Second Class Citizen

by Buchi Emecheta

  Most Nigerian wives would say that they had to send their children away because they lacked suitable accommodation for them, and there was a great deal of truth in this. But what they would not admit was that most of them were brought up in situations, far, far different from the ones in which they found themselves in England. At home in Nigeria, all a mother had to do for a baby was wash and feed him and, if he was fidgety, strap him onto her back and carry on with her work while that baby slept. But in England she had to wash piles and piles of nappies, wheel the child round for sunshine during the day, attend to his feeds as regularly as if one were serving a master, talk to the child, even if he was only a day old! Oh, yes, in England, looking after babies was in itself a full-time job. This was difficult for a Nigerian wife to cope with, especially when she realised that she could no longer count on the help the extended family usually gave in such situations. So most Nigerian children bora to the so-called “students” were condemned to be fostered away.

  Everybody expected Adah to do the same. It came as a big surprise, therefore, when they realised that she was not making any attempt to look for a foster-mother. And now Francis told her that he was not going to look after her children for her any more.

  Things were difficult for Francis, too. He had never in all his life been allowed to make his own mistakes because he had never made his own decisions. He had always consulted his mother, his father and his brothers. In England he had to make do with his Nigerian neighbours. Adah guessed that they had laughed at him behind her back when she was at work. So she took a deep breath before replying.

  “I thought we decided that you were to look after them until we got a nursery place … I thought …”

  “You mean you decided; you thought it all out, and then you tell me what I’m going to do. Everybody laughs at us in this place. No African child lives with his parents. It is not convenient; it is not possible. There is no accommodation for it. Moreover, they won’t learn good English. They are much, much better off with an English woman.”

  “But you forget, Francis, that when we were young, we spoke Yoruba flawlessly, even though we are Ibos. We picked the language up at school and at play. That shouldn’t be difficult. Our English, yours and mine, is not all that bad,” Adah explained in her gentlest voice, aware all the time that she was not only arguing with Francis, but with all the other tenants in Ashdown Street.

  He considered this for a while, and then replied: “But they have no friends to play with.”

  “But they will have, when they start at the nursery. I am sure they will.”

  Adah was hoping for the impossible. It would be easier for a loaded camel to go through the eye of a sewing needle than for a child with two parents to get a nursery place. The waiting list was a mile long.

  Then the landlord started his intimidation. The children must leave the house. He even took it upon himself to advertise for a foster-mother for them. Luckily, no one offered to take “two black children, boy and girl, aged nine months and two years respectively”. The landlady sensed that Adah did not like it and left her alone.

  But the men persisted. Another couple, the Ojos, who had left their four children behind, advised Adah to send hers back to Nigeria. Everybody talked and speculated. The trouble was that Adah was like a peacock, who kept wanting to win all the time. Only first-class citizens lived with their children, not the blacks.

  They were right, in a way. The housing conditions were so bad that for days she didn’t see Francis at all. As soon as she arrived home from work he would disappear for fresh air. The children had no amusements and their parents would not let them out for fear they would break their necks on the steep stairs. They were hushed and bullied into silence so that the landlord and his wife should not be disturbed. When it rained, which was often, the nappies were dried in the same room. The second-hand heater they used always smoked. The Obis lived not as human beings at all, but like animals.

  To cap it all, after the day’s work, Adah did not have sufficient space to sleep in. Francis was getting very fat, and their single bed was not big enough for him, let alone the pregnant Adah. So, usually, when she was not needed by her husband, she would squeeze in on the settee with her babies.

  At about this time she met and became friendly with a Cockney girl called Janet.

  Janet was Mr Babalola’s wife. Her story was not only remarkable, but startling as well.

  Mr Babalola had come to England, just like Francis and Adah, to study. But, unlike Adah and Francis, he had been single, and had a Northern Nigerian Scholarship. This meant that he had more money to spend, because the Northerners, unlike the overeducated Southerners, would do anything to encourage their men to really get educated so that they could come home and obtain the jobs in the North which were then going to the Southerners. Mr Babalola was, therefore, a very rich student.

  Rumour had it that he had a glossy flat and was always entertaining. This was no surprise to anyone who knew the Northerners. They liked to spend their money, to really enjoy what they had, and to them what they had was theirs only today; not tomorrow or the day after. Allah would take care of the future. That was certainly Babalola’s philosophy of life.

  For some reason, however, the money for Mr Babalola stopped coming, no one knew why. One thing was sure, he was not doing any studying, though he had come originally to read journalism. Word went round that he was getting poor. He could not maintain his old level of entertainment, so his friends of the happier days took to their heels. They stopped coming, and Babalola moved to a much more modest area - Ashdown Street in Kentish Town.

  It was at this time, when his funds were running low and he was desperately trying to convince his government that, given another opportunity, he would do well, that he met Janet.

  He was waiting impatiently at a telephone kiosk to make a call to one of his now elusive friends. He waited for what seemed ages, but the young woman already in the kiosk seemed to clutch at the receiver for hours. Many others came, got tired of waiting and left, grumbling. But Babalola waited. He was going to make his call, even if it took him all day. It started to drizzle and he was getting soaked to the skin, so he banged on the kiosk door, and shook his fist at the girl to frighten her. Then he looked closer, and saw that the girl was not phoning anybody, she was asleep, standing up.

