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Chapter 4: The Daily Minders
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
In July, Adah wakes up exhausted and with an ominous feeling. She wants to tell Francis, but he’ll ignore her worries like Caesar ignored his wife’s dream. As she feeds the children, Vicky wakes Francis up with his crying. Francis complains, and Adah explains that young Vicky seems angry this morning, though he doesn’t have a fever. Then she asks Francis to take the children to Trudy’s for her; Francis grudgingly agrees. Adah wants Francis to ask how she’s feeling, but she tells herself men only do that for their pregnant wives in sentimental romances. Still, she wishes someone loved and listened to her.
According to Roman historians, Julius Caesar’s wife Calpurnia had an ominous dream immediately prior to his assassination and warned him not to go to the senate meeting where he was assassinated. When Adah compares herself to Calpurnia, it shows that she does not view her own learning as merely a set of credentials or a way to make money—she also uses her historical and literary knowledge to make sense of her own life. Adah’s desire that Francis ask after her, meanwhile, shows her desire for love even as she tells herself that romance is a fiction.
Themes
Vicky fusses as Adah leaves. Titi, who has learned that her suffering changes nothing, doesn’t fuss. Adah comforts Vicky and leaves. Because nearly all Adah’s salary goes to rent, childcare, and Francis’s education, she eats a boiled egg for lunch—or nothing. This day, she goes for a walk on her lunch break to keep her coworkers from hearing her stomach rumble. Walking around, she looks at restaurants and thinks how Francis wouldn’t take her to one even if they had money because he has internalized that “such places were not for blacks.” Yet if Adah had the money, she would go and demand to be served.
Adah is going hungry while supporting her children and Francis, who does nothing to contribute economically to the family. This fact emphasizes that he’s exploiting Adah economically. Adah’s resolution that she would demand service in restaurants people like Francis consider “not for blacks” shows her refusal to endorse English racism, even as she has to navigate it from a position of relative powerlessness.
Themes
When Adah returns to the library, she encounters a coworker who was about to look for Adah. Adah asks whether it’s about her children. When the coworker asks how Adah knew, Adah reflects that she can’t explain to her childless coworker that “sometimes she lives in her children.” The coworker relays a message: Vicky is ill, but Trudy is waiting for Adah before taking him to the hospital.
Though Adah is strong-willed and individualistic, she also feels that “sometimes she lives in her children”—implying that a woman can be maternal and family-focused while remaining independent and focused on her goals.
Themes
At Trudy’s, an ambulance is outside. Inside, Adah finds a doctor and Trudy washing Vicky’s face with dirty water. Adah takes Vicky and asks what’s going on. The doctor says they must get Vicky to the hospital, but to Adah he just seems a little feverish. When the doctor tells her that the Royal Free Hospital will do an excellent job, Adah suggests that Vicky might have malaria, which is common enough back in Nigeria. The doctor says that she may be wrong. Riding in the ambulance, Adah worries that this “Free” hospital might be for “second-class people,” and that they’re taking Vicky here for racist reasons. She doesn’t trust free services and starts worrying that the hospital will steal Vicky’s organs.
Adah associates being poor with being vulnerable to racism. By her logic, a person would only access something “Free” if they couldn’t afford to pay for a better version of that thing (healthcare, in this case). And so, her logic goes, anyone offering something “Free” views people who use their services as “second-class” and must want to mistreat people in racist ways.
Themes
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At the hospital, nurses take Adah to a waiting room. She thinks she should tell Francis what has happened, but she doesn’t know where he is: he has stopped attending classes, instead studying alone. Later, doctors tell Adah that Vicky must be kept “for observation” until his test results return. Adah associates hospitals with childbirth or fatal illness; she isn’t sure she wants Vicky in the hospital but feels she has no choice. Hospital staff let Adah see Vicky through a window; then a nurse tells her to leave. Adah, afraid the hospital won’t know what to do if Vicky has a malarial seizure, stays anyway.
Though Adah has tried hard to adapt to English culture, there are limits to her cultural knowledge in the UK. In Nigeria she wouldn’t take Vicky to the hospital unless he were in danger of dying, and now she is unsure whether Vicky’s hospital visit is due to different English norms around hospital visits or due to the fatal severity of his illness. Moreover, she isn’t sure whether the hospital will know how to treat malaria—by implication because malaria is far more common in Nigeria than in the UK.
Themes
Adah falls asleep on a hospital bench. When she wakes, she sees the nurse who told her to leave. The nurse asks her whether Vicky is an only child. Adah says no, but her other child is “only a girl.” When the nurse objects that girls are equally valuable, Adah wonders how she could explain that she knows girls are equally valuable but that in her culture and her tribe, her status depends on producing male children. To show her own value, she says that she’s pregnant again; the nurse doesn’t reply, either not grasping Adah’s point or disagreeing with Adah’s values. The nurse tells Adah to go, but Adah insists on staying. Later, Francis arrives and cries with Adah rather than comforting her “like a man.”
