The Poisonwood Bible

Orleanna, Leah, Rachel, and Adah leave Kilanga with only the items they can carry. Fortunately, neighbors give them water and oranges for the journey. They walk toward Bulungu. Leah contracts malaria, and Anatole appears. She hallucinates Mr. Axelroot appearing with horns and a tail, mentioning something about Rachel before flying away. Anatole tends to her as she heals from the malaria, promising her mother to send her home when she is well. Orleanna and Adah catch a ride out of town, continuing their journey, but Rachel has flown away with Mr. Axelroot already. Leah still loves Anatole, but when she is well, he reminds her that he promised her mother that he would send her home. She asks where her mother thinks home is and he says, “where you are happiest” (401). Leah and Anatole agree to marry. She believes he is giving up more in the bargain, “but Anatole had no choice. I took him and held on. There’s enough of my father in me that I had to stand my ground” (401).

Rachel recounts how she got out of the Congo. She convinced Eeben Axelroot to fly her out. He received a medal and reward money from the US Embassy for saving her life and delayed in his promise to marry her with claims that being rewarded for rescuing his wife would look questionable. A year later, they are still not legally married, though she uses the name Rachel Axelroot and lives with him as his wife. Rachel’s new life in South Africa is pleasing to her as she lives in comparative luxury once more and has fashionable, French friends. Mr. Axelroot makes enough money for them to live well, though he continues to engage in nefarious get-rich-quick schemes. Despite this, Rachel is determined to make the best of things and does not regret her choice: “When I get out of bed every morning, at least I’m still alive and not dead like Ruth May. […] Sometimes you just have to save your neck and work out the details later” (405).

Adah recalls her escape from the Congo with her mother. They were eventually taken to the Belgian embassy by soldiers who thought that touching the dissociated Orleanna or the half-paralyzed Adah would cause them to be cursed. After treatment for parasites, fungus, and malaria, a hospital plane took them to Fort Benning, Georgia, where Orleanna called her second cousins, who came to get them. The locals in Bethlehem believed them both to be insane, so they left soon after arriving. Orleanna then rented a cabin with inheritance money from her father and surprised Adah by growing crops and flowers.

Adah decided to begin speaking and went to Atlanta to have an interview for admission to the university there. She announced that she needed to go to the college and would then need to attend its medical school. The interviewer was initially condescending, but, after a show of her intelligence and knowledge, determined that she was due some scholarship money as the daughter of a veteran. On her entrance exams, she scored 100% on the math portion and only missed four questions on the verbal portion, all to do with selecting the item of the group that did not belong, something with which she has always struggled.

Adah now visits her mother on weekends, where they sit in companionable silence. She considers the fact that her mother chose to take her out of Africa rather than Leah and wonders if it is penance for choosing Ruth May over her the night with the ants. Adah also explains that she has recently learned that, contrary to what she had been told, her father had not been awarded a medal for “heroic service,” but a purple heart, acknowledging his injury. While his discharge was officially honorable, she believes the unofficial conditions were “Cowardice, Guilt, and Disgrace” and after this, he had a compulsion to “posture desperately” for an unforgiving God (413). Adah states that this God has been looking in on her and that her dreams are haunted by Ruth May and the other children buried in Kilanga.

Leah, presently called Soeur Liselin, has taken refuge at a nunnery while Anatole is imprisoned. She recounts how she came to be there. In Bulungu, Leah was a liability as harboring a white person endangered the whole village while Mobutu’s army was around. While she asked to be sent somewhere that she would not be endangering others, Anatole had insisted it was not her fault. Leah was surprised by the assistance they received from friends from Kilanga, like Tata Boanda who brought money and a suitcase with a dress, Ruth May’s coloring book, pieces of the hope chests, and her bow and arrows. He also brought news of her father, who was struggling badly without the women to take care of him. He was reportedly unshaven, riddled with parasites, and ravaged by malnutrition. The house also burned down, likely as a result of his failed attempts at cooking, so he retreated to a hut which he was calling “the New Church of Eternal Life, Jesus is Bängala” (417). The new church failed to draw in congregants, as the villagers saw the reverend’s misfortunes as a lack of protection from his God. Leah was also surprised to learn that Tata Ndu threatened to exile Tata Kuvudundu for his part in Ruth May’s death. They also learned that Kilanga’s pro-Lumumbists, former students of Anatole, were having “armed skirmishes” with Mobutu’s army.

