Summary
Childhood
Adah tries to remember when her dream of going to the United Kingdom first began. She starts with childhood, explaining that since she was born a girl she was a great disappointment to her family and tribe.
She is a young girl when her mother and the other society women prepare themselves for the return visit of a lawyer to Lagos; he was from their town of Ibuza, which makes them full of pride. Her parents always touted the virtues of Ibuza over Lagos, and the Ibuza women are very excited for this lawyer, who had spent time in the United Kingdom. They talk of this place with reverence and Adah hears this in their voices and marvels at it.
Unfortunately, Adah has to go to school the day of the lawyer’s visit. School is important to the Ibo people, who know that it saves them from disease and poverty. Boy, Adah’s brother, already goes to an expensive school named Ladi-Lak, but it was not certain if Adah was going to go because she is a girl. She had decided to attend on her own one day, sneaking off to the local Methodist School around the corner. When she showed up, the children looked at her with amusement, but Mr. Cole, the teacher, took it in stride. He told her he would be happy to teach her if her parents allowed her to come. Adah worried about what Ma would say (and knows now her mother was responsible for her own poor ideas about women). Ma was punished by the police for child neglect, and forced to swallow gari, a white flour. Yet they told her to send Adah to school because she looked like a girl keen to learn, which impressed Ma and she relented. Even Pa, who gave her a few perfunctory hits with the cane, started treating her differently.
Adah started school, but Pa died not long after, dashing her hopes of going to Ladi-Lak. Boy was also withdrawn, and both were sent to an inferior school. Adah had just started, which is why Ma does not want her to attend the lawyer’s visit.
The women arrive at the wharf, dressed colorfully and waving gourds. Europeans gawk at them and take pictures; these are the days before Nigerian Independence when many Europeans are constantly going to and fro.
Adah reflects on how the men said that it was a good thing Lawyer Nweze did not bring a white woman with him or else Oboshi, the river goddess, would have sent leprosy on her. She finds it amusing how her countrymen still hold on to these sorts of superstitions; it seems a “doleful grip” (16).
The talk about Nweze goes on for months, and this is when Adah decides she has to go to the United Kingdom someday. It is the “pinnacle of her ambition” (16).
Escape Into Elitism
After Pa’s death, Ma is inherited by his brother. Boy is sent to live with one of Pa’s cousins, and Adah goes to live with Pa’s elder brother as a servant. She is allowed to continue school so her dowry will be bigger.
She misses “her old school, the cleanliness, the orderliness and the brightness” (17) but she has to go to a new one. Her work for her uncle is laborious, but for girls like her, this is simply custom and she does not question it. Girls are “taught to be very useful early in life” (18) and she is grateful she is industrious.
Ma is unhappy with her new husband and money for Boy’s schooling is running low. Talk turns to Adah getting a job, which frightens her. She hates Ma for marrying again and decide she will never marry any man whom she will have to serve and treat as master. This gives her an obstinate reputation, and her number of suitors dwindles.
Her dream also gets a small dent when, one day, she is caught laughing at the headmaster when he is talking to the children about secondary schools. She was not actually laughing at him but was listening to “the Presence,” the voice in her mind that is now telling her to go to the best school, but the headmaster is enraged by her behavior and beats and insults her.
Adah still desires to take the exam to get into the school, however, but needs two shillings. She takes it from the money given to her to buy steaks for the family. They know she is lying so her cousin Vincent canes her. He is surprised she will not cry, but she is actually happy to be keeping the two shillings so she does not crack.
There are other concerns, such as how she will pay the fees and how to go take the exam. She thinks she can get a scholarship, and as for the exam she decides not to lie about it. But the family is not particularly interested in her, and she takes the exam and passes. She also gets a full scholarship with board.
This is when she is overcome by the Presence, a companion that is always with her and comforts her. Adah is happy at the Methodist’s Girls’ School but time passes quickly and she is not prepared for life outside. She plans on continuing her education at Ibadan University, but she knows that she cannot live alone because it is not allowed, and she needs a quiet space to study. Thus, she decides she must marry.
Adah chooses Francis, a quiet young man preparing to be an accountant. He is not old and bald, and clearly has a good future ahead of him. The two are very young to be marrying and their wedding is a rather amusing affair since they forgot to buy rings. Adah is unhappy at first, but soon she has a daughter, Titi, and both parents are delighted.
Adah is honored with a job as a librarian in the American Consulate Library and earns a large salary. At first Francis is disconcerted, but his Pa tells him this is a good thing because her money is his money. The couple talk about what to do with their prosperity, especially since she is going to have another baby. She spontaneously tells Francis about her dream of going to the United Kingdom, and he excitedly embraces it as his own.
They decide he will go first and she will send him money. He will continue studying for accountancy and she will read librarianship. Adah is happy to do this arrangement because everything she does will go toward “making her young family into a family of Ibo elites just like Lawyer Nweze, who by then had become a minister in Northern Nigeria” (25). It seems as if her dreams are coming true, for she has servants and a job she loves and is easily able to provide for her husband and children.
