Born a Crime

mockery of it. The other women
would bow before men with this
polite little curtsy. My mom would
go down and cower, groveling in the
dirt like she was worshipping a
deity, and she’d stay down there for
a long time, like a really long time,
long enough to make everyone very
uncomfortable. That was my mom.
Don’t fight the system. Mock the
system. To Abel, it looked like his
wife didn’t respect him. Every other
man had some docile girl from the
village, and here he’d come with
this modern woman, a Xhosa
woman no less, a culture whose
women were thought of as