The Poisonwood Bible
Page 160
I can have a good laugh at my former self, remembering how my sisters and I nervously made our list of prospects: oranges, flour, even eggs! At our low point as missionaries, we were still fabulously wealthy by the standards of Kilanga. No wonder any household item we carelessly left on our porch quietly found a new home in the night. No wonder the neighbor women frowned in our doorway when we pulled out the linings of our pockets as evidence of our poverty. Not another soul in town even had pockets. They must have felt exactly as I do now glaring at Mobutu on the doorstep of his fairy-tale palaces, shrugging, with his two hands thrust deep into the glittering loot of his mines.
“I thought you said the Congolese don’t believe in keeping riches to themselves,” I told Anatole once, inclined toward an argument.
But he just laughed. “Who, Mobutu? He is not even African now.” “Well, what is he, then?”
“He is the one wife belonging to many white men.” Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and “wide from men “who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.
“Oh, I understand that kind of marriage all right,” I said. “I grew up witnessing one just like it.”
But it dawns on me now that, in the end, Mother carried every last one of our possessions outside as a farewell gift to Kilanga. There are wives, and then there are wives. My pagan mother alone among us understood redemption.
The rest of us are growing into it, I suppose. God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves. Janvier 17, Mort de Lumumba and Ruth May, that’s still the bleak day at our house. Anatole and I grow wordless and stare into the distance at our own regrets, “which aren’t so far apart anymore. On January nights I’m visited by desperate dreams of stretching myself out over the water, reaching for balance. When I look back at the shore, a row of eggs become faces of hungry children, and then comes the fall into blue despair, where I have to move a mountain that crumbles in my hands. It’s a relief to wake up drenched in sweat and find Anatole’s body next to me. But even his devotion can’t keep this weight off my shoulders. “Have mercy upon me, O God, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies,” I catch myself praying, before I’ve fully awakened to a world where I have no father, and can count on no tender mercies. Anatole says recurring dreams are common to those who’ve suffered seriously from malaria. When I’m nervous or sad I also fall prey to the awful itch from filaires, tiny parasites that crawl into your pores and cause a flare-up every so often. Africa has a thousand ways to get under your skin.
Our life here in Kinshasa contains more mercies than most can hope for. I haven’t yet had to bump off Mobutu’s elephant. I even got to bring home a nice fat paycheck, for a time. I signed on to an American payroll, rationalizing that I’d scatter dollars over the vendors in nay little corner of la cite, at least, as it’s certain no foreign relief will reach them any other way.
Mrs. Ngemba, English teacher, was my new identity. It chafed me as much as the Benedictine habit, as it turns out. I taught at a special school in the compound for Americans who came to work on the Inga-Shaba power line.This was the great nuptial gift from the U.S. to the Congo—financing the construction of the Inga-Shaba. It’s an enormous power line stretching across eleven hundred miles of jungle, connecting hydroelectric dams below Leopoldville to the distant southern mining region of Shaba. The project brought in Purdue engineers, crews of Texas roughnecks, and their families, who lived outside Leopoldville in a strange city called Little America. I rode the bus out there every morning to teach grammar and literature to the oddly unpoetic children of this endeavor. They were pale and displaced and complained of missing their dire-sounding TV shows, things with Vice and Cop and Jeopardy in their titles. They’d probably leave the Congo never knowing they’d been utterly surrounded by vice, cops, and the pure snake-infested jeopardy of a jungle. The compound was like a prison, all pavement and block, enclosed by razor wire. And like any prisoners, these kids fought with anything sharp they could find. They mocked my style of dress and called me “Mrs. Gumbo.” I pitied them, despised them, and silently willed them back home on the first boat. I got “warnings time and again, for “attitude” as the superintendent put it, but he tolerated me for want of a replacement. I quit at the end of the second term.
“I thought you said the Congolese don’t believe in keeping riches to themselves,” I told Anatole once, inclined toward an argument.
But he just laughed. “Who, Mobutu? He is not even African now.” “Well, what is he, then?”
“He is the one wife belonging to many white men.” Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and “wide from men “who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.
“Oh, I understand that kind of marriage all right,” I said. “I grew up witnessing one just like it.”
But it dawns on me now that, in the end, Mother carried every last one of our possessions outside as a farewell gift to Kilanga. There are wives, and then there are wives. My pagan mother alone among us understood redemption.
The rest of us are growing into it, I suppose. God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves. Janvier 17, Mort de Lumumba and Ruth May, that’s still the bleak day at our house. Anatole and I grow wordless and stare into the distance at our own regrets, “which aren’t so far apart anymore. On January nights I’m visited by desperate dreams of stretching myself out over the water, reaching for balance. When I look back at the shore, a row of eggs become faces of hungry children, and then comes the fall into blue despair, where I have to move a mountain that crumbles in my hands. It’s a relief to wake up drenched in sweat and find Anatole’s body next to me. But even his devotion can’t keep this weight off my shoulders. “Have mercy upon me, O God, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies,” I catch myself praying, before I’ve fully awakened to a world where I have no father, and can count on no tender mercies. Anatole says recurring dreams are common to those who’ve suffered seriously from malaria. When I’m nervous or sad I also fall prey to the awful itch from filaires, tiny parasites that crawl into your pores and cause a flare-up every so often. Africa has a thousand ways to get under your skin.
Our life here in Kinshasa contains more mercies than most can hope for. I haven’t yet had to bump off Mobutu’s elephant. I even got to bring home a nice fat paycheck, for a time. I signed on to an American payroll, rationalizing that I’d scatter dollars over the vendors in nay little corner of la cite, at least, as it’s certain no foreign relief will reach them any other way.
Mrs. Ngemba, English teacher, was my new identity. It chafed me as much as the Benedictine habit, as it turns out. I taught at a special school in the compound for Americans who came to work on the Inga-Shaba power line.This was the great nuptial gift from the U.S. to the Congo—financing the construction of the Inga-Shaba. It’s an enormous power line stretching across eleven hundred miles of jungle, connecting hydroelectric dams below Leopoldville to the distant southern mining region of Shaba. The project brought in Purdue engineers, crews of Texas roughnecks, and their families, who lived outside Leopoldville in a strange city called Little America. I rode the bus out there every morning to teach grammar and literature to the oddly unpoetic children of this endeavor. They were pale and displaced and complained of missing their dire-sounding TV shows, things with Vice and Cop and Jeopardy in their titles. They’d probably leave the Congo never knowing they’d been utterly surrounded by vice, cops, and the pure snake-infested jeopardy of a jungle. The compound was like a prison, all pavement and block, enclosed by razor wire. And like any prisoners, these kids fought with anything sharp they could find. They mocked my style of dress and called me “Mrs. Gumbo.” I pitied them, despised them, and silently willed them back home on the first boat. I got “warnings time and again, for “attitude” as the superintendent put it, but he tolerated me for want of a replacement. I quit at the end of the second term.
