Born a Crime

herself into me. She would find places for us to go where we didn’t have to spend money. We must have gone to every park in Joha ...

baloney and brown bread and margarine will instantly take me back. You can come with all the Michelin stars in the world, just g ...

Our car was a tin can on wheels, and we lived in the middle of nowhere. We had threadbare furniture, busted old sofas with holes ...

time I asked my mom for Adidas sneakers. She came home with some knockoff brand, Abidas. “Mom, these are fake,” I said. “I don’t ...

chicken bone and getting out every last bit of marrow inside. We didn’t eat chickens. We obliterated them. Our family was an arc ...

many months where that was all we ate. The butcher sold bones, too. We called them “soup bones,” but they were actually labeled ...

delicacy. It’s divine.” They ordered it, the waiter brought it out, and I was like, “Dog bones, motherfucker!” I was not impress ...

wall that ran from one end of the block to the other and go, “Wow. That’s only one house. All of that is for one family.” Someti ...

or shouldn’t do. She’d take me to the ice rink to go skating. Johannesburg used to have this epic drive-in movie theater, Top St ...

like a white kid—not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for my ...

rung of what’s possible is far beyond the world you can see. My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed ...

released, ten before democracy finally came, yet she was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom woul ...

People thought my mom was crazy. Ice rinks and drive-ins and suburbs, these things were izinto zabelungu—the things of white peo ...

Apartheid, for all its power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logic ...

Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African governmen ...

“Excuse me. I’m Japanese.” “Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.” ...

LOOPHOLES My mother used to tell me, “I chose to have you because I wanted something to love and something that would love me un ...

me me.’ ” My mom thought having a child was going to be like having a partner, but every child is born the center of its own uni ...

and a large sack of cornmeal. That was her way of preempting any complaints about my visit. At my gran’s house I always got seco ...

traffic. I loved to be chased. I thought it was a game. The old grannies my mom hired to look after me while she was at work? I ...