The Poisonwood Bible (24 page)

I repeated to Nelson that, however he might interpret the parable of Job, our family doesn’t believe in witch-doctor ngangas and evil-eye fetishes and the nkisis and gree-grees people wear around their necks, to ward off curses and the like. “I’m sorry, Nelson,” I told him, “but we just don’t worship those gods.” To make our position perfectly clear I added, “Baka vei.”This means, “We don’t pay for that,” which is how you say that you don’t believe.

Nelson gently stacked wood into my outstretched arms.”A bu” he said sorrowfully. I had no choice but to look closely into Nelson’s sweat-glazed face as he arranged the wood in my awkward embrace—our work brought us that close together. I could see that he seemed truly sad for us. He clicked his tongue the way Mama Tataba used to, and told me, “Leba, the gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.”

Adah

WONK TON O DEW. The things we do not know, independently and in unison as a family, would fill two separate baskets, each with a large hole in the bottom.

Muntu is the Congolese word for man. Or people. But it means more than that. Here in the Congo I am pleased to announce there is no special difference between living people, dead people, children not yet born, and gods—these are all muntu. So says Nelson. All other things are kintu: animals, stones, bottles. A place or a time is hantu, and a quality of being is kuntu: beautiful, hideous, or lame, for example. All these things have in common the stem word ntu. “All that is being here, ntu,” says Nelson with a shrug, as if this is not so difficult to understand. And it would be simple, except that “being here” is not the same as “existing.” He explains the difference this way: the principles of ntu are asleep, until they are touched by nommo. Nommo is the force that makes things live as what they are: man or tree or animal. Nommo means word. The rabbit has the life it has—not a rat life or mongoose life—because it is named rabbit, mvundla. A child is not alive, claims Nelson, until it is named. I told him this helped explain a mystery for me. My sister and I are identical twins, so how is it that from one single seed we have two such different lives? Now I know. Because I am named Adah and she is named Leah.

Nommo, I wrote down on the notebook I had opened out for us at our big table. Nommo ommon NoMmo, I wrote, wishing to learn this word forward and backward. Theoretically I was in the process of showing Nelson, at his urging, how to write a letter (ignoring the fact he would have no way to mail it). He enjoys my silent tutelage and asks for it often. But Nelson as a pupil is apt to turn teacher himself at the least provocation. And he seems to think his chatter improves our conversation, since I only write things on paper.

“NOMMO MVULA IS MY SISTER RACHEL?” I queried.

He nodded.

Ruth May, then, is Nommo Bandu, and Leah is Nommo Leba. And where does Nommo come from?             

He pointed to his mouth. Nommo comes from the mouth, like water vapor, he said: a song, a poem, a scream, a prayer, a name, all these are nommo. Water itself is nommo, of the most important kind, it turns out. Water is the word of the ancestors given to us or withheld, depending on how well we treat them. The word of the ancestors is pulled into trees and men, Nelson explained, and this allows them, to stand and live as muntu.

A TREE IS ALSO MUNTU? I wrote. Quickly I drew stick man and stick tree side by side, to clarify. Our conversations are often mostly pictures and gestures. “A tree is a type of person?”

“Of course,” Nelson said. “Just look at them. They both have roots and a head.”

Nelson was puzzled by my failure to understand such a simple thing.  

Then he asked, “You and your sister Leba, how do you mean you came from the same seed?”

Twins, I wrote. He didn’t recognize the word. I drew two identical girls side by side, which he found even more baffling, given that Leah and I—the beauty and the beast—were the twins under consideration. So then, since no one was around to watch us and Nelson seems incapable of embarrassment, I brought forth a shameless pantomime of a mother giving birth to one baby, then—oh my!— another. Twins.   His eyes grew wide. “Baza!”

I nodded, thinking he was not the first to be amazed by this news about Leah and me. But it must have been more than that, because he leaped away from me with such haste that he knocked over his chair.

“Baza!” he repeated, pointing at me. He delicately touched my forehead and recoiled, as if my skin might burn him.

I scribbled with some defensiveness: You never saw twins?

He shook his head with conviction. “Any woman who has baza should take the two babies to the forest after they are born and leave them there. She takes them fast, right away. That is very very very necessary.”

Why?

