The novel begins with Orleanna Price, mother and wife of the Price family, asking the reader to envision a scene in a jungle. Four girls and a woman come walking through the jungle and sit by a river to have a picnic of meager portions. The family is hungry and tired, she tells us, and eventually the four girls go swimming in the river and leave the woman alone. Orleanna identifies the woman as herself and the girls as her daughters, and thus the reader is introduced to the five narrators of the novel. Orleanna, however, is not alone for long on the bank of the river. Soon, she is joined by a okapi, a small mythical creature who few have seen. She calls this animal "her secret."

Orleanna relates the feeling of venturing to Africa with her husband and four daughters as missionaries in 1960. Her daughters, she says, each dealt with the experience in her own way, and her husband was so focused on his mission to evangelize among the natives that he left no time for loving his wife. "I remained his wife because it was the one thing I was able to do each day," she says. As she reflects on her time in Africa, she cannot help but recall it with bitterness and regrets.

The family came from Bethlehem, Georgia and ventured to the Congo to preach the gospel as missionaries. Leah, one of the middle children and a twin with Adah, recounts the family's preparation for the journey. They all attempted to pack as many of the creature comforts of American life that they could, even Betty Crocker cake mix so that they could celebrate the birthdays they would have while on their year-long mission. Orleanna says that all of the extra stuff is simply the "bare minimum, for my children." When the family arrives at the airport, they learn that there is a weight limit to their suitcases, and so the girls are all forced to take out extra clothes and items and to attach it to their person to get around the limits. Thus, they all board with personal items hung around their necks or stuffed in their shirts.

When they arrive in Leopoldville, they are greeted by sweltering heat, the smell of urine, and a missionary couple, the Underwoods, who serve as their guides to the village where they will live, Kilanga. The Underwoods are fascinated by the Price's Southern accents and naivete towards their culture, but they put them on the plane and send them off with all of their clothes and objects weighing them down - except for their father, who only brought the "Word of God, which fortunately weighs nothing at all."

Ruth May, the youngest daughter, describes a few of the events she experienced leading up to their departure. She relates a history of black people, derived from the "Tribe of Ham," and how boys in her Sunday school class teased her about getting eaten by the savages of Africa. As the family boards the plane for Kilanga, the Underwoods give Ruth May some comic books to entertain her, though she throws up on them during the plane ride.

Rachel Price, the oldest daughter, describes the family's preparation in terms of all of the things she is forced to leave behind, including clothes, amenities, and tools for proper hygiene. She describes the family's first night in the village after they touch down. The villagers had planned a large "prayer meeting" to greet the new family, in which they would all cook and celebrate their arrival. They usher the family to the town church, and everyone is there. The men begin beating on drums and singing hymns in their native language, while the women dance and prepare the meal, a goat stew. Rachel is shocked because the women leave their breasts exposed and their children run around naked. One of the leaders of the group then quiets everyone down and invites Reverend Price to come forward and lead the group in a Thanksgiving prayer. The Reverend steps up to the stage, but instead of beginning a prayer, he launches into a sermon on the "light" of God that has "yet to fall" on the darkness of the African tribe. He chastises them for their nakedness and compares their state to the wickedness of Sodom from Chapter 19 of Genesis. The sermon shocks the people and they lose their festiveness. Many of them, in fact, go home. The Price's still try to eat the stew the people have made for them even though they all think it tastes awful.

Adah, the other twin, begins her chapter by describing the village that the family walks through everyday. It is an abjectly poor place, with huts made out of thatch. You can see directly into the one room of each house, and the women sit in the front yard most of the day, cooking. The yard is the social center of the household. To Adah, the world doesn't seem real, as if, "The real earth where the real sun shines seems to be somewhere else, far from here." Leah, however, thinks it's "right out of a storybook...." Many of the villagers use whatever they can get to cook their meals, even using a rusted carburetor to boil water.

Adah is determined to walk the path that leads out from the village, even though she suffers from physical handicaps. Her "right side drags," and she "was born with half (her) brain dried up like a prune, deprived of blood by an unfortunate fetal mishap." Though she is handicapped, her mind is sharp and biting.

Analysis

The Poisonwood Bible introduces us to the five main narrators of the book: Orleanna (the mother and wife of Reverend Price), Rachel (the oldest daughter), Leah and Adah (the middle children, twins), and Ruth May (the youngest child, only five years old). As the novel begins, the family is leaving their home in Bethlehem, Georgia to become Baptist missionaries in the Congo, Africa. The town Bethlehem has symbolic meaning - with the name of the place where Jesus Christ was born - who also went on a mission that ultimately ended in self-sacrifice.

Though the novel is teeming with Christian symbolism and double-meaning, Kingsolver turns the concept of a 'bible' on its head by narrating the story through the eyes of five females, four of whom are children. Thus, unlike the Bible - which itself is steeped in patriarchy - here the symbolism has a uniquely matrilineal quality. Indeed, Kingsolver is inviting the reader to see religion, specifically the Christian narrative, through female eyes. Most tales of conquest and missionary activity, of course, are told from a white male perspective, but Kingsolver introduces the reader to a feminist point of view often ignored in such seminal stories. Each chapter of the book, moreover, is narrated by one of these characters, and each character brings her own point of view to the story. Leah seems brave and heroic; Adah is handicapped but retains a sharp wit and biting satire through her experiences. Rachel is consumed with materialism and pride and is hurt the most by the impoverished conditions, while Ruth May, only five years old, has absorbed many of the racist and ignorant views of white adults who are too duplicitous to say such things aloud.

Kingsolver invites the reader to make comparisons to Biblical narratives throughout the book. This first portion of the book, sub-named "Genesis," invites the reader to compare the Price family's travels to a foreign land to that of the Abrahamic narrative in the Old Testament. Like Abraham, the Prices leave their native country for a new land that God promises them. Nathan Price has visions of converting the native Africans and expanding God's kingdom. But, unlike the Abrahamic narrative, Kingsolver is also asking the reader to subvert the point of view of this particular Biblical story. Instead of seeing their soujourn through the eyes of the patriarch, Abraham, or Nathan in this instance, Kingsolver suggests what this kind of narrative might have looked like if it had been owned by a female narrator. Instead of a narrative focused on a promised land, a retelling of this story from a feminine point of view underscores the significance of conquest inherent in any such narrative. A land must be overtaken, as well as its inhabitants, and women become both implicit in this process as well as victims of it.

The beginning of the book finds Orleanna reminiscing on her life in Africa from her current vantage point of Sanderling Island, Georgia. The scene of a woman and her four children offers a vision of rare harmony with the land, where the okapi that's present has a number of symbolic meanings. First, it represents the myth of potential harmony between these women and the land of Africa. More importantly, however, it represents the fleeting notions of feminine self-reliance. As the reader learns, though these five women each strive for their own measure of independence, such independence is often short-lived under the oppression of masculinity and the will of the land.

The tension of the book explodes within the first few chapters when the family arrives on the continent. The opening section is called "The Things We Carried," and Kingsolver engages in a comic critique of materialism, gently poking fun at the family from Georgia who bring large amounts of "necessary" things from their previous life. This reliance on things is sharply contrasted with the poverty the family finds upon arriving in Kilanga, their new home. Kingsolver also blatantly illuminates the inherent racism that the Price family brings with them. Though the Prices are not overtly racist in their new cultural surroundings, the character of Ruth May allows Kingsolver to explore the interiority of the family as a whole, exposing the underlying motivations of the group. The racist attitudes of the Prices' home church in Georgia is indicative of their larger perspective. Ruth May, for instance, calls the African peoples the "Tribes of Ham," an allusion to a story from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. Ham was Noah's son who saw his father naked. Because of this, Ham was cursed. This story was interpreted, in later times, as a potential 'origin' story for the people of Africa. The African population, according to this myth, was cursed because of their lack of technology and sophistication - at least from a Western point of view. Thus, besides the many material things the Price family carries with them, they also import a host of myopic values and ideas.

Though the village people warmly welcomes the family, killing a goat in order to make a stew, Reverend Price chastises them for their nakedness and for the way in which they sing hymns and exhibit their spirituality. He compares the village to that of Sodom, a town in the book of Genesis which was destroyed by God because of its depraved behavior. Revered Price immediately imposes his own structures of morality on the people. This will comprise a main tension throughout the book: How can a Western individual honestly engage with a culture other than his or her own without projecting their own standards of morals and decency on it?

The Price daughters begin to adjust to their new surroundings, but mainly by helping their mother in the house so that they don't have to go outside. Leah, however, goes outdoors with her father to start planting a garden. He has brought seeds of native Georgia plants, tomatoes and beans, and planned on cultivating a large garden that would feed the family and help provide for the rest of the village. Leah is enamored with her father, and believes that he holds vast amounts of wisdom. When he asks her why God makes men plant their food instead of just giving it, he tells her, "the Lord helps those that help themselves."

The previous missionary in Kilanga, Brother Fowles, left behind a domestic servant and a parrot, both of which he had taught to speak English. He, apparently, had also left behind trouble, as he had gone crazy "consorting with the inhabitants of the land." Mama Tataba, the servant Brother Fowles left for the family, watches Leah and Reverend Price plant the garden and can't understand why they don't "make hills." Reverend Price tells her that he has been planting all his life, and she leaves with contempt. She also points out, however, a plant that she calls "Poisonwood." Reverend Price does not heed her warnings, however, and the next day he is covered in rashes from the plant's poison. Mama Tataba also rearranges their garden into hills, a state that Leah and the Revered quickly rectify by shoveling all the dirt back into neat rows.

Reverend Price decides that the village church needs something to help kick off his ministry, so he decrees that Easter will be celebrated on the Fourth of July, since the villagers don't have the same concept of time as the Prices. Rachel is upset because there "were no new clothes for the Price girls," but she is still especially shocked by the variety of clothes that the villagers wear - especially since nothing matches. Reverend Price plans an Easter pageant for the service, but since only men come to the church, the pageant only consists of a few of the men parading around with spears pretending to be Roman guards at the tomb of Jesus. This is also a shocking thing for Rachel since "We aren't all that accustomed to the African race to begin with, since back home they keep to their own parts of town."

The highlight of the pageant is a baptismal service down at the big river that runs near the village. The men veto the plan to dunk people in the river, however, and so Price has to settle for holding a church picnic supper near the river to entice the villagers to get close to the water. Even then, however, no one was ready to get in for their baptism. Mrs. Price kills and fries several chickens that had been left by Brother Fowles as a "peace offering" to the village, but Revered Price doesn't notice her effort. Instead, he is fixated on the fact that no one was baptized. Church suppers were "nothing, in terms of redemption."

Ruth May cannot understand why "if somebody was hungry, why would they have a big fat belly?" She also doesn't understand the way all the people dress. She relates the story of how one of the toys she brought with her, a sock monkey, is stolen off the family's front porch one night, and how she cried so hard about it that she peed in her pants. The Price's neighbor, Mama Mwanza, had her legs permanently disabled after her roof caught on fire and fell on her. Even though she lost use of her legs, she is still forced to carry on her duties as the mother and wife of the household, and she uses her hands to walk through the village with baskets of goods and buckets of water balancing on her head. Both the Reverend and Mrs. Price grieve over seeing the hardships of these Congolese people, but they espouse different types of sympathy. Reverend Price believes that their broken bodies are simply a manifestation of their broken souls and how they "don't even see how they could be healed" by accepting Jesus. Mrs. Price, defiant in her own way, believes that it is the condition of their world that forces these people to endure such terrible harship. "Even something precious can get shabby in the course of things...." she says.

