The Poisonwood Bible (36 page)

Adah

LIVE WAS I ere I saw evil. Now I am on the other side of that night and can tell the story, so perhaps I am still alive, though I feel no sign of it. And perhaps it was not evil I saw but merely the way of all hearts when fear has stripped off the husk of kind pretensions. Is it evil to look at your child, then heft something else in your arms and turn away?

Nod, nab, abandon.

Mother, I can read you backward and forward.

Live was I ere I saw evil.

I should have been devoured in my bed, for all I seem to be worth. In one moment alive, and in the next left behind. Tugged from our beds by something or someone, the ruckus, banging and shouting outside, my sisters leaped up screaming and were gone. I could not make a sound for the ants at my throat. I dragged myself out to moonlight and found a nightmare vision of dark red, boiling ground. Nothing stood still, no man or beast, not even the grass that writhed beneath the shadow, dark and ravenous. Not even the startled grass.

Only my mother stood still.There she was, planted before me in the path, rising on thin legs out of the rootless devouring earth. In her arms, crosswise like a load of kindling, Ruth May.

I spoke out loud, the only time: help me.

“Your father...” she said. “I think he must have gone on ahead with Rachel. I wish he’d waited, honey, he’d carry you but Rachel was ... I don’t know how she’ll get through this. Leah will, Leah can take care of herself.” !    

 She can you can’t you can’t!

I spoke again: Please.

She studied me for a moment, weighing my life. Then nodded, shifted the load in her arms, turned away.

“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.”

“You’re the only one here who’ll even talk to us, Anatole! Nobody else cares about us, Anatole!”

“Tata Boanda is carrying your mother and sister in his boat. Tata Lekulu is rowing his boat with leaves stuffed in his ears while your father lectures him on loving the Lord. Nevertheless, Tata Lekulu is carrying him to safety. Did you know, Mama Mwanza sometimes puts eggs from her own chickens under your hens when you aren’t looking? How can you say no one cares about you?”

“Mama Mwanza does that? How do you know?”

He didn’t say. I was stupid not to have figured it out. Nelson sometimes found oranges and manioc and even meat in our kitchen house when nothing was there the night before. I suppose we believed so hard in God’s providence that we just accepted miracles in our favor.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Beene, but you are here and nobody in Kilanga wants you to starve. They understand that white people make very troublesome ghosts.”

I pictured myself a ghost: bones and teeth. Rachel a ghost with long white hair; Adah a silent, staring ghost. Ruth May a tree-climbing ghost, the squeeze of a small hand on your arm. My father was not a ghost; he was God with his back turned, hands clasped behind him and fierce eyes on the clouds. God had turned his back and was walking away.

Quietly I began to cry, and everything inside me came out through my eyes. “Anatole, Anatole,” I whispered. “I’m scared to death of what’s happening and nobody here will talk to me. You’re the only one.” I repeated his name because it took the place of prayer. Anatole s name anchored me to the earth, the water, the skin that held me in like ajar of water. I was a ghost in ajar. “I love you, Anatole.”

“Leah! Don’t ever say that again.”

I never will.

We arrived at the opposite shore. Someone’s rescued hen fluttered up to the bow of our boat and strutted placidly along the gunwale, its delicate wattles shaking as it plucked up ants. For the first time that night, I thought of our poor chickens shut up for the night in their coop. I pictured their bones laid clean and white in a pile on top of the eggs.

Two days later, when the rebel army of tiny soldiers had passed through Kilanga and we could go home again, that is exactly how we found our hens. I was surprised that their dislocated skeletons looked just the way I’d imagined them. This is what I must have learned, the night God turned his back on me: how to foretell the future in chicken bones.

Book Four

BEL AND

THE SERPENT

Do you not think that Bel is a living God?

Do you not see how much he eats and

drinks every day?

BEL AND THE SERPENT, i :6

Orleanna Price

SANDERLING ISLAND

THE STING OF A FLY, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.

Maybe it was just a chance meeting. A Belgian and an American, let’s say, two old friends with a hunger in common, a hand in the diamond business. A fly buzzes and lights. They swat it away and step into the Belgian’s meticulously polished office in Elisabethville. They’re careful to ask after each other’s families and profits, and to speak of how they are living in a time of great change, great opportunity. A map of the Congo lies on the mahogany table between them. While they talk of labor and foreign currency their hunger moves apart from the gentlemanly conversation with a will of its own, licking at the edges of the map on the table, dividing it between them. They take turns leaning forward to point out their moves with shrewd congeniality, playing it like a chess match, the kind of game that allows civilized men to play at make-believe murder. Between moves they tip their heads back, swirl blood-colored brandy in glass globes and watch it crawl down the curved glass in liquid veins. Languidly they bring their map to order. Who will be the kings, the rooks, and bishops rising up to strike at a distance? Which sacrificial pawns will be swept aside? African names roll apart like the heads of dried flowers crushed idly between thumb and forefinger—Ngoma, Mukenge, Mulele, Kasavubu, Lumumba. They crumble to dust on the carpet.

