Mr. Potato Head

Mr. Potato Head is an American toy consisting of a plastic model of a potato which can be decorated with a variety of plastic parts that can attach to the main body. These parts usually include ears, eyes, shoes, a hat, a nose, and a mouth. The toy was invented and developed by George Lerner in 1949, and first manufactured and distributed by Hasbro in 1952.^[1] Mr. Potato Head was the first toy advertised on television^[2][3] and has remained in production since its debut. The toy was originally produced as separate plastic parts with pushpins that could be stuck into a real potato or other vegetable. However, due to complaints regarding rotting vegetables and new government safety regulations, Hasbro began including a plastic potato body within the toy set.^[4]

Over the years, the original toy was joined by Mrs. Potato Head and supplemented with accessories such as a car and a boat trailer. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head may be best known for their appearances in the Toy Story franchise. Additionally, in 1998 The Mr. Potato Head Show aired, but was short lived with only one season being produced.^[5] As one of the prominent marks of Hasbro, a Mr. Potato Head balloon has also joined others in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.^[6] Today, Mr. Potato Head can still be seen adorning hats, shirts, and ties. Toy Story Midway Mania at California Adventure Park in DisneylandCalifornia also features a large talking Mr. Potato Head.

More on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Potato_Head

Nikita Khrushchev

Khrushchev was leader of the Soviet Union from 1955 until 1964, succeeding Joseph Stalin. He presided over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born in 1894 into a poor family near Kursk in south-western Russia. He received very little formal education. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.

In 1929, Khrushchev moved to Moscow to attend the Stalin Industrial Academy. In 1931, he began to work full-time for the Communist Party, rising through its ranks to become first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee in 1938. The following year he became a member of the Politburo, the highest decision-making body of the Communist Party. During World War Two, Khrushchev worked as a political commissar in the army.

Stalin died in March 1953. Khrushchev became leader of the party shortly afterwards, but it took him several years to consolidate his position. In February 1956, he made a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, denouncing Stalin. It caused a sensation in the Communist Party and in the West, although Khrushchev failed to mention his own role in the Stalinist terror.

The speech initiated a campaign of 'de-Stalinisation'. Khrushchev also attempted to improve Soviet living standards and allow greater freedom in cultural and intellectual life. In the mid-1950s, he launched his 'Virgin Lands' campaign to encourage farming on previously uncultivated land in the Kazakh Republic (Kazakhstan). He invested in the Soviet space programme, resulting in the 1957 flight of Sputnik I, the first spacecraft to orbit the earth.

In relations with the West, Khrushchev's period in office was marked by a series of crises - the shooting down of an American U2 spy-plane over the Soviet Union in 1960, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, most significantly, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Despite this, Khrushchev also attempted to pursue a policy of co-existence with the West. This change in doctrine, together with Khrushchev's rejection of Stalinism, led to a split with Communist China in 1960.

Significantly, Khrushchev was not prepared to loosen the grip of the Soviet Union on its satellite states in Eastern Europe and, in 1956, an uprising in Hungary against Communist rule was brutally suppressed.

By 1964, Khrushchev had alienated much of the Soviet elite and was forced to retire by opponents led by Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev died on 11 September 1971 in Moscow

Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew is a fictional character in various mystery series. She was created by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate book packaging firm. The character first appeared in 1930. The books have beenghostwritten by a number of authors and are published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Over the decades the character has evolved in response to changes in American culture and tastes. The books were extensively revised, beginning in 1959, largely to eliminate racist stereotypes, with arguable success. Many scholars agree that in the revision process, the heroine's original, outspoken character was toned down and made more docile, conventional, and demure. In the 1980s a new series was created, The Nancy Drew Files, which featured an older and more professional Nancy as well as romantic plots. In 2004 the original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series, begun in 1930, was ended and a new series, Girl Detective, was launched, with an updated version of the character who drives a hybrid electric vehicle and uses a cell phone. Illustrations of the character have also evolved over time, from portrayals of a fearless, active young woman to a fearful or passive one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew




