Previous
Chapter 7: The Ghetto
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
On December 2, Adah wakes up and feels her baby moving inside her. The due date is December 9, so she tells herself that the movements are not a precursor to labor. In fact, she has told her employers that she isn’t due until February so she can keep working as late as possible. Francis plans to get a postal job over Christmas; between that and her late-pregnancy work, Adah hopes they’ll be able to afford rent and childcare until she can work postpartum.
This passage strongly implies that the library will not give Adah paid maternity leave: she lied about her due date so that they wouldn’t make her take more unpaid leave than they family could afford. The lack of protections for working mothers in 1960s England is another example of English culture treating women as (in the novel’s preferred phrase) “second-class citizens.”
Themes
In the future, Adah will think it strange that she never questioned taking on all the responsibility for supporting the family, while Francis just studies and begins spending time with a few other Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yet for now, she “accept[s] her role as defined by her husband”: no friends, especially Sue, and no media consumption. When she gets to the railway station, she learns the railway workers are on strike. She waits for a long time, but eventually decides the strike benefits her: the movement in her womb is unignorable. Yet she worries that Francis will accuse her of shirking work—and worries, too, that the London hospitals will give her gas, perhaps fatal gas, if she makes too much noise during labor.
Adah tries hard to succeed within the racist and sexist cultures in which she lives. While this strategy has helped her achieve some of her goals, it also leads her to “accept her role as defined by her husband”—that is, not to protest Francis’s controlling behavior because in their 1960s Ibo/Igbo culture, it is normal for husbands to tell their wives not to do. Yet Adah’s fear that Francis will accuse her of shirking when she’s going into labor indicates that Francis is not just culturally traditional but personally abusive. Her fear that the hospital might gas her for making too much noise, meanwhile, suggests that she still finds English cultural norms around being quiet strange and oppressive.
Themes
Adah goes home and explains to Francis that she couldn’t get to work because of a railway strike. Francis accuses her of lying. Adah helplessly wonders whether she should have screamed on the platform and let the hospital gas her—but then she resolves to live for Titi and Vicky. While Francis lectures her about “Jehovah God” and “the diligence of the virtuous women,” she notices that Francis is praising diligence while wearing pajamas late into the morning. She feels annoyed at Francis’s mother for coddling her sons. The baby kicks Adah’s ribs, and she recalls how Francis told her that a woman was called “wo-man” because she was made out of a man’s rib—a story that doesn’t make sense in Western Ibo, where the words for “man” and “woman” aren’t related.
Francis’s unreasonable, abusive accusations make Adah flirt with passively suicidal behavior—but she resolves to live for her children, showing how important being a mother is to her identity. Francis criticizes Adah’s supposed lazy shirking of work using religious language, yet he himself stays in bed late and doesn’t bother to change out of his pajamas—showing that he is trying to use the cultural power of religion to manipulate Adah without adhering to his own religious values. His claims about the word “wo-man”—which only make sense in English—are another rather inept attempt to use religion’s cultural power to argue that Adah is naturally “second class” because she’s a woman.
Themes
Seeing Adah’s skepticism, Francis says he’s going to show her in a book called The Truth Shall Make You Free. Adah thinks to herself that Biblical quotations can be used to justify anything: laziness, promiscuity, slavery. She just hates when people ask her to accept their justifications as true—she doesn’t mind whether Francis is a Jehovah’s Witness, unless it hampers his education or he refuses to give their children blood in a crucial moment. Then she recalls how Francis gave her blood during Titi’s birth. She thinks that he isn’t an awful person but “a man who could no longer cope with the overdemanding society he found himself in.”
“The truth shall make you free” is a Gospel quotation from John 8:32. In this context, it refers to Jehovah’s Witness religious literature. Adah’s thoughts of Biblical interpretation reveal that she’s aware Francis is abusing Biblical interpretation for his own ends—something that she herself has done in the past and that only bothers her in Francis’s case when it interferes with their family’s goals. Notably, although Jehovah’s Witnesses are not supposed to give blood, Francis gave Adah blood to save her life during her first childbirth, indicating that he endorses or ignores his religion’s culture when it suits him. Adah’s interpretation of him as a person who simply can’t “cope” may be overgenerous: Francis is attempting to abusively control Adah to make up for his feelings of powerlessness. Her generosity toward him suggests that she still loves him or wants to love him despite his cruel and controlling behavior.
Themes
Get the entire Second Class Citizen LitChart as a printable PDF.
Adah leaves, Francis yelling at her to come back. She walks laboriously to Dr. Hudson’s surgery. Dr. Hudson tells Adah that she’s likely to have her baby within a day and should already have called an ambulance. Adah is planning to have the baby at home: the hospital gives six pounds to buy supplies for a home birth, and she plans to spend the money on food. When she tells Dr. Hudson, the doctor angrily suggests that she go to University College Hospital. Adah doesn’t feel like explaining that her husband refuses to work because he believes Armageddon is coming soon, so she just says she’s going home. Dr. Hudson, defeated, volunteers to call the midwives.
