Read Online The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver - Free Book Online Page A

in the corner all together, so the tarantula spiders that use it for their house can just move on out when they take a notion. I sat real still on the floor and peeled my one banana like Saint Matthew would if he was a real monkey and not gone, and I heard them talking about the woman that got burned up. The roofs burn up because they are all made out of sticks and hay like the Three Little Pigs. The wolf could huff and puff and blow your house down. Even ours. It’s a right smart better than the other ones, but it’s not bricks. Mama Mwanza’s legs didn’t burn all the way off but it looks like a pillow or just something down there she’s sitting on wrapped up in a cloth sack. She has to scoot around on her hands. Her hand bottoms look like feet bottoms, only with fingers. I went over there and had me a good look at her and her little girls with no clothes on. She was nice and gave me a piece of orange to suck on. Mama doesn’t know.
    Mama Mwanza almost got burnt plumb to death when it happened but   then   she   got better. Mama says   that was   the poor woman’s bad luck, because now she has got to go right on tending after her husband and her seven or eight children. They don’t care one bit about her not having any legs to speak of. To them she’s just their mama and where’s dinner? To all the other Congo people, too. Why, they just don’t let on, like she was a regular person. Nobody bats their eye when she scoots by on her hands and goes on down to her field or the river to wash clothes with the other ladies that work down there every day. She carries all her things in a basket on top of her head. It’s as big as Mama’s big white laundry hamper back home and seems like she’s always got about ten hundred things piled up in there. When she scoots down the road, not a one of them falls out. All the other ladies have big baskets on their heads too, so nobody stares at Mama Mwanza one way or another.
    What they do is, they all stare at us. They look at Rachel the worst. First Mama and Father were thinking it might do Rachel some good to be cranked down a notch or two. Father said to Mama: “A child shouldn’t think herself better than others because she is blonde as a white rabbit.” He said that. I told it to Leah and she laughed out loud. I am blonde too but not as much as a white rabbit. Strawberry blonde, Mama says. So I hope I don’t have to get cranked down a notch or two like Rachel. I like strawberries about better than anything.You can keep a rabbit for a pet or you can eat it. Poor Rachel. Everwhen she goes out, whole bunches of little Congo children run after her on the road a-reaching and a-yanking on her long white hair to see if they can get it to come off. Sometimes even the grownups do too. I reckon they think it’s a right good sport. Leah told me it’s because they don’t believe it is her hair and think she’s got something strange draped over her head.
    Rachel gets her the worst sunburns, too. I get burnt but not like her. Pink is Rachel’s favorite color and it’s a good thing because that’s what she is. Father says it is the lot of every young woman to learn humility and God plots for each her chosen way.
    Mama says, “But must they look on us as freaks of nature?” Rachel was Miss Priss and now she is a freak of nature. Used to be, Adah was the only one of us in our family with something wrong with her. But here nobody stares at Adah except just a little because she’s white. Nobody cares that she’s bad on one whole side because they’ve all got their own handicap children or a mama with no feet, or their eye put out. When you take a look out the door, why, there goes somebody with something missing off of them and not even embarrassed of it. They’ll wave a stump at you if they’ve got one, in a friendly way.
    At first Mama got after us for staring and pointing at people. She was all the time whispering, “Do I have to tell you girls ever single minute