Previous
Intro
Adah, an Ibo girl, is born in Nigeria during World War II. Her extended family is so disappointed that she is not a boy that no one records her exact birthday. Jealous that her younger brother Boy gets to attend a prep school while she doesn’t get to attend school at all, eight-year-old Adah sneaks off to a nearby Methodist school, where a teacher lets her sit in on classes. Back at home—though Adah’s Pa canes her for misbehaving—her parents decide to start sending her to school with Boy. Later, Ma, Pa, and their friends celebrate the return of the first man from their hometown to get a degree in England. This event inspires Adah, and she decides she’d like to someday travel to the UK.
Adah’s Pa dies suddenly, so Adah is sent to live as a domestic servant in her mother’s brother’s house. One day, when Adah is about 11, her uncle’s family gives Adah two shillings and sends her to buy meat. The fee to take entrance exams for secondary school is exactly two shillings, so Adah returns home without meat and refuses to say what happened to the money even when her cousin canes her. Adah does so well on the exams that she wins a full scholarship to a boarding school. After boarding school, Adah decides to attend university in Lagos—but minors aren’t allowed to live alone in Lagos, so she marries a poor teenaged student named Francis so she can continue her education. After the marriage, Adah is quite depressed until she gives birth to a daughter, Titi.
After Adah gets a job with good pay, she convinces Francis that they should go to England. Francis’s father disapproves of women traveling to England and tells Francis to go alone to study accounting while Adah supports him financially from Nigeria. Though furious, Adah pretends to support this plan. By the time Francis leaves for England, Adah is pregnant again. Shortly after he leaves, she gives birth to a son, Vicky. Adah then convinces her in-laws to let her follow Francis by promising that she’ll be able to make more money if she goes to England.
When Adah, Titi, and Vicky join Francis in England, Adah is horrified to see the tiny room Francis rents and to learn that their neighbors are working-class. Francis angrily tells her that all Black people in England are “second class citizens.” He tries to convince her to take a factory job, but Adah insists on applying only to white-collar jobs. Eventually she gets a job offer to be a library assistant—only to realize that she’s pregnant again. The job requires a medical exam, so Adah is very friendly with the elderly male doctor to keep him from noticing that she’s pregnant. Her ruse works, much to her relief—she now believes that Francis is bound to her because he’s economically dependent on her, and she still wants their marriage to work.
Francis and Adah agree that while Adah works, Francis will study and watch the children until a nursery spot opens up for them. Yet after a while, Francis resents caring for the children and says he won’t do it anymore. Through neighbors, Adah finds a certified “daily-minder” named Trudy to watch the children. When Titi stops speaking after a few weeks at Trudy’s, Adah becomes suspicious and drops in on Trudy’s house. She finds Trudy flirting with a man inside while Titi and Vicky are left unsupervised in Trudy’s filthy yard. Adah goes straight to the local “children’s officer,” Miss Stirling, but Trudy follows Adah and lies to Miss Stirling about what happened. Adah is shocked to discover that some white people lie just like some Black people do and wonders why, in that case, white people make claims to racial superiority. Since Trudy promises to improve her childcare and Adah can’t find another babysitter, however, Adah keeps taking the children to Trudy. Not long after, Adah realizes that Titi stopped talking because Francis demanded that she only speak English, which Titi doesn’t know well.
One day, when Adah returns to the library from her lunch break, an alarmed coworker meets her with a message: Vicky is very sick. Adah rushes to Trudy’s, where an ambulance is already waiting. Vicky is diagnosed with viral meningitis, which Adah learns is contracted when a person ingests the virus. Recalling Trudy’s filthy yard, which is likely where Vicky contracted his illness, Adah tells Francis that she’s going to confront Trudy. When Francis questions Adah’s tone, Adah retorts that she knows Francis has been having sex with Trudy and that if something bad happens to Vicky, she’ll kill Francis and Trudy. When Adah confronts Trudy at her house, Trudy tries to claim that Vicky must have contracted meningitis in Nigeria. Then Titi walks inside, dirty, from the filthy yard. Adah moves to hit Trudy, but a passing neighbor holds her back and someone calls Miss Stirling. After Miss Stirling observes Trudy’s grimy house, she tells Adah that they’ve found a nursery for Titi and Vicky.
