Vicky Character Analysis

“You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos […] you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an élite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”

Everybody talked and speculated. The trouble was that Ada was like a peacock, who kept wanting to win all the time. Only first-class citizens lived with their children, not the blacks.

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.”

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.

You come to behave and act like a mad person if you are surrounded by mad people. Was that what people called adaptation? she wondered.

“I brought my children here to save them from the clutches of your family, and, God help me, they are going back as different people; never, never are they going to be the type of person you are. My sons will learn to treat their wives as people, individuals, not like goats that have been taught to talk.”

At least some of the provisions of the Welfare State worked for both second- and first-class citizens alike.

Francis could kill her child. She could forgive him all he had done before, but not this.

“You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos […] you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an élite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”

Everybody talked and speculated. The trouble was that Ada was like a peacock, who kept wanting to win all the time. Only first-class citizens lived with their children, not the blacks.

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.”

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.

You come to behave and act like a mad person if you are surrounded by mad people. Was that what people called adaptation? she wondered.

“I brought my children here to save them from the clutches of your family, and, God help me, they are going back as different people; never, never are they going to be the type of person you are. My sons will learn to treat their wives as people, individuals, not like goats that have been taught to talk.”

At least some of the provisions of the Welfare State worked for both second- and first-class citizens alike.

Francis could kill her child. She could forgive him all he had done before, but not this.