In The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver wrote: “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” 

 After the 2024 Presidential Election  in the USA, she may have recalled those words, but from somewhere deep within herself she managed to say the following:

For many years, I have considered The Poisonwood Bible to be one of my favorite books—Barbara Kingsolver wrote the fabulous Poisonwood Bible. My heart echoes the words she wrote after the 2024 election.

I am disappointed that over half of the people in this nation have chosen to reject the truth that they prefer for president a criminal, a fraudster, a nasty and vile man—not because of his Christianity [another lie–if Donald Trump is a Christian, I am Mother Teresa]. Trump’s voters also accept the lie that Trump will “fix” the economy [yes, Trump is about to fix the economy so that only the wealthy will prosper]. Most of his voters are not the wealthy class. They are about to find themselves high and dry. I agree with Barbara Kingsolver that over half of this nation must have felt that truth was an inconvenience they could simply reject.

The Trumpers also embrace a myth [another type of lie] that life was better way back when {when???? — the 1960s???].

Barbara Kinsolver’s Poisonwood Bible is a refreshingly honest look at how bad things were during the 60’s –especially for missionaries who were sent to the Congo.  I had been one of the hosts of people who grew up in the Southern Baptist church and who enjoyed my fantasy that the missions in Africa were essentially the Kum Ba Yah, sing-along, peace-love-and-joy experiences of my camp days.  I longed to travel across the world and join the cause.  For that reason, the Poisonwood Bible resonated with me on several levels.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist and was a young teen during the 60’s, a period when folk and rock music challenged its listeners to “Give Peace A Chance.”  “Come on, people, now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together and love one another right now.”  

Herds of us became agents of the movement and dreamed about joining the Peace Corps and/or becoming missionaries to Africa.  Then horrors began to echo from the “Dark” Continent.  Nuns were slaughtered.  Missions were destroyed, and the 70’s arrived with other challenges and causes.  Most of the 60’s teens became involved with marrying during the 70’s.  We had children, provided, and became semblances of adulthood in the USA.  Most of us never went on our mission trips.  The Poisonwood Bible recounts some of the horrors that we probably escaped.  Thank goodness, I grew up:

 “When I was a child, I thought as a child” 1 Corinthians 13:11:

The Ways that Religion Has Destroyed Faith

The Poisonwood Bible is written in the 5 voices of the wife and 4 daughters of the Georgia Baptist Preacher, Nathan Price, who had thrust himself upon the Congo, with his relentless plan to change the heathens there according to his idea of Christianity.  In this way, The Poisonwood Bible’s Nathan Price is a much too familiar reminder of the Reverend Abner Hale, who dragged his wife Jerusha Bromley to Hawaii on a similar pious [and racist] mission in James Michener’s Hawaii.

When Kingsolver writes in the voice of Nathan Price’s wife, Orleanna Price, her writing is excellent.  [I suppose that Kingsolver understands that voice.] It is decisive, accurate, and terse. The voice of Orleana Price scorches the heart of the reader.   I have added some of those quotes at the end of this post.

Morning Glory in Jacki Kellum Garden November 7, 2024

Today, I did what I always do when I need to be consoled. I went to my garden with my heart wide open, and my garden consoled me. I shouted about my disillusionment with people and everything political, and I ranted and raged. But my garden, the gentle mother that she is, remained steadfast. She cradled me.  Although people continuously fail me, my garden never does

I have copied some of Orleanna Price’s observations of the Congo that forever scarred her life.

Quotes from The Poisonwood Bible

“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

“First, picture the forest.  I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees.  The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason.  Every space is filled with life:  delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves.  Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight.  The breathing of monkeys.  A glide of snake belly on branch.  A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen.  And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arcing their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death.  This forest eats itself and lives forever.” p. 5 …

“Consider, even an Africa unconquered altogether. … What would that Africa be now? … All I can think of is a unicorn that could look you in the eye.” p. 10 …

Hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher

“And my husband, why, hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher.  I married a man who could never love me, probably.  It would have trespassed on his devotion to all mankind.  I remained his wife because it was one thing I was able to do each day.  My daughters would say:  You see, Mother, you had no life of your own.