After Vicky returns from the hospital, Francis and Adah get a letter from their landlord’s lawyer evicting them. Adah is unsurprised: she knows her childless landlord is jealous of her for having children and that her neighbors hate her for having a white-collar job. For two weeks, all the ads she finds for rooms say “Sorry, no coloureds.” Then she discovers an ad that doesn’t explicitly discriminate against Black people. She and Francis go to see the rooms, which are located in a dilapidated part of town—but when the white landlady sees that they’re Black, she tells them that the rooms are already rented. Adah becomes desperate enough to rent from Mr. Noble, a Nigerian man who immigrated to England in the 1940s; he has trouble getting tenants because of a rumor he started that his dead mother, a witch, killed the rent-controlled tenants he inherited when he first bought his house.
A week before her due date, Adah feels painful movements in her womb. Francis accuses her of making up the pain to get out of work. Over Francis’s protests, Adah walks to the nearest surgery, where the doctor tells her to go to the hospital immediately. Adah refuses: she plans to have a home birth to save money. The doctor calls the midwives. When the midwives arrive to examine Adah, they tell her that she’s bleeding terribly. They call an ambulance, and Adah ends up having her son, Bubu, via an emergency Cesarian section. While recovering in a maternity ward, Adah contrasts her unhappy marriage to Francis with the loving relationship she sees between the sleek woman in the bed beside hers and the woman’s husband.
Adah doesn’t want to get pregnant again—but when she tells Francis she wants contraception, he tells her he’ll just pull out. Adah sneaks to a family planning clinic and gets fitted for a cervical cap. Later that night, Francis starts a fight with her, and she ends up confessing about the cap—after which he beats her so badly that Mr. Noble intervenes. The next week, she discovers she’s pregnant again. Adah goes to her family doctor and asks him to terminate the pregnancy, so he gives her abortifacient pills. Meanwhile, Adah has started working at a new library, where she makes friends with her coworkers. One coworker, Bill, introduces her to novels by Black writers. Yet Adah doesn’t tell any of her nice coworkers about her problems.
After three months, Adah realizes that the abortifacient pills haven’t worked. She goes to a park to think. An Ibo immigrant approaches her, introduces himself as Okpara, and asks whether she’s had a fight with her husband. He offers to help Adah ask her husband’s forgiveness. Though irritated, Adah walks him back to her apartment. Okpara warns Francis that Adah is so unhappy she could have a mental breakdown, like many lonely Nigerian immigrants do, and tells Francis that his sons will never respect him unless he gets a job and starts supporting the family. Okpara insists that Francis and Adah socialize with him and his wife, but Okpara is unable to convince Francis to get a job: he’s too used to taking Adah’s money.
Eventually, Adah tells Francis that she’s pregnant and that she’s not going to support him anymore. Though Francis protests, Adah stands firm. After she gives birth to their fourth child, a daughter named Dada, Francis gets a job. Meanwhile, Adah stays at home and cares for the children. When she realizes that she has a few hours free each afternoon, she remembers her aspiration to become a writer and starts writing a novel she calls The Bride Price in some notebooks. When Adah finishes The Bride Price, she shows it to her former coworkers, including Bill, who tells her it’s her “brainchild” and suggests she try to get it published. Adah, excited, asks Francis to read it, but he tells her that it’s trash and that no one wants to read a Black woman’s writing. The next time Adah goes grocery shopping, she comes back to find Francis burning the manuscript. Feeling as if Francis has murdered one of her children, she resolves once and for all to leave him.
Adah gets a new job and moves out with the children, though Francis beats her as she’s leaving. Later, Francis follows Titi and Vicky home from school to Adah’s new address and tells her that married Nigerians don’t separate. When Adah points out that he violated Nigerian norms first by not supporting his family, he attacks her, beating and choking her until her upstairs neighbor intervenes.
Adah decides to take Francis to court. In court, Francis claims that Adah got all her injuries from a fall and refuses to pay child support. Adah resolves to support the children by herself and leaves the courtroom. Walking aimlessly, she encounters an old high school friend who sees her wedding ring and pays for her taxi home, as he assumes that she and Francis are still together.
