This chapter is an interview with Zelu's mother, who recounts her own background. She grew up in a palace in Ondo State, Nigeria, the daughter of a king's second wife. She had four mothers, including the queen (whom she affectionately called Yaya), and seventeen siblings. As an academically gifted, observant child, she became her father's favorite and frequently accompanied him to public functions, which made her older half-brother Remi, the heir to the throne, deeply resentful.

She describes the palace's complex social structure, including the children given to her father as 'slaves' who were raised, educated, and often freed. Remi turned these companions and their younger siblings against her, terrorizing her until she grew taller in her late teens. She defends her royal family proudly, criticizing American narrow-mindedness about unfamiliar customs and asserting the legitimacy of her lineage.

She then recounts meeting Zelu's father, Secret Wednesday Onyenezi, an Igbo man from Imo State, at university. They fell in love over a campus flower courtyard he tended. Despite her family's expectation that she marry a Yoruba man of status and her father's mocking reaction to Secret's name, she married him. Secret openly rejected royalty, advocating instead for African democracy.

She concludes by framing Zelu as the product of this conflict and diversity. While proud of her daughter, she admits she does not understand Zelu's novel or where its drama and imagination came from, and suggests Secret might explain it better.