“The ancestors and gods,” he stammered. “All gods. What god would not be furious at a mother who kept such babies? I think the whole village would be flooded or mostly everyone would die, if a mother kept her baza”

I looked around the room, saw no immediate evidence of catastrophe, and shrugged. I turned the page on our lesson in business correspondence, and began to work on an elaborate pencil drawing of Noah’s ark. After a while Nelson righted his chair and sat down approximately four feet away from me. He leaned very far over to try to peer at my picture.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT TWINS, I wrote across the top. Or who knows, maybe it is, I thought. All those paired-up bunnies and elephants.

“What happened to your village when your mother did not take you to the forest?”

I considered the year of my birth, and wrote: WE WON THE WAR. Then I proceeded to draw the outline of an exceptionally elegant giraffe. But Nelson glowered, still waiting for evidence that my birth had not brought down a plague upon my house. NO FLOODS. NO EPIDEMICS, I wrote. ALL IS WELL IN USA, WHERE MOTHERS KEEP THEIR BAZA EVERYDAY.

Nelson stared at me with such pure, annoyed skepticism I was tempted to doubt my own word. Hadn’t there been, say, a rash of hurricanes in the months after Leah and I were born? A bad winter nationwide for the flu? Who knew. I shrugged, and drew a second giraffe with a dramatic, Z-shaped crook to its neck. The benduka giraffe.

Nelson was not going to let me off. Clearly my twinhood was a danger to society. “Tata Jesus, what does he say?”

TOO MUCH, AS A RULE.

“What does he say to do when a woman has...” he hesitated over even saying the word in English.

I shrugged, but Nelson kept pushing me on this point. He would not believe that the Jesus Bible, with its absolutely prodigious abundance of words, gave no specific instructions to mothers of newborn twins. Finally I wrote: JESUS SAYS TO KEEP THEM, I GUESS.

Nelson became agitated again. “So you see, both wives of Tata Boanda go to the Jesus Church! And the Mama Lakanga! All these women and their friends and husbands! They think they will have twins again, and Tata Jesus will not make them leave the babies in the forest.”

This was fascinating news, and I queried him on the particulars. According to Nelson’s accounting, nearly half my father’s congregation were relatives of dead twins. It is an interesting precept on which to found a ministry: The First Evangelical Baptist Church of the Twin-Prone. I also learned from Nelson that we are hosting seven lepers every Sunday, plus two men who have done the thing that is permanently unforgiven by local gods—that is, to have accidentally killed a clansman or child. We seem to be the Church for the Lost of Cause, which is probably not so far afield from what Jesus himself was operating in his time.

This should not have been a great surprise. Anatole had already tried to explain to us the societal function of our church, during that fateful dinner that ended in a shattered plate. But the Reverend feels he is doing such a ripping job of clarifying all fine points of the Scripture to the heathen, he cannot imagine that he is still merely serving the purpose of cleaning up the streets, as it were.

Removing troublesome elements from the main ceremonial life of Kilanga. The Reverend failed to notice that every churchgoing family whose children were struck hard with the kakakaka quietly removed themselves back to ancestor worship, while a few of the heathen families that were hard hit quietly came and tried out Christianity. While it makes perfect sense to me, this pragmatic view of religion escapes the Reverend utterly. Each time a new convert limps through the door on a Sunday morning, he will boast over dinner that he is “really calling them home now, buddy. Finally attracting the attention of some of the local big shots.”

And so he continues ministering to the lepers and outcasts. By pure mistake, his implementation is sometimes more pure than his intentions. But mostly it is the other way around. Mostly he shouts, “Praise be!” while the back of his hand knocks you flat.

How did he come to pass, this nommo Nathan Price? I do wonder. In the beginning was the word, the war, the way of all flesh. The mother, the Father, the son who was not, the daughters who were too many. The twins who brought down the house, indeed. In the beginning was the word the herd the blurred the turd the debts incurred the theatrical absurd. Our Father has a bone to pick with this world, and oh, he picks it like a sore. Picks it with the Word. His punishment is the Word, and his deficiencies are failures of words— as when he grows impatient with translation and strikes out precariously on his own, telling parables in his wildly half-baked Kikongo. It is a dangerous thing, I now understand, to make mistakes with nommo in the Congo. If you assign the wrong names to things, you could make a chicken speak like a man. Make a machete rise up and dance.