Adah is forgoing childbirth in the hospital attended by doctors because Francis’s refusal to work makes it too expensive. He justifies his refusal by claiming that Armageddon—that is, the end of the world—is approaching, implying that it isn’t worthwhile to seek worldly wealth with so little time to enjoy it. Yet Francis previously refused to work because he was studying—indicating that he simply wants to exploit Adah’s labor while staying unemployed himself and is using his religious culture to rationalize his unfair desires.
Themes
Adah gets home and realizes she has forgotten her key—as she often does, because people didn’t lock themselves in their houses back home but stayed out on porches and talked. She rings the bell. Then she sees two women biking down the street whom she suspects are the midwives. When the midwives pass by the house, Adah doesn’t call out to them, hoping their confusion will give her time to tell Francis to put on his dressing-gown over his pajamas. Francis opens the door, fully dressed and looking angry.
Though Adah has tried hard to assimilate to English culture, she still reverts to Ibo/Igbo cultural practices (like not locking the door) when under stress. Adah delays getting help from the midwives to avoid Francis humiliating her by appearing at her home birth in his pajamas—showing how Francis’s refusal to conform to cultural norms around work or proper dress are causing Adah serious, even dangerous difficulties.
Themes
Just then, the midwives—an elderly English woman and a young East Asian woman—realize which house they want. They wheel their bicycles up to the house and ask whether Adah is “Mrs. Obi.” When she says she is, the older midwife asks whether Adah can read English. When Adah, not wanting to be thought illiterate, says she can, the older midwife asks whether she didn’t understand the directions telling her to call the midwives as soon as she began labor. Both midwives note that Adah has begun to bleed heavily, something Adah hadn’t noticed.
The older, English midwife’s question is rather racist: she assumes that Adah, a Black immigrant, can’t read in English rather than guessing that Adah’s personal family and economic difficulties prevented her from calling the midwives sooner.
Themes
Up in Adah and Francis’s room, the midwives examine Adah while the room seems to spin. Adah sees Francis transforming into Lucifer and telling her she’ll go to hell for not reading The Truth Shall Make You Free and meddling in his affair with Trudy. Meanwhile, the midwives discuss how the baby is too large for Adah to give birth to. Adah hears an ambulance. When ambulance workers carry her down the stairs, she sees Sue holding a terrified Vicky and prays to God that she’ll return for her children. She wants to give Sue advice on caring for Vicky and Titi in her absence, but she can’t speak.
Lucifer, the devil, is the most negatively connoted figure in Christian culture: the originator of evil. When Adah hallucinates Francis transforming into Lucifer, it implies that she subconsciously recognizes how abusive he is even as her desire to love him and save their marriage prevents her from consciously recognizing it. When Adah prays to return to her children, she is effectively praying that she survives—but in a way that reveals she wants to survive for her children’s sake rather than her own.
Themes
Adah sinks into dreams, perceiving Francis with a “sword of fire.” She hears a loud voice telling her that they’re going to remove the baby and then feels a needle prick her thigh. Then she sinks into another dream. In the dream, her newest son is five. Francis is no longer Lucifer; instead, he is a successful farmer. He and Adah are sitting on their porch, reminiscing about their awful, long-ago time in England. Titi attends an English convent school and Vicky attends Eton. They have many other children too. Francis praises Adah for helping him succeed and for being “virtuous.”
In Genesis 3:24, an angel with a flaming sword or a “sword of fire” guards the gates to Eden (paradise) after the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, are expelled for sinning. While Adah receives emergency medical treatment, she dreams that Francis is a “sword of fire,” hinting that she subconsciously knows he is a barrier to her achieving her goals (or, figuratively, “entering paradise”). Yet her second dream reveals that she still wishes that Francis would succeed, love her, and appreciate her. She also wants their children to have “high-class” educational opportunities (Eton is perhaps the most prestigious all-boys boarding school in England.)
Themes
The word “virtuous” triggers a riot of disorienting colors in Adah’s head. Eventually, she starts screaming. She screams for a long time—until someone hits her leg and orders her to wake up. When she opens her eyes, she sees people dressed in white and a large man splattered with blood—the one who removed the baby. She tries to communicate her gratitude to him with a look. The people bring the baby: a large, hairy boy (Bubu). Adah smiles very gratefully and falls asleep.
After Adah dreams that Francis calls her “virtuous,” she hallucinates unpleasant colors and starts screaming. This negative reaction suggests that even though she wants Francis to love and appreciate her, she subconsciously realizes that his sexist cultural ideals about wifely virtue are unreasonable and impossible for her for fulfill. The man splattered with blood is presumably a surgeon; the novel is implying that Adah needed an emergency C-section, showing that motherhood and childbirth can be dangerous even as Adah finds it highly meaningful.
Themes
