Born a Crime: Chapters 4–8

I was operating on my cousin Bulelwa’s ear with a set of matches when I accidentally perforated her eardrum.

I’d go to funerals and I’d walk in and the bereaved would look up and see me and they’d stop crying.

But because of scholarships we all sat at the same table. We wore the same maroon blazers, the same gray slacks and skirts. We had the same books. We had the same teachers. There was no racial separation. Every clique was racially mixed.

So the fact that I did speak African languages immediately endeared me to the black kids.

Most of them shut down, and black children were forced into crowded classrooms in dilapidated schools, often with teachers who were barely literate themselves.

She went gallivanting with him on his manic misadventures.

The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes, sovereign and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be “free.”

Other than the menial wages sent home from the cities, families scraped by with little beyond subsistence-level farming.

My mom would have to fight with the bigger kids to get a handful of meat or a sip of the gravy or even a bone from which to suck out some marrow.

She was hungry; let the animals fend for themselves.

Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero.

My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate.

Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply weren’t enforced.

There came a point, in the months before Mandela’s release, when we could live less furtively.

I remember moving out there in flashbacks, snippets, driving to a place I’d never seen, seeing people I’d never seen.

It was modest and cramped inside, but walking in I thought, Wow.

On the commute to work and school, there was a long stretch of the road into town that was completely deserted.

There was none of the fanfare of a picnic basket or plates or anything like that, only baloney and brown bread and margarine sandwiches wrapped up in butcher paper.

Her frugality was the stuff of legend.

We had threadbare furniture, busted old sofas with holes worn through the fabric.

She found her way through sheer force of will.

But, unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification.

So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black.

I was a voracious kid. I consumed boxes of books and wanted more, more, more. I ate like a pig.

Whenever I went to my cousins’ house for the holidays, my mom would drop me off with a bag of tomatoes, onions, and potatoes and a large sack of cornmeal. That was her way of preempting any complaints about my visit.

There’s a condition kids suffer from, a compulsive disorder that makes them do things they themselves don’t understand.

My relationship with my mom was like the relationship between a cop and a criminal in the movies—the relentless detective and the devious mastermind she’s determined to catch.

Our life turned into a courtroom drama with two lawyers constantly debating over loopholes and technicalities.

That way she could make her points and there could be no verbal sparring back and forth.

If we were having a real, full-on argument or if I’d gotten in trouble at school, I’d find more accusatory missives waiting for me when I got home.

I think he thought he was giving me an ultimatum that would get me to shape up.

Soon the roof was on fire, and from there the blaze spread to the main house, and the whole thing burned and burned and burned. Smoke was billowing into the sky.

What were they going to do, arrest a seven-year-old for arson?

My mom was wild and impulsive. My father was reserved and rational. She was fire, he was ice. They were opposites that attracted, and I am a mix of them both.

These licenses existed because hotels and restaurants needed them to serve black travelers and diplomats from other countries, who in theory weren’t subject to the same restrictions as black South Africans; black South Africans with money in turn exploited that loophole to frequent those hotels and restaurants.

At first the inspectors came and tried to get him on cleanliness and health-code violations. Clearly they had never heard of the Swiss. That failed dismally.

Then they decided to go after him by imposing additional and arbitrary restrictions.

I feel like my dad had enough money to be comfortable and travel, but he never spent lavishly on things.

The whole issue of Santa Claus is a rather contentious one when it comes to African Christmas, a matter of pride. When an African dad buys his kid a present, the last thing he’s going to do is give some fat white man credit for it.

He was incensed by the idea of my mom being in contact with her previous love, and she decided it was safer for everyone involved not to test his anger.