Later Adah wonders why she was not content with that life—with her lovely in-laws, support, comfort—but in her heart she knows it is superficial. She hates how decisions eventually had to be made by Big Pa, Francis’s father. She wants them to live their own lives.
Thankfully, Big Pa agrees they can go to the United Kingdom. Adah is elated; she is going to be a “been-to” now, the term for people who had “been to” England. But Francis clarifies—only he can go because Big Pa does not think women should go, so Francis will live there and she will support him and then he will come home in a few years. Crushed, Adah cannot believe her dream has led her to this dead end. She pretends to be for the plan, even through the expensive process of getting Francis ready to go. All the while, though, she is planning on how to work her in-laws.
On the day of Francis’s departure, the family gathers to bid him farewell. The wives are supposed to cry from love but Adah cannot do it until after he leaves, for which she is chided. The plane looks like a coffin to her and she is frightened and sorrowful because it reminds her of her father and makes her worry Francis might die as well.
Time passes. She has their son Vicky, sends Francis money, and works. Francis passes his examination for Part I and Adah knows she must act. She cannot wait here in Lagos for him to work on Part II, for it would be at least four years. She goes to her mother-in-law and makes the case that she will send money back and Ma will be envied and the sisters will go to secondary school and then when Adah returns someday she will make even more money. Ma is convinced, and finally Pa is as well.
As for the children, Adah has them immunized and pays for a first-class passage for them all. From the deck of the ship with Titi and Vicky, she sees Boy wiping away tears. Leaving her in-laws is not sad, but it does get to her when she sees Boy, for the two of them were the only ones left of her own family. She is aware of how things are indelibly changing, and hopes to make her brother proud.
There is no time for self-pity, she counsels herself. Things seem to be going well; she is treated like an elite on the ship and Francis has a good future ahead of him. A smile crosses her face when she thinks of how she told the in-laws they would only stay for a year and six months. She knows that she must be “as cunning as a serpent and as harmless as a dove” (34).
Analysis
As a child, Adah demonstrates most of the same traits she will as an adult. She is determined, tenacious, intelligent, ambitious, and pragmatic. She knows education is a necessity, so she sneaks away to go to school when she is very young. She also pursues secondary school, doing what she needs to do to take the exam—taking a bit of money from her uncle’s household—and passing the exam to get a scholarship. Her goal of being a librarian never fades, and she works extremely hard to make it a reality. Though she isn’t really interested in marriage, she knows that she has to do it in order to continue studying. She is also able to effectively manipulate her in-laws in order to get what she wants—joining Francis in London—congratulating herself on being “as cunning as a serpent and as harmless as a dove” (34).
Her marriage will soon prove to be the most disastrous thing in Adah’s life, but to her credit, she could not have known this when she chose Francis. She likes that he is not rich or snobby, that he is quiet and studious. Even though their wedding is a bit “hilarious” (24), as she sees it, when they have their first child “she and Francis were both delighted with the baby” (24). They enjoy their early prosperity and Francis shares her dream of going to the UK. Everything seems to be mostly rosy at the end of these first two chapters, and the reader may be as surprised as Adah to see what Francis turns into.
Emecheta skillfully undergirds the sense of hopefulness Adah feels with allusions to her future problems and disappointments. Nigeria is now free from colonial rule, and there is a sense of optimism, change, and modernity sweeping the country, particularly Lagos. Adah views herself as a modern woman, and decides that “Elders or no elders, [she and Francis] were going to live their own lives” (27). She is committed to moving to “a new surroundings, a new country and among new people” (27). On the ship, she experiences what it means to be an elite, which gives her “a taste of what was to come” (34).
Yet there are warning signs that this happy future will not be easily attained. Adah sees how spoiled Francis is by his family, and how he turns to them to make big decisions. When he suggests that he go to London and she stay behind because it is what his parents want, she decries how he is “an African through and through” and that a “much more civilized man would have probably found a better way of saying this to his wife” (28). She cannot bring herself to cry when Francis departs, only seeing the tears come when she thinks of her father’s death. She laments that the “romantic side of her life…[is] shattered, like broken glass” (28) when she hears Francis tell her it is a good idea that just he go to London.
Critic Abioseh Michael Porter provides more analysis of why Adah makes the deleterious choice to marry Francis: “As descriptions of life with her husband show, she enters into a hastily arranged and ill-conceived marriage without the least idea about the real nature of love, marriage, and the related notions of individual liberty and mutual support. This situation is so because Adah has grown up in environments where she has been deprived of learning about or experiencing such concepts that are so vital for successful marital relationships. In fact, it is shown that up to the time Adah and Francis get married she has neither experienced any serious love relationship nor has she ever thought deeply about the implications of marriage. She sincerely believes that all it takes to have a successful marriage is to be married to a young spouse of modest means.” As we will see with further analyses, despite Adah’s boldness and determination and feminist assertions, she is still a psychological victim of the patriarchy in her assumptions about men and women’s roles and the institution of marriage.