  Babalola’s first reaction was fear. Was she dead, he wondered? Then he banged harder and the girl woke. He was so sorry for her that he took her home.

  Janet was pregnant. The father of her baby was a nameless West Indian. Her stepfather would not take her in unless she promised to give the child away. Her mother had died a year before, leaving her stepfather seven young children to look after. Janet was the oldest, so she had been turned out of the house. She would not go to any social worker; all he would do would be to convince her that, at the age of sixteen, she was too young to keep her baby. But Janet wanted her baby.

  This story awakened the communal African spirit in Babalola. It never occurred to him that he was doing anything illegal, taking in a sixteen-year-old girl. On the contrary, Babalola started to entertain his few remaining friends with Janet. It never occurred to him that he might fall in love with her, that he might want to protect her, to make her his wife; at that time, Janet was being offered to any black man who wanted to know how a white woman looked undressed. Most of Adah’s neighbours had had their sexual adventures with Janet. But soon all that changed.

  Babalola realised that Janet could get dole money for herself and her child, enough to pay the rent. Janet, not knowing where else to go and also, like Adah, coming to terms with Babalola’s weaknesses, complied. Soon Babalola started to monopolise Janet.

  “You are not thinking of going straight with that thing you picked up at a kiosk?” his friends asked, astonished.

  Babalola said nothing, but gave orders to Janet to stop being liberal with his friends any more. Janet, feeling wanted at last, glowed. Soon after her first baby, she became pregnant with
her second, Babalola’s.

  It was at this time that Adah arrived. They became friends straight away. Adah found Janet very intelligent and realised that the rumours about her sleeping around were not true. She only wanted a roof over her head so that she could bring up her little boy, Tony. He was then a noisy eighteen-month-old baby who was a good playmate for Titi.

  Adah told Janet about her troubles and Janet confided in Adah. She suggested that Adah should look for a daily-minder for her children until the nursery had vacancies for them. Even Babalola was willing to help - by now he had become unpopular with his friends because he refused to hand his “fish and chips” girl around. The search was really depressing. It reached a point where Adah had to start knocking on door after door. Things got even worse for her when Francis failed his summer examinations. He blamed it all on her If she had not brought her children and saddled him with them, if she had allowed them to be fostered, if she had not become pregnant so soon after her arrival, he would have passed.

  Francis forgot that it had taken him five attempts to pass the first part, that he did not attend any lectures because he felt he could do better on his own, that he was always reluctant to get up early enough in the mornings.

  Luckily for Adah, Babalola heard of Trudy. She had two children of her own and agreed to look after Adah’s two as well. Francis praised Trudy to the skies. She was clean, well dressed and very friendly. Adah had not seen her yet, because she usually worked late in the library, coming home at eight o’clock most evenings.

  She would dress the children, and Francis wheeled them to Trudy’s, which was just a block away, and collected them at six, after Trudy had washed them and given them tea. That, at least, was the arrangement.

  After a few weeks, Adah noticed that Titi stopped talking altogether. This surprised Adah because Titi was a real chatter-box. She wondered what was happening and decided to take the children to Trudy herself. After all, she had carried them for nine months, not Francis. Francis was happy about this because he claimed that his friends laughed at him when they saw him with his children in a pushchair.

  What struck Adah first was the fact that Trudy’s milkman delivered only two pints every morning even though she was given Adah’s children’s milk coupon. But Trudy told her that Adah’s children took three pints a day and that her milkman delivered not the two Adah saw, but five pints every day.

  Adah said nothing, but started giving her children cereal before leaving for work. This meant extra work, but she would do all she could to bring Titi back to her old self again.

  Still uneasy, she started paying Trudy visits on her half-days. She did not like what she saw. Trudy’s house, like all the houses in that area, was a slum. A house that had been condemned ages ago. The back yard was filled with rubbish, broken furniture, and very near an uncovered dustbin was the toilet, the old type of toilet with faulty plumbing, smelly and damp.

  On the first day that Adah went, she saw Trudy’s two Little girls playing in the front garden. They both had red slacks and blue pullovers. Their long brown hair was tied with well-pressed red ribbons. They were laughing and looked very happy. They swung something in the air and Adah realised that Trudy’s girls were playing with the spades and buckets that she had bought for her own children. Her heart burned with anger, but she told herself to stop behaving like the little Ibo tigress. After all, she had not stayed five good years at the Methodist Girls’ High School for nothing. At least she had been taught to tame her emotions. Maybe her children were having a nap or something.

  She walked in and entered the sitting-room. She saw Trudy, a plump woman with too much make up. Her lips were scarlet and so were her nails. The colour of her hair was too black to be natural. Maybe it was originally brown like those of her little girls; but the jet black dye gave her whole personality a sort of vulgarity. She was laughing loudly at a joke which she was sharing with a man who was holding her at a funny angle. Adah closed her eyes. The laughter stopped abruptly when they noticed her.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” Trudy gasped.

