The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver

Author:Barbara Kingsolver [Kingsolver, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Americans - Congo (Democratic Republic), Families, Congo (Democratic Republic), Family, Religious, Family Life, General, Literary, Americans, Historical, Missionaries, Fiction, Domestic Fiction
ISBN: 9780060786502
Google: FSPI28onxDIC
Amazon: 0061577073
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Rachel

SEVENTEEN! I am now one score and seven years old. Or so I thought, until Leah informed me that means twenty-seven. If God really aims to punish you, you’ll know it when He sends you not one but two sisters who are younger than you but already have memorized the entire dictionary. I just thank heavens that only one of them talks.

Not that I actually got a speck of attention on my birthday. Two birthdays now I have had in the Congo, and I thought the first one was the worst there could be. Last year on my birthday Mother at least did cry, and showed me the Angel Dream cake-mix box she brought over all the way from the Bethlehem Piggly Wiggly to help ease the burden of spending my tender teen years in a foreign land. I felt put out because I didn’t get any nice presents: no sweater set, no phonograph records—oh, I thought that day was the lowest a girl can go.

Boy oh boy. Never did I dream I’d be spending another birthday here, another August 20 in the exact same clothes and underwear as last year, all grown shabby, except for the Bobbie girdle I quit wearing right off the bat, this horrid sticky jungle being no place for Junior Figure Control. And now on top of everything, a birthday passed by with hardly anybody even noticing. “Oh, it’s August twentieth today, isn’t it?” I asked several times out loud, looking at my watch like there was something I needed to do. Adah, on account of keeping her backwards diary, is the only one that keeps a close track of what day it is. Her and Father, of course, who has his little church calendar for all his important appointments, in case he ever gets any. Leah just ignored me, sitting herself right down at Father’s desk to work on her teacher’s-pet arithmetic program. Leah thinks she is all high and mighty ever since Anatole asked her to help teach some lessons at the school. Really, what a thing to get all jazzed up about. It is only math, the dullest bore in the entire world, and he only lets her teach the very littlest kids anyway. I wouldn’t do it even if Anatole paid me in greenback American dollars. I’d probably get highway hypnosis, watching the snot run down all those little snotroads from their noses to their lips.

So I asked Adah rather loudly, “Say, isn’t today’s date the twentieth of August?” She nodded that it was, and I looked around me in amazement, for there was my very own family, setting the breakfast table and making lesson plans and what not as if this were simply the next day after yesterday and not even anything as special as Thursdays back home in Bethlehem, which was always the day we had to set out the trash.

Mother did finally remember, as it happened. After breakfast she gave me a pair of her own earrings and a matching bracelet I had admired.

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