Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Fifteen years after it all happened, I sat by my radio in Atlanta listening to Senator Church and the special committee hearings on the Congo. I dug my nails into my palms till I’d pierced my own flesh. “Where had I been? Somewhere else entirely? Of the coup, in August, I’m sure we’d understood nothing. From the next five months of Lumumba’s imprisonment, escape, and recapture, I recall-what? The hardships of washing and cooking in a drought. A humiliating event in the church, and rising contentions in the village. Ruth May’s illness, of course. And a shocking scrap with Leah, who wanted to go hunting with the men. I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn’t cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of good-will adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.

Strange to say, when it came I felt as if I’d been waiting for it my whole married life. Waiting for that ax to fall so I could walk away with no forgiveness in my heart. Maybe the tragedy began on the day of my wedding, then. Or even earlier, when I first laid eyes on Nathan at the tent revival. A chance meeting of strangers, and the end of the -world unfolds. Who can say where it starts? I’ve spent too many years backing over that muddy road: If only I hadn’t let the children out of my sight that morning. If I hadn’t let Nathan take us to Kilanga in the first place. If the Baptists hadn’t taken upon themselves the religious conversion of the Congolese. What if the Americans, and the Belgians before them, hadn’t tasted blood and money in Africa? If the world of white men had never touched the Congo at all?

Oh, it’s a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it’s easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that’s nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don’t expect them to do a thing for you. They’re far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven’s name we will do next.

What We Lost

KILANGA, JANUARY 17,1961

Leah

You CAN’T JUST POINT to the one most terrible thing and wonder why it happened. This has been a whole terrible time, from the beginning of the drought that left so many without food, and then the night of the ants, to now, the worst tragedy of all. Each bad thing causes something worse. As Anatole says, if you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you’ll go crazy if you think it’s all punishment for your sins. I see that plainly when I look at my parents. God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

Looking back over the months that led to this day, it seems the collapse of things started in October, with the vote in church. We should have been good sports and lit out of the Congo right then. How could Father not have seen his mistake? The congregation of his very own church interrupted the sermon to hold an election on whether or not to accept Jesus Christ as the personal Saviour of Kilanga.

It was hot that day, in a season so dry our tongues went to sleep tasting dust and woke up numb. Our favorite swimming holes in the creek, which should have been swirling with fast brown ‘water this time of year, were nothing but dry cradles of white stones. Women had to draw drinking water straight from the river, while they clucked their tongues and told stories of women fallen to crocodiles in other dry years, -which were never as dry as this one. The manioc fields were flat: dead. Fruit trees barren. Yellow leaves were falling everywhere, littering the ground like a carpet rolled out for the approaching footsteps of the end of time. The great old kapoks and baobabs that shaded our village ached and groaned in their branches.They seemed more like old people than plants.

We’d heard rumors of rain in the river valleys west of us, and those tales aroused the deepest thirst you can imagine-the thirst of dying crops and animals. The dead grass on the distant hills was a yellowish red, not orange but a drier color: orange-white, like the haze in the air. Monkeys gathered in the high, bare branches at sunset, whimpering to one another as they searched the sky. Anything living that could abandon its home, some of our neighbors included, had migrated westward, in the direction from which we heard drums every night. Tata Kuvudundu cast his bone predictions, and nearly every girl in the village had danced with a chicken held to her head, to bring down rain. People did what they could. Church attendance rose and fell; Jesus may have sounded like a helpful sort of God in the beginning, but He was not bearing out.

That Sunday morning Tata Ndu himself sat on the front bench. Tata Ndu rarely darkened the door of the church, so this was clearly a sign, though who could say whether a good or bad one. He didn’t appear to be paying much heed to the sermon. Nobody was, since it didn’t have to do with rain. A month earlier when thunderstorms seemed imminent, Father had counseled his congregation to repent their sins and the Lord would reward them with rain. But in spite of all this repentance the rain hadn’t come, and now he told us he refused to be party to the superstitions. This morning he was preaching on Bel in the temple, from the Apocrypha. Father has always stood firm on the Apocrypha, though most other preachers look down on him for it. They claim those books to be the work of fear-mongers who tagged them on to the Old Testament just to scare people. Yet Father always says, if the Lord can’t inspire you to leave off sinning any other way, why then, it’s His business to scare the dickens out of you.

Bel and the Serpent wasn’t so frightening, as it mainly featured the quick wits of Daniel. This time Daniel was out to prove to the Babylonians that they were worshiping false idols, but even I was

having trouble paying attention. Lately I’d rarely felt touched by Father’s enthusiasm, and never by God.

“Now the Babylonians had an idol they called Bel” he declared, his voice the only clear thing in the haze that hung over us. People fanned themselves.

“Every day they bestowed upon the statue of Bel twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep, and fifty gallons of wine.”

Anatole translated this, substituting,manioc, goats, and palm wine. A few people fanned themselves faster, thinking of all that food going to just one hungry god. But most had dozed off.

“The people revered the statue of Bel and went every day to worship it, but Daniel worshiped the Lord our Saviour. And the King said to him,’Why don’t you worship Bel?’Why, Daniel replied,’I do not revere false idols but the living God, who is chief of all mankind.’ And the Babylonians said”-here my father dropped his voice to a more conversational tone-’“Can’t you see Bel is a living God? Don’t you see how much he eats and drinks every day?’

“Daniel laughed and told them, ‘Don’t be fooled! That is only a statue made of clay and bronze.’“

Father paused, and waited for Anatole to catch up. I personally like Bel and the temple; it’s a good story, but with all the delays for translation it was going too slowly to hold people’s interest. It’s a private-eye story, really. That’s how I’d tell it, if it were up to me: Daniel knew very well that the King’s high priests were sneaking in at night and taking all that food. So Daniel set up a trick. After everyone left their offerings in the temple, he went in and spread fireplace ashes all over the floor. That night the priests snuck in as usual through a secret stairway under the altar. But they didn’t notice the ashes, so they left their footprints all over the floor of the temple. They were having a big old party every night, compliments of their pal Bel. But with the ashes on the floor, Daniel caught them red-handed.