Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Otherwise this country is much like you’d find anywhere. Even the weather is very typical. I have always felt that people in other countries just don’t have any idea that Africa could be this normal. The only bad thing is that with the equator being above us the change of seasons conies backwards, which does take some getting used to. But do I complain? Heck, no, I just slap up our Christmas tree in the middle of summer and sing “Deck the Halls” and have a martini on the patio and don’t give it another thought anymore. I am a very adaptable kind of person. I don’t even mind speaking Afrikaans to the maid, which is practically the same thing as English once you get the hang of it. As long as you’re just giving orders, anyway, which are more or less about the same in any language. And if you hear the word “Nuus” on the radio, for example, why, any fool can figure out that means “News.” So you just get up and switch over to the English station!

I have a good life, as far as the overall surroundings. I have put the past behind me and don’t even think about it. Do I have a family? I sometimes have to stop and ask myself. Do I have a mother, father, and sisters? Did I even come from anywhere? Because it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like I’m just right here and always was. I have a little tiny picture of my sisters and me cut out in a heart shape, which I happened to be wearing in a gold locket when I left our unfortunate circumstances in the Congo. Sometimes I get it out and stare at those teeny little sad white faces, trying to make out where I am in that picture. That’s the only time I ever think about Ruth May being dead. Which I’ve said was all because of Leah, but really, mainly, it’s probably Father’s fault because the rest of us just had to go along with whatever he said. If it was up to me, I would never have stepped foot in that snake-infected place. I would have sat home and let other people go be missionaries if they wanted to, bully for them! But the picture is so small I have to hold it practically at the end of my nose to make out who is who. It hurts my eyes to focus on it, so mostly it stays in the drawer.

Like I said, I am content with my present circumstances for the most part. My misery comes from a different concern: my marriage. There is just no word bad enough for Eeben Axelroot. Who has still

not made an honest woman out of me, I might add! He just treats me like his slave-girlfriend-housemaid, having a roll in the hay when he feels like it and then running off doing God knows what for months at a time, leaving me alone in my prime of life. But if I threaten to leave him, he calls me the poor little rich girl (which, if we actually were rich, would be a whole different story) and says I can’t leave him because no man we know around here could afford the upkeep! That is completely unfair. Everyone we know has a nicer house than us. He received a large sum for his service in the Congo, a decent nest egg you might say, but have I seen it? No, sir, and believe you me I looked under the mattress, because that is the kind of person he is. Actually, there’s a gun under there. He says he invested the money. He claims he’s gotten back involved with the diamond business in the Congo and has many foreign partners, but you still have to remind him to take a bath on any given day. So if he has foreign partners, I don’t think they are of a very high class. I told him so, too. Well, he raised up his head from his beer bottle just long enough to have a good laugh at my expense. He said, “Baby, your intellectual capacity is out of this world!” Meaning the vacuum of outer space, ha, ha. His favorite joke. He said my brain was such a blank slate he could tell me every state secret he knows and then march me straight down to the Damnistry International and not have a thing to worry about. He said the government should hire me to work for the other side. This is not lovey-dovey quarreling, mind you. He says these things and laughs in my face! Oh, I have cried till I threatened to ruin my own complexion, let me tell you.

But not anymore. I have abided my time and kept my eyes open, while in the meantime telling him off good in the bathroom mirror whenever I’m all alone and he’s not there, just like I used to do to Father. “You just wait,” I tell him. “I’ll show you whose mind is a blank slate!”

And now Rachel Price is about to have her day. I have a trick up my sleeve which I haven’t told a soul about, even though it’s the God’s honest truth and I know it: I have a good shot at the Ambassador.

Actually Daniel is the First Attache, but the French are all so much of a higher class, regardless of their position. Like I said, we meet the best people through the Templetons, who have divine shindigs. “Come over for drinks and a braai,” meaning a barbecue, is what we always say in Johannesburg. Those parties have a very international flair, what with the scotch whiskey, American LPs, and the embassy gossip. After that one time the Prime Minister got shot in the head, there was a big old crackdown on the blacks, which was absolutely necessary, but resulted in misunderstandings at many of the foreign embassies. The nation of France, especially, has gotten all high-and-mighty about threatening to remove their associations from South Africa. We’ve all been hearing for weeks now that Daniel is going to be reposted to Brazzaville. His little Frenchy wife Robine will never hack it, I can see that as plain as day. She’s well known for just as soon firing her maids as looking at them, and as far as she is concerned, everything that lies outside the civilized boundaries of Johannesburg is Darkest Africa. She and Daniel were already on the verge of a breakup, even if they didn’t know it. So I saw my opportunity, you might say. “She doesn’t know how lucky she is,” I whispered in his ear. “I’ll tell you a little secret. If it was me, I’d go with you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” This was two Saturdays ago, over at the Templetons’ when we were slow-dancing around the pool to “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by the Four Seasons. I happen to remember that was the song. Because just that very morning I’d found out about another one of Axelroot’s little piccadillies, but I’m a big girl so I just put my hair up, marched downtown, and bought me a brand-new siren-red bathing suit with a bare midriff. Keeping up the insurance is how I think of it. Like they say in the magazines, Just wear a smile and a Janzen! And that is exactly what I was doing two Saturdays ago at the Templetons’ party.

“After what all I lived through in the Congo,” I cooed to Daniel, “I could take Brazzaville and keep right on smiling.”

And guess what: that is just what I’m going to do! I might as well get started packing my bags and getting measured for a Dior gown.

After what I know about that man, I can wrap him around my little finger. And what he did to me, boy! A man only does that kind of thing when he has certain feelings. I can tell you with absolute pos-itivity that I am soon going to be Mrs. Daniel Attache-to-the-Ambassador DuPree. Eeben Axelroot will be high and dry with no one but the maid to pick up his socks. And Daniel, bless his heart, will never even know what hit him.

Leah Price Ngemba

BIKOKI STATION JANUARY 17,1965

IT CAN FEEL COLD HERE, in the early-morning haze of the dry season. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe my blood’s gotten thin, a weakness Father used to accuse us of when we complained of the chill winters in north Georgia. Certainly there’s no winter here: the equator just about runs smack-dab through curbed. Anatole tells me I’m passing from the northern to the southern hemisphere whenever I go out to poke up the fire in the kitchen house, so I should consider myself worldly, even though it’s nearly impossible these days to leave the station.