The Poisonwood Bible (23 page)

All the eyes of America know what a Congolese looks like. Skin and bones dancing, lips upcurled like oyster shells, a no-count man with a femur in his hair.
     

The mganga Kuvudundu dressed in white with no bone in his hair is standing at the edge of our yard. He of eleven toes. He repeats the end of his own name over and over: the word dundu. Dundu is a kind of antelope. Or it is a small plant of the genus Veronia. Or a nil. Or a price yam have to pay. So much depends on the tone of voice. One of these things is what our family has coming to us. Our Baptist ears from Georgia will never understand the difference.

Rachel

FATHER FLEW with Eeben Axelroot to Stanleyville for the same reason the bear went over the mountain, I guess. And all that he could see was the other side of the Congo. The other main reason for his trip was quinine pills, which we had just about run out of, how unfortunate. Quinine pills taste bad enough to give you a hair problem. I happen to know Ruth May doesn’t even swallow hers all the time: once I saw her hide it behind her side teeth when she opened wide to show Mother it was down the hatch. Then she spat it out in her hand and stuck it on the wall behind her cot. Me, I swallow. All I need is to go back home with some dread disease. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed is bad enough, but to be Thyroid Mary on top of it? Oh, brother.

Father is mad at the Underdowns. Usually they send the basic necessities they think we will need every month (which believe you me is not much), but this time they just sent a letter: “Prepare your departure. We are sending a special Mission plane for your evacuation June 28. We are leaving Leopoldville the following week and have arranged for your family to accompany us as far as Belgium.”

The end? And the Price family lived happily ever after? Not on your life. Father is all psyched up to stay here forever, I think. Mother tries to explain to him day in and day out about how he is putting his own children in jeopardy of their lives, but he won’t even listen to his own wife, much less his mere eldest daughter. I screamed and kicked the furniture until one whole leg came off the table and threw a hissy fit they could probably hear all the way to Egypt. Listen, what else can a girl do but try. Stay here? When everybody else gets to go home and do the bunny hop and drink Cokes? It is a sheer tapestry of justice.

Father returned from Stanleyville with his hair just about standing on end, he was so full of the daily news. They had their election, I guess, and the winner is a man named Patrice, if you can believe. Patrice Lumumba. Father said Lumumba’s party won thirty-five of a hundredy-some-odd seats in the new parliament, mainly because of his natural animal magnetism. And also the large population of his hometown. It sounded kind of like student-council elections at Bethlehem High, where whoever has the biggest click of friends, they win. Not that a minister’s daughter would ever have a chance, jeez-oh-man. No matter how much you flirt or carry on like a cool cat and roll up your skirt waistband on the bus, they still just think you’re L—7. A square, in other words. Try to get a boyfriend under those conditions: believe you me, your chances are dull and void.

So Mr. Patrice will be the Prime Minister of the Congo now and it won’t be the Belgian Congo anymore, it will be the Republic of Congo. And do you think anybody in this hip town we live in is actually going to notice? Oh, sure. They’ll all have to go out and get their drivers’ licenses changed. In the year two million that is, when they build a road to here and somebody gets a car.

Mother said, “Now is he the one they’re saying is a Communist?”

Father said, “Not so’s you’d notice.”That is the one and only Mississippi expression he has ever picked up from Mother. We’ll ask her something like “Did you iron my linen dress like I asked you to?” And she’ll say, “Not so’s you’d notice.” Back home she could be a smart aleck sometimes, and how. When Father wasn’t around, that is. Father said he heard soon-to-be Prime Minister Lumumba talk on a radio in a barbershop in Stanleyville about neutral foreign policy and African Unity and all that jazz. He says now Patrice Lumumba and the other elected Congolese are trading chickens and eggs to set up a government that everybody in the parliament will go along with. But the problem is all of them still like their own tribes and their own chiefs the best. I can just picture the parliament room: a hundredy-some-odd Tata Ndus in pointy hats and no-glass glasses all flicking flies away with animal-tail magic wands in the sweltering heat, pretending to ignore each other. It will probably take them one hundred years just to decide which person gets to sit where. It’s enough already. All I want is to go home, and start scrubbing the deep-seated impurities of the Congo out of my skin.