Adah reveals how both she and her sister, Leah, were tested and found to be academically gifted. Mrs. Price attempted to keep this knowledge from Reverend Price because he thought that "Sending a girl to college is like pouring 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." So, Mrs. Price enrolls them in advanced school classes and begins letting Adah read a variety of books - Bunyan, Milton, Stevenson, Dickinson - without her father knowing. Adah is also extremely talented with numbers and letters. She is particularly fascinated by palindromes, words or sentences that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. She prefers her own name to be spelled A-D-A, so that it is a palindrome. Even when she finishes reading a book, she says, she will read it backwards and discover a whole new experience. This allows her to stay entertained for hours while her sisters are bored by the coming of the "rainy season."

Metheuselah, the parrot, also begins to exhibit some unruly behavior when the rains come, mimicking his previous owner when he says "Piss off, Methuselah!" This angers Reverend Price and confirms his suspicion that Brother Fowles was a "papist Catholic," but there is nothing he can do to punish the bird. After an afternoon of hard rains, the girls stalk out into the back yard to find the vegetable garden they had planted flooded by the rain. Reverend Price and Leah spend the rest of the afternoon reshaping and replanting the garden, this time using Mama Tataba's plan of building flood-proof mounds, though he will not admit it was her idea.

Analysis

The Prices' adaptation to Africa is not only a painful one, but also futile as well. For Orleanna, her hardship is not necessarily personal, but rather a result of all the poverty and suffering around her. She is anguished, for instance, by Mama Mwanza's physical deformities and further embarrassed by her husband's lack of sympathy for the people. She attempts to rectify the ill will beginning to form against her husband by feeding the entire village at the Easter picnic. Though the village appreciates it, however, Reverend Price does not.

Reverend Price's major vice at this point of the book turns out to be his stubbornness. He doesn't seem to comprehend that what worked in Georgia does not necessarily work in Africa. By having Easter on the Fourth of July, Kingsolver is explicitly linking Christ's defeat of death with the American way of life. Furthermore, Reverend Price's first step towards bringing the natives into the fold of Christianity is supposed to involve the collective baptism in the village river. When this fails, however, Oreleanna steps in to save the day by preparing an Easter feast. Certainly not for the last time in the novel, the instincts of women will rescue men from their own narrow-mindedness and limited goals. Indeed, perhaps Reverend Price's most stubborn - and indicative - moment comes when he refuses to build mounds for his plants because would involve taking another's idea. But when the rain comes, and all his plants are washed away, only then does he begrudgingly relent and build the mounds - although he efuses to give credit to Mama Tataba.

This scene of gardening reveals substantial tension in the book - specifically that of man versus nature. Kingsolver alludes to several Biblical narratives with this theme, including Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, as well as St. Paul's meditation on the groanings of creation in the Book of Romans. In Kingsolver's reading of this theme, creation is seen as a pure manifestation of God's power and man's struggle to work the land is both a manifestation of humanity's sin against nature as well as the destructive nature of technology against creation. In their own way, all of the characters of the novel have to deal with this theme of humanity versus nature.

Adah, though she is physically deformed, has the keenest mind of all the Price girls. She keeps her knowledge and advanced education to herself in an effort at self-preservation. Her penchant for words and puzzles helps her to see the African jungle in a way that her sisters and her parents do not, and she quickly establishes a cold distance from the people and the land. Overall, it seems, her character represents agnosticism's cool distance from the spiritual.

Reverend Price's style of ministry is not only suspect, but also seems to appear counterproductive. He chastises his predecessor, Brother Fowles, for taking too much of an interest in the local culture - so much so that it drove him mad. Pride, in other words, seems just as dangerous as sympathy or investment. Reverend Price, however, looks down on the people at the outset of the novel - so much so, that he's not willing to give them credit for their own traditions. Thus, when he discovers that flood mounds are indeed the only way to work the land, he must pretend it is his own idea in order to hold on to the tenuous belief that he will be the villagers' savior.

Nathan's ideals of ministry combined with the perspective of his wife, Orleanna, also provide a point of tension between the masculine point of view and that of the feminine. While Reverend Price is concerned about the salvation of souls, Orleanna focuses more on the bodily suffering of the people. This point of contention between the two characters seems to indicate deeper divisions between male and female perspective. While male-centered culture, especially in the time period between the nineteenth century - typified by Emersonian "self-reliance" - and mid-twentieth century literature - typified by writers such as Hemingway - exalted the masculine power over self and nature. Feminine critiques of literature and culture, meanwhile, attempted to highlight the notion of the body, especially the ways in which the body was used and often abused by the masculine. By bringing the conflict between Nathan and Orleanna centerstage, Kingsolver is critiquing religion's subjection of the body. This is, perhaps, most notable in the scene involving river-side picnic. Reverend Price's statement that church picnics were "nothing in terms of redemption" completely misses the feminine perspective that makes this scene possible: by feeding the people, Orleanna was attending to their bodily needs. Indeed, this one meal might have saved these people's lives in ways Revered Price might never understand.

Once the rains stop, Reverend Price's garden begins to grow quickly and all the Prices begin to look forward to the fruits and vegetables that they remember from home. Their luck is not as good, however, with the Betty Crocker cake mix they brought. Their stove is not really equipped to properly bake a cake, and even if it could, moisture and humidity had seeped into the cake mix packages and the mix "got transfigured like Lot's poor wife who looked back at Gomorrah and got turned to a pillar of salt." Mrs. Price can't be consoled, and she cries at the loss of the cake mix and at the realization that, "We brought all the wrong things."

Methuselah lets out a curse word and when Reverend Price hears it, he immediately wants to know which of the girls taught the bird to curse. When Rachel apologizes on behalf of all the girls, Revered Price uses the moment for a sermon on the "stink and taint of original sin." The Reverend has a special punishment for such situations: he gives the girls a Bible verse and they are expected to copy the next one hundred verses. The last verse will reveal their particular sin to them, so when the Reverend gives the girls a verse from the book of Numbers, the final verse gives them a lesson that "when you sin against the Lord you get found out, and to watch what proceeds out of your mouth." Leah, however, knows who really taught the bird to say the word: it was their mother, who had cursed over and over again when she realized the cake mix was unusable.

The Reverend comes up with the idea to "feed the belly and the soul will come," so he buys dynamite from Eeben Axelroot which he and the villagers use in the river to fish, though it kills many more fish than they are able to take in, all of which rot on the river banks since there is no ice to keep them from spoiling. In church that Sunday, the Reverend tells the story of the biblical character Daniel, and though Adah thinks the services translator, Tata Anatole, might have trouble with some of the concepts, she realizes that perhaps he is saying whatever he wants to the congregation and Reverend Price doesn't even realize it. As Adah looks around the sanctuary, she realizes that her disability helps her fit in much better with this African society than it ever had in Georgia. Here, everybody is broken. After the service, Mama Tataba is very upset with Reverend Price for still insisting on baptism.

Though the plants have grown in the Reverend's garden, they refuse to give fruit. The Reverend cannot figure this out and spends many days trying to figure why they grow but don't yield food. The Reverend takes this instance to teach Leah that sometimes "sometimes (God) doesn't deliver us out of our hardships but through them." Leah worries that her father is getting angry at God for not holding up his part of the bargain.

In August, after another sermon on baptism, Mama Tataba gives the Reverend "a good talking to." After they argue for a while, Mama Tataba returns and quits her job with the Prices. When Leah goes to find her father, she sees him looking at an insect. He has realized that the reason his plants have not developed fruit is because there are no bees to pollinate the plants. When Leah asks what Mama Tataba was so mad about, the Reverend tells here that she was upset about a little girl who had been killed by a crocodile. This was why no one would go down to the river and be baptized. When Methuseleh lets another curse word go in the Reverend's presence, he loses his cool and lets the bird fly away.

In a flashback scene, Mrs. Price remembers a day at the market when Leah accidentally knocked over a pile of oranges that a village woman was selling. The village woman's virulent reaction to Leah made her realize that she could not have things "both ways." She had thought that she could be a part of the village and faithful to her husband's vision of converting the villagers, but the villager's reaction to this folly makes her realize she is and will always be an outsider to their community. She also remembers the day that Mama Tataba and the parrot were released by her husband, and the extraordinary effort that was placed on her to take care of the family.

Slowly, the family begins to adjust to the culture of the Congo. They begin to learn the names of all the native fruits and trees and they begin to learn the names of all their neighbors. They know who each villager is by what they wear, "day in and day out," and Leah, bemused by one man who wears a ladies sweater, begins to wonder how anyone here could even know it was a ladies sweater, or how she even knows it. That same man is also a "sinner" because he keeps two wives, an old one and a young one. Reverend Price believes he should dump one of the wives, but Leah recognizes that it is a complicated matter of values and tradition.

The girls discover that all of the Congolese children find them fascinating, and Leah is frustrated by her inability to communicate with them. She has an adventurous spirit and tries very hard to keep an eye on all the happenings of the village, from the market days to the gatherings in the town square of all the villagers. She is fascinated by their activities and culture. She is also fascinated by Eeben Axelroot, who she spies on "for the cause of good." She discovers that he has a radio, as well as various other tools and guns.

Ruth May is the first Price child to make friends with the Congolese children. She teaches them all the game "Mother May I," and all the children play it for weeks together. Leah also makes close friends with one of the children, Pascal, who begins to teach her the language and the culture, as well as what plants to watch out for. Through their friendship, Leah begins to realize that there was a gulf of difference between her childhood and Pascal's. The Price's sorts of games - "Mother May I" and "Hide and Seek" - were quite different from his games - "Find Food" and "Recognize Poisonwood" and "Build a House."

Analysis

The book slowly transitions from an examination of the effects of all the material things that the Prices brought with them to Africa to a wider perspective of how Africa begins to affect the Prices. Indeed, the Prices felt that they could simply bring their things from home - wonder bean seeds, cake mix, even the English language and religion. Yet, now they realize that their American ways are limited in the larger world - American plants don't grow because there aren't bees to pollinate them, American communication is difficult because of the language barrier. Even the Reverend's notions of religion don't work - such as baptism - because he fails to understand that the villagers are afraid of the river because of a simple barrier like crocodiles. Even his attempt at using dynamite to teach the villagers to fish ends up a failure because so much is wasted in the process. Additionally, the scene involving the dissolution of the cake mix - and the parallel allusion to the story of Lot and his wife from the book of Genesis - is a parable examining the value of leaving things behind. Indeed, the Price women are finding it increasingly difficult to leave their belongings behind. In the Biblical narrative, when Lot's wife looks back at all she is leaving from her home in Sodom, God turns her into a pillar of salt to be blown away in the wind. Like Lot's wife, Orleanna finds herself struggling between adapting to the new land the family finds themselves in and the comforts and safety of their home.

In her chapters chronicaling the Price's navigation of the Kikongo language, Kingsolver is alluding to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In that story, men tried to become more powerful than God by building a giant tower up to heaven. God destroyed their tower because of their pride, and as punishment made each person speak a different language. Thus, the Prices, on a mission propelled by the pride of their father, find themselves unable to translate the culture and language of the place they find themselves in. As the reader will find out, God, or some other force, will scatter the family as well, creating in each member a language indecipherable to each other. Orleanna reflects, in a flashback scene, that she cannot have it "both ways" - meaning she cannot hang onto her American self while providing for her children in the context of Africa.

