118 pages • 3 hours read
Barbara KingsolverThe Poisonwood Bible
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Book 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 6 Summary: “Song of the Three Children”
Rachel Price; The Equatorial
Rachel, at age fifty, reflects on her life. She misses the comforts of America, but she has not returned, partly out of concern that the Equatorial would be taken apart in her absence. In hindsight, she admits that she should have left Africa right away when she first had the chance but did not do so because it had irrevocably changed her. She knew she would not fit in with her peers in Bethlehem, Georgia, who would have no way of understanding the horrors she survived. Rachel remains proud of her life and most of the choices that she has made, particularly her glamorous time as the wife of a dignitary, but she regrets being unable to have children as a result of an infection she acquired from Mr. Axelroot.
She muses that Africa cannot be changed, but that one simply cannot let it affect one’s thought process. She recommends putting any unpleasantness that does not directly affect one out of one’s mind and doing whatever one must to survive, regardless of whether the action is un-Christian: “This is darkest Africa, where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up” (517).
Leah Price; Sanza Pombo, Angola
Ten years after settling in their farming commune in Angola, Leah considers her life and thinks how much her new home feels like Kilanga. She still has relapses of malaria, through which her husband tends to her. Leah describes how she struggles to teach newcomers to the commune to consider the long-term strategies for the health of the land. She attributes this to the fact that Africa is prone to feast or famine, and everyone is simply trying to survive day-to-day. She considers herself an “un-missionary,” asking Africa to convert her to its ways. Leah also considers her father’s mistakes and how she has lost all belief in the justice and God he espoused. Instead, she believes in something closer to Brother Fowles’ concept of “creation,” seeing the beauty and cycles of nature all around her. Having now found a sense of home, she also determines that “time erases whiteness altogether” in viewing her children, whose skin-tones are all different (526).
Adah Price; Atlanta
Adah is now an acclaimed epidemiology researcher, having given up the practice of medicine “out of sympathy for the Devil and Africa,” being unable to reconcile herself to the idea of following the Hippocratic oath (528). She considers herself a witchdoctor and takes an unusual stance on the concept of death and disease, “believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth” (531). Adah secretly considers her viruses to be relations, mothering them in her own way. Orleanna disapproves of Adah’s perspective, claiming that she has “no heart” for her own kind. Adah argues that she has “too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve” (531). Like the others, Orleanna still suffers from diseases contracted in the Congo. She never remarried. Adah has also remained single because none of her lovers have passed her internal test: choosing her instead of Ruth May on the night with the driver ants.
Adah considers her childhood and the energy she “spent on feeling betrayed” by the world and by Leah, more specifically (532). She states that she was bent by this betrayal and built her life on a misunderstanding, just like everyone else. She collects Bible misprints and wonders about the Bible that her father had written in Africa. She muses: “Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible” (533).
Book 6 Analysis
Book 6 shows how the Price family ends: in direct opposition to the wishes of Reverend Price. Orleanna has left him, taking her children with her. She has publicly denounced him and spends her days fighting for civil rights, something which he would have detested. Rachel has lived in sin with Mr. Axelroot, seduced a married man, and married twice purely for social and monetary gain. She has no real appreciation for Christianity and is happy her father is dead.
Leah, the only one who has any remaining fondness for the reverend, has received a college education and married a Congolese man. Both actions run counter to the reverend’s expressed wishes. Additionally, Leah no longer believes in the God he espoused, a fact which would have rankled the preacher. Furthermore, while Leah has named a child after him, the child is biracial. Considering his condemnation of Brother Fowles, it is unlikely Reverend Price would have been pleased that his sole remaining legacy is a biracial child raised in an African commune.
Adah has not only attended college, but also medical school. She now considers herself a witchdoctor and has sexual relations outside of marriage. Worst of all, Ruth May has died unbaptized. Finally, rather than saving the heathen Africans with the power of his sermons and baptizing all of Africa, respected and revered by all for his service to God, Reverend Price was repeatedly run out of various villages and eventually killed by the people he intended to convert. He is remembered as a madman obsessed with drowning children in crocodile-infested waters. These facts highlight Reverend Price’s complete failure as a father, a Baptist, and a missionary.
Kingsolver further explores the concept of religion as Adah considers the religions of her family members to be something other than her father’s understanding of Christianity, or, indeed, any form of organized religion. Rachel worships herself above anything else according to Adah, and Orleanna’s civil rights work is her religion. This may be true, but as it is driven by her guilt, it could be argued that guilt is her true religion. Similarly, Adah says that Leah’s religion is “suffering.” This, too, is a reasonable assertion, though Leah comes to make peace the concepts which cause her to suffer, such as injustice.
Adah’s own religion is, to her own mind, a version of voodoo. She believes that “God” is everything that exists or has existed, not unlike the concept of muntu. As such, she believes in the balance of life and death in the large scale for the world, and that human beings are made up of the balance of their injuries and sins. This discussion offers a depiction of the concept of religion which differs from traditional viewpoints. Instead, Adah’s conception of religion appears to be tied up in one’s perception of the world, what one’s purpose is, and what is most critically important to them.
Adah’s consideration of the concept of religion and writing one’s own version of the Bible lead to her description of her father’s beliefs as “The Poisonwood Bible.” This is the title of the novel, implying that the events in the lives of the members of the Price family are all intimately connected to, if not subsumed by, Reverend Price’s folly. This is because the “poisonwood” refers to Reverend Price’s failed attempts to say “Jesus is precious” in Kikongo, where he mistakenly declared, “Jesus is Poisonwood” due to his incompetence with the language.
The theme of disability and ableism continues into Book 6 as Adah offers more of her thoughts on her newly abled body. Adah longs for the acceptance of disabled people personally as well as culturally. This is evidenced by her decision to break up with the neurologist she is seeing when she realizes that he had no interest in her when she was disabled. Adah’s decision is fueled by the fact that she still considers her history as a disabled person (and therefore her former disability) an important part of her identity, regardless of whether she has since recovered. As such, she will only consider romantic partners who she believes would have accepted her as she was and made the choice to save her, paralysis and all, on the night with the fire ants. This personal decision underscores the theme of ableism.
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