Ruth May

MAMA NEEDS her some Quick Energy.After Father went away with Leah on the plane, she went and got in her bed and won’t get up.

It wasn’t the Mr. Axelroot plane. He goes and comes whenever he feels like it. This was another airplane just as little but yellow this time. The driver had on a white shirt and Vitalis in his hair that you could smell. He smelled clean. He had Experimint gum and gave me a piece. He was a white man that talked French. Sometimes some of them do and I don’t know why. We all put on our shoes and went down to see the airplane land. I have to wear white baby shoes even though I’m not a baby. When I am grown my mother will still have my shoes. She aims to turn them into brown shiny metal and keep them on the table in Georgia with my baby picture. She did it for all the others, even Adah and her one foot’s no count; it curls up and makes the shoe wear out funny. Even that bad sideways-worn-out shoe Mama made into metal and saved, so she’ll save mine.

Mama said the airplane was a special chart plane the Under-downs sent for us to get all our stuff that needed getting and fly on out of here. But Father wouldn’t allow. Only he and Leah got on, and didn’t take anything because they are coming back. Rachel sassed him straight to his face, and tried to climb right into the airplane with her things! He flung her back. She threw her stuff on the ground and said fine, then, she was going to go drown herself in the river, but we knew she wouldn’t. Rachel wouldn’t want to get that dirty.

Adah wasn’t there either; she stayed home. Just me and Mama stood on the field to watch the plane fly away. But Mama wouldn’t even jump up and wave bye. She just stood with her face getting smaller and smaller, and when you couldn’t see the airplane anymore she went in the house and lay down on her bed. It was morning, not night. Not even nap time.

I told Rachel and Adah we needed some yUp for Mama. Rachel does the radio advertisements from back home and that is one: “Bushed? Beat? Need ionizing? yUp is the greatest discovery yet for getting new energy quick. In two to six minutes you’ll feel like a new you.”

But all day went by and it got dark and Mama still doesn’t feel like a new Mama. Rachel won’t talk to me about getting yUp. She’s sitting out on the porch looking at the hole in the sky where the airplane went away. And Adah doesn’t talk anyway, because of how she is. Nelson got us our dinner, but he is sneaking around the house like somebody got in a fight and he’s staying out of it. So it’s real quiet. I tried to play but I didn’t feel like it. I went in and picked up Mama’s hand and it fell back down. Then I just crawled in the bed with her, and now that makes two of us that don’t feel like getting up ever again.

Leah

MY FATHER AND I have patched things up. He allowed me to accompany him to Leopoldville, where we got to see history in the making. We watched the Independence ceremonies from a giant rusty barge tied to the bank of the Congo River that was loaded with so many pushing, squirming people Mrs. Underdown said we’d probably all go down like the Titanic. It was such an important event King Baudouin of Belgium, himself, was going to be there. It was childish, I know, but I got very excited when she told me that. I suppose I was picturing someone in a crown and an ermine-trimmed scarlet robe, like Old King Cole. But the white men sitting up on the stage were all dressed alike, in white uniforms with belts, swords, shoulder fringe, and white flat-topped military hats. Not a single crown to be seen. As they waited their turn to speak, dark sweat stains blossomed under the arms of their uniforms. And when it was all over I couldn’t even tell you which one had been the King.

The white men mostly spoke of the glorious days of the previous king of Belgium, King Leopold, who first made the Congo into what it is today. Mrs. Underdown reported this to me, in quick little bursts of translation while she squeezed my hand tightly, since it was mostly all in French. I didn’t care for her holding my hand; I am as tall as she is and a good sight less of a scaredy-cat. But we could have gotten lost from one another in all those people, too. And Father wouldn’t have held my hand for the world—he isn’t like that. Mrs. Underdown called me a poor lost lamb. She couldn’t believe it when Father and I showed up without the rest of them.

