Under the Udala Trees

While watching for the relief lorry, Ijeoma is approached by armed soldiers who ask for water. Her mother intervenes, telling the soldier not to beg. When Adaora goes back inside, Ijeoma goes to fill the man’s jerry can.

Adaora notices Ijeoma at the water tank, takes the jerry can from her, returns to the front gate, and tells the soldier they don’t have any water. Ijeoma worries Adaora sees her “as a burden, the same way that she saw the soldiers as a burden” (32).

When Red Cross workers do not appear on relief day, Ijeoma waits for the lorry, watches girls walk by, and compares her body to theirs, while Adaora prays inside. After Ijeoma tells her the lorry hasn’t arrived, Adaora describes her nightmares and feeling haunted in the daytime by her dead husband.

Ijeoma’s narration embeds a story about a “girl” (36) whose life does not turn out the way she expects. She reflects on the positive and natural aspects of change, and muses on God’s intentions regarding change.

Ijeoma then says she is that “girl”—the fairy tale story was her rationalization of her mother’s decision to send her away. Adaora plans to go alone to her parents’ old house in Aba while Ijeoma stays with a grammar school teacher and his wife in Nnewi. Adaora will then see whether Ijeoma can join her. Ijeoma argues with Adaora, begging to come along.

However, Adaora stands firm, clarifying that Ijeoma will be staying behind. The two pray together.

Before Ijeoma is sent away, Chibundu’s family, the Ejiofors, stop by for a visit. Chibundu has Ijeoma stand in front of a mirror with him to remember them together. She remembers him unbraiding her hair to steal a thread woven in it. Now, he worries that she will forget him and they drink water together.

Outside, they sit on an orange tree branch and watch passers-by, a bicycle man and vendor woman, collide and argue. After laughing at the scene, they kiss, Ijeoma doing so because she felt “a need to relieve him of the burden” of awkwardly initiating a kiss (46).

As Ijeoma and Adaora travel to Nnewi on a lorry, Ijeoma recalls that before the war her father would draw architectural designs, such as her “castle-in-the-village dreams” (47). In the present, they see Biafran soldiers marching and chanting, as well as corpses littering the roads.

When they approach the school teacher’s gate, Adaora leaves Ijeoma with a hug and a small bag. Adaora promises she will send for Ijeoma, tells her to mind her “Auntie” and “Uncle” (the respectful way to address family friends), and gives her Uzo’s old Bible. Ijeoma walks to the grammar school teacher’s house alone.  

The teacher is corpulent and his wife has straightened hair. They express their condolences for Uzo’s death and show Ijeoma to her room: small open quarters disconnected from the main house, including its kitchen and bathroom.

She sleeps for a few hours, and finds a water tank and soap to wash with outside. In her moonlight bath, Ijeoma “should have felt veiled” but “there was that other element of darkness, the one that left me feeling more vulnerable, more naked than in the light” (55). The openness of her new living space echoes in the exposure she feels. Afterwards, she stares at the sky while holding her father’s Bible, and looks around the bare hovel, wondering about the future.