Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

“There is news, Beene, since you asked for it. I’m afraid it is not very good. I came to talk to your father.”

“He’s not here. I can tell him whatever it is, though.”

I wondered if Anatole would consider me a sufficient messenger. I’d noticed Congolese men didn’t treat even their own wives and daughters as if they were very sensible or important. Though as far as I could see the wives and daughters did just about all the work.

But Anatole apparently felt I could be spoken to. “Do you know where Katanga Province is?”

“In the south,” I said. “Where all the diamond mines are.” I’d overheard talk of it when Mr. Axelroot flew Father and me back from Leopoldville. Evidently Mr. Axelroot went there often. So I was guessing, but I guessed with my father’s trademark confidence.

“Diamonds, yes,” Anatole said. “Also cobalt and copper and zinc. Everything my country has that your country wants.”

This made me feel edgy. “Did we do something bad?”

“Not you, Beene.”

Not me, not me! My heart rejoiced at that, though I couldn’t say why.

“But, yes, there is a bad business going on,” he said. “Do you know the name Moise Tshombe?”

I might have heard it, but -wasn’t sure. I started to nod, but then admitted, “No.” I decided right then to stop pretending I knew more than I did. I would be myself, Leah Price, eager to learn all there is to know. Watching my father, I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

“Moise Tshombe is leader of the Lunda tribe. For all practical purpose he is leader of Katanga Province. And since a few days ago, leader of his own nation of Katanga. He declared it separate from the Republic of Congo.”

“What? Why?”

“Now he can make his own business with the Belgians and Americans, you see. With all his minerals. Some of your countrymen have given a lot of encouragement to his decision.”

“Why can’t they just make their deals with Lumumba? He’s the one that got elected. They ought to know that.”

“They know. But Lumumba is not eager to give away the store. His loyalty is with his countrymen. He believes in a unified Congo for the Congolese, and he knows that every Katanga diamond from the south can pay a teacher’s salary in Leopoldville, or feed a village ofWarega children in the north.”

I felt both embarrassed and confused. “Why would the businessmen take Congo’s diamonds away? And what are Americans doing down there anyhow? I thought the Congo belonged to Belgium. I mean before.”

Anatole frowned. “The Congo is the Congo’s and ever has been.”

“Well, I know that. But-”

“Open your eyes, Beene. Look at your neighbors. Did they ever belong to Belgium?” He pointed across our yard and through the trees toward Mama Mwanza’s house.. ‘

I’d said a stupid thing, and felt terrible. I looked, as he commanded: Mama Mwanza with her disfigured legs and her small, noble head both wrapped in bright yellow calico. In the hard-packed dirt she sat as if planted there, in front of a little fire that licked at her dented cooking can. She leaned back on her hands and raised her face to the sky, shouting her bidding, and a chorus of halfhearted answers came back from her boys inside the mud-thatch house. Near the open doorway, the two older daughters stood pounding manioc in the tall wooden mortar. As one girl raised her pounding club the other girl’s went down into the narrow hole-up and down, a perfect, even rhythm like the pumping of pistons. I’d watched them time and again, attracted so to that dance of straight backs and muscled black arms. I envied these daughters, who worked together in such perfect synchrony. It’s what Adah and I might have felt, if we hadn’t gotten all snared in the ropes of guilt and unfair advantage. Now our whole family was at odds, it seemed: Mother against Father, Rachel against both of them, Adah against the world, Ruth May pulling helplessly at anyone who came near, and me trying my best to stay on Father’s side.

We were tangled in such knots of resentment we hardly understood them.

“Two of her children died in the epidemic,” I said.

“I know.”

Of course he knew. Our village was small, and Anatole knew every child by name. “It’s a terrible shame,” I offered, inadequately. He merely agreed, “E-e.” “Children should never have to die.”

“No. But if they never did, children would not be so precious.” “Anatole! Would you say that if your own children died?” “Of course not. But it is true, nevertheless. Also if everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure.” “But everybody wants to live a long time. It’s only fair.” “Fair to want, e-e. But not fair to get. Just think how it would be if all the great-grandparents still were walking around. The village would be crowded with cross old people arguing over who has the most ungrateful sons and aching bones, and always eating up the food before the children could get to the table.”

“It sounds like a church social back in Georgia,” I said. Anatole laughed.

Mama Mwanza shouted again and clapped her hands, bringing a reluctant son out of the house, dragging the flat, pinkish soles of his feet. Then I laughed, too, just because people young and old are more or less the same everywhere. I let myself breathe out, feeling less like one of Anatole’s schoolboys taking a scolding.

“Do you see that, Beene? That is Congo. Not minerals and glittering rocks with no hearts, these things that are traded behind our backs. The Congo is us.”

“I know.”

“Who owns it, do you suppose?” I did not hazard a guess.

“I am sorry to say, those men making their agreements in Katanga just now are accustomed to getting what they want.”

I drew the edge of the comb slowly down the center of Ruth May’s head, making a careful part. Father had said the slums outside Leopoldville would be set right by American aid, after Independence. Maybe I was foolish to believe him. There were shanties just as poor in Georgia, on the edge of Atlanta, where black and white divided, and that was smack in the middle of America.

“Can you just do that, -what they did down there? Announce your own country?” I asked.

“Prime Minister Lumumba says no, absolutely not. He has asked the United Nations to bring an army to restore unity.” “Is there going to be a war?”

“There is already a kind of war, I think. Moise Tshombe has Belgians and mercenary soldiers working for him. I don’t think they will leave without a fight. And Katanga is not the only place where they are throwing stones. There is a different war in Matadi, Thysville, Boende, Leopoldville. People are very angry at the Europeans. They are even hurting women and little children.”

“What are they so mad at the white people for?” Anatole sighed. “Those are big cities. Where the boa and the hen curl up together, there is only trouble. People have seen too much of the Europeans and all the things they had. They imagined after Independence life would immediately become fair.” “Can’t they be patient?”

“Could you be? If your belly was empty and you saw whole baskets of bread on the other side of a window, would you continue “waiting patiently, Beene? Or would you throw a rock?”

My belly is empty, I thought of telling Anatole. “I don’t know,” I confessed. I thought of the Underdowns’ home in Leopoldville with its Persian rugs and silver tea service and chocolate cookies, surrounded by miles of tin shanties and hunger. Perhaps there were boys stomping barefoot through that house right now, ransacking the near-empty pantry and setting fire to the curtains in a kitchen that still smelled of Mrs. Underdown’s disinfectant soap. I couldn’t say who was wrong or right. I did see what Anatole meant about the snakes and hens too close together in a place like that: you could trace the belly scales of hate, and come up howling. I glanced nervously at our own house, with no rugs or tea service, but how much did that matter? Would Jesus protect us? When He looked in our hearts to weigh our worth, would he find love for our Congolese neighbors, or disdain?