They made their way to Stanleyville, only to find that Leah’s white skin was more dangerous there than in Bulungu. Anatole took her to the mission in the Central African Republic. They planned for her to wait there safely for the six to eight weeks it would take for Anatole and the other Lumumbists to restore Lumumba’s plan for the country. Instead, he was beaten and incarcerated in Léopoldville.

Leah now works in the mission’s the clinic, waiting for the letters she receives from her fiancé every few weeks. She has improved her French and now also speaks Lingala, which she hopes will prove useful when she and Anatole reunite. Frustrated by the injustice of the world, she wonders how God could allow the Congo to come so close to freedom, only to have it snatched away. She laments that her skin color has placed her on the wrong side of this war and goes so far as to say that she would fight for the Simbas, “an army of pure desperation and hate,” if they would allow her to do so (421). Leah hears news that thirty-one whites have been killed in Stanleyville. The UN’s “Combined Forces” from the US, Belgium, and mercenaries who had been used in the Bay of Pigs, respond en masse.

Leah cries for the loss of her sister, her family’s mistakes, the impending violence, the victims of the war, and each child in the Congo who has no hope for the future. She prays for a chance with Anatole, but fails to conjure up an image of God, seeing only her father. Instead, she prays to the stones in the wall ahead of her: “I prayed to old black African stones unearthed from the old dark ground that had been here all along. One solid thing to believe in” (423).

Rachel enjoys her life in South Africa, except for the parts which involve Eeben Axelroot. He mocks her often, still rarely bathes, and has yet to actually marry her. Rachel briefly considers her family, wondering if they are even alive, but soon puts it out of her mind. She then mentions the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba resulting in a “big old crackdown on the blacks, which was absolutely necessary, but resulted in misunderstandings at many of the foreign embassy” (427). As such, the French ambassador may need to remove to Brazzaville. This is relevant to her life as the ambassador’s first attaché is Daniel DuPreé, the husband of her friend Robine. Though she has previously spoken of Robine with admiration, Rachel now intends to marry Daniel DuPreé in order to keep the luxuries she enjoys in South Africa while getting rid of Eeben Axelroot. She tells Daniel that, unlike Robine, she can handle Brazzaville with a smile. After seducing him, Rachel believes she can “wrap him around my little finger” and is confident he will soon marry her (428).

When January 17 comes, Leah mourns the anniversary of the loss of her sister, and the Congo mourns the loss of its independence. She blames herself for Ruth May’s death. Now married, she and Anatole live in Bikoki, a former rubber plantation, where Anatole is the headmaster for the local school. He was released after three years of imprisonment, becoming pen pals with a poet and resistance leader during that time. The government has ceased paying Anatole’s salary, but criticizing Mobutu is a deadly endeavor, so no one says anything about it. They are in danger from both Mobutu’s forces and the Simbas, as Anatole is a political dissident and Leah is white.

Though Leah appreciates visitors, they always bring bad news. She learns that Mobutu’s army murdered Pascale and two of Anatole’s former students. The Fowles inform her that her father recently made it to the Kikongo mission, yelling and claiming to have swallowed a live snake. After being given medicine, he disappeared into the forest. Leah is uncertain whether he is alive or dead. She meets other missionaries who stayed in Africa and is encouraged by their very different approach to Christianity and life:

They are so unlike Father. […] They’ve risked Mobutu and every imaginable parasite in the backwater places where children were left to die or endure when the Underdowns and their ilk fled the country. As Brother Fowles told us a long time ago: there are Christians and there are Christians (435).

Leah considers that she is losing her family one at a time. Ruth May is dead. Her father is lost, no matter where he may be, and she reports that the only way she could despise Rachel more would be if she knew “for sure which way to direct my ire” (436). With the corrupt state of the country, the postal service has skidded to a halt, so she cannot send letters to her mother or Adah.

Leah observes that the people of the Congo take all these losses in stride. She realizes that the concept of being treated as if their lives mean nothing is not new to them the way it is to her. In short, they are accustomed to persevering despite profound systemic injustice. Leah’s daily life with Anatole is physically difficult, but she loves him, and he raises her spirits with his love and sense of humor. She decides that she will carry Ruth May forever in her heart and mourn her, specifically, rather than the millions of others who have died on the same day.