The overarching theme of "Genesis," then, has another feminine meaning: the theme of new birth. In a sense, the Price family is undergoing the labors of child birth, being made into new things. They are being forced to leave slough their old selves and, painfully, inhabit new selves fully enmeshed in the culture and life of the Congo. Mrs. Price, for instance, remembers the day that Mama Tataba and Methuseleh, the parrot, were let go by Revered Price. She calls it their "independence day," but it was a time of deeper frustration for her. She now had to assume the role of caretaker for her household without Mama Tataba's help of navigating the dangers of disease and bacteria in the food and water. Her greater challenge, however, is seeing the death and pain around her and knowing that she and her family are responsible for bringing so much of it.

Adah's reflection on fitting in because of her handicap allows Kingsolver to address the ideas of 'brokenness' as well. In one sense, Adah can represent the continent of Africa: broken, overlooked, dark and brooding, but fierce in her own silent intelligence, with much to teach others. Each of the characters, in her own way, represents a certain aspect of the African land and Kingsolver exploits these characteristics to further explore the theme of humanity and nature. In the same vein, Leah's curiosity with the Congolese culture leads her to make her first friend, Pascal. Though Leah has tells the reader that she begins to think she could "stay forever" in the Congo, she also begins to recognize that she brings her own American perspective to Congolese culture. This both frustrates her and excites her. When she sees a man wearing a woman's sweater, she realizes that she is the only one who recognizes that garment as a woman's sweater, and the only reason she recognizes it as that is because her culture has taught her to think that way. Likewise, she also recognizes the differences between her own childhood and that of her friend's. Childhood, she realizes, is just an invention of her culture as well, since Pascal didn't really have a childhood in her sense of that term. For the first time Leah begins to resent her father for making her a "white preacher's child from Georgia." This frustration begins, more and more, to be felt by each of the Price children.

It is in these chapters that the book makes a transition from the theme of "Genesis" to the theme of "Revelation." The sub-theme to "Revelation" is "The Things we Learned." Thus, "Revelation" signifies the sense of new understandings for each member of the family - namely the process by which each member of the family engages with their culture. Each character, like the main characters in Biblical stories, wields their own emotional arc, which allows them to learn their lessons through triumph and tragedy, ultimately fulfilling their potential in the larger moral framework of the narrative. The theme will also have another meaning, that of apocalypse and new creation, explored in future chapters.

One afternoon, while climbing a tree, Ruth May falls out and breaks her arm. She was climbing the tree to spy on the "African Communist Boy Scouts," a group of boys who all wear red handkerchiefs and practice marching drills. These are different from the Belgian Army, who still come to the village to show that they are still in charge of the country.

Eeben Axelroot takes Revered Price and Ruth May to a hospital in Stanleyville. On the plane ride there, Ruth May accidentally discovers a small bag of diamonds but doesn't mention it to anyone. At the hospital, a Belgian doctor begins to put a cast on Ruth May's arm. The doctor and Reverend Price get into an argument over the usefulness of missionaries. The Revered declares that his job is to bring salvation to the native people, but the doctor tells him that, "We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands." The Reverend continues to argue that America will bring civilization and advancement to the Congo people, but the doctor sarcastically rebuffs him.

The doctor then tells the Reverend about Patrice Lumumba, a man who was gaining a following as a political leader of the Congolese people. The Reverend doesn't believe Lumumba to be a threat, but the doctor tells him about a riot he had started just the last week in which twelve people were killed.

One night, the Prices have Mr. Anatole, the town's school teacher over for dinner. Anatole speaks French and English and was educated enough to teach the town's boys basic grammar school subjects. Rachel is fascinated with him and the thin scars that cover his face. He had worked in the diamond and rubber mines as a boy, before being taken in by the Underdowns and educated. At dinner, Anatole tells Reverend Price that the village chief, Tata Ndu, was becoming worried at the moral decline in the village because so many people were going to church. Anatole explains that only the village's most unlucky and disdained members had been going to the church, simply because their personal gods had not been delivering on their promises, so they decided to try to sacrifice to Jesus. But, Tata Ndu is worried that the church is starting to draw too many upstanding citizens of the village. Reverend Price is angry at Tata Ndu, but decides he needs to further his efforts to get him to join the church. Anatole tells him that his real competition is not Tata Ndu, but rather Tata Kuvudundu, the town's local priest and fortune teller. Reverend Price calls Tata Kuvudundu a "witch doctor" and refuses to respect him. Anatole says that Tata Kuvudundu plays a practical role in town life, helping families who cannot conceive children or are plagued by adultery; these are things he thinks "ought to remain separate from Tata Jesus."

Condescendingly, Reverend Price asks Anatole to leave the house. He then begins to argue with Mrs. Price, culminating in the Revered smashing one of the plates that the girls loved. The Reverend retreats out of the house to begin work on a sermon that would clear up all the confusion about Tata Jesus and leaves the women in silence.

One afternoon, Leah and Adah are sent out to the market to shop for the family. Leah carries buckets of water and leaves Adah behind. But Adah begins to discover things about Africa that others miss. She finds the African pygmy people; she sees wildlife that others do not. Her slow walking allows her to witness things in the wilderness. She also spots Anatole speaking to a group of armed men in the woods.

The day that Leah and Adah went with buckets for water, Adah had to walk home alone, on account of Leah leaving her. As she is walking through a field of grass, she becomes aware that she is being followed by someone or something. She becomes very frightened, but knows that fear cannot help her. Her limbs will not allow her to move any faster. She keeps walking and eventually does make it home where the Price family is reading and preparing dinner.

Then, Tata Ndu walks up to the house to tell the Price family that Adah had been eaten by a lion. One of the villagers had seen the tracks of both, as well as a smear of blood, and believed her to be dead. Tata Ndu's real purpose in coming had been to best Reverend Price, to show him that "the gods of his village did not take kindly to the minister of corruption. As a small sign of Their displeasure, They ate his daughter alive." But when Adah finally walks up to her praying family, Tata Ndu retreats. The lion had actually eaten a small animal and Adah marvels at the fact that one God had bested another.

One day, Anatole sends a boy who calls himself Nelson to help the Prices. Nelson sleeps in the henhouse and does chores for the family, and in return he does much of the manual labor required around the house. Nelson, like Anatole, is an orphan, and so Anatole sent him to the Prices to become educated and have a better life.

As the rainy season progresses in the village, several families begin to become infected with the kakakaka. At first, the Prices think this is just a word for restlessness of the people, but Nelson explains that it is a disease that causes fatal cases of diarrhea. This causes Mrs. Price to keep the children indoors as much as possible, and they begin to suffer from a serious case of boredom. Leah can longer keep up with Mr. Axelroot and his curious behavior. During the times of boredom, Leah begins to have strange dreams that leave her feeling "wide awake below the waist." Soon, Mrs. Price realizes this is a side of effect of malaria. As Christmas comes around, Mrs. Price encourages the girls to begin collecting things for their "hope chests," boxes that contain things girls will want to use when they get married. Leah, however, has a hard time imagining romance and doesn't take a liking to the work. Rachel, on the other hand, throws herself into the work

The village church began to grow after Adah's lion incident. The village believes that if Jesus could protect a lame girl from a lion, than perhaps he could help them as well. Adah, however, is less than excited about the hope chest project as well, and begins to make morbid items to put into it. The hope chest project eventually tapers off because Rachel uses too much material and Leah and Adah don't care enough to keep it going.

Analysis:

The character of Ruth May also represents certain characteristics of Africa. In her trust and naivete, Ruth May puts her life into the hands of her parents. Since she is just a child, she has no way of understanding the danger she is in. While Kingsolver would not explicitly make the point that Africa is like a child in an immature, or undeveloped way, the analogy does fit when understanding the ways in which Western power, represented by Nathan Price and Eeben Axelroot, attempt to lie and cheat the land, creating situations of danger and conflict which the continent did not ask for nor have the tools to fight.

Kingsolver also begins to engage the difficult and incraesingly contentious political situation of the Congo. After breaking her arm, Ruth May is taken to a hospital in Stanleyville where her doctor and her father have a conversation about the rising threat of revolution. Patrice Lumumba, a local leader, is beginning to organize local Congolese to drive out the Belgians, and any other white people, from the Congo. Brief snippets of Congolese history make their way into these chapters through various characters. The Belgians had conquered the Congo and established a government. Their main goal had been to extract rubber and other natural resources, and they had used violent tactics to force people to work in the mines. Now, American interests discovered diamond mines, and they were using despicable and violent tactics to get at the natural reasources. Likewise, illegal diamond smuggling enterprises had sprung up, one of which was being run by Eeben Axelroot.

Lumumba is a charismatic leader who is organizing the people of the Congo to rise up against the Belgians. Small militias, many of them made up of children, are beginning to form in the Congo and one has even started in the Price's village. Revered Price remains convinced that America will bring prosperity and wealth to the Congolese people, as well as the gospel, but the Belgian doctor is less sure that anything but misery and death will come as a result.

Here, the theme of "Revelation" takes on another meaning, that of apocalypse. Just as in the Book of Revelation, when creation underwent violence and misery in order to be transformed, the Belgian doctor predicts that violence and misery will visit the Congo if it is to be transformed from a colony to a self-determining state.

The local political situation in the village is also becoming increasingly complex. Tata Nbu, the village chief, is unhappy that so many villagers are beginning to go to the church to worship Tata Jesus and are neglecting the family and village gods that protect the everyday interests of the villagers. This situation is compounded when Adah narrowly escapes a lion attack and the villagers begin to believe that this proves Tata Jesus is more powerful than some of the village gods. As the village begins to come under assault from a deadly wave of "kakakaka," the villagers word for dysentery, more people begin coming to the church looking for a refuge from the death surrounding them. Reverend Price, however, is still much more concerned with the state of their souls than the state of their surroundings.

The story of Adah and the lion bears casual resemblence to the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den from the Old Testament, but once again Kingsolver upends the Biblical narrative to assert a new point of view. In the story of Daniel, God subdues the lions that are supposed to kill him. Man, and his God, are thus seen to be rule over nature. But in Kingsolver's narrative, continuing the theme of humanity versus nature, nature is seen as the master of humanity. Adah escapes the lion's teeth not because God subdued the beast, but only because the random laws of nature allowed her to live and instead chose another young village boy to die in her place. Adah, as the most nihilistic of the characters, is subjected to nature's own version of nihilism.

The flood that engulfs the region also harkens back to story of the Biblical flood from the Book of Genesis. In the story of the flood, God kills all of humanity, save for Noah and his family, because of the wickedness of man. This flood, however, has no noble purposes and, instead, brings death to the youngest and most innocent of the village children. This is one aspect of Kingsolver's critique of religion. While Christianity asserts a progression of nature and history, Kingsolver retorts that nature and history are random and violent. Nathan Price's God only wants to save people's souls so that everyone will be saved from hell. Kingsolver retorts that there is hell on earth as well and religion is going nothing to save people from that.

