The Poisonwood Bible

Leah explains that her mother had collected many items in preparation for their one year stay in the Congo. This collection includes items like Betty Crocker cake mix, canned meat, yeast, scissors, a frying pan, medicine, Band Aids, pencils, a hatchet head, and a folding spade. When the family arrives at the airport, they learn that they are 62 pounds over the weight limits for their luggage and have to abandon some toiletry items, but they are able to keep the rest by wearing it onto the plane under their (many layers of) clothes.

When they arrive in Léopoldville, Ruth May faints. Leah is surprised to find that the airport smells like urine, but she remains excited for her adventure. They meet Reverend and Mrs. Underdown, fellow Baptists who had “started” Kilanga. Previously, it was a regular mission with four American missionary families and weekly visits from a medical doctor. Now, Kilanga has “gone into a slump” (17); the other missionary families returned to America, and the Underdowns have abandoned Kilanga for Léopoldville in the hopes of giving their sons a chance at an acceptable education.

Ruth May recounts her understanding of the history of Africans: They’re descended from Ham and cursed by Noah. Her warped understanding of the situation—“Jimmy Crow…makes the laws,” “their [African Americans] day at the Zoo is Thursday. That’s in the Bible”—reflect the mindset of a five year old (21). She describes members of her family and announces that they will be the only six white people in Kilanga. Ruth May is concerned that the Africans will eat them.

Rachel is overwhelmed by Africa, figuratively, by the lack of luxuries she has become accustomed to, and literally, by the swarm of local inhabitants who usher the family into the dirt-floor church. To her surprise, some bare-breasted women in boisterous group off Africans burst into song and begin cooking a goat stew as part of their welcome. A man who speaks English arrives, welcomes the family, and asks Reverend Price to say a blessing for the food. Reverend Price begins by speaking about God’s judgment against Egypt and Sodom in such a way that the joyful welcome dwindles into fear: “The emissaries of the Lord smote the sinners, who had come heedless to the sight of God, heedless in their nakedness…Nakedness and darkness of the soul!” (27-28).

The atmosphere becomes tense, and the sisters eat their stew, but the goat meat isn’t to their liking. Mrs. Price shocks Rachel by telling them that they must be polite and that she will “thrash” them if they spit out the stew. Their mother has never once laid a hand on any of them, and Rachel realizes what her life is going to be like for the next year and laments her fate.

Adah, Leah’s twin, suffers from hemiplegia. Deprived of blood in the womb, she is considered to be mentally as well as physically handicapped, but the story as shown by her perspective proves that this is not strictly the case—at least not to the extent that the family supposes. While doctors predicted that she would be incapable of speech, Adah has simply chosen not to speak, finding it to her advantage.

The family members have different reactions to Africa. Ruth May makes impolite but accurate observations, Leah expounds upon the fairy-tale-like setting, Rachel wishes for the trip to be over, and Adah is determined to make the most of their journey, despite her disability.

Leah helps her father establish the garden in which he plans to grow American plants. Leah hopes to gain his approval, and God’s, through her dedication to gardening. During their time working together, Mama Tataba appears. She is a servant who worked for the Price family’s predecessor, Brother Fowles. Leah once overheard her father say that Fowles had “gone plumb crazy, consorting with the inhabitants of the land” (38). Mama Tataba explains to the two that the tree he had tried to remove, a poisonwood tree, would “bite” and that nothing will grow without planting seeds in mounds. Reverend Price firmly declares that he knows best.

The next day, the reverend Price’s hands are covered in a rash that leaks yellow pus from touching the poisonwood. Still, when he sees that Mama Tataba has raised rows of mounds for the planting, he and Leah destroy them. After a few days, when he has recovered, Reverend Price explains to Leah that Mama Tataba had not meant to ruin their garden, so they would need to have patience with her native customs as she had good, if misguided, intentions.

Leah admires her father and explains that people often misunderstand him, considering him stern and frightening, when it is only that he has “keen judgment and purity of heart […] being always the first to spot flaws and transgressions, it falls upon Father to deliver penance” (41-42). She is certain that one day, when she is “large enough in the Holy Spirit” (42), she will have his approval.

Rachel remains displeased, commenting on the local’s cultural norms which are foreign to her, such as the women going about topless but insisting on covering their legs and failing to abide by any calendar beyond “market day” occurring every five days.

The church has been sparsely attended at best, and Reverend Price hopes to change that by holding an Easter Sunday celebration on the Fourth of July, since the Kilanga natives have no concept of a Christian or Julian calendar. He is displeased when the only people in attendance are the men he convinced to take part in the play. Rachel observes their enthusiasm for the play with casual disdain: “I didn’t see there was any need for them to be so African about it” (45).