Behind the gentlemen’s barbered heads, dark mahogany planks stand at attention. The paneling of this office once breathed the humid air of a Congolese forest, gave shelter to life, felt the scales of snake belly on its branches. Now the planks hold their breath, with their backs to the wall. So do the mounted heads of rhinoceros and cheetah, evidence of the Belgian’s skill as a sport hunter. Cut down, they are now mute spies in the house built by foreigners. Outside the window palm fronds rattle in a rising wind. An automobile creeps past. Leaves of unraveling newspaper blow into the rank water that runs in an open ditch; the newspaper wheels along the street, scattering its sheets onto the water, where they float as translucent squares of lace. No one can say whether it’s good news or bad. A woman strides alongside the ditch under her basket of roasted corn. When the Belgian rises to close the window, the scent of all this reaches him: the storm, the ditch, the woman with the corn. He shuts the window and returns to the world of his own making. The curtains are damask. The carpet is Turkish. The clock on the table is German, old but still accurate. The heads on the wall observe with eyes of imported glass. The perfect timepiece ticks, and in that small space between seconds the fancy has turned to fact.

Given time, legions of men are drawn into the game, both ebony and ivory: the Congo’s CIA station chief, the National Security Council, even the President of the United States. And a young Congolese man named Joseph Mobutu, who’d walked barefoot into a newspaper office to complain about the food he was getting in the army. A Belgian newspaperman there recognized wit and raw avarice—a useful combination in any game. He took this young Mobutu under his wing and taught him to navigate the airy heights where foreigners dwell. A rook who would be king. And the piece that will fall? Patrice Lumumba, a postal worker elected to head his nation.The Belgians and Americans agree, Lumumba is difficult. Altogether too exciting to the Congolese, and disinclined to let White control the board, preferring the counsel and company of Black.

The players move swiftly and in secret. Each broad turn sweeps across rivers, forests, continents, and oceans, -witnessed only by foreign glass eyes and once-mighty native trees cut away from their roots.

I’ve surmised this scene, assembled it piece by piece over many years from the things I read, when it all began to come out. I try to imagine these men and their game, for it helps place my own regrettable acts on a broader field, where they seem smaller. What trivial thing was I doing “while they divided the map beneath my feet? Who was the woman walking by with the roasted corn? Might she have been some distant kin of someone I haggled with on market days? How is it that neither of us knew the ways of the world for so long?

Fifteen years after Independence, in 1975, a group of Senators called the Church Committee took it upon themselves to look into the secret operations that had been brought to bear on the Congo. The world rocked with surprise. The Church Committee found notes from secret meetings of the National Security Council and President Eisenhower. In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself in a carefully chosen bush, and went out to seek the faces of his nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words—dangerous to the safety of the world!—from a roomful of white men who held in their manicured hands the disposition of armies and atomic bombs, the power to extinguish every life on earth. Would Lumumba have screamed like a cheetah? Or merely taken off his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, shaken his head, and smiled?

On a day late in August, 1960, a Mr. Allen Dulles, who was in charge of the CIA, sent a telegram to his Congolese station chief suggesting that he replace the Congolese government at his earliest convenience. The station chief, Mr. Lawrence Devlin, was instructed to take as bold an action as he could keep secret: a coup would be all right. There would be money forthcoming to pay soldiers for that purpose. But assassination might be less costly. A gang of men quick with guns and unfettered by conscience were at his disposal. Also, to cover all bases, a scientist named Dr. Gottlieb was hired to make a poison that would produce such a dreadful disease (the good doctor later testified in the hearings), if it didn’t kill Lumumba outright it would leave him so disfigured that he couldn’t possibly be a leader of men.

On the same August day, this is all I knew: the pain in my household seemed plenty large enough to fill the whole world. Ruth May was slipping away into her fever. And it was Rachel’s seventeenth birthday. I was wrapping up green glass earrings in tissue paper, hoping to make some small peace with my eldest child, while I tried to sponge the fire out of my youngest. And President Eisenhower was right then sending his orders to take over the Congo. Imagine that. His household was the world, and he’d finished making up his mind about things. He’d given Lumumba a chance, he felt. The Congo had been independent for fifty-one days.

Mr. Devlin and his friends sat down with the ambitious young Mobutu, who’d been promoted to colonel. On September 10, they provided one million dollars in UN money for the purpose of buying loyalty, and the State Department completed its plans for a coup that would put Mobutu in charge of the entire army. All the ducks were lined up. On September 14, the army took control of the momentarily independent Republic of Congo, and Lumumba was put under house arrest in Leopoldville, surrounded by Mobutu’s freshly purchased soldiers.

