Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

“Okay, you’re right.They all hate me,” I whined.”‘! guess I’m not a good teacher.”

“You are a fine teacher. That isn’t the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“Understand, first, you are a girl. These boys are not accustomed to obeying their own grandmothers. If long division is really so important to a young man’s success in the world, how could a pretty girl know about it? This is what they are thinking. And understand, second, you are white.”

What did he mean, pretty girl! “White,” I repeated. “Then they don’t think white people know about long division, either?”

“Secretly, most of them believe white people know how to turn the sun on and off and make the river flow backward. But officially, no. What they hear from their fathers these days is that now Independence is here and white people should not be in Congo telling us what to do.”

“They also think America and Belgium should give them a lot of money, I happen to know. Enough for everybody to have a radio or a car or something. Nelson told me that.”

“Yes, that is number three. They think you represent a greedy nation.”

I closed the book on French verbs for the day. “Anatole, that doesn’t make a bit of sense. They don’t want us to be friends, and they don’t respect us, and in Leopoldville they’re ransacking white people’s houses. But they want America to give them money.”

“Which part does not make sense to you?” “All of it.”

“Beene, think,” he said patiently, as if I were one of his schoolboys stumped on an easy problem. “When one of the fishermen, let’s say Tata Boanda, has good luck on the river and comes home with his boat loaded with fish, what does he do?”

“That doesn’t happen very often.”

“No, but you have seen it happen. What does he do?”

“He sings at the top of his lungs and everybody comes and he gives it all away.”

“Even to his enemies?”

“I guess.Yeah. I know Tata Boanda doesn’t like Tata Zinsana very much, and he gives Tata Zinsana’s wives the most.”

“All right. To me that makes sense. When someone has much more than he can use, it’s very reasonable to expect he will not keep it all himself.”

“But Tata Boanda has to give it away, because fish won’t keep. If you don’t get rid of it, it’s just going to rot and stink to high heaven.” Anatole smiled and pointed his finger at my nose. “That is just how a Congolese person thinks about money.”

“But if you keep on giving away every bit of extra you have, you’re never going to be rich.”

“That is probably true.”

“And everybody wants to be rich.”

“Is that so?”

“Sure. Nelson wants to save up for a wife.You probably do, too.” For some reason I couldn’t look at him when I said that.”Tata Ndu is so rich he has six wives, and everybody envies him.”

“Tata Ndu has a very hard job. He needs a lot of wives. But don’t be so sure everyone envies him. I myself do not want his job.” Anatole laughed. “Or his wives.”

“But don’t you want lots of money?”

“Beene, I spent many years working for the Belgians in the rubber plantation at Coquilhatville, and I saw rich men there. They were always unhappy and had very few children.”

“They probably would have been even more unhappy if they’d been poor,” I argued.

He laughed. “You might be right. Nevertheless, I did not learn to envy the rich man.”

“But you need some money,” I persisted. I do realize Jesus lived the life of poverty, but that was another place and time. A harsh desert culture, as Brother Fowles had said. “You need enough to pay for food and doctors and all.”

“All right then, some money,” he agreed. “One automobile and a radio for every village.Your country could give us that much, e-e?”

“Probably. I don’t think it would really make a dent. Back in Georgia everybody we knew had an automobile.”

“A bu, don’t tell stories. That is not possible.”

“Well, not everybody. I don’t mean babies and children. But every single family.”

“Not possible.”

“Yes, it is! Some families even have two!”

“What is the purpose of so many automobiles at the same time?”

“Well, because everybody has someplace to go every day. To work or to the store or something.”

“And why is nobody walking?”

“It’s not like here, Anatole. Everything’s farther apart. People live in big towns and cities. Bigger cities than Leopoldville, even.”

“Beene, you are lying to me. If everyone lived in a city they could never grow enough food.”

“Oh, they do that out in the country. In big, big fields. Peanuts and soybeans and corn, all that.The farmers grow it, then they put it on big trucks and take it all to the city, where people buy it from the store.”

“From the market.”

“No, it isn’t a bit like the market. It’s a great big house kind of thing, with bright lights and all these shelves inside. It’s open every day, and just one person sells all the different things.”

“One farmer has so many things?”

“No, not a farmer. A storekeeper buys it all from the farmers, and sells it to the city people.”

“And so you don’t even know whose fields this food came from? That sounds terrible. It could be poisoned!”

“It’s not bad, really. It works out.”

“How can there be enough food, Beene? If everyone lives in a city?”

“There just is.Things are different from here.”…

“What is so different?”

“Everything,” I said, intending to go on, but my tongue only licked the backs of my teeth, tasting the word everything. I stared at the edge of the clearing behind us, where the jungle closed us out with its great green wall of trees, bird calls, animals breathing, all as permanent as a heartbeat we heard in our sleep. Surrounding us was a thick, wet, living stand of trees and tall grasses stretching all the way across Congo. And we were nothing but little mice squirming through it in our dark little pathways. In Congo, it seems the land owns the people. How could I explain to Anatole about soybean fields where men sat in huge tractors like kings on thrones, taming the soil from one horizon to the other? It seemed like a memory trick or a bluegreen dream: impossible.

“At home,” I said, “we don’t have the jungle.”

“Then what is it you have?”

“Big fields, like a manioc garden as wide and long as the Kwilu. There used to be trees, I guess, but people cut them down.”

“And they did not grow back?”

“Our trees aren’t so vivacious as yours are. It’s taken Father and me the longest time just to figure out how things grow here. Remember when we first came and cleared out a patch for our garden? Now you can’t even see where it was. Everything grew like Topsy, and then died. The dirt turned into dead, red slop like rotten meat. Then vines grew all over it. We thought we were going to teach people here how to have crops like we have back home.”

He laughed. “Manioc fields as long and “wide as the Kwilu.”

“You don’t believe me, but it’s true! You can’t picture it because here, I guess, if you cut down enough jungle to plant fields that big, the rain would just turn it into a river of mud.”

“And then the drought would bake it.”

“Yes! And if you ever did get any crops, the roads would be washed out so you’d never get your stuff into town anyway.”

He clucked his tongue. “You must find the Congo a very uncooperative place.”

“You just can’t imagine how different it is from what we’re used to. At home we have cities and cars and things because nature is organized a whole different way.”