I invited Pascal into our kitchen house when Mother wasn’t there. We skulked about in the banana-smelling darkness, examining the wall over the plank counter where Mother tacks up pictures she tears out of magazines. They are company for her, I suppose, these housewives, children, and handsome men from cigarette ads, of which Father would disapprove if the Lord’s path ever chanced to lead him through the kitchen, which isn’t likely. Mother even has a photo of President Eisenhower in there. In the dimness the President’s pale, bulbous head shines out like a lightbulb. Our substitute for electricity! But Pascal is always more interested in poking through the flour sacks, and he sometimes takes small handfuls of Carnation milk powder. I find that substance revolting, yet he eats it eagerly, as if it were candy.
In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird’s nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them in his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.
On another afternoon Pascal showed me how to build a six-inch-tall house. Crouched in the shade of our guava, he planted upright twigs in the dirt. Then he built the twigs into walls with a sturdy basket -weave of shredded bark all the way around. He spat in the dirt to make red mud, then patted this onto the walls until they were covered. Finally he used his teeth to square off the ends of palm fronds in a businesslike manner, for the roof. Finally he squatted back on his heels and looked over his work with an earnest, furrowed forehead. This small house of Pascal’s, I realized, was identical in material and design to the house in which he lived. It only differed in size.
It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games-”Mother May I?,” “Hide and Seek”-and his: “Find Food,” “Recognize Poisonwood,” “Build a House.” And here he was a boy no older than eight or nine. He had a younger sister who carried the family’s baby everywhere she went and hacked weeds with her mother in the manioc field. I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress. For the first time ever I felt a stirring of anger against my father for making me a white preacher’s child from Georgia. This wasn’t my fault. I bit my lip and labored on my own small house under the guava tree, but beside the perfect talents of Pascal, my own hands lumbered like pale flippers on a walrus out of its element. My embarrassment ran scarlet and deep, hidden under my clothes.
Ruth May Price
THE VERY DAY MAMA SAID, You’re going to crack your head wide open, but no sir. I broke my arm instead.
How I did it was spying on the African Communist Boy Scouts. Way up there in the tree I could see them but they couldn’t see me. The tree had green alligator pears that taste like nothing much. Not a one of us but Mama will eat them, and the only reason is she can remember how they tasted back home from the Piggly Wiggly with salt and Hellman’s mayonnaise. “Mayonnaise,” I asked her. “What color was the jar?” But she didn’t cry. Sometimes when I can’t remember things from Georgia, she’ll cry.
They looked like regular Congo Boy Scouts to me, marching, except they didn’t have any shoes. The Belgium Army men all have shoes and guns and they come marching right straight through here sometimes, on their way to somewhere. Father said they are showing everybody Congolese, like Tata Undo, that Belgium is still calling the shots. But the other army is just boys that live around here. You can tell the difference. There aren’t any white ones in charge, and they don’t have all the same clothes. They’ve just got their shorts and barefooted or whatever they’ve got. One has got him a red Frenchie hat. Boy, I like that hat. The others have red hankies tied around their necks. Mama said they are not Boy Scouts, they are Jeune Mou-Pro. She says, “Ruth May, sugar, you don’t have a speck of business with the Jeune Mou-Pro, so when you see them, why, you run on into the house.” Mama does let us play with little children and boys, even if they are mostly naked, but not those ones in the red hankies. Mbote fe-That means no good. That is how I come to climb up the alligator pear tree when I saw them. For a long time I thought Mama was saying they were the Jimmy Crow, a name I knew from home.
In the morning we can’t spy. My sisters have to sit and have their school, and I have to color and learn my letters. I don’t like having school. Father says a girl can’t go to college because they’ll pour water in your shoes. Sometimes I can play with my pets instead of coloring, if I’m quiet. Here are my pets: Leon and the mongoose. Also the parrot. My father let the parrot go because we accidentally taught it to say bad words, but it didn’t go plumb away. It goes and then it comes back because its wings aren’t any count; it got too tamed and forgot how to fly away and eat by itself. I feed it sour limes from the dima tree to make it sneeze and wipe its bill off, one side and then the other side. Mbote ve! Dima, dimba, dimbama. I like to say all those words because they come out of your mouth and laugh. My sisters feel sorry for the parrot but I don’t. I would have me a snake too if I could, because I’m not scared of them.
Nobody ever even gave me the mongoose. It came to the yard and looked at me. Every day it got closer and closer. One day the mongoose came in the house and then every day after that. It likes me the best. It won’t tolerate anybody else. Leah said we had to name it Ricky Ticky Tabby but no sir, it’s mine and I’m a-calling it Stuart Little. That is a mouse in a book. I don’t have a snake because a mongoose wants to kill a snake. Stuart Little killed the one by the kitchen house and that was a good business, so now Mama lets it come on in the house. Dimba means listen! You listen here, Buster Brown! The snake by the kitchen house was a cobra that spits in your eyes. You go blind, and then it can just rare back and bite you any old time it feels like it.
We went and found the chameleon all on our own. Leah mostly found that one on her bed. Most animals are whatever color God made them and have to stay that way, but Leon is whatever dern color he wants to be. We take him in the house when Mama and Father are still at church and one time we put him on Mama’s dress for an experiment and he turned flowered. If he gets out and runs away in the house, oh boy Jeez old man. Then we can’t find him. Wenda mbote- good-bye, fare ye well, and amen! So we keep him outside in a box that the comic books came in. If you poke him with a stick he turns black with sparkles and makes a noise.We do that to show him who’s boss.
When I broke my arm it was the day Mr. Axelroot was supposed to come. Father said that was good timing by the grace a God. But when Mr. Axelroot found out we had to go to Stanleyville he turned around and took right off again up the river or something, nobody knew, and he’d be back tomorrow. Mama said, “That man.” Father said, “What were you doing shimmying up that tree in the first place, Ruth May?” I said Leah was suppose to be watching me so it wasn’t my fault. I said I was hiding from the Jimmy Crow boys.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Mama said. “What were you doing out there at all when I told you to run inside whenever you see them coming?” She was afraid to tell Father because he might whip me, busted arm and all. She told him I was a lamb of God and it was a pure accident, so he didn’t whip me. Not yet. Maybe when I’m all fixed, he will.