Now in medical school, Adah has learned from a neurologist that there is no neurological reason her brain hasn’t compensated for her damaged half. He argues that, at this point, she drags her right side along through the force of habit rather than a true inability. His experiments involve having her un-learn how to walk and begin again. To her surprise, the process works, and Adah finds herself becoming more mobile. She wonders if she will lose her identity when she loses her limp.

Orleanna now has a job in Atlanta working for civil rights. She loves taking place in the marches. Adah considers her talent for marching for miles through tear gas without taking any physical damage and calls her impervious to harm. Leah, Anatole, and their son, Pascal, now also live in Atlanta. With their presence, Adah feels rescued from the abandonment she feels she still deserves, but she also believes they will not stay long due to their disdain for American consumer culture.

Adah considers the concept of religion, stating that she may need to find one. Orleanna’s new religion seems to be her civil rights work. Leah’s is suffering. Rachel, Adah believes, is the happiest of any of them without any religion at all, though she muses that Rachel sees herself as a kind of goddess.

Concerned that Leah will steal her mother’s attention with her young child and another baby on the way, Adah finally asks Orleanna why she chose to take Adah out of Congo with her instead of Leah. She answers that it was because Adah was her youngest remaining child and that “a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up” (444). Adah realizes that the answer has nothing to do with her worth as a person, but her mother’s need: “After Ruth May, she needs me most. I find this remarkably comforting. I have decided to live with it” (444).

Leah and her family live in Congo once again, though it is now called Zaire. All the foreign-named cities have also been renamed in indigenous languages to remove the traces of colonialism. The family lives in the outskirts of a city now called Kinshasa, once called Léopoldville. They now have three sons and also live with Anatole’s Aunt Elisabet and occasionally her daughter, Christiane.

Mobutu’s corruption still rules Zaire. Leah is outraged to hear that Mobutu is paying Muhammad Ali and George Foreman five million dollars each to box in his stadium. It will also cost another ten million for security and festivity, all of which comes out of the national treasury. Meanwhile, much of the country continues to starve, and Elévée, one of Anatole’s most promising students, must quit school and work as a prostitute at the age of 10 or 11 to support her family. This prospect outrages Leah, though Elisabet reminds her not to make the child feel worse about the situation by railing against it in her presence.

Since no governmental jobs have received their pay in two years, the entire country runs on bribes more than ever. Leah comes to understand and respect the bargaining-based economy. In hindsight, she better understands her life in Kilanga. She now realizes that, though her family felt poor, they still had more than anyone else but had no awareness of that fact. She understands that the children who demanded gifts were not greedy beggars, “they were accustomed to the distribution of excess and couldn’t fathom why we held ourselves apart” (453). She also determines that Tata Ndu never had any expectation of marrying Rachel, but he wanted to gently imply that the family had become a burden to the village and that the traditional way of handling such a burden was by “rearranging families”; if they were unwilling to consider such a strategy, they might prefer to live somewhere else. In light of their comparative riches, Leah now understands why the items they left on the porch were stolen and the reactions of the townsfolk to their assertions that they had nothing to give: “They must have felt exactly as I do now glaring at Mobutu on the doorstep of his fairy-tale palaces, shrugging, with his two hands thrust deep into the glittering loot of his mines” (455). Leah gives credit to her mother for leaving all of their possessions as farewell gifts to the people of Kilanga, saying, “There are wives and then there are wives. My pagan mother alone among us understood redemption” (456).

Anatole describes Zaire’s situation as being in an exploitative marriage with America. Leah sees the parallels between this relationship and her parents’ marriage and acknowledges the astute comparison. Leah briefly works as an English teacher at a compound for Americans who came to work on the Inga-Shaba power line. Initially, she views this project as doomed through ignorance, but she is horrified to learn that the failure was entirely intentional. There was infrastructure to maintain the line, so it was immediately cannibalized for parts as soon as sections of it fell into disrepair while the workers continued to build new sections. As intended, the billion-dollar loan left Zaire in debt to the US, which they’d pay in diamonds and cobalt indefinitely.

