White Teeth: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Alsana and Clara mistrust English education. For Clara, it is because of what happened to her grandmother, Ambrosia Bowden, when she—the adolescent daughter of Captain Charlie Durham’s landlady—became pregnant by Captain Durham in May 1906, in Kingston, Jamaica. Captain Durham told Ambrosia that he wanted to “give her lessons” three times a week, though he mostly gave her “anatomy” lessons—“given on top of the student as she lay on her back.” Captain Durham told Ambrosia that she wasn’t a servant anymore because she was now educated. Five months before Hortense, Ambrosia’s child, was born, though, Ambrosia discovered that Captain Durham had left.

Durham entrusts Ambrosia’s continued education to Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard, who believed that the “natives required instruction, Christian faith, and moral guidance.” Glenard brings Ambrosia to a Christian woman named Mrs. Brenton, who introduces Ambrosia to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Hortense Bowden believes that “at the moment her mother recognized Jehovah, Hortense herself became conscious.”

On January 14, 1907, as Ambrosia’s pregnancy reaches full term, she walks down King Street, praying for “the return of Christ or the return of Charlie Durham—the two men who could save her.” Sir Glenard blocks Ambrosia’s path as she walks down the street and lures her into the old Spanish church nearby, where he begins to touch her breasts. Suddenly, the world begins to shake, and Ambrosia’s water breaks; Glenard is crushed by the statue of an angel, and Ambrosia gives birth while the earthquake occurs. Durham returns to Kingston the next day, desperate to find Ambrosia; he finds her cousin and asks her to deliver a note to her, saying that he wishes to marry Ambrosia and take her with him on an outgoing ship. Ambrosia replies with one sentence from the Book of Job: “I will fetch my knowledge from afar.”