We his daughters and wife are not innocent either. The players in his theater. We Prices are altogether thought to be peculiarly well-intentioned, and inane. I know this. Nelson would never come out and say as much. But he has always told me, when I ask, the words we get wrong. I can gather the rest. It is a special kind of person who will draw together a congregation, stand up before them with a proud, clear voice, and say words wrong, week after week.

Bandika, for example: to kill someone. If you spit it out too quickly, as the Reverend does, it means to pinch back a plant or deflower a virgin. What a surprise it must be to the Congolese to hear that brave David, who intended to smite the mighty Goliath, was actually jumping around pinching back plants, or worse.

Then there is batiza, Our Father’s fixed passion. Batiza pronounced with the tongue curled just so means “baptism.” Otherwise, it means “to terrify.” Nelson spent part of an afternoon demonstrating to me that fine linguistic difference while we scraped chicken manure from the nest boxes. No one has yet explained it to the Reverend. He is not of a mind to receive certain news. Perhaps he should clean more chicken houses.

Ruth May

SOMETIMES YOU JUST WANT to lay on down and look at the whole world sideways. Mama and I do. It feels nice. If I put my head on her, the sideways world moves up and down. She goes: hhh-huh. hhh-huh. She’s soft on her tummy and the bosoms part. When Father and Leah went away on the airplane we just needed to lay on down awhile.

Sometimes I tell her: Mommy Mommy. I just say that. Father isn’t listening so I can say it. Her real name is Mother and Misrus Price but her secret name to me is Mommy Mommy. He went away on the airplane and I said, “Mama, I hope he never comes back.” We cried then.

But I was sad and wanted Leah to come back because she’ll pick me up and carry me piggyback sometimes, when she’s not hollowing at me for being a pest. Everybody is nice sometimes and Baby Jesus says to love everybody no matter how you really do feel. Baby Jesus knows what I said about wishing Father would never come back anymore, and Father is the preacher. So God and them love him the best.

I dreamed I climbed away up to the top of the alligator pear tree and was a-looking down at all of them, the teeny little children with crooked cowboy legs and their big eyes looking up and the teeniest wrapped-up babies with little hands and faces that are just as fair till they get older and turn black, for it takes a spell I guess before God notices they are the Tribes of Ham. And the dirt-color houses all just the same as the dirt they’re sitting on. Mama says not a thing in the whole village that won’t melt in a good hard rain. And I could see Mommy Mommy, the top of her. I could see everything she was thinking, like Jesus does. She was thinking about animals.

Sometimes when you wake up you can’t tell if it was dreaming or real.

Adah

GOD WORKS, as is very well known, in mysterious ways. There is just nothing you can name that He won’t do, now and then. Oh, He will send down so much rain that all his little people are drinking from one another’s sewers and dying of the kakakaka.Then he will organize a drought to scorch out the yam and manioc fields, so whoever did not die of fever will double over from hunger. What next, you might ask? Why, a mystery, that’s what!

After the Independence cut off our stipend and all contacts with the larger world, it seems God’s plan called for Mother and Ruth May to fall sick nigh unto death. They grew flushed and spotted and thick-tongued and tired and slow-moving near unto the lower limit of-what is generally thought to constitute a living human body.

The Reverend seemed unconcerned about this. He forged ahead with his mission work, leaving his three older girls in charge of hearth and home for days on end while he sallied out to visit the unsaved, or to meet with Anatole about imposing Bible classes upon boys of tender years. Oh, that Bible, where every ass with a jawbone gets his day! (Anatole evidently was not keen on the plan.) Often the Reverend simply went out and walked along the river for hours, alone, trying out his sermons on the lilies of the field—who understand him about as well as his congregation and frankly are better listeners. All in all, being God’s sole and abandoned emissary to Kilanga was keeping Our Father very busy. If we plagued him with our worries about Mother, he merely snapped that she would heed God’s call soon enough, and get herself up and around. At night we overheard strange, tearful arguments, in which Mother spoke in a quiet, slurred, slow-motion voice, like a phonograph record on the wrong speed, outlining the possibilities for our family’s demise. In a small fraction of the time it took her to form her plea, Our Father irritably countered that the Lord operates in mysterious ways. As if she did not know.