Acts of faith (22 page)

He was conferring again with Ken, in low tones. Ken set the airline bag down and pointed toward the river. Suddenly Quinette’s knees felt rubbery, and people and objects wavered before her eyes, as though a translucent curtain had dropped between her and them. Thinking she was about to faint, she sat down and leaned her head against the tree trunk and took in deep breaths, her heart beating as if it were trying to get out of her chest.

“Are you all right?” Jim Prewitt asked.

She nodded.

“You look white as a sheet.”

“Got woozy for a second. I’m okay.”

“It’s the heat,” Jim said, wiping his brow for emphasis. “Jet lag, too, I’ll bet. Maybe that malaria medicine. That can do it, too.”

She nodded again, although she knew, now that the vertigo was gone and her heart rate was returning to normal, that it wasn’t the heat, the malaria pills, or jet lag. It was the airline bag, stuffed with ten thousand dollars and Ken standing there so casually with it at his feet. It was the rebel soldiers with their fierce, scarred foreheads and missing teeth and the trees with green trunks instead of brown and the knowledge that she’d been plunked down in a place without electricity, telephones, highways, cars, TVs, or a single familiar thing. She’d left home only three days ago. Actually, she wasn’t sure if it had been three days. She’d lost track of time, flying from the small airport in Waterloo to Chicago O’Hare, from O’Hare all the way to Geneva, Ken and Jim meeting her there, then whisking her off to a connecting flight to Nairobi, where she’d tried to sleep but couldn’t, and then at dawn this morning winging on to Lokichokio in a twin-engine plane, stepping off it into the single-engine Cessna that had delivered her to this nameless place on the White Nile. Her mind and senses had been in suspended animation until that dizzying instant, moments ago, when they were awakened to the foreignness of her surroundings and to the reality of the incredible turn her life had taken. She who had been out of Iowa only a few times, never for very long and seldom very far, and who’d never done anything exceptional in her life, unless you counted the mess she’d been making of it until recently (and you really couldn’t because it had been an unexceptional mess—“trailer park trash, that’s what you’ve turned into,” her mother had scolded her, as if the commonness of her bad behavior was what made it offensive), had journeyed to a country at war in the heart of Africa, on a mission to liberate two hundred and nine black people from captivity. She felt inadequate to the task and completely out of place and a fleeting but intense longing to be home again, amid its everyday routines.

“Looks like we might be here for a while longer, so I might as well take advantage and do you two.” It was Phyllis, with her cameramen. She was done up in a Jungle Jane outfit—short-sleeve safari jacket with lots of pockets and green, lightweight pants and a wide hat over her long hair.

Phyllis motioned for her and Jim to come out into the light.

“I’ll start with you.” She indicated Quinette with a movement of her head. “You’re the reason I’m here. You’re the story.”

Quinette flinched and gave Phyllis a puzzled look. True, Ken had invited her to go on this particular mission and paid her travel expenses to draw attention to his cause, but she didn’t think of
herself
as the story.

“It’s the kids. They’re the story,” she began.

“Right. Sunday school kids from the American heartland, that’s the spin,” said Phyllis in her rough voice. “But you organized the campaign, right?”

“No. I helped out, but I—”

“Let’s make sure I’ve got your name right.” She took out a notebook from a side pocket of her Jungle Jane jacket and spelled out Quinette’s first and last names, and Quinette nodded that she had it right, and then was asked her age and what she did for a living and if she was married and had children, the reporter jotting down her responses in the flip-up notebook. At a gesture from Phyllis, the man holding the video camera on his shoulder zoomed in on Quinette.

“Do you mind if I brush my hair first?” she pleaded, with a sidelong glance at her rucksack, where her hairbrush was.

“This is an interview, not an audition. Better if you look a little rough. You’re in Africa, the bush.”

“Okay, but there’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t organize it. Our minister and the two Bible study teachers did, Alice and Terry. I worked on it, sure, but they put it together. The only reason they’re not here is because they’re, you know, middle-aged and married, with kids to take care of.”

“Are you saying you’re here instead of them because you’re expendable?” Phyllis asked, in a jokey sort of way that wasn’t entirely jokey. Quinette felt that the woman was trying to put words in her mouth.

“No!” she answered. “It’s just that it is dangerous out here, and—”

The reporter raised her hand like a crossing guard stopping traffic.

“I’ll be sure to get your role in this right. I’ll say that you were
one
of the organizers, how’s that? So let’s get started. Are you rolling?” she asked the cameraman. He nodded. In a twinkling, Phyllis’s posture and demeanor changed. She struck a pose, putting one foot forward and straightening her shoulders. Even her voice changed, no more gravel, just a smooth, formal, oh-so-clear TV-reporter voice, asking: “Your campaign is called CLASS. What does that stand for?”

Quinette hesitated, rosettes of sweat blossoming on her shirt. During the fundraising drive, she’d been interviewed by the
Des Moines Register
and by a cable TV station out of Iowa City, becoming a local celebrity for a brief time. It had been exciting to have perfect strangers come up to her in the mall to say that they recognized her, but that hadn’t made her a media veteran. This was CNN. Her face, her voice would be broadcast all over the country, maybe the world.

“Did you understand the question?” asked Phyllis.

Quinette said she did, then explained that CLASS was an acronym standing for Christian Love Against Slavery in Sudan.

“And of course it also refers to a Sunday school class. It was the children who thought up the idea. Could you tell us about that? How it got started?”

Quinette didn’t know where to begin. She wished she would stop sweating, but how could she, standing in the sun? Phyllis, though, looked dry as a pressed leaf. Kristen once kept a whole book of them—oak and maple and cottonwood leaves flattened between thin sheets of paper and all so crinkly they would crumble into fragments if you didn’t pick them up by the stems.

