Lit Circle #3: Bel and the Serpent: New Critic

1. “ On the same August day, this is all I knew: the pain in my house hold seemed plenty large enough to fill the whole world. Ruth May was slipping away into her fever. And it was Rachel’s seventeenth birthday. I was wrapping up green glass earrings in tissue paper, hoping to make some small peace with my eldest child, while I tried to sponge the fire out of my youngest. And President Eisenhower was right then sending his orders to take over the Congo. Imagine that. His household was the world, and he’s finished making up his mind about things. He’d given Lumumba a chance, he felt. The Congo had been independent for fifty-one days.” (Orleanna: 320)

This quote seemed very significant to me because of the way it paralleled Orleanna's life and household with Eisenhower household and the global community. I think that Orleanna feels guilty about how much such insignificant things as her daughters birthday affected her and how little global issues such as the present state of their current and past country's leaders or weather the country that they are living in will remain exploited and abused by the U.S. and Belgium or if it will finally gain it's freedom.

2.“The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.” (Orleanna: 317)
“You can’t just point to the one most terrible thing and wonder why it happened. This has been a whole terrible time, from the beginning of the drought that left so many without food, and then the night of the ants, to now, the worst tragedy of all. Each bad thing causes something worse. As Anatole says, if you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you’ll go crazy if you think it’s all punishment for your sins. I see that plainly when I look at my parents. God doesn’t punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.” (Leah: 327)
“Maybe I shouldn’t say so but it’s true: Leah is the cause of all our problems. It goes back to when she and Father commenced World War Three at our house. What a crazy mixed-up scene. Leah would rare up and talk back to Father straight to his face, and then, boy oh boy. The rest of us would duck and cover like you have to do whenever they drop the A-bomb. Leah always had the upper-most respect for Father, but after the hullabaloo in the church where they voted Father out, she just plumb stopped being polite.” (Rachel: 335)

These three quotes were very interesting to me because they showed three very different perspectives on how their problems started and most likely how Ruth May was allowed to die. Rachel staying true too herself blames it on her sister Leah. Where as Leah herself, says that you cannot just point out one individual event and give it a reason or try to find one. Orleanna interprets this as stemming from a more insignificant event that just domminoed it's way to live changing events.

3.“I only remember hearing a gulp and a sob and a scream all at once, the strangest cry, like a baby taking it’s first breath. We couldn’t tell where it came from, but strangely enough, we all looked up at the treetops. A nervous wind stirred the branches, but nothing more. Only silence fell down. It’s a very odd thing to recall, that we all looked up. Not one of us looked at Ruth May. I can’t say that Ruth May was even there with us, in that instant. Just for the moment it was as if she’d disappeared, and her voice was thrown into the trees. Then she returned to us, but all that was left of her was an awful silence. The voiceless empty skin of my baby sister sitting quietly on the ground, hugging herself.” (Leah: 363)
“BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH—He kindly stopped for me. I was not present at Ruth May’s birth but I have seen it now, because I saw each step of it played out in reverse at the end of her life. The closing parenthesis, at the end of the palindrome that that was Ruth May. Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby’s first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with a pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than –life that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.” (Adah: 365)
“She went out to the kitchen house, fired the stove, warmed a pan of water, them carried it back into the house and set it on the big dining table where Nelson had laid the body on a bedsheet. Mother bathed Ruth May with a washcloth as if she were a baby. I stood with my back to the wall, remembering too much of another time, as I watched her rub carefully under the chin and in the folds at the backs of the elbows and knees. In our house in Bethlehem I used to stand outside the bathroom door, where I could see the two of them in the mirror. Mother singing soft questions and kissing her answers into the tiny, outstretched palms. Adah and I were nine then, too old to be jealous of a baby, but still I wondered if she had ever loved me that much. With twins, she could only have loved each of us by half. And Adah was the one who required more of her.” (Leah: 369)
‘Throughout the time of loss and salvation, Bwanga had remained Ruth May’s most loyal playmate. Even that my father wouldn’t have known. I felt an unspeakable despair. He knew nothing about the children. Under his cupped hand Bwanga’s little bald head looked like an overripe avocado he was prepared to toss away. She stood wide-eyed and motionless. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he repeated, and released her. “Mah-dah-may-I?” Bwanga asked. Several other children remembered this game and echoed: “Mah-dah-mey-I?” Their eyes left Father and came to rest on Ruth May inside the drenched cloud of netting on the table. They all picked up the refrain, asking again and again in a rising plea: Mother May I? And though they surely knew no permission would be granted, they kept up their soft, steady chant for a very long time in the pouring rain. Water clung to their eyelashes and streamed in runnels down their open faces. Their meager clothes, imposed on them by foreigners, clung to their thin chests and legs like a second skin finally ready to accept the shape of their bodies. The dust on our feet turned blood-colored and the sky grew very dark, while Father moved around the circle baptizing each child in turn, imploring the living progeny of Kilanga to walk forward into the light.” (Leah: 375)

These quotes all have to do with the death of Ruth May and how her family dealt with it. Leah described hearing a scream up from the branches of the trees and that they had all looked up at the sky, not one of them looked at Ruth May. This was interesting because in earlier chapters when Ruth May was very sick Nelson had given Ruth May a box in which to put her spirit into so that right before she died she could disappear to her special place of choice and she chose her place to be up in the trees as a green mamba and so she flew. Adah described her death in her backwards way, she said that she saw Ruth May's birth rather than death. And in this moment, Adah's character began to make a little more sense to me. She described the symmetry of how Ruth May would wait after death exactly as long as she had before birth. Orleanna had a calm attitude at the news, even though Ruth May had been Orleanna's favorite. Leah described how she doubted that Orleanna could never love her as much as Ruth May and that she wasn't Jealous. I think that maybe Orleanna loved Ruth May best because she felt that she had to. Orleanna mentioned early on a feeling of guilt about knowing inside her that she had to many children, before Ruth May was even in the picture. And from this guilt I believe Orleanna created a compromising love and care for Ruth May. Nathan remaining his own true self took advantage of his daughter’s death and exploited it to the best of his ability. Inspired by his lack of baptism of Ruth May he began baptizing each child he saw, in rainwater falling from the sky to the parched earth.