Rachel’s most recent husband, Remy Fairley, died and left her the Equatorial Hotel in Brazzaville, French Congo. Rachel delights in her wealth and control over the hotel, where she has rich, white clientele and everything runs in accordance with her wishes. She fantasizes about having a family reunion and forcing Leah and Adah to see how she has succeeded and admit that she has done well, but she does not believe it will ever happen. She particularly resents Leah’s refusal to visit given that she lives nearby in Zaire with her family, but she also does not understand her decision to marry Anatole or recognize their children as relatives. Rachel considers these decisions to be a result of Ruth May’s death, which she believes affected each of them by drawing out what was in their hearts. For Rachel’s part, she believes there was nothing she could have done about Ruth May and is determined not to be inconvenienced by any sort of grief.

Leah recounts some of their family’s stays in America. The barest lodgings and supplies were luxuriant by their standards, but the people were condescending towards Anatole and their children. As such, despite the quality of life offered by American standards of living, Leah and her family returned to Zaire, where the people respect Anatole.

Returning from a trip to America, Anatole’s passport is taken. Leah had not known that he was a wanted man at the time. Anatole is taken to Camp Hardy, where Lumumba was once held, and where most of the prisoners starve to death. Leah rails against the injustice of the situation and does what she can, speaking with officials, learning who to bribe, and asking her mother to send telegrams to Amnesty International on Anatole’s behalf. She blames herself for his arrest, but she cannot regret their life together as it has led to three beautiful children. Without Anatole, Leah is lonely and bitter. She also realizes how much the presence of her husband “justified” her presence in Zaire as a white person when the behavior of the people around her changes.

Leah considers the hope chests as prophetic of the girls’ married lives, as Ruth May was exempted and never married, Rachel’s enthusiasm led to multiple marriages of low quality, Leah’s reluctance then eventual painstaking attention led to a deeply committed marriage, and Adah’s dismissal of the task is echoed by her disinterest in marriage. Leah also considers that each member of her family has, in their own way, never left Africa: “Even Adah, who’s becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt” (474).

Ultimately, Leah commiserates over her frustrations with being a white American and the internal conflict between comfort and her idealism. While she wants to have a safe, quiet life, she also wants to be a person who “stays” and feels the anguish when it is called upon by the situation. She wants to be accepted and feel belonging, but mainly, she wants her husband back: “Most of all, my white skin craves to be touched and held by the one man on earth I know has forgiven me for it” (474).

Rachel reflects that she will never participate in another reunion with her sisters. She explains that Leah masterminded the idea, as she was stir-crazy in the last month before her husband’s release from prison. Previously, Anatole had been slated for release only to receive another year of imprisonment at the last minute. Rachel is unsympathetic to Leah’s distress, stating that if someone breaks the law, they should expect to go to prison, and she derides the idea of marrying a “criminal.” The plan is also a means of delivering a Land Rover from Atlanta to Kinshasa, where Leah will use it for the farming commune she plans to start before moving across the border to Angola when it is safe. Rachel scorns this idea, since she considers Angola communistic and resents the fact that her mother and her friends raised money for a Land Rover for Leah, but they refused to help her install plumbing in the second floor of her hotel.

Rachel was also put out by Leah’s preoccupation with her husband’s release from prison during their trip. She was particularly dismayed when, after insisting that Leah come and see her hotel so that she can show off her success, Leah agreed on the condition that they retrieve Anatole first. Rachel was offended when her hesitation as on the topic of whether to allow a black man in her hotel led to Leah’s dismissal of the idea altogether.

In Rachel’s retelling of the events, it is clear that Rachel wants to have a happy reunion with her sisters, but her narcissism and racist, ignorant beliefs get in the way, particularly those about the politics involved in Africa. When Leah tries to educate Rachel, she dismisses the information and doubles down on the pro-American propaganda: “You two can just go ahead and laugh [..] But I read the papers. Ronald Reagan is keeping us safe from the socialistic dictators, and you should be grateful for it” (478).

Rachel describes the trip as difficult because the three of them were unable to get along, but there are no indications that Adah and Leah had any interpersonal issues. Instead, Rachel remarks upon their similarities now that Adah can walk.

