MILLICENT BELL
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defini tion by their differences from the foreigners they meet. The
Mricans-who would once have been racistIy called "primitive"-are
really comparable, after all, to James's sophisticated Europeans who, in
James's time, challenged the American visitor's sense of superiority.
Nathan Price has come to convert the heathen. This fundamentalist
Baptist missionary from Bethlehem, Georgia tells his congregation in the
Ii
ttIe Congo village of Kilanga, "Tata Jesus is bangala," ignorant of the fact
that his statement is ambiguous to his hearers. "Bangala" in their language
may mean either "precious and dear" or "poisonwood"-a noxious plant
which grows in his missionary garden and gives him a painful rash.
In
the
same garden he has planted Kentucky wonder beans he has brought from
home, which, lacking pollinators, will not bear fruit. They are as irrelevant
to the Congo environment as his message. He has no sense at all of the cul–
ture he wants to eradicate. Of course, he does not succeed; he becomes an
object of mirth and, finally, of irri tation to the villagers, and fails to adjust
to the practical difficul ties and dangers of life in the Congo. Eventually, he
vanishes from the story, dying intransigent and half-mad in the jungle
wilderness. His family of women-his wife, Orleanna, and his daughters
Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May-come to terms with Africa.
It
is they who narrate the story in remarkable alternating monologues.
Kingsolver establishes for each a characteristic language that attains, at each
return of its speaker, a complex richness. Orleanna, who begins as the sub–
missive missionary wife who has carried packets of Betty Crocker cake
mix and cans of Underwood Deviled Ham with her from America, grad–
ually learns to understand the world around her and to reject the blind
willfulness of her husband who has separated his family from their village
neighbors by his self-righteousness and made their lives miserable and dan–
gerous. Only the youngest daughter, Ruth May, young enough to learn to
play with the village children, becomes a member of the local community
without difficulty-yet she is sacrificed to the hostility her father has
aroused when she is bi tten by a deadly snake planted in her bed by a
resentful witch doctor. The oldest daughter, Rachel, a frustrated teenage
prom queen, is as rigid as her father in her attachment to her culture–
though not to its religion but to new dresses for Easter and Breck Special
Formulated Shampoo for her "platinum blonde" hair.
In
the end she
adjusts to Africa better than any of the others not by submitting to its true
nature but by finding a place for herself among the exploiters. She marries
a white adventurer working for the CIA and after two more marriages is
last seen running a hotel for rich tourists. Leah, on the other hand, who
begins by being her father's disciple and admirer, grows gradually into a
sort of Huckleberry Finn who masters the wilderness with tomboy skills
and falls in love with a black schoolteacher and revolutionary. Her twin,
