Born a Crime

mattress where we’d left the matches and the magnifying glass. We ran and called the maid. She came, but she didn’t know what to ...

this kid and the maid, we ran out to the road and watched as the firemen tried to put it out, but by the time they did, it was t ...

police, didn’t threaten to sue. What were they going to do, arrest a seven-year-old for arson? And we were so poor you couldn’t ...

huge fight. “Your son has burned down my life!” But there was no punishment for me that day. My mom was too much in shock. There ...

will tell you, “Trevor burned down a house.” If people thought I was naughty before, after the fire I was notorious. One of my u ...

Mlungisi got maybe one hiding in his life. After that he said he never wanted to experience anything like it ever again, and fro ...

breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bru ...

I grew up in a black family in a black neighborhood in a black country. I’ve traveled to other black cities in black countries a ...

the middle of the game. A security guard, seeing the cat, did what any sensible black person would do. He said to himself, “That ...

that’s what sent them over the edge. Black people were just confused. They didn’t see any problem with what the man did. They we ...

FUFI A month after we moved to Eden Park, my mother brought home two cats. Black cats. Beautiful creatures. Some woman from her ...

excited because she loves animals. She didn’t believe in any nonsense about cats. It was just another way in which she was a reb ...

and found the cats strung up by their tails from our front gate, gutted and skinned and bleeding out, their heads chopped off. O ...

they accept any of mine. Had the cats made more of an effort, I might have felt like I had lost something. But even as a kid, lo ...

man’s alarm system. You buy a dog and you keep it out in the yard. Black people name dogs by their traits. If it has stripes, yo ...

strange mix. My mom said she’d take them both. She brought them home, and I was the happiest kid on earth. My mom named them Fuf ...

Clean lines, happy face. She looked like a perfect bull terrier, only skinnier because of the Maltese mixed in. Panther, who was ...

and broke her spine. We took her to the vet and she had to be put down. After examining her, the vet came over and gave us the n ...

Fufi was the love of my life. Beautiful but stupid. I raised her. I potty-trained her. She slept in my bed. A dog is a great thi ...

by a wall at least five feet high. After a while, every day we’d come home and Fufi would be sitting outside the gate, waiting f ...