The History of Nancy Drew

For over 80 years, Nancy Drew has trailblazed through generations, her enduring and forever timeless quality a huge part of her appeal. She endured through the depression era of the 1930's and the war-torn 1940's when many other series were discontinued and waned in popularity. There are many factors that have led to the success of Nancy.In the beginning she was just a name. Just a few pages of plot at the hands of creator Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate. She debuted at a time when girls were ready for something different--something that gave them higher ideals. Nancy was the embodiment of independence, pluck, and intelligence and that was what many little girls craved to be like and to emulate.
It was Mildred A. Wirt Benson, who breathed such a fiesty spirit into Nancy's character. Mildred wrote 23 of the original 30 Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. It was this characterization that helped make Nancy an instant hit. The Stratemeyer Syndicate's devotion to the series over the years under the reigns of Harriet Stratemeyer Adams helped to keep the series alive and on store shelves for each succeeding generation of girls and boys. Nancy was always Harriet's favorite. Harriet's dedication to the series helped tremendously in ensuring that Nancy is still around today and likely will be for many years to come.
The original publishers, Grosset & Dunlap, played a huge role in the success of Nancy Drew. From their marketing strategies to their many salesmen, they kept the series in widespread distribution so that children from all around the country and later in foreign countries could discover Nancy's exciting world.
It was Grosset & Dunlap who helped choose the original artist, Russell H. Tandy, to illustrate the series. His illustrations have been a huge factor in Nancy's success. They were sophisticated and classy. They brought to life the character of Nancy very memorably and no doubt helped sales as children were attracted to the glamorous covers.
Each succeeding generation of women and men who read the books as children, have passed them down to siblings, to children, to grandchildren and have kept alive the memories of reading Nancy as a child. Nostalgia plays a large factor in the continuing success of the series, which is still published today by Simon & Schuster, who helped bring Nancy Drew into the modern era.This section will be a brief highlight of some of these key players in the success of the Nancy Drew series. A time line below will chronicle the major events in the history of Nancy Drew...


http://www.nancydrewsleuth.com/history.html





In 2007 they made a movie about Nancy Drew, starring Emma Roberts.

Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Emery Lumumba

b. July 2, 1925, Onalua, Belgian Congo [now Congo (Kinshasa)]
d. January 1961, Katanga province

Patrice Emery Lumumba

African nationalist leader, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (June-September 1960). Forced out of office during a political crisis, he was assassinated a short time later.


Lumumba was born in the village of Onalua in Kasai province, Belgian Congo. He was a member of the small Batetela tribe, a fact that was to become significant in his later political life. His two principal rivals, Moise Tshombe, who led the breakaway of the Katanga province, and Joseph Kasavubu, who later became the nation's president, both came from large, powerful tribes from which they derived their major support, giving their political movements a regional character. In contrast, Lumumba's movement emphasized its all-Congolese nature.


More on: http://www.africawithin.com/lumumba/historical_bio.htm
                  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba

An interesting article I found:

Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century

The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the hero of Congolese independence, took place 50 years ago today 
(date of the article: 1/17/2011)

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of theDemocratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.

Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as "the most important assassination of the 20th century". The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader.

For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.

When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals , and hired killers.

In Congo, Lumumba's assassination is rightly viewed as the country's original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence (on 30 June, 1960), it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed, as well as a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.

The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under four separate governments: the central government in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville); a rival central government by Lumumba's followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville); and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai. Since Lumumba's physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country. These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.

No sooner did this unification process end than a radical social movement for a "second independence" arose to challenge the neocolonial state and its pro-western leadership. This mass movement of peasants, workers, the urban unemployed, students and lower civil servants found an eager leadership among Lumumba's lieutenants, most of whom had regrouped to establish a National Liberation Council (CNL) in October 1963 in Brazzaville, across the Congo river from Kinshasa. The strengths and weaknesses of this movement may serve as a way of gauging the overall legacy of Patrice Lumumba for Congo and Africa as a whole.

The most positive aspect of this legacy was manifest in the selfless devotion of Pierre Mulele to radical change for purposes of meeting the deepest aspirations of the Congolese people for democracy and social progress. On the other hand, the CNL leadership, which included Christophe Gbenye and Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was more interested in power and its attendant privileges than in the people's welfare. This is Lumumbism in words rather than in deeds. As president three decades later, Laurent Kabila did little to move from words to deeds.

