Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

“Come on!” she commanded over her shoulder. I tried to stay close behind her, but even under the weight of Ruth May she was sinuous and quick in the crowd. My heels were nipped from behind by other feet. Stepped on, though I felt it vaguely, already numb from the burning ants. I knew when I went down. Someone’s bare foot was on my calf and then my back, and I was being trampled. A crush of feet on my chest. I rolled over again and again, covering my head with my arms. I found my way to my elbows and raised myself up, grabbing with my strong left hand at legs that dragged me forward. Ants on my earlobes, my tongue, my eyelids. I heard myself crying out loud-such a strange noise, as if it came from my hair and fingernails, and again and again I came up. Once I looked for my mother and saw her, far ahead. I followed, bent on my own rhythm. Curved into the permanent song of my body: left… behind.

I did not know who it was that lifted me over the crowd and set me down into the canoe with my mother. I had to turn quickly to see him as he retreated. It was Anatole. We crossed the river together, mother and daughter, facing each other, low in the boat’s quiet center. She tried to hold my hands but could not. For the breadth of a river we stared without speaking.

That night I could still wonder why she did not help me. Live was I ere I saw evil. Now I do not wonder at all. That night marks my life’s dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began. The wonder to me now is that I thought myself worth saving. But I did. I did, oho, did I! I reached out and clung for life with my good left hand like a claw, grasping at moving legs to raise myself from the dirt. Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.

Leah

SUDDENLY THEN I was pushed from behind and pulled by other hands into a boat and we were on the water, crossing to safety. Anatole clambered in behind me. I was stunned to see he had Ruth May over his shoulder, like a fresh-killed antelope.

“Is she okay?”

“She is sleeping, I think. Twenty seconds ago she was screaming. Your mother and Adah have gone ahead with Tata Boanda,” he said.

“Praise God. Adah’s all right?”

“Adah is safe. Rachel is a demon. And your father is giving a sermon about Pharaoh’s army and the plagues. Everyone is all right.”

I squatted low with my chin on my knees and watched my bare feet change slowly from dark auburn, to speckled, to white as the ants dispersed and forayed out into the bottom of the canoe. I could hardly feel the pain now-the feet I gazed at seemed to be someone else’s. I gripped both sides of the boat, suddenly fearing I might vomit or pass out. When I could hold my head up again, I asked Anatole quietly, “Do you think this is the hand of God?”

He didn’t answer. Ruth May whimpered in her sleep. I waited so long for his answer I finally decided he hadn’t heard me.

And then he simply said, “No.”

“Then why?”

“The world can always give you reasons. No rain, not enough for the ants to eat. Something like that. Nsongonya are always moving anyway, it is their nature. Whether God cares or not.” He sounded bitter against God. Bitter with reason. The night felt like a dream rushing past me too fast, like a stream in flood, and in this uncontrollable dream Anatole was the one person who cared enough to help me. God didn’t. I tried to see through the thick darkness that clung to the river, searching out the opposite shore.

“God hates us,” I said.

“Don’t blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants.”

“They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive?”

“When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.”

The boat was crammed with people, but in the dark I couldn’t recognize their hunched backs. Anatole and I were speaking English, and it seemed no one else was there.

“What does that mean? That you think it’s right to hurt people?”

“You know me as a man. I don’t have to tell you what I am.”

What I knew was that Anatole had helped us in more ways than my family could even keep track of. My sister was now sleeping on his shoulder.

“But you believe in what they’re doing to the whites, even if you won’t do it yourself. You’re saying you’re a revolutionary like the Jeune Mou Pro!’

The dark, strong arms of a stranger paddled us forward while I shuddered with cold dread. It occurred to me that I feared Anatole’s anger more than anything.

“Things are not so simple as you think,” he finally said, sounding neither angry nor especially kind. “This is not a time to explain the history of Congolese revolutionary movements.”

“Adah says President Eisenhower has sent orders to kill Lumumba,” I confessed suddenly. After holding in this rank mouthful of words for many days, I spilled them out into our ant-infested boat. “She heard it on Axelroot’s radio. She says he’s a mercenary killer working for the Americans.”

I waited for Anatole to make any response at all to this-but he didn’t. A coldness like water swelled inside my stomach. It couldn’t possibly be true, yet Adah has always had the power to know things I don’t. She showed me the conversation between Axelroot and another man, written down in her journal. Since then I’ve had no clear view of safety. Where is the easy land of ice-cream cones and new Keds sneakers and We Like Ike, the country where I thought I knew the rules.Where is the place I can go home to? “Is it true, Anatole?”

The water moved under us and away, a cold, rhythmic rush. “I told you, this is not a time to talk.”

“I don’t care! We’re all going to die anyway, so I’ll talk if I please.”

If he was even still listening, he must have considered me a tedious child. But I had so much fright in me I couldn’t stop it from coming out. I longed for him to shush me, just tell me to be still

and that I was good.

“I want to be righteous, Anatole. To know right from wrong, that’s all. I want to live the right way and be redeemed.” I was trembling so hard I feared my bones might break. No word.

I shouted to make him hear. “Don’t you believe me? When I walk through the valley of the shadow the Lord is supposed to be with me, and he’s not! Do you see him here in this boat?”

The man or large woman whose back I’d been leaning against shifted slightly, then settled lower. I vowed not to speak another word.

But Anatole said suddenly, “Don’t expect God’s protection in places beyond God’s dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I’m warning you.When things go badly, you will blame yourself”

“What are you telling me?”

“I am telling you what I’m telling you. Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.”

I could see what he thought: that my faith injustice was childish, no more useful here than tires on a horse. I felt the breath of God grow cold on my skin. “We never should have come here,” I said. “We’re just fools that have gotten by so far on dumb luck. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

“I will not answer that.”

“Then you mean no. We shouldn’t have come.”

“No, you shouldn’t. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.”