Throughout those days, while we scratched and haggled for our daily bread, I had a photograph of President Elsenhower for company in my kitchen house. I’d cut it out of a magazine and nailed it over the plank counter where I kneaded the bread. It was so much a part of my life I remember every detail of him: the clear-rimmed glasses and spotted tie, the broad smile, the grandfatherly bald head like a warm, bright light bulb. He looked so trustworthy and kind. A beacon from home, reminding me of our purpose.

On November 27, very early in the day, probably while I was stoking our woodstove for breakfast, Lumumba escaped. He was secretly helped along by a net of supporters stretching wide across the Congo, from Leopoldville to our own village and far beyond. Of course, no one spoke to me about it. We’d only heard faint rumors that Lumumba was in trouble. Frankly, we were more interested in the news that heavy rain was falling to the west of us and might soon reach our own parched village. The rain provided the Prime Minister’s cover, as it turned out. Leopoldville had been drenched the previous night. I can imagine the silk texture of that cool air, the smell of Congolese earth curling its toes under a thatch of dead grass. In the dense fog, the nervous red glow of a guard’s cigarette as he sits dreaming, cursing the cold but probably rejoicing in the rain—most likely he’d be the son of farmers. But in any case, alone now, at the front gate of Lumumba’s prison house in Leopoldville. The tires of a station wagon hiss to a stop in the darkness. The guard sits up, touches his uniform, sees the station wagon is full of women. A carload of household employees from the night shift on their way home to the shantytown margins of the city. The boy puts on an attitude of impatience: he’s much too busy with matters of state to be bothered by maids and a chauffeur. He flicks his thumb and forefinger, motioning for the station wagon to pass.

Behind the backseat, pressed against the white-stockinged knees of the maids, the Prime Minister crouches under a blanket.

A Peugeot and a Fiat are waiting down the street to file in behind the station wagon. All three cars head east, out of the city. After they’ve crossed the Kwango River by ferryboat, the Prime Minister rises from the backseat, stretches his long, narrow frame, and joins his wife, Pauline, and small son, Roland, in a car belonging to the Guinean embassy. It proceeds alone, east toward Stanleyville, where loyal crowds wait to hail their chief, believing with all their hearts that he’ll restore their dreams of a free Congo.

But the roads are terrible. The same delicious mud that’s salvation to manioc is the Waterloo of an automobile. They inch forward through the night, until dawn, when Lumumba’s party is halted by a flat tire. He paces on the flattened grass by the ditch, remaining remarkably clean, while the driver labors to change the tire. But the effort stirs the black, wet road to a mire, and when he starts up the car again, it won’t move. Lumumba kneels in the mud to add the force of his own shoulder to the back bumper. It’s no use; they’re hopelessly bogged down. They’ll have to wait for help. Still exuberant with freedom, they remain confident. Two of Lumumba’s former cabinet members are behind them, coming from Leopoldville in another car.

But there has been bad luck. Those two men have reached the Kwango River and are gesturing helplessly at an astonished fisherman. They want him to go wake the ferryman. The ferry squats low in the water at the opposite shore, where it left off Lumumba’s party the  night before. These  fugitive  dignitaries  are  both  from  the Batetela tribe and learned French in mission schools, but have no inkling of how to talk to the Kwango tribesmen who fish the rivers east of Leopoldville. It never mattered before; prior to Independence, hardly anyone gave a thought to the large idea of a geographical Congo. But now, on the morning of November 28, it means everything. The river is not so wide. They can plainly see the ferry, and point to it. But the fisherman stares at these men’s city suits, their clean hands, and their mouths, which exaggerate incomprehensible syllables. He can see they’re desperate. He offers fish. This is how things go.

Lumumba’s party waited most of the day, until they were found and rescued by  a  regional   commissioner, who  took  them to Bulungu. There they paused, since Lumumba’s wife and son were hungry and needed to eat. While he waited in the shade of a tree, brushing dried mud from his trousers, the Prime Minister was recognized by a villager and pulled into what quickly became an excited crowd. He gave an impromptu speech about the unquenchable African thirst for liberty. Somewhere deep in that crowd was a South African mercenary pilot who owned a radio. Very shortly, the CIA station chief knew Lumumba was free. All across the Congo on invisible radio waves flew the code words: The Rabbit has escaped. The army recaptured Lumumba less than fifty miles from our village. People flocked to the roads, banging with sticks and fetishes on the hoods of the army convoy that took him away. The event was reported quickly with drums, across our province and beyond, and some of our neighbors even ran there on foot to try to help their captured leader. But in the midst of all that thunder, all that news assaulting our ears, we heard not a word. Lumumba was taken to Thysville prison, then flown to Katanga Province, and finally beaten so savagely they couldn’t return the body to his widow without international embarrassment.

Pauline and her children grieved, but having no body to bury properly is a terrible thing for a Congolese family. A body unmourned can’t rest. It flies around at night. Pauline went to bed those nights begging her husband not to gnaw with his beak at the living. That’s what I believe, anyway. I think she would have pled with him not to steal the souls of those who would take his place. Despite her prayers, the Congo was left in the hands of soulless, empty men.

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?