Summary
The Collapse
Adah goes to her Indian doctor and tells him she wants the pregnancy terminated. He is sympathetic and gives her some white pills. She decides she will not tell Francis. This is simply a new challenge and she can face it alone, and she and her children will prevail. The Presence is back too, and she talks to Him all the time. She does not go to church, though, for in England “churches were cheerless” (150). London killed her “congregational God [but] created instead a personal God who loomed large and really alive” (151).
Adah concentrates on working and enjoying her new job. She befriends the people there–Peggy, an Irish girl who is heartbroken over a summer boyfriend in Italy; the big boss, Mr. Barking, a kind man; Bill, a handsome Canadian man who married the children’s librarian Eileen the year before, who liked Black writers and encouraged Adah to read them, and who was her first real friend outside of her family; and a “half-caste West Indian” (152) girl. All of them were going through their own troubles at this time, and they all thought Adah had none. She let them believe this, as there was no point in disabusing them of this irony.
It has been three months and she can tell the pills did not work. Things are even worse with Francis now; she hits him back when he hits her, and he digs his nails into her. She still gives in to his sexual demands for peace sometimes. Mr. Noble is fed up with their fights and tells them they must move, and all the female tenants write up a petition telling Adah to control her husband, who won’t stop pursuing them.
Adah visits the doctor and tells him the pills did not work. He is shocked and angry at this and spits out that he did not give her abortive pills. She looks at him and tells him they both know he did, and she is carrying the child now and if it is anything less than perfect, he is responsible.
Her thoughts go to Boy, who sent her his savings to get her to leave Francis and come home. No doubt Francis’s family, to whom he wrote, will conclude she slept around. She is grateful her own parents are dead.
A Black man’s hand touches Adah’s shoulder as she is deep in thought. He introduces himself as Mr. Okpara, an Ibo man, and says he can tell she’s been fighting with her husband. He walks with her to the house and talks the whole way. He and his wife and their baby have been here for some time and are going home to Nigeria in four months. His wife is a secretary and he is in Civil Service.
As Okpara talks, her thoughts turn to what she should have done, which was make Francis work so she could stay home. Maybe she could still try that and it would save their marriage. She still believes if the marriage fails it is her fault. She wonders why she is letting Okpara come home with her, but acknowledges she has always needed someone to listen and talk to.
When Okpara enters the room where Francis is, she is struck by the difference between them. Francis is just Francis, and Okpara is immaculate and well-dressed. Francis whines to Okpara that he did not hit his wife, and resents this intrusion into their family life.
Adah also realizes Okpara is only English on the surface, for Francis’s behavior does not offend him and he makes them promise to come visit him and his family. He advises Francis to be a man, and stop thinking staying at home and being a Jehovah’s Witness will take care of his family. This humiliates Francis, who indicates he might try to change, but over the next couple of weeks it is clear that he will be the same as he has always been.
Adah finally tells Francis she is going to have another baby, and all he can do is laugh ruthlessly. She does not care, though, and starts making beautiful baby clothes. Her maternity grant will not go to Francis this time, she vows. She also learns that she can live off of something called Assistance until the children grow up. She’d heard of this before and does not know if she can claim it, but it intrigues her.
She decides to make sure in advance that it seems like she is loved and desired in the maternity ward, so she writes cards to herself and arranges for flowers to be delivered. The Indian doctor, now sorry for his behavior, becomes her strongest ally and watches out for her. She starts taking classes to learn about “relaxation birth,” tells Francis she will no longer work for him and will care only for the children, and quits her job at the library. She is glad she discovered she has a talent for making friends, and that she is strong enough to block Francis from her mind now. He vows to contact the Law about her, but it never comes.
She gives birth to Dada, a beautiful small baby, and nicknames her “Sunshine.” Hunger drives Francis to work as a postal clerk. At first she wonders if this might save their marriage, but again, this is not the case. Adah vows once and for all to only be responsible for her children and their needs, not his.
Adah breastfeeds her child, hearing this is better than the bottle. She also decides now is the time to try writing, and pens what will be “The Bride Price.”
The Ditch Pull
The five months after Dada’s birth is glorious since Adah gets to be a stay-at-home mother. Francis, though, is annoyed since she is educated and now she is not earning money. Adah does not care what he thinks, and finds joy in writing her novel. She does not care if it is actually published, because all that matters is that she wrote a book.
Adah sees that she is a thorn in Francis’s flesh because she does not conform to his idea of what a woman and a wife should be like. She does hope he might change, but she is not holding her breath.
She takes the manuscript to her friends at the library and they say it is very good. Bill even encourages her to publish it, and that it must be typed out. This is exciting and nerve-racking to Adah, who realizes she must tell Francis about the book now. She wonders if she is a real writer; this book feels like a child, a labor of love. She must study writing more, though she does not know how to do it. She will have to write in English even though it is not her mother tongue, so she will have to return to the Bible and Shakespeare.
That evening she tells Francis about her book but he refuses to read it, preferring to watch a show on their new TV. She pleads and says it is good but he will not relent. He sneers at her that she keeps forgetting she is a woman and she is Black. Nothing she says changes his mind but she is still going to get a typewriter to prepare the manuscript.
It is clear Francis cannot handle an intelligent woman, and she wonders if they should not have come to England. Yet she always knew she would be a writer, so this conflict would have come sooner or later.
