Born a Crime

Before Chapter 16 begins, Noah remarks of his Black neighborhood: “Soweto was beautiful because, after democracy, you watched Soweto grow” (201). However, unlike Soweto, Alexandra can’t expand outwards or vertically. It is constrained and can’t change.

Noah begins Chapter 16 by talking about his friend Sizwe. Despite being friends with him throughout high school, he had never visited Sizwe’s neighborhood of Alexandra. However, once Noah graduates, Sizwe suggests they go to the hood, or Alexandra. Noah, never having been, is curious and agrees to go. Noah notices that “Alex is laid out on a grid, a series of avenues. The streets are paved, but the sidewalks are mostly dirt” (205). There’s also a crazy concoction of smells, and it feels like “a complete sensory overload for [him], but within chaos there was order, a system, a social hierarchy based on where you lived” (206). Essentially, the grid of Alexandra is broken up according to socio-economic status. One block would be families and the next would be serious gangsters.

Alexandra is super cheap. You can get basic meals for next to nothing, and the more money you have, the more extras you can get with your food. The ultimate upgrade is cheese, so if a person can afford cheese, he or she is considered a “cheese boy” (207). Noah elaborates on what this term means: “You’re not really hood because your family has enough money to buy cheese” (207). Because of where Sizwe lives in Alexandra, he’s considered a cheese boy. He, like other cheese boys, are socio-economically affected by the end of apartheid:

Cheese boys were in a uniquely fucked situation when apartheid ended. It is one thing to be born in the hood and know that you will never leave the hood. But the cheese boy has been shown the world outside. His family has done okay. They have a house. They’ve sent him to a decent school. […] He has been given more potential, but he has not been given more opportunity (208).

After spending time in Alexandra, Noah's perspective changes: “One of the first things I learned in the hood is that there is a very fine line between civilian and criminal” (209). He realizes that there are varying degrees of criminality based on necessity, from a mom stealing food from the back of a truck to feed her family to the gangster selling weapons. However, in Alexandra, everyone knows everyone, and criminals are most likely your friend. Noah sells his pirated CDs in Alexandra, but soon him and Sizwe start hustling and make even more money. Essentially, they use their CD profits to give people short term loans, and they use their cash to “leverage in the hood’s barter economy” (211). This means that when someone steals something and tries to sell it for a high price, with cash they can talk the person down, buy the stolen good for cheap, and then sell it for a higher price to someone else: “At the peak of our operation we probably had around 10,000 rand in capital. We had loans going out and interest coming in” (216).

While Noah had originally intended to save up money for college, after two years he stopped planning for school and hadn’t saved any money. He says the “tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all” (217).

One night Noah is DJ’ing in Lombardy East, a nice neighborhood outside Alexandra. The police are called because of the noise, and they come and shut the party down. The police yell at Noah to shut off his music, but it takes a long time because “Windows 95 took forever to shut down” (220). The police think he’s taking too long, so they shoot his computer monitor, and he loses all his music and essentially his business. Later, someone sells him a stolen camera with pictures of a family. He realizes that he hasn’t just stolen an object but someone’s memories, a “part of someone’s life” (221). For the first time, he thinks of stealing as a crime.

While taking a minibus to a dance competition, the cops pull the bus over. They ask where they’re from, and when they say Alex, the police say, “Dogs from Alex. You come here and you rob people and you rape women and you hijack cars. Bunch of fucking hoodlums” (223). It’s clear the police want bribe money, but since Noah and his friends don’t have money, they’re put in jail.

Before Chapter 17 begins, Noah recalls shoplifting batteries once because his mom wouldn’t buy them for him. The cops call his mom to tell her what happened, but she tells them to keep him to teach him a lesson.

Chapter 17 opens with Noah reminiscing about the life lessons his mother bestowed: “My mom never gave me an inch. Anytime I got in trouble it was tough love, lectures, punishment, and hidings. Every time. [….] You get that a lot with black parents. They’re trying to discipline you before the system does” (227). Getting arrested is commonplace is Alexandra, and Noah’s mom hates the hood and his friends there, especially how “it didn’t pressure [Noah] to become better" (228). He explains the alternative: "She wanted me to hang out with my cousin at his university” (228).

One day Noah sees that a shop in the suburbs is having an amazing clearance deal on mobile phones. He decides that he can buy the phone and sell it in the hood for a profit. The shop is too far to walk, so he takes one of Abel’s many junkyard cars to get there. On his way, he gets pulled over by a cop. At first, he’s more worried about getting in trouble with his parents than with the law, because parents “served as judge, jury, and executioner for your entire childhood, and it feels like they give you a life sentence for every misdemeanor” (230). He begins to realize just how serious it is once the cop assumes that he’s driving a stolen car since it’s not registered.

