“You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos you may be a million publicity officers for the Americans; you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an elite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”
Francis starts showing his true colors almost as soon as Adah joins him in England. Also of significance is that this quote is not the first occasion of the titular phrase, nor will it be the last. It is, though, the most direct and pointed usage of the term. While Francis is unquestionably wrong about many things, he is right about England. The dream that Adah starts out with is one in which England represents an almost magical escape from the brutal patriarchy of Nigeria, but the reality is far closer to the portrait that Francis paints for her in which she is destined to always be a second-class citizen due either to being an immigrant, Black, or a woman. Adah hates that Francis is mostly right about this and that he has convinced himself of the veracity of the oppressors' opinions of them, and does her best to push back against this mindset for the sake of both herself and children.
Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that the whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why, then did they claim to be superior?
Adah has an epiphany when dealing with the reprehensible Trudy: how can all whites be considered definitively superior to all Blacks when clearly there are many whites who are demonstrably inferior to other whites, who are themselves demonstrably inferior to many Blacks? This moment is only one of many epiphanies and moments of shock and surprise that Adah will have in this culture clash of Nigeria and England.
Did she not feel totally fulfilled when she had completed the manuscript, just as if it were another baby she had had?
Adah has always dreamed of being a writer but does not have the opportunity to practice her writing until she is on maternity leave with her fourth child. She pens a novel based on her own life, pouring everything she has into its pages. Here, she equates it to a human child—something that is inextricably part of her, something she conceived and grew and birthed, something that was occasionally painful to endure but always beautiful and meaningful. Thus, when Francis burns the manuscript she is absolutely gutted, for it feels like he murdered one of her own children.
Her children were going to be different. They were all going to be black, they were going to enjoy being black, be proud of being black, a black of a different breed.
Adah despises Francis's willingness to internalize the ideas of Black/immigrant inferiority, and here vows that she will not let her children grow up that way. She is not ignorant, of course, and admits to struggling with such thoughts herself, but ultimately she hopes for a different future for her children, and sees that it is her role to foster positive thinking and self-acceptance.
London, having killed Adah's congregational God, created instead a personal God who loomed large and really alive.
Several times in the novel Adah struggles with religion, trying to decide who she thinks Jesus is and what he means to her, what is "sinful" and what is not, and how to express devotion and penitence. Ultimately, she decides that London does not offer religious institutions that foster intimacy, community, and tolerance; they are cold and drab and do not see her for who she is. Instead, she turns to the Presence that she has listened to since childhood, nurturing it and letting it guide her thoughts and actions.
They were going to get the room they were asking for. Pa Noble was too old for Sue.
The reader has to read between the lines here: Adah is saying that Sue is not sexually satisfied with Pa Noble and likes the idea of having the young and virile Francis in her house; this means she is fine giving the Black couple rooms in their home. This quote also reinforces the double standard the patriarchy imposes, which is that men can have as many affairs as they want and women can only do so if they're "whores" or other disreputable women like Sue. Adah is not allowed to do anything like that for fear of reprisal, and Emecheta does not even begin to explore a situation in which Adah wants to be with another man.
Hunger drove Francis to work as a clerical officer in the post office. Adah's hopes rose. This might save the marriage after all.
This line of thinking comes after a litany of Francis's abuses, including hitting Adah, insulting her, shaming her, and much more. It is even after Adah vows to end the marriage because Francis publicly humiliated her after the cap incident. Why, then, is she still hoping that the marriage can be saved? It may be a desire for the children to have a father in their lives, it may be a microscopic amount of love left, or it may be patriarchy, deeply embedded in Adah's psyche to the extent that she is still blaming herself for the marriage's failure and still hoping to please Francis. It is easy to fault Adah for being weak in terms of not sloughing off Francis earlier, but Emecheta suggests there is much more at play here.
This old friend of Adah's paid for the taxi that took her home from Camden Town because he thought she was still with her husband.
This is an admittedly rather odd, abrupt end to the novel, and one that might be a tad confusing for some readers, especially as Adah frames this encounter as "Fate" and as a wild true story one might read in the magazine. An interpretation is as follows: the man thinks she is still married to Francis, not knowing that she has left him. She needs money to get home. He thinks it is acceptable to pay for her taxi since she is a married woman, whereas if she were single it may be considered forward. This is ironic since, again, Adah is for all intents and purposes not married to Francis anymore, and that it is the loathsome Francis's existence at all that gets Adah the money to take a cab home (though if Francis hadn't done what he did, she would not be in that exact spot at that exact time).
Then the thought suddenly struck her. Yes, she would go to school.
One way to read the novel is as a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age story in which we follow the protagonist's journey to adulthood and selfhood. Childhood usually does include an encounter with education, with the child discovering learning/reading. Adah is an apposite example of this, as she decides she does not want to be left out of school and cleverly gets herself enrolled. She excels as well, and then parlays that success into a career as a librarian.
So, sorry as she was for making a fool out of an old doctor, this was just one of the cases where honesty would not have been the best policy.
Adah has many salient character traits, but some of the most impressive are her ambition and her pragmatism. She knows that her new pregnancy might jeopardize her job, and she also knows that lying and taking advantage of people are wrong; however, she decides that she will do what needs to be done for herself and her family (within reason, of course; she would not hurt someone else). Her flirtation with the old doctor is harmless to him and has an overwhelmingly positive outcome for her. This instance is the perfect exemplar of her motto of being as harmless as a dove and cunning as a serpent.
