Mama BekwaTataba stood watching us—a little jet-black woman. Her elbows stuck out like wings, and a huge white enameled tub occupied the space above her head, somewhat miraculously holding steady while her head moved in quick jerks to the right and left. Mama Tataba’s job, we were surprised to learn, was to live with us and earn a small stipend by doing the same work she’d done for our forerunner in the Kilanga Mission, Brother Fowles. He’d left us two boarders, in fact: Mama Tataba and a parrot named Methuselah. Both had been trained by him in the English language and evidently a good deal else, for Brother Fowles left some mystery in his wake. I gathered through overhearing my parents that Brother Fowles had entered into unconventional alliances with the local people, and too he was a Yankee. I heard them saying he was New York Irish, which tells you a lot, as they are notorious for being papist Catholics. Father explained to us that he had gone plumb crazy, consorting with the inhabitants of the land.

That’s why the Mission League finally allowed us to come. At first they’d insulted my father by turning us down, even after our Bethlehem congregation had done special tithes for a whole year to fly us here for the perfusion of Jesus’ name. But no one else volunteered for the Kilanga post, and the Underdowns had requested that it be taken by someone steady, with a family. Well, we were a family all right, and my father is steady as a stump. Still, the Underdowns insisted that our mission last no more than one year—not enough time for going plumb crazy but only partway, I guess, even if things went poorly.

Brother Fowles had been in Kilanga six years, which really when you think about it is long enough for about any kind of backsliding you could name. There was no telling how he might have influenced Mama Tataba. But we needed her help. She carried all our water up from the river and cleaned and lit the kerosene lamps and split wood and built the fire in the cookstove and threw buckets of ash down the hole in the outhouse and paused to kill snakes more or less as a distraction between heavier jobs. My sisters and I stood in awe of Mama Tataba, but were not quite used to her yet. She had a blind eye. It looked like an egg whose yolk had been broken and stirred just once. As she stood there by our garden, I stared at her bad eye, while her good eye stared at my father.

“What you be dig for? Worm grub?” she demanded. She turned her head slightly from side to side, surveying my father’s work with what he calls her “acute monocular beam.” The galvanized bucket remained perfectly still on top of her head—a great, levitating crown.

“We’re cultivating the soil, sister,” he said.

“That one, brother, he bite,” she said, pointing her knuckly hand at a small tree he was wresting from his garden plot. White sap oozed from the torn bark. My father wiped his hands on his trousers.

“Poisonwood,” she added flatly, emphasizing the descending syllables as if she were equally tired of all three.

My father mopped his brow again and launched into the parable of the one mustard seed falling on a barren place, and the other one on good soil. I thought of the bright pointy-nosed mustard bottles we used in abundance at church wiener suppers—a world apart from anything MamaTataba had ever seen. Father had the job of his life cut out for him, bringing the Word to a place like this. I wanted to throw my arms around his weary neck and pat down his rumpled hair.

Mama Tataba seemed not to be listening. She pointed again at the red dirt. “You got to be make hills.”

He stood his ground, my father, tall as Goliath and pure of heart as David. A film of red dust on his hair and eyebrows and the tip of his strong chin gave him a fiendish look untrue to his nature. He ran his large, freckled hand across the side of his head, where his hair was shaved close, and then through the tousled crown, where Mother lets it grow longer. All this while inspecting Mama Tataba -with Christian tolerance, taking his time to formulate the message.

“Mama Tataba,” he said at last, “I’ve been tending the soil ever since I could walk behind my father.”

When he says anything at all, even a simple thing about a car or a plumbing repair, it tends to come out like this—in terms that can be interpreted as sacred.

Mama Tataba kicked the dirt with her flat, naked sole and looked disgusted. “He won’t be grow. You got to be make hills,” she stated, then turned on her heel and went in the house to help my mother slosh Clorox water across the floor to kill the hookworms.

I was shocked. In Georgia I’d seen people angered by my father before, or intimidated, but not contemptuous. Never.

“What does she mean, make hills?” I asked. “And why did she think a plant could bite you?”