Summary
“Sorry, No Coloureds”
One morning, Francis looks downtrodden and says he has bad news. Adah knows he has a flair for the dramatic and for complaining when the world will not bend to his wishes, and she is impatient with his drawing it out. Finally he says that the landlord and landlady are kicking them out within a month. This is terrible news, but Adah is less surprised than Francis, who thought the other Yorubas in England would be on their side rather than envying them. Adah sometimes thinks more discrimination comes from the Blacks than the whites.
Looking for a new place is demoralizing. Almost all of them refuse to rent to “coloureds,” and Adah begins to despair. Everything good and pure seems to be for white people, not them. This takes a psychological toll on her and she begins to doubt herself and behave as if she did something wrong.
The landlord and landlady are thrilled to be getting rid of the proud couple and their children, as are the neighbors who are jealous and constantly sing rude songs about them.
Adah finds a notice for a vacant space nearby and decides when she calls she will make sure her voice does not sound African. The woman is happy to show her the two rooms and Adah hopes that when she sees them she will not turn them away. When she tells Francis, he is full of disbelief and wants to know the catch, but she does not tell him and hopes she will simply be successful and their marriage will remain intact.
The time arrives to meet with the woman. Adah chooses an hour when it is darker so perhaps the woman will not realize in time that they are Black. Francis is excited, and treats her and the children kindly. She wonders if maybe he does love her.
The couple walks to the neighborhood with the rooms. It is very rundown but Adah does not care because this might mean the landlady is more apt to rent to Blacks. When the landlady opens the door for them, it seems like she does not see their color at first, but when she does, it is almost like she has a seizure. Her eyes pop and she tells them hurriedly that the rooms were just let. Adah has never quite faced rejection like this, “rejection by this shrunken piece of humanity, with a shaky body and moppy hair, loose, dirty and unkempt” (77). The woman seems frightened of them, silently begging them to go as they remain standing there.
They finally walk away, Francis lost in his thoughts. Finally he mocks her that she thinks she is carrying another Jesus and she might need a new Joseph. She begins talking about how Jesus and Joseph and Mary were “coloured,” and talks on and on while an exhausted Francis listens and does not interrupt.
The Ghetto
In the 1940s when Nigeria was still a colony, a group of Nigerians came to England. They knew that colonialism would soon be too expensive to maintain and decided that they’d go to England, get law degrees, and return and rule their country in the vacuum left by the English. They would have cushy jobs and nice cars and new wives. They “abandoned all they had held dear” (80) in their quest, but only a few succeeded at this and came back. The rest failed to make it in England, got stuck in the pubs, consorted with the women in the pubs, occasionally married these women and had “half-caste” children, and saw their dream of aristocracy become “a reality of being a black, a nobody, a second-class citizen” (81).
One of these men is Mr. Noble, and Adah knew of the stories about him. He came to England to read law, failed miserably, became a lift man at a tube station, and commenced embodying stereotypes for the white men. They laughed at his childishness and nicknamed him Mr. Noble, but he didn't care that he was debasing himself because he was noticed.
One day, though, Mr. Noble boasted that he could shoulder the lift himself and was almost killed by it; his right shoulder was useless and he was let go but compensated generously for the injury. He decided to face reality and bought an old, cheap house. But there were two women living upstairs, as they were rent-controlled tenants. He thought he could get rid of them but the laws protected them and they refused to leave or take a rent increase.
This became more and more problematic as the woman Mr. Noble took up with bore him several children, so he decided on a new tactic of scaring the tenants with psychological pressure—he told them his mother was a witch in Africa and would kill them. He kept up the chicanery through a cold winter, telling the women his mother was doing this. One woman died, then the other.
The story amused people and made him popular, but he realized that no one would live in his house. It was not nice enough for white families, and Nigerians were hesitant about staying there long. This is how rooms came to be available for Adah and Francis to try and procure.
