The Poisonwood Bible (64 page)

“What did they see?” I always ask, though I already know. They saw Africans. Men and women black as night, strolling in bright sunlight along the riverbanks. But not naked—-just the opposite! They wore hats, soft boots, and more layers of exotic skirts and tunics than would seem bearable in the climate. This is the truth. I’ve seen the drawings published by those first adventurers after they hurried back home to Europe. They reported that the Africans lived like kings, even wearing the fabrics of royalty: velvet, damask, and brocade. Their report was only off by a hair; the Kongo people made remarkable textiles by beating the fibrous bark of certain trees, or weaving thread from the raffia palm. From mahogany and ebony they made sculpture and furnished their homes. They smelted and forged iron ore into weapons, plowshares, flutes, and delicate jewelry. The Portuguese marveled at how efficiently the Kingdom of Kongo collected taxes and assembled its court and ministries.There was no written language, but an oral tradition so ardent that when the Catholic fathers fixed letters to the words of Kikongo, its poetry and stories poured into print with the force of a flood. The priests were dismayed to learn the Kongo already had their own Bible. They’d known it by heart for hundreds of years.

Impressed as they were with the Kingdom of Kongo, the Europeans were dismayed to find no commodity agriculture here. All food was consumed very near to where it was grown. And so no cities, no giant plantations, and no roads necessary for transporting produce from the one to the other. The kingdom was held together by thousands of miles of footpaths crossing the forest, with suspension bridges of woven vines swinging quietly over the rivers. I picture it as Anatole describes it: men and women in tiers of velvet skirts, walking noiselessly on a forest path. Sometimes, when I have relapses of my old demon, I lie in the crook of his arm and he comforts me this way, talking to me all night long to stave off the bad dreams. Quinine just barely keeps my malaria in check, and there are resistant strains here now. The fever dreams are always the same, the first warning that I’ll soon be knocked on my back. The old blue hopelessness invades my sleep and I’m crossing the river, looking back at the faces of children begging for food, “Cadeaux! Cadeaux!” But then I wake up in our nation of two, enclosed in our mosquito tent’s slanted planes lit silver by moonlight, and always think of Bulungu, where we first lay together like this. Anatole cradling me into forgiveness, while I rattled and shook with fever. Our marriage has been, for me, a very long convalescence.

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.
     

We’re not far from the border, and the people of this region look and speak so much as they did in Kilanga I was dumbstruck when we first came here by a sense of childhood returned. I kept expecting someone I knew to come around the corner: Mama Mwanza, Nelson, Tata Boanda in his red trousers, or most eerily, my father. Obviously, the boundary between Congo and Angola is nothing but a line on a map—the Belgians and Portuguese drawing their lots. The ancient Kongo used to stretch across all of central Africa. As a nation it fell, when a million of its healthiest citizens were sold into slavery, but its language and traditions did not. I wake up to the same bubbling mbote! shouted outside the open window of our station house. The women wrap and rewrap their pagnes in the same way, and press the palm-oil harvest in the same kind of contraption that Mama Lo used. Often I hear ghosts: the upward slant of Pascal’s voice in the question Beta nki tutasala? What are we doing?

I don’t hear it often, though. In our village there are very few boys of an age to climb trees for birds’ nests, or girls stomping self-importantly down the road with a sibling clutched sideways like an oversized rag doll. I notice their absence everywhere. The war cost most of its lives among children under ten. That great, quiet void is moving slowly upward through us. A war leaves holes in so much more than the dams and roads that can be rebuilt.
 
I teach classes in nutrition, sanitation, and soybeans, to women who respectfully call me Mania Ngemba and ignore nine-tenths of what I tell them. Our hardest task is teaching people to count on a future: to plant citrus trees, and compost their wastes for fertilizer. This confused me at first. Why should anyone resist something so obvious as planting a fruit tree or improving the soil? But for those who’ve lived as refugees longer than memory, learning to believe in the nutrient cycle requires something close to a religious conversion.

I ought to understand. I’ve been as transient in my adult life as anyone in our cooperative. And only now, after working this same land for ten years, am I coming to understand the length and breadth of outsiders’ failure to impose themselves on Africa. This is not Brussels or Moscow or Macon, Georgia. This is famine or flood.You can’t teach a thing until you’ve learned that. The tropics will intoxicate you with the sweetness of frangipani flowers and lay you down with the sting of a viper, with hardly room to breathe in between. It’s a great shock to souls gently reared in places of moderate clime, hope, and dread.

The Portuguese were so shocked, evidently, that they stripped the gentle Kongo and chained them down in rows, in the dark, for the passage. Condemned for their lack of cash crops. The Europeans couldn’t imagine a reasonable society failing to take that step, and it’s hard for us to imagine even now. In a temperate zone it’s the most natural thing in the world, right as rain, to grow fields of waving grain. To grow them year after year without dread of flood or plague, in soil that offers up green stems that bend to the scythe again and again, bread from a bottomless basket. Christians could invent and believe in the parable of the loaves and fishes, for their farmers can trust in abundance, and ship it to burgeoning cities, where people can afford to spend their lives hardly noticing, or caring, that a seed produces a plant.

Here you know what a seed is for, or you starve. A jungle yields no abundance to feed the multitudes, and supports no leisure class. The soils are fragile red laterite and the rain is savage. Clearing a rain forest to plant annuals is like stripping an animal first of its fur, then its skin. The land howls. Annual crops fly on a wing and a prayer. And even if you manage to get a harvest, why, you need roads to take it out! Take one trip overland here and you’ll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream. The soil falls apart. The earth melts into red gashes like the mouths of whales. Fungi and vines throw a blanket over the face of the dead land. It’s simple, really. Central Africa is a rowdy society of flora and fauna that have managed to balance together on a trembling geologic plate for ten million years: when you clear off part of the plate, the whole slides into ruin. Stop clearing, and the balance slowly returns. Maybe in the long run people will persist happily here only if they return to the ways of the ancient Kongo, traveling by foot, growing their food near at hand, using their own tools and cloth near the site of production. I don’t know. To be here without doing everything wrong requires a new agriculture, a. new sort of planning, a new religion. I am the un-missionary, as Adah would say, beginning each day on my knees, asking to be converted. Forgive me, Africa, according to the multitudes of thy mercies.

If I could reach backward somehow to give Father just one gift, it would be the simple human relief of knowing you’ve done wrong, and living through it. Poor Father, who was just one of a million men who never did catch on. He stamped me with a belief injustice, then drenched me in culpability, and I wouldn’t wish such torment even on a mosquito. But that exacting, tyrannical God of his has left me for good. I don’t quite know how to name what crept in to take his place. Some kin to the passion of Brother Fowles, I guess, who advised me to trust in Creation, which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a bird raises its brood in the forest, and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes, followed by torrential rains, and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either. They’re rewards, let’s say, for the patience of a seed. The sins of my fathers are not insignificant. But we keep moving on. As Mother used to say, not a thing stands still but sticks in the mud. I move my hands by day, and by night, when my fever dreams come back and the river is miles below me, I stretch out over the water, making that endless crossing, reaching for balance. I long to wake up, and then I do. I wake up in love, and work my skin to darkness under the equatorial sun. I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

Adah Price

ATLANTA

A
  
TOAD CAN DIE OF LIGHT! Emily warned us, as she peered out at the street from between her drawn curtains. Death is the common right of Toads and Men. Why swagger, then?