More importantly, the greatest legacy that Lumumba left for Congo is the ideal of national unity. Recently, a Congolese radio station asked me whether the independence of South Sudan should be a matter of concern with respect to national unity in the Congo. I responded that since Patrice Lumumba has died for Congo's unity, our people will remain utterly steadfast in their defence of our national unity.

• Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination

Bethlehem, GA

Bethlehem, GA is the small town in the United States, where family Price comes from.
"The little town under the star"


Bethlehem is located in Barrow County, an incorporated town on Georgia State Highway 11, 4 miles South of Winder, 9 miles North of Monroe and 18 miles from Athens off Highway 316. Several historians agree the town received its name from the Bethlehem Methodist Church which was established in 1796. The suggestion for naming the town came from Judson L. Moore, well-known gospel songwriter and publisher who lived there. The street names in town are all names from the story of the birth of Christ.

Jimmy Crow law

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. The separation led to treatment, financial support and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades.


The name Jim Crow is often used to describe the segregation laws, rules, and customs which arose after Reconstruction ended in 1877 and continued until the mid-1960s. How did the name become associated with these "Black Codes" which took away many of the rights which had been granted to Blacks through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments?




"Come listen all you galls and boys,
I'm going to sing a little song,
My name is Jim Crow.
Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."


These words are from the song, "Jim Crow," as it appeared in sheet music written by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice.



More on: http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/who.htm
                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

no comments...

fufu

Fufu (Foo-foo, Foufou, Foutou, fu fu) is to Western and Central Africa cooking what mashed potatoes are to traditional European-American cooking. There are Fufu-like staples all over Sub-Saharan Africa: i.e., Eastern Africa's Ugali and Southern Africa's Sadza (which are usually made from groundcorn (maize), though West Africans use maize to make Bankuand Kenkey, and sometimes use maize to make Fufu). Fufu is a starchy accompaniment for stews or other dishes with sauce. To eat fufu: use your right hand to tear off a bite-sized piece of the fufu, shape it into a ball, make an indentation in it, and use it to scoop up the soup or stew or sauce, or whatever you're eating.

In Western Africa, Fufu is usually made from yams, sometimes combined with plantains. In Central Africa, Fufu is often made from cassava tubers, like Baton de Manioc. Other fufu-like foods, Liberia's dumboy for example, are made from cassava flour. Fufu can also be made from semolina, rice, or even instant potato flakes or Bisquick. All over Africa, making fufu involves boiling, pounding, and vigorous stirring until the fufu is thick and smooth.

More on: http://www.congocookbook.com/staple_dish_recipes/fufu.html

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Wasilyevich Kandinsky was born on December, 16th (4), 1866 in Moscow, in a well-to-do family of a businessman in a good cultural environment. In 1871 the family moved to Odessa where his father ran his tea factory. There, alongside with attending a classical gymnasium (grammar school), the boy learned to play the piano and the cello and took to drawing with a coach. "I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of the reality", he wrote later. In Kandinsky's works of his childhood period we can find rather specific color combinations, which he explained by the fact that "each color lives by its mysterious life". 

However, Wassily's parents saw him in the future as a lawyer. In the year of 1886 he went to Moscow and entered Law Faculty of Moscow University. Graduating with honors, six years later Wassily married his cousin, Anna Chimyakina. In 1893 he became Docent (Associate Professor) of Law Faculty and continued teaching. In 1896 the famous in Derpt University in Tartu, where at that time the process of russification was taking place, a thirty-year-old Kandinsky was appointed Professor to the Department of Law, but at this particular time he decided to give up a successful career to devote himself completely to painting. Later on Kandinsky recollected two events, which had affected this decision: his visiting an exhibition of the French impressionists in Moscow in 1895 and an emotional shock he experienced from K. Monet's, "Haystacks", and an impression of Rihard Wagner's "Lohengrin" at the Bolshoi Theatre. 


