Free Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe

like this piece of chalk," said Obierika. He held up a piece of chalk, which every man kept in his obi and with which his guests drew lines on the floor before they ate kola nuts. "And these white men, they say, have no toes."
    "And have you never seen them?" asked Machi.
    "Have you?" asked Obierika.
    "One of them passes here frequently," said Machi. "His name is Amadi."
    Those who knew Amadi laughed. He was a leper, and the polite name for leprosy was "the white skin."
    CHAPTER NINE
    For the first time in three nights, Okonkwo slept. He woke up once in the middle of the night and his mind went back to the past three days without making him feel uneasy. He began to wonder why he had felt uneasy at all. It was like a man wondering in broad daylight why a dream had appeared so terrible to him at night. He stretched himself and scratched his thigh where a mosquito had bitten him as he slept. Another one was wailing near his right ear. He slapped the ear and hoped he had killed it. Why do they always go for one's ears? When he was a child his mother had told him a story about it. But it was as silly as all women's stories. Mosquito, she had said, had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.
    Okonkwo turned on his side and went back to sleep. He was roused in the morning by someone banging on his door.
    "Who is that?" he growled. He knew it must be Ekwefi.
    Of his three wives Ekwefi was the only one who would have the audacity to bang on his door.
    "Ezinma is dying," came her voice, and all the tragedy and sorrow of her life were packed in those words.
    Okonkwo sprang from his bed, pushed back the bolt on his door and ran into Ekwefi's hut.
    Ezinma lay shivering on a mat beside a huge fire that her mother had kept burning all night.
    "It is iba," said Okonkwo as he took his machete and went into the bush to collect the leaves and grasses and barks of trees that went into making the medicine for iba.
    Ekwefi knelt beside the sick child, occasionally feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead.
    Ezinma was an only child and the centre of her mother's world. Very often it was Ezinma who decided what food her mother should prepare. Ekwefi even gave her such delicacies as eggs, which children were rarely allowed to eat because such food tempted them to steal. One day as Ezinma was eating an egg Okonkwo had come in unexpectedly from his hut. He was greatly shocked and swore to beat Ekwefi if she dared to give the child eggs again. But it was impossible to refuse Ezinma anything. After her father's rebuke she developed an even keener appetite for eggs. And she enjoyed above all the secrecy in which she now ate them. Her mother always took her into their bedroom and shut the door.
    Ezinma did not call her mother Nne like all children. She called her by her name, Ekwefi, as her father and other grownup people did. The relationship between them was not only that of mother and child. There was something in it like the companionship of equals, which was strengthened by such little conspiracies as eating eggs in the bedroom.
    Ekwefi had suffered a good deal in her life. She had borne ten children and nine of them had died in infancy, usually before the age of three. As she buried one child after another her sorrow gave way to despair and then to grim resignation. The birth of her children, which should be a woman's crowning glory, became for Ekwefi mere physical agony devoid of promise. The naming ceremony after seven market weeks became an empty ritual. Her deepening despair found expression in the names she gave her children. One of them was a pathetic cry, Onwumbiko--
    "Death, I implore you." But Death took no notice,- Onwumbiko died in his fifteenth month. The next child was a girl, Ozoemena--
    "May it not