The Poisonwood Bible

| 1998

The Poisonwood Bible

Published: 1998

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband’s part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters — the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father’s intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

Dancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking possibilities of human hope, The Poisonwood Bible possesses all that has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver’s previous work, and extends this beloved writer’s vision to an entirely new level. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring writers of modern times.

Praise For The Poisonwood Bible

“There are few ambitious, successful and beautiful novels. Lucky for us, we have one now, in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible . . . this awed reviewer hardly knows where to begin.”

— JANE SMILEY, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

“Haunting … A novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women.”

— NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Barbara Kingsolver has dreamed a magnificent fiction and a ferocious bill of indictment. … What we have here—with this new, mature, angry, heartbroken, expansive out-of-Africa Kingsolver—is at last our very own Lessing and our very own Gordimer.”

— THE NATION

“Fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.”

— NEWSWEEK

“Kingsolver’s powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned nineteenth-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption and the ‘dark necessity’ of history.”

— MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NEW YORK TIMES

“A powerful new epic. … She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin, and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.”

— LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Beautifully written. … Kingsolver’s tale of domestic tragedy is more than just a well-told yarn. … Played out against the bloody backdrop of political struggles in Congo that continue to this day, it is also particularly timely.”

— PEOPLE

“Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.”

— TIME

“Tragic and remarkable. … A novel that blends outlandish experience with Old Testament rhythms of prophecy and doom.”

— USA TODAY

“The book’s sheer enjoyability is given depth by Kingsolver’s insight and compassion for Congo, including its people and their language and sayings.”

— BOSTON GLOBE

“Most impressive are the humor and insight with which Kingsolver describes a global epic, proving just how personal the political can be.”

— GLAMOUR

“Compelling, lyrical and utterly believable.”

— CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“A triple-decker, different coming-of-age novel, but also a clever look at language and cultures.”

— SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

“A bravura performance. … A subtle and complex creation, dealing with epic subjects with invention and courage and a great deal of heart.”

— NEWSDAY

“A novel that brims with excitement and rings with authority.”

— PORTLAND OREGONIAN

“Kingsolver’s work is a magnum opus, a parable encompassing a biblical structure and a bibliography, and a believable cast of African characters.”

— ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

“There are few ambitious, successful and beautiful novels. Lucky for us, we have one now, in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible . . . this awed reviewer hardly knows where to begin.”

— JANE SMILEY, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

“Haunting … A novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women.”

— NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

— THE NATION

“Fully realized, richly embroidered, triumphant.”

— NEWSWEEK

“Kingsolver’s powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned nineteenth-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption and the ‘dark necessity’ of history.”

— MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NEW YORK TIMES

“A powerful new epic. … She has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin, and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.”

— LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

— PEOPLE

“Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words.”

— TIME

“Tragic and remarkable. … A novel that blends outlandish experience with Old Testament rhythms of prophecy and doom.”

— USA TODAY

“The book’s sheer enjoyability is given depth by Kingsolver’s insight and compassion for Congo, including its people and their language and sayings.”

— BOSTON GLOBE

“Most impressive are the humor and insight with which Kingsolver describes a global epic, proving just how personal the political can be.”

— GLAMOUR

“Compelling, lyrical and utterly believable.”

— CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“A triple-decker, different coming-of-age novel, but also a clever look at language and cultures.”

— SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

“A bravura performance. … A subtle and complex creation, dealing with epic subjects with invention and courage and a great deal of heart.”

— NEWSDAY

“A novel that brims with excitement and rings with authority.”

— PORTLAND OREGONIAN

“Kingsolver’s work is a magnum opus, a parable encompassing a biblical structure and a bibliography, and a believable cast of African characters.”

— ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

READ EXCERPT

pp. 8-10

In the year of our Lord 1960 a monkey barreled through space in an American rocket; a Kennedy boy took the chair out from under a fatherly general named Ike; and the whole world turned on an axis called the Congo. The monkey sailed right overhead, and on a more earthly plane men in locked rooms bargained for the Congo’s treasure. But I was there. Right on the head of that pin.

I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband’s confidence and the undertow of my children’s needs. That’s my excuse, yet none of them really needed me all that much. My firstborn and my baby both tried to shed me like a husk from the start, and the twins came with a fine interior sight with which they could simply look past me at everything more interesting. And my husband, why, hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher. I married a man who could never love me, probably. It would have trespassed on his devotion to all mankind. I remained his wife because it was one thing I was able to do each day. My daughters would say: You see, Mother, you had no life of your own.

They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.

I’ve seen things they’ll never know about. I saw a family of weaver birds work together for months on a nest that became such a monstrous lump of sticks and progeny and nonsense that finally it brought their whole tree thundering down. I didn’t speak of it to my husband or children, not ever. So you see. I have my own story, and increasingly in my old age it weighs on me. Now that every turn in the weather whistles an ache through my bones, I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them, but find myself being careful, too, choosing which ones to let out into the light. I want you to find me innocent. As much as I’ve craved your lost, small body, I want you now to stop stroking my inner arms at night with your fingertips. Stop whispering. I’ll live or die on the strength of your judgment, but first let me say who I am. Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways, as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease, from which I have not managed a full recovery. Maybe I’ll even confess the truth, that I rode in with the horsemen and beheld the apocalypse, but still I’ll insist I was only a captive witness. What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself? For that matter, what is he? When he rides in to vanquish the untouched tribes, don’t you think they fall down with desire before those sky-colored eyes? And itch for a turn with those horses, and those guns? That’s what we yell back at history, always, always. It wasn’t just me; there were crimes strewn six ways to Sunday, and I had my own mouths to feed. I didn’t know. I had no life of my own.

And you’ll say I did. You’ll say I walked across Africa with my wrists unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods: cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity. Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same. There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow. It’s easy to point at other men, conveniently dead, starting with the ones who first scooped up mud from riverbanks to catch the scent of a source. Why, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, wasn’t he the rascal! He and all the profiteers who’ve since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

I would be no different from the next one, if I hadn’t paid my own little part in blood. I trod on Africa without a thought, straight from our family’s divinely inspired beginning to our terrible end. In between, in the midst of all those steaming nights and days darkly colored, smelling of earth, I believe there lay some marrow of honest instruction. Sometimes I can nearly say what it was. If I could, I would fling it at others, I’m afraid, at risk to their ease. I’d slide this awful story off my shoulders, flatten it, sketch out our crimes like a failed battle plan and shake it in the faces of my neighbors, who are wary of me already. But Africa shifts under my hands, refusing to be party to failed relations. Refusing to be any place at all, or any thing but itself: the animal kingdom making hay in the kingdom of glory. So there it is, take your place. Leave nothing for a haunted old bat to use for disturbing the peace. Nothing, save for this life of her own.

We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away.

Excerpted from The Poisonwood Bible, copyright © 1998 by Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers.