Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

From talking with the patients I’ve gotten passably fluent in Lingala, which is spoken throughout northern Congo, in Leopoldville, and along most of the navigable rivers. If Anatole ever comes back for me, I’ll be ready to go most anywhere. But then a month will pass with no letter and I’m sure he’s slipped into death or recovered his clear ideals and the sense to steer clear of a badly misplaced white girl, he’s gone forever. As lost to me as my sister, oh, sweet Jesus, Ruth May. And Adah, Rachel, Mother, and Father, all gone as well. What’s the meaning of my still being here without name or passport, parroting “how-do-you-do” in Lingala? I am trying to get some kind of explanation from God, but none is forthcoming. At nights in the refectory we sit with our hands in our laps and stare at the radio, our small, harsh master. We hear one awful piece of news after another, with no power to act. The free Congo that so nearly came to pass is now going down. What can I do but throw my rosary against the wall of my cell and swear violence? The nuns are so patient. They’ve spent decades here prolonging the brief lives of the undernourished, accustomed completely to the tragedy playing out around us. But their unblinking eyes framed by their white starched wimples make me want to scream, “This is not God’s will be done!” How could anyone, even a God distracted by many other concerns, allow this to happen?

“Ce n’est pas a nous,” says Therese, not ours to question. As convincing as Methuselah shouting, Sister God is great! Shut the door!

“I’ve heard that before,” I tell her. “I’m sure the Congolese heard it every day for a hundred years while they had to forbear the Belgians. Now they finally get a fighting chance, and we’re sitting here watching it get born dead. Like that baby born blue out of that woman with tetanus this morning.”

“That is an awful comparison.”

“But it’s true!”

She sighs and repeats what she’s told me already. The sisters take no position in war, but must try to hold charity in their hearts even for the enemy.

“But who is the enemy? Just tell me that much, Therese. Which side are you trying not to hate, white men or Africa?”

She snaps a sheet open wide in her hands and takes the center with her teeth to fold it in half. Also, I think, to stop up her mouth.

“I’d fight alongside the Simbas if they’d let me,” I confessed to her once.

Therese has a way of looking at me sideways, and I wonder if she wasn’t too hasty in taking her vows. She’s attracted to mine sweeping. “You have a good aim and good nerves,” she allowed behind the sheet she was folding. “Go join them.”

“You think I’m joking.”

She stopped to look at me seriously. “Non, ce n’est pas me blague. But it’s not your place to fight with the Simbas, even if you were a man. You’re white. This is their war and whatever happens will happen.”

“It’s no more their war than it is God’s will be done. It’s the doing of the damned Belgians and Americans.”

“The Reverend Mother would wash your mouth with disinfectant.”

“The Reverend Mother has more pressing needs for her disinfectant.” And nowhere near enough, either, I thought. In the privacy of my little room I’ve damned many men to hell, President Eisen-hower, King Leopold, and my own father included. I damn them for throwing me into a war in which white skin comes down on the wrong side, pure and simple.

“If God is really taking a hand in things”, informed Therese, “he is bitterly mocking the hope of brotherly love. He is making sure that color will matter forever.” With no more to say between a devout farm girl and a mine sweeper, we folded our sheets and our different-colored habits.

The Simbas would shoot me on sight, it’s true. They’re an army of pure desperation and hate. Young Stanleyville boys and old village men, anyone who can find a gun or a machete, all banded together. They tie nkisis of leaves around their wrists and declare themselves impermeable to bullets, immune to death. And so they are, Anatole says, “For how can you kill what is already dead?” We’ve heard how they sharpened their teeth and stormed the invaders in northeastern Congo, feeding on nothing but rage.

Thirty whites killed in Stanley, two Americans among them-we heard that over the shortwave radio and knew what it meant. By nightfall the United Nations would launch their answer, an air and land attack. The Combined Forces, they’re calling this invading army: the U.S.,Belgium, and hired soldiers left over from the Bay of Pigs. Over the next weeks we heard a hundred more times about the whites killed by Simbas in Stanleyville. In three languages: Radio France, the BBC, and Mobutu’s Lingala newscasts from Leopoldville, the news was all one. Those thirty white people, rest their souls, have purchased an all-out invasion against the pro-Independents. How many Congolese were killed by the Belgians and labor and starvation, by the special police, and now by the UN soldiers, we will never know. They’ll go uncounted. Or count for nothing, if that is possible.

The night the helicopters came in, the vibrations pummeled us out of our beds. I thought the old stone convent was falling down. We ran outside with the wind from the blades tearing down on us from just above the trees, whipping our plain white nightgowns into a froth. The sisters registered their dismay, crossed themselves, and hurried back to bed. I couldn’t. I sat on the ground, hugging my knees, and started to cry, for the first time since time began, it seems. Crying with my mouth open, howling for Ruth May and the useless waste of our mistakes and all that’s going to happen now, everyone already dead and not yet dead, known or unknown to me, every Congolese child with no hope. I felt myself falling apart- that by morning I might be just bones melting into the moldy soil of the sisters’ vegetable garden. A pile of eggless, unmothering bones, nothing more: the future I once foretold.

To hold myself together I tried to cry for something more manageable. I settled on Anatole. Kneeling before our little statue of the Virgin with an eroded face I endeavored to pray for my future husband. For a chance. For happiness and love and, if you can’t pray for sex outright, the possibility of children. I found I could hardly remember Anatole s face, and couldn’t picture God at all. He just ended up looking like my father. I tried to imagine Jesus, then, in the body of Brother Fowles.Tata Bidibidi, with his kind, pretty wife and their precarious boat dispensing milk powder and quinine and love to children along the river. Attend to Creation, was his advice. Well, the palm trees in our courtyard were ripped and flattened from the wind of the helicopters, and looked far too defeated by war to accept my prayers. So I focused on the sturdy walls of the compound and prayed straight to the black stones. I implored them, “Please let there be sturdy walls like these around Anatole. Please let them hold up a roof that will keep this awful sky from falling on him.” I prayed to old black African stones unearthed from the old dark ground that has been here all along. One solid thing to believe in.

Rachel Axelroot

JOHANNESBURG 1964

IF I’D KNOWN WHAT MARRIAGE was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

It isn’t living here in South Africa that I mind. It hardly even seems like a foreign country here. You can get absolutely anything you need in the stores: Breck Special Formulated Shampoo, Phillips’ milk of magnesia, Campbell’s tomato soup, honestly you name it! And the scenery is beautiful, especially taking the train down to the beach. My girlfriends and I love to pack up a picnic basket with champagne and Tobler biscuits (which actually are cookies, not biscuits-imagine my surprise when I bought some aiming to serve them with gravy!), and then we just head out to the countryside for a view of the green rolling hills. Of course you have to look the other way when the train goes by the townships, because those people don’t have any perspective of what good scenery is, that’s for sure. They will make their houses out of a piece of rusted tin or the side of a crate-and leave the writing part on the outside for all to see! But you just have to try and understand, they don’t have the same ethics as us.That is one part of living here. Being understanding of the differences.