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

In the privacy of my little room I've damned many men to hell, President Eisenhower, King Léopold, and my own father included. I damn them for throwing me into a war in which white skin comes down on the wrong side, pure and simple.

If I’d known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

After what I know about that man, I can wrap him around my little finger. And what he did to me, boy! A man only does that kind of thing when he has certain feelings.

This is a day Anatole and I simply have to get through. I’ve heard people say grief brings you closer, but the griefs he and I carry are so different. Mine are white, no doubt, and American. I hold on to Ruth May while he and the rest of the Congo secretly hold a national day of mourning for lost Independence. I can recall, years ago, watching Rachel cry real tears over a burn hole in her green dress while, just outside our door, completely naked children withered from the holes burning in their empty stomachs, and I seriously wondered if Rachel’s heart were the size of a thimble. I suppose that’s how he sees me today. Any other day I might pray, like my old friends the Benedictine sisters, to lose my self-will in the service of greater glory. But January 17, in my selfish heart, is Ruth May’s only.

It's taken a lot to dampen our hopes. But everything has turned around so fast, like a magician's trick: foreign hands moved behind the curtain and one white King was replaced with another. Only the face that shows is black. Mobutu's U.S. advisors even tried to hold elections here, but then got furious when the wrong person won-Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba's lieutenant. So they marched the army into parliament and reorganized it once again in Mobutu's favor.

What little scrap of audacity caught the attention of an army officer on the road? What if I marked him with some English word I taught him, as stupidly as we doomed our parrot?

Poor Father. Now he's left Kilanga altogether, vanished into the forest, it seems, or melted under the rain. Sometimes at night I think about how he might be dead and I haven't heard yet. It's a hard thing to live with in the dark, and I lie awake cooking up plans to go hunt for him. But in daylight a wall of anger pushes me in a different direction, roaring that I must leave Father behind me. I couldn't strike out on my own, and even with help it's not worth the risk. I understand that he's dangerous to me now.

I find an extraordinary kindred spirit in Anatole. We are both marked, I suppose. Freaks at first sight, who have learned to take the world at face value. He was marked early on by his orphaned state, his displacement, his zealous skeptical mind, his aloneness. I have noticed that he, too, reads things backward: what the billboards are really selling, for example. Also where poverty comes from, and where it goes. I shall not covet my sister's husband, but I shall know him, in my way, better. Anatole and I inhabit the same atmosphere of solitude. The difference between us is he would give up his right arm and leg for Leah, whereas I already did.

They see a great deal of Mother. Mother last year gave up her floral hermitage in Bethlehem and moved to an apartment in Atlanta, having found a new church of sorts. She marches for civil rights. They pay her to work in an office, but I know she lives for the marches. She is very good at it, and impervious to danger. She came over to my apartment one night, having walked nearly a mile through tear gas, so that I could check her eyes for damage to the cornea. Her eyes were not even red. I think bullets would pass right through her.

Leah has one: her religion is the suffering.

What I carried out of Congo on my crooked little back is a ferocious uncertainty about the worth of a life. And now I am becoming a doctor. How very sensible of me.