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Chapter 9: Learning the Rules
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Second Class Citizen, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class, Gender, and Race
Culture vs. Individual Freedom
Motherhood and Art
Family and Love
Economics vs. Aspiration in Education
Summary
Analysis
During the winter, Francis works for two weeks for the postal service. Though she knows he should be supporting the family, Francis makes Adah feel terribly guilty by complaining about the work: the cold, the heavy bag, and in particular the terrifying dogs. When he tells Adah that white English people would let their dogs kill a Black man, Adah asks whether that would happen. Francis replies that it could—and will likely happen to him. Adah imagines Francis burdened like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress as dogs attack him.
Both Francis and Adah know from experience that some white English people treat Black immigrants like “second-class citizens.” Yet Francis’s claim that white English people will likely let their dogs kill him on his postal route seems highly exaggerated, less a statement of his real fears than an expression of unreasonable resentment at having to support the family while Adah is recovering from an emergency C-section. Adah’s invocation of Pilgrim’s Progress (a famous 1678 work of Christian allegorical religious fiction by John Bunyan) to imagine Francis’s job shows how her education provides her with a means of interpreting her life as well as with academic credentials.
Themes
Five days after leaving the hospital, Adah is walking Titi to a play group when she feels so dizzy that her vision fills with “colorful balloons.” She becomes angry at herself for worrying about Francis having to work when she herself is still so unwell. When they reach the play group, the woman in charge notes how fatigued Adah looks and volunteers to walk Titi to and from the group until Adah is better. As Adah walks home, she spots a Black female postal worker walking “briskly,” almost joyfully, unafraid of dogs. When Francis comes home and complains in hyperbolic terms about work, Adah ignores him.
Adah is so exhausted after her emergency C-section that she sees “colorful balloons” (a fanciful description of spotty vision) just trying to walk down the street—yet Francis, well and able-bodied, complains about having to work. The Black female postal worker who seems to be enjoying her job undermines Francis’s claims that postal work is necessarily terrible for him as a Black person in England due to English racism; as such, seeing the woman prompts Adah to stop feeling guilty over Francis’s complaints.
Themes
Around Christmas, Adah tells people that her family won’t be exchanging presents because they are Jehovah’s Witnesses. When Sue expresses shock, Adah explains that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Jesus’ birthday is in October and Christmas celebrations are satanic. In fact, Adah doesn’t care about these details. She believes in a loving God, and she believes the historical Jesus was a great man, but she isn’t sure about Jesus’ divinity. She’s a Christian primarily because her Pa was and because she went to Christian school. She thinks God will “understand” that the family is too poor to celebrate Christmas.
Throughout the novel, various characters use their religious culture as an excuse to do what they want or need while ignoring their religion’s rules when it conflicts with what they want to do. Here, Adah uses a religious tenet of Francis’s sect, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to explain why her family isn’t celebrating Christmas. But really, this lets her hide that they lack the money to buy presents. Yet Adah does genuinely believe in God—though not necessarily in Christianity—despite using religion opportunistically.
Themes
Adah’s boss from the library, Mrs. Konrad, sends presents for Titi, Vicky, and Bubu, which Adah interprets as a sign of God’s understanding and support. She is relieved that her children will have something for Christmas now, as Sue and Mr. Noble have bought their own children many presents on an installment plan. Adah is shocked by installment plan payments, thinking that the debtors could just run away. But Mr. Noble tells her that unlike in Nigeria, it is hard to change addresses in the UK, so creditors can hunt you down. Adah wishes she could go into stores and select her children’s presents herself, but she simply doesn’t have the money.
In many ways Adah tries hard to assimilate to English culture, yet the English practice of paying in installments for presents bought on credit shocks her—showing that it is difficult to alter one’s cultural assumptions quickly. Adah’s desire to buy her children’s presents herself, meanwhile, shows her motherly love for them and her wish to provide for them. It also reinforces that she has no genuine interest in adhering to the rules governing Jehovah’s Witnesses’ behavior.
Themes
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On Christmas Eve, Adah notices that Vicky’s ear is swollen. He’s not in pain, so she puts Vaseline on the ear and goes to sleep. On Christmas Day, Adah is dressing the children for a tea party with the Nobles when she sees that Vicky’s ear has swollen further. Frightened, Adah shouts for Francis. When he sees Vicky’s ear, he suggests they call the doctor. Adah protests that you could never get a doctor on Christmas in Nigeria; Francis retorts that you can get one in the UK because it’s “the law” that doctors must help you. After Francis leaves, Adah worries that the doctor will ignore the law because Vicky is Black.
Here Adah and Francis try to mobilize an English cultural idea—that doctors by “law” must help patients any day of the year—to get help. This shows how they try to accept or reject English cultural mores according to the needs of the moment. Adah’s intense fear at Vicky’s possible illness may be due to his earlier, alarming hospitalization for meningitis, but it also shows Adah’s strong attachment to her children.
Themes
Adah, hearing a dispute in the street, looks out the window and sees Francis talking to two policemen. She becomes fearful that Francis will be arrested and she’ll have to parent alone while still ill. Her vision fills with colorful “balloons” and she feels unsteady. Francis and the policemen enter the family apartment, where the police examine Vicky’s ear and agree he needs a doctor. After the police leave to fetch a doctor, Francis starts cursing their regular doctor (who isn’t coming to see Vicky), an Indian man Francis calls terribly ugly and “black.” Adah wonders what the doctor did to make Francis curse him.
Adah fears the coercive cultural power of police, perhaps due to her early childhood experience of witnessing police force her mother to drink gari. When Francis curses the Indian doctor, he calls the man ugly and implicitly attributes that ugliness to the man’s dark skin. Francis’s colorism (negative attitude toward darker skin on non-white people) shows the racism he has internalized, perhaps as a result of the racist discrimination he has suffered in England.
Themes
Shortly after, another doctor, a young Chinese man, arrives, examines Vicky’s ear, and asks whether the apartment has bedbugs. Adah feels humiliated. The doctor explains a method his grandmother in China used to kill bedbugs: putting tins of water around the bed into which the bugs fall and drown. Adah feels wretched that she interrupted the doctor’s Christmas over a bug bite, though he assures her that parents are often nervous about their children’s health.
Though uncleanliness doesn’t actually cause bedbug infestations, Adah’s shame may imply that she sees having bedbugs as a sign of unhygienic behavior and perhaps “low-class” status. Adah’s panic over a mere bug bite emphasizes how traumatic Vicky’s earlier, serious childhood illness was to her; it also emphasizes again her strong attachment to her children.
Themes
Francis destroys the note he received from their regular doctor, which predicts that Vicky’s ear is swollen due to a bug bite. Adah asks why Francis involved the police, and Francis said he approached the policemen because their doctor wouldn’t come when summoned even though he’s required to in an emergency. Adah reflects that government services work for “both second- and first-class citizens alike” in some cases.
Adah’s realization that some government services work for “second- and first-class citizens” indicates that bias and oppression can happen even when the law is technically unbiased: even if English law applies to Black and white people equally, English culture discriminates against Black people. Still, it’s also true that the police summoned a doctor, suggesting that in at least some cases, the law works as written for all citizens.
Themes
