Free In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker Page B

the central character of Second Class Citizen, has no memory of her existence before the age of eight. She is not positive she was eight, because, “you see, she was a girl. A girl who had arrived when everyone was expecting and predicting a boy. So, since she was such a disappointment to her parents, to her immediate family, to her tribe, nobody thought of recording her birth.” Adah’s “tribe” are the Ibos of Nigeria, and among the Ibos a woman’s only function is to work hard around the house and have countless children, preferably boys.
    It is her brother, Boy, who is routinely sent to school, while Adah is left home to learn the duties of a wife. Bright and intensely interested in learning to read, Adah sneaks off to school: because her desire to be educated is as pathetic as it is obvious, she is allowed to stay. Her parents are reminded by her teachers that, since Adah will be educated above the other girls in her age group, her bride price will be higher. In short, they will be able to make money off her.
    The years pass in dreams of going to England (which Adah thinks is a kind of heaven), in hard work at home, and in study, which Adah loves. When it is time to apply to the university, however, Adah—who is now orphaned—discovers that because she has no home she will not be allowed to take the necessary exams. Because women who live alone in Ibo society are considered prostitutes, and because she needs a home to continue her education, Adah marries Francis, a lazy and spoiled perennial student who considers her his property. (And in Ibo society, she is.) Eager for elevation among her clan (a woman who has many sons eventually reaches the rank of man), Adah has two children in rapid succession, impressing everyone with her ability to reproduce as well as hold down a high-salaried civil-service job at the American consulate. When she follows Francis to London she discovers such speedy reproduction is not admired there. With children in tow and a husband who has accommodated himself to being a second-class citizen, resigned to living in a hovel (almost no one, English or otherwise, will rent to “Africans with children”), Adah must adapt to a country that is overwhelmingly racist, and to people who seem incapable of decent behavior toward their former subjects.
    Ignoring her husband’s advice that she too is now a second-class citizen and must accept work in a factory with the other African wives, Adah applies for a better job, in a library. To her husband’s discomfiture, she gets it, but must soon give it up because she is pregnant again.
    The horrors of Adah’s life are many: Francis is physically abusive out of frustration at not passing the exams he came to England to study for; Adah’s countrymen and -women are rude and unhelpful because they consider Adah, with her first-class job, a show-off; Adah’s pregnancies are hard, and her children often sick. But through it all she manages to view her situation from a cultural perspective that precludes self-pity. Early on, she makes a distinction between her husband and her children: “But even if she had nothing to thank Francis for, she could still thank him for giving her her own children, because she had never really had anything before.”
    And it is here that Adah makes the decision that seems to me impressive and important for all artists with children. She reasons that since her children will someday be adults, she will fulfill the ambition of her life not only for herself, but also for them. The ambition of her life is to write a novel, and on the first day she has her oldest child in a nursery and her youngest two down for their naps, she begins writing it. Since this novel is written to the adults her children will become, it is okay with her if the distractions and joys they represent in her life, as children, become part of it. (I agree that it is healthier, in any case, to write for the