Her jaw dropped to her bosom. Later, when we were alone, she told me it was her opinion that Father was not in his right mind and should think of his poor children. I told her my father would know what was best in the sight of the Lord, and that we were privileged to serve. Why, that just flabbergasted her. She is a meek woman and I can’t say that I respect her. They are leaving tomorrow to go to Belgium, and we’re going back to Kilanga to hold the fort until another family can come. That is Father’s plan. Reverend Underdown is pretending not to be mad at us.

After the King and the other white men spoke, they inaugurated Patrice Lumumba as the new Prime Minister. I could tell exactly which one he was. He was a thin, distinguished man who wore real eyeglasses and a small, pointed beard. When he stood up to speak, everyone’s mouth shut. In the sudden quiet we could hear the great Congo River lapping up its banks. Even the birds seemed taken aback. Patrice Lumumba raised his left hand up and seemed to grow ten feet tall, right there and then. His eyes shone bright white with dark centers. His smile was a triangle, upcurved on the sides and reaching a point below, like his beard. I could see his face very clearly, even though we were far away.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Congo,” he said, “who have fought for the independence won today, I salute you!”

The quiet crowd broke open with cheers and cheers. “Je vous salue! Je vous salue encore!”
      

Patrice Lumumba asked us to keep this day, June 30,1960, in our hearts forever and tell our children of its meaning. Everyone on the raft and the crowded banks would do what he said, I knew. Even me, if I ever get to have any children. Whenever he paused to take a breath, the people screamed and waved their arms.

First he talked about our equal partner, Belgium. Then he said other things that made Mrs. Underdown nervous. “Our lot was eighty years of colonial rule,” she translated, and then she stopped. She let go my hand, wiped it on her slacks, and grabbed me again.

“What all’s he saying?” I asked her. I didn’t want to miss word one of Patrice Lumumba. As he spoke his eyes seemed to be on fire.

I have seen preachers at revival meetings speak like that, with voices rising in such a way that heaven and anger get mingled together. The people cheered more and more.

“He’s saying we despoiled their land and used the Negroes for slaves, just as long as we could get away with it,” she said.

“We did that?”
 

“Well. The Belgians in general. He’s very mad about all the nice things they said earlier about King Leopold. Who was a bad egg, I’ll admit that.”

“Oh,” I said. I narrowed my eyes to a hard focus on Patrice Lumumba and tried to understand his words. I was jealous of Adah, who picked up languages easier than she could tie her own shoes. I wished I’d studied harder.

“We have known les maisons magnifiques for the whites in the cities, and the falling-down houses for the Negroes.”

 
Oh, I understood that all right. He was right, I’d seen it myself when we went to the Underdowns’. Leopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make their homes out of sticks or tin or anything in the world they can find. Father said that is the Belgians’ doing and Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment. He says after Independence the Americans will send foreign aid to help them make better houses. The Underdowns’ house has soft red Persian rugs, chairs with matching ottomans, even a radio. She had a real china tea set on the dark wooden sideboard. Last night I watched her pack up all the fragile cups, moaning about what she’d have to leave and who’d get it. For dinner the houseboy brought us one thing after another until I thought I’d burst: real meat, orange cheeses wrapped in red wax, canned yellow asparagus. After a hundred white meals of fufu, bread, Potato Buds and Carnation milk, it was too much taste and color for me. I chewed and swallowed slowly, feeling sick. After dinner, why, chocolate cookies from France! The Underdowns’ two sons, big crew-cut boys shifting around in grown men’s bodies, grabbed handfuls of cookies with their big hands and bolted from the table. I took only one and couldn’t get my mouth to eat it, though I wanted to badly. The Underdowns’ skinny houseboy sweated in his ironed white apron while he hurried to bring us more things. I thought about the kilo of sugar he’d tried to stash under his shirt. With so much else around, “why wouldn’t Mrs. Underdown just go ahead and give it to him? Was she actually going to take all her sugar back to Belgium?