More from : http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/

Forest Edge 1903

Odessa. Port 1898

nkisi

The term nkisi is the general name for a a spirit,or for any object that spirit inhabits. It is frequently applied to a variety of objects used throughout the Congo Basin in Central Africa thought to contain spiritual powers or spirits. The term and its concept have passed with the slave trade to the Americas, especially Latin America (in Palo Mayombe the spirits of nkisi are often called "mpungo"). The current meaning of the term derives from the root, *-kitį- referring to a spiritual entity, or material objects in which it is manifested or inhabits in Proto-Njila, an ancient subdivision of the Bantu language family.
Nkisi was a little gift Nelson gave to Ruth May when she was really sick. 


More info on : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nkisi

hmmm...

Bataan death march:
was the forcible transfer, by the Imperial Japanese Army, of 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war after the three-month Battle of Bataanin the Philippines during World War II, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of prisoners.The 128 km (80 mi) march was characterized by wide-ranging physical abuse and murder, and resulted in very high fatalities inflicted upon prisoners and civilians alike by the Japanese Army, and was later judged by an Allied military commission to be a Japanese war crime. more on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March

Significant sentences from book five EXODUS

• The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as reals as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be. Orleanna, pg 381.
• We only took what we could carry on out backs. Leah, pg 390.
• In all our time in the Congo I'd been awestruck by what the ladies could carry this way, but had never once tried it myself. What a revelatioin, that I could carry my own parcel like amy woman here! After the first several miles I ceased to feel the weight on my head at all. Leah, pg 390.
• I ahve only the haziestrecollection of waving at my mother and sister in a rising cloud of diesel exhaust and mosquitoes as they began their slow, permanent exodus from the Congo. I wish I could remember their faces, Adah's especially. Did she feel I'd helped to save her? Leah, pg 399.
• For the last entire year I have worn my little white gloves and pillbox hat to the First Episcopal Church in Johannesburg and recited it right along with the best of them. Rachel Price Axelroo, pg 402.
• Not that I would have minded the company of simple minds, but I needed to flee from Bethlehem, where the walls are made of eyes stacked in rows like little bricks, and every breath of air has the sour taste of someone's recent gossip. Adah Price, pg 407.
• In organic chemistry, invertebrate zoology, and the inspired symmetry on Mendelian genetics, I have found a religion that serves. I recite the Periodic Table of Elements like a prayer; I take my examinations as Holy Communion, and the pass of the first semester was a sacrament. Adah Price, pg 409.
• Betrayal is a friend i have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with the clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune...As it turns out, though, betrayal can also breed penitents, shrewd minor politicians, and ghosts. Our family seems to have produces one of each. Adah, pg 414.
• When we're alone in the laundry room, she asks me how do I know I'm in love. "I must be. What else would make you stupid enough to put hundreds of people in danger?" Leah, pg 416.
• If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree. Rachel Axelroot, pg 454.
• I can recall, years ago, watching Rachel cry real tears over a burn hole in her green dress while, just outside our doorm completely naked children withered from the wholes in their empty stomachsm and I seriously wondered if Rachel's heart were the size of a thimble. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 430.
• When the neighbours or students ask me my nationality, I tell them I came from a country that no longer exists. they can believe it. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 433.
• We have manioc and yams to fill our bellies, but protein is scarcer than diamonds. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 436.
• "But, aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doeasn't really need?" Pascal. Adah Price, pg 441.
• Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirts and bone dust to quiet the fire in their emty stomach lining? Adah Price, pg 441.
• What I carried out of Congo on my crooked little back is a ferocious uncertainty about the worth of a life. And now I am becoming a doctor. How very sensible of me. Adah Price, pg 443.
• Our house is sturdy, with concrete floor and a tin roof. We live in what would be called, in America, a slum, though here it's an island of relative luxury in the outskirts of la cite, where the majority have a good deal less in the way of roofing, to say the least. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 446.
• "I thought you said the Congolese don't believe in keeping rickes to themselves," I told Anatole once, inclined toward the argument. But he just laughed. "Who? Mobutu? He is not even African now." "Well, what is he, then?" "He is the on wife belonging to many white men." Leah Price Ngemba, pg 455-456.
• Remy, my third husband, was very devoted. He was and older man. My life has been 101 calamities with at least half of them in the marriage department, but finally I got lucky in love, with Remy Fairley. He at least had the decency to die and leame me the Equatorial. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 461.
• Oh, I wokr myself to the bone, keeping this business open seven days a week and the weekends. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 462.
• We're all keeping out hopes up for family relations, I guess, but our true family fell apart after Ruth May's tragic death. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 464-465
• What happened to us in the Congo was simply athe bad luck of two opposite worlds crashing into each other, causing tragedy. Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley, pg 465.
• The citizens of my homeland regarded my husband and children as primitives, or freaks.On the streets, from a distance, they'd scowl at us, thinking we were merely the scourge they already knew and loathed - the mixed-race couple, with mongrel children as advertisment of our sind. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 468-469.
• Now, husbandless in this new neighbourhood, my skin glows like a bare bulb. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 472.
• They know just one thing about foreigners, and that is everything we've ever  done to them. I can't possibly inprove Anatole's standing in their eyes. I must be the weakness that brought him down. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 472.
• This was the first and the absolute last time I am going to participate within a reunion of my sisters, I've just returned from a rendezvous with Leah and Adah that was simply a sensational failure. Rachel Price, pg 478.
• All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it." Adah Price, pg 492.
• Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking. Adah Price, pg 492.
• No one else misses Ada. Not even Mother. She seems thoroughly pleased to see the srumpled bird she delivered finally straighten up and fly right. Adah Price, pg 492.
• Congo was a woman in shadows, dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder. Adah Price, pg 495.
• Tall and straigh I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power in in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are out successes. Adah Price, pg 496.
• I have four sons, all named for men we lost to was: Pascal, Patrice, Martin-Lothaire, and Nataniel. Leah Price Ngemba, pg 497.

