“Is Victor your only child?”
Adah shook her head, Vicky was not, there was another, but she was only a girl.
“Only a girl? What do you mean by ‘only a girl’? She is a person, too, you know, just like your son.”
Adah knew all that. But how was she to tell this beautiful creature that in her society she could only be sure of the love of her husband and the loyalty of her parents-in-law by having and keeping alive as many children as possible, and that though a girl may be counted as one child, to her people a boy was like four children put together? And if the family could give the boy a good university education, his mother would be given the status of a man in the tribe. How was she to explain all that? That her happiness depended so much on her son staying alive.
“Do you know, I’m making another one!” she volunteered, to show the nurse how good a wife she was.
The nurse, who either did not understand, or whose idea of a good and valuable wife was different from Adah’s, nodded but said nothing.
If Adah did not go, they would send for her husband, she said. She had to go.
Adah said she would only go if they used force, and so long as they were not going to do that, she was going to stay. But she went down to the corridor below, and watched some West Indian housewives coming to do their cleaning jobs.
Later that night, Francis came. Titi was spending the night at Trudy’s, so he had come to look for her. For a while, it seemed as if Vicky’s illness might bring the parents together again. Francis did not tell her not to worry, because he did not know how to do such things, how to be a man. Instead he cried, like a woman, with Adah.
Three days later, it was discovered that Vicky had virus meningitis. So Adah read all about this horrible thing, with its horrible unpronouncable name, in the library; she studied the causes, and knew all the effects.
“But where did he get it from? We never heard of such things in my family, and I never heard Ma mention it to me in your family either. Where did he get it from then? I want to know, because I’d like to prevent it in future, if he has any future, that is.”
“They cure everything here,” Francis replied, gazing into space.
“His chances of surviving are very slim, from the statistics I checked in a medical encyclopaedia. I want to know where my son got this virus from. The medical books say he must have taken it through his mouth. I am very careful with Vicky and have not made as many mistakes as I did with Titi. I want to know where he got it from, and look, Francis, I don’t care what you think any more, I am going to find out. From Trudy.”
“What’s come over you?” he demanded, not believing his ears. “What’s happening to you?”
“You want to know what’s happening to me? I’ll tell you. You will have to know sooner or later. If anything happens to my son, I am going to kill you and that prostitute. You sleep with her, do you not? You buy her pants with the money I work for, and you both spend the money I pay her, when I go to work. I don’t care what you do, but I must have my children whole and perfect. The only thing I get from this slavish marriage is the children. And, Francis, I am warning you, they must be perfect children.”
Francis looked at her, as if with new eyes. Somebody had warned him that the greatest mistake an African could make was to bring an educated girl to London and let her mix with middle-class English women. They soon know their rights. What was happening to them? Francis wondered. In their society, men were allowed to sleep around if they wanted. That gave the nursing mother a break to nurse her baby before the next pregnancy. But here in London, with birth control and all that, one could sleep with one’s wife all the time. But he was not brought up like that. He was brought up to like variety. Women at home never protested, and Adah had said that she did not mind, but, feeling the intensity of her anger, he sensed that she did mind. No man liked his freedom curtailed, particularly by a woman, his woman. He would not argue, he would not beat her into submission because of the baby, but he was not going to be tied to Adah, either. Why, in bed she was as cold as a dead body!
Adah was still talking. She was going to Trudy. She was going to get the truth from her, if it killed her.
“God help you,” Francis said. “This is not home, you know. You can be jailed for accusing her falsely. You will be in trouble if you go and fight a woman in her own home, you know. After all, she is keeping Titi for us.”
“Yes, I know she is keeping Titi, so that you can pretend to go and see her at eleven o’clock every night. Last night you left at eleven, and you did not come back until I was ready for work. Seeing Titi!”
An uncomfortable pause followed, during which Adah seemed to be weighing up her new freedom. After all, she earned the money in the family.
She continued, in a strange threatening way: “If she does not give me a good answer, I shall bring Titi home with me and I am not leaving this house to work for you until the kids are admitted into the nursery or you agree to look after them. I don’t care what your friends say. I am going to Trudy. She has something to tell me.”
“You’re just like your mother after all. That quarrelsome troublemaker! People say women grow up to be like their mothers. But unfortunately for you, you’re not as tall and menacing as she was. You’re small, and I’m sure Trudy will teach you a lesson or two.”
“We’ll see,” Adah replied as she dashed out of the house in a rage.
“They said at the hospital that Vicky had virus meningitis. And he is still on the danger list. I want to …” Adah began.
But Trudy cut her short.
“Yes, I phoned the hospital and they told me that. So I told them that you had brought him to London only a few months ago. He could have caught it from the water you drank at home, you know, before you brought him here …”
Adah stared at her; she could not believe her ears. Was she dreaming? What was it Trudy was saying about the child she had had in the best hospital in Nigeria, in the best ward, under the most efficient Swiss gynaecologist that the Americans could get for her as a member of their staff, which was one of the innumerable fringe benefits attached to working for the Americans? She wanted to explain all this to Trudy, but at that moment she saw Titi, coming in from the back yard, as filthy as the last time. Adah never knew what came over her. All she knew was that she lost control of the situation. Her inner eye kept seeing kaleidoscopically Vicky and Titi in the rubbish dump in Trudy’s back yard. She could not eradicate that picture, rotating in her mind, and she did the only thing that came to her instinctively. In front of her was an enemy, insulting her country, her family, her person and, worst of all, her child.