“The kids were studying about the captivity,” Quinette said, “the Babylonian Captivity. A girl in the class, a thirteen-year-old, raised her hand and said she’d read a newspaper story about how black Christians were being captured and put into bondage by Muslims, you know, like the ancient Israelites had been by the Babylonians. Well, that was news to everyone, not just the kids, but the teachers too, Alice and Terry. It was news to them.”

“They were shocked that this sort of thing is going on today?” Phyllis asked.

“Sure, of course they were. The girl had cut the story out and brought it to the class and showed it to, I think it was Alice, and Alice read it out loud and the kids heard about Ken and the WorldWide Christian Union, over in Switzerland. How it sent people into Sudan to buy back slaves with money that was donated by, you know, church groups and ministries like Jim’s here. The kids decided they had to do something to help. To raise money and send it to Ken. Alice and Terry figured out how to do it, but like you said, the idea came from the kids.”

“How much money and how did they raise it?” was Phyllis’s next question.

The goal was twenty-five hundred dollars, enough to purchase liberty for fifty people. They did it by selling T-shirts and running bake sales in the church basement. A special collection was taken up at services one Sunday, donations were solicited by telephone and by going door-to-door in Cedar Falls and in neighboring towns like Waterloo and Waverly, and the response was overwhelming, it was just so gratifying. When the drive ended, three months later, it had collected five thousand dollars.

“So half the people who are going to be freed on this trip will owe their freedom to these children from Iowa, who probably never heard of Sudan before. That’s pretty impressive.”

Quinette couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement, and there was a canned, faked quality to the emotion Phyllis had thrown into her voice, like she was trying to tell her viewers what to feel when she didn’t feel it herself.

“Tell us, Quinette, what led you to get involved?”

She hesitated. The rosettes were spreading, their petals touching at the tips. Another five minutes of this, and she would look like she was in a wet T-shirt contest. People would see her bra line, strangers in their living rooms all over the U.S.A. Where the hell were those guys with the goddamned boat?
Forgive me, Lord.

“That’s kind of personal,” she said.

“In what way?” Phyllis persisted.

Quinette paused, images reeling through her mind of the Sunday morning service in the church that didn’t look like a regular church, with pews and stained-glass windows, but more like an auditorium, with lots of flowers on the carpeted stage and the choir in pale blue robes at the back and the band on one side, warming everyone up with the hymn “I Want to Be a Christian,” before Pastor Tom got up and led off with Isaiah—
” ‘The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound’ “—
pausing to let Isaiah’s words sink in, then describing the wonderful thing that had happened in the Sunday school the week before, how the Holy Spirit had touched the children’s hearts, so they could hear and answer the cry for deliverance that was coming from across the ocean. And it’s coming to us, too! Tom thundered, his voice ringing off the walls. He was really fired up, it was one of his best sermons ever, holding four or five hundred people spellbound.
“And we must heed it. . . . Our brothers and sisters in faith are being persecuted over there in Africa. . . . Our children are giving us a lesson in Christian duty, and we cannot let them down!”
He stood without speaking for a while, his hands on the lectern, his glance sweeping over the congregation so that he seemed to meet each pair of eyes. The kids were going to need a big hand from adults, organizing the drive and making sure it ran smoothly, he said, his tone cooler now and more matter-of-fact. Alice and Terry were busy women, with families to watch after, and couldn’t manage everything by themselves. Anyone who wanted to volunteer to assist them should check in at the church office after the service. Then he announced the special collection and called on everybody to contribute, to get the drive off to a running start. Ushers started down the aisles, passing polished offertory plates from row to row, and as Quinette watched men reaching for their wallets, women opening their purses, she heard a voice. It was her own voice, but it was coming from outside of herself, telling her that here was what she had been seeking ever since she’d been saved: a real purpose, a cause she could devote herself to, and this as well: a channel for the restless energies that tempted her to backslide. She didn’t wait for Pastor Tom to return to his office but approached him at the church door, as he was saying good-bye to his flock. He looked at her and said, “I knew you’d be the first, you’re just who I had in mind when I asked for volunteers.”

How could she sum up all that in a soundbite?

“It was the right thing to do,” she replied to Phyllis’s question. “I’m a Christian, these people here are Christians—”

“Not all of them, maybe not even most of them,” Phyllis interrupted.

“Excuse me?”

“Some of them practice their traditional religions. Nature-worshippers, ancestor-worshippers, old-fashioned pagans. You didn’t know that? Did the kids in your Sunday school know that?”

There was a slight, scornful curl to the reporter’s thin lips, a vague hint of ridicule in the way she’d spoken.

Flustered, Quinette didn’t know what to say. She and everyone in the congregation assumed the slaves were Christians, because that’s what the newspaper had said—the story the girl had brought to class.

“If you had known that, and all the people who contributed to your drive, do you think it would have made a difference?” Phyllis asked into her silence. “Would you still have raised five thousand dollars?”

A dislike of Phyllis rose, a hot little flame. The woman had made her feel dumb and look dumb.

“Slavery is a violation of human rights, and last we checked, these people are human beings,” Ken Eismont declared in the hard, no-nonsense voice he could put on when he needed to. He’d been standing a little ways behind Quinette all the time, and she could have kissed him for rescuing her.

He gave the reporter a brief lecture about how the Arabs had raided Dinkaland for centuries, stealing cattle, capturing women and children, making concubines out of the women, and forcing the children to gather firewood and tend livestock. It was like a tradition, so much so that the Arab word for Dinka—for all black people—was
abid,
slave. Slavery had been abolished in Sudan seventy-odd years ago, he said, but then the new Islamist government revived it, for political reasons. It supplied the Arab tribes with horses and modern weapons, it ordered them where to raid and when.