Significant sentences from book four BEL AND THE SERPENT.

• The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin. Orleanna, pg 317.
• That Sunday morning Tata Ndu himself sat on the front bench, Tata Ndu rarely darkened the door of the church, so this was clearly a sign, though who could say whether a good or a bad one. Leah, pg 328.
• My sister, little Miss The-Lord-Is-My-Shepherd, now thinks she is Robin Hood. Rachel, pg 335.
• It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them. Rachel, pg 337.
• In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and overstrong will. But in Congo i am those things perfectly united: Adah. Adah, pg 343.
• Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not. Adah, pg 345.
• I killed my first game, a beautiful tawny beast with curved horns and a black diagonal stripe across his flank: a young male impala...Even a playground bully will want his mother in the bitter end. Leah, pg 348.
• I stood and prayed to the Lord Jesus if he was listening to take ma home to Georgia, where I could sit down in a White Castle and order a hamburger without having to see its eyes roll back in its head and the blood come spurting out of its corpse. Rachel, pg 350.
• After the hunt ended there was supposed to be a celebration, but before the old men could drag their drums out under the tree and get the dancing started, it had already turned into a melee of screaming and fighting. Leah, pg 352.
• And so it came to pass that the normal, happy event of dividing food after a hunt became a war of insults and rage and starving bellies. Leah, pg 354.
• Someone could have remarked that it is Leah who wears pants in our family, which is true. Rachel, pg 356.
• Leah says in Congo there's only two ages of people: babies that have to be carried, and people that stand up and fend for themselves. No in-between phase, No sich thing as childhood. Sometimes I think she's right. Rachel, pg 358.
• Strange to say, if you do not stamp yourself with the wors exhilarated or terrified, those two things feel exactly the same in a body. Adah, pg 361.
• Nelson knelt too, putting his face close to hers. He opened his mouth to speak, to reassure her, I imagine, for he loved Ruth May. I know this. I've seen how he sings to her and protects her. Leah, pg 363.
• 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. Adah, pg 365.
• There's a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true but you haven't told anyone yet. Rachel, pg 366.
• For once he had no words to instruct our minds and improve our souls, no parable that would turn Ruth May's death by snakebite into a lesson on the Glory of God. Leah, pg 368

