are, and we talk. In my imaginary scene, Father has forgiven Anatole and encourages his friendship with our family. Anatole has a very understanding smile, with a slight gap between his perfect front teeth, and I imagine feeling so encouraged by that smile I even get up the nerve to ask him about his amazing face: how did they make every scar so perfectly straight? Did it hurt very much? And then he tells me about the rubber plantations. What were they like? I read in a book that they cut off the workers’ hands if they hadn’t collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled up like a mess of fish. Could this be true of civilized white Christians?

In my imagination Anatole and I talk in English, though in real life he mostly speaks Kikongo to his schoolboys. His Kikongo accent is different from everyone else’s-even I can hear that. He pulls his mouth into broad, exact shapes around his teeth as if he’s forever worried about being misunderstood. I think Anatole helps out our family because he is an outsider here too, like us. He can sympathize with our predicament. And Father does seem grateful that he’s still willing to translate the sermons, even after the two of them had words. Anatole could be my father’s friend, if only he had a better grasp of the Scripture.

We were stumped as to why he was kind enough to send us Nelson, though. The first time Nelson fetched the water and boiled it by himself Mother was so grateful she sat down in a chair and cried. A prize pupil is a very large gift. My theory is it was because of two things Anatole saw in our house: one, plenty of books for a smart boy to read, even if he can’t go to school anymore. And two, we needed the help about as badly as the children of Moses needed Moses. Somewhere around Thanksgiving, Mother had begun praying out loud in front of my father for the Lord to please deliver us out of here all in one piece. He did not care for her displays of faltering faith, and said so. It’s true Ruth May gave us a bad scare, but he reminded Mother sensibly that a child can break an arm in Georgia or Kansas City or anywhere. And to tell the truth, if any of us was meant to do it, it was Ruth May. She tears through her life like she plans on living out the whole thing before she hits twenty. And I hate to say it but Adah is just as ornery and bent on destruction, in her own slowpoke way. No one tells her to go off trailing through the jungle all alone. She could have stayed with me. The Lord is our Shepherd and the very least we sheep can do is keep up with the flock, by our own devices, I should think. Especially since we are practically grown-ups now, to hear others tell it. You always see twins dolled up together as kids, but you never see two grown women running around in identical outfits, holding hands. Are Adah and I expected to go on being twin sisters forever? Nevertheless, we both had to do the Verse, Genesis 4, about Cain and Abel, after her so-called brush with the lion, and what with all that and the broken arm, Mother feared for our lives with fresh vigor. The rainy season had gotten heavier and the whole village was coming down with the kakakaka. We’d thought this just meant “hurry up.” When Mama Mwanza told us all her children were getting it, we thought she meant they were getting restless or were finally scolded into doing their chores. But Nelson said, “No, no, Mama Price, kakakaka!” Evidently it’s a disease where you have to go to the bathroom a thousand times a day. (He acted it out in a pantomime that made Ruth May laugh fiercely.) He said you go so many times you don’t have anything left of your insides.Then the children sometimes will die. Well, Nelson says a lot of things. For example, if you run across two sticks in the shape of an X you have to hop over it backwards on your left foot. So we didn’t know whether to believe him about the disease. But then, next thing we knew, the little house right down the road from us turned up with a funeral arch made of braided palm fronds and flowers and sad, sad faces in the yard. It wasn’t a baby dead, but the mother of them all, who were left looking just that much more skinny and forlorn, as if the wind got knocked out of the family when the mama went. You do have to wonder what she died of, and if it’s catching.

Well, that put Mother in a whole new frame of mind. Contagion, why, this was worse than snakes, since you couldn’t see it coming! She dreamed up a hundred and one excuses for keeping us inside the house even when it wasn’t raining. She invented “rest time,” a period of endless inactivity stretching out after school and lunch, in which we were ordered to stay in our beds, under our mosquito-net canopies. Mother called it siesta time, which at first I mistook as, fiesta time, a puzzlement to me since it was not at all festive. Ruth May usually fell asleep, open-mouthed in the heat, with her hair plastered down across her sweaty face like the poster child for fever. The rest of us just sweated like swine as we sprawled side by side in our metal-frame beds, separated by the ghostly walls of our mosquito nets, insulting each other out of a sense of general outrage and wishing we could get up. I had nothing to read but The Bobbsey Twins in Eskimo Land, a childish book with nothing whatsoever to hold my interest. I just envied those dumb Bobbseys for having a superior adventure to ours, in that cool, snowy place, where no one had to endure an enforced fiesta.

I missed my freedom. There were so many things I needed to keep up with in the village. Foremost among them,EebenAxelroot. He was up to something. The last time Adah and I spied down there we heard the radio shrieking bloody murder, and for once we actually got to see him answer it. He rolled off his cot and muttered words I knew I could go to hell just for hearing. He knelt by the roaring footlocker and put a wire contraption against his head. He said, “Got it,” many times over, and “As good as dead if they do, sir.” Oh, mercy, I had to tear myself away!

And now I might never find out who or what was as good as dead, for it looked as if we were going to have to languish on our cots forever while the rain poured down. At least Rachel was useful, for once in her life. In desperate straits she can make us laugh, with her main talent being radio commercials oozed out in a fabulous fashion-model voice: “Medically tested Odo-ro-no, stops underarm odor and moisture at the source!” She’d toss her head then and throw her arms into the air, exposing her dark-stained underarms. She also did various hair products, swirling her white mane into a cow pie on top of her head, “For today’s new look of luxury! “And she loved to remind us of Carnation instant nonfat dry milk (“New magic crystals dissolve instantly!”), which had become our mainstay food and did not dissolve instantly but clotted up like white blood in our glasses. We were all so sick of those crystallized lumps they choked us in our dreams.