”They have no idea.  One has only a life of one’s own.” p. 11 …

“So you see.  I have my own story, and increasingly in my old age it weighs on me.  Now that every turn in the weather whistles an ache through my bones, I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass.  I crave to be rid of them, but find myself being careful, too, choosing which ones to let out into the night. p. 12

“The riverbank, though it looks attractive from a distance, is not so lovely once you get there:  slick, smelly mudbanks framed by a tangle of bushes with gaudy orange flowers so large that if you tried to put one behind your ear like Dorothy Lamour you’d look like you were wearing a Melmac soup bowl.

“The River Kwilu is not like the River Jordan, chilly and wide.  It is a lazy rolling river as warm as bathwater, where crocodiles are said to roll around like logs.

“No milk and honey on the other side, either, but just more stinking jungle laying low in the haze, as far, far away as the memory of picnics in Georgia.” pgs. 82-83.

“Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa.  it makes me want to sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use. …

“Ripe fruits, acrid sweat, urine, flowers, dark spices, and other things I’ve never even seen…It has found me here on this island, in our little town, in a back alley where sleek boys smoke in a stairwell amidst the day’s uncollected refuse.  A few years back, it found me on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi….Once I merely walked out of the library in Atlanta and there it was, that scent knocking me down, for no reason I can understand.  The sensation rises up from inside me…holding sway…..my body can never be free of Africa….where one of my children remains in the dank red earth.” pgs. 149-150

About going to an African Market Day

“From everywhere in walking distance, every fifth day, people with hands full or empty appeared in our village to saunter and haggle their way up and down the long rows where women laid out produce on mats on the ground.  The vendor ladies squatted, scowling, resting their chins on their crossed arms, behind fortresses of stacked kola nuts, bundles of fragrant sticks, piles of charcoal, salvaged bottles and cans, or displays of dried animal parts.  They grumbled continually as they built and rebuilt with leathery, deliberate hands their pyramids of mottled greenish oranges and mangoes and curved embankments of hard green bananas. … Yet, my eye could not decipher those vendors:  they wrapped their heads in bright–colored cloths as cheerful as a party, but faced the world with permanent vile frowns.  They slung back their heads in slit-eyed boredom while they did each other’s hair into starbursts of astonished spikes. However, I might pretend I was their neighbor, they knew better.  I was pale and wide-eyed as a fish.  A fish in the dust of the marketplace, trying to swim, while all the other women calmly breathed in that atmosphere of overripe fruit, dried meat, sweat, and spices, infusing their lives with powers I feared. …

“The woman squatting beside the oranges leaped up hissing, slicking her hands like scissors blades at the two of us, scorching me with eyes so hot the angry chocolate irises seemed to be melting into the white….

“Until that moment I’d thought I could have it both ways:  to be one of them, and also my husband’s wife.  What conceit!” pgs. 150-153

“I can still recite the litany of efforts it took to push a husband and children live and fed through each day in the Congo.  The longest journey always began with sitting up in bed at the rooster’s crow, parting the mosquito curtain, and slipping on shoes–for there were hookworms lying in wait on the floor, itching to burrow into our bare feet.  Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day.  Dreaming of coffee….Out the back door, in to the shock of damp heat, straining for a look at the river:  resisting the urge to run.

“Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sandbars to the sea.  The hardest work of every day was deciding, once again, to stay with my family.  They never even knew.  When I pried open the lock meant to keep the beasts and curious children out of our kitchen hut, I nearly had to lock it again behind me, to keep myself in.  The gloom, the humidity, the permanent sour breath of rainy season all bore down on me like a bothersome lover.  The fresh stench of night soil in the bushes.  And our own latrine, which was only one step removed.” pgs. 156-157

But then nothing came to us free.  Not even water.  It had to be carried a mile and a half, and boiled.  ‘Boiled,’ a small word, meant twenty minutes over a roaring fire on a stove that resembled the rusted carcass of an Oldsmobile.  ‘Fire’ meant gatering up a pile of sticks in a village that had already been gathering firewood for all the years since God was a child, picking its grounds clean of combustibles as efficiently as an animal combing itself for lice.  So ‘fire’ meant longer and longer forays into the forest, stealing fallen branches from under the blunt-eyed gaze of snakes, just for one single bucket of drinkable water.” pg. 158

Kingsolver’s writing is visual, dramatic, and emotional. In my opinion, Kingsolver’s fiction is very nearly poetry–if it actually is not.

From Amazon:

“The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil.

“The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband’s part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father’s intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.”