Even though Adah and the nurse both believe in gender equality, Adah has had to navigate a cultural context in which achieving her educational and travel goals—and getting others to recognize her value—has required meeting certain sexist expectations, such as that good wives produce male children. When Adah tries to use her production of male children to establish her value in a different cultural context, it backfires—because while English culture in the novel is also sexist, it has different unreasonable standards for women than Nigeria does. Interestingly, even though Francis polices Adah’s gender performance, he himself fails to act “like a man” by Nigerian standards.
Themes
After three days, the hospital discovers that Vicky has “virus meningitis.” Adah, studying the disease at the library, reads that it’s frequently fatal and can be contracted by ingesting the virus. She believes that she was much more careful with Vicky than she was with Titi, and so informs Francis she’s going to demand Trudy tell her how Vicky was infected. When Francis expresses shock at her tone, Adah snaps back that she knows Francis is having sex with Trudy and that they both spend her money. The only thing Francis has given Adah is children, and if anything bad happens to Vicky, she’ll kill both him and Trudy.
This passage implies that Adah believes Vicky contracted meningitis by putting some dirty object from Trudy’s backyard in his mouth one day while Trudy failed to supervise him. Adah’s verbally violent reaction to Francis’s defense of Trudy hints that she resents both his adulteries and his failure to be a traditional masculine breadwinner. She may resent the latter not because of internalized sexism, but because his passivity forces her to be both the breadwinner and the domestic caregiver in their family, while he contributes basically nothing. Her murderous anger also emphasizes how important motherhood is to her identity.
Themes
Francis, baffled, thinks that it’s culturally normal in Nigeria for husbands to have sex with women other than their wives: it helps space out their wives’ pregnancies. He blames the UK for teaching women “their rights” and internally refuses to stay faithful to Adah. He tells Adah that this isn’t Nigeria and that she could be jailed for slandering or fighting Trudy. Adah, newly conscious that she earns the family’s money, tells Francis that unless Trudy has a good explanation, Adah will bring Titi home and care for her until Francis agrees to perform childcare or a nursery accepts Titi and Vicky. Then she leaves.
Francis tries to use conflicting cultural norms to his own advantage somewhat in the same way that Adah does: he wants to retain the Nigerian cultural norm that justifies his own behavior (having extramarital sex—even if Francis isn’t doing it to space out Adah’s pregnancies) while telling Adah not to retain a different Nigerian cultural norm (personally confronting someone who hurt your child) that makes him uncomfortable. Adah, focused on her maternal role, simply cuts through his hypocrisy by insisting on protecting her children, no matter the economic consequences.
Themes
At Trudy’s, Adah has just brought up meningitis when Trudy interrupts, suggesting Vicky was infected by drinking water in Nigeria. Adah is baffled, thinking how Vicky was born in “the best hospital” under the best gynecologist in Nigeria. Then Titi walks in, very dirty, from Trudy’s backyard. Adah snaps and tries to hit Trudy. A passing neighbor grabs Adah and tries to soothe her. Adah, furious, thinks that no mother would have stopped her from murdering Trudy in Nigeria—but now the “law and order” English won’t even let Adah smack Trudy.
Trudy’s attempt to avoid blame is clearly racist: knowing little about Nigeria or Adah’s class status there, she relies on racist stereotypes about dirty, dangerous Africa to claim that Vicky must have contracted meningitis there—even though Trudy’s own backyard is filthy. Titi’s entrance underscores the unhygienic conditions to which Trudy has exposed Adah’s children, triggering Adah’s violent maternal response. While in some cases—mostly involving gender roles—Adah prefers English cultural mores to Nigerian ones, here she resents the “law and order” English for preventing vigilante justice against the person who has endangered her child.
Themes
Adah tells Trudy that she will murder her if Vicky is harmed and accuses Trudy of neglecting Vicky even after Adah paid Trudy and let her sleep with Francis. The neighbor holding Adah back, a white woman, seems astonished. Adah is shocked and miserable too. The UK has forced her to repress too much: in Nigeria you can share your trouble with neighbors, but in England no one cares about your trouble except “paid listeners”—like Miss Stirling, who arrives, looks around at Trudy’s house, and tells Adah they’ve found a nursery for Vicky and Titi. Adah realizes that she’s been lied to again: “second-class citizens could keep their children with them,” albeit at a terrible price. Trudy loses her childcare license and moves neighborhoods.
Trudy’s white neighbor’s reaction implies that Adah’s speech is unusual in an English cultural context. Yet ultimately, it gets Adah’s children what they need: nursery spots instead of a neglectful babysitter with a dangerously unhygienic house. At the same time, however, the neglectful conditions that Titi and Vicky suffer at Trudy’s cause Adah to label herself a “second-class citizen[],” showing how victims of damaging, racist behaviors can internalize the prejudice from which they suffer.
Themes