Kingsolver also begins to play with the notion of hope. Mrs. Price starts the girls creating their "hope chests," collections of things for their wedding days. This task unwittingly reveals aspects of each character - Leah becomes quickly bored with the task, much more enthralled by the world around her; Adah's hope chest takes on a dark, forboding quality, reminiscent of her nihilistic tendencies; Rachel throws herself whole-heartedly into the endeavor showing a surprising amount of entrepeneurial spirit. This desire for material things would serve her well in her own personal endeavors later in life. This endeavor of hope, however, seems trivial amidst the confusion and devastation surrounding them, and so the girls eventually give up on the task, still hoping for a return to their former life, but not sure if that will happen now.

In the new year, the Underdowns, one of the families responsible for the administration of the mission league makes a surprise visit to see the Prices. They bring a newspaper article for everyone to read, and though the children are dismissed from the room, Rachel sneaks back into the room to grab the paper when the adults are done with it. The article is about how Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, had plans to invade the Congo and install a communist government there. Though this news is troubling, the Underdowns have worse news to tell them. They tell the Prices that Belgium has decided to relinquish their rule of the Congo and turn it over to a government of the people in June. Orleanna Price becomes outraged at this news and that the mission league didn't do anything to stop them from coming. Frank Underdown reminds her, and Reverend Price, that their mission wasn't sponsored by the mission league and that the $50 a month stipend they receive is more charity than wages. Reverend Price soon becomes angry with the Underdowns when they suggest that he should make plans to leave the country. He tells them that there is no way that the Congolese will be able to hold elections and run a government since almost none of them have any formal education or knowledge of such things. He defiantly declares that they will stay until July when the new missionary family joins them. When the Underdowns tell him that that family is not coming, Reverend Price declares they will stay until God sends them home. This, understandably, is troubling to Rachel.

Adah recalls when, as a child, she questioned her Sunday school teacher about why some children would be damned to hell just for being born in the wrong place like Africa, while other children were guaranteed salvation for being born in Christian places. Adah recalls that she was punished and then decided not to believe in God anymore. She had a keen sense for those that were born at the wrong time and in a wrong way. For Adah, it is no surprise that the Congolese are rising up against the white people that have dominated their country for so long. Indeed, Adah can see the white race's stupidity in her own family. They live in a big house, they try to feed the Congolese children to the crocodiles for Tata Jesus, and they ignorantly disregard every sacred rule of the village such as where to bathe, or wash clothes, or get drinking water. The kakakaka, Nelson tells them, is their fault because they have ignored the sacred rules.

Reverend Price takes a trip to Stanleyville with Eeben Axelroot to get more quinine pills for the family. A letter had arrived from the Underdowns, instead of their usual supplies, that only said they should prepare to leave by June 28th. Revered Price, however, seems determined to stay despite the protests of his wife and children. After his trip to Stanleyville, he tells the family that Patrice Lumumba has won the county's election and is preparing to transition the country from the Belgian Congo to the Republic of Congo. He speaks of African unity, but Reverend Price is skeptical. Rachel is mostly upset that she is not able to go home to date boys and drink Cokes. Ruth May recounts, how, a few months later another plane came. The plane was supposed to take the family to Leopoldville where they would meet the Underdowns and leave the country, but only Leah and Reverend Price get on the plane with the intention of coming back. Mrs. Price flees to her bedroom where she lies in bed and won't get up all day.

In Leopoldville, the Underdowns take Leah and the Reverend to watch the transition ceremony from Belgian rule to the presidency of Patrice Lumumba. The Underdowns are upset with the Prices, but pretend that nothing is wrong. At the ceremony, after several speeches by Belgian officials, Lumumba stands up to speak. He chastises the Belgians for their rule and promises a new day of freedom for all of the Congo. The crowd roars and cheers. At the Underdowns house, Mrs. Underdown prepares to leave. Their house is quite luxurious compared to the shacks in surrounding neighborhoods. They feed Leah and the Reverend a lavish meal with meats and cheeses and things they haven't had in months. Leah eats so much she can't even eat the French cookie they serve for dessert.

Back in Kilanga, on the same day that Lumumba is inaugurated, Methuselah the parrot is killed by a cat. The parrot that had been taught all of the English words and been caged so long that he could no longer fly, loses his life in a foreshadowing of the hard times to come for those that had attempted to force their culture on the people of Africa.

Analysis:

The political situation of the Congo comes under the spotlight in these chapters, which begin to position the plight of the Prices in a much larger context. Indeed, much change is on the horizon for the Congolese and the Underdowns relate the disturbing news to the Prices during a surprise visit. They reveal that the Belgian government is pulling out and leaving the country to be ruled by the Congolese people. This frightens Mrs. Price tremendously - first, because she fears for her children's safety, and secondly because she sees that the thin threads of order are secured by the Belgian troops that periodically march through the village. She worries what will happen when groups of Congolese with no education or training in government assume responsibility for what little government services there are. She also worries about who will control the growing army.

The Price's political struggle with the Congo highlights the tension of imperialism inherent in the work of missionaries. Kingsolver is increasingly critical of missionaries whose main work hinges upon the generosity of a Western-installed and maintained government. Kingsolver wants the reader to consider two important questions when examining the role of missionaries. First, she wants to question the legitimacy of a mission to a foreign land if that mission is simply a tool to bring Western values and culture while disregarding the culture and values of the host country. Secondly, she wants to question a kind of mission work that only takes into account the spiritual existence of the missionized and not the physical. When these questions are brought to bear on the work that the Prices are doing, it increasingly shows the selfishness of Nathan Price's work and the naivete of Orleanna Price.

The character of Adah increasingly takes on signs of agnosticism, even atheism. The story she relates - of being chastised in church and then not believing in God - is a classic argument that many agnostic and atheist scholars made against religion in the twentieth century. Notably, Nietzsche argued that "God is dead" in the established Protestantism of the West, and Bertrand Russell announced that it was no longer intellectually feasible to be a Christian. Adah's argument against God follows their arguments against God: Protestant Christianity, as it is experienced in Europe and America, has no room for other cultures and people. Therefore, a religion that is supposed to be based on love has lost the one trait that made it unique. Thus, for Adah, like Nietzsche, God is dead.

Though the Underdowns tell the Prices that they should leave, Reverend Price refuses. Only bad fortune, however, will result from this decision. In a poignant moment, Adah makes a connection between the microcosm of her family and the macrocosm of the entire white occupation of the Congo. She relates how her own family has brought nothing but trouble to the village because of their ignorance of customs and rules - things that were designed to keep order and elicit safety for the people of the village. Likewise, it is the rule of the white people, with their ignorance of rules and customs and their greed for the natural resources of the land, that ruins the people that inhabit that land. Though Reverend Price thinks it will never happen, he is there on the day when Patrice Lumumba is inaugurated President of the Republic of Congo, ushering in a new government and new rule. Still, the Reverend refuses to leave.

The death of Methuselah the parrot on the same day that Lumumba takes office is symbolic of Africa's inability to escape the "claws" of Western power. Methuselah had been taught to talk and act like a human, just as Africa was being taught to talk and act just like a Western nation. But, when Methuselah was thrown into the wild by Revered Price, the bird did not live long, just as Kingsolver foreshadows the fall of the Congo at the hands of American interests. Kingsolver, moreover, also reintroduces the notion of hope, but in a negative light - namely to reveal how hope is slowly dying for Africa. Relating Methuselah to hope, Adah quotes the Emily Dickinson line - "hope is a thing with feathers." But, just like Dickinson's own life, often devoid of hope, Methuselah - a literal creature with feathers - is killed, suggesting a dim future for the Prices and for the Congo.

In a scene of flashback, Orleanna Price recalls how she met Nathan Price as a young girl and how they married. Orleanna grew up in Pearl, Mississippi. Her father had been an optometrist; her mother had died when Orleanna was very young. At the age of seventeen, she attended a Baptist tent revival where she met Nathan Price. After a brief courtship, it was decided that they would marry. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Nathan was drafted by the army and was sent to the Philippines. His company was attacked by Japanese soldiers and he was injured. But his injury proved to be his salvation as the rest of his company were rounded up and marched to a prison camp where they all died. When Nathan heard this news, something inside of him broke and Orleanna bemoaned that she never again heard from the man she had originally married. Back home, Nathan redoubled his efforts for God, proclaiming that his salvation meant that God was especially watching him and his wife - and everything they did. He was embarrassed by sex and the pregnancy that resulted and for months they lived in a station wagon while Nathan preached on a traveling circuit. They finally settled in Bethlehem, Georgia where Orleanna gave birth to the twins, and later Ruth May. But she relates how the harshness of her husband's ways, and the difficulty of rearing children in poverty, broke her own spirit. She compares herself to the Congo in this way; "barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom."

Leah and Reverend Price arrive back in Kilanga but now have new difficulties to face. They no longer have any money now that their stipend will no longer be coming. The villagers are confused by this as they had come to believe that white people have never ending supplies of money. Mama Mwanza takes pity on them, however, and gives them some oranges and promises that if her husband's catch is good, she will share some of their fish. Leah muses that "you know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you." Nelson believes that a curse has bee placed on the family that will soon manifest itself in all the females of the house.

Nelson gives Adah a lesson in Congolese metaphysics. He explains that a thing gets its essence when it is named, and that everything is as it is because of the "nommo," the name. Adah understands this - she is the way she is because her name is Adah, Leah is the way she is because her name is not Adah. She asks Nelson about twins, and then explains to him that she and Leah are twins. Nelson is shocked and scared by this news. Twins, or "baza" as they are called in Congolese, is a very bad thing for a village. Any woman who has twins, he explains, is mandated by the village gods to take the babies out into the jungle and leave them there to die. If they do not, floods and disease will come to the village. Nelson is shocked that atrocities did not come to the USA when Leah and Adah were born. Nelson also explains that almost all the couples that attend the village church had had twins at some point. This leads to a further reflection on the type of congregation that Revered Price was assembling. "By pure accident" Reverend Price was attracting all of the refugees of Kilanga village life, though he failed to recognize this. Meanwhile, Mrs. Price was sinking further and further into a deep depression. Her and Ruth May mainly lay in bed all day.

Mrs. Price's depression leaves a vacuum of responsibility in the home. Leah, Adah, and Rachel convene to come up with a plan to put food on the table. Reverend Price remains willfully ignorant and scolds them when dinner is not ready on time. They inventory the food they have and come up with plans to find fruits and nuts. Each take a task - Leah finds oranges, Adah is in charge of the chickens, and Rachel claims she will bake the bread, though Leah is skeptical that Rachel can do any of those things.

Analysis:

Kingsolver introduces here another important theme: Africa as an analogy for femininity. Indeed, Orleanna Price has become a symbol for the continent. Like Africa, religion came upon her in the form of Nathan Price and ravaged her soul. Like Africa, political winds changed and left her and her family without food or support. Like Africa, her own spirit becomes broken and there seems little hope of ever being whole again. Orleanna Price, then, herself has been a victim of colonization and imperialism, and she is left bereft, ransacked as a result, devoid of identity. Her journey, then, like that of Africa is to renew her identity and find peace even though her independence comes at a terrible price.

The Prices are suddenly thrown into Kilanga life without the safety net of money or contact with the outside world. Indeed, they are fully cut off and now must fend for themselves. Leah has a revelation about the kind of society they have been living in and how they've simply brought their own presumptions of culture with them. She realizes that in Kilanga, a household is deemed strong when there is a man to find food and care for the family. But Reverend Price believes his job is simply to preach - something that might have provided for a family in Georgia, but does not put food on the table in Kilanga. Kingsolver, it seems, is critiquing the usefulness of religion. It is a theme that she comes back to repeatedly, but here is given new dimension - specifically one of economic utility. Religion, Kingsolver dryly notes, does not put food on the table. It was true for the people of the Congo before - Nathan Price's sermons have not helped them physically or materially - but all of a sudden it does not put food on the Price table either. The reader is allowed to imagine this same scenario in their own worlds and to question the utility of religion in their own lives.

