It was a drizzling fall evening. The doctor had told them to start coming to the hospital when the contractions became regular. They called a cab, and she cried all the way to the hospital. He thought she was in a lot of pain, but she told him later that she had cried because back home, when a woman was to have a baby, the men sat outside drinking ogogoro, the local gin, while the woman was surrounded by local midwives and aunts and cousins and grandmothers who had had many children themselves and knew how to flip the baby in the womb if it chose to come feetfirst instead of headfirst. It was the wife’s idea that they should have a baby while in America. He was not very enthusiastic about the idea; he was here to study, he told her. And, besides, babies cried a lot, and one of the things that was said about white people when he was growing up in Nigeria was that they did not like noise, the other two being that (1) they did not tell lies, and (2) they were completely fearless. Since they came to America, he had added reason to agree with the fact that white people did not like noise.
