Born a Crime

refrigerator, and it was now my mom’s job to provide it. So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the proble ...

more freedom than she’d had in Transkei, so she ran away. She ran all the way down to the train station and jumped on a train an ...

in the village. She’d tell me these things and I’d be like, Lady, clearly you do not know what kind of stories to be telling a t ...

Just as she let the past go, she was determined not to repeat it: my childhood would bear no resemblance to hers. She started wi ...

that’s all he’s done his whole life, disappear and reappear. He’ll go off on a drinking binge and then pop back up out of nowher ...

the abandoned kids and form a troop and take them around to the shebeens. They’d collect empties from the men who were passed ou ...

fate. She wanted me to be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. She gave me the tools to do it as well. She taught me Eng ...

Honest. She bought a set of encyclopedias, too; it was fifteen years old and way out of date, but I would sit and pore through t ...

mysteries or some shit. I had no time for that. Give me Roald Dahl. James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolat ...

to explain Jesus.” She wasn’t comfortable with that. “No, no. No false idols, my friend.” Eventually I wore her down. That was a ...

lessons especially. She was big into Psalms. I had to read Psalms every day. She would quiz me on it. “What does the passage mea ...

others simply weren’t enforced. There came a point, in the months before Mandela’s release, when we could live less furtively. I ...

she would always be seen as that. So, since my mom didn’t want to move to a black area and couldn’t afford to move to a white ar ...

the edge of civilization, the kind of place where property developers have said, “Hey, poor people. You can live the good life, ...

in flashbacks, snippets, driving to a place I’d never seen, seeing people I’d never seen. It was flat, not many trees, the same ...

bed most nights. There was no stepfather in the picture yet, no baby brother crying in the night. It was me and her, alone. Ther ...

Anytime I made the mistake of turning on the fan the vent would fart bits of leaves and dust all over me. Whenever it broke down ...

When the car did work, we had the windows down, sputtering along and baking in the heat. For my entire life the dial on that car ...

townships, waiting for public transport. We were black people who were out in the world. We were black people who could wake up ...

onto her lap and take the stick, and she’d call out the gears as we drove. There was this one part of the road that ran deep int ...