The nuances of language and belief are also dealt with here. As the girls begin to pick up Congolese words, they realize the subtleties that they are unable to convey in the language. Reverend Price, especially, in his attempts to convey Congolese expressions often ends up butchering the meaning. The word for baptism, for instance, can mean both "to baptize" and "to frighten." These are things, moreover, that no one wants to tell him. By noting the ways in which the Prices cannot grasp the nuances of the language, Kingsolver is critiquing American and Western attitudes prevalent during that time - specifically the notion that African society is "primitive." Indeed, by revealing how the "civilized" American cannot understand the nuances of the language, Kingsolver suggests the bombastic pride inherent in any interaction between Western power and African culture.

Adah's realization that her father's church is only attracting the outcasts of the town suggests that the Reverend's work is doing more Christian good than he realizes. In the New Testament, Jesus ministers to the outcasts of society, usually critiquing the institutions of power instead of trying to accommodate them. Without knowing it, then, Reverend Price has created this kind of church - which embraces the outcasts into a fold which allows them to find value in their own lives and avoid the condemnation of their own society. But Kingsolver is only mocking the missionary enterprise here, for attracting the outcasts is certainly not what Price set out to do - and remains antithetical to his goal of civilizing an entire culture.

Reverend Price is also woefully unaware of the practical ways in which the villagers deal with religion. The Congolese pay their respects to a multitude of gods, of which Tata Jesus is simply one of many. If a child dies, a person might try to worship Jesus. If a drought comes, however, Jesus is believed to be inadequate, and so the person moves to another ancestral god. For Reverend Price, his teachings on Jesus make perfect sense; like the plants they brought with them from Georgia, however, these teachings are not able to flower in the cultural context of the Congo.

Leah takes the responsibility of trying to cheer up Ruth May, but she remains despondent to her pleas. As Leah is braiding Ruth May's hair, Anatole shows up with news for the family. He tells Leah that Katanga, a southern province with large diamond mines, is seceding from the Congo. Leah asks why and Anatole tells her it is because the leader of Katanga is making deals with the Belgians for the natural resources. Patrice Lumumba wants to keep the Congo's resources for the people, but he is fighting a difficult battle. He has threatened to bring in Russia to defeat the Belgian's and make the Congo a communist country. These are worries for Leah, but she can't help but feel they are far off as she comes more and more to admire the local culture and people of the village.

Ruth May and Mrs. Price spend most of their time in bed. Ruth May recounts how she sometimes hears Mrs. Price arguing with Reverend Price, telling him how in Stanleyville they rounded up the white missionaries and shot two of them. Revered Price simply tells her that the meek will inherit the earth and that the first shall be last. To cure Ruth May, Nelson brings her a talisman, a small bone that was burned in a magic fire. He tells Ruth May to breathe into it and that if she ever is faced with death, she can disappear and go to a magic place where she will be safe.

Rachel and Leah get into a huge fight when Leah burns their dinner one night. Rachel begins cursing and throwing things, and suddenly Mrs. Price emerges from her bedroom and stoically tells her daughters to serve the food and that tomorrow she will teach Rachel to cook. From that point on, Mrs. Price begins to raise herself out of her depression a changed woman. She openly flaunts Reverend Price's authority and tells everyone that she will get her and her daughters out of the Congo regardless of the price she has to pay. Leah, herself, begins to have more and more grave doubts about what her father has gotten them into. Though she still admires him, she can't help but think that "If his decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn't right, then what else might he be wrong about?"

One afternoon, as Rachel was "slaving" away in the kitchen, the village stirred with the news that "Tata Bidibidi" was arriving. It turns out, it was Brother Fowles, the missionary that had preceded the Prices in Kilanga. Brother Fowles was an old man with a long gray beard. He had married a Congolese woman, Celine, and they had several children. They were on their way to visit Celine's family up the river and stopped in Kilanga to check on the Prices and to visit friends. Brother Fowles tells great stories about nature and birds and has a tight grip on memorizing scripture. He tells them that the Congolese people are actually very religious, though it may be hard to see sometimes. When Reverend Price comes home, he and Brother Fowles begin debating scripture, and though Brother Fowles keeps his good nature about it, Reverend Price does not invite them to stay for dinner. As they are leaving in their house boat, Brother Fowles gives the Price woman extra food and medicine and tells them about a Baptist Missionary hospital in a neighboring town. As they leave, Brother Fowles reminds Mrs. Price that they are all "branches grafted on this good tree...The great root of Africa sustains us." He encourages her to talk with Tata Ndu to ask for help and relates that though he may not have saved souls the way that Nathan Price wanted to, good things were done while he was there, like the practice of wife-beating falling out of favor with the village men.

After Brother Fowles's visit, the summer months pass in a daze. The drought worsens and there is little or no food for the Price family besides what little they can muster. Then, the village undergoes a festive five day market time in which, unexpectedly, Tata Ndu brings five successive gifts of food to the Price household. Each time he comes in and lines up the Price girls and has conversations with Reverend Price. Reverend Price thinks that Tata Ndu is finally coming around to the side of the Gospel, but Nelson explains to Mrs. Price that he is actually looking to take another wife, Rachel. He explains that Tata Ndu could see that they Price's didn't have enough food, and so he thought he might be able to bargain for Rachel, whose pale skin, Nelson says, would "cheer up" Tata Ndu's other wives. Both Mrs. Price and Nelson laugh at the idea of Rachel taking on the responsibility of a Congolese wife.

Analysis

Ruth May's decline in health precipitates a reawakening for Mrs. Price, who doggedly rises from her own depression to take the household back from Rachel, Leah, and Adah. She has a new determination now, and does not care what her husband thinks or says. She often tells her daughters now that she will do whatever is necessary to get her and her children out of Africa, especially when news of a the killings of white missionaries starts to leak in. Eeben Axelroot, who is reluctant to help, decides that even he has a price that he is willing to accept for flight to Leopoldville - money or sex.

The character of Leah grows in complexity through these chapters. At the beginning of the novel, Leah represented the naivete of mission work, specifically the belief that she and her father's mission were right - but as the novel progresses, her character begins to embody doubt and she comes full circle to the Congolese point of view. Indeed, she will grow in admiration for the unique culture around her and begin to more fully engage in it. But the arrival of Brother Fowles changes the mood of the Price children. They are shocked to discover that this white man has decided to live and work here in the Congo, voluntarily. More shocking are his ministry practices. He is a nature lover and reads God's creation as the ultimate Bible. He tries to explain to Leah that the Bible is really a tool of culture, written in a specific time and place with specific cultural markers for those that wrote it 2000 years ago. This sets Leah's head to spinning, and it angers Reverend Price.

The character of Brother Fowles represents an alternate religious vision than the hard-edged Protestantism of Nathan Price. Brother Fowles represents pantheism, the belief that all created things hold within them a measure of divinity. His belief that all of creation is divine in its own way is more in line with the traditional beliefs of the people of Kilanga. It is also no coincidence that his last name sounds so similar to "fowl" - birds, and it reminds the reader of the Dickinson line from earlier in the novel that "hope is a thing with feathers." Brother Fowles, and the pantheistic approach to religion, offers hope to the Price women, espeically Leah, who, as mentioned above, is undergoing a spiritual transformation of her own.

Brother Fowles's arrival, his relative prosperity, and his friendship with the villagers is also a revelation to Mrs. Price. He tells her that though his missionary style is very different from Revered Price's, much good was done while he was there - including the banning of wife beating. The love that the villagers have for Brother Fowles is, in a way, an indictment of the Price's failed style of missionary work. Brother Fowles, through his charity and willingness to bend to the cultural norms of Congolese society, was more successful than the Prices could ever be in the work of loving their neighbors. His arrival brings the cloud of doubt to the Price women, not just about their work in the Congo, but about the way they live their religion as well.

In this way, then, Brother Fowles is also a critique of the Western notion of the Protestant work ethic. The Protestant work ethic, a theory formulated by the social theorist Max Weber, argued that Protestantism, with its focus on "working" for salvation also increased economic prosperity for Western nations. But the pantheism of African religion and culture, in which working for salvation is not necessary, critiques the style and culture of the Western way of life. Brother Fowles has managed to have a very comfortable life, living in a houseboat, without the Western Protestant understandings of salvation or work. Kingsolver uses African culture to critique the idea that Western religion and Western notions of work and economics are inherently better than others.

The Prices are put in a tough spot with Tata Ndu's offer to buy Rachel. They don't want to offend the chief - for he molds the will of the people and can make their lives easier - but they refuse to sell one of their daughters. Rachel is indignant that her parents would even consider the offer. The Prices, however, come up with a plan to pacify the village. Eeben Axelroot agrees to pretend to be engaged to Rachel so that the chief will stop coming around. Rachel and Axelroot have to sit on the front porch together and feign a friendship.

One afternoon Mrs. Price decides to move Ruth May's cot into the living room so that she can be with her sisters, even as she is getting progressively sicker. When they move the cot, they discover tiny buttons stuck to the wall. These are Ruth May's malaria pills. She had put them in her mouth and then stuck them to the back of the wall when no one was looking because she didn't like the way they tasted. Mrs. Price pries them all off the wall and discovered 61 - the same amount of weeks they had been in the Congo. Ruth May's condition is quickly deteriorating and she now has hallucinations and a constant fever. She blames herself and all her sins for her sickness.

Rachel's birthday comes again, this her seventeenth, but it passes with hardly anyone noticing. Mrs. Price gives her a small piece of old jewelry, but the only exciting events of the day come when Adah is stung on the foot by a scorpion and a mongoose steals eggs from the henhouse. Leah begins to draw closer to Anatole. He lets her teach arithmetic to the children and he teaches her French and Congolese in return. He also made her a bow and arrow as a present and she becomes a "frighteningly good shot." This, however, does not win her any praise in the village as she begins to be known as very "unfeminine," which Adah believes will have consequences down the road. Reverend Price increasingly tries to use the Congolese language in his sermons and always pronounces that "Tata Jesus is bangala." "Bangala" can mean "dear" and "beloved," yet the way he pronounces it, it means "poisonwood."

Leah is developing a crush on Anatole and she often wonders what he thinks of her. They begin to have a conversation about the differences between America and Congo. Leah tells Anatole all about supermarkets and the way that crops are grown in the country and shipped to the cities where every family has a car and some have two. Anatole can hardly believe any of this that she tells him and explains to her that the reason that the Congolese do not like white people is because they cannot understand why a nation with so much cannot give it away to those that need it, just like the Congolese people do. He tells her that many white people have come to their village, some bringing tools or learning or Jesus, and the Congolese simply have to determine which of these things is the most useful. He tells her that her nickname, Beene, means "as true as the truth can be," and she promises to make him a globe as he's never seen a map of the whole world.