Noah is held at the police station until his bail hearing. Despite getting money from a friend for a lawyer, he still must stay the night. He gets a mat and an itchy blanket to sleep on a concrete floor, but worse than the physical conditions are the company. In the cell, it’s impossible to distinguish between hardened criminals versus people locked up for minor traffic violations. Given the stereotype that colored gangsters are “ruthless,” Noah uses this to his advantage and pretends to be a colored gangster, hoping to encourage everyone else not to mess with him.

On the third day a huge, Hulk-like figure is put into the cell. Noah is terrified. The guard keeps trying to talk to the guy in Zulu, but Noah recognizes that the guy speaks Tsonga, a language Noah speaks. He becomes the interpreter between the guard and the guy, creating an instant friendship between Noah and the Hulk. Noah attributes their bond to the shared language, something Nelson Mandela knew the importance of when he said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart” (236). Once Noah and the guy start talking, he realizes that despite looking big and tough, the guy is the sweetest gentle giant. He feels sorry for him because the guy became a petty thief to feed his family. Noah realizes that the law is like a lottery based on such trivial things as your skin color, how much money you have, your lawyer, and your judge.

On the day of his hearing, Noah is “handcuffed and put in the back of a police van and driven to the courthouse to meet [his] fate. In South African courts, to minimize your exposure and your opportunities for escape, the holding cell where you await your hearing is a massive pen below the courtroom” (238). He meets a man that implies he’s going to rape him and another who’s having a mental health crisis and threatening to die by suicide. Both these men terrify Noah, and for the first time he realizes the severity of his situation.

Noah ends up being granted bail, and after being released he goes to his mom’s house. He lies to her and says that he’s been at his cousin’s the last few days, but she has a hurt look on her face and says, “Boy, who do you think paid your bail? Hmm? Who do you think paid your lawyer? Do you think I’m an idiot? Did you think no one would tell me?” (242).

She says that she’s only hard on Noah because she loves him. She says, “Everything I have ever done I’ve done from a place of love. If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you” (243).

Before Chapter 18 begins, Noah recalls a memory of eating a whole bowl of custard and jelly, known to Americans as Jell-O, and feeling sick afterward. On top of feeling sick to his stomach that night, his entire body gets bitten by mosquitos. The next morning, his mom wants them to go to church. He says he doesn’t feel well enough to go, but she says that’s exactly why they need to go, so that he can be healed.

At the beginning of Chapter 18, Noah says that once he starts cornrowing his hair for the matric dance, he begins receiving attention from girls. But his mom just makes fun of him, saying that he spends more time on his hair than she does. They joke back and forth about their looks, but he thinks his mom is “beautiful on the outside, beautiful on the inside" (248). He regards his mother with esteem: "She had a self-confidence about her that I never possessed” (248).

Noah only remembers two men ever being in his mom’s life: his dad and his stepfather, Abel. Noah initially likes Abel; he’s big, charming, and loves to help people. When Noah’s mom tells him that she’s going to marry Abel, he tells her it’s not a good idea. Despite liking him, he tells her, “There’s just something not right about him. I don’t trust him. I don’t think he’s a good person” (249).

A year after Noah’s mom and Abel marry, his baby brother, Andrew, is born. After that, they meet Abel’s family for the first time. In his family, the women do all the cooking and cleaning while the men relax. Noah’s mom doesn’t fit in, and she refuses to ever go back. Noah says that for most of his life he lived in a world run by women, but after Abel moves in, he starts asserting himself as the head of the household. He makes them keep their dogs outside, even though they’ve always been inside dogs, and he tries to limit how much time Noah’s mom spends at church. He also doesn’t want Noah’s mom taking him to see his dad, since it’s her ex.

After he moves in, Abel begins drinking heavily. He would average a six-pack of beer a night. Noah recalls how his stepfather would be when he drank:

[H]is eyes would go red, bloodshot. That was the clue I learned to read. I always thought of Abel as a cobra: calm, perfectly still, then explosive. There was no ranting, no clenched fists. He’d be very quiet, and then out of nowhere the violence would come […]. His eyes were everything. They were the eyes of the Devil (254).

The first time Abel gets violent with Noah’s mom, he is drunk and almost burns the house down. She yells at him, and he thinks she’s disrespecting him, so he smacks her across the face, twice. She runs to the police station to file a report, but the police don’t take her seriously. Noah describes it like a boy’s club; the police always take the man’s side. Noah, his mom, and Andrew go stay with her family in Soweto for a while, but they move back in with Abel after he apologizes.

