The Poisonwood Bible: Book One

Even now they resist affinity like cats in a bag: two blondes—the one short and fierce, the other tall and imperious—flanked by matched brunettes like bookends, the forward twin leading hungrily while the rear one sweeps the ground in a rhythmic limp.

Even now they resist affinity like cats in a bag: two blondes—the one short and fierce, the other tall and imperious—flanked by matched brunettes like bookends, the forward twin leading hungrily while the rear one sweeps the ground in a rhythmic limp.

I didn’t know any name for what I’d seen until some years afterward in Atlanta, when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

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.

Little regiments of children lurked by the doorways, apparently for the express purpose of accosting foreign missionaries.

Leah and Adah began our life as images mirror perfect. We have the same eyes dark and chestnut hair. But I am a lame gallimaufry and she remains perfect.

My father by then was in a paroxysm of exasperation.

In some ways they are so strict you might as well have a Communist for your parents, but when it comes to something you really wish they’d notice, oh, well! Then parental laxity is the rule of the day.

To amuse my depraved Ada self during homework time I wrote down that quote from memory on a small triangular piece of paper and passed it to Leah, with the query: FROM WHAT BOOK OF THE BIBLE?

Mostly he says incomprehensible things in Kikongo but also speaks like Mr. Poe’s Raven a desultory English.

Other lucky children might merely be thrashed for their sins, but we Price girls are castigated with the Holy Bible.

Oh, dear Lord. He was staring directly at me. My heart palpitated fiercely.

Many Kikongo words resemble English words backward and have antithetical meanings: Syebo is a horrible, destructive rain, that just exactly does not do what it says backward.

We listened vaguely to Our Father’s tale of the putative Mercedes truck.

Did Father aim to suggest God was not obligated to send us down any beans or squash at all, no matter how we might toil in His name? That He just proposed to sit up there and consign us to hardships one right after another?