The Poisonwood Bible (52 page)

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.

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.

It’s taken a lot to dampen our hopes. But everything has turned around so fast, like a magician’s trick: foreign hands moved behind the curtain and one white King was replaced with another. Only the face that shows is black. Mobutu’s U.S. advisors even tried to hold elections here, but then got furious when the wrong person won— Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba’s lieutenant. So they marched the army into parliament and reorganized it once again in Mobutu’s favor.

“If the Americans mean to teach us about democracy, the lesson is quite remarkable,” Anatole observed.

“Breathtaking,” I agreed.

He says I have different personalities: that my Lingak is sweet and maternal, but in English I’m sarcastic. I told him, “That’s nothing—in French I’m a mine sweeper. Which personality annoys you the most?”

He kissed my forehead. “The most, I love my Beene.” His absolute truth. Is that what I am? When the neighbors or students ask me my nationality, I tell them I came from a country that no longer exists. They can believe it.

In the last months our government paychecks have dwindled from almost nothing to nothing. We tell our coworkers that a mere lack of funds mustn’t discourage our hopes. We know that to criticize Mobutu, even in private, is to risk having your head cracked open like a nut, which naturally would discourage one’s hopes entirely. We live on what we can find, and when we’re offered news of friends, we take a deep breath first. My old friend Pascal and two other former students of Anatole’s were murdered by the army on the road south of here. Pascal had a kilo of sugar cane and a defunct World War II handgun in his backpack. We heard about it on Christmas Day, when we had a visit from Fyntan and Celine Fowles.They’re now staying at Kikongo, the hospital mission on the Wamba they told us about. I rejoiced to see them, but any reunion brings awful news, and I cried myself to sleep when they left. I’d nearly forgotten Pascal, his wide-set eyes and insolent smile, and now he comes creeping around my dreams, throwing open windows faster than I can shut them. What little scrap of audacity caught the attention of an army officer on the road? What if I marked him with some English word I taught him, as stupidly as we doomed our parrot?

This is the kind of crazy dread we live with. Our neighbors are equally terrified of Mobutu’s soldiers and their opposition, the Simbas, whose reputation is stalking northern Congo like a lion itself. The Simbas’ anger against all foreigners is understandable, but increasingly their actions aren’t. We hear of atrocities on the shortwave, then hear them exaggerated on Mobutu’s official newscasts, and it’s hard to know what’s real. I think about food, mostly, and occupy my mind by watching children. I don’t really fear the Simbas, even though I’m white. Anatole is very well respected; my alliance with him will save me, or it won’t. Justice moves in mysterious ways.
   

Father is still carrying on with his tormented Jesus Is Bangala church.This was the Fowleses’ other awful news: Father had walked or hitchhiked all the way over to the Kikongo mission in an agitated state, bellowing that his guts were on fire with venom. He claimed he’d swallowed a live snake. The mission doctor gave him quinine and vermifuges, which would give pinworms a run for their money, but likely not a green mamba. Poor Father. Now he’s left Kilanga altogether, vanished into the forest, it seems, or melted under the rain. Sometimes at night I think about how he might be dead and I haven’t heard yet. It’s a hard thing to live with in the dark, and I lie awake cooking up plans to go hunt for him. But in daylight a wall of anger pushes me in a different direction, roaring that I must leave Father behind me. I couldn’t strike out on my own, and even with help it’s not worth the risk. I understand that he’s dangerous to me now.

Dangerous to many people, and always was, I guess. Fyntan and Celine must have been alarmed by our misguided outpost in Kilanga, where we slept in their same house, antagonized their former friends, even turned their parrot out to nature’s maw. And that mission doctor at Kikongo must have found Father a sight to behold: a wild-haired preacher with a snake in his belly. That doctor has stayed on with his family, in spite of the danger—they’re from someplace in the South, Fyntan thought, Georgia or Kentucky. I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.

It’s the only time I get homesick, when America lands on my doorstep in a missionary guise.There are others who didn’t go back, like me. But they seem so sure of being right here where they are, so rooted by faith—Fyntan Fowles, for one, and the strangers who turn up every so often to ask if I can help get a message through or keep a box of medicines safe till a boat is found to take it up river. I’ll happily invent a meal and make up a bed on the floor, just to hear the kindness in their stories. They’re so unlike Father. As I bear the emptiness of a life without his God, it’s a comfort to know these soft-spoken men who organize hospitals under thatched roofs, or stoop alongside village mamas to plant soybeans, or rig up electrical generators for a school.They’ve risked Mobutu and every imaginable parasite in the backwater places where children were left to die or endure when the Underdowns and their ilk fled the country. As Brother Fowles told us a long time ago: there are Christians, and there are Christians.