Somebody had left a carpet-sweeper by the door. (Adah later wondered why this was so, because there was no carpet in either of Trudy’s two rooms.) Without thinking, she picked it up, heavy as it was, and banged it blindly in the direction of Trudy’s head! Trudy saw it coming and dodged. Somebody, another neighbour of Trudy’s who was standing in the doorway, held Adah from the back.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t do that,” this neighbour’s voice came from behind her, cool, rational, reassuring.
Adah spat, foaming in the mouth, just like the people of her tribe would have done. Among her people, she could have killed Trudy, and other mothers would have stood solidly behind her. Now, she was not even given the joy of knocking senseless this fat, loose-fleshed woman with dyed hair and pussy-cat eyes. She belonged to the nation of people who had introduced “law and order”.
Her tummy began to ache, just like the onset of indigestion. Adah was not used to bottling up her anger. Why, hadn’t Pa told her that it was bad for the system? So to let off steam, she threatened:
“I am going to kill you. Do you hear that? I am going to kill you, if anything happens to my child. I shall sneak in here and kill you in your sleep. If not, I’ll pay people to do it for me, but, believe me, I am going to kill you, and with a smile on my face. I saw Vicky with my own eyes in the rubbish dump. I smelt of you through my husband
. I pay you with the money I earn, let my husband sleep with you, and then you want to kill my son!”
Then Adah broke down and started to cry, her voice coming out like that of somebody being tortured, strangled and harsh. The other white women stood there looking at her, shocked. They had probably never seen an angry Ibo woman.
If they were surprised, Adah was more than that; she was horrified at her own behaviour. She could not control herself any more. She had had so many things to bottle up inside her. In England, she couldn’t go to her neighbour and babble out troubles as she would have done in Lagos, she had learned not to talk about her unhappiness to those with whom she worked, for this was a society where nobody was interested in the problems of others. If you could not bear your problems any more, you could always do away with yourself. That was allowed, too. Attempted suicide was not regarded as a sin. It was a way of attracting attention to one’s unfortunate situation. And whose attention do you attract? The attention of paid listeners. Listeners who make you feel that you are an object to be studied, diagnosed, charted and tabulated. Listeners who refer to you as “a case”. You don’t have the old woman next door who, on hearing an argument going on between a wife and husband, would come in to slap the husband, telling him off and all that, knowing that her words would be respected because she was old and experienced. Instead you have the likes of Miss Stirling, whose office was along Malden Road in front of Trudy’s house. Mercifully somebody had called her, and she arrived, breathing hard and blinking furiously.
She listened patiently to Adah’s story, and appeared to agree with her, but said nothing about it. Instead, she was quiet for a while, as Adah looked round at these strange people. Nobody blamed her, or Trudy. No speech. Adah felt like a fool. She was learning. People here do not tell everything; they don’t say things like: “I even allowed my husband to sleep with her as part of the payment”. She noticed one thing, though; Trudy looked as if somebody was forcing her to eat shit. Her mouth went ugly, and her eye make-up was running in streaks all over her face. Even her black hair showed some strands of brown.
Then Miss Stirling spoke. “We’ve got nursery places for the children. Your little girl could start on Monday and, when the baby is out of hospital, there will be a place for him too.”
Adah had exploded another myth. Second-class citizens could keep their children with them, but just look at the price they had to pay! Vicky was still in danger, her marriage hung in the balance, and now all this row.
She did not know whether to feel ashamed or grateful. She felt both, in a way, especially as it now seemed that her threats had been empty ones. There was no need for them.
She would not apologise to Trudy; that woman was a rotten liar anyway. They removed her name from the council list of approved child-minders and, still scared of Adah’s threats, maybe, she left Malden Road, and moved to somewhere in Camden Town, so that even if Vicky had died, Adah could not have carried out her threats.
She left the group, and walked home, crying quietly to herself. It was a cry of relief.
6
“Sorry, No Coloureds”
One morning, when Adah was rapidly tying her colourful lappa around her thickening waist in her haste to catch the train to work, her husband, who had gone out of the room, came in walking as if in a trance. He looked dejected, disappointed, and Adah thought she saw his hands shake. She looked up, the string of her lappa still between her lips, and her eyes started to beg for an explanation. Francis was not unaware of this, but for the time being he seemed to have decided not to tell her anything. Instead, he flopped down on the only available sitting place in the room - their unmade bed.
“Sad news,” he spat out eventually, as if he had a poison that tasted bad in his mouth. He reminded Adah of a snake spitting out venom. Francis had a small mouth, with tiny lips, too tiny for a typical African, so when he pouted those lips like that, he looked so unreal that he reminded the onlooker of other animals, not anything human.
