Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood(78)

She didn’t know. She was forty-four years old. She’d had her tubes tied after Andrew. Even her doctor had said, “This shouldn’t be possible. We don’t know how this happened.”

I was boiling with rage. All we had to do was wait for Andrew to grow up, and it was going to be 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 stay with this man another eighteen years? Are you crazy?”

“God spoke to me, Trevor. He told me, ‘Patricia, I don’t do anything by mistake. There is nothing I give you that you cannot handle.’ I’m pregnant for a reason. I know what kind of kids I can make. I know what kind of sons I can raise. I can raise this child. I will raise this child.”

Nine months later Isaac was born. She called him Isaac because 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 what she names her son.

Isaac’s birth pushed me even further away. I visited less and less. Then I popped by one afternoon and the house was in chaos, police cars out front, the aftermath of another fight.

He’d hit her with a bicycle. Abel had been berating one of his workers in the yard, and my mom had tried to get between them. Abel was furious that she’d contradicted him in front of an employee, so he picked up Andrew’s bike and he beat her with it. Again she called the police, and the cops who showed up this time actually knew Abel. He’d fixed their cars. They were pals. No charges were filed. Nothing happened.

That time I confronted him. I was big enough now.

“You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “This is not right.”

He was apologetic. He always was. He didn’t puff out his chest and get defensive or anything like that.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t like doing these things, but you know how your mom is. She can talk a lot and she doesn’t listen. I feel like your mom doesn’t respect me sometimes. She came and disrespected me in front of my workers. I can’t have these other men looking at me like I don’t know how to control my wife.”

After the bicycle, my mom hired contractors she knew through the real-estate business to build her a separate house in the backyard, like a little servants’ quarters, and she moved in there with Isaac.

“This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen,” I told her.

“This is all I can do,” she said. “The police won’t help me. The government won’t protect me. Only my God can protect me. But what I can do is use against him the one thing that he cherishes, and that is his pride. By me living outside in a shack, everyone is going to ask him, ‘Why does your wife live in a shack outside your house?’ He’s going to have to answer that question, and no matter what he says, everyone will know that something is wrong with him. He loves to live for the world. Let the world see him for who he is. He’s a saint in the streets. He’s a devil in this house. Let him be seen for who he is.”

When my mom had decided to keep Isaac, I was so close to writing her off. I couldn’t stand the pain anymore. But seeing her hit with a bicycle, living like a prisoner in her own backyard, that was the final straw for me. I was a broken person. I was done.

“This thing?” I told her. “This dysfunctional thing? I won’t be a part of it. I can’t live this life with you. I refuse. You’ve made your decision. Good luck with your life. I’m going to live mine.”

She understood. She didn’t feel betrayed or abandoned at all.

“Honey, I know what you’re going through,” she said. “At one point, I had to disown my family to go off and live my own life, too. I understand why you need to do the same.”

So I did. I walked out. I didn’t call. I didn’t visit. Isaac came and I went, and for the life of me I could not understand why she wouldn’t do the same: leave. Just leave. Just fucking leave.

I didn’t understand what she was going through. I didn’t understand domestic violence. I didn’t understand how adult relationships worked; I’d never even had a girlfriend. I didn’t understand how she could have sex with a man she hated and feared. I didn’t know how easily sex and hatred and fear can intertwine.

I was angry with my mom. I hated him, but I blamed her. I saw Abel as a choice she’d made, a choice she was continuing to make. My whole life, telling me stories about growing up in the homelands, being abandoned by her parents, she had always said, “You cannot blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices.”

She never let me see us as victims. We were victims, me and my mom, Andrew and Isaac. Victims of apartheid. Victims of abuse. But I was never allowed to think that way, and I didn’t see her life that way. Cutting my father out of our lives to pacify Abel, that was her choice. Supporting Abel’s workshop was her choice. Isaac was her choice. She had the money, not him. She wasn’t dependent. So in my mind, she was the one making the decision.

It is so easy, from the outside, to put the blame on the woman and say, “You just need to leave.” It’s not like my home was the only home where there was domestic abuse. It’s what I grew up around. I saw it in the streets of Soweto, on TV, in movies. Where does a woman go in a society where that is the norm? When the police won’t help her? When her own family won’t help her? Where does a woman go when she leaves one man who hits her and is just as likely to wind up with another man who hits her, maybe even worse than the first? Where does a woman go when she’s single with three kids and she lives in a society that makes her a pariah for being a manless woman? Where she’s seen as a whore for doing that? Where does she go? What does she do?