Born a Crime: Chapters 17–18

Eventually he let me go on the assumption that I was some wayward orphan, because what mother would send her ten-year-old child to jail?

I stepped out of the car, and he put the cuffs on me and told me I was being arrested on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. He took me in, and the car was impounded.

The Hillbrow police station looks exactly like every other police station in South Africa. They were all built by the same contractor at the height of apartheid—separate nodes in the central nervous system of a police state.

I needed someone sympathetic to my plight, and I didn’t believe she was that person.

I called a friend and asked him if he could ask his dad to borrow some money. He said he’d handle it. He talked to his dad, and the lawyer got his retainer the next day.

I woke up the next morning with that fleeting sensation where you think something has all been a dream.

The most notorious colored gangs are the Numbers Gangs: the 26s, the 27s, the 28s. They control the prisons. They’re known for being brutally violent—maiming, torturing...

...not for the sake of making money but just to prove how ruthless and savage they are, like Mexican drug cartels.

He’s paid a pittance but at least he’s paid.

It’s like the cantina scene from Star Wars, where the band’s playing music and Han Solo’s in the corner and all of the bad guys and bounty hunters from all over the universe are hanging out—a wretched hive of scum and villainy, only there’s no music and there’s no Han Solo.

I thought back on how naive I’d been just hours before, thinking jail wasn’t so bad and I could handle it.

Right next to me as I walked in was a young man having a complete meltdown, talking to himself, bawling his eyes out. He looked up and locked eyes with me, and I guess he thought I looked like a kindred soul he could talk to.

They were mostly in for white-collar crimes, money schemes, fraud and racketeering.

The bailiff read out my case number, and the judge looked up at me.

But now I was even more petrified because I didn’t want the judge to think I wasn’t taking him seriously because I was laughing.

My mother loathed every moment of being there.

In the homelands, the firstborn son almost becomes the father/husband by default because the dad is off working in the city.

The firstborn son is the man of the house. He raises his siblings. His mom treats him with a certain level of respect as the dad’s surrogate.

My mom would go down and cower, groveling in the dirt like she was worshipping a deity, and she’d stay down there for a long time, like a really long time, long enough to make everyone very uncomfortable.

Every other man had some docile girl from the village, and here he’d come with this modern woman, a Xhosa woman no less, a culture whose women were thought of as particularly loudmouthed and promiscuous.

The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women.

To this day I’ll never forget the patronizing, condescending way they spoke to her.

To this day I’ll never forget the patronizing, condescending way they spoke to her.

But I remember standing there watching my mom, flabbergasted, horrified that these cops wouldn’t help her.

As headstrong and independent as my mom is, she remains the woman who gives back.

Inevitably Abel would get behind schedule on a car, and since he was our ride, we’d have to wait for him to finish before we could go home.

German cars were wonderful, especially Mercedes. Big, plush leather seats, like couches. They were cold when you first climbed in, but they were well insulated and warmed up nicely.

Someone was taking over the property; there were liens against his assets.

I can’t recall the details of it, because now it’s muddled with all the other times that came after it.

It was sporadic enough to where you’d think it wouldn’t happen again, but it was frequent enough that you never forgot it was possible.

A father does not fear retribution from his son, but I was not his son.

She herself seemed resolute, as determined as ever, but with an undertone of sadness I had never seen before, like the news had devastated her at first but she’d since reconciled herself to the reality of it.

She herself seemed resolute, as determined as ever, but with an undertone of sadness I had never seen before, like the news had devastated her at first but she’d since reconciled herself to the reality of it.

Where does a woman go when she’s single with three kids and she lives in a society that makes her a pariah for being a manless woman?

The days of endlessly schlepping back and forth to church were no longer my problem, and I was lazily sleeping in.

He still looked perfectly calm, completely stoic.

I turned and ran into the emergency room. My mom was there in triage on a gurney.

For all the pain I felt that day, in hindsight, I have to imagine that Andrew’s pain was far greater than mine.

If anything, I felt vindicated; I’d been right about Abel all along.

I felt completely impotent, but I still felt I had to do something.