Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood(70)

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I can only assume that my mother broke more than a few hearts in her day, but from the time I was born, there were only two men in her life, my father and my stepfather. Right around the corner from my father’s house in Yeoville, there was a garage called Mighty Mechanics. Our Volkswagen was always 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 mechanics. I’d see him when we went to fetch the car. The car broke down a lot, so we were there a lot. Eventually it felt like we were there even when there was nothing wrong with the vehicle. I was six, maybe seven. I didn’t understand everything that was happening. I just knew that suddenly this guy was around. He was tall, lanky and lean but strong. He had these long arms and big hands. He could lift car engines and gearboxes. He was handsome, but 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 called him Abie. He called her Mbuyi, short for Nombuyiselo.

I liked him, too. Abie was charming and hilarious and had an easy, gracious smile. He loved helping people, too, especially anyone in distress. If someone’s car broke down on the freeway, he pulled over to see what he could do. If someone yelled “Stop, thief!” he was the guy who gave chase. The old lady next door needed help moving boxes? He’s that guy. He 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 whole world says he’s a saint, you begin to think that you’re the bad person. It must be my fault this is happening is the only conclusion you can draw, because why are you the only one receiving his wrath?

Abel was always cool with me. He wasn’t trying to be my dad, and my dad was still in my life, so I wasn’t looking for anyone to replace him. That’s mom’s cool friend is how I thought of him. He started coming out to stay with us in Eden 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 the white people’s house, and that was the end of that. From then on we lived together in Eden Park.

One night my mom and I were at a prayer meeting and she took me aside.

“Hey,” she said. “I want to tell you something. Abel and I are going to get married.”

Instinctively, without even thinking, I said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

I wasn’t upset or anything. I 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 toward Abel; it had only shown me, in flesh and blood, what he was capable of.

“I understand that it’s hard,” she said. “I understand that you don’t want a new dad.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not that. I like Abel. I like him a lot. But you shouldn’t marry him.” I didn’t know the word “sinister” then, but if I had I probably would have used it. “There’s just something not right about him. I don’t trust him. I don’t think he’s a good person.”

I’d always been fine with my mom dating this guy, but I’d never considered the possibility of him becoming a permanent addition to our family. I enjoyed being with Abel the same way I enjoyed playing with a tiger cub the first time I went to a tiger sanctuary: I liked it, I had fun with it, but I never thought about bringing it home.

If there was any doubt about Abel, the truth was right there in front of us all along, in his name. He was Abel, the good brother, the good son, a name straight out of the Bible. And he lived up to it as well. He was the firstborn, dutiful, took care of his mother, took care of his siblings. He was the pride of his family.

But Abel was his English name. His Tsonga name was Ngisaveni. It means “Be afraid.”

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Mom and Abel got married. There was no ceremony, no exchange of rings. They went and signed the papers and that was it. A year or so later, my baby brother, Andrew, was born. I only vaguely remember my mom being gone for a few days, and when she got back there was now this thing in the house that cried and shat and got fed, but when you’re nine years older than your sibling, their arrival doesn’t change much for you. I wasn’t changing diapers; I was out playing arcade games at the shop, running around the neighborhood.

The main thing that marked Andrew’s birth for me was our first trip to meet Abel’s family during the Christmas holidays. They lived in Tzaneen, a town in Gazankulu, what had been the Tsonga homeland under apartheid. Tzaneen has a tropical climate, hot and humid. The white farms nearby grow some of the most amazing fruit—mangoes, lychees, the most beautiful bananas you’ve ever seen in your life. That’s where all the fruit we export to Europe comes from. But on the black land twenty minutes down the road, the soil has been decimated by years of overfarming and overgrazing. Abel’s mother and his sisters were all traditional, stay-at-home moms, and Abel and his younger brother, who was a policeman, supported the family. They were all very kind and generous and accepted us as part of the family right away.

Tsonga culture, I learned, is extremely patriarchal. We’re talking about a world where women must bow when they greet a man. Men and women have limited social interactions. The men kill the animals, and the women cook the food. Men are not even allowed in the kitchen. As a nine-year-old boy, I thought this was fantastic. I wasn’t allowed to do anything. At home my mom was forever making me do chores—wash the dishes, sweep the house—but when she tried to do that in Tzaneen, the women wouldn’t allow it.