The Poisonwood Bible (6 page)

I didn’t much care for looking at those men in the pageant. We aren’t all that accustomed to the African race to begin -with, since back home they keep to their own parts of town. But here, of course, with everyplace being their part of town. Plus, these men in the pageant were just carrying it to the hilt. I didn’t see there was any need for them to be so African about it. They wore steel bracelets on their black arms, and loose, flapping clotths tucked half hazardly around their waists. (Even the peg leg one!) They came running or hopping into the church, carrying the sarnie heavy spears they would use later in the week to slew the animals.We knew they did it. Their wives came to our door daily with whole, dripping legs of something not ten minutes dead. Before the great aadventure is all over, Father expects his children to eat rhinoceros, I ssuppose. Antelope is more or less our daily bread. They started bringing us that the very first week. Even, once, a monkey. Mama Tatalba would haggle with the women at the door, and finally turn tco us with her scrawny arms raised up like a boxing champ, holding up our dinner. Jeez oh man, tell me when it’s over! Then she’d stoimp out to the kitchen hut and build such a huge fire in the iron stowe you’d think she was Cape Carniveral launching a rocket ship. Slhe is handy at cooking anything living or dead, but heaven be prraised, Mother rejected the monkey, with its little dead grin. She told  MamaTataba we could get by on things that looked less like kinfollk.

So when the men with their bloodstained spears came jingling down the aisle of our church pageant on Easter Sumday it represented progress, I’m sure, but it wasn’t what Father re:ally hoped for. He had envisioned a baptism.The whole point of Easster in July was supposed to be an altar call, followed by a joyful proceession down to the river with children dressed all in white getting saved. Father would stand waist deep out there like the Baptist Saint John and hold up one hand, and in the name of the Father amd the Son and the Holy Ghost he would dunk them under, one by one. The river would be jam-packed with purified souls.

There is a little stream that runs by the village, writh small pools where people wash clothes and get water for drinkiing, but it isn’t deep or wide enough for anything near the proper bsaptismal effect. For Father it’s the wide Kwilu River and nothing less. I could see exactly how he meant the ceremony to go. It couild have been, really, a pretty sight.

But the men said no, that was not to be. The women were so opposed to getting dunked in the river, even on hiearsay, they all kept their children extra far from the church that day. So the dramatic points of Father’s pageant were lost on most of Kilanga.What with my sisters and me, our mother, and Mama Tataba being the only females in attendance, and all the men that could walk being in the play, a higher proportion of the audience than you’d care to think was either daydreaming or examining the contents of their nostrils.

Afterwards, instead of the baptism, Father lured people down as near as he could get them to the river by means of the age-old method of a church supper. We had a picnic down on the bank of the Kwilu, which has the delightful odor of mud and dead fish. The families that would not darken the door of the church, which by the way doesn’t have any door, did manage to join us for the picnic. Naturally, since we brought most of the food. They seem to think we are Santa Claus, the way the children come around begging us for food and things every single day—and us as poor as church mice! One woman who came trying to sell us her handmade baskets looked in our door and spied our scissors and asked right flat out if she could have them! Imagine having the nerve.

So they all came grandly down to the picnic: women with their heads wrapped in print cloth like birthday presents. Children wearing what few clothes they had—which even that was only for our benefit, I knew, after Father’s blowup over the little dress-code problem. In a certain way they seemed naked irregardless. Some of the women had newborn babies too, teeny fawn-colored frowning things, which the mothers wrap up in great big bundles of cloths and blankets and even little woolly caps, in all this heat! Just to show how prized they are, I guess. In all this dust and dirt with hardly anything ever coming along that’s shiny and new, a baby does seem like quite an event.

Of course, everyone kept staring at me, as they always do here. I am the most extreme blonde imaginable. I have sapphire-blue eyes, white eyelashes, and platinum blonde hair that falls to my waist. It is so fine I have to use Breck Special Formulated and don’t care to think what I’ll do when my one bottle that Father allowed runs out: beat my hair on a rock like MamaTataba does with our clothes, charming. On their own initiative the Congolese seem unable to produce much in the way of hair—half of them are bald as a bug, even the girls. It is a disturbing sight to see a good-sized little girl in a ruffly dress, and not a hair on her head. Consequently they are all so envious of mine they frequently walk up boldly and give it a yank. It’s surprising that my parents allow the situation to present itself. In some ways they are so strict you might as well have a Communist for your parents, but when it comes to something you really wish they’d notice, oh, well! Then parental laxity is the rule of the day.

