Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Adah

TATA JESUS is BANGALA!” declares the Reverend every Sunday at the end of his sermon. More and more, mistrusting his interpreters, he tries to speak in Kikongo. He throws back his head and shouts these words to the sky, while his lambs sit scratching themselves in wonder. Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! for Jesus will make you itch like nobody’s business.

And while Our Father was preaching the gospel of poisonwood, his own daughter Ruth May rose from the dead. Our Father did not particularly notice. Perhaps he is unimpressed because he assumed all along this would happen. His confidence in the Lord is exceptional. Dog ho! Evol’s dog! The Lord, however, may or may not be aware that our mother assisted this miracle by forcing Ruth May to eat the same pills twice.

Sllip emas. There is no stepping in the same river twice. So say the Greek philosophers, and the crocodiles make sure. Ruth May is not the same Ruth May she was. Yam Htur. None of us is the same: Lehcar, Hael, Hada. Annaelro. Only Nahtan remains essentially himself, the same man however you look at him. The others of us have two sides. We go to bed ourselves and like poor Dr. Jekyll we wake up changed. Our mother, the recent agoraphobe, who kept us pumpkin-shelled indoors through all the months of rain and epidemic and Independence, has now turned on her protector: she eyes our house suspiciously, accuses it of being “cobwebby” and “strangling us with the heat.” She speaks of it as a thing with will and motive. Every afternoon she has us put on our coolest dresses and run away from our malignant house. Down the forest path we march, single file, to the stream for a picnic. When we run off and she thinks we cannot see her she sways in the clearing, gently, like a tree blown by wind. Despite the risk of hookworm, she removes her shoes.

And now rejoice, oh, ye faithful, for Ruth May has risen, but she has the naked stare of a zombie and has lost interest in being first or best at anything. Nelson will not go near her. This is his theory: the owl we held as a temporary captive memorized our floor plan so it could find its way back through a window and consume her soul.

My other sisters, in different ways, have become stricken with strange behavior regarding men. Rachel is hysterical and engaged. The engagement is feigned, but that does not keep her from spending hours at a time playing “Mirror Mirror on the Wall” in her new green glass earrings, then throwing tantrums of protest against her upcoming marriage.

And Leah, the tonier twin. Leah has come down with a devout interest in the French and Kikongo languages-specifically, in learning them from Anatole. In the mornings she teaches arithmetic to his younger pupils, and afterward spends many hours at his bright-white shirtsleeve conjugating the self-same reflexive verbs- I’homme se noie-which a year ago she declared pointless. Apparently reflexive verbs gain a new importance for certain girls at the age of fifteen. She is also being instructed in the art of bow hunting. Anatole gave her as a gift a small, highly functional bow and a quiver of arrows with red tail feathers-like the “Hope” in Miss Dickinson’s poem, and like the quite hopelessly dead Methuselah, our former parrot. Anatole, with his very own knife, slipped these gifts for Leah out of a branch of greenheart wood.

Here is my palindrome poem on the subject: Eros, eyesore.

Nelson, however, is cheered. He views Leah’s bow and arrows as a positive development in our household after so many other discouraging ones, such as the death, for all practical purposes, of Ruth May. Nelson has taken it upon himself to supervise Leah’s military education. He makes targets of leaves, and pins them to the trunk of the great mango at the edge of our yard. The targets grow smaller each day. They began with a giant elephant-ear leaf, like a big triangular apron flapping in the breeze, which was nearly impossible to miss. One at a time Leah sent her wobbling arrows through the slashed green margin. But she has worked her way steadily down, until she now aims at the round, shiny, thumb-sized leaflet of a guava. Nelson shows her how to stand, close one eye, and whack her arrow trembling into the heart of a leaf. She is a frighteningly good shot.

My hunt-goddess twin and I are now more distant kin than ever, I suppose, except in this one regard: she is beginning to be looked upon in our village as bizarre. At the least, direly unfeminine. If anything, I am now considered the more normal one. I am the benduka, the single word that describes me precisely: someone who is bent sideways and walks slowly. But for my twin who now teaches school and murders tree trunks I have heard various words applied by our neighbors, none with much fondness. The favored word, bdkala, covers quite a lot of ground, including a hot pepper, a bumpy sort of potato, and the male sexual organ.

Leah does not care. She claims that since Anatole gave her the bow, and since it was Anatole who requisitioned her to teach school, she must not be breaking any social customs. She fails to see that Anatole is breaking rules for her, and this will have consequences. Like an oblivious Hester Prynne she carries her letter, the green capital D of her bow slung over her shoulder. D for Dramatic, or Diana of the Hunt, or Devil Take Your Social Customs. Off with her bow to market she goes and even to church, although on Sundays she must leave the arrows behind. Even our mother, who is not on the best of terms with Jesus just now, still draws the line at marching into His house toting ammunition.

Leah

ANATOLE’S FACE IN PROFILE, with his down-slanted eye and high forehead, looks like a Pharaoh or a god in an Egyptian painting. His eyes are the darkest brown imaginable. Even the whites are not white, but a pale cream color. Sometimes we sit at the table under the trees outside the schoolhouse after the boys are finished with their school day. I study my French and try not to bother him too much while he prepares the next day’s lessons. Anatole s eyes rarely stray from his books, and I’ll admit I find myself thinking of excuses to interrupt his concentration. There are too many things I want to know. I want to know why he’s letting me teach in the school now, for instance. Is it because of Independence, or because of me? I want to ask him if all the stories we’re hearing are true: Matadi, Thysville, Stanleyville. A can trader passing through Kilanga on his way to Kikwit gave us terrifying reports of the slaughter in Stanleyville. He said Congolese boys wearing crowns of leaves around their heads were invulnerable to Belgian bullets, which passed through them and lodged in the walls behind them. He said he’d seen this with his own eyes. Anatole was standing right there but seemed to ignore the tales. Instead, he carefully examined and then purchased a pair of spectacles from the can trader. The spectacles have good lenses that magnify things: when I try them on, even French words look large and easy to read.They make Anatole look more intelligent, though somewhat less Egyptian.

Most of all I want to ask Anatole this one unaskable question: Does he hate me for being white?

Instead I asked, “Why do Nkondo and Gabriel hate me?”

Anatole gave me a surprised look over the horn rims and genuine lenses of his new glasses. “Nkondo and Gabriel, more than the others?” he said, slowly bringing his focus onto the present conversation, and me. “How can you tell?”

I blew air out through my lips like an exasperated horse. “Nkondo and Gabriel more than the others because they play their chairs like drums and drown me out when I try to explain long division.”

“They are naughty boys, then.”

Anatole and I both knew this was not exactly the case. Drumming on chairs might have been of no special consequence in a Bethlehem school where little boys acted up whenever they took a mind. But these boys’ families were scraping together extra food or cash for their sons to go to school, and no one ever forgot it. Going to school was a big decision. Anatole’s students were as earnest as the grave. Only when I tried to teach math, while Anatole was working with the older students, did they raise pandemonium.