The Poisonwood Bible
Page 64
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.
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.