Adah asks Francis about this when they are having sex, which is the only time he will agree to do what she wants. He agrees that they can visit the Nobles.
It is a damp and windy day when they pay a visit to the Nobles’ house. It is an old structure, sandwiched like a “midget between two giants” (87) and sorely neglected. They can hear the Beatles playing inside. They have to knock many times to be heard, but finally Mr. Noble answers the door. He looks “like a black ghost, for his head was hairless, and he seems to have dyed the skin on his head black” (88). He has a croaking voice and his face is lined with the sorrows and joys of his life. He talks incessantly, as if he were a “dying old man eager to tell it all to the living world before he passed to the other side and his voice was silent forever” (88). His eyes are wicked and wise, his hands claw-like. He looks like a witch-doctor, just like people said.
He welcomes them in. The room is warm and cluttered. His wife, Sue Noble, comes in. She is white, young, and pretty. There is the air of a gypsy around her. She welcomes them fervently and Adah sees that she is “warm-hearted, kind, friendly, loud, and unreserved” (90).
Adah is nervous that she might change once she realizes they are not visitors but potential tenants, and she also tries to cover up her pregnancy. Yet Mrs. Noble notices and asks her questions about the other children. Adah is surprised that she knows, but guesses it is the Nigerian neighbors.
She listens to Mr. Noble prattle on about untrue, stereotypical, and exoticized views of his family and how he only really lived when he came to England and met Sue. Adah hates hearing this and blurts out that he might as well tell his wife his father had a tail. Mr. Noble laughs and says she is young and inexperienced. Francis jumps in to say that she is only a woman. Mrs. Noble also laughs and the way Francis looks at her, Adah can tell they are going to get the rooms.
Role Acceptance
One day the baby in her belly begins to kick gently, but the kicks turn into stronger punches. Adah is worried, since she has to work as long as possible to keep paying for rent and the children's nursery and to put away for when she is off work. Looking back, she is surprised how sure she was that it was only her responsibility to work, not Francis’s.
That morning, she arrives at the station and realizes that there is a “go-slow” by the train workers. She and Francis are cut off from all news (even though Francis sometimes went downstairs to watch television with Mrs. Noble) so she had no idea this was happening. Inside, the baby’s pushes are more and more determined.
She sits to wait, worried that Francis will be angry. She decides when the time comes that she will scream hysterically so he will see how much pain she is in and how she is not faking anything. She is worried, though, for she has heard in London that midwives give delivering mothers drugs and gas; she doesn't know when they give the gas or how much, and is worried she might die.
When Adah goes home, she has to tell Francis she did not go to work because of the train. He is still in his pajamas. He accuses her of making it up or of listening to liars. The baby nudges her painfully again but she decides she does not want to scream because of the gas. She is certain she is going to die, and worries about Titi and Vicky. But then she decides she is not going anywhere, that “she was going to live to see not just her grandchildren, but her great-grandchildren as well” (98).
Francis natters on, giving her a sermon. She pretends to listen, cursing her mother-in-law for spoiling her sons. As Francis drones on about his religious convictions recently acquired from being a Jehovah’s Witness, she thinks about what to do with the baby. She also inwardly scoffs at how religious people take a portion of the Bible and then twist it so it serves their own purposes.
Adah leaves the house and walks determinedly to Dr. Hudson’s surgery at the Crescent. There is a pain in her which is not quite labor and which she does not understand. Sitting, standing, and walking are all uncomfortable. Patients trickle out as she waits. She does not care to leave because she cannot stand to hear Francis anymore.
In the waiting room is a charlady who chats amiably, but as with Francis, she only pretends to listen. Another woman brings her into the room and tells her that her time is near and she will have her baby in less than twenty-four hours. They must phone for the ambulance now. Adah does not want to hear this, for she and Francis had decided she would have the baby at home because they would earn six pounds, and it was too expensive to bring all the things one needed to the hospital for confinement. The doctor does not understand why Adah would want this, and says she has already reserved a room for her at University College Hospital. Adah does not know how to tell her that the six pounds is necessary for their family to survive, and that her husband does not care what happens in this life since he believes in Armageddon. She tells the doctor she is going home. The doctor sighs and says she will send the midwives.