  “I was going to the clinic at Maiden Road, so I thought I’d look in and see how you were getting on with Titi and Vicky.”

  There was a pause, during which Adah could hear her heart-beat racing. She was finding it more and more difficult to control her temper. She remembered her mother. Ma would have torn the fatty tissues of this woman into shreds if she had been in this situation. Well, she was not Ma, but she was Ma’s daughter, and, come what may, she was still an Ibo. She screamed.

  “Where are my children? You pro -” She stopped herself. She was about to call Trudy a prostitute, but was not sure whether the man watching them, with his flies open, was her husband or not. The man quickly excused himself though, and Adah blamed herself for not completing her sentence. The man was not Trudy’s husband. He was a lover, a customer or a boy friend, or maybe a mixture of both. Adah did not care. She wanted to see her children.

  Trudy pointed towards the door. Adah’s eyes followed the pointing finger to the back yard. Yes, Adah could hear the faint voice of Vicky, babbling something in his own special language. She ran out and saw her children. She stood there, her knees shaking and burst into tears.

  Vicky was busy pulling rubbish out of the bin and Titi was washing her hands and face with the water leaking from the toilet. When they saw her, they ran to her, and Adah noticed that Vicky had no nappy on.

  “They won’t talk to us. The other day I gave an ice-cream to Titi, and she did not know what to do with it. They wet themselves all the time.” Trudy went on and on like a woman possessed, talking non-stop.

  Adah bundled the children into their push-chair and took them to the children’s officer at Malden Road. After all, Trudy was a registered baby-minder, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  The children’s officer tut-tutted a great deal. Adah was given a cup of tea and told not to worry too much. After all, the children were all right, weren’t they?

  While they were still talking, Trudy arrived in floods of tears. She protested that she had only allowed them into the back yard that day because she had a stinking visitor who would not go. Had Adah not seen him? He wouldn’t leave her alone. Of course the children had wandered into the back yard. She wouldn’t have the heart to put a dog there, to say nothing of little “angels” like Adah’s kids. She was a registered daily-minder. Registered by the Borough of Camden. If her standards had been low, she would not have been registered in the first place. Adah should ask Miss Stirling

  Miss Stirling was the children’s officer. She wore a red dress and rimless spectacles, the type academics in old photographs usually wore She blinked a great deal She was blinking now, as her name was mentioned. But she could not get a word in, Trudy was making all the running.

  As for Adah, she listened to Trudy destroying forever one of the myths she had been brought up to believe: that the white man never lied. She had grown up among white missionaries who were dedicated to their work, she had then worked among American diplomats who were working for their country in Nigeria, and since she came to England the only other whites she had actually mixed with were the girls in the library and Janet. She had never met the like of Trudy before. In fact she could not believe her ears; she just gaped in astonishment.

  Trudy even went as far as to tell the children’s officer that Adah’s kids drank five pints of milk a day. She loved the children, she said, and to prove it she made a grab at Titi, but the child recoiled, protesting wildly.

  Trudy was reprimanded and she promised to mend her ways. She would never let the children out of her sight. Six pounds a week was not easy to come by especially for a woman who stayed at home all day.

  She babbled all the way home, telling Adah her whole life history and the history of her parents and her grandparents. But 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 bl
acks! Why, then did they claim to be superior?

  From that day on she took everything Trudy said with a pinch of salt. Francis told her not to worry. Even if the children were left in the back yard, he was sure it must have been clean before the kids messed it up. Instead he told Titi and Vicky to be good children and never, never go near the rubbish dump again because dustbins were dirty. The babies just stared at him. Then he told Titi that if she did not keep herself dry, he would beat her with his belt.

  But how was Titi to obey an order that she did not understand? In Nigeria and on the boat, she was a noisy toddler, talking and singing in Yoruba like all her little friends. Adah was teaching her English sentences, and sometimes read her nursery rhymes, of which “Baa baa, black sheep” was her favourite. But now she simply refused to talk. Adah worried so much about it and spoke to God about it in her prayers.

  Then one day a friend and classmate of hers came to visit them. Not having anything to give her, Adah decided to make her a bowl of custard. When her back was turned, the friend started to tease Titi in Yoruba, encouraging her to talk. Tired of Titi’s silence, Adah’s friend snapped at Titi: “Have you lost or sold your tongue? You used to talk to me in Nigeria. Why don’t you talk to me now?”

  Then Titi, the poor thing, snapped back in Yoruba: “Don’t talk to me. My Dad will cane me with the belt if I speak in Yoruba. And I don’t know much English. Don’t talk to me.”

  Adah was so startled that she spilled the hot custard she was making. So that was it! Francis wanted their daughter to start speaking only in English.

  This was due to the fact that Nigeria was ruled for so long a time by the English. An intelligent man was judged by the way he spoke English. But it did not matter whether the English could speak the languages of the people they ruled. This convention had a terrible effect on little Titi. She later overcame her difficulty in speaking, but she was well over six years old before she mastered any language sufficiently well to be able to converse intelligently. That early confusion retarded her verbal development a great deal. But, thank God, it did not land her in one of those special schools for backward children!