“We’ve learned from the books left behind by Brother Fowles, field guides to the mammals and birds and the Lepidoptera, which are the butterflies. And we’ve learned from anyone (mostly children) who will talk to us and point at the same time. We’ve even had a surprise or two from our own mother, who grew up way deeper in Dixie than we did. As the buds on the trees turn to flowers, she raises her black eyebrows in surprise above her wide blue eyes and declares: hougainvillea, hibiscus, why, tree of heaven! Who would have thought Mother knew her trees? And the fruits—mango, guava, avocado—these we had barely glimpsed before, in the big Kroger store in Atlanta, yet now the trees reach right down and deliver such exotic prizes straight into our hands! That’s one more thing to remember -when I’m grown, to tell about the Congo: how the mango fruits hung -way down on long, long stems like extension cords. I believe God felt sorry for the Africans after putting the coconut so far out of reach, and aimed to make the mango easier to get a hand on.

I look hard at everything, and blink, as if my two eyes were a Brownie camera taking photographs to carry back. At the people, too, who have names to be learned. Gradually we’ve begun to call out to our neighbors. Closest by is poor lame Mama Mwanza, who scurries down the road on her hands. And Mama Nguza, who walks with her head held strangely high on account of the giant goiter nestled like a goose egg under her chin.Tata Boanda, the old fisherman, goes out in his boat every morning in the brightest red pair of trousers you ever saw in your life. People wear the same thing day in and day out, and that’s how we recognize them, by and large. (Mother says if they really wanted to put one over on us, they’d all swap outfits for a day.) On cool mornings Tata Boanda also wears a light green sweater with a white border on the placket—he’s quite a sight, with his muscular chest as manly as all get-out framed by the V-neck of a ladies’-wear sweater! But if you think about it, how would he or anyone here ever know it’s a lady’s sweater? How do I even know? Because of the styling, though it’s nothing you could plainly describe. So is it even a lady’s sweater, here in the Congo? I wonder.

There is something else I must confess about Tata Boanda: he’s a sinner. Right in the plain sight of God he has two wives, a young and an old one. Why, they all come to church! Father says we’re to pray for all three of them, but when you get down to the particulars it’s hard to know exactly what outcome to pray for. He should drop one wife, I guess, but for sure he’d drop the older one, and she already looks sad enough as it is. The younger one has all the kids, and you can’t just pray for a daddy to flat-out dump his babies, can you? I always believed any sin was easily rectified if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart, but here it gets complicated.

Mama Boanda Number Two doesn’t seem fazed by her situation. In fact, she looks like she’s fixing to explode with satisfaction. She and her little girls all wear their hair in short spikes bursting out all over their heads, giving an effect similar to a pincushion. (Rachel calls it the “haywire hairdo.”) And Mama Boanda always wraps her pagne just so, with a huge pink starburst radiating across her wide rump. The women’s long cloth skirts are printed so gaily with the oddest things: there is no telling when a raft of yellow umbrellas, or the calico cat and gingham dog, or an upside-down image of the Catholic Pope might just go sauntering across our yard.

Late in the fall, the milky green bushes surrounding every house and path suddenly revealed themselves as poinsettias.They bloomed their heads off and Christmas rang out in the sticky heat, as surprising as if “Hark the Herald Angels” were to come on your radio in July. Oh, it’s a heavenly paradise in the Congo and sometimes I want to live here forever. I could climb up trees just like the boys to hunt guavas and eat them till the juice runs down and stains my shirt, forever. Only I am fifteen now. Our birthday, in December, caught me off guard. Adah and I were late-bloomers in terms of the bad things, like getting breasts and the monthly visit. Back in Georgia when my classmates started turning up in training brassieres, one after another, like it was a catching disease, I bobbed off my hair and vowed to remain a tomboy. With Adah and me doing college algebra and reading the fattest books we could get our hands on, while the other kids trudged through each task in its order, I guess we’d counted on always being just whatever age we wanted to be. But no more. Now I’m fifteen and must think about maturing into a Christian lady.

To tell the truth, it’s not purely paradise here, either. Perhaps we’ve eaten of the wrong fruits in the Garden, because our family always seems to know too much, and at the same time not enough. Whenever something big happens we’re quite taken aback, but no one else is the least bit surprised. Not by a rainy season come and gone where none was supposed to be, nor by the plain green bushes changing themselves bang into poinsettias. Not by butterflies with wings as clear as little cats-eye glasses; not by the longest or shortest or greenest snake in the road. Even little children here seem to know more than us, just as easily as they speak their own language. I have to admit, that discouraged me at first: hearing the little kids jabbering away in Kikongo. How could little babies smaller than Ruth May speak this whole other language so perfectly? It’s similar to the way Adah will sometimes turn up knowing some entire, difficult thing like French or the square root of pi when I’d been taking for granted I knew everything she did. After we first arrived, the children congregated outside our house each and every morning, which confused us. We thought there must be something peculiar, such as a baboon, on our roof. Then we realized the peculiar thing was ws.They were attracted to our family for the same reason people will pull over to watch a house afire or a car wreck. We didn’t have to do a thing in the world to be fascinating but move around in our house, speak, wear pants, boil our water.