After service, there is a picnic. Mrs. Price has killed and fried the majority of the chickens left to them by Brother Fowles in an attempt to mend their relationship with the locals. Despite her progress, Reverend Price only stews over the fact that his real goal for the day—an altar call leading to baptisms—has failed utterly.

Ruth May reflects on the lifestyle of the Kilanga natives, including their approach to disabilities. She remarks that the locals do not stare at Adah because of her paralyzed right side the way that people did in the US. Instead, they only stare because she is white. She recounts the situations of several individuals who have various disfigurements and notes that her mother views their practical approach to such things as reasonable.

Reverend Price takes exception to the locals treating the body as if it were tool, claiming that the body is the temple of the Lord. Mrs. Price risks his anger to disagree, though she mitigates it by calling him “sir”: “Even something precious can get shabby in the course of things. Considering what they’re up against here, that might not be such a bad attitude for them to take” (54). Ruth May thinks that if she had “talked back” like her mother, her father would have beaten her with his belt. She also thinks about her father’s rocker in their living room in Georgia, which no one else could sit in. She worries that the family who is living in their house while they are away might mistakenly let people sit in it and invoke his wrath upon his return.

Adah shares her unique perspective. Despite her physical disabilities, in school, she was placed in the “gifted” class along with her twin, Leah. She expresses her befuddlement that people are impressed by her ability to calculate sums quickly when she considers poetry to be a much more difficult task. When hearing that his daughters are gifted, Reverend Price was unimpressed. Adah cites him as regularly stating that providing a girl a college education is like putting water in your shoes: “It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes” (56).

Adah, who prefers the spelling “Ada” as it is a palindrome, reads a wide variety of books, many of which her father would not approve of. Only her mother is aware of this practice. Adah’s ability to become absorbed by a book helps her adapt to the Congo where others have more difficulties. She enjoys reading books forward and backwards to learn new things and regularly writes palindromes and backwards sentences.

Reverend Price likes to punish his daughters by forcing them to copy a hundred verses by hand only to learn what they are being punished about in the last line. They call this punishment “The Verse.”

A storm destroys the garden, and the reverend finally replants in mounds like Mama Tataba told him, but he pretends it was his own idea. Adah considers this adjustment to be proof that Africa has influenced him, whether he likes it or not.

Methuselah, the African grey parrot left behind by Brother Fowles, says the word “damn” in a feminine voice. Reverend Price is furious that one of his family members has used foul language and, worse, taught an innocent creature to sin. He demands to know who taught the bird. Leah is anguished to be accused of such a crime “because I crave heaven and to be my father’s favorite” (66). Eventually, Rachel apologizes on behalf of all of them, which Leah hopes their father takes as an admission of guilt. He orders all three of them to write a hundred verses in punishment.

In truth, it was their mother, Orleanna Price, who had said the word repeatedly, mourning her failed attempts to make a decent cake for Rachel’s birthday with her Betty Crocker mix and her primitive oven that was more a stove than anything else. Leah explains that they could never give their mother up as, on rare occasions, they must protect her from their father. She recalls throwing her arms around her mother’s legs as a young child when her father would regale her “with words and worse” for “the sins of womanhood” (68).

Reverend Price, failing to realize that his wife had already taken up such a strategy, decides he needs to provide food for the locals to come to church. He has the men fish with dynamite, resulting in thousands of dead fish—far more than can be eaten. His poorly thought out gesture leads to the pervasive smell of rotten fish. Adah considers her father’s sermons on judgment against the so-called “sins” of various biblical women and whether the translator actually bothers to translate them into Kikongo.

At home, the reverend tells a story which Adah deems clearly fabricated. In the parable, a Mercedes truck loses a fan belt remains functional when twelve boys fanning the engine with palm fronds. This style of discourse is a familiar tool that Reverend Price uses to make his female family members feel stupid. He typically follows this by loudly lamenting their “hopelessness” to God in a show of his longsuffering intelligence. Adah views this as less dangerous than other moods of his as he “rarely actually” strikes his daughters at the dinner table. Still, she considers acting to be “a crucial skill” in their family to avoid abuse (75).

Leah enjoys a quiet moment with her father, but he acts defeated by their garden’s failure to thrive in the African soil. He blames it on a lack of appropriate pollinators and states that God sometimes delivers the righteous “through” hardships rather than out of them. Leah is not pleased that the hard work they have done might come to nothing.

Mama Tataba shocks the family by shouting at Reverend Price and storming out, declaring that she will not stay with them any longer. Later, Reverend Price explains that Mama Tataba had informed him that the reason that the locals had been so against the idea of a baptism was that a little girl had been killed and eaten by a crocodile in the river the previous year. As a result, they do not ever let their children enter the river. The reverend is momentarily cowed by the information, but he soon rallies, stating that “I fail to understand why it would take six months for someone to inform me of that simple fact” (81). He tells Methuselah that he is “free to go” and literally throws him out of the house (81).