She was terrified that her father was dead. When the kidnappers called her mother, her mother had asked to hear her husband’s voice, but the man on the line refused. Her father was diabetic and didn’t have his medicine with him. The F.B.I. man told her mother to forge an emotional connection with the kidnapper, so she called him “my dear son,” and told him she was an old, old lady, and begged him for mercy. The family made a plan to drop off the money. The kidnappers knew all about them: they said that Okey or a particular son-in-law could go, but no one else. Okey drove to a point on the highway near Nsukka, then, as instructed, set off on a motorcycle taxi for the designated meeting place, carrying ten million naira in a sack. Nobody knew if he would be seen again. They had heard that sometimes a family member would bring the money, only to find that the victim was already dead, and then be killed himself.

Okey rode on the back of the motorcycle, talking to the kidnapper on his phone. The motorcycle driver asked where they were going, there was nothing around here. Okey said to him, Just keep driving. When they entered a forest, the kidnapper told Okey to stop. The kidnapper told him not to look to the right or left, just keep walking, then drop the bag. Okey obeyed; the kidnapper on the phone told him to leave. Back at the house, the family held their phones, willing them to ring and afraid that they would ring. Then her father was delivered.

A few days after he was released, her parents flew to America. Her father seemed to her to have shrunk. He had a cut on his head from when the kidnappers threw him into the trunk of the car. When they got to the forest, they had left him sitting in the dirt for many hours. He hadn’t eaten, because he thought their food might be poisoned. Now any loud noise made him jump—her husband took to making his smoothies in the garage, because her father would startle at the sound of the blender. He rambled when he spoke.

She felt anxious all the time, although she knew he was safe. She would go to his room often, to make sure he was still there. For months, as her pregnancy progressed, she barely slept, and when she did she dreamed about the kidnapping. She dreamed that she had found out where he was being held but she couldn’t get to him, and she woke up crying and sweating. She also felt very guilty. The kidnappers had said to her father, Tell your daughter Chimamanda to come up with the money. She thought, It was all my fault: I should have known that my parents would be a target because of me, I should have arranged for a guard to protect them. Why did I not do that?

For six months, she refused to go to Nigeria or to read Nigerian news. What really hurt was that the problem wasn’t just her country—it was Igboland. Kidnappings were more common in Igboland than anywhere else, and it was well known that it was often your own relatives who were the kidnappers.

Her child is two. Soon she will have to go to school and become part of the world, and this brings up several quandaries that Chimamanda has postponed thinking about. She recently wrote a short manual on rearing a child—“Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions”—but although she is now a published authority on the subject, and holds fully formed opinions on questions such as how gender stereotypes imprison boys as well as girls, she finds that when one descends from principles to logistics things become complicated. She cannot create a child in the way that she can create a character, of course, but she can choose the setting and the language of her daughter’s childhood, which is already to choose one set of possible selves over another.

She wants to raise her child in Nigeria, because she wants her to be protected as she herself was protected, growing up there: not knowing she is black. Someday she will talk to her about what it means to be black, but not yet. She wants her daughter to be in a place where race as she has encountered it in America does not exist.

Even as a privileged Americanah, she found that arriving at an American airport was often jarring—a reminder that she was once again black and foreign. And it wasn’t just the white customs officers who hassled her. “There is a certain kind of black American that deeply resents an African whom they think of as privileged,” she says. “Privileged Nigerians especially. My husband and I have got to the airport and they’ve said to us, You’re Nigerian, I bet you have twenty-five thousand dollars in your bag, let’s see it.”

Her neighborhood in Maryland is more diverse than most, but it’s still America. She moved into her current house just before the 2016 election, and when, the morning after Trump won, she began reading about post-election vandalism in Baltimore, and about how someone had spray-painted “nigger” on a black woman’s car, and how Trump had been elected not by the white working class after all but by suburbanites, she started to panic. She became convinced that her new neighbors had guns and were going to shoot them because they were black and supported Clinton. All day, she refused to leave the house. Then the doorbell rang, and it was the neighbors bearing welcome gifts, and they turned out to be a Japanese couple, a Bangladeshi couple, a white-black couple, and a lefty white couple. She was so relieved that she almost cried.

“There aren’t enough middle-class black folks to go around,” Bill said. “Lots of liberal white folks are looking for black friends.”

Another advantage of raising her daughter in Nigeria would be that she would spend more time speaking Igbo. She was determined that her daughter should grow up speaking the language, but her husband is not Igbo and doesn’t speak it perfectly, so she had hired an Igbo nanny. She had noticed that her daughter was picking up a lot of words and phrases from her books, which were all in English. She thought about translating them, but they described things, such as flying elephants, for which she could not imagine an Igbo equivalent, so she decided that she had to write some Igbo children’s books herself.

On the other hand, raising her daughter in Nigeria would mean that she would likely learn much sooner, and more definitively than she would in America, that she was a girl. She doesn’t want her to know that too early, either. Of course, there was sexism in America as well, but nobody was going to say to her in an American school, You! Go to the girls’ line. In “We Should All Be Feminists,” she told the story of her ambition, when she was nine, to be class monitor, because the monitor was empowered to patrol the classroom, holding a cane, and write down the names of noisemakers. Told that the child who scored the highest mark on a test would become monitor, she concentrated hard and attained the highest mark, only to be told by the teacher that the monitor had to be a boy. The boy who got the second-highest mark duly took up the post, although he was unsuited for its responsibilities. “The boy was a sweet, gentle soul who had no interest in patrolling the class with a cane,” she said, “whereas I was full of ambition to do so.” Should her daughter grow up cherishing similar ambitions, she did not want them thwarted.