The Joys of Motherhood Race Quotes

Dr. Meers peered over the paper, smiled mischievously and answered, "Goodnight, baboon."

Mrs. Meers straightaway went into a torrent of words, too fast and too emotionally charged for Nnaife, who stood there like a statue, to understand. He gaped from husband to wife and back again, wondering why she should be so angry. The woman went on for a while, then suddenly realised that Nnaife was still standing by the door. She motioned with her arm for him to go away. He heard Dr. Meers laugh and repeat the word "baboon".

Women were all the same, Nnaife thought as he made his way to his own part of the compound, determined to ask someone in the near future what the word "baboon" meant. Not that he was the type of man who would have done anything had he known its meaning. He would simply shrug his shoulders and say, "We work for them and they pay us. His calling me a baboon does not make me one." (4.11-13)

If the master was intelligent, as it was said all white men were, then why did he not show a little of it, and tell his wife to keep quiet? What kind of an intelligent man could not keep his wife quiet, instead of laughing stupidly over a newspaper? Nnaife did not realize that Dr Meers's laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for animals at least respected each other's feelings, each other's dignity (4.14)

All the time he was saying this, a sick sensation was turning round and round inside Nnu Ego's head. That she had to keep such a joyous thing as this quiet because of a shriveled old woman with ill-looking skin like the flesh of a pig! If Nnaife had said it was because of Dr Meers, Nnu Ego might have swallowed it; but not for that thing of a female whom she would not dream of offering to an enemy god. O, her dear mother, was this a man she was living with? How could a situation rob a man of his manhood without him knowing it?

She whirled round like a hurricane to face him and let go her tongue. "You behave like a slave! Do you go to her and say, 'Please, madam crawcraw-skin, can I sleep with my wife today?' Do you make sure the stinking underpants she wears are well washed and pressed before you come and touch me? Me, Nnu Ego, the daughter of Agbadi of Ibuza. Oh, shame on you! I will never marry you in church. If she sacks you because of that, I shall go home to my father. I want to live with a man, not a woman-made man?" (4.58-59)

When Nnu Ego later confided in Cordelia, the wife of Ubani, she had laughed at her moanings about her husband and had said to her, "You want a husband who has time to ask you if you wish to eat rice, or drink corn pap with honey? Forget it. Men here are too busy being white men's servants to be men. We women mind the home. Not our husbands. Their manhood has been taken away from them. The shame of it is that they don't know it. All they see is the money, shining white man's money"

"But," Nnu Ego had protested, "My father released his slaves because the white man says it is illegal. Yet these our husbands are like slaves, don't you think?"

"They are all slaves, including us. If their masters treat them badly, they take it out on us. The only difference is that they are given some pay for their work, instead of having been bough. But the pay is just enough for us to rent an old room like this." (4.66-68)

"Oh, you people living with the white men. I never can make out which room or house belongs to which cook or which washerman. So I had to call you from the street." (7.13)

"I know, loving and caring are more difficult for our men. But Nnaife is very loving; you see, he copies the white people he works for. He is not bad in the other way, too…" (7.24)

"Neither did I dream of marrying a man who would stay away months at a time. You know something, they say men who work on the ships have mistresses wherever they land."

"Oh!" Nnu Ego exclaimed, covering her mouth. "Your husband would never do a thing like that. Never. The women overseas, they have a different colour from ours, pale like pigs—how can our men stand them? And what do these women see in our men?"

"Well, I don't care really. They say their men are not very strong." (7.25-27)

So weeks later when Nnu Ego sang and rocked her new child Oshia on her knees, she was more confident. The voices of all the people who knew them had said she deserved this child. The voices of the gods had said so too, as her father had confirmed to her in his messages. She might not have any money to supplement her husband's income, but were they not in a white man's world where it was the duty of the father to provide for his family? In Ibuza, women made a contribution, but in urban Lagos, men had to be the sold providers; this new setting robbed the woman of her useful role. Nnu Ego told herself that the life she had indulged in with the baby Ngozi had been very risky: she had been trying to be traditional in a modern urban setting. It was because she wanted to be a woman of Ibuza in a town like Lagos that she lost her child. This time she was going to play it according to the new rules. (7.67)

The woman was never able to pronounce his name properly. At first is used to annoy him, but later he shrugged his shoulders; after all, she was not one of his people and it gave him a kind of secret delight to have proof that he white people, with all their airs, did not know everything. If anyone had pointed out to him that neither did he pronounce the Meers' name properly, that his version sounded like "Miiaass" to his employers, he would have said, "But I am only a black man, and I don't' expect to know everything." He was one of the Africans who were so used to being told they were stupid in those days that they started to believe in their own imperfections. (8.7)

"I shall still kill you. No child of mine is marrying a tribe that calls us cannibals. A tribe that looks down on us, a tribe that hates us," Nnaife growled, struggling in the hands of his captors. (17.95)