At home, Adah realizes she has forgotten her key, so she rings the doorbell fiercely. While she is waiting, she sees two women ride by on bikes whom she assumes are the midwives. One of them is English, in her forties, and possessive of a determined, superior mien. The other is younger and either Chinese or Japanese. The older one criticizes her for not calling sooner and thinks she is illiterate.
The younger one notices Adah is bleeding so the women inspect her. While her pains are not worse, Adah looks at Francis and realizes she can no longer handle it. He does not care about her; he thinks she will live forever and take his beatings and bear his children and make money for him and listen to his pablum.
Things turn hazy for her, and she cannot concentrate. She hears words and envisions Francis as Lucifer. She hears the baby is too big for her to deliver. Then there are ambulance bells, and an image of Vicky clinging to Mrs. Noble. She sinks into dreams. Someone says they must hurry. Adah envisions a future where the baby is now five and their family is happy and Francis loves her.
There is screaming and it seems like it will never stop, but then someone tells her to wake and open her eyes. The surgeon has a splash of blood on him. Her baby is huge and hairy and hungry like a wolf, and he does not cry.
Analysis
Adah and Francis’s demoralizing experience looking for housing is an effective critique of England’s racism and xenophobia. The couple is turned away from several properties because they are Black, with one woman exhibiting a reaction so strong it seemed like an “epileptic seizure” (77). This indignity is mind-boggling to Adah, who “had never faced rejection in this manner. Rejection by this shrunken piece of humanity, with a shaky body and moppy hair, loose, dirty and unkempt” (77).
Francis and Adah have different reactions to this sort of racism. Francis and other Nigerians seem to have internalized their inferiority, whereas Adah, even though she admits the discrimination sometimes gets to her, is “not going to accept it from anyone. She was going to regard herself as the equal of any white” (71). She will not be pulled down by whites or Blacks, and she will definitely not let her children grow up thinking they have anything to be ashamed of; this is a lonelier existence, but one that she embraces even though it is difficult. Ashley Dawson notes, “if [Adah’s] classism forces her into a self-imposed exile from the working-class Nigerians in proximity to whom she is forced to live by the racism of British landlords, her refusal to internalize racist British attitudes is also a crucial factor in her solitude. If other black Britons are willing to settle for second-class citizenship, Adah kicks valiantly against this designation.”
Francis continues to sink to new lows as the novel proceeds. He is more contemptible than ever—he is lazy, selfish, brutish, unsympathetic, and hypocritical. He is a philanderer and a dead weight for Adah, who supports the family while he putatively works toward his accountancy. In this section, he has no compassion for her as she endures a painful labor, criticizing her for not being at work and making him money.
Abioseh Michael Porter sees Emecheta’s depiction of Francis as a bit “weak” and bordering on caricature, but acknowledges his role in her development of selfhood: “In scenes that are too numerous to elaborate upon here, Francis is shown to be self-centered, cruel, narrowminded, and in fact downright venal. Instead of helping Adah to develop the creative potential which she obviously has (and part of which she uses to support him), Francis only proves himself to be an obstacle on her route toward self-improvement.”
Francis is an abuser—emotionally, physically, and sexually—but Adah stays with him for a long time, handing over her money, having sex with him, and often hoping their marriage can be saved. Dawson explains that “Despite her apparent strength in other walks of life, Adah conforms to many of the characteristics of the abused woman who clings to her batterer. Women like Adah often remain within abusive relationships because their identity is defined through their attachment to an apparently stronger—but also deeply needy—partner… Like many women in abusive relationships, in other words, Adah’s individual passivity is partially a product of the stigma attached to perceptions of inadequate comportment by married women, who are often perceived as upholders of community honor.”
