The Poisonwood Bible
Page 63
Nelson says it was our offenses that brought on this rainy season. Oh, it rains, it pours, Noah himself would be dismayed. This rainy season has shattered all the rules. When it came early and lasted so long and poured down so hard, the manioc hills melted and tubers rotted away from their vines, and finally the downpour brought us the kakakaka. After all, even when everyone defecates righteously, there are villages upstream from us. Downstream is always someone else s up. The last shall be first.
Now the thunderstorms have ended. The funerals are drying up as slowly as the puddles. Methuselah sits puny and still in his avocado tree with his eyes ticking back and forth, unprepared for a new season of overwhelming freedom. Beto nki tutasala? he mutters sometimes in Mama Tataba’s ghost voice: What are we doing? It is a question anyone might ask. In the strange quiet our family doesn’t know what to do.
Everyone else seems brain-dashed and busy at the same time, like dazed insects coming out after the storm. The women beat out their sisal mats and replant their fields while grieving for lost children. Anatole goes to our neighbors’ houses, one by one, offering his condolences for our village’s lost schoolboys. He is also, I have seen, preparing them for the election, and Independence. It is to be a kitchen election: since no one can read, every candidate is designated by a symbol. Wisely these men choose to represent themselves with useful things—knife, bottle, matches, cooking pot. Anatole has set out in front of the school a collection of big clay bowls and next to each one the knife, the bottle, or the matches. On election day every man in Kilanga is to throw in one pebble. The women tell their husbands constantly: the knife! The bottle! Don’t forget what I’m telling you! The men, who get the privilege of voting, seem the least interested. The old ones say Independence is for the young, and perhaps this is true. The children seem most excited of all: they practice throwing pebbles into the bowls from across the yard. Anatole dumps these out at the end of each day. He sighs as the stones fall on the dirt in the shapes of new constellations. The make-believe votes of children. At the end of election day Tata Ndu’s sons will put the pebbles in bags along with the proper symbol for each candidate—knife, bottle, or matches—and carry them by canoe all the way upriver to Banningville. Pebbles from all over Congo “will travel up rivers that day. Indeed, the earth shall move. A dugout canoe seems such a fragile bird to carry that weight.
Toorlexa Nebee, Eeben Axelroot, is traveling also. He wastes no time. These days he makes as many trips as, he can up the Kwilu River to wherever he goes in the south. Katanga and Kasai, his radio says. Where the mines are. He stops here every week just long enough to pay the women his nothing for their manioc and plantains, leaving them wailing like mourners alt a funeral, flying away with whatever he can stuff into his sack, while he can. The Belgians and the Americans who run the rubber plantations and copper mines, I imagine, are using larger sacks.
The doctor poet in our village is the nganga Kuvudundu, I think. The rare nut, Our Father calls him, a thing, a seed to be cracked. The pot calls the kettle black. The nganga Kuvudlundu is writing poems for us alone. So much depends on the white chicken bones in the calabash bowl left standing in a puddle of rain outside our door.
I saw him leave it there. I was looking out the window and he turned back just for a second, staring straight into my eyes. I saw a kindness there, and believe he means to protect us, really. Protect us from angry gods, and our own stupidity, by sending us away.
Bongo Bango Bingo. That is the story of Congo they are telling now in America: a tale of cannibals. I kmow about this kind of story—the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyome feel much better. So, Khrushchev is said to be here dancing with the man-eating natives, teaching them to hate the Americans and the Belgians. It must be true, for how else would the poor Congolese know how to hate the Americans and the Belgians? After all, we have such white skin. We eat their food inside our large house, and throw out the bones. Bones that lie helter-skelter on the grass, from which to tell our fortunes. Why ever should the Congolese read our doom? After all, we have offered to feed their children to the crocodiles in order for them to know the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory.
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.
Now the thunderstorms have ended. The funerals are drying up as slowly as the puddles. Methuselah sits puny and still in his avocado tree with his eyes ticking back and forth, unprepared for a new season of overwhelming freedom. Beto nki tutasala? he mutters sometimes in Mama Tataba’s ghost voice: What are we doing? It is a question anyone might ask. In the strange quiet our family doesn’t know what to do.
Everyone else seems brain-dashed and busy at the same time, like dazed insects coming out after the storm. The women beat out their sisal mats and replant their fields while grieving for lost children. Anatole goes to our neighbors’ houses, one by one, offering his condolences for our village’s lost schoolboys. He is also, I have seen, preparing them for the election, and Independence. It is to be a kitchen election: since no one can read, every candidate is designated by a symbol. Wisely these men choose to represent themselves with useful things—knife, bottle, matches, cooking pot. Anatole has set out in front of the school a collection of big clay bowls and next to each one the knife, the bottle, or the matches. On election day every man in Kilanga is to throw in one pebble. The women tell their husbands constantly: the knife! The bottle! Don’t forget what I’m telling you! The men, who get the privilege of voting, seem the least interested. The old ones say Independence is for the young, and perhaps this is true. The children seem most excited of all: they practice throwing pebbles into the bowls from across the yard. Anatole dumps these out at the end of each day. He sighs as the stones fall on the dirt in the shapes of new constellations. The make-believe votes of children. At the end of election day Tata Ndu’s sons will put the pebbles in bags along with the proper symbol for each candidate—knife, bottle, or matches—and carry them by canoe all the way upriver to Banningville. Pebbles from all over Congo “will travel up rivers that day. Indeed, the earth shall move. A dugout canoe seems such a fragile bird to carry that weight.
Toorlexa Nebee, Eeben Axelroot, is traveling also. He wastes no time. These days he makes as many trips as, he can up the Kwilu River to wherever he goes in the south. Katanga and Kasai, his radio says. Where the mines are. He stops here every week just long enough to pay the women his nothing for their manioc and plantains, leaving them wailing like mourners alt a funeral, flying away with whatever he can stuff into his sack, while he can. The Belgians and the Americans who run the rubber plantations and copper mines, I imagine, are using larger sacks.
The doctor poet in our village is the nganga Kuvudundu, I think. The rare nut, Our Father calls him, a thing, a seed to be cracked. The pot calls the kettle black. The nganga Kuvudlundu is writing poems for us alone. So much depends on the white chicken bones in the calabash bowl left standing in a puddle of rain outside our door.
I saw him leave it there. I was looking out the window and he turned back just for a second, staring straight into my eyes. I saw a kindness there, and believe he means to protect us, really. Protect us from angry gods, and our own stupidity, by sending us away.
Bongo Bango Bingo. That is the story of Congo they are telling now in America: a tale of cannibals. I kmow about this kind of story—the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyome feel much better. So, Khrushchev is said to be here dancing with the man-eating natives, teaching them to hate the Americans and the Belgians. It must be true, for how else would the poor Congolese know how to hate the Americans and the Belgians? After all, we have such white skin. We eat their food inside our large house, and throw out the bones. Bones that lie helter-skelter on the grass, from which to tell our fortunes. Why ever should the Congolese read our doom? After all, we have offered to feed their children to the crocodiles in order for them to know the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory.
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.