The next weekend, Adah runs errands and leaves the children with Francis. When she returns home she smells burning paper. She confronts him and asks what he is doing, unnerved by the smile on his face–the smile of cruelty and deviousness. To her horror, she realizes he is burning her story, and asks him if he would burn her child as this book is practically a child of hers. He tells her he read it and his family would not be happy with his wife behaving like this.
This is the last straw for Adah. She gets a new job at the British Museum as a library office, and, after a purgatorial time at home, moves her children out to a dirty two-room flat. Francis puts up a fight and will not let her take anything with her, and the landlady calls the police so as to prevent him from potentially killing Adah.
Adah “walked to freedom, with nothing but four babies, her new job and a box of rags” (171). She is elated to be away from Francis, but he finds her and starts banging on her window one day. He angrily tells her in their country there is no such thing as divorce and separation, but she retorts that he broke the laws of their people first, not her. He starts beating her and she worries he will stab her, and it is not until an old Irish neighbor breaks down the door that she gets away.
This cannot go on, Adah knows, and she decides she has to pursue legal redress. She does not expect money from the jobless Francis, but just wants a judge to tell him to stay away from her and her children.
In the courtroom, Francis lies spectacularly, and Adah rues that she has no knowledge of the Law but that Francis does. The magistrate says the children must be taken care of and Francis insists they are not actually married. Francis says he does not mind if the children are put up for adoption and Adah is suddenly filled with a sense of hope and strength and resilience. She leaves the courtroom, saying the children are hers and that is enough; she will “never let them down as long as I am alive” (174).
Adah wanders through the street, tears flowing. She arrives in Camden Town at a butcher’s shop and stands there. She hears her Ibo pet name called out and sees a man she knew from school. He looks at her hand and comments that she married Francis and she says yes.
It is like fate. He pays for her cab home because he thinks she is still with Francis.
Analysis
Though Adah decides her marriage with Francis is over, she still has a few moments of wondering if the marriage can be saved. It cannot, of course, and by the end of the novel Adah has taken Francis to court and begun moving on with her life. She primarily cares for her children’s safety and emotional well-being, but she also cares about herself—cares about working where she pleases and reaping the full rewards from that job, cares about being free from shame and ridicule, cares about establishing bodily autonomy. And though the novel does not tell us this, since we know Adah’s story is more or less Buchi Emecheta’s story, Adah will go on to find success in her writing and to make a good life for her children.
There are intimations earlier in the text about Adah’s desire to tell her story, but in these final few chapters she decides that she simply has to write; this is at the same time as she is breastfeeding, and the symbolic implications are clear. This creative undertaking is immensely cathartic—she likens it to having a child, and the final product as being like a child. She writes with an “urge” (164), and is “oblivious to everything except her children” (164) when she’s writing, because it is indeed like a child. She is self-abnegating, initially deciding she doesn’t care if it gets published, criticizing it for being “over-romanticized” (164) and “simple” (165), and becoming flustered when her friends tell her to publish it.
One of those friends is Bill from the library, “the first real friend she had had outside her family” (152). Even though Bill is white, to use somewhat anachronistic terms, he is a progressive and an ally. He helps awaken in Adah a sense of her Blackness, encouraging her to read Black writers such as James Baldwin. From Baldwin, “She came to believe… that black was beautiful” (152). He also encourages her to get her novel published, and says he will help her by showing it to someone. This is extremely exciting and nerve-racking for Adah, who knows that she has to show Francis now that the novel might be out in the world.
Adah’s claim that Bill is her first “real friend” raises questions about why she does not have female friends. After all, her individual experiences are also universal experiences for many women—pregnancy and childbirth, sex, body image, domestic violence, balancing career and family—and one might think she might turn towards those women for the comfort and understanding she says several times that she craves. Marie Emeh lauds Emecheta’s novels for this very thing, writing that Emecheta “condemns the Nigerian males' insensitivity to the needs of their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters—women in general. Her novels are about victimization and the predominant theme is freedom from oppression. Her works involve the struggles of African women to achieve the liberation of self-awareness. Her most impressive stories are those in which black women transcend predicaments: poverty, unhappiness, violence, intimidation and attraction to false values. She also centers upon the African woman's recognition of her own power and dignity as well as her quagmires.”
However, Adah has a rather antagonistic view towards most other women. Ashley Dawson relates this to the patriarchy, Nigerian culture, and Adah’s complicated relationship with her mother: “Indeed, so deeply does Adah internalize notions of male supremacy that she ends up directing much of her anger at the women who surround her rather than at the men who benefit most from the patriarchal structures of the extended Ibo family. This is due in part to the fact that, among extended kin groups, it is older women who are charged with social reproduction, which includes preparing their daughter for lives of domestic servitude. Thus, Adah’s rebellion against her allotted place in life initially targets her mother, whom she sees as complicit in perpetuating her subordination.” Ultimately, there is a “a pattern of hostility toward other women that leaves Adah isolated and, consequently, far more easily subjected to the whims of her increasingly tyrannical husband. Emecheta’s depiction of Adah thus grates against idealistic notions of women’s inherent orientation toward community and solidarity with other women. The bonds that Adah forges with women outside her immediate family in Second-Class Citizen are tenuous and extremely hard won.”