The day after Rachel's seventeenth birthday, Eeben Axelroot comes by to walk around the village with her, pretending to be engaged. Rachel is becoming more fond of Axelroot, almost finding him handsome before reminding herself that he's a "creep." As they are walking, he shares a cigarette with her, and when they get a a little farther out of the village he kisses her. She is both thrilled and disgusted, and as they are walking back to the village he tells her a big secret: that the U.S. is going to pay the new leader of Katanga to assassinate President Lumumba. One night, Adah sneaks out of the house to spy on Axelroot. He has a friend over and they listen to the radio and talk about the plot to assassinate Lumumba. The news is that someone has created a poison that will simulate an African disease so that the death will look natural. They say they can put it in his toothpaste. This makes Axelroot angry since he knows no one uses toothpaste in the Congo. He thinks he should "be running the show."

Leah is woken up in the middle of the night by Nelson. In a half-dream like state, she is told to run to the river and as she is running, she realizes that the village is being overrun by a giant horde of ants. When she reaches the river she realizes that she has once again left Adah behind and she begs God for mercy. Rachel also makes a dash out of the house, but makes sure to grab her mirror first. Using a trick she learned in a "How to Survive" book, she sticks her elbows out and surfs the crowd rushing to the river. When she reaches the river, however, she realizes that everyone is getting onto boats, but when she tries, no one lets her on. Her mirror cracks as she is knocked off one boat and she is left sitting in the mud. Ruth May gets separated from her mother when a Congolese person grabs her and she tries to think of the safe place that Nelson had told her she would go if she had the talisman. She decides that she wants to be a green mambo snake, so she can sit up in a tree and look down on everything, but the world wouldn't see her. Adah has the most difficult time getting to the river. As she stands on the porch of their house with ants all over her body, she cries out to her mother to save her...but her mother leaves her behind. It is then that Adah says she sees her "dark center" and when the path from growing up to dying began. She is almost crushed by the crowd, but manages to pull her self up and Anatole grabs her and brings her to the river and puts her in a canoe with her mother.

Anatole takes Leah and Ruth May in his boat while Reverend Price is taken in another boat by one of the villagers. They row downstream to get away from the ants until they have passed through the village. Leah, distressed, tries to talk to Anatole, to find out if he thinks it was a bad thing for them to have come and what the future of the country will be; but Anatole doesn't want to talk. He tells her that things are more complicated than Leah tries to make them and that right and wrong cannot be judged so easily. He tells her that the people of the village have been taking care of them in ways they do not even realize - giving them eggs and slipping them food because they knew they were hungry. When they do return to the village, two days later, Leah finds the bones of their own chickens. They had been completely devoured by the ants.

Analysis

The Price's are beginning to be pulled more into the life of the village, both physically and emotionally. Leah and Rachel both find they are attracted to men in the Congo - Axelroot for Rachel, who we discover is actually a kind of mercenary working for the Americans in their interest in the diamond and natural resource mines in Katanga - and Anatole for Leah, who gives her a position in the school teaching the younger children. In their own ways they both begin to find parts of the Congo beautiful, though they both still hold deep doubts about their place in it. By being thrown into utter poverty, and always close to starvation, the Prices have unwittingly become more a part of the village than they ever imagined possible when they first arrived. Even Tata Ndu tries to marry Rachel so that the Prices would not have to feed her. Reverend Price's stubborn attempts at missionary activity are still somewhat futile, though small glimpses of progress can be seen, such as when he convinces a group of men to thatch the roof of the church.

Ruth May's sickness, then, symbolizes the continual decline of the Price's own innocence in the Congo. She would not take her quinine pills because of the bitter taste, a metaphor for the Price's own unwillingness to accept the bitter conditions of their mission a deep desire to return to the life they left in Georgia. Increasingly, however, this seems to not be an option. The characters of Rachel and Leah, moreover, provide differing metaphors for the ways in which Christianity interacts with those that it seeks to convert. On the one hand, Rachel, and her growing affair with Axelroot, symbolizes the ways in which religion binds itself to the imperial powers of the world who steal the riches of the land. On the other hand, there is Leah, who, in her growing love for Anatole, begins to teach him about the wider world, helping him to discover the riches that lie outside Africa. Likewise, he is teaching her - specifically the language and the customs of this new land. At it's best, Kingsolver suggests missionary activity can be a relationship of interaction and sharing; at its worst, however, it is an activity of domination.

The swarm of ants that attack the village play both a metaphorical and existential role. They are metaphorical because they represent the growing political upheaval in the Congo. Adah learns that Patrice Lumumba is part of an assassination attempt that is possibly being sponsored by the American government. The Americans are more interested in working with the war lord leader of Katanga, a southern province of the Congo that is rich with diamonds and natural resources, than they are in working with Patrice Lumumba who has allied himself with the people of the Congo and is working on reforms to better their lives. Anatole tells Leah that the people of Africa are not that much different than the ants. When they are hungry and disaffected, they rise up and devour anything that is in their way. The looming political strife of the Congo and the way it will disrupt the Price's small gains in the life of the village is represented by the ants devouring of anything the Price's held dear - food, mirrors, and even relationships.

The ant crisis is especially existential for Leah and Adah who both find their "dark center." Adah realizes that she was the only person in her family that felt that her life was worth saving in the stampede. Though she always knew she was looked down upon in the family because of her disability, it is a shock that when she cries for help no one is there to help her. Indeed, even her mother abandons her. The character of Adah, in this way, is fully bound to the symbols of atheism - those who cry out to God to find no one is there. This will now doubtlessly steer Adah's life towards a more detached and cynical disposition. Leah is now on the precipice of losing her faith as well; in her father, in his mission and in the God that she cries out to. Death, for her, seems inevitable and she doubts the very reasons she and her family are here. She identifies herself with the chicken bones she finds when they return to the village after the ant attack; they are clean and represent God turning His back on her. But they also represent the witchcraft of the local Congolese people. The ant attack, then, is a turning point in Leah's own journey - leaving her American self to embrace a Congolese self.

The ant swarm, as well as many of the other tragedies in the village, are retellings of the seven plagues from the book of Genesis. In the Biblical story, God sends plagues to the land of Egypt so that the Egyptians will let the Israelites leave the land. The story is revised by Kingsolver, however, for in the African version of the stories it is the people of the land who needlessly suffer under the plagues - drought, flood, and now ants. Like the biblical stories, these plagues will also lead to an Exodus.

In a flashback scene, Orleanna Price recalls the coup that overthrew Patrice Lumumba from power in the Congo. From information that she pieced together years later, she realized that a call was made from President Eisenhower's office to the local Congo CIA office on the day of Rachel's seventeenth birthday. That call gave the CIA permission to overthrow Lumumba's government because they believed he was a "dangerous" man. The CIA and Belgians had recruited a man named Mobutu to become colonel in the Congolese army and to place Lumumba under house arrest. Lumumba escapes, but is captured after a "South African mercenary pilot" hears him speak to a small village close to Kilanga and radios in his whereabouts. Lumumba is recaptured and taken to Katanga where he is beaten and killed. Orleanna has a hard time believing that while all of that was going on, she was oblivious, wrapped up in the small needs of her family, though the smallness of those needs does give her comfort in her ignorance.

Leah's own faith is beginning to falter along with that of the village. The drought has now turned into a looming catastrophe with most of the water sources for the village drying up. In site of this catastrophe, Tata Ndu shows up at the church service. During the middle of Reverend Price's sermon, which he takes from the apocrypha, Tata Ndu stands up and declares that the village must vote on whether Tata Jesus will be the god of the village. The church members set up bowls to throw pebbles into and begin voting. Reverend Price, while at first encouraging, soon becomes furious when it appears the election will not go in Tata Jesus's favor. He begins to yell at Tata Ndu, but Tata Ndu then begins to lecture Revered Price. He tells them that the white men brought Jesus and democracy and he doesn't understand why the two shouldn't mix. In the end Tata Jesus loses the election.

Soon, Tata Ndu calls together the village to participate in a massive hunt for animals so that the village can have food. Leah decides that she wants to participate with the men, using her bow and arrow to hunt for food. This causes an uproar in the village and all the men gather to hold a council meeting to discuss whether she can participate. Anatole begs Leah's case, but Tata Kuvudundu is firmly against the idea, saying it will disrupt the ways of the world. Finally, Tata Ndu takes a village vote and Leah wins. This leads to a terrible row between Reverend Price and Leah - and just as the Reverend is about to beat her for being insolent, she runs off into the forest where she "stays scarce" for several days. Meanwhile, a curse is put on Anatole for his part in the matter and he narrowly misses being bitten by a mamba snake that is found in his bedroom.

The night before the big hunt no one in the village sleeps. At dawn all of the women, carrying baskets, go towards a great field and begin to make a giant circle around it. They then light the grass on fire and begin fanning the flames so that they move towards the center of the circle. As the fire moves, all of the women begin to pick up the edible bugs and insects. As the fire gets closer to the center, the animals that had been asleep in the field begin to realize they are trapped by a circle of fire. As they panic, some jump out of the circle, only to be shot by the hunters. It is during this hunting exercise that Adah learns something about the nature of life: "The death of something living is the price of our own survival...We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep." Leah kills a young impala, though the kill is controversial. She tracks the animal as it leaves the fire and fires her arrow, but as she approaches she sees two other arrows in the beast as well. One of Tata Ndu's sons comes over to claim the kill for himself, but Nelson comes to defend Leah and show how it was really her arrow that killed the impala. He insults Tata Ndu's son by calling him a "woman," an insult that leaves Leah feeling both excited and confused.

After the hunt, Rachel has her own crisis. She can't help but feel disgusted and sorry for the scene of the villagers, and her own sisters, skinning animals and eating bugs for their survival. They were all just "dumb animals." As the villagers bring the meat back to divide up, fights begin to break out between everyone. Tata Ndu's sons insult Leah, who then insults them back. Tata Ndu declares that the Prices had forfeited their right to meat, as well as Anatole. Soon fighting and stealing begins, and what was supposed to be a celebration of plenty turns into a fight for what is not enough. There is also tension back at the Price house as Leah and Reverend Price are still fighting over her role in the hunting debacle. Nelson then comes running into the house proclaiming that someone has put the evil curse on the Price's chicken house where he sleeps. He refuses to go back out there, but Reverend Price won't let him sleep in the main house and gives into Congolese "false idols." Nelson stays out on the porch, whimpering to be let in, until Leah and the rest of the girls defy their father by going out and helping Nelson set a trap to catch anyone that might be trying to do them harm. They lay a bed of ashes around the chicken house so that they'll know if anyone tries to sneak in.

In the morning Nelson and the girls sneak out of the house to see what their trap had caught. Nelson takes a big pole and when he opens the chicken house door he sees a green mamba snake curled around two dead chickens and their eggs. Nelson hits the snake until it leaves and they all discover the footprints of a man with six toes - Tata Kuvudundu - who had planted the snake to kill Nelson. Suddenly, they hear a scream and realize its coming from Ruth May, who had crumpled to the ground and has started to turn blue from a lack of oxygen. Nelson rips off her shirt and they discover two small puncture wounds - a green mamba bite - on her chest. Nelson yells for Leah to get help, but they are all paralyzed by what is happening. Rachel has the revelation, as she thinks about having to wake her mother to tell her that Ruth May is dead, that she had once thought her self different from the Congolese because she had never imagined that their tragedies would be her tragedies. Now they all know differently.

