Grace Webb’s Reviews > The Poisonwood Bible > Status Update

I decided right then to stop pretending I knew more than I did. I would be myself, Leah Price, eager to learn all there is to know. Watching my father, I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

I’d watched them time and again, attracted so to that dance of straight backs and muscled black arms. I envied these daughters, who worked together in such perfect synchrony. It’s what Adan and I might have felt, if we hadn’t gotten all snared in the ropes of guilt and unfair advantage. Now our whole family was at odds, it seemed: Mother against Father, Rachel against both of them, Adan against the world, Ruth May pulling helplessly at anyone who came near, and me trying my best to stay on Father’s side. We were tangled in such knots of resentment we hardly understood them.

I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

I was shocked and frightened to see her flout Father's authority, but truthfully, I could feel something similar moving around in my own heart. For the first time in my life I doubted his judgment. He’d made us stay here, when everybody from Nelson to the King of Belgium was saying white missionaries ought to go home. For us to be here now, each day, was Father's decision and his alone. Yet he wasn't providing for us, but only lashing out at us more and more. He wasn't able to protect Mother and Ruth May from getting sick. If it's all up to him to decide our fate, shouldn't protection be part of the bargain?

But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl's bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square. Call you worse, if you're Adah.

All my life I've tried to set my shoes squarely into his footprints, believing if only I stayed close enough to him those same clean, simple laws would rule my life as well. That the Lord would see my goodness and fill me with light. Yet with each passing day I find myself farther away. There's a great holy war going on in my father's mind, in which we're meant to duck and run and obey orders and fight for all the right things, but I can't always make out the orders or even tell which side I am on exactly. I'm not even allowed to carry a gun. I'm a girl. He has no inkling.

If his decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn't right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty under-foot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.

Leah leaned back in her chair, probably wondering what Father would say to that. As if we didn’t know. He’d say the Irish and them are well known Catholics papists and worshipers of the false idols. The business about the flowers and little birdies just clinches the deal.

"Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it's a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it's the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?" He leaned forward toward Leah with his hands on his knees. “Och, I shouldn't be messing about with your thinking this way, with your father out in the garden. But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers."