Born a Crime

“Trevor Noah.” “Okay. Now we can carry on.” The whole courtroom started laughing, so then I started laughing, too. But now I was ...

The judge assigned my trial date and set my bail, and I was free to go. I walked out of court and the light of day hit my face a ...

— I drove with Mlungisi to his place, took a shower, and slept there. The next day he dropped me back at my mom’s house. I strol ...

I was telling all these stories, going on about everything Mlungisi and I had been up to that week, and I caught my mom giving m ...

course she’d known: the car. It had been missing the whole time. I’d been so wrapped up in dealing with jail and covering my tra ...

jail thinking I was so slick. But she’d known everything the whole time. “I know you see me as some crazy old bitch nagging at y ...

My favorite thing to eat as a kid, and still my favorite dessert of all time, was custard and jelly, what Americans would call J ...

That night I went to bed and I got absolutely butchered by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes love to feast on me, and when I was a kid it w ...

“Eh, I’m not sure that’s how it works.” My mom and I had different ideas about how Jesus worked. She believed that you pray to J ...

medicine, are we not denying the grace that he has given us?” Like all of our debates about Jesus, this conversation went nowher ...

MY MOTHER’S LIFE Once I had my hair cornrowed for the matric dance, I started getting attention from girls for the first time. I ...

much pain as they did to look good. Either way, once I found success, I wasn’t going to mess with the formula. I kept going back ...

like a million bucks. Once she was all done up, she couldn’t resist teasing me, throwing little verbal jabs the way we’d always ...

She had a self-confidence about her that I never possessed. Even when she was working in the garden, dressed in overalls and cov ...

breaking down, and my mom would take it there to get it repaired. We met this really cool guy there, Abel, one of the auto mecha ...

he wasn’t good-looking. My mom liked that about him; she used to say there’s a type of ugly that women find attractive. She call ...

liked to be liked by the world, which made his abuse even harder to deal with. Because if you think someone is a monster and the ...

Park. Some nights he’d want us to crash with him at his converted garage flat in Orange Grove, which we did. Then I burned down ...

just had a sense about the guy, an intuition. I’d felt it even before the mulberry tree. That night hadn’t changed my feelings t ...

I’d always been fine with my mom dating this guy, but I’d never considered the possibility of him becoming a permanent addition ...