When Ruth May's body is brought into the house there is only a stunned silence. Mrs. Price begins taking down all the mosquito nets and begins making a shroud for her daughter. She places her on a table in the front yard and Nelson makes a funeral arch. All of the women of the village come and wail for the dead child, just as they did for their own children during the rainy season. Reverend Price has nothing to say - only "She wasn't baptized." From nowhere, rain begins to fall on the village, and Reverend Price goes out into the front yard where Ruth May's play friends had gathered and begins baptizing the children in the rain.

Analysis

This section of the book, entitled "What We Lost" brings a climax to the chaos that the Prices bring with them to Kilanga and also the chaos they will leave in their wake. The section starts with the political intrigue of the assassination of Lumumba that throws the Congo into a period of civil war and turmoil. Though the Prices have little knowledge of what is exactly going on outside of their village, the larger situation of war and fighting that characterizes the rest of the country is happening on a much smaller level within the confines of the village.

This section further reveals the chaos that can result by forcing systems of rule and regulation on a culture without respecting the former systems of rules that governed the society beforehand. In Kilanga, these systems are democracy and Christianity - two entities that Reverend Price conflate with each other. These systems turn against the Reverend, however, when the citizens of Kilanga vote out Tata Jesus from the church because of the severe drought that is overtaking the land. The Kilanga people, being very practical about their use of divinity, simply don't see what practical good Christianity is bringing, and thus use another tool they've been given, to rid themselves of what is not useful.

Though this is a setback for Reverend Price's mission, and a slightly humorous scene, the Congolese's use of democracy becomes troublesome when the village takes a vote on whether or not to allow Leah to hunt. This divides the village between those who follow Anatole and his pleas for reason, and those that follow Tata Kuvudundu and his proclamations of evil spirits. Once the hunt takes place, with the energy of blood and killing, fights break out amongst the rival factions of the village - and stealing and looting of the meat becomes rampant. The former way of doing things in Kilanga was to talk things over until a consensus could be reached - but this use of democracy only makes one group unhappy, ultimately precipitating violence. Though they couldn't have known it, a similar situation developed throughout the entire country as unhappy citizens rose up in violence to protest what they believed was critical injustice.

With the hunt, Leah's character makes her full transformation from victim to empowered woman. The character of Leah, moreover, now represents a new vision of femininity, one that will lead her family out of the captivity of Revered Price. But Kingsolver leaves no illusions about the consequences of such a re-visioning of the role of femininity. When Leah stands up for herself against Tata Ndu's sons, the village is quickly thrown into chaos. Kingsolver suggests that gender remains a divisive issue across cultures.

On a personal level, with the death of Ruth May, the Prices realize they have fully become part of the Kilanga village, both in life and death. Ruth May's death finally brings the reality of the Congolese people forefront into the minds of Rachel and Leah. Though they might have thought they could return to America and resume the life they left, they now know they have past a point where they can never go back to once they once knew. As they were slowly reduced to poverty, and now death, they join in the one pervasive aspect of Congolese life they had not been able to experience before: grief.

Ruth May's death is certainly the climax of the novel as well as the pinnacle of several themes. First, her death represents the move in the novel from hope to grief. Ruth May had represented the innocence and naivete of the Prices, but now that she is gone, the family becomes burdened by impossible grief - clouded by the lack of sunshine. At the same time, the novel also shifts from the biblical theme of Genesis - beginnings - to Exodus - leaving. The Price's now must attempt to leave Africa, but in turn, they will also leave their blood upon the soil.

In grief, Orleanna Price discusses her loss and her decision to leave her husband. With the death of her youngest child, she moves all of their furniture out into the yard to go through the "digestive tract of Kilanga." She compares herself to Africa, conquered by a force that she neither understood nor knew any way of resisting. But the conquerers mistake, she knows, is that the land they conquer keeps moving. Just as her emotions and person moved beyond Nathan Price with the death of her youngest child, so too would Africa move beyond the ability of the U.S. or any other foreign nation to control it.

The Price women leave the village in the downpour carrying only what they can on their backs. Some of Mama Mwanza's daughters help them by carrying oranges and water and they trudge through the mud and rain, staying one night with some of Mama Mwanza's relatives in a small village, until they reach Bulungu. Because of the rain there is an influx of mosquitos on their trip and Leah contracts malaria as they walk the two day trek. She becomes delirious with fever and only survives because a group of men find them on the road and carry her to the village. Her recollection is filled with crazy dreams merging with reality, but she knows that a deal is made with Eeben Axelroot for Rachel and that soon Anatole joins her family. As she recovers, Mrs. Price and Adah leave to go on to Leopoldville and eventually back to America, but they leave Leah in the care of Anatole until she is well enough to come along. Leah, however, slowly falls in love with Anatole until they decide together that she will stay and be his wife.

A year later, in 1962, Rachel is living in Johannesburg, South Africa with Eeben Axelroot. He had made a deal with her to get her to safety, and as a reward, the American Embassy paid him a large sum of money. Though they aren't married, yet, Rachel decides to start calling herself Rachel Axelroot and no one in "Joburg" knows different. She begins to make her way into Joburg society, making friends with the wives of Ambassadors and going to the Episcopal Church. She is once again reunited with the luxuries and conveniences of modern society and she is grateful to simply "not be dead" like her sister Ruth May.

Adah and Orleanna Price did make it out of Africa, however. After being ferried across the river in Bulungu, they hitch a ride on a banana truck until they are ditched again, wandering the roads for days until they are picked up by a group of soldiers and delivered to the Belgian embassy. After weeks of a being in the hospital being treated for all the various diseases and infections they had picked up on the journey, an American military plane plants them safely at Fort Benning, Georgia. Back home, Orleanna rents a small cottage where she starts gardening, growing flowers and food, and Adah journeys to Atlanta where she demands entrance into Emory University, and is given it. She is troubled, however, by the change in her situation: no longer is she the pariah who is owed something by society; instead, she now owes her mother her very life.

Two years later, in 1964, Leah finds herself in a convent in the Congo. After she had recovered in Bulungu, she finds that she is a hazard to everyone around her. As the pro-Lumumbists attempt to regather their strength to fight Mobutu, Leah finds that even being white is a liability. The Simba's, the pro-Lumumbu group, has engaged in war with Mobutu's forces, and Mobutu's forces have been indiscriminately killing anyone or burning any village that seems to support them. Under these conditions, Anatole arranges for Leah to stay at a French convent while he reorganizes with the pro-Lumumbu group. But he is captured quickly and taken to jail where Leah only gets letters from him. Her love for him deepens however, and as all out war breaks out between Mobutu's forces, with the United Nations to back him up, and the Simba's, Leah prays that he is protected. Meanwhile, in South Africa, Rachel has found marriage to Eeben Axelroot to not be as great as she thought. He routinely verbally abuses her, and she, for her part, punishes him by spending money on lavish clothes and vacations to the beach. According to her, he is once again involved in the diamond trade, leaving her for months at a time. In order to get back at him, she threatens divorce, and when that doesn't work, begins having an affair with an attache to the French Ambassador, who promises to move her away to another city.

Another year later, on January 17th, 1965, Leah and Anatole mourn their respective losses. They were married after Anatole was released from prison without ever being charged for anything, and they made their way to a safer place where they set up a home - she attending to the duties of the house and he teaching children in a new school. January 17th is the anniversary of two deaths they mourn: Ruth May and Patrice Lumumba. The political situation in the Congo continues to worsen as Mobutu's government gives into corruption and waste. All of the government services have been shut down and the people's anger over everything is kept in check by the money that Mobutu is able to spend on military and police forces. Leah and Anatole's lives become harder and harder as their money dries up and the people of their village realize that simply getting an education is putting them in danger. News does reach Leah about her father though. He has become a wild man, setting up a church in the jungle after his house in Kilanga burned to the ground. One day he wanders into a missionary doctor's office crying that he'd swallowed a snake. He has becomed ravaged by disease and sickness. After he is treated, he simply wanders back into the jungle.

Two more years pass, and now it is Christmas eve of 1968. Adah recounts what has become of her family as she knows it: her mother has found a new religion, Civil Rights, and moved to Atlanta where she marches and demonstrates. Leah and Anatole have also moved to Atlanta, and have had a child, where she starts school at Emory for Agriculture. Her religion is suffering, Adah says, and they are constantly shocked by the abundance of America. Adah herself has started medical school and is faced everyday with issues of life and death, the same issues that still haunt her from the Congo. When a teenage mother gives birth to premature triplets, Adah has to remember the Congolese tradition of taking twins out to the forest to die, and she has to wonder whether her practice of medicine is a better solution for this teenage mother. Adah is also undergoing changes - a neurologist diagnosed her limp as a habit, not a deformity, and after months of retraining her body, she is finally learning to walk correctly. The whole of her identity, then, is now fully under question. After a night of dreams of dying children and a changing world, Adah calls her mother and asks why it was her that she decided to save from the Congo and not Leah. Orleanna admits that once Ruth May died, Adah was the youngest, and a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.

The story then moves to 1974. Leah and Anatole have moved back to the Congo, though Mobutu has renamed the country Zaire, and renamed all the towns to rid the entire landscape of any sign of foreign oppressors. But Leah and Anatole's situation proved that one oppression is simply replaced with another. Her story in 1974 tracks the political failings of the country: Mobutu has ceased paying for any public service and now all the people of Zaire are forced to negotiate and steal for what they need. To add insult to injury, Mobutu announces that two famous American boxers, George Forman and Muhammad Ali, will be coming to fight in the nation's capital at a cost of $20 million, a sum that enrages Leah because she hears this news just as one of Anatole's students tells her that she is quitting school to become a prostitute at ten years of age. Her own family is constantly ravaged by parasites and disease and she has never had less in her entire life. She feels foolish now, remembering how she and her sisters planned their survival when their mother lay in bed depressed - even then they had infinitely more food than they have now. To make matters even worse, the U.S. loaned Zaire a billion dollars for a power grid that never worked. This leaves the country in a debt they can never pay off and makes true independence impossible.

More years pass, and now it is 1978. Rachel recounts how she married the French Ambassador to the French Congo, but that he soon left her for his mistress. She then found another husband, an older businessman, who died and left her a hotel, the Equatorial. In the hotel, Rachel finally finds a semblance of independence. She runs the operations and improves the place until it becomes known as a luxury destination for business travelers. She laments, half-heartedly, that her family won't come to visit her, but she doesn't think much of what they've decided to do with their lives anyway - Leah, especially, who she simply believes to be unnatural for marrying a Congolese man and having children with him.

Analysis

The narrative arc of the book picks up a great deal of pace, moving through almost twenty years in the span of a few chapters. The lives and dealings of each of the Price children are detailed as well as the manner in which they deal with the demons of their experience in the Congo - and, of course, the death of their youngest sibling. Several themes are highlighted in each of their respective new legacies.

The women's trek out of the village is symbolic of the Hebrew people's escape from Egypt, detailed in the book of Exodus. The journey begins after the death of the youngest child after a visit by an angel of death, the green mamba. This is the final plague that now sends the remaining women on a journey. Though the Price women do not find such overt miracles like the parting of the Red Sea, they do make the trek through the pouring rain, with the help of Mama Mwanza's daughters. Just the as the Israelites left Egypt looking for their freedom, so also do the Price women leave the village in search of their own. The deal that Mrs. Price makes with Eeben Axelroot for Rachel, is symbolic of the Faustian deal that Africa made with Western powers. When Western powers, such as Europe and the U.S. make promises to save the land, there is inevitably a trade off of something very valuable. For Orleanna, that tradeoff is giving up her oldest daughter to the country she will abandon. Adah and Orleanna do, eventually cross a river to leave the country, just as the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. It was the final obstacle to leaving the land and they soon return home.

For Leah, her life several years later is intimately tied up in the political situation of the Congo, which has been renamed Zaire. For her, she correlates the passively abusive relationship of her mother and father with the abusive relationship between Zaire and the industrialized countries of the world. Anatole calls Mobutu the wife of these white countries, manipulated and forced into doing whatever they will, and Leah proclaims that she understands because that was the very same tension that brought her and her family to the Congo so many years before. To break that cycle, she willingly devotes herself to a life of poverty and sickness and suffering with the people of Zaire though she knows she and her children could return to the U.S. at any point. She refuses to be a part of the oppression of the people of Zaire. Ruth May and Patrice Lumumba represent the death of hope, and grief has overtaken them as well.

The story comparing the boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali with Leah's own poverty is particularly striking. This story represents the the imperialism of American culture. It is ironic that Mobutu has attempted to wipe out all signs of foreign influence since American culture has so thoroughly infiltrated the country. Kingsolver suggests this is the imperialism of capitalism - money and greed are the values that take hold in Africa, not democracy and freedom.

Adah sees her time in the Congo in a more dramatic light. Her experience is forever influenced by the night in which her mother chose to save Ruth May instead of her when the ants attacked. Once Ruth May was killed, however, her mother chose her and explains that a mother provides for her family from the bottom up. Adah has difficulty reconciling the hard choices that her mother had to make regarding the lives of her daughters and finds small bits of forgiveness in her mother's new devotion to her. Adah begins to see her African situation in the light of hard science and the hard choices of life and death that must be made by the Congolese people everyday for their survival. In this way Adah continues to symbolize the arc of reason versus religion. Reason, however, has a hard time accounting for the nature of love, and thus Adah's own worldview begins to undergo another transformation as a result.

Rachel remains as aloof and greedy as she was as a child. She moves from husband to husband, never able to find true love until her third husband dies and leaves her a large sum of money and a hotel to run. She oppresses the people of the Congo just as the white nations of the world do - exploiting the country's wealth and neediness - but the reader also understands that she is haunted by the death of her sister and her family's unwillingness to see her, though glosses ove rthis by reframing her family's history in Africa as one in which she was simply in a helpless situation. Indeed, she buys a hotel - which represents hospitality for others - when the last thing that Rachel has ever done is think about the comfort of others. Though she buys the hotel for herself, she finds that being hospitable is meaningful work for her. Kingsolver does not completely absolve her, though, as the hospitality she is offering is one of lavish capitalism while the rest of the continent starves.

The narrative advances to 1981 and Anatole has been put in prison, perhaps, as Leah laments, "for the last time." She recounts their visits back to America, the first when they were both students at Emory University, the second with just her and the children, and the third with the entire family. It was the third, when coming back, that the government took Anatole's passport and then showed up at their house the next day to arrest him. Though no formal charges have been made, the prospect is that Anatole will spend the rest of his life in prison unless bribes can be made to reduce his sentence and get him food. Leah discovers that now her life is challenged even more by the color of her skin. Without Anatole to justify her living here, the people of Zaire deal with her suspiciously, because they only know "one thing" about white people: namely all the havoc they've wreaked on their country.

Three more years pass with Anatole in prison, but Leah soon learns that he is to be let out. In order to cope with the last month before he's released, she organizes a reunion for her and her sisters. Adah comes over with a Land Rover so that Leah and Anatole can move to Angola and start a farm commune, and Rachel comes over to tour West Africa with them. Their reunion is not as happy as Rachel hopes, and they spend much of the time fighting over their different views of the political and economic situation in Africa: Rachel is convinced that the Reagan administration is going to protect Africa from Communism, while Leah and Adah argue that democracy has done more to wreck the land than Communism ever has. On a tour of an ancient village where they learn of ritual sacrifices, Leah tells her sisters of news she heard that their father had died. She tells them that he had moved north to a village where he lived in seclusion and hiding, trying to baptize the children of the village. The villagers grew superstitious of him and believed he could turn into a crocodile, and so when a boat full of children is killed or drowned by a crocodile, the villagers hunt him down and burn him alive, letting the animals devour his body. Adah marvels that his fate mirrors the last verse of the Apocrypha, a Verse she had been forced to write out many times as punishment. Leah and Rachel argue that they simply cannot understand African culture and should be ashamed that they believed they could force another system of belief and practice on another people. In a restaurant, they drink beer and toast their dead father, saying "Tata Jesus is bangala" - meaning, Tata Jesus is poisonwood.

When Adah return to Atlanta she tells her mother of their father's death. Orleanna, in typical fashion, doesn't respond but simply moves outdoors to the garden where she violently plants some flowers. Adah confesses to her that she thought their father was a despicable man and that they should be allowed to remember the scars, physical and emotional, that were inflicted upon them. For Adah, there is still the crooked little girl inside her, always trying to "call a spade a spade."

The narrative moves to 1986 and Leah recalls the birth of her fourth child, Nathaniel. She gives birth to the baby on the side of a road when labor comes upon her unexpectedly. The baby is very sick and it takes a week of constant care and nursing before he will even eat. During the week, Leah imagines that she goes mad, speaking to anything she can to keep her baby alive - and she has a vision of her mother, praying to whatever god will listen, to keep Ruth May alive when she stopped taking her malaria pills. But the baby does survive and the Ngembes continue their life. They have moved to a small commune just ten miles from the border with Angola. Anatole has received several offers of employment within the new government of Angola, though he has been unable to accept thus far. Leah worries because America sees Angola as a communist threat, and begins shipping arms to war lords with the hope of taking down the threat. To Leah, however, she cannot understand how communism can be such a threat. She remembers the words of her father - "they do not fear the Lord, and they think everybody should have the same kind of house." After living for so many years in abject poverty and watching all those around her die from disease and war, she has a hard time seeing anything wrong with that vision of the world. For Leah and Anatole, their vision is simply to not give up on Africa.

The closing chapters of the book contain the reflections of the three living Price daughters. Rachel, now fifty years old, is still managing The Equatorial. She reflects on why it was that she never left the Congo. Mainly, she surmises, it was because she feared she'd never be able to fit back into American culture. She regrets the "easy living" that she doesn't have and not ever being able to have children, but she is proud for being able to keep her looks and credits her success in Africa to her ability to avoid calamity. She understand now that her father's failure in Africa was in thinking that he could change the entire continent without realizing that the continent would change him right back. This is what Rachel realizes always happens. Her advice: "Let others do the pushing and shoving, and you just ride along. In the end, the neck you save will be your own."

Nathaniel, Leah's youngest son, is now ten years old and Leah and Anatole are now living out their days on a small commune in Angola. They farm the land as best they can and take in refugees every dry season after the roads open back up from the rains. At night, Anatole tells her stories of what might have been had the Portugeuse not come and conquered this land. He reconstructs society as it was and would have always been: men and women would have lived off the land. There would have been no batteries or ferries - if a river was the be crossed, they would have built a bridge, and if a river was too wide to build a bridge, that river was not to be crossed. Leah regrets that the Europeans ever came and crossed any rivers. Now, Africa lives with the enslavement of its people to European systems of commerce and tyranny, and when that had not worked in the past, the Europeans had simply shipped the people off to be slaves somewhere. Within this system she locates her father's own sins; thinking he could come to Africa, like a million other white men, and change everything. Leah laments that if she could give her father just one gift it would be "the simply human relief of knowing you've done wrong, and living through it." Nathaniel Price, however, did not live through it.

Adah eventually leaves the practice of medicine and focuses her interest on tracking African viruses. She has a real love for these viruses, the way they change or grow, and she comes to see them as her children in a way. Once a month she returns to Georgia to visit her mother, who is growing old but survives despite the chronic disease she still carries in her body from the time she spent in Africa. Adah has an acute appreciation for nature and the way it works itself out. She is not as concerned with a cure for viruses as she is in seeing how they interact and compete with the human and animal population. Her colleagues call her cynical, but she simply sees it as a way of carrying history and nature forward. Though she is no longer crooked in the way she was as a child, she cannot help but still be that old Adah, who knew the true cruelty of the world.

The closing chapter is the only chapter of the book that opens without a clear narrator, though by the end of the chapter we know that it is Ruth May, looking down upon her mother and sisters from an eternal viewpoint. She first sees her mother and sisters as they walk along a path to a swimming hole, the same scene that opened the book when it was told from the perspective of Orleanna Price. But Ruth May's sense of things is different - she sees herself kill a spider on the path and then sees the mythical okapi who they scare away. But Ruth May knows that their presence there saved the okapi's life for another year, just as it killed the spider. Ruth May's view of the world is larger in death. She then sees her mother and sisters many, many years later. Her mother is old and her sisters are grown up and they have ventured back to the Congo to put a gravestone on Ruth May's burial place. However, they cannot enter the Congo because of the war raging there and Mobutu's impending death. Instead they wander the streets of an Angolan town and barter for goods in the market. They ask about Kilanga, but a woman says that that town doesn't exist anymore. As the book ends, the omnipotent voice of Ruth May urges her mother to forgive herself.

Analysis

Kingsolver seems to bring the novel to a close by extrapolating her themes to the global problem of race. Whiteness, which has characteristically meant purity, goodness, or wholeness in literary mythology, here becomes a symbol of distrust and broken promises. Kingsolver thus reveals how such a symbol can mean different things within different contexts. This attempt to revise and repoisiotn goes to the larger purpose of the novel as a revisionist 'Bible' - an attempt to reform the templates of perception which dictate the foundations for our stories, our relationships, our world.

Anatole is put back in prison, though released a few years later, and though Leah has doubts about staying in Africa, she does nevertheless. Her mind increasingly turns towards alternative forms of government and economics, such as communism, as a boon to the Africa economy. She and Anatole continue to work to overthrow the government of Mobutu, thought they now can only do it quietly and on a small communal farm not far from the Angolan border. Mobutu's violence has silenced them, though they continue to struggle for their own freedom and the freedom of Africa. As Leah's narrative closes, the reader sees that she is still the same person as the one at the outset of the narrative; stil stubborn and independent enough to lead her to continue to fight for Africa in the face of overwhelming odds. Leah represents a kind of femininity that challenges the accepted roles of women. Like the continent of Africa, she is both abused by those who oppress her, but also capable of an inner fortitude that revives her hope for the future.

The death of Nathan Price upends the biblical prophetic narrative. While, in the Bible, prophets are villainized by the people they preach to, they are redeemed by the truth of their prophecies. Revered Price, however, takes on the role of the prophet - a roaming mad man predicting doom unless the people of Africa repent - whose work will not be redeemed. Instead, his body is literally eaten by the land. His legacy will be complex, however, as the stories about him still travel from village to village. It is the irony of the story that his lack of understanding of the people and the land means that his religion is ultimately reduced to 'poisonwood.' His misguided intentions, characterized by his misuse of the language, meant that his religion and his politics could never be translated into something good.

Rachel is haunted by her time in Africa and though she still exhibits her penchant for money grubbing and selfishness, it is tempered by her realization that she is also a part of this continent, though she falls on the side of the conquerer more than the conquered. In the closing chapter Ruth May comments that Rachel still holds her purse close to her chest, but one can certainly find sympathy in her inability to le