Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

The plain bitter truth is that this day chills me to the bone. I try not to pay attention to the month and date, but the blossoming poinsettias roar at me that it’s coming anyway, and on January 17 I’ll wake up too early, with an ache in my chest. Why did I have to crow, “Who’s brave enough to go out there with me?” Knowing her as I did, that she’d never stand to be called a coward by anyone, least of all her sister.

It’s a bleak anniversary in our household. I killed a snake this morning, just whacked it into pieces with my machete and flung all three of them up in the trees. It was the big black one that’s been hanging around the back door since the end of the rains. Anatole came out and clucked his tongue at my handiwork.

“That snake was not doing us any harm, Beene.”

“I’m sorry, but I woke up this morning craving an eye for an eye.”

“What does this mean?”

“It means that snake crossed my path on the wrong day.” “He was eating a lot of rats. Now they will be into your manioc.”

“Black rats or white ones? I’m not sure I can tell the difference.” He looked at me a long time, trying to work me out. Finally he asked, “Why do you think your sadness is so special? Children died every day in Kilanga.They are dying here and now”

“Oh, how could I forget, Anatole. She was just one of a million people who left the world that day, along with the great Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. I’m sure in the long run Ruth May hardly mattered at all.”

He came to me and touched my hair, which has gotten rather shaggy. When I can remember to be a good Congolese wife, I tie it up in a headcloth. Anatole carefully wiped my eyes with the tail of his shirt. “Do you think I can’t remember Little Sister? She had the heart of a mongoose. Brave and clever. She was the chief of all children in Kilanga, including her big sisters.”

“Don’t talk about her. Just go to work. Wenda mbote!’ I took his hand away and glared at him. Don’t mention her and I won’t speak of your Lumumba shattered with machetes like this poor snake and thrown in pieces into an abandoned house in Elisabethville, with the blessings of my hateful homeland. I stomped off to the kitchen house, where I could hear the rats already at the manioc, rewarding my spite.

This is a day Anatole and I simply have to get through. I’ve heard people say grief brings you closer, but the griefs he and I carry are so different. Mine are white, no doubt, and American. I hold on to Ruth May while he and the rest of Congo secretly hold a national day of mourning for lost Independence. I can recall, years ago, watching Rachel cry real tears over a burn hole in her green dress while, just outside our door, completely naked children withered from the holes burning in their empty stomachs, and I seriously wondered if Rachel’s heart were the size of a thimble. I suppose that’s how he sees me today. Any other day I might pray, like my old friends the Benedictine sisters, to lose my self-will in the service of greater glory. But January 17, in my selfish heart, is Ruth May’s only.

Through a crack between the boards I watched him pick up his book bag and head off in his earnest, square-shouldered Anatole way down the road toward the school. Anatole, my first prayer to Creation answered. Both of us were spared, in body at least, by the stone walls of our different imprisonments, and altered in spirit, in ways we’re struggling to understand. I’ve lost all the words to my childhood prayers, so my head rings with its own Grand Silence. And Anatole has found new words for shaping belief.

His circumstances were as bizarre as mine, and very lucky-we agree on that. Most dissidents now are executed, or held under conditions that make them wish for execution. But Mobutu was just getting organized in ‘61, and still given to peculiar omissions. Anatole got to spend his days playing bottle-cap checkers with a pair of lackadaisical guards, who let him read and write anything as long as he didn’t escape. They liked Anatole, and apologized that they had to support their families on the handful of coins or rice they got when Mobutu’s deputies came by to count the prisoners each morning. After that he could organize lessons under the courtyard’s scabby mango, teaching literacy to any guard or fellow prisoner who felt like improving himself on a given day. The guards helped get books for Anatole, and went to a lot of trouble to get his letters posted to various countries. Right under Mobutu’s nose, he discovered the writings of the great African nationalist Kwame Nkrumah, and the poetry of a young doctor in Angola, Agostinho Neto, with whom he started up a correspondence.

Neto is about Anatole’s age, also educated by missionaries. He’d already gone abroad to study medicine and returned home to open a clinic, where his own people could get decent care, but it didn’t work out. A gang of white policemen dragged him out of his clinic one day, beat him half to death, and carted him off to prison. The crowds that turned up to demand his release got cut down like trees by machine-gun fire. Not only that, but the Portuguese army went out burning villages to the ground, to put a damper on Neto’s popularity.Yet, the minute he got out of prison, he started attracting droves of people to an opposition party in Angola. Anatole is encouraged by his example and talks about Neto a good deal, hoping to meet with him somehow, somewhere. I can’t feature it, when it’s too dangerous now for them even to continue writing letters.

Of course, Anatole’s most faithful prison correspondence was with a nun in Bangassou, which was a matter of great hilarity to his fellow prisoners. Sa planche de salut! they teased-his long plank to salvation-a slang expression meaning your last hope. Anatole still sometimes calls me his planche de salut. But by the time we were reunited last fall, I was unsure enough of God and too mad at everybody else to offer any kind of salvation. For sure, though, I’d had enough of poverty-chastity-obedience to trade it in on being Anatole’s wife. A medical evacuation Jeep got me through disguised as a corpse all the way to Bikoki, an old rubber plantation settlement outside of Coquilhatville. My sweetheart, released after three years without formal charges, was waiting here to raise the dead.

We chose Bikoki expecting to find people Anatole knew here, former friends and employers in the rubber trade, but most are dead now or have left the country. A surprise, though, was Aunt Elisabet, his mother’s youngest sister. She came looking for him here a decade ago. Anatole was already gone long before, but Elisabet took work at the mission station, had a child, and never left. It’s a great change for Anatole to have relatives and a wife, after his lifelong status as an orphan.

The mission is a ghost town now, and the agricultural station also nearly deserted. The Simbas have cleared the place of Europeans without ever setting foot here. The plantation is mostly rubble. (I imagine it dismantled by the whacked-off ghost hands of all those rubber workers.) The one building left standing contains the very library where Anatole, as a young household servant, taught himself to read and write English. At my request we were married in that room by the village chief, in i ceremony that was neither quite Christian nor Bantu. I asked for God’s blessing and carried red bougainvillea flowers for my mother. Aunt Elisabet draped around our shoulders the traditional marriage cloth called mole, a beautiful double-sized pagne that symbolizes the togetherness of marriage. It also works as a bedspread.

Since its heyday as a planter’s mansion, parts of the house had been used as an army bunker, a birthing hospital, and a goat barn. Now the plan was to use it for a school. The department chief in Coquilhatville admires Anatole, so turned a blind eye to his prison record and hired him as headmaster for the regional hole secondaire. We’re also trying to keep open the agricultural extension program, training former rubber workers to subsistence farming. And I volunteer at the clinic, where a Guinean doctor comes once a week from Coquilhatville to immunize and diagnose babies. In spite of all we’d been through, Anatole and I stood together last fall and declared the word Independence out loud. We said it with our eyes on the sky, as if it were some fabulous bird we could call down out of the air.