The Poisonwood Bible
Page 184
Now they are walking home, Beene. With baskets of palm nuts and orchids from the forest. They’re singing. Songs about what?
Oh, everything. The colors of a fish. And how well behaved their children would be if they were all made of wax. I laugh. Who are they? How many? Just a woman and a man on the path. They are married. And their troublesome children aren’t with them? Not yet. They have only been married one week. Oh, I see. So they’re holding hands. Of course.
What does it look like there?
They are close to the river, in a forest that has never been cut down. These trees are a thousand years old. Lizards and little monkeys live their whole lives up above without coming down to the ground. Up in the roof of the world.
But down on the path where we are, it’s dark?
A nice darkness. The kind your eyes can grow to like. It’s mining, but the branches are so thick that only a little mist comes down. New mbika vines are curling up from the ground behind us, where the water pools in our footsteps.
What happens when we come to the river? We’ll cross it, of course.
I laugh. As easy as that! And what if the ferry is stuck without a battery on the other side?
In the Kingdom of Kongo, Beene, no batteries. No trucks, no roads. They declined to invent the wheel because it looked like nothing but trouble in this mud. For crossing the river they have bridges that stretch from one great greenheart tree to another on the opposite bank.
I can see this couple. I know they’re real, that they really lived. They climb up to a platform in the greenheart where the woman pauses for balance, bunches her long skirts into one hand, and prepares to walk out into the brighter light and rain. She touches her hair, which is braided in thick ropes and tied at the back of her neck with little bells. When she’s ready she steps out over the water on the swaying vine-bridge. My heart rushes and then settles into the rhythm of her footsteps along the swinging bridge.
“But what if it’s a huge river,” I asked him once—”like the Congo, which is much broader than the reach of any vine?”
“This is simple,” he said. “Such a river should not be crossed.”
If only a river could go uncrossed, and whatever lay on the other side could live as it pleased, unwitnessed and unchanged. But it didn’t happen that way. The Portuguese peered through the trees and saw that the well-dressed, articulate Kongo did not buy or sell or transport their crops, but merely lived in place and ate what they had, like the beasts of the forest. In spite of poetry and beautiful clothes, such people were surely not fully human—were primitive; that’s a word the Portuguese must have used, to salve their conscience for what was to come. Soon the priests were holding mass baptisms on shore and marching their converts onto ships bound for sugar plantations in Brazil, slaves to the higher god of commodity agriculture.
There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me -wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the meek inherit anything. What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That’s pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There’s the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace.
For ten years now we’ve been living in Angola, on an agricultural station outside of Sanza Pombo. Before independence, the Portuguese had a palm-oil plantation here, cleared out of virgin jungle a half-century ago. Under the surviving oil palms we grow maize, yams, and soybeans, and raise pigs. Every year in the dry season, when travel is possible, our cooperative gains a few new families. Mostly young children and women with their pagnes in tatters, they come soundlessly out of the forest, landing here as lightly as weary butterflies after years of fleeing the war. At first they don’t speak at all. Then after a week or two the women usually begin to talk, very softly but without cease, until they’ve finished the accounting of places and people they’ve lost. Nearly always I learn they’ve made a circular migration in their lifetimes, first having fled their home villages for the city, bluntly facing starvation there, and now returning to this small, remote outpost, where they have some liope of feeding themselves. We manage to produce a little extra palm oil for sale in Luanda, but most of what we grow is consumed here.The cooperative owns a single vehicle, our old Land Rover (which has had such a life it would tell its own history of the “world if it could), but our rains start in September and the road doesn’t become passable again until April. Most of the year, we look at what we have and decide to get along.
Oh, everything. The colors of a fish. And how well behaved their children would be if they were all made of wax. I laugh. Who are they? How many? Just a woman and a man on the path. They are married. And their troublesome children aren’t with them? Not yet. They have only been married one week. Oh, I see. So they’re holding hands. Of course.
What does it look like there?
They are close to the river, in a forest that has never been cut down. These trees are a thousand years old. Lizards and little monkeys live their whole lives up above without coming down to the ground. Up in the roof of the world.
But down on the path where we are, it’s dark?
A nice darkness. The kind your eyes can grow to like. It’s mining, but the branches are so thick that only a little mist comes down. New mbika vines are curling up from the ground behind us, where the water pools in our footsteps.
What happens when we come to the river? We’ll cross it, of course.
I laugh. As easy as that! And what if the ferry is stuck without a battery on the other side?
In the Kingdom of Kongo, Beene, no batteries. No trucks, no roads. They declined to invent the wheel because it looked like nothing but trouble in this mud. For crossing the river they have bridges that stretch from one great greenheart tree to another on the opposite bank.
I can see this couple. I know they’re real, that they really lived. They climb up to a platform in the greenheart where the woman pauses for balance, bunches her long skirts into one hand, and prepares to walk out into the brighter light and rain. She touches her hair, which is braided in thick ropes and tied at the back of her neck with little bells. When she’s ready she steps out over the water on the swaying vine-bridge. My heart rushes and then settles into the rhythm of her footsteps along the swinging bridge.
“But what if it’s a huge river,” I asked him once—”like the Congo, which is much broader than the reach of any vine?”
“This is simple,” he said. “Such a river should not be crossed.”
If only a river could go uncrossed, and whatever lay on the other side could live as it pleased, unwitnessed and unchanged. But it didn’t happen that way. The Portuguese peered through the trees and saw that the well-dressed, articulate Kongo did not buy or sell or transport their crops, but merely lived in place and ate what they had, like the beasts of the forest. In spite of poetry and beautiful clothes, such people were surely not fully human—were primitive; that’s a word the Portuguese must have used, to salve their conscience for what was to come. Soon the priests were holding mass baptisms on shore and marching their converts onto ships bound for sugar plantations in Brazil, slaves to the higher god of commodity agriculture.
There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me -wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the meek inherit anything. What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That’s pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There’s the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace.
For ten years now we’ve been living in Angola, on an agricultural station outside of Sanza Pombo. Before independence, the Portuguese had a palm-oil plantation here, cleared out of virgin jungle a half-century ago. Under the surviving oil palms we grow maize, yams, and soybeans, and raise pigs. Every year in the dry season, when travel is possible, our cooperative gains a few new families. Mostly young children and women with their pagnes in tatters, they come soundlessly out of the forest, landing here as lightly as weary butterflies after years of fleeing the war. At first they don’t speak at all. Then after a week or two the women usually begin to talk, very softly but without cease, until they’ve finished the accounting of places and people they’ve lost. Nearly always I learn they’ve made a circular migration in their lifetimes, first having fled their home villages for the city, bluntly facing starvation there, and now returning to this small, remote outpost, where they have some liope of feeding themselves. We manage to produce a little extra palm oil for sale in Luanda, but most of what we grow is consumed here.The cooperative owns a single vehicle, our old Land Rover (which has had such a life it would tell its own history of the “world if it could), but our rains start in September and the road doesn’t become passable again until April. Most of the year, we look at what we have and decide to get along.