Leah mentions that their father is likely dead, surprising Rachel. She goes on to mention several people from Kilanga, but Rachel does not know who Leah could be referring to: “I honestly couldn’t think of a soul. We left, Axelroot left. The Underdowns went all the way back to Belgium, and they weren’t even really there” (482). She is bewildered by the grief Leah has for her childhood friend, Pascal, after whom she named her son.

Leah explains that their father became wild and unkempt, likely mad, and worked his way up the river after being run out of Kilanga and other villages. According to her reports, “he’d gotten a very widespread reputation for turning himself into a crocodile and attacking children” (485). Despite being told to leave his last village multiple times, he insisted that he would not go until he had “taken every child down the village and dunked them under” (486). After an incident in which a boat full of children was flipped by a crocodile, resulting in the deaths or maiming of all the children, Reverend Price was blamed. The villagers chased him into a tower in a coffee field. They set fire to the tower, and the reverend jumped off while aflame. He was left there for the animals to take away.

Adah remarks that the reverend got The Verse, reciting the verses which he had frequently given her, describing how a troublemaking man was put into a tower and died, without burial. Rachel asks how the verse ends. Adah answers that the closing verse of the Old Testament (including the Apocrypha) is “so this will be the end” (487). The girls repeat the statement and sit in silence for an hour.

Later, Leah mentions that their father had five wives who all left him. Leah goes on to discusses Mobutu’s dictatorship, the military state of Zaire, and the lack of governmental pay. Though Rachel internally admits these issues are the source of her business at the Equatorial, she is irritated that Leah has brought them up, declaring that she is fed up with Leah’s “sob story.” After a brief discussion of the downsides of applying foreign mores to a different culture, Rachel declares that murder is wrong because it says so in the Bible. Adah raises her glass, saying “Tata Jesus is bängala!”; She and Leah laugh, as Leah proclaims, “Jesus is Poisonwood” and toasts to her father’s five wives (490). Adah explains that they are the “wives” in question, but Rachel does not understand any of it.

When Adah regains the use of her right side, she also loses ability to read things backwards and find poetry in things which others miss. She laments that loss and sometimes finds herself limping in her house, hoping to regain the abilities she once had. Any return of these skills is temporary.

Adah returns to Atlanta and visits her mother to tell her about the reverend’s death. Adah and Orleanna discuss how they resent that the “sins of the father” are not discussed in polite society—no one has ever asked them about Ruth May’s deaths or acknowledge what happened to them in the Congo (495). Adah muses on how even the Congo has decided to reinvent itself with a revisionist history, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the past. The two also discuss the reverend, and Adah admits that she often fantasized about killing him by burning his bed and only refrained to avoid hurting her mother. Internally, she considers her mother asking why she had not done it anyway and replying that she did not want to free her mother, but she wanted her to remember what the reverend was doing to them instead. While she has regained full use of her body, Adah believes she will always be Ada, crooked and truthful. She concludes, “the power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes” (496).

Leah gives birth to a fourth son, named Nataniel, on a roadside. He nearly dies on several occasions in his first weeks, but he manages to survive. The family settles into the illegal farming commune they are developing near the border to Angola, prepared to flee if Mobutu’s spies come to take them away.

Agostinho Neto, the doctor-poet who had been Anatole’s pen pal during his first stay in prison, became President of Angola, but died young. They had almost gone to Angola when he was president, but the US soon broke their peace treaty. Leah was overcome with shame for the country of her birth and stated that she could no longer call it home.

Currently, she is not bothered by the toil of her daily life, but she is exhausted by the injustice in the world. She considers that she will never stop expecting life to be fair and being disappointed and hurt when it is not. She attributes this to her upbringing: “I suppose I loved my father too much to escape being molded to at least some part of his vision” (504). She considers the meaning of Kikongo synonyms for nzolo—“dearly beloved,” “grub for fish bait,” “fetish against dysentery,” and “little potatoes”—and concludes that there is a thread of meaning connecting them: all these things are precious. She knows that Angola is still unsafe and covered in land mines, but she hopes to have a peaceful life there one day. She is determined to find a place to belong: “But in my dreams I still have hope, and in life, no safe retreat. If I have to hop all the way on one foot, damn it, I’ll find a place I can claim as home” (506).