Born a Crime

even get between Abel and Mom. I remember one night when Abel threw a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at Andrew’s head. It just missed h ...

when he started running his workshop out of our yard. It’s also when my mother divorced him. In African culture there’s legal ma ...

divorced him in order to separate their financial affairs. She also took her name back. Because Abel had started running an unli ...

like a side hobby almost. He was supposed to pay for Andrew’s school fees and groceries, but he started falling behind even on t ...

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

hates himself.” To a kid this makes no sense. “Well, if he hates himself,” I’d say, “why doesn’t he kick himself?” Abel was one ...

was in. There were so many nights he would stumble into my room thinking it was his and kick me out of bed and pass out. I’d yel ...

like clockwork. Abel kicked the dogs, too. Fufi, mostly. Panther was smart enough to stay away, but dumb, lovable Fufi was forev ...

with her. The strange thing was that when Fufi got kicked she never yelped or cried. When the vet diagnosed her as deaf, he also ...

and charming never went away. He had a drinking problem, but he was a nice guy. We had a family. Growing up in a home of abuse, ...

good times in between were what allowed it to drag out and escalate as far as it did. He hit my mom once, then the next time was ...

no conversations, nothing. We moved through the house as strangers, at different times. Complete silent treatment. Then one morn ...

“This man is unbelievable,” she said. “What happened?” “He bought a gun.” “What? A gun? What do you mean, ‘He bought a gun’?” A ...

“I don’t know.” She said she’d confronted him about it, and he’d gone off on some nonsense about the world needing to learn to r ...

son, but I was not his son. He knew that. The analogy my mom used was that there were now two male lions in the house. “Every ti ...

helped me get my flat, and I moved out. The flat was only ten minutes away from the house, so I was always around to drop in to ...

that would finally free my mom from this abusive man. Then one afternoon my mom called and asked me to come by the house. A few ...

reality of it. “How could you let this happen?” “Abel and I, we made up. I moved back into the bedroom. It was just one night, a ...

over, and now it was like she’d re- upped on the contract. “So you’re going to have this child with this man? You’re going to st ...

in the Bible Sarah gets pregnant when she’s like a hundred years old and she’s not supposed to be having children and that’s wha ...