The Easter picnic on the Fourth of July was one long, drawn-out eternity of a Congolese afternoon. The riverbank, though it looks attractive from a distance, is not so lovely once you get there: slick, smelly mudbanks framed by a tangle of bushes with gaudy orange flowers so large that if you tried to put one behind your ear like Dorothy Lamour you’d look like you were wearing a Melmac soup bowl. The River Kwilu is not like the River Jordan, chilly and wide. It is a lazy, rolling river as warm as bathwater, where crocodiles are said to roll around like logs. No milk and honey on the other side, either, but just more stinking jungle laying low in the haze, as far, far away as the memory of picnics in Georgia. I closed my eyes and dreamed of real soda pop in convenient throwaway cans. We all ate fried chicken that Mother had cooked, southern style, starting from scratch with killing them and lopping off their heads. These were the self-same chickens Ruth May had chased around the house that very morning before church. My sisters moped somewhat, but I nibbled my drumstick happily! Considering my whole situation, I was not about to be bothered by the spectrum of death at our picnic. I was just grateful for a crispy taste of something that connected this creepy, buzzing heat  with real summertime.

The chickens had been another surprise for us, like Mama Tataba. There was just the biggest flock of black-and-white-checkered hens here waiting for us when we arrived. They were busting out of the henhouse, roosting in the trees and wherever they could find a spot, for after Brother Fowles left, they’d all gone to hiding their eggs and raising up babies during the backslide between missions. People in the village had thought of helping us out by eating a few before we got here, but Mama Tataba, I guess, kept them warded off with a stick. It was Mother who decided to contribute most of the flock for feeding the village, like a peace offering. On the morning of the picnic she had to start in at the very crack of dawn, to get all those hens killed and fried up. At the picnic she walked through the crowd passing out thighs and drumsticks to the little children, who acted just as pleased as punch, licking their fingers and singing out hymns. Yet, for all her slaving over a hot stove, Father hardly noticed how she’d won over the crowd. His mind was two million miles away. He just mostly stared out at the river, where no one was fixing to get dunked that day, whatsoever. Just big mats of floating plants going by with stilty-legged birds walking around and around on top, every one of them no doubt thinking he’s king of the world.

I was sore at Father all right, for us having to be there in the first place. But it was plain to see he was put out, too, something fierce. When he gets his mind set on something you’d just as well prepare to see it through.The picnic was festive, but not at all what he’d had in mind. It was nothing, in terms of redemption.

Ruth May

IF SOMEBODY WAS HUNGRY, why would they have a big fat belly? I don’t know.

The children are named Tuniba, Bangwa, Mazuzi, Nsimba, and those things. One of them comes in our yard the most and I don’t know his name at all. He’s near about big, like my sisters, but doesn’t wear a thing on God’s green earth but an old gray shirt without any buttons and baggy gray underpants. He has a big old round belly with his belly button sticking out like a black marble. I can tell it’s him because of the shirt and underpants, not because of the belly button. They all have those. I thought they were all fat, but Father said no. They re hungry as can be, and don’t get their vitamins. And still God makes them look fat. I reckon that’s what they get for being the Tribes of Ham.

One of them is a girl, because of her dress. It’s purple plaid, and it’s ripped right open on the bodice so one of her nipples shows, but she just runs around a-wearing it anyway like she never noticed and neither did anybody. She has shoes too. They used to be white but now they’re dirt-color. Anything that ever was white is not white here.That is not a color you see. Even a white flower opening up on a bush just looks doomed for this world.

I only got to bring me two toys: pipe cleaners, and a monkey-sock monkey. The monkey-sock monkey has done gone already. I left him out on the veranda and come the next morning, he was gone. One of those little children stole, which is a bad sin. Father says to forgive them for they know not what they do. Mama says you can’t hardly even call it a sin when they need ever little thing as bad as they do. So I don’t know which one, if it was a sin or it wasn’t. But I sure got mad and had a fit. I accidentally peed in my britches. My monkey-sock monkey was named Saint Matthew.

