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

"You just can't assume that what's right or wrong for us is the same as what was right or wrong for them," she said.

"Jesus is poisonwood!" Leah said. "Here's to the Minister of Poisonwood. And here's to his five wives!" Adah stopped laughing. "That was us."
"Who?" I said. "What?"
"Nathan's five legendary wives. They must have meant us."
Leah stared at her. "You're right."
Like I said: night, day, and the Fourth of July. I don't even try to understand.

Orleanna and Africa at a standoff.

Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one's fault, but one still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed. When Jesus cured those crippled beggars, didn't they always get up and dance off stage, jabbing their canes sideways and waggling their top hats? Hooray, all better now, hooray!

The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you, or get The Verse. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.

How can I explain that my two unmatched halves used to add up to more than one whole? In Congo I was one-half benduka the crooked walker, and one-half benduka, the sleek bird that dipped in and out of the banks with a crazy ungrace that took your breath. We both had our good points. Here there is no good name for my gift, so it died without a proper ceremony. I am now the good Dr. Price, seeing straight. Conceding to be in my right mind.

Mother keeps wanting to wash herself clean, but she clings to her clay and her dust. Mother is still ruthless. She claims I am her youngest now but she still is clutching her baby. She will put down that burden, I believe, on the day she hears forgiveness from Ruth May herself.

"Not one woman in Bethlehem ever asked me how Ruth May died. Did you know that?"
"I guess."
"And all those people I worked with in Atlanta, on civil rights and African relief. We never once spoke of my having a crazy evangelist husband still in the Congo somewhere. People knew. But it was embarrassing to them. I guess they thought it was some awful reflection on me."
"The sins of the father," I said.
"The sins of the father are not discussed. That's how it is." She returned to her business of stabbing the earth.
I know she is right. Even the Congo has tried to slip out of her old flesh, to pretend it isn't scarred. Congo was a woman in shadows, dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is a tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder.

Because then you would be free too. And I didn't want that. I wanted you to remember what he did to us.

Rachel informs me I've had my brains washed by a Communist plot. She's exactly right. I've been won to the side of schoolteachers and nurses, and lost all allegiance to plastic explosives. No homeland I can claim as mine would blow up a struggling, distant country's hydroelectric dams and water pipes, inventing darkness and dysentery in the service of its ideals, and bury mines in every Angolan road that connected food with a hungry child. We've watched this war with our hearts in our throats, knowing what there is to lose. Another Congo. Another wasted chance running like poisoned water under Africa, curling our souls into fists.

And mine, I think, is to leave my house one day unmarked by whiteness and walk on a compassionate earth with Ruth May beside me, bearing me no grudge. Maybe I'll never get over my grappling for balance, never stop believing life is going to be fair, the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided. Like the malaria I've never shaken off, it's in my blood. I anticipate rewards for goodness, and wait for the ax of punishment to fall upon evil, in spite of the years I've rocked in this cradle of rewarded evils and murdered goodness. Just when I start to feel jaded to life as it is, I'll suddenly wake up in a fever, look out at the world, and gasp at how much has gone wrong that I need to fix. suppose I loved my father too much to escape being molded to at least some part of his vision.

I'm afraid all those childhood lessons in holiness slid off me like hot butter off the griddle.

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.

Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn't know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

Mother, you can still hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live I forgive you, Mother. I shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers. The teeth at your bones are your own, the hunger is yours, forgiveness is yours. The sins of the fathers belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in iron bracelets, and here you stand, remembering their songs. Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.