Abel’s boss sells his business, Mighty Mechanics, and Abel buys it with Noah’s mom’s financial help. Abel is an amazing mechanic but a horrible businessman, and eventually the business is sinking. Noah’s mom quits her job and dedicates her time to helping Abel run the shop. The shop ends up consuming so much of their lives that they start staying the night there, and Noah sleeps in the cars. They’re even forced to live on Mopane worms:

Mopane worms are literally the cheapest thing that only the poorest of the poor people eat. […] They’re these spiny, brightly colored caterpillars the size of your finger. They’re nothing like escargot, where someone took a snail and gave it a fancy name. They’re fucking worms. They have Black spines that prick the roof of your mouth as you’re eating them (260).

After living in the shop for nearly a year and watching Abel drink away their profits, Noah’s mom has had enough. She gets another secretarial job and buys a house in Highlands North.

Noah’s mom gives him what he calls “Old Testament discipline,” whereas Abel's beatings were different: “In all the time I received beatings from my mom, I was never scared of her. […] I understood that it was discipline and it was being done for a purpose. The first time Abel hit me I felt something I had never felt before. I felt terror” (262). He is in sixth grade the first time it happens. Noah falsifies his mom’s signature and gets caught. This makes Abel angry, and he takes Noah into a small closet, blocking the entrance. Noah is oblivious to what’s about to happen because Abel has never shown any violence to him before. In the blink of an eye Abel punches Noah in the ribs:

It was the most terrifying moment of my life. I had never been that scared before, ever. Because there was no purpose to it—that’s what made it so terrifying. It wasn’t discipline. Nothing about it was coming from a place of love. It didn’t feel like something that would end with me learning a lesson about forging my mom’s signature. […] It felt like there was something inside him that wanted to destroy me (264).

Noah manages to escape and runs away. Abel initially chases him, but eventually Noah loses him. From that day forward Noah avoids being alone with Abel.

After Abel loses the business and Noah’s mom starts making more money than him, “that’s when [they] saw the dragon emerge. The drinking got worse. He grew more and more violent” (266). Around this time, he hits Noah’s mom again. She again tries to file a police report, and the police again ignore her. Abel also begins kicking Noah’s dog, Fufi. Despite being beaten, Fufi always came back to Abel because, not only is Fufi deaf, she also has a condition where she can’t feel pain.

One afternoon, Noah comes home from high school and learns that Abel has bought a gun. Shortly after, Noah moves out. A couple years later, despite having a separate bedroom from Abel, Noah’s mom tells Noah that she’s pregnant again. He is insanely angry, not understanding how she could let this happen. He always assumed she would leave Abel after Andrew was old enough, and now she would have to stay with him another 18 years. Noah’s mom doesn’t know how it could happen considering she’s 44 and her tubes have been tied. She believes she’s pregnant for a reason.

Soon Noah’s new baby brother Isaac is born, and shortly afterwards Abel hits Noah’s mom with a bicycle. She again tries to file a charge and again the police ignore her. Noah’s mom has a small house built behind their normal house, and she moves into it with the children. He asks his mom why she doesn’t just leave, and she says because he’ll kill them.

Eventually Noah’s mom leaves Abel and remarries. Noah loses touch with his mom and “[y]ears passed. Life carried on” (273). Then one day his little brother Andrew calls to say that their mom has been shot in the head. Immediately Noah knows Abel did it. At the hospital, Andrew tells the story of how they were coming home from church when Abel randomly showed up with a gun. Andrew tried getting in front of his mom, but Abel said if he didn’t move he would shoot him too. Abel shot her in the back of the leg and then hovered over her, aiming straight at her head. He pulled the trigger multiple times, but the gun misfired. Realizing this, she ran and got into the car, and Andrew got in beside her. Just as she was about to pull out, blood splattered the windshield. Abel had shot her in the back of the head from behind the car. Thinking quickly, Andrew got into the driver’s seat and brought her to the hospital.

Noah calls Abel and he actually answers. He screams that Abel has killed his mother. Abel responds coldly that he knows, and that if he had known where Noah was, he would have killed him, too. The doctors are reluctant to help Noah’s mom because she doesn’t have insurance, so Noah pays for everything on his credit card. His mom doesn’t die because somehow the bullet didn’t do any real damage, and she’s out of the hospital in only four days and back to work in seven.

After Chapter 18, Noah gives an update on Abel. Apparently, after he shot Noah’s mom, he grabbed Isaac and took off. He told him that he killed his mom because he’s very sad, and he’s going to die by suicide. He then dropped Isaac off with a friend and went around to friends and family to say his goodbyes. However, his cousin talks him out of dying by suicide, and he turns himself in. The case never went to trial, and “[h]e didn’t serve a single day in prison. He kept joint custody of his sons. He’s walking around Johannesburg today, completely free” (284).