The Poisonwood Bible
Page 66
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?
Tomorrow she’ll be gone, and I’ll still be here, I thought to myself as we stood on our barge fastened to the bank of the Congo, watching history. A rat ran under the bare feet of some people standing near us, but no one paid any attention. They just cheered. Patrice Lumumba had stopped speaking for a moment to take off his glasses and mop his forehead with a -white handkerchief. He wasn’t sweating in his dark suit the way the white men had stained their white uniforms, but his face gleamed.
“Tell me what he’s saying,” I pleaded with Mrs. Underdown. “I’ve only gone as far as the past perfect tense in my French book.” Mrs. Underdown relented after a while and told me certain sentences. Much of the rest of it began to come to me in bursts of understanding, as if Patrice Lumumba were speaking in tongues and my ears had been blessed by the same stroke of grace. “My brothers,” he said,”Mesfreres, we have suffered the colonial oppression in body and heart, and we say to you, all of that is finished. Together we are going to make a place for justice and peace, prosperity and grandeur. We are going to show the world what the homme noir can do when he works for freedom. We are going to make the Congo, for all of Africa, the heart of light.”
I thought I would go deaf from the roaring.
Adah
EMULP DER ENO. So much depends on the single red feather I saw when I stepped out of the latrine.
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?
Tomorrow she’ll be gone, and I’ll still be here, I thought to myself as we stood on our barge fastened to the bank of the Congo, watching history. A rat ran under the bare feet of some people standing near us, but no one paid any attention. They just cheered. Patrice Lumumba had stopped speaking for a moment to take off his glasses and mop his forehead with a -white handkerchief. He wasn’t sweating in his dark suit the way the white men had stained their white uniforms, but his face gleamed.
“Tell me what he’s saying,” I pleaded with Mrs. Underdown. “I’ve only gone as far as the past perfect tense in my French book.” Mrs. Underdown relented after a while and told me certain sentences. Much of the rest of it began to come to me in bursts of understanding, as if Patrice Lumumba were speaking in tongues and my ears had been blessed by the same stroke of grace. “My brothers,” he said,”Mesfreres, we have suffered the colonial oppression in body and heart, and we say to you, all of that is finished. Together we are going to make a place for justice and peace, prosperity and grandeur. We are going to show the world what the homme noir can do when he works for freedom. We are going to make the Congo, for all of Africa, the heart of light.”
I thought I would go deaf from the roaring.
Adah
EMULP DER ENO. So much depends on the single red feather I saw when I stepped out of the latrine.