Adah, knowing him, did not hurry him. He might decide not to tell her at all, and then her whole day would be ruined with wondering what on earth it could be. So she took her time.
“What sad news?” she asked, her heart thumping between her ribs. She was making a frantic attempt to make her voice sound unhurried, normal. Anything for a quiet life.
Francis held up an envelope, an impersonal type of envelope, one of those horrible khaki-coloured ones that usually herald the gas bill or the pink statement from the London Electricity Board. In any case, that type of envelope never brought good news to anyone.
“It is very, very bad news. And, believe me, I am beginning to lose faith in human nature,” he went on, savouring Adah’s suspense. She was not surprised to hear the latter statement from Francis. He was always disappointed in human nature when other humans refused to bend to his wishes. He now sat there, smacking and resmacking his little wet lips, like a toy mouse-trap.
Adah could no longer bear the suspense. She was impatient, and was beginning to hate it all. She hated being treated like a native woman who was not supposed to know the important happenings in her family until they had been well discussed and analysed by the menfolk. Well, Francis could not do that, not in their one room apartment, he couldn’t. So Adah wanted to know immediately. She threw caution to the wind, walked menacingly towards her husband, snatched the envelope to the amazement of the latter, opened it and ran her eyes through the contents.
The message was short, to the point. No meandering.
A certain solicitor, representing their landlord, would like them to quit and give up all claims to the tenancy of their one-room in Ashdown Street. And within a month!
This left a harrowing emptiness inside her.
Adah left the letter on the table, and went on dressing. There was no need to ask each other what they were going to do, because there was nothing they could do. Adah had known the notice would come. She had not actually had an open confronation with any of the tenants, neither had she had any disagreement with the landlady, because she did everything to avoid such clashes, but there were many factors working against her. In fact, to most of her Nigerian neighbours, she was having her cake and eating it. She was in a white man’s job, despite the fact that everybody had warned her against it, and it looked as if she meant to keep it. She would not send her children away to be fostered like everybody else; instead they were living with them, just as if she and Francis were first-class citizens, in their own country. To cap it all, they were Ibos, the hated people who always believe blindly in their ideologies. Well, if they were going to be different from everybody else, they would have to go away from them. When the fact of Vicky’s admission to the hospital became known, everybody kept looking at Adah with an “I told you so” sort of sympathy. Even the childless landlady was able to take the news that Adah was expecting her third with equanimity because, at the time, she was sure that Vicky was going to die. Instead, three weeks later, Vicky had arrived home from the hospital, weak, but alive and with a nursery place waiting for him. This was more than they could bear. Adah and her husband must go.
It was a surprise to Francis, because he thought that by confiding in them and adapting to their standards they would accept him. But he was forgetting the Yoruba saying that goes, “a hungry dog does not play with one with a full stomach”. Francis forgot that, to most of their neighbours, he had what they did not have. He was doing his studies full time, and did not have to worry about money because his wife was earning enough to keep them going. He could see his children every day and even had the audacity to give his wife another. One never knew, Adah and Francis might even have another boy. They should go as far as possible from Ashdown Street. They knew how difficult it would be for them, but that was the desired effect.
Thinking about her first year in Britain, Adah could not help wondering whether the real discrimination, if one could call it that, that she experienced was not more the work of her fellow-countrymen than of the whites. May
be if the blacks could learn to live harmoniously with one another, maybe if a West Indian landlord could learn not to look down on the African, and the African learn to boast less of his country’s natural wealth, there would be fewer inferiority feelings among the blacks.
In any case, Francis and Adah had to look for another place to live. If it had been possible for them to find a new place, they would have moved within weeks of her arrival in London. But it had not been. During the days and weeks that followed, she had asked people, at work if they knew of anywhere. She would read and reread all that shop windows had to advertise. Nearly all the notices had “Sorry, no coloureds” on them. Her house-hunting was made more difficult because she was black; black, with two very young childred and pregnant with another one. She was beginning to learn that her colour was something she was supposed to be ashamed of. She was never aware of this at home in Nigeria, even when in the midst of whites. Those whites must have had a few lessons about colour before coming out to the tropics, because they never let drop from their cautious mouths the fact that, in their countries, black was inferior. But now Adah was beginning to find out, so did not waste her time looking for accommodation in a clean, desirable neighbourhood. She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks.
This had a curious psychological effect on her. Whenever she went into big clothes stores, she would automatically go to the counters carrying soiled and discarded items, afraid of what the shop assistants might say. Even if she had enough money for the best, she would start looking at the sub-standard ones and then work her way up. This was where she differed from Francis and the others. They believed that one had to start with the inferior and stay there, because being black meant being inferior. Well, Adah did not yet believe that wholly, but what she did know was that being regarded as inferior had a psychological effect on her. The result was that she started to act in the way expected of her because she was still new in England, but after a while, she was not going to accept it from anyone. She was going to regard herself as the equal of any white. But meanwhile she must look for a place to live.
Second Class Citizen Page 8