Significant sentences from book three THE JUDGES

• For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. Orleanna, pg 191.
• Jackson, Mississippi, in the Great Depression wasn't so different from the Congo thirty years later, except that in Jackson we knew of some that had plenty and I guess that did make us restless from time to time. Orleanna, pg 192.
• I accepted the Lord as my personal Saviour, for He finally brought me a Maytag washer. Orleanna, pg 201.
• Whenever you have plenty of something, you have to share it with the fyata, she said. (And Mama Mwanza is not even Christian!) Really you know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feel sorry for you. Leah, pg 207.
• He clocked his tongue the way Mama Tataba used to, and told me, "Leba, the gods you do not pay are the ones that curse you best."
• The things we do not know, independently and in unison as a family, would fill two separate baskets, each with a large hole in the bottom." Adah, pg 209.
• He went away on the airplane abd I said, "Mama, I hope he never comes back." We cried then. Ruth May, pg 215.
• Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. Adah, pg 218.
• "God works, as is very well known, in mysterious ways." Adah, pg 217.
• "And I will bake the bread. Mother will show me how," Rachel announced, as if that finally solved all our troubles. Adah, pg 221.
• That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a think like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this."Leah, pg 235.
• He said now if anything happens to me, if I start fixing to die or something, hold on to this tight and bambula! Ruth May will disappear. Ruth May, pg 239.
• She looked like Cindarella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among ashes." Leah, pg 242.
• They really were leaving, but Mother seemed just plain desperate to keep the conversation going. Rachel, pg 257.
• And August brough tus no pleasant dreams at all. Adah, pg 259.
• But up until day 5 - and ever afterward, on the whole - Our Father was delighted with this new attentionfrom the chief. The Reverend cockadoodled about the house, did he. Adah, pg 260.
• Nelson, as usual, was the one who finally took pity upon our benighted stupidity and told us what was up: kukwela. Tata Ndu wanted a wife. Adah, pg 262.
• To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second on plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you havent heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line. Leah, pg 265.
• My family is thinking og everything but my personal safety. The instants we get back to Georgia I am filing for an adoption. Rachel, 268.
• And if that wasn't already the living end, now my knight in shining armor has arrive: Mr. Stinkpot Axelroot. Rachel, pg 268.
• Who is real Rachel Price? But I won't tell her. I prefer to remain anomalous. Rachel, pg 270.
• He told Father Rachel would have to have the circus mission where they cut her so she wouldn't want to run around with people's husbands. Ruth May, pg 271.
• Father says white people have to stick together now so we have to be Mr. Axelroot's friend. But I don't want to. When we were waiting in the airplane, he put his hands on me hard. Ruth May, pg 273.
• SEVENTEEN! I am now one score and seven years old. Or so I thought, until Leah informed me that means twenty-seven. If God really auns to punish you, you'll know it when He send you not one but two sisters who are younger than you but already have memorized the entire dictionary. I just thank heavens that only on of them talks. Rachel, pg 274.
• "TATA JESUS IN BANGALA!" declares the Reverend every Sunday. Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Adah, pg 276.
• My hunt-gooddess twin and I are now more distant kin than ever, I suppose, except in this one regard: she is beginning to be looked upon in out village as bizarre. Adah, pg 278.
• Most of all I want to ask Anatole this one unaskable question: Does he hate me for being white? Leah, pg 279.
• "My father thinks the Congo is just lagging behind and he van help bring it up to snuff. Which is crazy. It's like he's trying to put rubber tires on a horse."Leah, pg 284.
• So we strolled out into the unbearable heat of August twenty-first, Nineteen-thousand-and-sixty. Rachel, pg 288.
• Benduka is the bent-sideways girl who walks slowly, but benduka is also the name of a fast-flying bird, the swallow with curved whings who darts crookedly quick through trees near water.  Adah, pg 295.
• How could I leave Adah behind again?Once in the womb, once to the lion, and now like Simon Peter I had denied her for the third time. Leah, pg 300.
• I THOUGHT I HAD DIED and gone to hell. But it's worse then that - I'm alive in hell. Rachel, pg 301
• It hurt, the little ants were biting us all over bad and it burnde. That time Leah fed one to the ant lion, Jesus saw that. Now his friends are all coming back to eat us up. Ruth May, pg 303.
• That night marks my life's dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began. Adah, pg 306.
• The night felt like a dream rushing past me too fast, like a stream of flood, and in this uncontrollable dream Anatole was the one person who cared enough to help me. Leah, pg 308.
• This is what I must have learned, the night God turned his back on me: how to foretell the future in chicken bones. Leah, pg 311.