The grown-up Congo men are all named Tata Something. That one, name of Tata Undo, he is the chief. He wears a whole outfit, cat skins and everything and a hat. Father had to go see Tata Undo to pay the Devil his do. And the women are all Mama Something, even if they don’t have children. Like Mama Tataba, our cooking lady. Rachel calls her Mama Tater Tots. But she won’t cook those. I wish she would.

The lady in the little house that’s pretty close to ours is Mama Mwanza. One time her roof caught on fire and fell on her and burnt up her legs but not the rest of her. That happened way back years ago. Mama Tataba told Mama about it in the kitchen house and I was listening. They won’t talk about the bad things in front of my sisters, but me I can listen all the livelong day while I’m getting me a banana in the kitchen house and peeling it. Mama Tataba hangs the whole big family of bananas up in the corner all together, so the tarantula spiders that use it for their house can just move on out when they take a notion. I sat real still on the floor and peeled my one banana like Saint Matthew would if he was a real monkey and not gone, and I heard them talking about the woman that got burned up. The roofs burn up because they are all made out of sticks and hay like the Three Little Pigs. The wolf could huff and puff and blow your house down. Even ours. It’s a right smart better than the other ones, but it’s not bricks. Mama Mwanza’s legs didn’t burn all the way off but it looks like a pillow or just something down there she’s sitting on wrapped up in a cloth sack. She has to scoot around on her hands. Her hand bottoms look like feet bottoms, only with fingers. I went over there and had me a good look at her and her little girls with no clothes on. She was nice and gave me a piece of orange to suck on. Mama doesn’t know.

Mama Mwanza almost got burnt plumb to death when it happened but  then  she  got better. Mama says  that was  the poor woman’s bad luck, because now she has got to go right on tending after her husband and her seven or eight children. They don’t care one bit about her not having any legs to speak of. To them she’s just their mama and where’s dinner? To all the other Congo people, too. Why, they just don’t let on, like she was a regular person. Nobody bats their eye when she scoots by on her hands and goes on down to her field or the river to wash clothes with the other ladies that work down there every day. She carries all her things in a basket on top of her head. It’s as big as Mama’s big white laundry hamper back home and seems like she’s always got about ten hundred things piled up in there. When she scoots down the road, not a one of them falls out. All the other ladies have big baskets on their heads too, so nobody stares at Mama Mwanza one way or another.

What they do is, they all stare at us. They look at Rachel the worst. First Mama and Father were thinking it might do Rachel some good to be cranked down a notch or two. Father said to Mama: “A child shouldn’t think herself better than others because she is blonde as a white rabbit.” He said that. I told it to Leah and she laughed out loud. I am blonde too but not as much as a white rabbit. Strawberry blonde, Mama says. So I hope I don’t have to get cranked down a notch or two like Rachel. I like strawberries about better than anything.You can keep a rabbit for a pet or you can eat it. Poor Rachel. Everwhen she goes out, whole bunches of little Congo children run after her on the road a-reaching and a-yanking on her long white hair to see if they can get it to come off. Sometimes even the grownups do too. I reckon they think it’s a right good sport. Leah told me it’s because they don’t believe it is her hair and think she’s got something strange draped over her head.

Rachel gets her the worst sunburns, too. I get burnt but not like her. Pink is Rachel’s favorite color and it’s a good thing because that’s what she is. Father says it is the lot of every young woman to learn humility and God plots for each her chosen way.

Mama says, “But must they look on us as freaks of nature?” Rachel was Miss Priss and now she is a freak of nature. Used to be, Adah was the only one of us in our family with something wrong with her. But here nobody stares at Adah except just a little because she’s white. Nobody cares that she’s bad on one whole side because they’ve all got their own handicap children or a mama with no feet, or their eye put out. When you take a look out the door, why, there goes somebody with something missing off of them and not even embarrassed of it. They’ll wave a stump at you if they’ve got one, in a friendly way.